Itoh, Project: Harmony

But I lacked the stamina and the will to shout it out loud, so I simply muttered, “So she died.”

My mother nodded, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Cian’s okay, though. She’s being treated at a different center.”

“Oh.”

The pharmaceutical regime and counseling that came next dragged me, kicking and screaming, back into society’s fold.

Back to the world of constant, mandated health.

With daily counseling and daily pills, I dug the ditch of my failure ever deeper. At least I had the common sense not to let my counselor know how I felt about it.

It came to me as I was riding home from the center in a taxi with my mother.

I was sitting next to her, looking out the window at the evening sun on the Sumida River. The calm serenity of the buildings lining both banks chilled me to the bone. They were all painted in pastels—pink, blue, green—all of them just a little off-white.

There weren’t any laws against painting a building something more exciting, and yet here they were, an endless line of houses, all cast in bland, nondescript shades. None of them stood out against the others. Nothing to disturb the eye, and therefore nothing to disturb the heart.

There’s nothing I can do.

It was then that I learned how to give up. Miach was dead, and she had accomplished nothing. I lost all hope in the world and, at the same time, learned how to live without hope.

I looked out the window and saw the evening sun on the twelfth of June, 2060, shining down on a giant hospital ward stretching to the horizon on both sides of the river. Mankind was trapped in an endless hospital.

I’m sorry, Miach.

I couldn’t do it. And it had taken the sacrifice of a life to the gods of medicine for me to understand. I started to cry there in the backseat of a taxi. My mother’s eyes remained fixed forward on the road ahead, as though she didn’t notice. After I cried myself out, I leaned back in my seat and fell asleep.

≡

I opened my eyes again.

Tuan Kirie, senior inspector, age twenty-eight.

Étienne was shaking me by the shoulder where I lay next to the crates of cigars and wine.

“We are at the base, ma reine .”

05

The “blushing maiden brigade.”

That was what people called the medical corps. I think they meant it as a compliment.

If you were wondering whether every admedistration’s medical corps wore pink uniforms, you were right. Go to France, Russia, or Mexico, and every medical corps uniform, helmet, and armor transport was painted the color of a lightly ripened peach. Like the army always wore drab olive, and the navy black and white.

Which was why the tents in the Niger armistice monitoring camp were all pink.

Against the sea of pale pink, the deep crimson coats we Helix agents wore stood out. We stood out everywhere, for that matter. Now I was making my way through the tents, back to where the crates were being unloaded—our backyard.

I carried off the portion for myself and for our server techie— call him Alpha—and left Étienne and his crew to handle the rest of it. I would get back to my own office as quickly as possible and drink myself into a stupor, as I always did. At least, that was the plan.

I had zero interest in knowing the details of how Étienne divvied up the booty from the Kel Tamasheq, or how much money he made, or how much he skimmed for himself. He would always pass me some credit after we were done, so I knew he at least wasn’t stealing everything. That was good enough for now. All I needed were smokes and booze. That was it.

In my world, you had to come all the way out to this hinterland, to a battlefield, just to find ways to damage yourself. Effective, yet ultimately trivial ways. Far more trivial than what I had attempted back in high school, before I lost Miach.

“I brought the goods,” I announced, stepping past the pink flap of the tent where Alpha worked—where I found not only Alpha surrounded by his infield terminal screens, but also my boss with an excessively stern look on her face. I caught the look of abject fear on Alpha’s face and realized things had taken a decided turn for the worse. “We were waiting for you, Senior Inspector Kirie,” the woman in the crimson coat just like mine announced.

“You needed to talk to me about something, Os Cara?”

“Only about what that is you’re hiding behind your back.”

I shrugged and tossed the vintage wine in her direction. I had a reputation for giving up easily.

She caught the ancient Petrus, the ruby red liquid sloshing inside the glass bottle.

Château Petrus

Brand name of an alcoholic beverage originating in France’s Pomerol region. A “bordeaux wine.” Noted for its label depicting Saint Peter, the twelfth apostle.This château wine vaulted from relative obscurity to immense popularity after winning a gold medal at the 1889 Paris Exposition. One of the most expensive wines in its heyday, after the Maelstrom and the ascendance of lifeism it shared the same fate as all other alcoholic beverages.

It had already been over forty years since anyone in a developed country had been able to freely enjoy alcohol. “What do we have here?” Os Cara breathed as she caught the bottle of forbidden pleasure lightly in her left hand. “I would ask if you have no shame, but then, I already know the answer.”

“It’s called wine.” I snorted. “Heard of it?”

She didn’t even look at the label. “A bordeaux. Lots of merlot in these—100 percent in some barrels, depending on the year. Makes for a very smooth texture.”

“No shit.”

“Most certainly not. I drank one of these when I was much younger, actually. The last generation that could truly relish alcohol. We had a Petrus just like this one in my house.”

“I hear it was quite expensive,” I said, stepping closer to the trembling Alpha and my boss, even as I felt like I was walking into a trap.

“My family was quite well-to-do before the Maelstrom.”

“You don’t say,” I said, now standing directly in front of my boss. Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg.

Anointed the cherub of Helix agents; at Geneva HQ she’s known simply as ‘Prime.’ Single. Age seventy-two, with the looks of a beautiful woman in her late thirties due to ultrahigh resolution WatchMe, a perfect control system, regular antioxidant treatments, and periodic removal of accumulated RNA transcription errors.

“Well, this won’t do.” She presented the bottle. “You know how embarrassing something like this is for us.”

“I haven’t lost all capacity for rational thought, if that’s what you’re suggesting, Prime,” I said, my smile thin.

She glared at me. Alpha, sweating bullets, shrank back into the shadow of his monitors. He wasn’t even seeing us there anymore. His eyes were looking off into the distance somewhere, probably at the wreckage of his career.

“At least you seem to be aware of your own wrongdoing. However, you clearly do not comprehend where we are and what we’re doing here.”

I had to laugh at that. It was precisely because I knew so thoroughly what kind of place the Sahara was that I had specifically requested a transfer here. There was silence again until my boss spoke.

“The Nigerian armistice monitoring group is in an extremely delicate situation at present. The report that we Helix agents submit will determine which of the two parties, the Nigerians or the Tuareg, had the right of this conflict.”

I shrugged. I was pretty sure that if it became known we were partaking of smokes and booze, the Tuareg would probably consider us their allies, what with their predilection for living a life of moderation. This was apparently not the scenario my boss had in mind, however. She began to walk around me in a tight circle.