Harmony (2 page)

Ignoring me, she went on, “Could you stand that happening to you, Tuan?”

“What I can’t stand is what your hand is doing to me right now!”

But Miach kept squeezing and smiling. “Do you think you could stand letting them replace your body with data? I know I couldn’t.”

≡

Miach first discovered me in the park.

Some parents were playing with their kids on a warped pink jungle gym, and there she was, a girl my age, sitting on a bench reading a book. I had seen her in class, so I knew who she was. Everyone knew who she was.

Spooky.

That was what they called her. A lot of the cliques in school, girls and boys alike, had approached her in the beginning—her grades alone meant she stood out—but she managed to remain unaffiliated, preferring a beautiful kind of solitude.

Some of the groups misunderstood and took pity on her. Not that I blamed them for not getting Miach. Everyone was so concerned about everyone else as it was. And with goodwill toward men the norm of the day, it was hard to imagine anyone who didn’t want to take part in all that. So the girls would invite her over to eat lunch with them, or want to text with her, all trying to get her attention.

We were taught to be kind to one another, to support one another, to live in harmony. That was what it meant to be adult, they said.

That was how we were told to be. That was how everyone had to be, from East to West, after the Maelstrom.

This was the society Miach hated. Parents couldn’t choose their children, but children didn’t get to choose anything. “I would have at least liked to pick the world I have to live in,” Miach used to say. When the other boys and girls at school approached her, she refused them politely at first. If they kept pushing, she would say something like “I’m not interested in mere humans,” and that would usually settle things.

She was like Princess Kaguya turning away potential suitors on the grounds that they weren’t from the moon or couldn’t pluck a jewel from a dragon’s neck. This flat-out refusal to associate with anyone worked like a charm. She didn’t leave even the starry-eyed would-be fans any room for interpretation. Of course, if she really meant what she said, that would mean that Cian and I weren’t “mere humans.” It occurred to me that maybe I should have been upset about that.

The upshot was that I never felt like I fit in at school and tried to spend most of my time holed up at home, though I did somehow get dragged into one group or another during my years there. I like to think of that as my last vestige of societal behavior. I tried to hide in plain sight, praying that no one would call on me to do anything in our extracurricular activities, thoroughly weary of the kindness of friends.

The thoughtfulness of my teachers, of my parents, of everyone around me was like silent suffocation. I’d heard once about something they used to call
bullying
.

I wasn’t really sure what it was like, nor had I learned much about it then, at the young age of fifteen, but somewhere I had picked up the vague impression that it involved kids acting in a group to attack a designated target, usually another kid. This had happened all the time at one point, but after the Maelstrom, no attack on so valuable a natural resource as children would have been permitted, not even if the assailants themselves were children. Bullying had simply vanished.

Resource awareness.

That was how people defined their obligation to society. That and the concept of a communal body. Always be aware that you are an irreplaceable resource, they would tell us. “Life is the most important thing of all” and “The weight of a life is the weight of the world” went the slogans.

Had I been born a century earlier, would I have been bullied?

Probably, I thought. I wanted to be bullied. And I knew for sure that I wouldn’t be the one doing the bullying.

≡

So I found her there on my way home from school, sitting in the park next to that jungle gym with something in her hands. It was only later that I learned what that thing was—dead-tree media, a book. Up until that point, I had been as largely ignorant of the past as every other high school student. I knew that parts of our history had been censored, images in particular, though I assumed they were of horribly disfigured corpses, or something like that. You needed special clearance to see those. The bulk of the visual media called movies couldn’t be found on the Borgesnet because of the violence they depicted. Even what had probably been considered tame content by the standards of yesteryear was teeming with violence by the peaceful, elegant standards of admedistrative society. In order to see anything containing a visual portrayal of violence you needed legal credentials: an EVIL, or Emotionally-traumatic Visual Information License.

A license I have now because my work requires it, incidentally, but of course I didn’t have one as a child. I didn’t even know about them. Nor did I know about books, dead and gone a long time by then, nor had I heard that there was a pretty lucrative trade in them among enthusiasts. Girls in high school were so busy growing, where would one have even come by the motivation to learn about the past? Their heads? Their hearts? Their guts?

I wasn’t annoyed by Miach’s presence in the park that day. I merely acknowledged it, passing my gaze over her and moving on.

But Miach saw me.

Thrusting her book into her bag, she strode in my direction, taking big steps. I remember being surprised by her masklike expression. She had one finger thrust out, pointing at the jungle gym.

“You know why they synced the way the jungle gym moves to the children?”

I had no idea. Miach raised an eyebrow at my silence and went on. “It’s so the kids won’t die. Kids used to die on jungle gyms a long time ago. You know that?”

I shook my head. I was dumb. Both in the sense of being speechless and in the sense of being an idiot. I’d never heard of a kid dying by accident or even getting hurt on the jungle gym before. Miach talked like she was playing a flute, an entrancing tone that was as soft as it was cold and utterly devoid of emotion.

“At the beginning of the twenty-first century, jungle gyms were made out of metal—geometric lattices made of crisscrossing pipes.”

“Kids would fall off the top?”

“They sure would. Jungle gyms back then didn’t catch them like the ones do now. Metal bars aren’t intelligent. They can’t change, and they aren’t even soft. Some kids hit their heads on the bars and died of skull fractures. And the sandboxes were breeding pools for viruses and bacteria. The park was a very dangerous place.”

I hadn’t the faintest idea why this person, arguably the strangest girl in class, was giving me an archaeological lecture on the history of jungle gyms. At least by then I had regained enough presence of mind to play along.

“So,” I ventured, “what we call parks nowadays are very different from what they used to be.”

She shook her head. “Not really. The look of the park hasn’t changed for a century. There are trees and things to play on. There were kids back then who sat on benches reading books like I was just now. What’s different is that the sand in the sandbox and the jungle gym and the climbing ropes weren’t intelligent. They didn’t
care
what happened to the kids that played on them.”

“Sorry, that thing you were looking at just now, that’s a book?” I asked.

“That’s right, Tuan Kirie. I was reading a book. I always carry one around with me. I usually read it during breaks in class.”

Miach pulled her book out of her bag and showed it to me. The cover read
An Unremarkable Man
.

“Doesn’t sound that interesting.”

Miach laughed at that. “As I thought! I know I have a tendency to fade into the woodwork, but still, I’m amazed you haven’t noticed me before—that girl always off on her own, always reading some strange
thing
. You don’t pay much attention to your surroundings, do you?”

How
hadn’t
I noticed her? Practically the only girl who didn’t join in any of the class groups, reading some strange artifact during recess? I thought for a moment that maybe no one had noticed her but immediately dismissed that. With all the initial interest in making friends with Miach, the other kids must have seen her, wondered about her. I was the only one oblivious.

“It’s because you don’t want to pay attention to people. You don’t want to try to be friends. That’s who you want to be, isn’t it? You run with the other girls in their little groups, and you go out to volunteer on the weekends, but the person you’re most concerned with is yourself. You don’t give a rat’s ass about harmony. That’s why you didn’t even bother to notice me and
my book.”

She was right.

She was right, and I was sure no one else but she had ever noticed this about me. It took me a while to regain my footing as I considered how to respond. All I managed was a completely tangential, and ultimately stupid, observation.

“Aren’t books kind of heavy and hard to carry around?”

“Yes, they are heavy and hard to carry around, Miss Kirie. Being heavy and hard to carry around is downright antisocial behavior these days, don’t you think?” she said in a voice like a boy soprano’s. And then she began to walk, holding her bag in her hands behind her back. I’m not sure to this day why I followed her. I only remember that it seemed as if what she said, her every word, was cutting into the heart of something I’d been unable to express for so long, and hearing her say it felt good. Or maybe it was that she had found an old blade inside me, rusty from seawater, and given it a bit of a sharpening. Incidentally, when I asked Cian about how she met Miach sometime later, she said she’d met her in the park too.

“So,” Miach said, without turning around. “Q: if a person goes their whole life without falling from anything, how will they know what it means to fall?” I could only see the back of her head, but I was sure she was smiling.

“You’re talking about the jungle gym.”

“Not only that, but good enough.”

“Isn’t it instinct to be afraid of falling?”

It seemed to me pretty unlikely that someone could really go their entire lives without ever falling once, but even if someone managed it, I felt that somehow they would still have a fear of falling in their head.

Miach sighed, a sort of noncommittal sigh neither affirming nor denying my theory.

“So that’s your answer? It’s human nature to be afraid of falling—we’re just made that way?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever fallen off something?”

In fact, I had. It was when I was still pretty young. We’d gone camping, and I slipped off a boulder and fell into a stream. I could remember the instant it happened. You hear people talk about how time slows down during an accident, but for me it seemed like as soon as I realized my feet were slipping I was on my knees in the water.

I had scraped my leg on my way down, and when I looked at it, I saw a thin line of color emerging from my right calf, curling off into the slightly cloudy water like a red ribbon. A little trout had gone swimming through it, and I thought he might get tangled in the thread, but of course he didn’t. A moment later my father was helping me out of the stream. He used his portable med kit to fix my scrape, but I still remember what it looked like, that red thread of blood, drifting almost sensually in the water. The medicule paste—the same stuff that Miach claimed could kill fifty thousand people—quickly sealed the cut while the same medcare tank made antibodies to kill any infectious bacteria I might have picked up. My father attached the unit to
the medcare port beneath my shoulder blade.

“What did it feel like, the moment you fell?”

Miach stopped and turned toward me. I answered honestly that it had been over so quick I didn’t remember
feeling
anything. One moment I was on the boulder, the next I was in the water.

“Oh.”

Miach shrugged and began walking again. I followed along behind.

“So you think someone who’s never taken a fall in their life
wouldn’t be afraid of falling?”

“I didn’t say that. But they could forget their fear. Just like we’re forgetting what disease means.”

“Disease is when you get older more quickly and your muscles stiffen up.”

Miach looked over her shoulder, a smile on her lips. “That’s what it means now, true, but that refers to only one condition that affects a few unlucky people with some unlucky genes. I didn’t mean that kind of disease. I mean just getting
sick
. Like catching a cold or having a headache. Ever heard of those?”

I shook my head.

“In the past, there were lots of diseases in us, thousands. Everyone got sick, and this is only half a century ago I’m talking about. When the nuclear warheads fell during the Maelstrom, everyone got cancer from the radiation. The whole world was one big disease.”

“Oh, I learned about that.”

Many people developed cancer from the radiation. At the same time, the radiation caused mutations in China and the depths of Africa, spawning a flood of unknown viruses. With such a clear and present threat to its health, the world transformed overnight from a capitalist society monitored by governmental units to a medical welfare society organized by admedistrative bodies.

“Right? I’m not sure why I have that memorized. Impressed?”

“Yes, but they never tell you about how people used to get sick before then. You may have your history lesson memorized, but you don’t even know what a cold is. How could you? You’ve never experienced one. Our society’s accomplished a pretty amazing thing. Thanks to WatchMe and medcare, we’ve driven almost every disease off the face of the planet.”