Harmony (20 page)

I knew this not because Miach had ever told me, but because of the date palm pictured in the symbol of the Helix Inspection Agency. Any Christian overtones in that were nullified by the fact that the date palm had appeared as a symbol of life in the Koran and even in the tale of Gilgamesh—another local favorite in its day.

There were lots of people out in the street, the polar opposite of the state of affairs in the post-declaration admedistrative society I’d just left. I doubted many of the folks here had even heard the news. Only the billions of people with WatchMe installed had reason to be scared shitless. The residents of the lifeist block, responsible for 80 percent of the global economy. For the Iraqis on this twilight street, WatchMe and medicules had nothing to do with their lives.

Life on the outside, life on the inside.

The difference between the two couldn’t be greater.

On one side, people cut up their bodies and entrusted the parts to different service providers in order to fulfill the functions demanded of them by society. On the other, these people weren’t letting anyone touch their bodies.

As I busied myself with the river fish—the dish was called
masgouf
, I learned—the proprietor brought a bowl of watery yogurt. This I decided was less a dessert and more another course in the meal. He set it down on the pitted surface of my wooden table and retreated into the back.

As he left, I noticed another piece of paper sticking out from beneath the yogurt bowl. I opened it. It said “To the river” in Japanese.

I motioned for the lighter again and burned the second piece of paper over my ashtray. Finished with the
masgouf
, I went out onto the street, weaving my way through the crowd in hopes of losing the tail my mystery correspondent doubtlessly feared.

This street had once been an entertainment district: Abū-Nuwās.

The name referred to this street, the one with the market. Abū-Nuwās had been a great Arab poet and a lover of wine and carnal pleasures in an Islamic society that forbade alcohol. His hedonistic poems took the list of things forbidden by Islam and threw it out the window—social shock poetry. In other words, two thousand years ago, a man had lived here who fought against the same kind of dogma that lifeist society espoused today. It was the perfect setting for a secret rendezvous between a spineless conformist to the system and someone who very likely had a hand in controlling the system.

I made a careful scan for tails, then left Abū-Nuwās for the banks of the river, glowing in the evening sun. The riverbank was open sand all the way down to the water. I wondered if it would be Gabrielle Étaín waiting for me, or even Miach Mihie herself. The light reflected off the Tigris, playing tricks with the eyes and hiding the face of the person I now saw standing a short distance away from me, closer to the river.

“You know why they call this place Mesopotamia?” the figure on the bank asked in a familiar voice. “
Mesopotamia
means ‘between the rivers.’ You understand?”

“Because we’re between the Tigris and Euphrates?”

“Precisely.”

The man stepped closer. He was wearing a tattered suit. A hobo suit. Fitting for the man who had left my mother and me thirteen years ago to come to Baghdad.

05

“I’m surprised you came all this way.”

It was my father. The genuine article. Though his face bore the wear and tear of thirty years, it was still the same face as the man who had been defeated in that session by the caffeinehating woman, and the man who had left me and my mother after Miach died.

It hadn’t been easy getting here.

A lot of people died.

I told him that.

“I’ve heard. The whole world has it pretty bad right now.

It’s a shame.”

“A shame? But didn’t you tell Miach to kill them?”

“Not true,” my father said, his back to the setting Baghdad sun.

“Have you been here this whole time? Thirteen years?”

He shook his head slowly. “I left on occasion. With an ID from my current organization I can go most places in the world without revealing who I am.”

“Organization? Which organization might that be?”

“The only organization truly capable of controlling the world—the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group. All the resources and medical planning take place here in the Dian Cécht complex.”

“What exactly do you mean by control the world?”

My father began to walk slowly down the riverbank. I walked alongside him, listening carefully to every word.

“You’ve heard something from Saeki, yes? Or Étaín?”

“I’ve learned that human will is the state of struggle between various agents in a feedback web located in the midbrain. And I’ve learned that the hyperbola traced by that feedback influences our decisions.”

“That’s basically true, yes.”

The sun had set and the temperature began dropping. It made the midday heat seem like a dream. I rubbed my hands together against the slight chill, glad I had thought to wear a jacket.

“And you’re doing research into this?”

“No. The research is pretty much completed.”

I hesitated. If the research were completed, then what was the Next-Gen group doing now? What was my father working on?

“Our organization’s goal is to be prepared. We prepare for the possible coming collapse. We keep our technology safe, secret, and ready to deploy should the need ever arise. Of course, we would prefer that time never come, but Miach’s group sees things somewhat differently.”

“Explain.”

“Hmm. Well, you seem to have already grasped the workings of the feedback mechanism and how it generates what we call
will
.”

“Professor Saeki said it was like a conference.”

“An analogy we often use. One important thing to understand, however, is the reflexive nature of the system. Based on the outcome of this ‘conference,’ the feedback mechanism is exposed to endless change and adjustment. The results influence our feedback system, and the feedback system generates more results in a loop. If we make a decision, that bias will increase in a cyclical fashion. The chaos in the system multiplies. This is why human will is illogical, never static, and very hard to predict. You follow?”

“I think so.”

“In controlling the feedback web in the midbrain with medicules, we found we were able to influence human decisions, emotions, and thoughts. This all happened shortly before you were born. At that time, the control of human will was a hot topic with upper leadership at WHO and some of the admedistrations.”

That would be the frightened old men.

Frightened of chaos.

Frightened of people losing their rational minds.

Frightened of riots leading to genocide leading to nukes going off all over our planet.

“The Maelstrom,” I said, half to myself.

My father nodded. “At the time, the idea was to create a safety net to prevent mankind from ever sliding back into the disorder of those days. They called on us to do something about it. They thought we could find a way to save us from our own barbarous selves. Thus the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group was born.”

The group was no mere research organization, my father explained. In a way, it had more power than the United Nations, more power even than WHO. These powerful, frightened old men and women who were part of WHO and the United Nations and the admedistrations were also part of the Next-Gen group.

“We had all the funding we needed, and research progressed swiftly. It wasn’t long before we had medicules in past the bloodbrain barrier,” he said.

“What?”

“No one is comfortable with the idea of people messing with their brains. The idea that the brain is protected from medicules is a misunderstanding we spread quite deliberately. If you looked through all the literature on medicule technology, I’m sure you would find enough pieces to put it together yourself. This is publicly available information too. We just altered the flow of data and buried those papers in a pile of other research, where they would never draw unwanted attention. The problem wasn’t the blood-brain barrier to begin with. All we had to do to get past that was dress our medicules up to look like the oxygen and protein that were already passing through the barrier, and we were through in no time at all. The problem, Tuan, was with the very direction of our research.”

I wondered what he meant. “Personally, I see a big problem with the whole idea of controlling peoples’ wills in the first place,” I told him.

“I imagined you’d say that. But think about it a little. People let medicules control their bodies every day to suppress disease. Why then shouldn’t we suppress potentially harmful thoughts in the brain?”

I was about to say the words “free will,” but I hesitated.

Humanity had always gone out of its way to suppress nature.

We built cities, built societies, built systems.

All of these revealed an overriding human desire to take the unpredictable elements of nature and place them within a predictable, controllable framework. In order to live through an age of nuclear fallout and plagues, we had striven to conquer the last remaining vestiges of nature within us, and had largely succeeded. We installed medicules in our bodies and linked up to health supervision servers. We thoroughly rid our society of lifestyle habits that were bad for our health. Our victory was complete, with the exception of old age, of course.

Wasn’t the brain also part of the body? What possible reason could there be not to control it as well? I lost my conviction and sat down on the sandy riverbank. My gaze wandered off down the river. In the distance, I saw several young boys playing with a dog.

If that dog had a will of its own, then how could we say our souls are any more valuable than the soul of that dog?

“To our elders who lived through the Maelstrom, human will was nothing more than our barbaric nature, red in tooth and claw. Admedistrative society calls on its constituents to always remember public virtue and resource awareness. To follow its regulations and ‘atmosphere’ of their own free will. That is how we have been able to create the least lethal, most equal, most peaceful, and most love-filled society since the dawn of time.”

The smells of the market floated down from the street to the Tigris banks.

ate—masgouf>

Smells we had excised from our society.

The kind of society my father was talking about was the society Miach hated. To her, the heights mankind had reached, this temple to peace, thoughtfulness, and health, was just another prison to be shut down and abandoned.

What a picture our society painted: everybody binding themselves to unwritten rules, carefully staying inside unseen boundaries.

I don’t give a shit about love.

Or a damn about thoughtfulness.

And resource awareness can go fuck itself.

My body isn’t here for the admedistration. It’s not here for any of you. It’s only here for me.

These tits, this ass, these belong to Miach Mihie.

Miach put my feelings into words perfectly. Or maybe my feelings changed to fit her words. Whichever it was, a part of me buried deep down still felt that way.

All I had done by getting my job as a Helix agent, besides finding a place where I could relax and smoke a cigarette in the gray zone between barbarism and morality known as the battlefield, was create a weak partition between myself and society. I had to get close to the battles to escape the suffocation of society, but I never took it all the way. I wasn’t about to strap on a rifle and join in the battles myself.

I had merely found a comfortable spot somewhere between Miach and society.

Even without the mass simultaneous suicides, admedistration reports showed the suicide rate among youngsters going up year after year. More kids were

Souls in danger of being crushed by society were, in turn, gnawing away at its underbelly.

Souls that just didn’t fit. Souls of children yearning for disease, for damage, for pain. With wickedness in their hearts they tried to ruin their own precious lives, and they knew what they were doing. Something had to be wrong with this picture. Even in our brainwashed society, I think people had begun to realize it, but not with such clarity that they felt they could talk about the wrongness yet. It was just a slight feeling of discomfort, which they pushed down into their subconscious with all their might.

What I had found was middle ground between chaos and regulation, a limbo where I could hang for eternity.

I had sometimes felt like I was Miach’s doppelgänger.

But that wasn’t true at all. I had merely become the person I imagined Miach
would
have become if she had to live in my world.

“The reason I took Miach was, for one, because she was a perfect confluence of the various stressors our society creates. If we could bend Miach’s obdurate will and steer it off its collision course with death, then we could control anybody. That was the thought. In those days, we picked up a lot of kids like her and put them into treatment. We gathered the ones that wanted to kill themselves—especially the ones who overate or refused to eat, the ones who wanted to watch themselves grow weak and die. Our goal was to create a harmonized will inside the human brain. We called it the Harmony program. The experiments we performed on kids like Miach were tests-to-destruction, of a sort. We were seeing how far Harmony could go.”

I felt an irrational anger swelling up inside me. But not because of the tests they performed on Miach.

I wanted to know why they hadn’t tested me.

Of course, I knew precisely why. They needed someone who was really, deeply, fundamentally without hope. They probably had their eyes on hundreds of emergency morality centers. There were plenty of kids back then who had attempted suicide more than once, just as there were plenty of them now.