Harmony (21 page)

With Miach, my father had found his rock bottom.

He had seen the despair in her eyes.

He saw that she was, as Cian had said, standing on the edge of a cliff.

That was what my father had to control, or at least attempt to control.

That was the reason he had abandoned me and my mother and come here to Baghdad. I had to accept that. Yes, I was feeling jealous. Children always got upset when they weren’t chosen for something. Still, at the same time, what they had done was beyond grotesque.

Despairing kids by the dozen.

“How could you?”

My father nodded grimly. “It wasn’t easy. But if we didn’t do something, those children were a grave danger to themselves. All of them had repeatedly tried to take their own lives, and one day, they very well might have succeeded.”

“Nice try, but you’re just taking a consequence and calling it an objective.”

“True enough. Nor were our results by any means perfect.”

“What do you mean?”

“Harmony had a very serious side effect we didn’t anticipate— though, in hindsight, some simple logical reasoning should have made it obvious. As it was, we never saw it coming.”

Suddenly, it occurred to me what he was going to say.

He was right. Logically speaking, it was obvious. If the feedback web reached perfect harmony and all decisions could be made without any conflict and all actions taken clearly, what would that mean? It would mean nothing less than “I” was on the line.

“You killed consciousness.”

06

The death of consciousness.

My father’s eyes opened wide. For moment, he seemed at a
loss for words.

“That’s right. How did you know?”

“Because I’ve heard from three people now what consciousness really is.”

The answer came out so smoothly it surprised even myself.

“That’s right, the conference. If all the participants have the same opinion, and all of their roles are perfectly aligned, then why hold a conference at all? If the feedback web does not plot our values on a hyperbola, but instead uses a logical, exponential curve, this is perfect harmony, in other words a state without any consciousness. It was something we couldn’t detect in our tests on animals.”

So my father had been trying to create a self-evident person, perfectly adapted to the stresses of admedistrative society. For someone whose every desire was self-evident, there was no need to make decisions. If their feedback web worked on clear, logical values, no will was needed to choose between one thing or the other. Consciousness was no longer required.

It almost made me laugh to think that such an obvious outcome hadn’t occurred to anyone in my father’s research group.

The mingled smells of spices and things cooking floated down toward the river from the direction of Abū-Nuwās. I spotted the boys again with their dog, running in and out of the water.

“We announced our findings to the other researchers and investors in the working group, that perfect harmony invariably meant the absence of consciousness. That consciousness was indeed only a mechanism for choosing between the various agents of desire teeming in our subconscious, the result of conflicts that required conscious thought to resolve, and the acting upon those conflicts. These choices were obvious to a perfectly harmonious will, thereby removing the need for a will to determine actions. We were chasing after the perfect human but ended up killing consciousness, for it was no longer needed.”

It was ironic. Our souls were nothing more than the product of a hyperbolic evaluation system we had developed over the course of our evolution. Perfect humans didn’t need souls.

“What happens when you lose your consciousness? Do you just sit there all day in your chair, drooling?”

“Nothing of the sort. You go shopping, you eat, you enjoy entertainment—you merely no longer have to make decisions what to do at any given time because everything is self-evident. It’s the difference between having to make choices and having it all be obvious to you. That’s all it is. That’s what divides the world of the consciousness and the world without. People have absolutely no problem living without consciousness or will, Tuan. They live their lives as normal. People can be born, grow old, and die without consciousness. Consciousness has very little to do with culture, really. From the outside, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether someone has a consciousness or is merely
acting
as though they did. However, because their system of values is fashioned to be in perfect harmony with society, there are far fewer suicides, and the kinds of stress we find in our admedistrative society disappear completely.”

So Miach and presumably these other kids had experienced this in the tests. They had experienced
being
without a consciousness.

All the billions of people on this earth had, at some point in their ancestry, along the long path of evolution, obtained what we call a consciousness. Evolution was a very haphazard thing. Only the genes well suited to a particular environment survived. The result of these patched-together adaptations was the species of human as we knew it now, each one of us possessing that curious byproduct of evolution we called a consciousness.

“When she came back, Miach said it had been pure ecstasy,” my father said with a wry chuckle. “While she was without consciousness, she ate normally, studied, spoke with us, and lived life as normal. When we brought her consciousness back, Miach didn’t remember a thing about her time during the test. She only had the sensation that she had been in a wonderful, joyous place.”

That made sense to me. You couldn’t look at dogs and not think they were, generally speaking, much happier than people. Someone once said that the bird that freezes upon the branch never knows suffering. What Miach had experienced was the state of mankind long before we had obtained consciousness, long before we got lost in the labyrinthine world of introspection and reflection.

The sun was sinking below the horizon now. I reached out as if to touch it with my fingers. People with perfect judgment do not require a consciousness, so it does not exist.

“And you tried to do this to everyone in the world? You were going to steal consciousness from everyone who was stupid enough to install WatchMe?”

“No—we weren’t,” my father said, beginning to walk back up the bank in the direction of the street. “We could not just make the decision to eliminate consciousness. For one, I was terrified of the thought. To lose who I am, my own consciousness…In a sense, it’s like dying. We didn’t have the right to decide whether or not to impose something like that on billions of people.”

“I suppose it depends on what death is,” I said.

I admit that I shared an inclination to think of my
self
as my consciousness. The consciousness had the ability to make predictions and to control and order the body and mind, and it was easy to think of that as being everything. Though I was sure my body saw things differently.

We were back in the heat of the crowd up on the main street. Lights had gone on, bare bulbs illuminating the open shop fronts. It wasn’t just restaurants—there were places selling cooking wares and fabrics and carpets. People of different occupations bustled about in the midst of mingled smells from the many stoves and grills.

“We asked WHO and a few of the admedistrations to make a decision,” my father was saying. “In the end, we settled on a compromise, that we would install the system in everyone, but not activate it. That’s right, the medicule network necessary to control our feedback web is already in place in your brain, as it is in mine. If ever mankind should threaten to sink back into the chaos that was the Maelstrom, then, as an emergency measure, we can activate Harmony.”

Praise be to God. Though none of us asked, we have received. An automatic hallelujah device in our brains. Stuck right onto the synapses of our midbrain, never to let go or be removed. I could hear the choir singing now.

Ever since God had given us our self-awareness, it had done nothing but torment the suicidal and the literary among us, and now we were free to throw it all away. Free to return in primal ecstasy to the Kingdom of Heaven.

Hallelujah.

“So you gave someone the power of life and death over our consciousnesses and stole Miach’s consciousness away from her? You’re worse than I thought.”

“I thought you’d say something of the sort—though admittedly, I never expected to hear that from the despairing little girl you used to be. I’m sure most people wouldn’t want to lose that part of their brain that recognizes ‘me’ as ‘me.’ No matter what the potential cost to society. Which is why the old folks in our group, in their fear of the chaos that was the Maelstrom, put their plan into action without any public discussion or any morality session review.”

If these old folks wanted it, the human race could have its consciousness taken away.

We could all become people free of our useless consciousness, all doing precisely what we should be doing at all times.

We could upgrade to the newer model.
Homo perfectus
.

“So if you wanted to—”

“Yes, but right now, we do not. No matter how big a mountain of suicides our gentle society creates, there has to be a societal solution for this. Because we believe this, our fingers have never once strayed toward the Harmony button. Believe me, we don’t want this to happen.”

“But Miach Mihie does?”

My father stopped and picked up a kettle from a stand out in front of one of the shops. He stared at it. “Tuan. Have you ever heard of the island of sign language?”

I blinked and said that I hadn’t. “That’s kind of a sudden change of topic, don’t you think?”

“The people who first colonized Martha’s Vineyard—that’s an island off the American coast—were cut off for some time from the mainland, and there was a lot of inbreeding. This resulted in several families where both parents had a recessive gene for deafness, and in another generation or two, hardly anyone on the island could hear at all. It was more unusual to
have
your hearing than not. So, everyone on the island communicated via sign language. Sign language became their mother tongue. And no one was the worse for it. There, a person with hearing—which we take to be the norm—was instead a radical departure from the norm. Their culture did not require a sense of sound.”

“I’m still not sure what this has to do with our conversation.”

“It has to do with Miach Mihie.”

“Don’t tell me that she was deaf—or wait, that she had some sort of consciousness impairment, like those people had a hearing impairment?”

“No, she had a consciousness. However, it was different from ours in that she had formed her consciousness sometime after her birth.”

After her birth?

“You mean, she was born
without
a consciousness?”

“That’s correct.” My father tapped the kettle he held with one fingernail.
Ding.
The clear, high tone echoed in my skull. “Several decades ago, in the midst of the conflict between Russia and Chechnya, a minority ethnic group was discovered. This was a completely new group as far as the scientific community was concerned, mind you, not appearing in any records until then. Though their clothing, food, culture, and language had all been influenced by the surrounding peoples, they avoided close relations with any of them, maintaining a small community in a rugged mountainous region, where they had been inbreeding for many generations.”

“Wait, Dad, are you saying—”

“I’m saying that these people shared a common recessive trait. It’s a trait that shows up very rarely in the general population, and the chances of two people with it marrying are so slim that there has never been any observations made of this occurring. The trait of which I speak is a missing gene—the gene responsible for consciousness. I’m sure that of the billions of people in the world, there are a few born without the ability to form a consciousness, but in this Chechen minority group, nearly everyone lacked a consciousness.”

“But then how did they live or develop a culture?”

“After we found them, we ran them through several tests. They were extremely adept at logical thinking. Their value system was not like our irrational hyperbola, which attributes too much value to that which is right before us. They did not make choices. MRI scans showed that, indeed, there was none of the activity we associate with consciousness going on, yet they lived regular lives and had their own culture—though much of it was borrowed from surrounding peoples as the need arose. They were a people that neither possessed nor required consciousness. Just like the people of Martha’s Vineyard didn’t require speech. They were people in perfect harmony with a perfectly logical value system.”

“So Miach…”

“The conflict had spread into the mountains, plunging her people into chaos. Miach was taken from her village at the age of eight by Russian soldiers and sent to a camp run by human traffickers. This was a place of unspeakable tragedy, where sex slaves were kept for the sole use of the Russian army. This is where her consciousness awoke. Her brain needed a consciousness with a hyperbolic value system in order to withstand the daily, immediate terror of repeated rape. What happened was, a region in her cerebrum began to emulate the functions of the feedback mechanism usually handled by the midbrain. You’ve heard stories of how brains damaged in accidents will activate undamaged regions to take over some of the lost functionality, right? The brain is a very flexible organ.”

Miach’s consciousness was an emulation?

Not a true consciousness like our own.

Not a pattern woven by the feedback web in the midbrain.

A replica, created to serve a dire need.

Imitation consciousness.

I stared at my father’s back. He hadn’t brought Miach to Baghdad just because her despair had been deeper and more violent than mine.