Harmony (3 page)
I hadn’t told anyone at school who my father was—if they knew anything, it was that he was someone important. Nuada Kirie had been the first scientist to put forth the theory that led to the technologies in WatchMe in a thesis he wrote with an associate thirty-five years ago now.
Did Miach know? What kind of face would she make if I told her? Would she hate me if I told her that this world she hated so much had all started with my dad? I wondered if I’d get a pardon if I told her that I too hated the world.
“You know we’re living in the future,” Miach said, her grim frown at odds with what should have been a positive statement. “And the future is, in a word, boring. ‘The future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.’ A man named Ballard said that. He was a science fiction writer. And he was talking about here, this place,
our
world. Our world where the admedistration takes care of everyone’s lives and health. We’re trapped in someone’s antique vision of the future, and it sucks.”
We walked on awhile until we came to a crossroads where Miach stopped and took me by the hand. I froze. This was different. She lifted my hand up before her face, with all the obeisance of a courtier before the queen, and said, “We’ve taken the mechanics of nature—things we didn’t even understand before—and outsourced them. Getting sick, living, who knows what’s next? Maybe even thinking. These things used to belong just to us, they could
only
belong to us, and now they’re part of the market system, handled externally. I don’t want to be a part of the world. My body is my own. I want to live my own life.Not sitting around like some sheep waiting to be strangled by some stranger’s kindness.”
And then she kissed the back of my hand.
I tried to yank my hand away, but I was already too late. The feel of her lips was permanently inscribed on my skin.
Cold.
That was my first thought. Her lips were cold. But it didn’t feel bad; in fact it left a pleasant chill on my skin, like an aftertaste, that seeped down in between the cells. When I looked up, Miach was already across the street, heading in the direction away from my house.
“You and I are cut from the same cloth, Tuan Kirie,” she called out, smiling again. Then Miach broke into a run and kept running until I could see her no longer.
≡
That was how I met Miach Mihie.
I walked by a park. She was reading a book. That was all.
It was enough to start a friendship that, short-lived though it was, would change the rest of my life.
03
Before I talk about my separation from and reunion with Miach Mihie, a story which begins in the Sahara, I should start by telling you about Cian Reikado’s death by her own hand. It had been thirteen years since the three of us met. Forty-eight hours before Cian did a face-plant in a plate of
insalata di caprese
with
and died, I was in the Sahara, in a world of painted blue and vivid yellow divided along a single line.
The colors met at the horizon, lush, permeated with pigment, enough to make anyone forget that the Sahara used to be a desert.
Forgotten by man, forgotten from history.
The shimmering waves of heat, the layered petals, even the gentle swaying of stalks in the breeze were all traces left by the painter’s brush—a landscape turned into century-old art. A Mark Rothko abstract in yellow and blue. I sat looking out at it through half-lidded eyes from my vantage point atop a WHO armored transport. My lips relished the texture of the cigar they held, membranes of skin caressing the slight roughness of hard banana leaves. I enjoyed my illicit vice. Our caravan sat at the end of a vast sea of sunflowers, here in the place they once called the Sahara desert. Here, where the RRWs once fell.
The Reliable Replacement Warhead, a type of warhead produced en masse by a nation called the United States of America, starting on or around the year 2010. These warheads were hailed as the “nuclear warhead of the twenty-first century,” intended to replace the aging twentieth century arsenal with better durability, safety, and ease of use. During the Maelstrom which broke out in the English-speaking countries of North America in 2019, many of these warheads found their way to the Third World. And though EU forces, primarily those of France and Germany, intervened and were successful in disabling many nuclear sites, a final toll of thirty-five RRWs were lost from the American arsenal. Of these, fourteen were later recovered, two were detonated on American soil, and the remaining nineteen were used in various conflicts around the world. (Excerpt from an International Atomic Energy Agency report.)
Thus the sunflowers.
It was an old method, yet still very effective. Whenever a war faded into peace, people planted flowers. The only thing different this time had been the scale of the effort. Enough yellow flowers to send a hippie crying for a flashback. It was old-fashioned phytoremediation. Genetically modified sunflowers sent roots deep into the soil, sucking up strontium and uranium and other pollutants along with the nutrients they needed to grow. In the course of a flower’s life cycle, the land was cleansed.
As with so many other nations, the assembled countries of North Africa that so gleefully purchased nukes from unscrupulous characters in America during the Maelstrom and then dropped them with wild abandon here in their own land were now no more than a chapter in the history books. A brief scene in history’s play from an age in which every war of independence bore the label “terrorism.”
“They’re here,
ma reine
.”
Étienne called up to me from where he leaned against the side of the transport. He was wearing the standard pink medical troop–issue fatigues. Our guests would be coming, bearing gas lighters and cigars. I spotted a cluster of heads wrapped in blue peeking out from the admedistrative society–planted sea of sunflowers. They stuck out against the brilliant yellow of everything around them. The Kel Tamasheq had always worn those indigo turbans and veils, and they probably always would. They even wore them when they rode to war on camelback, which was impressive considering what terrible camouflage indigo made in a field of flowers.
Four Tamasheq warriors emerged from the lapping edge of the sunflower sea, each with the traditional AK-47 on his shoulder. I got down from the roof of the transport and walked up to their leader.
“Greetings, woman of the medicine people. It has been some time.”
“Greetings, warrior of the Tuareg.”
The man in indigo shook his head. “Do you know what this word
Tuareg
means in Arabic?”
“Sorry.”
“It means ‘the people abandoned by Allah.’ It is the name given to us by outsiders.”
“So what does
Kel Tamasheq
mean then?”
“The ones who speak Tamasheq.”
I couldn’t help but think that “the people abandoned by Allah” sounded a hell of a lot cooler, and I told him so. Our gods, Asklepios and Hippocrates, watched closely over us, the “medicine people,” and in their name we built temples to clinical medicine and struck down nearly every disease ever known to man. Our faith was such that we would continue striking them down, and so the medicine people would never be abandoned by their gods. We had even put WatchMe inside our bodies, just to make sure there was no place where the eyes of our gods could not see.
“You seem to dislike your own gods, woman of the medicine people.”
“Yet you have no compunction about receiving their bounty from us.” I had meant it as sarcasm, but the Tuareg smiled, white teeth against tan skin. “Yes, but the difference between us is that we worship only the minimum amount, no more. Luckily for us, the gods are very understanding about this arrangement.”
I shook my head and sighed at the pragmatic wisdom of these desert—well, ex-desert—dwellers, and pulled a memorycel from my pocket.
“You think we bow too deeply to our gods, then?”
“In a word, yes. ‘All things in moderation’ you say, but you do not practice it. You are so filled with your faith that you must push it upon us as well. And this is why we fight.”
“You don’t think we represent the Nigerians, do you? We’re not even an old-style government. We are an organization under the Geneva Convention, a consensus of medical conclaves— admedistrations—from all over the world. We’re not allies of Niger, or the Tuareg for that matter. We’re just an armistice monitoring group and not even a sanctioned branch of that.”
“Whether you are Nigerian or of the medicine people it is all the same to the Kel Tamasheq. The only thing different is the surface—your skin. And sometimes not even that.”
“Yes, but admedistrations are governmental systems. It’s politics, not faith.”
“Faith, imperialism—these are two words for the same thing. Niger may invoke this lifeism when they tell us to connect to their server, but it is just imperialism, plain and simple. In the past, we fought against the colonialism of England and France. When Qaddafi saw our bravery, he promised us glory as warriors, but the moment things went south, as they say, we were driven from his lands. We have fought dictators in Mali, Niger, and Algeria. All of them use the same imperialist hardware. Your lifeism is just new software for the same old machinery.”
I sighed again. As a Helix agent operating as part of WHO, political negotiations were a large part of my work, and yet I found politics boring in the extreme. I shook the memorycel in my right hand.
“Then this med patch is imperialist software too.”
“Which is why we partake only in moderation.”
The warrior snapped his fingers, and the men behind him went back into the sunflowers. When they emerged, they were carrying several wooden crates between them. I knew what the crates contained—precious goods still enjoyed widely outside of admedistrative society and strictly forbidden within it. Things like the cigar I was still smoking, and booze, and a whole variety of other unhealthy delights.
“Actually, I’m a fan of moderation myself. That goes for Étienne over there as well, and for a great deal of people back at camp eagerly awaiting our return.”
“Yours is a curious race. If so many of you desire to live in moderation, then why do you accept such rigid restrictions on
your own person?”
“No, no, we moderates are in the minority. People like rigid rules and prohibitions, you know. They make them for themselves and live in fear that if they don’t uphold the restrictions then things will go back to the way they were—the dark ages, chaos. That’s basically it. For people living in fear, moderation just doesn’t cut it. And most of the people in my world
are
fearful. It’s like keeping a piggy bank when you never empty your wallet in the first place.”
“What is this ‘piggy bank’? A wallet, I’ve heard of.”
“Actually, I’m not sure myself. About either of them. They’re both from back when money was something you could put in
your pocket.”
Ancient words. The only reason I knew them was because Miach Mihie knew them.
“If your people could only learn the value of moderation, then there would be no war here.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
While the warrior and I spoke, Étienne and his crew received the crates from the Tuareg and began examining their contents. Étienne was French. While he was a bit too macho for my tastes, he had a discerning eye for beauty in his blood, and in my experience there were no people better at finding fault with things than the French. Nestled among the wood chips inside the crates was enough contraband to send any law-abiding member of admedistrative society into a swoon. Not that there would be any lack of those willing to partake back at camp. The moment these crates hit the ground, their contents would be divvied up. That was how it always was. Of course, we only opened the crates to the mob after Étienne’s crew, our coconspirator who downloaded the contents of the memorycel in my hand from the admedistration server, and I took our cuts.
This was how I, as an adult, chose to give the finger to society.
The society that strangled you with kindness.
The society that knocked you out with a stealthy sucker punch to the soul.
All you needed to break free was:
Just those two things.
They say that long ago, students who wanted to behave badly had to sneak off to the lavatory or go behind the school gym in order to smoke cigarettes. Another thing I learned from Miach. What Miach didn’t know was that the lavatory didn’t cut it if you wanted to smoke a fag these days. Now you had to go all the way to the battlefield. Whether you wanted to see it as the act of a lost soul or as the act of an idiot risking their life for a little nicotine buzz, that was up to you.
I will state for the record, however, that before I got to this place I tried a lot of different things, and I lost something very important to me.
What I tried was overeating and self-starvation.
What I lost was Miach Mihie.
≡
Life.
The swarms of medicules my father and his friend unleashed on the world drove the vast majority of diseases off the face of the planet. The homeostatic internal monitoring system known as WatchMe monitored immune consistency and blood cells down to the level of RNA transcription errors. What didn’t fit was immediately removed. The little pharmaceutical factory found in every household, the medcare unit, instantly formulated the necessary cocktail of medicules for eliminating any disease-causing substances found in blood proteins. In a matter of milliseconds, the unit could pinpoint the area where it was needed most and send in the troops.