Harmony (14 page)

“It seems as though Nuada’s daughter has only grown wilder with age.”

“It’s an occupational disease. There are worse symptoms, if you care to see them.”

“That’s quite all right. I frighten easily enough,” the professor said. He called up a command pad on his desktop screen and began downloading data from someplace. He indicated the desk, so I reached out and touched it to do the transfer.

A densely packed scientific paper began scrolling at high speed through my AR.

“I don’t have time to read all this and you know it.”

“Call it my little way of getting back at you.”

“Um, excuse me?”

“I’m kidding, mostly. Let me sum it up for you. The paper is concerned with human will. A certain Russian researcher was able to use a psychological simulation based on these data to create a fairly detailed model of how the human will works.”

The professor pulled up a 3-D image embedded in the paper. It was a small picture of the brain that now began to rotate in my AR. A narrow wedge of it was blinking.

I pointed. “What’s that?”

“Part of the mesencephalon, the midbrain,” he said. “This is the part that governs the feedback system in our brains. Put simply, it processes the signals that motivate us to do things. Every action, no matter how small, has its associated reward. In most cases it’s a simple sensation of pleasure or fulfillment. If I have sex I will feel good—that’s a very simple, extreme example. Actually, my explanation is slightly off, but all you need to know is the general concept here. What I’m talking about is the range of feedback, great and infinitesimally small, that inspires us to repeat certain choices. This reward system creates a vast variety of motivating desire modules that compete for our attention. We call the act of choosing between these modules our
will
.”

The professor looked at me as if to ask whether I understood. I motioned for him to continue.

“Picture, say, a conference room. Real or in an AR session, it doesn’t matter. There’re all these people there and they’re all clamoring for this or that, until they boil things down to a collection of salient points and come to a conclusion. Think of the desire modules we all carry around as the people in that meeting, trying to get their opinions heard. When we think of human will, it’s common sense to think of it as a single existence or an all-discerning soul. But it’s not. It’s the heated debate, the shouting and the name-calling. It’s the process itself. The will isn’t one thing, it’s all of your desires clamoring for attention—that very state of being. Humans forget that we are a collection of disparate fragments and go around calling ourselves ‘I’ as though we were one immutable entity. It’s comical, really.”

“And this paper models that system?”

The professor dropped his display and leaned forward on his desk, nodding. “It does. When Nuada read this, he realized that if you could influence the various elements in a person’s feedback system, you could influence their will. Even control it.”

Controlling a person’s will?

I appreciated the professor’s finesse in saying something of such dire import with all the nonchalance of someone discussing the weather.

“Desire is very closely linked to reward. If the reward associated with a particular desire is slight, it reduces our will to act on that desire, and it becomes very hard for that particular desire to take the floor in that meeting of modules I talked about. People change their minds all the time. It’s the differences in reward levels that change our will, and it’s all mapped out. We even know how the feedback system interacts with different parts of the brain. The only problem was creating the medicules that could act on this knowledge. There needed to be a way to get the troops into the battlefield, which is the midbrain in this case.”

A light went on in my head. “Past the blood-brain barrier.”

“There is that, yes. But that’s only one of the problems involved. In any case, that’s what Nuada went to Baghdad to study.”

Controlling people’s desires.

Controlling people’s wills.

If you could sweep up all the fragments that made up our souls and lock them together like pieces of a puzzle, could you make a perfect person? What kind of person would that be?

Not someone like Miach. Not someone like me.

Miach had implored us to show our lack of value to the world. The day they figured out how to completely control a person’s will, the point would be moot.

I pictured a world of people all living together in perfect harmony.

A perfect society, run by perfect people, perfectly.

Our collective medical society was a good start in that direction. All it lacked was the tool sufficient to finish the job. My father had left myself and my mother and Japan to go to Baghdad to find that tool. To fashion a scalpel sharp enough to cut souls.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Tuan, but the prospect of being able to fiddle with a person’s soul makes for a very attractive research project.”

The professor scratched his head, averting his eyes from me, as though he felt he shared a bit of my father’s guilt. His gaze drifted to the row of pink-leaved trees outside the window. “You can’t wave a good idea like this in front of a scientist and expect them not to reach for it. I’m not condoning what he did to you and your mother, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand what it’s like to be a scientist in his position—and why he left you to go to Baghdad.”

“I understand what you’re saying, professor. But you’re not my father. His sin is his and no one else’s.”

I looked away, my eyes wandering until they found a yellow square among the floppy disks scattered across the floor. There was a label on the front of it with some kind of logo and an illustration like one from a children’s book. Probably some kind of game in its day.

“Someday, that will be us lying there,” the professor said quietly. I looked up, not understanding.

“Dead media. Relics of a bygone age.” He leaned back in his chair. “You’ve read those science fiction stories where humans manage to digitize the consciousness and upload themselves to some computer network. We do that, and our bodies will be nothing but antiquated dead media as far as our souls are concerned. It’s not hard to imagine a few soulless bodies lying around between the piles of magnetic tape and flash memory cards in my office once we evolve our consciousness beyond the need for the flesh.”

“Really?” I asked. “I always thought it was the other way around. That the soul was just a function of the body—a means to keep it alive. Once our bodies find something more suitable to propagate themselves and are able to trade in these old souls, then it’s we who become the dead media.”

That caught him off his guard. The professor sat with a blank expression on his face for a few moments. Then he laughed out loud. “True enough! A very radical idea at first blush, but from the perspective of evolution, I’d say yours is more correct. Perhaps it is I who was caught up in an antiquated notion of the human soul as something sacred and unique.”

“The question is, if someone developed the technology to control and change human will, what would they do with it?”

“Tuan.” The professor shook his head. “I think, and this is just my opinion, but I think that most scientists don’t do research like that with any kind of objective. They aren’t thinking what they want to do with it. The research itself is the goal. It’s a challenge. Like the mountain climber says, they do it because it’s there. If there is an issue of scientific interest, they’ll look into it. That’s all the motivation they need.”

I stood and strode toward the door, not even bothering to pick my way through the piles of printouts that scattered in my wake. I stopped just before I reached the door and said over my shoulder, “Professor, I’m looking for Miach Mihie. Finding my father is just a means to that end.”

I left the lab behind me, feeling like I was getting closer to the truth than I had ever been. I could feel it in my bones. I was on the right path.

I didn’t need bobbing AR arrows to find my way on this one.

≡

Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg was not pleased with my failure to report my findings either to the Japanese police or to my own Helix Inspection Agency branch. She was on my HeadPhone right now, criticizing me in sentences carefully worded to avoid any offensive language.

“Don’t worry, I’m making progress,” was all I could tell her, which she followed by asking for more details. Her persistence made me feel like I had somehow unconsciously uttered the shocking words
It’s private
and now she had it in for me. Of course, that was just my imagination working overtime. Os Cara had no idea of my growing personal involvement in the investigation.

I walked, letting my eyes wander along the ground, grunting noncommittal replies to her questions as I made my way down the white walkway that led past the pink trees on the way to the university parking lot.

“I’m going to Baghdad.”

“What?!”

Though her voice was as smooth as ever, it was clear she was fuming just beneath the surface. Still, she managed an almost civil “Why Baghdad?” to which I replied, “Because that’s where my investigation is leading me. Neither of us has a whole lot of options when it comes to what we can say, do we?” I added. That really rubbed her the wrong way.

“Don’t think you can keep playing the Niger card over and over again.”

“Oh,” I said, “I intend to use that one till it’s worn around the edges.” I stared at the alias graphic my AR displayed in place of Os Cara’s real face. It amused me that our aliases looked so calm while we were down in the trenches, lobbing verbal grenades at each other.

Most people had the habit of looking down at their feet while they were on their HeadPhone—probably because otherwise they would get too caught up in the conversation and trip on something. It was such a common sight these days that hardly anyone paid it a second thought, but if someone from a hundred years ago slipped into our time, they would see a bunch of people walking around staring down at the ground muttering to themselves and rightly determine we were all in need of therapy.

I’m sorry, Miach.

Those words tickled the back of my mind. Something about the way Cian had been staring down at her
caprese
. In all the other AR archive footage of the suicides I’d seen, the act had progressed smoothly from what came before. People were just doing whatever they normally did, then they were finding a way to kill themselves.

Cian was the only one who had taken any time before the act, her head bowed, as though she were reflecting on what she was about to do.

She had been the only one to look down, just as I was looking down right now while I talked to Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg. Just Cian Reikado. Just her.

“Prime, we’re going to have to continue this from the PassengerBird. Something really important’s just come up.”

I cut the call before Prime had time to really lose her shit, and drawing on the access to local police records we Helix agents had been given as part of this investigation, I called up Cian Reikado’s phone records.

The day of Cian’s death. 13:16.

Just before she died.

As she looked down at her plate.

My spine froze. That day, as Cian sat across from me staring at her
caprese
, she had been on the phone with someone else.

I didn’t have to think too hard to figure out who it was.Cian had said her name, after all.

It was just hard to accept.

It was terrifying to accept.

A dead person—or at least, someone I had believed to be dead—calling my friend just before her own death. The record of that call from 13:16 two days ago blinked in the corner of my AR, quietly yet steadily demanding that I play back this message from beyond the grave.

With trembling fingers, I reached out and pressed the blinking entry on the list.

A voice recording opened.

Hello, Cian.

Long time no see. Thirteen years, huh?

I’m calling because I wanted to talk to you about what it means to be “good.”

I’m talking
Good
with a capital
G
.

What do you think it means?

It’s not about helping people in need or making friends or not hurting others. Those are aspects of being good, but they’re really just details. If you get right down to it,
Good
is the will it takes to maintain a certain set of values over time.

That’s right, maintenance. Maintaining a family, maintaining happiness, maintaining peace. It doesn’t really matter what you’re maintaining. All you have to do is keep something going that people believe in. That’s the essence of Good.

But nothing goes on forever, does it?

That’s why you have to make a constant, conscious effort to be good. You have to keep those branches spreading toward the sun. Good has to be actively maintained. Put it another way, that which you consciously believe in and maintain is Good.
Even though that could be all kinds of things.

Too bad our bodies aren’t built for the task. People grow, then grow old. People get sick. People die. There’s no good or bad in nature because everything always changes. Everything goes away in the end. That’s what’s kept Good from swallowing up the world so far. That’s what’s kept people from growing arrogant with all the Good they’ve done, though only just barely. But now, thanks to WatchMe and medicules, disease and even regular aging are in the process of being eliminated.
The value we call health is trampling over everything else.
What do you think that means? It means that the flood is coming. We’re about to drown.

If it isn’t all Good now, it soon will be.

It was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Miach Mihie’s voice. It was also, beyond question, her thinking.