Harmony (7 page)

“How’d you find me in that crowd?” I asked.

“What are you talking about, Tuan? You stand out in any crowd!”

“Oh?”

“You should really watch that—you probably attract enough attention as it is with your job and all. Wow, you’re really, uh, rough-looking too. No offense.”

“Comes with the territory. I can’t help it if battlefields always tend to be the deserts and the highlands and the swamps. It’s tough on the skin.”

To tell the truth, my skin condition probably had more to do with my various indulgences than any battlefield conditions. The only thing keeping my WatchMe from alerting the nearest admedistration-contracted counselor was the DummyMe I’d installed to send phony data about my body to the server, but the DummyMe fell short when it came to fooling the human eye. I must’ve stuck out like a sore thumb.

Having bad skin meant you weren’t living up to at least one of the basic requirements of lifeist society. A sure sign you were a wrench in harmony’s cogs. Lifeist society meant everyone, man or woman, had to conform to certain standards. Nonconformity made itself physically obvious.

Bad skin? A sure sign of poor self-control.

Shadows under your eyes? A lack of proper publicly correct resource awareness.

All of this was reflected in your SA score. The vast majority of admedistrations required all adults to make their histories, including their medical records, public knowledge. This was, in part, to make the process of assigning a social assessment score as transparent as possible. No doubt, if politicians these days were as fat as the leaders of old had been, such open sharing of personal information would never have come to pass.

I remembered my surprise when I came across pictures of great leaders while leafing through historical archives.

There they were, unadulterated, men and women of power, and most of them were grossly overweight.

Judged by modern standards, someone like Churchill could never be considered a hero. Who would trust a man as copiously fat as that? Any nude painted before the eighteenth century was completely out as well.

I came across an old schoolyard rhyme once.

Fatty fatty, two-by-four, can’t fit through the bathroom door!

fatty
, repeated here, mean?>

Words like “fatty” hadn’t been used in years—too great a risk of hurting someone’s feelings. Not that there was anyone chubby enough to rate the term anyway. Like alcohol, tobacco, and the morally depraved man who paid money for sex with girls, these terms of belittlement had simply faded away. They were soon followed in their extinction by fat people and even skinny people. All gone. Under the constant monitoring of WatchMe and the constant advice of a health consultant, obesity and emaciation both had been driven out of the human experience.

I looked at Cian, my friend who had tried to starve herself to death along with me and Miach.

Her body fit perfectly within the prescribed margins for a healthy adult.

A boring body, in a boring adult size.

I quickened my pace across the airport lobby—itself designed with incredible attention paid to reducing any feeling of oppressive authority the structure might have naturally possessed. A cluster of yellow tables stood out against the burgundy interior, grabbing the eye. As I headed for the subway, dragging my bags behind me, Cian made an effort to match my pace. It was incredible really. For all the vast space here, and the high ceilings, I couldn’t detect a whiff of authority to the place. Admedistrative design was sterile like that. By their very nature, large architectural spaces had a certain fascist scent to them, a prideful authority that came from being monumental and leaked out whether the builders intended it to be there or not. Large structures made human beings small by comparison. Even public places, like this airport, did that.

Which was why the designers of the place had pulled out all the technological stops to reduce the impact of the airport’s size. I could sense the attempt to cover the unwanted stench of power, and it made me sick to my stomach. Calling the place a monastery made it sound too Christian, but it was true that the world we lived in often felt like it was being run by nuns. It was fascism, courtesy of Mary, Mother of God.

The world had been made thoroughly gentle. Even the arts.

My profiling sheet—just one of a multitude of healthmaintenance applications I had to use in my daily life—was like another version of me.

A version of me that accepted everything the real me hated.

My profiling sheet lived inside the admedistration server from where it monitored my daily routine, identifying my likes and dislikes and keeping a careful eye out for anything, be it literature or an image, that might cause me emotional trauma. Any novel or essay I was about to read would be scanned in advance and cross-referenced with my therapy records. If any content therein touched on a past trauma I had experienced, it would often be filtered out before I ever saw it. At the very least, I would receive a warning.
This work of art contains potentially emotionally damaging material
, or my favorite,
This novel contains possible violations to the general morality code, article 40896-A as determined by the Health and Clarity Admedistration Moral Review Board of 4/12/2049.

When all possibility of fear was removed from our environment, a more subtle kind of fear replaced it.

“Do you know something?” I heard Miach say. “A long, really long time ago, there was this artist who used an airplane and smoke to write the word
BANG
in the sky over Hiroshima. What do you think?”

“
Bang
, like the atomic bomb? That’s in pretty bad taste, I’d say.”

“It’s totally in bad taste!” Miach said, grinning. “The artist got so much criticism that he had to publicly apologize. Because his art made some people unhappy, it hurt people’s feelings. But no one would even
do
that kind of thing these days. They’d be warned away from it by the admedistration before they even got to it. They probably wouldn’t even have the idea in the first place. With these filters warning us what we’re about to see all the time, no one looks at anything. How could an artist get any bad ideas to start with? I look at old books and paintings and I envy the imaginations of our predecessors. I really do.”

“Why?”

“Because there was always the chance that they would hurt with their art. Always the chance they would make someone sad or angry.”

My eyes fell on an old man, a custodial worker, cleaning the airport. Clearly, he hadn’t been paying as much attention to his health as he should have. His SA score was about as low as it got. A low SA score brought job security of a kind—no one would dream of taking your job away from you, out of pity—but it also meant an utter lack of mobility. You were basically stuck doing whatever it was they made you do. That said, the old man was very likely leading a fairly comfortable life, thanks to food distributed by volunteers and a living support center where he could sleep at night. He might’ve even had some family.

Cian was slightly shorter than I was, so when we walked side by side, she had to lengthen her strides just to keep up. When I walked, I didn’t care whether I was matching anyone else’s pace or not. I had decided that was how I was going to walk a long time ago. Right after I’d lost Miach.

And there it was. Walking together with Cian brought on the feeling of loss I had dreaded was out there somewhere waiting for me. Miach should’ve been standing right there, right by Cian, book held behind her back, telling us in great detail (without actually looking at us) how we could damage the world in which we lived.

It was like Cian and I were a temple from which someone had stolen our golden Buddha named Miach Mihie. I couldn’t help feeling like there was this space in front of us that should have been filled.

Odd that being together with someone should remind me of what was missing. Our charismatic leader, gone these thirteen years. She carried far too much knowledge in her tiny body, and far too much hatred, and far too much beauty. And now she was gone.

I want to dance on the graves of those kind, healthy people.

A waltz, I think.

A nonexistent Miach looked back at us over her shoulder.

Miach Mihie. Miach Mihie. Miach Mihie.

We passed by volunteers handing out artificial protein soup to political refugees in the airport lobby and took the elevator down to the floor where the subways connected to the airport. On my way down, I had the sudden sensation that Miach was standing right behind me, and I had to turn and look, but it was only Cian.

“You going home?” she asked me as we waited on the subway platform. The platform had been painted an inoffensive sea blue.

I shook my head. “I’ll look for a hotel or find someplace to crash. There’s nothing for me at home.”

“I wouldn’t say that. Everyone wants to hear your stories, you know.”

“Who’s everyone?” I chuckled and shook my head. “Actually, I did get a message from one of the neighbors saying they wanted to throw a welcome home party. They were going to call everyone for two blocks around and be here waiting when my PassengerBird landed. Can you imagine? No thanks. That’s the last thing I need. Especially since my mom was so enthusiastic about the idea.”

“Why not let them have their party? It could be fun.”

“I have nothing to talk to them about.”

“What are you saying? You could tell them about the Sahara, or where you were before that—Colombia, was it? You’ve been to so many places and seen so many things, Tuan.”

Yeah, I could tell them stories. Like the one about the child soldiers drugged up and made to shoot their own parents and siblings for target practice. Or the bloody severed arms and legs piled up in heaps like firewood. Hardly anyone who bought into the admedistration’s protected life had the faintest clue about the realities of war. They were far too busy being nice to everyone in their immediate vicinity to care. Cian was as ignorant as any of them. Ignorant and innocent. Nothing had changed in that regard.

“And I think they’d want to hear about what you’ve been doing,” Cian was saying.

“I’m just not interested.” I sighed for effect. “Cian, you volunteering at all?”

“A little. Three days a week. Delivering meals and taking care of the elderly, that sort of thing.”

“Morality sessions and health conferences?”

“Online, yeah. About fifteen hours a month. It’s not too bad.”

What was this? One of my friends, a girl who couldn’t stand this world, who tried to kill herself just to leave a mark on its perfect face, had conformed completely to a typical, publicly correct lifestyle.

Or maybe it was less personal. Maybe it was just that kids grew up and became adults.

Miach’s ghost hovered nearby, a cold smile on her lips as she whispered.

This body, these tits, this ass, this uterus. These are mine.

Aren’t they?

So after our failure, Cian had taken the plunge headfirst into the adult world. The only one dragging her heels was me, and I couldn’t decide whether that was admirable or pitiable.

I hung, suspended in space, somewhere between Miach Mihie’s ghost and Cian Reikado’s innocence.

“Look, Cian, I’ve been overseas a long time, right? So I just don’t know the people who live around my home. I haven’t volunteered with them or gone to health meetings with them. I’m just not very connected to the community.”

I explained to her that being a globe-trotting Helix agent meant:

Because we lacked a conclave to assess us, the admedistration awarded us an arbitrary SA score in order to account for the inconsistency that resulted from doing something very important to the continuation of the admedistration’s lifestyle while, by necessity, being forced to operate independently of that admedistration.

“Oh. Really?”

“Really.”

As I was explaining my life to Cian, I couldn’t help but feeling that I had somehow become Miach. Miach explaining how to use a medcare unit to make a chemical weapon capable of killing fifty thousand people. Miach who could make a pill that would shut down your entire digestive tract.

Miach who could wear a cool smile as she told you she wanted to watch the world burn.

I felt like she must have back then, filled with knowledge no one else had, talking openly, brazenly, full of confidence, fearing nothing, giving every word a declaration.

Hey, Cian, did you know that if you install DummyMe, you can spoof your physical data before it gets sent to the server? Hey, Cian, did you know that you can do anything to yourself with DummyMe installed? Hey, Cian, have you heard about this… Hey, Cian… Say, Cian…

But instead of playing Miach’s doppelgänger, I merely smiled cynically and said, “The real reason they give me a score is because if they didn’t, I’d be labeled a sociopath.”