Harmony (6 page)
There’s nothing I can do.
It was then that I learned how to give up. Miach was dead, and she had accomplished nothing. I lost all hope in the world and, at the same time, learned how to live without hope.
I looked out the window and saw the evening sun on the twelfth of June, 2060, shining down on a giant hospital ward stretching to the horizon on both sides of the river. Mankind was trapped in an endless hospital.
I’m sorry, Miach.
I couldn’t do it. And it had taken the sacrifice of a life to the gods of medicine for me to understand. I started to cry there in the backseat of a taxi. My mother’s eyes remained fixed forward on the road ahead, as though she didn’t notice. After I cried myself out, I leaned back in my seat and fell asleep.
≡
I opened my eyes again.
Tuan Kirie, senior inspector, age twenty-eight.
Étienne was shaking me by the shoulder where I lay next to the crates of cigars and wine.
“We are at the base,
ma reine
.”
05
The “blushing maiden brigade.”
That was what people called the medical corps. I think they meant it as a compliment.
If you were wondering whether every admedistration’s medical corps wore pink uniforms, you were right. Go to France, Russia, or Mexico, and every medical corps uniform, helmet, and armor transport was painted the color of a lightly ripened peach. Like the army always wore drab olive, and the navy black and white.
Which was why the tents in the Niger armistice monitoring camp were all pink.
Against the sea of pale pink, the deep crimson coats we Helix agents wore stood out. We stood out everywhere, for that matter. Now I was making my way through the tents, back to where the crates were being unloaded—our backyard.
I carried off the portion for myself and for our server techie— call him Alpha—and left Étienne and his crew to handle the rest of it. I would get back to my own office as quickly as possible and drink myself into a stupor, as I always did. At least, that was the plan.
I had zero interest in knowing the details of how Étienne divvied up the booty from the Kel Tamasheq, or how much money he made, or how much he skimmed for himself. He would always pass me some credit after we were done, so I knew he at least wasn’t stealing everything. That was good enough for now. All I needed were smokes and booze. That was it.
In my world, you had to come all the way out to this hinterland, to a battlefield, just to find ways to damage yourself. Effective, yet ultimately trivial ways. Far more trivial than what I had attempted back in high school, before I lost Miach.
“I brought the goods,” I announced, stepping past the pink flap of the tent where Alpha worked—where I found not only Alpha surrounded by his infield terminal screens, but also my boss with an excessively stern look on her face. I caught the look of abject fear on Alpha’s face and realized things had taken a decided turn for the worse. “We were waiting for you, Senior Inspector Kirie,” the woman in the crimson coat just like mine announced.
“You needed to talk to me about something, Os Cara?”
“Only about what that is you’re hiding behind your back.”
I shrugged and tossed the vintage wine in her direction. I had a reputation for giving up easily.
She caught the ancient Petrus, the ruby red liquid sloshing inside the glass bottle.
Brand name of an alcoholic beverage originating in France’s Pomerol region. A “bordeaux wine.” Noted for its label depicting Saint Peter, the twelfth apostle.This château wine vaulted from relative obscurity to immense popularity after winning a gold medal at the 1889 Paris Exposition. One of the most expensive wines in its heyday, after the Maelstrom and the ascendance of lifeism it shared the same fate as all other alcoholic beverages.
It had already been over forty years since anyone in a developed country had been able to freely enjoy alcohol. “What do we have here?” Os Cara breathed as she caught the bottle of forbidden pleasure lightly in her left hand. “I would ask if you have no shame, but then, I already know the answer.”
“It’s called wine.” I snorted. “Heard of it?”
She didn’t even look at the label. “A bordeaux. Lots of merlot in these—100 percent in some barrels, depending on the year. Makes for a very smooth texture.”
“No shit.”
“Most certainly not. I drank one of these when I was much younger, actually. The last generation that could truly relish alcohol. We had a Petrus just like this one in my house.”
“I hear it was quite expensive,” I said, stepping closer to the trembling Alpha and my boss, even as I felt like I was walking into a trap.
“My family was quite well-to-do before the Maelstrom.”
“You don’t say,” I said, now standing directly in front of my boss. Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg.
“Well, this won’t do.” She presented the bottle. “You know how embarrassing something like this is for us.”
“I haven’t lost all capacity for rational thought, if that’s what you’re suggesting, Prime,” I said, my smile thin.
She glared at me. Alpha, sweating bullets, shrank back into the shadow of his monitors. He wasn’t even seeing us there anymore. His eyes were looking off into the distance somewhere, probably at the wreckage of his career.
“At least you seem to be aware of your own wrongdoing. However, you clearly do not comprehend where we are and what we’re doing here.”
I had to laugh at that. It was precisely
because
I knew so thoroughly what kind of place the Sahara was that I had specifically requested a transfer here. There was silence again until my boss spoke.
“The Nigerian armistice monitoring group is in an extremely delicate situation at present. The report that we Helix agents submit will determine which of the two parties, the Nigerians or the Tuareg, had the right of this conflict.”
I shrugged. I was pretty sure that if it became known we were partaking of smokes and booze, the Tuareg would probably consider us their allies, what with their predilection for living a life of moderation. This was apparently not the scenario my boss had in mind, however. She began to walk around me in a tight circle.
“The monitoring we do on behalf of admedistrative society must not be allowed to itself incite more conflict. If word got out that we, who by all rights should be the upholders of lifeism and champions of long life and health, were indulging in such harmful substances as alcohol and tobacco, it would be a disaster.”
A disaster for whom
, I wondered. It certainly wouldn’t bother me any. I wasn’t harming anyone with my secondhand smoke. And shouldn’t I be allowed to harm myself as much as I pleased?
No
, I immediately corrected myself. Even
thinking
that was verboten in this age of public correctness.
“What I want to know is how you kept your own WatchMe silent all this time. Any amount of alcohol consumption should trigger the medicules in your system, which would immediately inform the health supervision server—”
“Well, being out here in the sticks and all, the server does go off-line pretty frequently,” I said, as though my boss really needed an explanation of conditions here at the armistice monitoring camp. “And besides, we girls know a little magic. That is, those of us who still remember that we’re girls.”
“That’s very funny,” she said without a trace of humor in her voice. “I don’t know what underhanded means you used to get this contraband, but I will have you know what damage your actions have caused to our operations.”
“I already know: none.”
I clapped a hand on her shoulder as lightly as I could. In her crimson coat, Os Cara Stauffenberg quaked with rage. I ran my finger gently over the embossed snakes curling around the staff of knowledge on the WHO badge she wore. “I wouldn’t worry about your badge getting tarnished, Os Cara. Because you’re not going to tell anyone about this, are you.”
Os Cara clucked her tongue. It occurred to me that this was probably the most dramatic expression of disdain she, a dyed-in-the-wool member of admedistrative society, could muster.
“Of
course
I can’t go public with this.”
She glared at me. “If the authority of this agency were to be impugned, then all our efforts to make this world a healthier, more peaceful, more charitable place will have been wasted. Even in the short term, were I to go on the record about your little ‘party time,’ our monitoring operation here in Niger would lose any and all credibility overnight.”
“So sorry to hear that, Prime.”
At this point, Alpha seemed to realize that things might not be as terribly bad as he’d imagined them to be. I gave him a pat on the shoulder as well, saying, “I certainly hope nothing of the sort happens to our wonderful operation here.”
“I’m not finished!”
Alpha resumed his former state of rigid terror.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to take responsibility for what you’ve done, Senior Inspector Kirie. You will be returning home on the next available flight and remain until you’ve seen the error of your ways.”
“Home? You don’t mean Japan…”
No fucking way.
After all I’d done to escape that gulag—the overeating, the starvation, the loss of a friend—all ending in the pursuit of my current career flying from one war zone to another.
No fucking way.
“That’s right. Japan. I won’t have you using this battlefield for your recreation room. You betrayed us. I want you to go back and experience what it’s like to truly love and be loved by your neighbor, Tuan. You
will
learn how to be publicly correct.”
My boss set the bottle of wine down by one of Alpha’s terminals and strode out of the tent, leaving me rooted to the spot. I was already beginning to imagine the days of depression ahead of me. I would be living in Japan. The place I hated as a youth, the place Miach detested with all her heart. Japan.
“You’re incredible,” Alpha whispered, a sigh of relief escaping his lips. “Simply amazing. I can’t believe you got off with such a light punishment. I’d heard you were a powerhouse, Tuan, but that was something else. No wonder Étienne calls you his queen.”
I felt the sudden urge to slap the cheerfully babbling Alpha hard across the cheek, but instead of allowing myself to resort to violence, I picked up the wine and slammed the entire bottle of Château Petrus in one breath. A stream of the ruby liquid spilled from the side of my mouth and ran down my chin, splattering over my crimson Helix agent’s coat. Alpha swallowed, his momentary elation evaporating more quickly than the wine on my collar.
I needed this. I needed to be able to drink like this. It might be my last drink in a long time.
My heart sank.
Sayonara, Sahara.
Catch you around, Kel Tamasheq.
06
And so I found myself stranded in the desert called normal life. A vast wasteland of public correctness and people as resources.
Stuck in a sinkhole called harmony.
I could see it spreading out from the airport like an oily film on the land. Forming a gestalt that made me want to retch. I spotted clusters of residential buildings below, square little blocks in inoffensive pastels. Like tiny multiplying pixels of artificial life on a monitor. The PassengerBird I was on flexed its wings, tracing a soft circle through the air. An announcement sounded near my inner ear, telling me to prepare for landing.
An RPG comes flying out of nowhere, slamming into the side of the PassengerBird.
The giant bird flies into pieces, raining down its contents—the passengers—on the little Cubist residents far below. In death, the bird looks just like the WarBird I shot down over the Sahara. The men in suits spill out of its body cavity so lightly and evenly, just like in
Golconde
On the ground, the residents waste no time flinging off their pretenses of charitable love to pick up baseball bats with which to knock the falling men back up into the air.
As the bird touched down on the runway I realized I had been daydreaming. The other passengers were already standing from their seats, getting ready to disembark. I grabbed my bag, left the bird, went through luggage screening, and spilled out with the rest of the bird droppings into a burgundy-colored airport lobby.
The moment that I stepped off the PassengerBird, the augmentedreality in my contacts kicked in. Just about everything in my field of vision had AR metadata associated with it. I glanced at the entrance to a café and saw the menu hanging in midair with a meter next to it telling me how many seats were empty and next to that some stars indicating favorable reviews.
Everything in our world had a user review attached to it.
Even people had little social assessment stars stuck on them.
Café de Paris in the airport lounge: four stars.
Tuan Kirie: four stars.
Cian Reikado: three.
“Tuan! Tuantuantuan!”
A little girl’s voice shouting my name.
Since I didn’t know any little girls, I was pretty sure it had to be Cian Reikado. She was one of the only people who knew I was coming back. I went to pick up my Helix agent code at the baggage counter, then turned to Cian, who was yelping and jumping with excitement. If she’d had a tail, she’d have been wagging it for sure. Some public metadata was attached to her body—the name of the admedistration she belonged to and the