by Project Itoh
“I see.”
“That is why we understand pain to be a subjective experience. For a physical sensation, it is highly dependent on environmental factors to determine whether or not it is selected and to what degree. That is why there is no absolute scale to measure pain.”
“So all of the sensations that make up our reality are these agents who have been selected for advancement to the upper levels of the brain?”
“That’s one way to put it, yes. Even sight, sound, smell, and taste must be selected before they are permitted into the consciousness,” Étaín said. “Of course, these basic stimuli have steep hyperbolas, making it easy for them to make the final cut, so they are rarely entirely ignored.”
“Which means that, in a sense, your research isn’t just about our consciousness, but about how our very reality is constructed.”
Étaín raised an eyebrow and looked at me as though I had said something peculiar. “But reality and consciousness are the same thing, Inspector Kirie.”
“Are they?”
“The reality we can accept is limited to our consciousness, after all.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
Gabrielle Étaín stood and extended her hand. “I hope I have answered all of your questions to your satisfaction, Inspector Kirie. Now, if you don’t mind, I should get back to my work.”
I thanked her and shook her hand, saying that I might be back again. Just then, I became suddenly curious as to how this woman had taken the news of the declaration. I wondered what decision she would make.
I loved asking the uncomfortable questions.
“By the way, I was wondering whether you heard the declaration.”
“I did.”
“What did you think?”
It wasn’t a fair question. But I was hoping that its very vagueness might catch her by surprise and reveal something. Her response was disappointing.
“It’s quite horrible.”
I pressed the attack. “Don’t you think the technology you’re researching here treads similar ground to the mind-control suicides they threatened?”
Étaín’s finger went to her chin again. “I’d have to agree. But we are not criminals. We cannot control another’s will nor show them a different reality.”
“Have plans to do anything before the deadline?”
Uncomfortable question number two.
Étaín furrowed her brow at my lack of tact. “I will do nothing. It’s clear they’re just trying to scare us.”
“But they might actually have the technology to make people kill themselves. You saw what that newscaster did.”
“And I trust the various admedistration members will show us their public resolve. Our society will bow to no one.”
It was a pitch-perfect response. Perhaps too perfect.
Étaín showed me to the door in silence. As I walked through, a final question occurred to me. The drama of the moment was a bit forced, but sometimes that could be quite effective.
“One last thing, you don’t happen to know of any organization called the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group, do you?”
There was a brief moment of silence before Étaín’s calm reply.
“Never heard of them.”
04
The media was showing video of armed troops stationed in every major city in the world.
Streets lined with pink trees.
Pink paint to camouflage the rough edges of the city for its citizens.
Pink firearms.
Pink grenades.
Pink gas masks.
I had no doubt that the tear gas would be pink too.
The admedistrations had demanded every region in the world declare a state of emergency.
Police and Geneva Convention forces stood at every corner.
Their orders were to watch for killers and potential suicides. The killers would probably be wearing pink. Of course, since the police officers and soldiers on patrol were all subject to the same one-man-one-kill declaration, who could trust them? Everyone was suspect, and armed people even more so.
From the moment of the declaration, the world had been walking backward through history. People saw the Maelstrom in every shadow.
The central district of Baghdad was completely abandoned. Everyone was huddled in their homes as if they could avoid having to make a decision. But the declaration had made its effectiveness clear, and everyone belonging to an admedistration who had WatchMe installed was at risk.
It was hard when you were forced to make a very personal decision in a society that stressed following advice and cooperative consensus.
I had no doubt that the tech-heads were busily combing the admedistration servers, looking for holes in security. Holes in the WatchMe servers responsible for monitoring the medicules in several billion people’s bodies.
For my part, I had just used my privileges as a Helix agent to slip some eavesdropping medicules into Gabrielle Étaín when I shook her hand. The medicules went in through the skin, finding their way through her body, until they activated the eavesdropping circuit in her HeadPhone. Though there hadn’t been a single thing wrong with Étaín’s performance to make me suspect her, she was the only lead I had.
A call came in from business-card man as I drove down the deserted road.
“Did you meet with Gabrielle Étaín?” Vashlov asked. He sounded pleased with himself.
“Word travels fast.”
“The SEC Neuromedical Research Consortium is just one public front of the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group. Étaín is one of them, Inspector Kirie.”
“And you know this how?”
“We followed the money. I realize that’s a bit beyond the capabilities of a Helix agent.”
“Then why not bug Gabrielle Étaín instead of me?”
“Oh, we are. With little result. She knows she’s being watched.”
“Then why didn’t you stop me from going to see her? If I’d known she was involved—”
“Because we were hoping for a chemical reaction.”
That was troubling. So the man from Interpol had used me, letting me meet with Étaín in hopes that the specter of an official agency investigation would elicit a reaction from the Next-Gen group. They had reached a dead end with their informants and surveillance, so they put their money on my being just the element of surprise they needed to tip the scales.
“Well, don’t I feel stupid.”
“You understand how critical the situation is. They might take defensive action. Take care of yourself.”
“Oh, I always do. There’s no shortage of terrorists who would like a Helix agent as a feather in their cap.”
I ended the call to my HeadPhone and pulled in to the Baghdad Hotel.
Back when this had been a war zone, the American occupying forces had surrounded the place with four concrete walls to keep out the improvised explosive devices and the RPGs. In the middle of the explosions and the debris, the CIA had set up camp here. Though most surveillance of the terrorist sector these days was carried out by Geneva Convention forces and the military information suppliers they hired, at the time, the CIA was the largest information network run by any nation in the world.
That age had passed, and now the place was just a typical upscale hotel on Sadoon Street, where it passed through the Baghdad Medical Industrial Zone. Coming from Geneva forces camps on the front lines, I preferred less ostentatious places to stay, but there was a tradition of WHO and admedistration officials coming to the Baghdad Hotel, so I had little choice in
the matter. I went through the lobby, passing by admedistration officers and WHO VIPs along the way. When I reached my room and pressed my finger to the door, it swung open. A single folded piece of paper fell to the floor.
Reflexively, I switched off my AR. I didn’t want anyone who might be snooping on my visual feed to see what, if anything, was written on the note. Like I had been able to see those records of the suicidees, the police and Interpol and certain civilian MIS had the authority to snoop on visual feeds in real time. Just to be sure, I went into the bathroom and used removal liquid to wash the AR contacts out of my eyes. Then I shut the door and crawled under the bed. Interpol was using me. They could easily be monitoring my room. Curled up like a fetus in the dark, I opened the twice-folded paper.
ABŪ-NUWĀS. EVENING. NO AR, NO RIDERS.
I crawled out from beneath the bed and looked out the window.
The sky was slowly growing redder, getting ready for dusk. By riders they meant visual and audio bugs. Someone wanted me to see or hear something they didn’t want recorded by AR and sent to any servers.
Evening was pretty soon.
In a movie Miach showed me once, someone who’d received a secret message had used a lighter to burn it in an ashtray. How convenient that must’ve been, I thought as I changed into my civilian clothes and shoved the paper into a pocket.
It was very rare to see an actual Iraqi within the area occupied by the medical industrial collective. It had been a strange chain of events that led to this Middle Eastern country becoming the world center for medicine. But like there was no place better than any other for making movies or manufacturing PassengerBirds, there was no best place for making medicine. Once a little bit of wealth had accumulated, it had taken off, transforming the desert into a giant industrial zone.
The fact that Iraq had, during the Maelstrom, suffered from nuclear fallout meant that there was no shortage of disease here for medical researchers to study. But in those days, it would have been hard to find a place that hadn’t been hit by nukes. Nor were the tax breaks and morally lax laws enough to explain the bizarre medical oasis that had sprung into existence here. The only explanation you could give was teleological: the wealth had accumulated here because of an accumulation of wealth.
Military resource suppliers took care of the security.
The zone was completely reliant on military resource supplier security.
Though from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century nonstanding forces had still been the property of nations, as the nations weakened, the balance of military force shifted to MRSs and military information suppliers. On the surface, there was very little difference, though, seeing as how nearly all MRSs and military information suppliers were contracted by the Geneva Convention Organization, an international body formed by an accord between every admedistration. I stopped at a SecGate in the several kilometer–long wall surrounding the medical zone so a medical soldier in his pink uniform could check my identification. They also needed my acknowledgment that they could not guarantee my well-being outside the security zone, and that my WatchMe would go off-line.
I was free, once again in a world without WatchMe, medcare units, or AR. I looked around at scenery that time had forgotten: barracks after barracks after barracks, a tangle of crumbling buildings. The place had a feel to it that was completely missing from any admedistration city, and the air was filled with scents and smells.
A man sat on the street smoking tobacco out of a giant pipe that looked more like a strange musical instrument. There was the smell of fish cooking, meats, and all kinds of spices. This was a market. I went into a nearby restaurant and ordered a meal of uncertain composition, calories, and risk vectors. I noticed an ashtray on the table, so I motioned to the owner that I wanted to smoke. He produced some cigarettes and a lighter. I took the memo I had stuck in my pocket, held it over the ashtray, and set it on fire. Cool. I’d always wanted to do that.
This was life outside the admedistration. This was living.
It pleased me that even with the world medical headquarters looming over them, most people in lower Baghdad hadn’t installed WatchMe. They weren’t connected to any server. They just
I puffed on the cigarette, my first since Niger. Living here wouldn’t be so bad, though I had my doubts as to how long the admedistrations would leave these people to their own devices.
Pretty soon my fish came out. It looked like a carp that had been caught in the nearby Tigris, sliced open and grilled. It came with a ball of some kind of bread and uncooked dates.
My simple dish, with no AR readout floating over it, was beautiful in its simplicity.
“That looks great,” I said under my breath. Uncooked dates had been a rare delicacy for the desert people here, and maybe still were. Thus dates’ status as symbols of beauty and victory in the Bible. I had heard that the Tree of Life in the Christian tradition was sometimes thought to have been a date palm. When he came into Jerusalem, the people of the city had waved date fronds to bless Jesus. This fruit was life, and faith.
I knew this not because Miach had ever told me, but because of the date palm pictured in the symbol of the Helix Inspection Agency. Any Christian overtones in that were nullified by the fact that the date palm had appeared as a symbol of life in the Koran and even in the tale of Gilgamesh—another local favorite in its day.
There were lots of people out in the street, the polar opposite of the state of affairs in the post-declaration admedistrative society I’d just left. I doubted many of the folks here had even heard the news. Only the billions of people with WatchMe installed had reason to be scared shitless. The residents of the lifeist block, responsible for 80 percent of the global economy. For the Iraqis on this twilight street, WatchMe and medicules had nothing to do with their lives.
Life on the outside, life on the inside.
The difference between the two couldn’t be greater.
On one side, people cut up their bodies and entrusted the parts to different service providers in order to fulfill the functions demanded of them by society. On the other, these people weren’t letting anyone touch their bodies.
As I busied myself with the river fish—the dish was called masgouf, I learned—the proprietor brought a bowl of watery yogurt. This I decided was less a dessert and more another course in the meal. He set it down on the pitted surface of my wooden table and retreated into the back.
As he left, I noticed another piece of paper sticking out from beneath the yogurt bowl. I opened it. It said “To the river” in Japanese.
I motioned for the lighter again and burned the second piece of paper over my ashtray. Finished with the masgouf, I went out onto the street, weaving my way through the crowd in hopes of losing the tail my mystery correspondent doubtlessly feared.
This street had once been an entertainment district: Abū-Nuwās.
The name referred to this street, the one with the market. Abū-Nuwās had been a great Arab poet and a lover of wine and carnal pleasures in an Islamic society that forbade alcohol. His hedonistic poems took the list of things forbidden by Islam and threw it out the window—social shock poetry. In other words, two thousand years ago, a man had lived here who fought against the same kind of dogma that lifeist society espoused today. It was the perfect setting for a secret rendezvous between a sp
ineless conformist to the system and someone who very likely had a hand in controlling the system.
I made a careful scan for tails, then left Abū-Nuwās for the banks of the river, glowing in the evening sun. The riverbank was open sand all the way down to the water. I wondered if it would be Gabrielle Étaín waiting for me, or even Miach Mihie herself. The light reflected off the Tigris, playing tricks with the eyes and hiding the face of the person I now saw standing a short distance away from me, closer to the river.
“You know why they call this place Mesopotamia?” the figure on the bank asked in a familiar voice. “Mesopotamia means ‘between the rivers.’ You understand?”
“Because we’re between the Tigris and Euphrates?”
“Precisely.”
The man stepped closer. He was wearing a tattered suit. A hobo suit. Fitting for the man who had left my mother and me thirteen years ago to come to Baghdad.
05
“I’m surprised you came all this way.”
It was my father. The genuine article. Though his face bore the wear and tear of thirty years, it was still the same face as the man who had been defeated in that session by the caffeinehating woman, and the man who had left me and my mother after Miach died.
It hadn’t been easy getting here.
A lot of people died.
I told him that.
“I’ve heard. The whole world has it pretty bad right now.
It’s a shame.”
“A shame? But didn’t you tell Miach to kill them?”
“Not true,” my father said, his back to the setting Baghdad sun.
“Have you been here this whole time? Thirteen years?”
He shook his head slowly. “I left on occasion. With an ID from my current organization I can go most places in the world without revealing who I am.”
“Organization? Which organization might that be?”
“The only organization truly capable of controlling the world—the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group. All the resources and medical planning take place here in the Dian Cécht complex.”
