by Project Itoh
“What exactly do you mean by control the world?”
My father began to walk slowly down the riverbank. I walked alongside him, listening carefully to every word.
“You’ve heard something from Saeki, yes? Or Étaín?”
“I’ve learned that human will is the state of struggle between various agents in a feedback web located in the midbrain. And I’ve learned that the hyperbola traced by that feedback influences our decisions.”
“That’s basically true, yes.”
The sun had set and the temperature began dropping. It made the midday heat seem like a dream. I rubbed my hands together against the slight chill, glad I had thought to wear a jacket.
“And you’re doing research into this?”
“No. The research is pretty much completed.”
I hesitated. If the research were completed, then what was the Next-Gen group doing now? What was my father working on?
“Our organization’s goal is to be prepared. We prepare for the possible coming collapse. We keep our technology safe, secret, and ready to deploy should the need ever arise. Of course, we would prefer that time never come, but Miach’s group sees things somewhat differently.”
“Explain.”
“Hmm. Well, you seem to have already grasped the workings of the feedback mechanism and how it generates what we call will.”
“Professor Saeki said it was like a conference.”
“An analogy we often use. One important thing to understand, however, is the reflexive nature of the system. Based on the outcome of this ‘conference,’ the feedback mechanism is exposed to endless change and adjustment. The results influence our feedback system, and the feedback system generates more results in a loop. If we make a decision, that bias will increase in a cyclical fashion. The chaos in the system multiplies. This is why human will is illogical, never static, and very hard to predict. You follow?”
“I think so.”
“In controlling the feedback web in the midbrain with medicules, we found we were able to influence human decisions, emotions, and thoughts. This all happened shortly before you were born. At that time, the control of human will was a hot topic with upper leadership at WHO and some of the admedistrations.”
That would be the frightened old men.
Frightened of chaos.
Frightened of people losing their rational minds.
Frightened of riots leading to genocide leading to nukes going off all over our planet.
“The Maelstrom,” I said, half to myself.
My father nodded. “At the time, the idea was to create a safety net to prevent mankind from ever sliding back into the disorder of those days. They called on us to do something about it. They thought we could find a way to save us from our own barbarous selves. Thus the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group was born.”
The group was no mere research organization, my father explained. In a way, it had more power than the United Nations, more power even than WHO. These powerful, frightened old men and women who were part of WHO and the United Nations and the admedistrations were also part of the Next-Gen group.
“We had all the funding we needed, and research progressed swiftly. It wasn’t long before we had medicules in past the bloodbrain barrier,” he said.
“What?”
“No one is comfortable with the idea of people messing with their brains. The idea that the brain is protected from medicules is a misunderstanding we spread quite deliberately. If you looked through all the literature on medicule technology, I’m sure you would find enough pieces to put it together yourself. This is publicly available information too. We just altered the flow of data and buried those papers in a pile of other research, where they would never draw unwanted attention. The problem wasn’t the blood-brain barrier to begin with. All we had to do to get past that was dress our medicules up to look like the oxygen and protein that were already passing through the barrier, and we were through in no time at all. The problem, Tuan, was with the very direction of our research.”
I wondered what he meant. “Personally, I see a big problem with the whole idea of controlling peoples’ wills in the first place,” I told him.
“I imagined you’d say that. But think about it a little. People let medicules control their bodies every day to suppress disease. Why then shouldn’t we suppress potentially harmful thoughts in the brain?”
I was about to say the words “free will,” but I hesitated.
Humanity had always gone out of its way to suppress nature.
We built cities, built societies, built systems.
All of these revealed an overriding human desire to take the unpredictable elements of nature and place them within a predictable, controllable framework. In order to live through an age of nuclear fallout and plagues, we had striven to conquer the last remaining vestiges of nature within us, and had largely succeeded. We installed medicules in our bodies and linked up to health supervision servers. We thoroughly rid our society of lifestyle habits that were bad for our health. Our victory was complete, with the exception of old age, of course.
Wasn’t the brain also part of the body? What possible reason could there be not to control it as well? I lost my conviction and sat down on the sandy riverbank. My gaze wandered off down the river. In the distance, I saw several young boys playing with a dog.
If that dog had a will of its own, then how could we say our souls are any more valuable than the soul of that dog?
“To our elders who lived through the Maelstrom, human will was nothing more than our barbaric nature, red in tooth and claw. Admedistrative society calls on its constituents to always remember public virtue and resource awareness. To follow its regulations and ‘atmosphere’ of their own free will. That is how we have been able to create the least lethal, most equal, most peaceful, and most love-filled society since the dawn of time.”
The smells of the market floated down from the street to the Tigris banks.
ate—masgouf>
Smells we had excised from our society.
The kind of society my father was talking about was the society Miach hated. To her, the heights mankind had reached, this temple to peace, thoughtfulness, and health, was just another prison to be shut down and abandoned.
What a picture our society painted: everybody binding themselves to unwritten rules, carefully staying inside unseen boundaries.
I don’t give a shit about love.
Or a damn about thoughtfulness.
And resource awareness can go fuck itself.
My body isn’t here for the admedistration. It’s not here for any of you. It’s only here for me.
These tits, this ass, these belong to Miach Mihie.
Miach put my feelings into words perfectly. Or maybe my feelings changed to fit her words. Whichever it was, a part of me buried deep down still felt that way.
All I had done by getting my job as a Helix agent, besides finding a place where I could relax and smoke a cigarette in the gray zone between barbarism and morality known as the battlefield, was create a weak partition between myself and society. I had to get close to the battles to escape the suffocation of society, but I never took it all the way. I wasn’t about to strap on a rifle and join in the battles myself.
I had merely found a comfortable spot somewhere between Miach and society.
Even without the mass simultaneous suicides, admedistration reports showed the suicide rate among youngsters going up year after year. More kids were
Souls in danger of bei
ng crushed by society were, in turn, gnawing away at its underbelly.
Souls that just didn’t fit. Souls of children yearning for disease, for damage, for pain. With wickedness in their hearts they tried to ruin their own precious lives, and they knew what they were doing. Something had to be wrong with this picture. Even in our brainwashed society, I think people had begun to realize it, but not with such clarity that they felt they could talk about the wrongness yet. It was just a slight feeling of discomfort, which they pushed down into their subconscious with all their might.
What I had found was middle ground between chaos and regulation, a limbo where I could hang for eternity.
I had sometimes felt like I was Miach’s doppelgänger.
But that wasn’t true at all. I had merely become the person I imagined Miach would have become if she had to live in my world.
“The reason I took Miach was, for one, because she was a perfect confluence of the various stressors our society creates. If we could bend Miach’s obdurate will and steer it off its collision course with death, then we could control anybody. That was the thought. In those days, we picked up a lot of kids like her and put them into treatment. We gathered the ones that wanted to kill themselves—especially the ones who overate or refused to eat, the ones who wanted to watch themselves grow weak and die. Our goal was to create a harmonized will inside the human brain. We called it the Harmony program. The experiments we performed on kids like Miach were tests-to-destruction, of a sort. We were seeing how far Harmony could go.”
I felt an irrational anger swelling up inside me. But not because of the tests they performed on Miach.
I wanted to know why they hadn’t tested me.
Of course, I knew precisely why. They needed someone who was really, deeply, fundamentally without hope. They probably had their eyes on hundreds of emergency morality centers. There were plenty of kids back then who had attempted suicide more than once, just as there were plenty of them now.
With Miach, my father had found his rock bottom.
He had seen the despair in her eyes.
He saw that she was, as Cian had said, standing on the edge of a cliff.
That was what my father had to control, or at least attempt to control.
That was the reason he had abandoned me and my mother and come here to Baghdad. I had to accept that. Yes, I was feeling jealous. Children always got upset when they weren’t chosen for something. Still, at the same time, what they had done was beyond grotesque.
Despairing kids by the dozen.
“How could you?”
My father nodded grimly. “It wasn’t easy. But if we didn’t do something, those children were a grave danger to themselves. All of them had repeatedly tried to take their own lives, and one day, they very well might have succeeded.”
“Nice try, but you’re just taking a consequence and calling it an objective.”
“True enough. Nor were our results by any means perfect.”
“What do you mean?”
“Harmony had a very serious side effect we didn’t anticipate— though, in hindsight, some simple logical reasoning should have made it obvious. As it was, we never saw it coming.”
Suddenly, it occurred to me what he was going to say.
He was right. Logically speaking, it was obvious. If the feedback web reached perfect harmony and all decisions could be made without any conflict and all actions taken clearly, what would that mean? It would mean nothing less than “I” was on the line.
“You killed consciousness.”
06
The death of consciousness.
My father’s eyes opened wide. For moment, he seemed at a loss for words.
“That’s right. How did you know?”
“Because I’ve heard from three people now what consciousness really is.”
The answer came out so smoothly it surprised even myself.
“That’s right, the conference. If all the participants have the same opinion, and all of their roles are perfectly aligned, then why hold a conference at all? If the feedback web does not plot our values on a hyperbola, but instead uses a logical, exponential curve, this is perfect harmony, in other words a state without any consciousness. It was something we couldn’t detect in our tests on animals.”
So my father had been trying to create a self-evident person, perfectly adapted to the stresses of admedistrative society. For someone whose every desire was self-evident, there was no need to make decisions. If their feedback web worked on clear, logical values, no will was needed to choose between one thing or the other. Consciousness was no longer required.
It almost made me laugh to think that such an obvious outcome hadn’t occurred to anyone in my father’s research group.
The mingled smells of spices and things cooking floated down toward the river from the direction of Abū-Nuwās. I spotted the boys again with their dog, running in and out of the water.
“We announced our findings to the other researchers and investors in the working group, that perfect harmony invariably meant the absence of consciousness. That consciousness was indeed only a mechanism for choosing between the various agents of desire teeming in our subconscious, the result of conflicts that required conscious thought to resolve, and the acting upon those conflicts. These choices were obvious to a perfectly harmonious will, thereby removing the need for a will to determine actions. We were chasing after the perfect human but ended up killing consciousness, for it was no longer needed.”
It was ironic. Our souls were nothing more than the product of a hyperbolic evaluation system we had developed over the course of our evolution. Perfect humans didn’t need souls.
“What happens when you lose your consciousness? Do you just sit there all day in your chair, drooling?”
“Nothing of the sort. You go shopping, you eat, you enjoy entertainment—you merely no longer have to make decisions what to do at any given time because everything is self-evident. It’s the difference between having to make choices and having it all be obvious to you. That’s all it is. That’s what divides the world of the consciousness and the world without. People have absolutely no problem living without consciousness or will, Tuan. They live their lives as normal. People can be born, grow old, and die without consciousness. Consciousness has very little to do with culture, really. From the outside, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether someone has a consciousness or is merely acting as though they did. However, because their system of values is fashioned to be in perfect harmony with society, there are far fewer suicides, and the kinds of stress we find in our admedistrative society disappear completely.”
So Miach and presumably these other kids had experienced this in the tests. They had experienced being without a consciousness.
All the billions of people on this earth had, at some point in their ancestry, along the long path of evolution, obtained what we call a consciousness. Evolution was a very haphazard thing. Only the genes well suited to a particular environment survived. The result of these patched-together adaptations was the species of human as we knew it now, each one of us possessing that curious byproduct of evolution we called a consciousness.
“When she came back, Miach said it had been pure ecstasy,” my father said with a wry chuckle. “While she was without consciousness, she ate normally, studied, spoke with us, and lived life as normal. When we brought her consciousness back, Miach didn’t remember a thing about her time during the test. She only had the sensation that she had been in a wonderful, joyous place.”
That made sense to me. You couldn’t look at dogs and not think they were, generally speaking, much happier than people. Someone once said that the bird that freezes upon the branch never knows suffering. What Miach had experienced was the state of mankind long before we had obtained consciousness, long before we got lost in the labyrinthine world of introspection and reflection.
The sun was sinking below the horizon now. I reached
out as if to touch it with my fingers. People with perfect judgment do not require a consciousness, so it does not exist.
“And you tried to do this to everyone in the world? You were going to steal consciousness from everyone who was stupid enough to install WatchMe?”
“No—we weren’t,” my father said, beginning to walk back up the bank in the direction of the street. “We could not just make the decision to eliminate consciousness. For one, I was terrified of the thought. To lose who I am, my own consciousness…In a sense, it’s like dying. We didn’t have the right to decide whether or not to impose something like that on billions of people.”
“I suppose it depends on what death is,” I said.
I admit that I shared an inclination to think of my self as my consciousness. The consciousness had the ability to make predictions and to control and order the body and mind, and it was easy to think of that as being everything. Though I was sure my body saw things differently.
We were back in the heat of the crowd up on the main street. Lights had gone on, bare bulbs illuminating the open shop fronts. It wasn’t just restaurants—there were places selling cooking wares and fabrics and carpets. People of different occupations bustled about in the midst of mingled smells from the many stoves and grills.
“We asked WHO and a few of the admedistrations to make a decision,” my father was saying. “In the end, we settled on a compromise, that we would install the system in everyone, but not activate it. That’s right, the medicule network necessary to control our feedback web is already in place in your brain, as it is in mine. If ever mankind should threaten to sink back into the chaos that was the Maelstrom, then, as an emergency measure, we can activate Harmony.”
Praise be to God. Though none of us asked, we have received. An automatic hallelujah device in our brains. Stuck right onto the synapses of our midbrain, never to let go or be removed. I could hear the choir singing now.
