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01
I have a story to tell.
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<declaration:calculation>
<pls: The Story of a Failure>
<pls: The Story of a Defector>
<eql: In other words, me.>
</declaration>
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02
<theorem:number>
<i: When children become adults, they become data.>
<i: When adults die, they are liquefied.>
</theorem>
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No, that’s not quite right. Better to describe it in prohibitions:
<rule:number>
<i: A child’s body should not be reduced to data until it has matured.>
<i: When an adult dies, the body should be disincorporated into liquid.>
</rule>
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Children’s bodies are restless, eager. They won’t sit still, not even for a moment. An adult’s body is always moving too— moving steadily toward death—but at a far more deliberate pace. WatchMe doesn’t belong in a restless body. WatchMe doesn’t belong in the body that skips and runs. WatchMe monitors constancy, but a child grows every day. They’re changing all the time. What’s constant about that?
So,
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<list:item>
<i: While my tits are still getting bigger…>
<i: While my ass is still getting bigger…>
<i: No WatchMe in me!>
<i: A body with WatchMe is an adult body.>
</list>
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For a high school girl like me, growing up was the last thing I wanted to do.
“Let’s show ’em, the both of us,” Miach said one day. Miach Mihie was her full name. I sat behind her in class. While everyone was getting ready to go home, she turned around in her chair and leaned over my desk.
“We’ll make a declaration, together: we’ll never grow up.”
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<list:item>
<i: our bodies>
<i: our tits>
<i: our pussies>
<i: our uteruses>
</list>
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“These things are ours. That’s what we’ll tell them. We’ll whisper it at the top of our lungs!”
Yeah, me and Miach were the weird kids.
In a world of kind, thoughtful, group-consciousness types, we might not have been entirely on our own, but we sure felt like it.
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<declaration>
<i: We won’t become them.>
</declaration>
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Part of a whole world practically tripping over itself not to offend others, to be thoughtful of others—even of me.
“Hey, Tuan, you know what?” Miach’s eyes sparkled. Miach knew everything. Of all the delinquents in our class, she had the best grades. Miach never spoke to anyone besides me and Cian—Cian Reikado, our other friend—unless it was absolutely necessary.
I still don’t know what Miach saw in us. I didn’t get very good grades, and while I wasn’t ugly I wasn’t particularly attractive either. The same went for Cian. Sometimes I wondered why she hung out with us at all, but I never asked. Not once.
“A long time ago, there were men who would actually pay to have sex with a couple of innocent bodies like ours. So all these girls who weren’t even poor would sell themselves as fuck toys, and they wouldn’t even feel guilty about it at all. And neither would the morally depraved men who bought them. They’d meet up in hotels and pay them cash.”
“What?” I said, giggling. “You want to sell your body?” The way Miach was talking, she sounded like she would be off for the nearest red-light district right then if she could—that is, had they still existed anymore. There, a little girl could be as depraved as she wanted to be. She could throw away her whole life, destroy her body with loveless sex, diseases, alcohol, recreational drugs, and cigarettes.
Plague, booze, and smokes—loot too good to pass up.
You couldn’t find any of these things in Japan, a nation obsessed with health, or anywhere else under admedistration rule, for that matter. All these vices, things which had gone more or less ignored in the past, had been carved into a list of sins by the all-powerful hand of medicine, and one by one, they had been purged from society.
“If there were still men of that caliber of depravity around today, maybe growing up wouldn’t be as bad as it sounds. But there aren’t.”
She had a point. Had the streets been filled with people secure in their own perversion, then maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t hate school and pretty much everything else so much. But the world kept getting healthier and more wholesome, more peaceful, more beautiful, and just depressingly good. Have a little selfrespect, you might tell it, but I doubt the world would care.
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<declaration:anger>
<“We don’t know what rock bottom is like. And they wouldn’t let us know, even if we tried.”>
</declaration>
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Miach’s favorite line.
Miach knew everything. For example:
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<list:item>
<i: How to tweak a medcare unit to convert medicules into a chemical weapon capable of killing a city of fifty thousand people.>
<i: How to trick a medcare unit into making small amounts of feel-good endorphins.>
</list>
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“Medcare units are these magic boxes,” she told me once. “All you need is a half tank of medicules and you can do just about anything. Want to fill a bathroom with poison gas? Beyond easy.”
Telling us in gory detail about the many dangers of medcare units was one of Miach’s favorite things to do. Even a residential medcare unit was highly adaptable. All it had to do was download a recipe and it could throw together a compound to generate just the right kind of medicules you needed to take care of any illness. It was like a magic hand that reached in and crushed disease. To Miach the ramifications of this were obvious: flip a switch, and the medcare unit would go from good to evil, from panacea to plague. The only thing keeping people from doing it was the medcare unit telling them they couldn’t. All that stands between us and Armageddon is a little bit of coding, she’d say. Turn one little routine on its head, and you could overturn the world. It all came down from the top. The admedistration checked your WatchMe data in order to download the right information to the medcare unit in your home, which would then produce the necessary substances to fight whatever was ailing you.
“Think of the billions of people in the world under constant WatchMe surveillance, consuming whatever their medcare unit pumps out. Take control of the system, and you could slam every last one of them with some nasty, incurable disease. Or worse.
“It’s just a matter of wanting to do it,” Miach would say.
When she wasn’t talking to us, Miach would sit on a bench in a park where the local children played and quietly read books. Reading text on dead-tree media was her only hobby, as far as we could tell. I asked her once why she bothered with books when she could just call up the same thing in augmented reality on the net.
“When you want some real solitude, dead-tree media’s the only way to go. Then it’s just the two of us. Me and the medium,” was Miach’s answer. She went on in that cool, silky smooth, soporific voice of hers. “It works with movies and paintings too. But a book will give you the most persistence by far.”
“What do you mean, ‘persistence’?”
“The persistence of solitude.”
So Miach would download the text she wanted from the Borgesnet and go to a printer who would make her an actual physical copy. Places that printed books for hobbyists weren’t easy to come by, but you could still find them if you looked. The majority of Miach’s spending money went to book-making, and she probably had her hobby to thank for her formidable store of knowledge.
She spent her days swimming through a sea of letters, searching for something to give her that edge she wanted.
“I have to think I’m pretty sharp by now,” she was fond of saying.
I didn’t need to ask what she meant.
She was honing herself to be the perfect public enemy. A vicious attack dog, dreaming of the day she could take on the whole so-stifling-sweet-it-felt-like-it-was-choking-you-with-a-silken-thread world.
“So what I’m saying is, if a few people had the inclination, they could kill everyone in Japan—” she snapped her fingers— “like that. It’s just a matter of wanting to.”
“But you can’t just kill people,” Cian would say, but her words seemed flimsy in the face of Miach’s conviction. Or maybe that was just my resentment talking—resentment that I had never even thought about whether you shouldn’t do such a thing, or why.
Maybe: