<memory>
Want to fill a bathroom with poison gas? Beyond easy.
</memory>
✦ ✦ ✦
Hadn’t Miach said something like that?
<maxim>
Every person holds within themselves the potential to take another’s life.
</maxim>
✦ ✦ ✦
I’ve got the power.
I could kill someone.
Even myself.
Each of us holds within us the power to destroy something important.
Had Cian killed herself, after a thirteen-year delay, just to truly understand the meaning of Miach’s words for herself? Was I to be the only one left behind?
“In two hours from now at a general emergency meeting of WHO in Geneva, I will be addressing all admedistrations and telling them that this, this chaos, is evidence of a full-on attack against lifeism,” Prime announced.
“As senior inspectors, all of you will be cooperating with security in your local regions. You all know about the treaties binding each admedistration to WHO—we’re going to make them honor those treaties. I want each of you to take the initiative in rooting out the people responsible for this, and let them know we will not sit idly by while they threaten our very way of life.”
Every agent in the room nodded. Like that, the session ended, and I was back in my hotel room, surrounded by unpacked bags.
Unlike the other inspectors, I didn’t have much time. I had to start right now.
✦ ✦ ✦
<recollection>
Just two hours earlier, our fearless leader Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg had opened a secure session in AR with me.
<scorn>
“Though it is not public knowledge, you are under house arrest. Add to that the fact that you witnessed one of the people involved take her own life, and it is clear that you cannot be allowed to be involved in the upcoming investigation. Let us not forget that as a recent victim of an emotionally traumatic experience, you have likely sustained psychological damage. Most admedistration ordinances dictate that any conclave member who has experienced a dramatic ordeal must submit themselves to a minimum of one hundred twenty hours of psychiatric counseling and drug therapy. Your presence will not be required at the emergency meeting of Helix inspectors to be called in two hours time.”
</scorn>
I laughed. Of course I should be involved with the investigation. And seeing my friend kill herself was emotional trauma? Really? If I’d suffered an emotional trauma, it was when I failed to die at the age of fifteen. No, it had been when I tried to kill myself by overeating, long before I met Miach Mihie. Don’t talk to me about psychological damage. I’ve been damaged for years.
<laugh>
But I didn’t say that. Instead I saluted Prime Inspector Stauffenberg and informed her that I would happily use my newfound free time to work on my press release informing the media just how many of us in the Niger armistice monitoring camp had collaborated in acts of shameless, wanton indulgence.
</laugh>
She had asked me if I was serious.
“Deadly serious.”
<press release>
<i: Confession, part I>
<d: For over half a year, we copied immunization patches off an admedistration server without authorization and provided them to the Tuareg, who were involved in an armed conflict at the time.>
<i: Confession, part II>
<d: In return for providing this, we received crates filled with shamefully harmful substances, such as alcohol, tobacco products, and, once, even hallucinogens.>
<i: Confession, part III>
<d: We installed copies of DummyMe, available on the black market, and used them to spoof our physical data in order to deceive the health consultant server.>
</press release>
I wanted everyone living in every admedistration across the world to know exactly what we did, even if that revelation should happen to take the fragile state of truce between the Nigerians and the Kel Tamasheq and throw it off a cliff, leading to the loss of countless lives and the complete gutting of the Helix Inspection Agency as it lost all authority in the aftermath.
Also, I added, if my memory serves, due to the nature of our work in conflict zones, Helix agents are given a five-day reprieve before they are required to report to mandatory therapy following a traumatic incident, ma’am.
I was satisfied to see a shiver run through Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg as the sheep’s clothing came off her misguided, insubordinate underling. Clearly, she was wondering how someone with such a deeply flawed character could have sneaked her way into the upper ranks of an elite division of WHO.
Except I knew she wasn’t trembling at me. She was trembling at the unseen, unnamed specter of Miach Mihie standing right behind me. At times like this, I often felt like it was Miach’s words coming out of my mouth.
I counted roughly thirty seconds of rage, regret, and hesitation passing before Prime spoke again.
“Fine. You will participate in the investigation.”
I nodded, satisfied.
“However,” she added, “though you may have a reprieve, don’t dream you’re getting out of therapy. Not even I could do that. Five days from now, you will be placed in an emergency morality center to undergo a full therapeutic regimen.”
This was about the worst that Prime Inspector Stauffenberg could threaten me with, and nothing she was saying was news. Unfortunately, she was right. The mandatory therapy requirement would be a very hard one to get out of. In five days’ time they’d toss me in an emergency morality center somewhere, pile on the kindness and thoughtfulness until I couldn’t breathe, and when I cried uncle they’d keep me in their benevolence-stained sweatshop a few weeks more just for good measure. As long as I was a member of an admedistration, there was no way around it.
I had five days. I only hoped that would be enough time to figure out why Cian had died.
</recollection>
✦ ✦ ✦
02
<movie:ar:id=6aehko908724h3008k>
That day, found the perfect rope in his storage closet.
The image was completely’s POV, so I couldn’t actually see him, though I knew what his face looked like from a little data window in the lower right-hand corner of my field of vision.
Ichiro Tokume; life pattern designer; 38.
These were the people that designed how other people should live. It was a branch of health consulting.
They would look at your hormonal balance, blood sugar levels, CRP, GTP—the works, all supplied by WatchMe— then determine a lifestyle pattern to optimize both their client’s health and their social assessment score. They would devise lifestyle “recipes” that told their clients what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; what sports they should participate in; and the most efficient place for them to go to volunteer in their free time.
Planning out someone’s daily life.
Planning out someone’s life.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Ichiro Tokume himself were following a life design given him by some other health consultant. That was how you lived in our postconsumer society.
Now this life planner was deftly working his fingers, holding the rope up where he could see it, and tying a knot to make a loop. Somehow, I didn’t think what he was doing had anything to do with his hormonal balance or GTP or any of that.
Next he walked into the kitchen where he found a small stool—probably something his wife stood on when she needed to reach the top cupboards. I watched him pick it up and return to the living room where he had been tying his rope. There he stood on the stool and began looping the other end of the rope around a light fixture in the middle of the ceiling.
Again his field of vision lowered as he stepped down and began to walk through the house toward the bathroom. (I wonder what he’s up to?) I watched him turn on the water, then everything went dark as he closed his eyelids. (He’s washing his face.) When he next opened his eyes, Ichiro Tokume was wiping his face with a towel. I caught a glimpse of his expression in the mirror for only a moment.
Not a trace of emotion.
Empty eyes, open mouth. Three empty holes.
Back to the living room. The noose was swaying gently from the ceiling. As he stepped up onto the stool he looked down at his feet, then back up. The noose encircled my field of vision and then was gone, around Ichiro Tokume’s neck. My field of vision shook violently.
Now we were swaying back and forth, looking out at the living room interior. A soft-pink sofa. A screen on one wall. Intelligent wall material made to look like plaster. We turned a full circle around the pivot of the rope, as though Ichiro wanted me to see where he lived with his wife. Everything was recorded.
Come in, come see my home!
This is the living room. This is where I hang myself.
Of course, I was merely watching what his AR contact lenses had recorded. Ichiro Tokume, age thirty-eight, had expired when the full weight of his body had pulled at the vertebrae in his neck. If I’d wanted to, I could have watched the feed until his body stopped providing its electrical current to the lenses and it went dark—a nice natural stopping point to the record of his last few minutes on earth.
</movie>