First-person POV suicide flicks.
Of the 6,582 cases, 2,049 had been wearing AR contact lenses when they did the deed. The last things they saw remained on the server, giving us close-up front-row seats to their deaths.
AR contacts monitor focus points, and I wanted to see what Ichiro Tokume had been looking at. A cursor blipped around the screen, highlighting wherever his eyes went. The objects and angle of view were then listed up and run through several formulas to analyze Mr. Tokume’s mental state in the ten minutes leading up to lights out. The results, displayed in bold on another screen, were nothing surprising.
Severe depressive tendencies.
Suicidal tendencies.
I decided to watch a hundred more similar movies at 3x speed. Each was about twelve minutes long. Divided by three times one hundred equaled four hundred minutes.
I plugged in the commands and sat back, for just under seven hours, to watch the deaths of one hundred people randomly selected from 2,049, back to back.
My database of suicide movies.
I couldn’t imagine anything other than a mass, unexplained suicide requiring the creation of such a morbid collection.
Each person in the database had only ten minutes’ worth of footage, the reason being that all had taken action so swiftly. It was like each of them had parents who had told them to never put off for tomorrow what could be done today, and they listened. The logger in Canada had been cutting through a particularly large pine tree when he suddenly pulled out the chain saw and cut through his own neck. I watched his field of vision lurch, then fall until it was rolling across a bed of matted decaying leaves.
The scene changed to the next victim.
✦ ✦ ✦
<movie:ar:id=8dhkie470267k9948s>
I was looking at my own face, from another time and place. My breath stopped.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall.
She had been among a random selection of a hundred victims.
I was staring at me. A dead person was staring at me.
I looked at myself, Tuan Kirie, through the eyes of my friend who, in a matter of minutes, would stick a table knife through her own throat and paint the walls of the restaurant with her blood.
<silence>
<fear>
My face. Skin tanned a little by the ultraviolet rays of the Sahara.
What a grotesque mirror.
The Italian restaurant on the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building.
The field of vision went from my face down to the bright red and fresh white slices on her plate—the insalata we’d both ordered. I noticed everything was moving at normal speed and realized I must have flicked off the fast forward without even realizing it. The cursor told me Cian was focusing on the red slices of tomato and brilliant white slices of mozzarella layered atop them.
<horror>
“I’m sorry, Miach.”
</horror>
That was what Cian would be saying any second now.
I heard the words moments after anticipating them.
Cian’s attention shifted to the table mats, and I saw her healthy arm and hand, neither fat nor slim, slide into view. The hand grabbed the knife to the right of her dish, gripping the handle with the blade pointing down, while I stared. A waiter walked up to fill my glass of water—
<limit:patience>
I switched off the AR.
</limit>
</fear>
</silence>
</movie>
✦ ✦ ✦
My lungs were screaming for air, my brain for oxygen. I had forgotten to start breathing again.
The sound of my heaving breaths filled the conference room of the WHO Japan branch I was using for my little viewing session.
Thankfully, I was alone in the room. I had been the only Helix agent in Japan when the event occurred, which was lucky for me. This way I wouldn’t be obliged to cooperate with any other agents.
Maybe I should go in for immediate therapy. Maybe I should go to some emergency morality center with white cotton walls to escape from the words that had spilled from Cian’s mouth.
Calm down. Steady breaths.
Don’t you want to find out why Cian died? Didn’t you blackmail your boss just for a chance to find out what your friend’s last words meant? So you saw yourself looking at your friend just before she died, so what? You’re breathing heavy just because you remembered a few words?
I’m sorry, Miach.
And then something occurred to me.
Of my one hundred randomly chosen victims, Cian had been the only one to say something as she died. Why was she the only one to leave last words? Were those even “last words,” as we like to think of them, or just something she happened to say? My selection had been truly random, and while it had been just a coincidence that Cian’s name was on the list, I found it hard to believe that the other ninety-nine people’s not saying anything before committing suicide, or even leaving a note, had also been a coincidence.
“Go through all the records and pull out just the ones containing the subject’s voice,” I told the database. This got me a few results, all mundane snippets of daily conversation with family or friends, none of which seemed connected in any way to the optimal methods of suicide they were about to employ.
I’m sorry, Miach.
Which left Cian Reikado as the exception. The only one with something to say.
That something being the name of the girl who had died, leaving us cowardly deserters behind.
✦ ✦ ✦
≡
I had returned to that place Miach called the “suburb of the soul.” Back to an endless, boring future of connected blocks, their nanomaterial plaster walls painted in light pastels.
I took an automag from the hotel. I didn’t care to experience the horror of the subway again, nor did I feel like going back to my own home. I was here to visit Miach Mihie’s parents.
I’m sorry, Miach.
I couldn’t exactly go to the police or Prime Inspector Os Cara Stauffenberg and tell them that the trigger for 6,582 people across the world taking their lives had been those words—words important only to myself, Cian, and Miach. They wouldn’t believe me. In fact, they’d probably recommend me for immediate therapy.
I wasn’t sure I would be able to explain why I was going to find Miach’s parents. Certainly not because one of 6,582 people had mentioned her name before committing suicide.
Truth be told, I didn’t really believe me either. I had come here on the strength of a clue you could barely call a clue, a gut feeling that was hardly reliable enough to call a gut feeling, and an emotion that was something like fear—fear of the ghost of Miach Mihie. In a world where everything was public property, my reason was so private it was almost lewd.
Through the lens of AR, everyone in the world wore their
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<list:item>
<i: name>
<i: age and occupation>
<i: social assessment score>
<i: current state of health>
</list>
✦ ✦ ✦
on their sleeve. Focus for any amount of time on someone you saw in the street, and a box of data would appear by their head, telling you everything you could possibly want to know about them. In lifeist society, where it was considered a moral obligation to reveal personal information, especially that concerning one’s health, the very word private had the illicit stench of secrecy to it.
✦ ✦ ✦
≡
So it was that I found myself on a solo investigation, using the authority granted me by the Geneva Convention as a Helix agent to the fullest extent. Miach Mihie’s parents had moved several months after their daughter died, but it did not take me long to track down their new residence.
The neighborhood was one of those admedistration collectives with security cameras monitoring all passersby. At the entrance to the zone, you had to switch from whatever mode of transport you had used to get there to a collective-provided magcar. I stepped out of the car and walked up to the front door of the house, then pressed my index finger to the fingerplate.