<recollection>
“Hey, Tuan, did you know that people used to hit doors with their hands?”
Miach’s voice in my memory.
“There used to be no way to tell who was standing outside your door at all. Some people installed little fisheye lenses on their doors, but that was about the limit of the technology. Not that being in the dark about the people around you was any big deal back then—there weren’t ubiquitous personal information displays all the time half a century ago. These days, you just touch the plate on the door and all your info is posted to the AR of the person inside on their wall or something, but they didn’t have any way of doing that before.”
“So they just hit the door? That’s so, I don’t know, primitive,” Cian said.
“It was the easiest way to announce their presence to whoever was inside. They called it ‘knocking.’ You used your knuckles, like this.” Miach demonstrated on the classroom wall. “When a person inside heard the knocking, they would shout out ‘Who is it?’ and the person on the outside would shout back ‘It’s so-and-so from such-and-such.’ And the person inside just had to take them at their word. So, if you think about it, every time you opened your door, you were taking a little risk.”
Cian and I nodded enthusiastically, starry-eyed at the seemingly limitless font of knowledge that was Miach Mihie.
“But you got to think people are getting tired of this telling-everyone-who-they-are-all-the-time business. What a drag it is to have to show you’re healthy and you’re taking care of yourself all the time. We’re tired of it, right? People shouldn’t have to walk around with labels over their heads, proving every minute and every second exactly who they are to the world.”
“Say, Tuan—”
Another memory.
“You know privacy didn’t used to be such a naughty word.”
I shook my head, eyes flitting around the room. I couldn’t believe she had just said that word here in class, in the middle of the day.
Not that Miach ever cared who heard her proclamations.
“It was because,” she continued, oblivious, “information about yourself used to be available only to yourself and a few others. That’s what privacy meant. But now, everything that used to be private is public, so the only thing ‘private’ these days is sex. Now, why do you think that happened, Cian?”
Cian shrugged her shoulders.
For some reason, a light went off in my head at that moment. “It’s like we’ve offered ourselves to the rest of the world as hostages to guarantee our own good behavior,” I said eagerly.
Miach smiled. “That’s right, Tuan, it’s just like that.”
I remember feeling a little elation at having said something to please her.
“It’s just like Tuan says. By letting everyone else know every little detail about ourselves, we’re making sure we can’t get away with anything. Give up your erratic free will as a hostage to everyone else in society and you’re guaranteed to keep things safe and peaceful.”
This was how Miach dispensed wisdom, little by little, to us little girls in the corner of a classroom, explaining to us exactly why we were so frustrated and why we felt like we didn’t belong.
Thinking back on it now, I’m amazed it never occurred to me at the time to wonder what sort of people Miach’s parents were. I had never met them, and I didn’t remember Miach ever talking about them.
Eventually, I had told Miach who my dad was, that he had written the thesis that led to WatchMe, that he had contributed significantly to the world we despised.
All Miach had said was “huh.”
She hadn’t lost it. She hadn’t hated me. She had hardly reacted at all.
</recollection>
✦ ✦ ✦
Now I found I really was curious what kind of parents it took to raise a girl who could smile while she daydreamed out loud about using a household medcare unit to kill fifty thousand people. I removed my finger from the plate and waited quietly for an answer.
“Might I ask what sort of business a member of an international organization has with us?” the door said, breaking the silence and snapping me out of my reverie fully back into the present.
“I’m with the Helix Inspection Agency—I suppose you saw that from my ID. We’re an investigative branch of WHO. I was hoping I could talk to you for a moment concerning the multiple suicides in the Sukunabikona Conclave yesterday.”
The door opened and a woman emerged. She looked to be in her late fifties. It was Reiko Mihie, Miach’s mother.
✦ ✦ ✦
<disappointment>
Her face held none of Miach’s twisted willfulness, that “dark illumination” for lack of a better term—none of her eccentric vitality. Instead, her face was like that of every other admedistration member, like the people I had seen on the subway upon my return to Japan. They were healthy but lifeless, if that made any sense. Compared to the Kel Tamasheq whose bodies, wrapped in indigo, practically shimmered with a vitality that sprang from their deep history, the people living in this country were like walking corpses.
That’s progress, said the Miach Mihie living inside me. The more advanced a people became, the closer they grew to death.
</disappointment>
✦ ✦ ✦
“Of course I’m happy to help in any way that I can. I’m just not sure what that would be.”
“I wanted to ask you about your daughter, Miach.”
A cloud passed over Reiko’s face. I saw confusion in her eyes.
“My daughter has been gone—dead—for more than ten years now. I’m sorry, but I don’t see the connection.”
“Yes, I’m aware of this,” I said, marveling that this woman didn’t appear to remember her daughter’s friend, or that I had taken an oath to kill myself with her. That I had been one of three foolish little girls.
“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about your daughter before her death.”
The mother’s eyes dropped like she was scanning the depths of her memory, looking for something she’d lost a long time ago. “Well, this is hardly a pleasant story, but when my daughter was a child, she often tried to take her own life. She slashed her wrists on several occasions.”
“I’m aware of that too. It’s in our records,” I lied.
Reiko, I was there with her. I would have followed her all theway down to hell. “I’m also aware,” I said, “that she tried to kill herself by eating too much, and then by not eating at all. As though she were trying to damage her own precious body precisely because it was so precious.”
From the woman’s expression I knew I had hit the mark. And it was true. We had tried to die because they told us our bodies were a public resource, because they kept telling us our bodies didn’t belong to us.
“We loved her, truly we did. We wanted her to grow up healthy, to make a contribution to society. But we failed. She was always cleverer than we were by far, and stronger, and yet, at the same time, fragile—a delicate little girl.”
“So what happened?”
“It’s kind of a long story. Maybe you should come inside,” Reiko said, drawing away from the door. She led me into an extremely average living room, motioned for me to sit on a sofa, and disappeared into the kitchen, asking as she went if I liked the smell of lavender. I made some noncommittal grunts, not really having an opinion on the subject.
“Here,” she said upon her return and handed me a glass of water. I took it. It did smell like lavender. This was a recent trend—using your medcare unit to add scents to drinking water. It probably had something to do with the whole aromatherapy concept that smells could help generate a feeling of calm.
A good 80 percent of admedistrative society was this: pastel pink buildings and lavender scents.
“So, you tried to help her, and what happened?” I asked Reiko as she sat down across from me. The woman who had once been Miach’s mother—I suppose that technically she still was—turned her eyes toward the twisted branches of a palmetto growing outside the window.
“Miach was adopted. Maybe you remember the admedistration campaign to adopt war orphans to counterbalance the problem of our aging society? There were those posters: ‘The best resource of all is our youth.’ We had tried to have a child of our own, but I was told by the doctor that my body couldn’t produce children. When my husband and I imagined the long lives ahead of us, thanks to WatchMe, just years of gradually growing old, it seemed so…flat, so homogeneous. How horrible, we thought, and how sad. Maybe you remember the conflict in Chechnya?”
I told her it was still going on.
“Is that so? Well, that’s where Miach was from. She was the child of a minority group there, a very small community, the admedistration official told us. Their facial features resemble ours quite a lot, and she was only eight years old when we got her, so they told us she wouldn’t have any problem getting used to our family and our way of life. All of which was very good news to us. They did mention she’d seen some pretty rough times, but that she’d gone through heavy therapy for her trauma already, and all we needed to do was provide a warm, loving home for her.”