<surprise>
Miach, a war orphan? I was sure she’d never said anything about that. And neither I nor Cian ever doubted she was Japanese. She spoke fluently, and though she’d had a certain exotic beauty to her features, they fit well within the margins of Japanese variation.
</surprise>
✦ ✦ ✦
In the course of my work I’d had several opportunities to meet child soldiers—one of the many scenes AI social filtering kept out of the admedistration media due to a risk of trauma to viewers.
I remembered them in one of the many African countries I visited, carrying the customary AK-47s and a few M-4s from America. Children. Their country was sluggishly transitioning from an antiquated government to an admedistrative system, but there were still armed factions here and there, and the embers of conflict still smoldered.
We were at the negotiation table across from a twelve-year-old boy. A boy who happened to be the leader of an armed force 140 strong—I won’t call them “men” because they were boys too. His boys’ eyes were blank as they looked over the firepower we were offering them in exchange for their cigarettes and drugs.
Chechnya I’d never been to, but I’d heard plenty of rumors. According to the Helix inspector for the region, the military goods dealer on contract with the Geneva Convention forces there had made a mess of the place with various abuses of the law, only serving to increase the small republic’s hatred and distrust of its larger neighbors.
And Miach had been there, in the middle of that tragedy. I knew the crimes that children experienced in war zones. Now I considered the possibility that Miach had seen or experienced many of them herself. For the first time I had learned that Miach was carrying something inside her, a darkness she hadn’t told anyone—not even her coconspirators. The fact that she had come from such a hell on earth made her hatred of the admedistrative world—which must have seemed heavenly by comparison—all the more impressive.
“At first she was fine. Everything was normal. But when she got into middle school, it was like she became someone else, possessed almost. She started trying to kill herself. I told you how she attempted to cut her wrists. Well, eventually she found a way to hurt herself without anyone knowing. She came by these drugs—I don’t know where—that stopped the body’s absorption of nutrition from food. She and some of her friends made a pact that they would kill themselves that way.”
✦ ✦ ✦
<confession>
I was one of those friends.
I was that little girl who failed thirteen years ago and hadn’t forgotten it for a moment since.
I and Miach and Cian had taken those pills together in order to strike a blow against the world that had tried to suffocate us by making us too important to be lost. We wanted to hurt the world, and we were willing to hurt ourselves to do it. Well, some of us, at least.
</confession>
✦ ✦ ✦
Of course, I said nothing. All I had to do at that point to keep her talking was nod at the appropriate times and occasionally ask a suitably leading question.
“Of course, even when they took the drugs, it still looked like they were eating well. I didn’t notice anything. Nor did the parents of the other girls. By the time I did realize something was wrong, Miach had already passed the point of no return.”
The woman’s eyes fell to her lavender-scented water. “You must think I’m a terrible mother, not to realize my own child was dying before my very eyes.”
“No, not at all—”
“No, it’s all right. It’s the truth, after all.” She chewed her lip.
✦ ✦ ✦
<passion>
“But, I ask you, what can a parent do when their child does something we can’t even imagine?” Tears glistened in Reiko Mihie’s eyes. “I know that sounds like an excuse, but we really did everything we could to be good parents to her. We went to get advice from the morality center and asked for help from our admedistrative community. The community people were very kind and held several sessions on our behalf.”
Was that all you could think of? I thought, cringing inwardly. It was the usual protocol: if a kid had problems, smother them with goodwill until they no longer thought for themselves, or thought anything at all.
Miach didn’t have to do much to find herself well beyond the limitations of this woman’s small, frail imagination.
“Every time we tried a new approach, Miach seemed to just slip through our hands like sand, drifting off in some other direction. The pain she was suffering was beyond our ability—no, beyond the whole admedistration’s ability to comprehend. She was in pain for reasons we couldn’t even imagine, screaming in perfect silence.”
</passion>
<disturbed>
To be honest, I hadn’t been ready for the woman’s pained confession.
Even though, as a Helix agent, I was used to negotiating with admedistrations, the few big governments that refused to die, and the armed factions, I had no tools to deal with this kind of outpouring of raw emotion.
This was the kind of scene you expected in therapy sessions run by the admedistration community and the morality center. The world where everyone knew everything about everyone else. There was no shame in showing your emotions there. Everyone welcomed your grief with a smile and set about debating how to fix things on your behalf. A terrifying thought, I know.
That was the world I had fallen from, hard. The world from which I was estranged.
Confronted with the mother’s confession, I realized just how much of an outcast I was from Japan—no, from the entirety of the advanced admedistrative world.
</disturbed>