I looked through the passenger compartment and saw that, indeed, most people were somehow tied to the medical industry.
<list:item>
<i: a researcher for a medical industrial collective>
<i: a top economist for one of the medical think tanks>
<i: a software engineer manager for a medcare unit maker>
</list>
✦ ✦ ✦
Of course, when I thought about it, it was difficult to find someone in our modern society who didn’t have a connection to some sort of medical service. I was reminded that my Helix agent ID made me stand out like a sore thumb. Especially with me standing up here, doing caffeine.
I scrunched down into my gelatin seat and watched as the PassengerBird wheeled through the sky. The seat twisted beneath me, absorbing the extra Gs as we descended to the Baghdad landing deck.
✦ ✦ ✦
≡
It didn’t take long for the first cracks to appear in the world’s facade.
✦ ✦ ✦
<movie:ar:id-593-6586afv50-73649o-arin678>
While I was in the PassengerBird an Italian man hanged himself: Luigi Vercotti, a volunteer resource manager in the Weiland Admedistration.
Vercotti had a six-year-old son and a thirty-eight-year-old wife. He had made a loop in a necktie while his wife and child were out shopping, tied it to a rafter, and kicked the small crate he’d been standing on out from under his feet.
The weight of his entire body falls on his neck.
The carotid artery begins to scream under the pressure.
The brain ceases to function in less than ten seconds’ time.
Then, gradually, the heart. stops. beating.
</movie>
✦ ✦ ✦
Inside his body, WatchMe was blaring with emergency messages for the medical server. Even when it was all over, the medicules would keep racing about until they ran out of energy from furiously signaling that there didn’t seem to be enough oxygen getting to the brain. Seen from the outside, death was a very gradual process of cell decomposition. It took time. Death didn’t happen in an instant.
Miach once showed me a picture scroll from the twelfth century or so called the “Nine Faces Poem.”
It consisted of nine illustrations showing a woman who had died. Her body gradually changed color, became bloated, then began to rot. The scroll ended with various birds and animals coming to eat her. The pictures were real, raw. It was hard to imagine the thing had been drawn so long ago. I had no idea how Miach had gotten her hands on such obviously emotionally traumatic material. Though I assumed she was capable of pretty much anything that was illegal.
“At the time when this was written, death was everywhere,” Miach said. “It takes time for a person to die, lots of time. When we go to someone’s great-grandfather’s or great-grandmother’s funeral these days, they have that case for melting and sterilizing the body. But back then, they put the body in a coffin and put the whole thing in the ground. You’ve probably never even seen a coffin, have you?
“Even when they processed the bodies, they didn’t take them to a reduction center to have them converted into harmless goop, they actually burned them. When they said ‘dust to dust,’ they really meant it.”
The idea that human death comes with brain death is a pretty recent one. From the time when people started thinking that we were our brains.
The moment I stepped off the bird in Baghdad, a call came in from the local Helix Agency office. I opened the message in my call box and I was in a real-time AR feed. There were reports from the Italian police in a document list and feeds with chatter about an incident that had happened thirty minutes prior. More was coming in: evidence, witness statements, etc.
“Is this the work of our mastermind or masterminds?” Someone in AR asked. Stauffenberg was there. She shook her head and indicated to all of us that we should read the suicide note posted in evidence.
“He left a note?” someone else said, surprised. No one had left anything in the earlier wave of suicides, with the possible exception of Cian Reikado.
The suicide note was a simple affair.