<list:action>
<a: cutting their wrists.>
<a: hanging themselves.>
<a: jumping off buildings.>
</list>
✦ ✦ ✦
Souls in danger of being crushed by society were, in turn, gnawing away at its underbelly.
Souls that just didn’t fit. Souls of children yearning for disease, for damage, for pain. With wickedness in their hearts they tried to ruin their own precious lives, and they knew what they were doing. Something had to be wrong with this picture. Even in our brainwashed society, I think people had begun to realize it, but not with such clarity that they felt they could talk about the wrongness yet. It was just a slight feeling of discomfort, which they pushed down into their subconscious with all their might.
What I had found was middle ground between chaos and regulation, a limbo where I could hang for eternity.
I had sometimes felt like I was Miach’s doppelgänger.
But that wasn’t true at all. I had merely become the person I imagined Miach would have become if she had to live in my world.
“The reason I took Miach was, for one, because she was a perfect confluence of the various stressors our society creates. If we could bend Miach’s obdurate will and steer it off its collision course with death, then we could control anybody. That was the thought. In those days, we picked up a lot of kids like her and put them into treatment. We gathered the ones that wanted to kill themselves—especially the ones who overate or refused to eat, the ones who wanted to watch themselves grow weak and die. Our goal was to create a harmonized will inside the human brain. We called it the Harmony program. The experiments we performed on kids like Miach were tests-to-destruction, of a sort. We were seeing how far Harmony could go.”
I felt an irrational anger swelling up inside me. But not because of the tests they performed on Miach.
I wanted to know why they hadn’t tested me.
Of course, I knew precisely why. They needed someone who was really, deeply, fundamentally without hope. They probably had their eyes on hundreds of emergency morality centers. There were plenty of kids back then who had attempted suicide more than once, just as there were plenty of them now.
With Miach, my father had found his rock bottom.
He had seen the despair in her eyes.
He saw that she was, as Cian had said, standing on the edge of a cliff.
That was what my father had to control, or at least attempt to control.
✦ ✦ ✦
<anger>
That was the reason he had abandoned me and my mother and come here to Baghdad. I had to accept that. Yes, I was feeling jealous. Children always got upset when they weren’t chosen for something. Still, at the same time, what they had done was beyond grotesque.
Despairing kids by the dozen.
</anger>
✦ ✦ ✦
“How could you?”
My father nodded grimly. “It wasn’t easy. But if we didn’t do something, those children were a grave danger to themselves. All of them had repeatedly tried to take their own lives, and one day, they very well might have succeeded.”
“Nice try, but you’re just taking a consequence and calling it an objective.”
“True enough. Nor were our results by any means perfect.”
“What do you mean?”
“Harmony had a very serious side effect we didn’t anticipate— though, in hindsight, some simple logical reasoning should have made it obvious. As it was, we never saw it coming.”
Suddenly, it occurred to me what he was going to say.
He was right. Logically speaking, it was obvious. If the feedback web reached perfect harmony and all decisions could be made without any conflict and all actions taken clearly, what would that mean? It would mean nothing less than “I” was on the line.
“You killed consciousness.”