<shaken>
After her birth?
“You mean, she was born without a consciousness?”
“That’s correct.” My father tapped the kettle he held with one fingernail. Ding. The clear, high tone echoed in my skull. “Several decades ago, in the midst of the conflict between Russia and Chechnya, a minority ethnic group was discovered. This was a completely new group as far as the scientific community was concerned, mind you, not appearing in any records until then. Though their clothing, food, culture, and language had all been influenced by the surrounding peoples, they avoided close relations with any of them, maintaining a small community in a rugged mountainous region, where they had been inbreeding for many generations.”
“Wait, Dad, are you saying—”
“I’m saying that these people shared a common recessive trait. It’s a trait that shows up very rarely in the general population, and the chances of two people with it marrying are so slim that there has never been any observations made of this occurring. The trait of which I speak is a missing gene—the gene responsible for consciousness. I’m sure that of the billions of people in the world, there are a few born without the ability to form a consciousness, but in this Chechen minority group, nearly everyone lacked a consciousness.”
“But then how did they live or develop a culture?”
“After we found them, we ran them through several tests. They were extremely adept at logical thinking. Their value system was not like our irrational hyperbola, which attributes too much value to that which is right before us. They did not make choices. MRI scans showed that, indeed, there was none of the activity we associate with consciousness going on, yet they lived regular lives and had their own culture—though much of it was borrowed from surrounding peoples as the need arose. They were a people that neither possessed nor required consciousness. Just like the people of Martha’s Vineyard didn’t require speech. They were people in perfect harmony with a perfectly logical value system.”
“So Miach…”
“The conflict had spread into the mountains, plunging her people into chaos. Miach was taken from her village at the age of eight by Russian soldiers and sent to a camp run by human traffickers. This was a place of unspeakable tragedy, where sex slaves were kept for the sole use of the Russian army. This is where her consciousness awoke. Her brain needed a consciousness with a hyperbolic value system in order to withstand the daily, immediate terror of repeated rape. What happened was, a region in her cerebrum began to emulate the functions of the feedback mechanism usually handled by the midbrain. You’ve heard stories of how brains damaged in accidents will activate undamaged regions to take over some of the lost functionality, right? The brain is a very flexible organ.”
Miach’s consciousness was an emulation?
Not a true consciousness like our own.
Not a pattern woven by the feedback web in the midbrain.
A replica, created to serve a dire need.
Imitation consciousness.
I stared at my father’s back. He hadn’t brought Miach to Baghdad just because her despair had been deeper and more violent than mine.
He had brought her here because of her lineage.
So she had been dragged from hell to start a new life in Japan, but for Miach, that wasn’t harmony either. Japan’s society, in its attempt to attain a kind of harmony, let itself be ruled by a strangling, enforced kindness that had produced a mountain of suicides.
Miach Mihie hated admedistrative society as much as she had hated Chechnya.
For Miach, Chechnya and Tokyo were just two different neighborhoods in the same hell.
</shaken>
✦ ✦ ✦
Had Miach wanted to take us with her into death because she saw harmony on the other side?
“There are always monsters who find sexual attraction in children. These pedophiles among the Russian soldiers forced her to develop a consciousness out of hate, or rather something like a consciousness, and her newfound simulated consciousness despaired and chose death. I found it profoundly moving, and discouraging, that the decision to end one’s own life is a highlevel, conscious act, that only one with a conflicted consciousness can make.”
Dong! Just then, the kettle my father was holding flew out of his hands.
It shot across the shop, barely missing the half-dozing shopkeeper before crashing into a pile of pots and pans.
I whirled around and spotted a man hiding beneath a large hat. He was about ten feet away, smoke still rising from the barrel of his gun. Vashlov. The gun was pointed toward us.
“Interpol,” he said, reaching in with his free hand to pull a business card from his breast pocket. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Dr. Nuada Kirie. I’m also pleased to inform you that you’re under arrest for the mass coercion of suicides.”
✦ ✦ ✦
<tension>
I took a step back, my hand reaching for the gun beneath my jacket.
“Whoa there, Tuan. You don’t move either. You’re related to the accused, after all.”
“Liar,” I said.
“No really, you are related to him. Or did you mean something else?”
I spat on the ground. “You’re not Interpol.”
“Oh, but I am. Look, it’s written on my card.” He waved his card in the air. Seeing the lack of reaction on our faces, he frowned. “Aw. And I thought my cards would be a big hit, what with AR off-line here.”
“You may have Interpol ID, but you’re working for Miach’s group, against my father. You’ve been at the center of this madness all along.”
“An intriguing deduction.”
I took another half step back, further into the shop. “You figured that by putting me into play you could get my father out in the open, away from the protection of the Next-Gen group.”
“Fascinating. And what was I going to do then?” Vashlov grinned, clearly enjoying himself. My right hand moved toward the holster again, and his gun jerked up to point straight at me. “I really wouldn’t do that, Miss. It’s not necessary. I’m only here to take Dr. Kirie into my custody.”
“I don’t suppose taking him back to Geneva is part of the plan.”
“Probably not. I am, as you say, with Miach Mihie.”
“What do you want?”
“Your father is the leader of the main faction within our group, you see.” The barrel drifted over to point at my father. “If I take him in, they’ll lose their focus—it will weaken them. The next day or two are of vital importance, you see. If I can keep him out of action just a little while, the balance of things will shift in a favorable direction.”
“And what direction might that be?”
“Well, we—”
While Vashlov was talking—a bit too involved with what he was saying—I had reached behind me with my left hand until I found a smallish metal object with a handle. Now I threw it at him as hard as I could. The pot smacked Vashlov’s forehead with a dull thonk and he lost his footing, falling over backwards. I almost laughed out loud at the unexpected efficacy of my attack.
</tension>