<list:item>
<i: wings covered with hard points>
<i: a body and fuselage controlling the wings>
<i: a living animal brain fused with a neural net>
<i: a little bit of armor plating>
</list>
✦ ✦ ✦
What had been the bird scattered in the sky in a brief flare of plasma—a daub of bright paint haphazardly added to the blue and yellow landscape.
“Combat glasses!” I shouted, thrusting my hand down into the compartment without taking my eyes off the sky behind us. Étienne passed up his binoculars and I quickly scanned the area. No more WarBirds in sight.
“Nothing at a low altitude, at least. Let’s keep an eye out though,” I announced as I ducked back inside the transport.
I let the now-empty launching tube roll on the floor, and I collapsed, feeling the tension drain from my limbs. After I had caught my breath, I undid my ponytail. Free from its restraint, my hair swirled, brushing across my forehead and cheeks.
Smoking cigars was tough these days. Getting your hands on them in the first place was even harder. My mind, newly released from the vice-grip of tension, was whimpering inside my skull, wanting to see nothing, hear nothing. Why not? Étienne can get us back to the base. I’ll just sit here quietly until we’re through that security gate.
I closed my eyes and let a soft sleepiness come over me. Waves of fatigue, lapping at my temples.
✦ ✦ ✦
≡
The swift realization came the moment I opened my eyes. I failed.
The light on the ceiling glowed with a soft, pale pink light.
I was lying on my side, surrounded by machinery. There were tubes attached to me—not just the one on the medport below my collarbone, but attached the old way too, with needles. I was in an emergency room at a hospital. Or maybe an emergency morality center. It only took me a little while to realize which it probably was.
I was alive. Which meant I had failed.
Not just once, but twice.
This hadn’t been the first time I’d attempted to kill myself with food. A while before I’d even met Miach Mihie, I’d been carried to a center just like this one after overeating. I don’t think I had consciously decided to die that first time. It was more of a vaguely defined longing toward death that had been rattling around inside my skull for years before I finally decided to take action.
✦ ✦ ✦
<disappointment>
Overeating didn’t kill me. Neither did undereating.
</disappointment>
“Not again,” I mumbled, even though by then I had realized that my mom was sitting right there next to my bed.
This is it, this is the time I die. I had been so sure of it. How foolishly optimistic I had been. All I needed was Miach and the tools—the weapons—she gave me, I’d thought, and I’d make it for sure. If she could make a device capable of mass murder out of a household medcare unit, she could do anything.
If I couldn’t do this thing even with her help, then I’d live my entire life without being able to do it at all.
How completely dependent on her I was.
“You’re awake,” my mother said, then she began to cry. It was like what I’d said hadn’t even fazed her. Or maybe my throat had been too parched for her to make out the words. Who cared, anyway? I was the one that would have to live with my failure, not her.
“What about Miach?”
This time I was sure she heard me. I saw her frown a little, her eyebrows drawing together. I asked her again.
Somewhere over my head, a children’s bio-monitor was softly chirping away.
I wouldn’t need one of those if I were an adult. They wouldn’t need any external devices to tell what was going on inside me. Not with WatchMe installed. Not with a swarm of medicules tattling on everything going on beneath my skin at all times.
“Miach … didn’t make it,” my mother said, chewing her lip. Like it was her fault.
I wanted to vomit.
✦ ✦ ✦
<anger>
Don’t do that, Mom.
</anger>
✦ ✦ ✦
My mouth remained closed, but inside my thin, motionless body, I shouted: Don’t do that! Don’t feel guilty about someone else’s death! She had nothing to do with you! It was this world— the one that demanded you sympathize with everyone, even people you’d never met—that I couldn’t stand. The air reeked of kindness, with the awareness that everyone was public property. The only acceptable form of thought was a public correctness that compelled you to blame yourself for not being able to stop someone from committing suicide—even if there was no conceivable way you could have.
But I lacked the stamina and the will to shout it out loud, so I simply muttered, “So she died.”
My mother nodded, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Cian’s okay, though. She’s being treated at a different center.”
“Oh.”
The pharmaceutical regime and counseling that came next dragged me, kicking and screaming, back into society’s fold.
✦ ✦ ✦
<list:item>
<i: Out of the world of hypokalemia.>
<i: Out of the world of hypothyroidism.>
<i: Out of the world of osteoporosis.>
</list>
✦ ✦ ✦
Back to the world of constant, mandated health.
With daily counseling and daily pills, I dug the ditch of my failure ever deeper. At least I had the common sense not to let my counselor know how I felt about it.
It came to me as I was riding home from the center in a taxi with my mother.
I was sitting next to her, looking out the window at the evening sun on the Sumida River. The calm serenity of the buildings lining both banks chilled me to the bone. They were all painted in pastels—pink, blue, green—all of them just a little off-white.
There weren’t any laws against painting a building something more exciting, and yet here they were, an endless line of houses, all cast in bland, nondescript shades. None of them stood out against the others. Nothing to disturb the eye, and therefore nothing to disturb the heart.
✦ ✦ ✦
<hopelessness>
There’s nothing I can do.
</hopelessness>
✦ ✦ ✦
It was then that I learned how to give up. Miach was dead, and she had accomplished nothing. I lost all hope in the world and, at the same time, learned how to live without hope.
I looked out the window and saw the evening sun on the twelfth of June, 2060, shining down on a giant hospital ward stretching to the horizon on both sides of the river. Mankind was trapped in an endless hospital.
✦ ✦ ✦
<regret>
I’m sorry, Miach.
</regret>
✦ ✦ ✦
I couldn’t do it. And it had taken the sacrifice of a life to the gods of medicine for me to understand. I started to cry there in the backseat of a taxi. My mother’s eyes remained fixed forward on the road ahead, as though she didn’t notice. After I cried myself out, I leaned back in my seat and fell asleep.
✦ ✦ ✦
≡
I opened my eyes again.
Tuan Kirie, senior inspector, age twenty-eight.
Étienne was shaking me by the shoulder where I lay next to the crates of cigars and wine.
“We are at the base, ma reine.”