“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Not really. They’re both kinds of acquaintances, in a loose sense of the term, but the bond between kindred spirits isn’t friendship per se. It’s more like the bond between fellow soldiers.”
Picking up knife and fork, I cut off a bite-sized chunk from my insalata. Cian was looking at me, clearly trying to comprehend what I was saying and just as clearly failing.
“See, Miach didn’t want friendship,” I continued. “She wanted someone to fight by her side. You can’t fight a war alone, you know.”
“The more the merrier?”
“You bet. Of course, it’d be a lot easier if she could find someone who already shared a lot of the feelings she had about things. So you’re right in that she was lying in wait for us, just for a slightly different reason.”
“We weren’t really the soldiers she hoped we would be, were we, then. At least, I wasn’t.”
Cian was probably right. Miach clearly identified the enemy and charged ahead all by herself. We were basically no better than deserters.
If Miach had been saved as we had been, would she be sitting here today, eating lunch with us? Would she have a smile for her former soldiers who fled the front lines? I had no idea.
It was then that I noticed Cian looking at her plate with a strangely expressionless face. It was bizarre. Like her plate was a pool, and she was watching something swim at the bottom. Her eyes remained fixed on one spot, unmoving. I was about to ask what was wrong when Cian opened her mouth, her eyes still fixed on her caprese.
“I’m sorry, Miach,” she whispered, then suddenly, her table knife was in her hand. Before I had time to wonder what she was doing, Cian had thrust the tip of the knife into her own throat.
“Ehgu,” said a strange voice from Cian’s mouth.
<silence>
<surprise>
Summoning some strength I never would have imagined to be in her, she twisted the table knife inside her throat and brought it straight through her carotid artery and out one side. The knife couldn’t have been that sharp. Her strength was unbelievable. It was as if her neck had been a tree trunk, and she had cut halfway through it with one blow of a hatchet.
Blood sprayed from her neck.
The blood splattered all over the interior of the Italian restaurant on the sixty-second floor of the Lilac Hills building, painting the walls in patches of somber red. A shower of blood caught the server—who had just been coming to our table to fill our water glasses—directly in the face. He passed out. >It all happened in a single, endless moment. All I could do was stare. Blood flowed down onto her plate, mingling, but not blending with, the olive oil dripping down from her salad.
</surprise>
</silence>
The other customers began to scream.
Just as, at that very moment, similar screams rose up across the globe.
Because, at that very same time, by a number of various means, 6,582 other people also tried to take their own lives.
</body>
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<part:number=02:title=A Warm Place/>
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01
<flashback:repeat>
<re: I’m sorry, Miach.>
<re: I’m sorry, Miach.>
<re: I’m sorry, Miach.>
<re: I’m sorry, Miach.>
<re: I’m sorry, Miach.>
Cian, whispering in my memory.
Her last words on infinite repeat.
<re: I’m sorry, Miach.>
</flashback>
“We’ve confirmed 2,796 deaths,” the communications officer from Interpol explained. On the same day, at the same time, 6,582 people all attempted suicide, and a little less than half of them were successful.
I subtracted the number of successful suicides from the total number of attempts: 6,582 minus 2,796 equaled 3,786.
For 3,786 people, that fateful moment was less than fatal.
The communications officer in my AR projection was still talking. Apparently several of those involved who had survived their initial attempt eight hours ago were in critical condition, meaning the total death toll could still rise.
Those “involved.”
Apparently, it had taken Interpol and all the senior Helix agents participating in this AR gathering quite some time to decide exactly what to call them. Were they victims? Suicides? For so many to attempt to end their own lives at the same time, they had to have been under some kind of influence or had been, indeed, victims of some sort of coercion. Yet look at any one of the people in the resulting pile of corpses and you had to think they did it themselves, all on their own.
<public_opinion>
<i: Everyone agrees suicide is a selfish, shameless act.>
<i: —A direct assault on the body, a public resource.>
<i: —Stark evidence of an appalling lack of awareness of the public nature of one’s own body.>
<ex: As far as I’m concerned, if someone wants to off themselves, they’re welcome to it.>
</public_opinion>
Okay, people were allowed to grieve, fine. If one of my friends died, I’d grieve. But to sit back and judge someone else’s choice, someone completely unrelated to you—to talk about “public property” and “resource awareness” when someone just died to justify giving someone’s life a cold look? That was what I called arrogance, and I wanted no part of it.
Miach would have thought the same thing. Rather, Miach did think that.
But not the rest of the world.
The only reason the suicides weren’t punished was because they were dead.
Beyond the admedistration’s reach. Finally.
If someone were to come up with a way to effectively punish the dead, I’m sure the world wouldn’t hesitate. I knew the regimen of drugs and counseling awaiting the failed suicides—it would be an earnest attempt to reclaim the resources the “involved” very nearly squandered, to patch up these damaged goods and put them back on the assembly line. To reinstate them as the basic unit in the medical economy, so that they could fulfill their societal function as consumers. Cian and I knew how that went. Been there, done that.
Except Cian wouldn’t be coming back this time.
Suicide was an offense punishable by disdain. Even if it wasn’t technically a legal offense. I remembered Miach telling us how the Catholics buried their suicides in the middle of a crossroads as punishment for betraying God.
Admedistrative society, lifeist society, hadn’t quite figured out how to treat suicides yet. The gravediggers wanted to know if they were victims or perpetrators. So, uh, ma’am? Should we just go ahead and dig this hole in the crossroads here, just to be safe?
People had no idea what to do. I didn’t blame them. Lately, not even battlefields produced this many corpses. In lifeist society, it took old age, accidents, and the occasional, very rare homicide to result in a body. Otherwise, people just didn’t die. Cancer and other diseases were targeted in real time by WatchMe and removed. The all-important credo that was resource awareness helped us keep ourselves in check. Keep your WatchMe updated and your body fat ratio low.