</recollection>
≡
They closed the lid on Cian’s coffin while the procession watched.
As was the custom, the family had chosen a gentle, light pink for the coffin. Like they could paint over the horrible, illogical shock of losing someone so abruptly in an age when everyone was supposed to live forever. Most of the people in the procession wore light yellow and emerald green in mourning. The ceremony had been brief. Cian’s cold body would now be carried by hearse to the local reduction facility. I watched the family procession leave the community center. I had no desire to go to the factory. I didn’t think I’d be able to stand there and wait for the reduction process to finish. I was out of time as it was. I had to figure out why Cian had died before they dragged me off to therapy.
The factory, the melting pot, the reduction center.
It was a relic from the time of the mutant viruses after the nukes dropped.
The bodies of the dead were reduced with a protein liquefier, and the resulting goop was further processed to remove any possibility of viral or bacterial transmission. The processing plant of the dead. A reminder of more chaotic times that had lived on for over half a century now. From a law-enforcement perspective, it was a pain in the ass. You couldn’t use medicules to analyze someone’s brain once it’d been liquefied.
Back during the Maelstrom, when mutant plagues ran rampant, corpses were nothing more than disease vectors to be eliminated as quickly as possible. Corpses started new outbreaks, and merely scorching the flesh wasn’t enough. The custom that arose under those conditions became the norm, which meant that bodies these days were dealt with as soon as possible. After an extremely brief autopsy to determine cause of death, the body would be subjected to protein reduction and that was it.
While it was still possible to use imaging to examine a corpse after the fact, there was no time to use medicules to investigate anything on the nano level.
<sentiment>
“Goodbye, Cian. And thank you,” I muttered toward the hearse as it drove away from the funeral home. A soft breeze against my face was Cian’s answer. I felt like crying for a little while after that, but I stood and watched the car until I could no longer see it. Our friend. She had watched over us. She had saved my life. And she had suffered for it for years.
Maybe she was the kind of comrade-in-arms Miach had been looking for.
To me, Cian Reikado had been a friend.
A little girl, braver than any of us, and more of an adult than I would ever be.
</sentiment>
I wiped away a tear with the back of my hand and left the funeral home to go to the university where Keita Saeki worked. While Nuada Kirie, aka my father, had gone off to Baghdad, his partner had remained behind to continue his research here in Japan. He was still at the same school where he and my father had worked together on their medicule theories so many years before.
≡
I parked my car in the university lot and touched my hand to the screen of a FindYou on the way into the school (the granite base that the screen sat on gave it a nice academic look) and announced I was looking for Keita Saeki. The message searching appeared in the middle of the screen as the FindYou hunted for Keita’s WatchMe signal. After a moment, the lab and a map showing how to get there rose up on the screen. I touched the display to transfer the map to my own AR, and willfully ignoring the looks that my crimson Helix agent uniform got from the students, I followed the bobbing arrows that appeared in the air in front of me toward the laboratory.
Past a row of evergreens with pink leaves I found the building I was looking for. I pressed a finger to the door to identify myself and made for the laboratory.
“Come on in, I’ve been waiting for you,” came a familiar voice from inside. Of course, when I’d asked the FindYou to locate him, it let Keita Saeki know (as was his legal right) that I was looking for him. I strode through the door into the cluttered office.
“Wow, what a mess.”
The place was a mountain of printouts—manuscripts and research materials and the like. There were mounds of other dead media too. The thin black squares I recognized as floppy disks. “They’re like memorycels,” he had told me once when I had visited the laboratory as a child. As for the other things there, I had no idea what they might be called. Just looking at them, it was hard to even imagine what they might do.
“I’m surprised you can even walk around in here,” I said, making a show of hopping from bare spot to bare spot, going toward the professor like someone jumping from rock to rock across a river.
“I manage. Besides, ThingList remembers where I put everything if I ever need to find it,” the professor replied as he scratched his tangled monkey-puzzle-tree of a hairdo with one hand.
“It’s not a question of practicality. It’s a question of mental hygiene.”
“For scientists it’s always a question of need, Miss Kirie. As long as my ThingList has location tags, and it does, there’s no need for me to remember where anything is. I can just follow the arrows.”
“ThingList is a bad influence.”
“I like to think of it as outsourcing my memory to someone far more competent. I use a NeedList inside my ThingList so I don’t forget anything when I go out either.”
“Well, I spend a lot of time off-line, so that wouldn’t work for me.”
“Where’s that thesis?” Keita addressed the room. “The one that Czech mathematician wrote three years ago.” A long, pink, rubbery appendage extended from the intelligent material on the ceiling, moved about thirty feet across the room, then grew fingers to fish several sheets of a printout from a large stack, which it then brought to us. Everything in the room was tagged for identification and immediate retrieval—which meant that somewhere on the university server there was a perfect real-time replica of the professor’s office. No wonder the human race was growing soft.
I stood next to the professor and a gelatin seat materialized from the floor beneath me.
“Care for some water?”
“Got any caffeine?”
“Nah. The university—that is the student admedistration— won’t allow it. I’m surprised how well this generation looks after itself.”
“Wasn’t it your generation that wanted society to be this way?”
“Now now, how could anyone have predicted such an extremely health-conscious society would rise out of what we had before? Yo, two waters please.”
Once again the arm extended from the ceiling, pouring water into two cups and carrying them to us.
“There are many from our generation that can’t bear to fit into the molds society stamps for them,” I told him. “Plenty of people in your generation too, for that matter.”
“Give birth, consume. That’s the safe, stable cycle of life. Those who would attempt to destroy themselves, and thereby destroy that cycle, are anathema to the rest of us. Before they are allowed to do such a thing, it is our responsibility to notice the telltale signs and subject them to heavy therapy. That’s what being a thoughtful society means.”
“Don’t you think we’ve reached the limits of our over-considerate society by now?”
“What we’ve reached is a healthy, conflict-free status quo. Though the statistical rise in suicides within admedistrative society is troubling for sure, there are many who believe that pharmaceuticals and the development of novel therapeutic treatments, as well as the legal support for such treatments, will eventually bring the trend under control.”
“You seem well, professor.”
“Show me someone who doesn’t. With disease virtually abolished, it shouldn’t be hard. A lot of old expressions have lost their teeth that way, you know.”