Colds.
Migraines.
Infectious diseases.
I wondered how much pain I would have to feel before I could truly prove I existed. That I felt pain. That I was satisfied.
Cian had felt pain, and it terrified her.
She was frightened of being an undeniably living creature, with a nervous system and the whole works.
It went a little differently for the elderly. Life span was a hard out and an undeniable barrier. The older you got, the more you experienced that balance between life and death, and the more you began to fall apart, beyond the abilities of WatchMe and a medcare unit to catch up.
“Speaking of losing teeth, you can’t say that a feeble old man has no health problems,” I challenged him.
“True enough. There is no panacea for old age, I’ll give you that. But you have to agree those little buggers your dad and I cooked up are doing one hell of a job.”
“Well, for a world without disease, people sure do spend a lot of time gabbing about their health.”
The professor shrugged his shoulders as if to say it’s no fault of mine. He moved dexterously for a man in his mid-eighties.
“That’s because everyone’s still afraid that all it will take is one misstep and the cancers and viruses will be right back on us.”
“It’s already been half a century since the Maelstrom.”
“And the people who had to live through that—myself included—have control of the admedistrations. Plenty of councilors and commissioners are in their seventies and eighties. That chaos and the nuclear war that followed made our world a very harsh environment. The kind of place where you’d die without a space suit on. It was like living in a space station, one thin wall away from oblivion. The nuclear war and the radiation it spread made the perpetuation of our species a very dicey proposition, which it still would be without the help of homeostatic monitoring thanks to WatchMe and constant treatment by a medcare unit. You need strong armor to live in a harsh world.”
“So, even though the radiation’s gone, the fear remains?”
“Well, there’s a lot to be said for socialistic tendencies. Did you know that the first group to attempt the nationwide eradication of cancer and the prohibition of smoking were the Nazis?”
Fleeting memories of twentieth century history as taught in school.
With the Maelstrom waiting at the end of the semester, the sorry fate of the twentieth century Jews got sidelined in class. The longer history got, the more compressed its parts became.
“We’ll be lucky if we get one minute’s time,” Miach had said once. Leave it to Miach to imagine a history lesson one thousand years in the future. And who wouldn’t want to skip such an uneventful period in favor of something more exciting? As history marched on, our time would shrink, and shrink, and shrink away until finally there’d be nothing left.
The tragic genocide of the Jews was hanging on, tooth and nail, to its two minutes in class.
“They’re the lot who killed all those Jews, right?”
“You make them sound like rabble. They were a nation. Democratic in origin, with citizens, and voting, and a representative government. The Nazis took control over the details of daily life to a greater extent than anyone before them. They made a register of all cancer patients, listing all who had been affected, categorizing and analyzing them, all in the first organized attempt to eradicate cancer in history.”
“Fascism, was it? The political system in Germany under the Nazis, I mean.”
“Yes, and you can draw clear parallels between our admedistrative system and the health policies of the Nazis, if you like. Were you aware that pejorative words like fatty dropped from our language over the last half century?”
“Actually, I did know that one.” I chuckled. Miach Mihie, banzai!
“Under Nazi rule, the ‘crippled’ became the ‘physically impaired.’ Lunatic asylums became psychiatric hospitals. Countless words pertaining to the human body changed in subtle ways.”
“What’s lunatic mean?”
“Think of it as a not-very-nice way to refer to someone in serious need of high-level counseling and deep therapy. The Nazis also spearheaded the first nationwide attempt to stamp out smoking because of its detrimental effects on health. In 1939, the Nazi government established a regulatory agency for alcohol and tobacco products. In 1941, a research laboratory to study the harmful effects of tobacco was established at the Universität Wien under the auspices of Hitler himself.”
“You make it sound like the Nazis were a bunch of dogooders.”
With these cherry-picked examples, Nazi society didn’t sound all that different from ours. Which meant that now I had a personal reason to hate the Nazis as the forebears of the assholes who wouldn’t let me smoke today.
“In a sense, that’s true. Even if they were responsible for the greatest genocide of the twentieth century. There are many sides to everything, that’s the point. Take a clean freak and turn them up a few notches, whammo, they’re talking about racial purity.‘Tobacco is the source of all ills, a danger to the nation’s citizens.’That’s a protoform of what we call resource awareness today.”
I shrugged. “So we’ve just reinvented Nazi Germany on a global scale then. Great.”
“In a sense, yes, we have. Though there are significant differences. Foremost among them is that, in the time of the Nazis, it was the Nazi party and a few scientists who were pushing eugenics as a way to clean things up. In admedistrative society, everyone’s out there together, waving the same flag. We are all health freaks. The Nazis might have had the idea long before us, but not even they could keep their own soldiers on the front lines from smoking—especially in the harsher places like the Eastern Front.”
“Oh, I understand that. I really understand that.” I chuckled. Of course, for me it worked the other way around. It wasn’t battlefield conditions that made me smoke. It was the smokes that lured me out to the battlefield. I wondered for the first time what had become of Étienne and the others who used to partake in our contraband exchanges. For a moment, I was transported back to the sunflower fields and blue skies of the Sahara, dotted with the indigo veils of the Kel Tamasheq.
“But now tobacco’s gone from the world. Save for a few holdouts in Africa and parts of Asia—conflict zones, mostly. Go to any admedistration and you’ll not find a single constituent partaking of either cigarettes or alcohol. The same goes without saying for harder drugs. Do you know why drugs were prohibited in the first place, way back when?”
“Enlighten me.”
“It started back during the settlement of North America. The slaves and laborers brought in from Africa and China had a custom of chewing on coca leaves, which enabled them to work far beyond the usual limits of their physical bodies. Of course, this didn’t amuse the white laborers who weren’t partaking. By abolishing drugs for moral reasons, they attempted to wrest the title of top laborers from so-called inferior races.”
“That’s funny. I always thought it was because drugs ruined people’s lives.”
“Well, that’s true too, but that’s only one aspect of the truth.” The professor leaned back in his chair. “Of course, my generation is blessed and cursed with having seen the reasons why our current health-obsessed society needs to be what it is. And I’m sure you had to sit through your share of lessons on the Maelstrom when you were in school, Tuan.”
The section of history class dealing with the Maelstrom was a curriculum heavyweight. Thinking back on it, it occurred to me that history had always been Miach’s favorite subject—the only one she was truly passionate about—and the Maelstrom was her favorite part of that.
I had never been much interested in history class, even though we were always happy to receive Miach’s gleanings of wisdom from the same.