Hey, Tuan, you know what?
A whole ten million people died during just a few years in North America… “
That’s mostly because the people writing your textbooks were just the right age to remember the Maelstrom with fear,”Professor Saeki went on. “There were riots all over America—the strongest and wealthiest nation in the world at the time—that touched every corner of the land. A lot of racial cleansing too. Hispanics, Koreans, Africans—everyone was a target. The killing was so frenzied you would think everyone in the country had been born with an organ specifically designed for massacring people who didn’t look like them. So ethnicity killed ethnicity, and the chaos spread to other countries, until the terrorists decided to start lobbing the nukes they’d stolen, and everything went to hell. Our current benevolent society is a reaction to that. Some people might find the air a bit stifling, but it’s a sight better than falling into chaos like the Maelstrom again. After all, no one wants to see themselves and their children die, and what we have now is far preferable to the past, when a few men in smoke-filled rooms had all the power.”
“I’m glad we’ve learned how to tame each other, then. It’s like we’re all one another’s pets, isn’t it.”
“Always a cynic. Look, when people experience something really extreme, it’s very difficult for them to find balance after that. Their reaction usually points in an equally extreme opposite direction. That’s how we got our lifeist society. I agree, we’ve gone overboard for sure. It’s a bit silly to keep a piggy bank around when your wallet’s always full—but you wouldn’t know what a piggy bank is, would you, Tuan?”
I tried to keep from laughing out loud and only mostly succeeded.
The professor raised an eyebrow at me. “Something funny?”
“No, I was just remembering having heard a friend use that expression a long time ago.”
“You don’t say.” The professor shrugged. “Whatever, I’m sure you didn’t come here to learn about antiquated idiomatic expressions. What do you want to know, Tuan? When a WHO agent comes calling, it’s usually something important.”
“Miach Mihie.”
It was quick, but I didn’t miss the look of alarm that passed across Professor Saeki’s eyes. He put one hand to his mouth and looked thoughtful. “Hmm, yes. I received her body on Nuada’s behalf.”
“Where is my father?”
“A good question. Neither of us have tried contacting each other for quite some time.”
I decided I would press the attack. “My father took Miach along with him to Baghdad, didn’t he?”
The professor waved his hand as if to suggest this was not a fruitful line of questioning. The old man’s guard was up, I could tell.
“Where is my father? Is he not in Baghdad?”
The professor shook his head and sighed. “If he’s not in Baghdad, then your guess is as good as mine. Why not ask the global FindYou?”
“I did. Apparently, he’s no longer on the planet.”
He cocked his head. “What do you suppose that means?”
“I didn’t get a single hit from a search. Nor is he on any of the death records of any admedistration. He might’ve turned off the location signal on his WatchMe, but even then I’d still get a hit—I just wouldn’t know where he was.”
I stared at the professor, wondering how many of his defenses I would have to patiently dismantle, how many moats I would have to fill to get to the truth. No wonder Miach’s mother gave me his contact information, for all the good it was doing me.
Professor Saeki scratched his head and chewed his lip. “That’s perplexing. Mind telling me why the sudden interest in finding your father?”
“Actually, I’m not that interested in my father. What I want to know is what happened to Miach. You’re aware of the mass suicide the other day?”
“Over six thousand people across the planet killed themselves at exactly the same time. Show me someone who doesn’t know about it.”
“Well, I think Miach Mihie was involved, and before you remind me, yes, I know she’s been dead for thirteen years.”
Keita Saeki was silent. A hard look came into his eyes. “If that’s what you want to know about, you should talk to the woman who was working as Nuada’s assistant in Baghdad. Name of Gabrielle Étaín. She’s in the Baghdad labs of the SEC neuromedical consortium. Nuada and Gabrielle worked there together.”
“What were they working on?”
“Do you really need to know?” he asked. I could see his mind racing behind his eyes.
“I’ll be the judge of that. If I have to, I can get a warrant from the Japanese police.”
The professor stared at me, his mouth hanging slightly open. This wasn’t my first time at the negotiation table, and I wasn’t going to let some eccentric scholar locked up in his ivory tower talk me out of getting the information I wanted.
“It seems as though Nuada’s daughter has only grown wilder with age.”
“It’s an occupational disease. There are worse symptoms, if you care to see them.”
“That’s quite all right. I frighten easily enough,” the professor said. He called up a command pad on his desktop screen and began downloading data from someplace. He indicated the desk, so I reached out and touched it to do the transfer.
A densely packed scientific paper began scrolling at high speed through my AR.
“I don’t have time to read all this and you know it.”
“Call it my little way of getting back at you.”
“Um, excuse me?”
“I’m kidding, mostly. Let me sum it up for you. The paper is concerned with human will. A certain Russian researcher was able to use a psychological simulation based on these data to create a fairly detailed model of how the human will works.”
The professor pulled up a 3-D image embedded in the paper. It was a small picture of the brain that now began to rotate in my AR. A narrow wedge of it was blinking.
I pointed. “What’s that?”
“Part of the mesencephalon, the midbrain,” he said. “This is the part that governs the feedback system in our brains. Put simply, it processes the signals that motivate us to do things. Every action, no matter how small, has its associated reward. In most cases it’s a simple sensation of pleasure or fulfillment. If I have sex I will feel good—that’s a very simple, extreme example. Actually, my explanation is slightly off, but all you need to know is the general concept here. What I’m talking about is the range of feedback, great and infinitesimally small, that inspires us to repeat certain choices. This reward system creates a vast variety of motivating desire modules that compete for our attention. We call the act of choosing between these modules our will.”
The professor looked at me as if to ask whether I understood. I motioned for him to continue.
“Picture, say, a conference room. Real or in an AR session, it doesn’t matter. There’re all these people there and they’re all clamoring for this or that, until they boil things down to a collection of salient points and come to a conclusion. Think of the desire modules we all carry around as the people in that meeting, trying to get their opinions heard. When we think of human will, it’s common sense to think of it as a single existence or an all-discerning soul. But it’s not. It’s the heated debate, the shouting and the name-calling. It’s the process itself. The will isn’t one thing, it’s all of your desires clamoring for attention—that very state of being. Humans forget that we are a collection of disparate fragments and go around calling ourselves ‘I’ as though we were one immutable entity. It’s comical, really.”
“And this paper models that system?”
The professor dropped his display and leaned forward on his desk, nodding. “It does. When Nuada read this, he realized that if you could influence the various elements in a person’s feedback system, you could influence their will. Even control it.”