I had always thought that tea was tea.
Coffee was coffee.
Except that, just like all wine contained alcohol, these beverages contained caffeine.
<antipathy>
To this day I remember her clearly, the woman with a big voice who was running the show. I don’t remember her name. She began very demurely, waiting for her turn to take the floor. Yet when she spoke, her words were anything but demure.
“I was just wondering if there isn’t a moral problem with the taking of caffeine.”
According to her, caffeine was basically
<list:item>
<i: a stimulant.>
<i: an excitement enhancer.>
<i: bad for the stomach.>
<i: an unhealthy substance.>
</list>
“Caffeine is essentially addictive,” the woman said.
Very softly.
A gentle denunciation.
“It just seems to me,” she went on to say, “that there is something indecent about the effects of long-term use.”
</antipathy>
“What about those who require the use of caffeine in their occupation?” asked my father, the scientist. This was why I was soon to witness my father being verbally pummeled in public. Which was odd, because as far as I could tell, what he had said was correct, common sense, and altogether noninflammatory.
But the woman’s argument was so in line with admedistration ideas of propriety, so modestly put—and so one-sided, so easy to understand, and so filled with determination.
Determination after determination.
People in the admedistrations liked other people to decide things for them. People who made decisions created an atmosphere. Scientists had always been bad at this. That was because the facts could be dry and were often complex; yet by necessity the truth must be plain enough to withstand repeated inquiry, all of which made it unappealing. So my father told me some time after the session had ended.
My father had said that certain occupations required the use of caffeine, and that there were certain kinds of stress that caffeine helped reduce.
<antipathy>
“The arguments Mr. Kirie gives us,” the woman said, close to the end of the session, “are quite like the rationales given by those who clung to their tobacco and alcohol habits, even when everyone around them had abandoned the foul things.”
<list:item>
<i: She indicated evidence that caffeine caused panic attacks.>
<i: She indicated that caffeine contributed to insomnia.>
<i: She even went so far as to indicate that caffeine could cause seizures in some people.>
<i: She noted that caffeine could act as a trigger for headaches and amnesia.>
</list>
</antipathy>
Not once did my father manage to get the word moderation in edgewise. Though caffeine wasn’t about to be wholly abolished, the atmosphere in the session clearly colored caffeine as a poisonous, indecent substance to be avoided.
<antipathy>
I felt sick through most of the session.
Not an upset stomach. More of a spiritual queasiness. Like my mind wanted to vomit. To me, the woman was a menace, and I couldn’t understand why everyone in the session seemed to be nodding and swallowing the venomous words she spat out like candy.
“I know it’s not very realistic, but I have a dream that someday,” the woman said in closing, “someday caffeine will be entirely abolished.”
</antipathy>
<regret>
I regretted having asked my parents to take me with them to the session.
I remembered seeing a media channel where they showed picture after picture of food items I had never seen before in my life. When I asked my father what it was, he said they called it the “Two Minutes’ Hate.”
“It’s for us, mainly, the last generation who ate food with too much fat, too much cholesterol, too much salt—food that’s bad for your health and not properly resource-aware. We were to watch that and think ‘I can’t eat that. People who eat those things aren’t fit to be in our society. They lack resource awareness. They’re harming their public body.’ It’s a form of self-suggestion.”
The program had aired regularly ten years before. And now the kind of hatred against unhealthy food that started with the Two Minutes’ Hate had born fruit in the form of opinions like the one we heard in the session that day—a call for everyone to join in a shared hatred of caffeine.
I was proud of my father. He had created WatchMe. He had changed the world. I didn’t want to see him shamed like this. If this was the admedistration, if this was the world, then I didn’t want to be there. This was long before I met Miach, but my feeling of discomfort that day was so severe that I remembered the morality session for a long time afterward. The discomfort followed me to school, and even when I played games at home. It was always there, gnawing at my stomach. I never wanted to go to a session again.
</regret>
The first person to notice my discomfort was a girl reading a book by the jungle gym in the park I passed by on my way home from school. She walked up to me and asked if I knew why the jungle gym bars warped the way they did.
</recollection>
≡
“This is BirdRider with an announcement for all passengers. This Northern Passengers 947 DR flight out of Tokyo will be landing in the Baghdad Medopolis in one hour.”
The announcement telling me my arrival time came like a soft whisper in my ear. Very pleasant. Unpleasant things were abhorred in this world.
No disease, no unsettling tastes, no disturbing images. If, by some gross miscalculation, you did happen across any of these things, there were plenty of therapists waiting to help.
A world devoid of unpleasantness. I wondered how much further we had to go until we reached a world devoid of life. The land of the dead.
While the silky soft voice sounded next to my ear, I leaned forward in my seat and looked out the window at the six main wings of the PassengerBird. The wings rippled and changed form, as if they were actually flapping as they curled around invisible currents of air. Back when airplanes had been the main form of aerial transportation, travel hadn’t been half as elegant.
That put me in mind of the jungle gym again. The words from Miach’s lips.
Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, jungle gyms were still made of metal. Not intelligent, not morphable. Not even soft.
<list:item>
<i: Miach, still alive>
<i: Miach, who didn’t die>
<i: Miach, who didn’t leave us behind>