<i: Miach, who might have killed Cian, and 2,795 other people besides>
</list>
I thought by now I was my own woman, but here I was, chasing after Miach’s shadow again. For most of my time in flight, I had been reading a paper about healthy society that Professor Saeki had recommended to me. It turned out that there were many things the Nazis had started. PA systems, for instance. Before digital delivery and direct feeds to HeadPhones became widespread, these electronic devices magnified one’s voice in order to broadcast information to many people at the same time. The autobahn had been the grandfather of our modern expressway. Funny that it was only scholars who seemed to associate the Nazis with a healthy society.
<recollection>
“Hitler’s mother died of breast cancer, you know,” Professor Saeki said. “Her doctor was a Jew. That’s what started Hitler’s hatred of the Jewish people. In other words, the Holocaust was born from Hitler’s mother’s breast…I forget whether it was the right or the left.”
</recollection>
I left my seat and walked up the steps from the passenger area to the café on the PassengerBird’s upper deck lounge. Up here, it was like you were standing on the roof of the Bird. Blue sky stretched in every direction, and the sea of clouds below shone a brilliant white, thick with moisture. Perhaps with this in mind, the floor had been made of a supple white material that gave softly under pressure, visually blending with the clouds at its edges. The walls of the PassengerBird were made of an intelligent material that went transparent when you looked at it, giving its passengers a panoramic view. If it were not for the thin lines of the PassengerBird’s frame, it would have seemed like you were floating in the sky.
Everything in the world is floating in the sky.
When there’s no disease, when time has stopped.
People who take nicotine know nothing of politeness.
Nicotine makes your arteries shrink and your blood run thick.
Schopenhauer and Kant both despised smoking, Professor Saeki told me.
I rested my elbows on the bar counter and ordered a small enough portion of caffeine to not break any rules of etiquette. Though tobacco and alcohol had been thoroughly obliterated, I was glad that caffeine had somehow managed to hang on. Even so, there were a lot of people who frowned at you if you ordered a cup of coffee, signs of a slowly building wave of momentum against caffeine. It had gotten worse in the last decade.
I went to one corner of the café and found a seat—one of several red gelatinous mushrooms protruding from the white deck. The café was completely empty. There were hardly any passengers either. I asked one of the attendants whether this was typical of the flight, and he agreed that numbers were down today.
Because the world had changed.
People were staying in their homes, thinking. No longer could anyone say for sure they wouldn’t be dying anytime soon. Especially not the people who had witnessed the newscaster killing himself.
<list:item>
<i: Do I believe the declaration?>
<i: Will I kill someone?>
<i: Who should I kill?>
</list>
To each, his or her own level of internal conflict.
Distress, hesitation, resentment, raw emotion.
Should I not kill and die, or should I kill and live? That was the question.
I imagined darkness sweeping through the households of the world in a churning wave of bleak emotions. Most admedistrations had called immediate sessions to discuss the declaration, but hardly anyone had shown up. What was there to discuss?
Okay, everyone, I’d like to start today’s session.
Should we really kill others so that we can survive?
Should we use knives or blunt instruments?
No one here has a gun, do they?
I had a hard time imagining it. Yet if they didn’t deal with the matter head on, what was left but empty platitudes? Calm down, everyone is going to be okay—even when they knew they wouldn’t be. This wasn’t something you could discuss in public. This was a decision everyone had to make on their own. At this moment, everyone in the world was being tested.
Just thinking about it made me grit my teeth and start fiddling with my fingers. It was times like this you really needed some nicotine.
It had been several days now since I’d had a smoke, and I missed it. I couldn’t eat to compensate either, or I’d get fat, which would draw unwanted attention. Being fat was even worse than having bad skin. Deviations from standard physique really stood out when everyone was listening so attentively to their health consultant’s advice and following their perfectly designed lifestyle plans to the letter. The range of acceptable body types grew narrower every year.
Q: How long will this game go on?
A: We want to keep everyone playing until the body fat ratio of everyone in the world is plus or minus 1 percent of everyone else of their own gender. There are several ways to quit the game along the way, such as death, death, or our favorite, death.
Maybe the ones who had killed themselves just wanted out.
<recollection>
Heidrich and Himmler tried to eliminate obesity among the SS, Professor Saeki said. Himmler’s dream was that one day, all Germans would be vegetarians.
</recollection>
Maybe everyone wanted out of the game, but the atmosphere of conformity that society generated was too hard to break free of, and eventually, they gave up trying to quit. I had stayed in, myself, but in ways that didn’t require me to be serious about it at all. This meant that I had to spend most of my time on the fringes, tromping across battlefields.
<dictionary>
<item>Baghdad</item>
<definition>
Capital city of Iraq. Located in the middle of Iraq on the Mesopotamian plain. Baghdad is an old city, built during the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate and nearly destroyed in a wave of terrorist attacks against a U.S. occupying force stationed there following the second Gulf War at the beginning of this century. After the Maelstrom, Baghdad reinvented itself as a medical industry mecca. Tax breaks favoring medical investors and laws allowing the testing of experimental treatments on humans made the city an attractive place for medical industrial combines, medical think tanks, and research organizations, all who raced to establish their headquarters here, giving rise to the city’s nickname, “Medical Dubai.”
</definition>
</dictionary>
I looked through the passenger compartment and saw that, indeed, most people were somehow tied to the medical industry.
<list:item>
<i: a researcher for a medical industrial collective>
<i: a top economist for one of the medical think tanks>
<i: a software engineer manager for a medcare unit maker>
</list>
Of course, when I thought about it, it was difficult to find someone in our modern society who didn’t have a connection to some sort of medical service. I was reminded that my Helix agent ID made me stand out like a sore thumb. Especially with me standing up here, doing caffeine.
I scrunched down into my gelatin seat and watched as the PassengerBird wheeled through the sky. The seat twisted beneath me, absorbing the extra Gs as we descended to the Baghdad landing deck.
≡
It didn’t take long for the first cracks to appear in the world’s facade.
<movie:ar:id-593-6586afv50-73649o-arin678>