While I was in the PassengerBird an Italian man hanged himself: Luigi Vercotti, a volunteer resource manager in the Weiland Admedistration.
Vercotti had a six-year-old son and a thirty-eight-year-old wife. He had made a loop in a necktie while his wife and child were out shopping, tied it to a rafter, and kicked the small crate he’d been standing on out from under his feet.
The weight of his entire body falls on his neck.
The carotid artery begins to scream under the pressure.
The brain ceases to function in less than ten seconds’ time.
Then, gradually, the heart. stops. beating.
</movie>
Inside his body, WatchMe was blaring with emergency messages for the medical server. Even when it was all over, the medicules would keep racing about until they ran out of energy from furiously signaling that there didn’t seem to be enough oxygen getting to the brain. Seen from the outside, death was a very gradual process of cell decomposition. It took time. Death didn’t happen in an instant.
Miach once showed me a picture scroll from the twelfth century or so called the “Nine Faces Poem.”
It consisted of nine illustrations showing a woman who had died. Her body gradually changed color, became bloated, then began to rot. The scroll ended with various birds and animals coming to eat her. The pictures were real, raw. It was hard to imagine the thing had been drawn so long ago. I had no idea how Miach had gotten her hands on such obviously emotionally traumatic material. Though I assumed she was capable of pretty much anything that was illegal.
“At the time when this was written, death was everywhere,” Miach said. “It takes time for a person to die, lots of time. When we go to someone’s great-grandfather’s or great-grandmother’s funeral these days, they have that case for melting and sterilizing the body. But back then, they put the body in a coffin and put the whole thing in the ground. You’ve probably never even seen a coffin, have you?
“Even when they processed the bodies, they didn’t take them to a reduction center to have them converted into harmless goop, they actually burned them. When they said ‘dust to dust,’ they really meant it.”
The idea that human death comes with brain death is a pretty recent one. From the time when people started thinking that we were our brains.
The moment I stepped off the bird in Baghdad, a call came in from the local Helix Agency office. I opened the message in my call box and I was in a real-time AR feed. There were reports from the Italian police in a document list and feeds with chatter about an incident that had happened thirty minutes prior. More was coming in: evidence, witness statements, etc.
“Is this the work of our mastermind or masterminds?” Someone in AR asked. Stauffenberg was there. She shook her head and indicated to all of us that we should read the suicide note posted in evidence.
“He left a note?” someone else said, surprised. No one had left anything in the earlier wave of suicides, with the possible exception of Cian Reikado.
The suicide note was a simple affair.
<list:item>
<i: I do not think I am capable of killing another person.>
<i: I do not think I could bear the guilt I would feel even if I did manage to kill someone.>
<i: Though my body is a public body, the same goes for others around me.>
<i: I will not let myself be killed by the evil people who claim to be doing this.>
<i: I apologize to my wife and son, and my neighbors, for choosing to kill myself instead.>
</list>
That was all.
“This is a new development. We do not think our mastermind was involved,” Stauffenberg said.
I had to agree. This wasn’t the doing of whoever had sent that memorycel to Network 24. This was someone who had taken that news report seriously and decided to take their own life before the “mastermind” could take it for him. It wasn’t an entirely outrageous decision.
Stauffenberg asked about media coverage and was informed that at present the only people other than the family who knew about the suicide were the local Italian police, Interpol, and the Helix Inspection Agency. Still, they would probably only be able to keep it under wraps for a few days at most. After that, the Werther effect would sweep the globe.
That was why they were giving the media a gag order, to keep would-be Werthers from popping up. Incidentally, the Werther effect refers to multiple linked suicides after a widely publicized one. Why did I know this mostly useless fact? Because Miach Mihie had told me.
<recollection>
“See this?” Miach held up a book. “The Sorrows of Young Werther. This book killed a lot of people. Impressive, isn’t it?”
How does a book kill people, I asked her. “You mean someone hit them with it?”
So Miach explained the travails of jungen Werther to me. Apparently, the titular character loves this girl, but the girl is engaged to marry another man. Unable to bear unrequited love, our hero kills himself.
“Sounds like a pretty typical romantic love tragedy,” I said. “What does that have to do with lots of people dying?”
“Get this—people who identified with Werther, because, say, they were in a similar position, were influenced by the story to kill themselves. Then people heard about that and they killed themselves. The first copycat suicides! And all after a completely fictional character, though no doubt inspired by the author Goethe’s own experiences.”
Miach Mihie flashed her customary smile and thrust the book out in front of her. “Isn’t it cool? Words, books, fiction all have the power to kill.”
</recollection>
Useless information, rotting at the bottom of the world.
I knew these things, thanks to Miach.
If word of the suicide and the accompanying note got out, it was a sure thing that plenty of other people would follow suit. I wondered how many would choose suicide before we reached the time limit, and how many people would do as they were told and kill at least one other person. It occurred to me that there would be a lot of people unable to kill themselves or another person who would simply try to wait it out.
Either way, it was clear we were headed for another Maelstrom.
“Couldn’t we take everyone’s WatchMe off-line and cut the links to the health supervision servers?” someone suggested, but it was an impractical idea. WatchMe was tied into the global ID system. If a person took their WatchMe off-line, they couldn’t buy things, get on the train, or even get into their own home. It would be mass chaos.
“The world will fall into chaos,” grumbled one of the other Helix agents in the AR session. Then the weary-faced agents all began to talk at once, their words describing a grand list of what we would lose.
“All the admedistrative functions: hitch-homing, morality sessions, mutual aid, elder care. All will cease.”
“Our social system is based on the open exchange of information and unlimited trust in others within the admedistration and regional collectives. What will happen to that?”
“And our economic cycle is based on the assumption that people will live long, healthy lives.”
“Things will grind to a halt.”
“What’s to keep people from killing each other? From killing us?”
“If things keep going this way—”
“We’ll be back to the beginning of the twenty-first century, no—”