Miach sighed, a sort of noncommittal sigh neither affirming nor denying my theory.
“So that’s your answer? It’s human nature to be afraid of falling—we’re just made that way?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you ever fallen off something?”
In fact, I had. It was when I was still pretty young. We’d gone camping, and I slipped off a boulder and fell into a stream. I could remember the instant it happened. You hear people talk about how time slows down during an accident, but for me it seemed like as soon as I realized my feet were slipping I was on my knees in the water.
I had scraped my leg on my way down, and when I looked at it, I saw a thin line of color emerging from my right calf, curling off into the slightly cloudy water like a red ribbon. A little trout had gone swimming through it, and I thought he might get tangled in the thread, but of course he didn’t. A moment later my father was helping me out of the stream. He used his portable med kit to fix my scrape, but I still remember what it looked like, that red thread of blood, drifting almost sensually in the water. The medicule paste—the same stuff that Miach claimed could kill fifty thousand people—quickly sealed the cut while the same medcare tank made antibodies to kill any infectious bacteria I might have picked up. My father attached the unit to the medcare port beneath my shoulder blade.
“What did it feel like, the moment you fell?”
Miach stopped and turned toward me. I answered honestly that it had been over so quick I didn’t remember feeling anything. One moment I was on the boulder, the next I was in the water.
“Oh.”
Miach shrugged and began walking again. I followed along behind.
“So you think someone who’s never taken a fall in their life wouldn’t be afraid of falling?”
“I didn’t say that. But they could forget their fear. Just like we’re forgetting what disease means.”
“Disease is when you get older more quickly and your muscles stiffen up.”
Miach looked over her shoulder, a smile on her lips. “That’s what it means now, true, but that refers to only one condition that affects a few unlucky people with some unlucky genes. I didn’t mean that kind of disease. I mean just getting sick. Like catching a cold or having a headache. Ever heard of those?”
I shook my head.
“In the past, there were lots of diseases in us, thousands. Everyone got sick, and this is only half a century ago I’m talking about. When the nuclear warheads fell during the Maelstrom, everyone got cancer from the radiation. The whole world was one big disease.”
“Oh, I learned about that.”
<reference:textbook:id=hsj56093-4n7mn 2jp:line=3496>
<content>
Many people developed cancer from the radiation. At the same time, the radiation caused mutations in China and the depths of Africa, spawning a flood of unknown viruses. With such a clear and present threat to its health, the world transformed overnight from a capitalist society monitored by governmental units to a medical welfare society organized by admedistrative bodies.
</content>
</reference>
“Right? I’m not sure why I have that memorized. Impressed?”
“Yes, but they never tell you about how people used to get sick before then. You may have your history lesson memorized, but you don’t even know what a cold is. How could you? You’ve never experienced one. Our society’s accomplished a pretty amazing thing. Thanks to WatchMe and medcare, we’ve driven almost every disease off the face of the planet.”
I hadn’t told anyone at school who my father was—if they knew anything, it was that he was someone important. Nuada Kirie had been the first scientist to put forth the theory that led to the technologies in WatchMe in a thesis he wrote with an associate thirty-five years ago now.
<reference:thesis:id=stid749-60d-r2yrui6ronl>
<title>
“Concerning the Possibility of Homeostatic Health Monitoring with Medical Particle (Medicule) Swarms and Plasticized Pharmalogical Particles (Medibase).”
</title>
<author>Nuada Kirie, researcher</author>
<author>Keita Saeki, coresearcher</author>
</reference>
Did Miach know? What kind of face would she make if I told her? Would she hate me if I told her that this world she hated so much had all started with my dad? I wondered if I’d get a pardon if I told her that I too hated the world.
“You know we’re living in the future,” Miach said, her grim frown at odds with what should have been a positive statement. “And the future is, in a word, boring. ‘The future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.’ A man named Ballard said that. He was a science fiction writer. And he was talking about here, this place, our world. Our world where the admedistration takes care of everyone’s lives and health. We’re trapped in someone’s antique vision of the future, and it sucks.”
We walked on awhile until we came to a crossroads where Miach stopped and took me by the hand. I froze. This was different. She lifted my hand up before her face, with all the obeisance of a courtier before the queen, and said, “We’ve taken the mechanics of nature—things we didn’t even understand before—and outsourced them. Getting sick, living, who knows what’s next? Maybe even thinking. These things used to belong just to us, they could only belong to us, and now they’re part of the market system, handled externally. I don’t want to be a part of the world. My body is my own. I want to live my own life.Not sitting around like some sheep waiting to be strangled by some stranger’s kindness.”
And then she kissed the back of my hand.
I tried to yank my hand away, but I was already too late. The feel of her lips was permanently inscribed on my skin.
Cold.
That was my first thought. Her lips were cold. But it didn’t feel bad; in fact it left a pleasant chill on my skin, like an aftertaste, that seeped down in between the cells. When I looked up, Miach was already across the street, heading in the direction away from my house.
“You and I are cut from the same cloth, Tuan Kirie,” she called out, smiling again. Then Miach broke into a run and kept running until I could see her no longer.
≡
That was how I met Miach Mihie.
I walked by a park. She was reading a book. That was all.
It was enough to start a friendship that, short-lived though it was, would change the rest of my life.
03
Before I talk about my separation from and reunion with Miach Mihie, a story which begins in the Sahara, I should start by telling you about Cian Reikado’s death by her own hand. It had been thirteen years since the three of us met. Forty-eight hours before Cian did a face-plant in a plate of insalata di caprese with
<list:item>
<i:bright red slices of tomato>
<i:pure white discs of mozzarella cheese>
</list>
and died, I was in the Sahara, in a world of painted blue and vivid yellow divided along a single line.
<landscape>
<i: Blue sky as far as the eye can see.>
<i: Yellow flowers as far as the eye can see.>
</landscape>
The colors met at the horizon, lush, permeated with pigment, enough to make anyone forget that the Sahara used to be a desert.