So why put human consciousness up on the altar? Why worship this strange artifact we had attained? Morality, holiness—these were just things our brains picked up along the way, pieces of the patchwork. We only experienced sadness and joy because they benefited our survival in a particular environment. That said, I couldn’t understand how something like joy was really vital. Nor did I know why sadness and despair had helped us survive.
Still, like diabetes, what if the useful shelf life of our emotions had expired some time ago? What if an environment that required us to feel emotions and possess a consciousness was gone? Why hesitate to cure our brains of emotions and consciousness like we had cured our bodies of diabetes?
Mankind had once required anger.
Mankind had once required joy.
Mankind had once required sadness.
Mankind had once required happiness.
Once, once, once.
My epitaph for an environment, and an age, that had disappeared.
Mankind had once required the belief that “I” was “I.”
Keita Saeki, Gabrielle Étaín, and Nuada Kirie.
My encounters with them had removed any basis I had felt for “me” to exist. Like what my father had said about people with the recessive gene for deafness coupling in Martha’s Vineyard, here people with the recessive gene for the absence of consciousness coupled, and that was normal.
Maybe as long as a society based on mutual aid was in place, outmoded features like consciousness were fated to disappear. Maybe we should embrace the social systems we’d developed and throw out the spawning pool of opposition, hesitation, and anguish that was consciousness altogether.
Where are the whys that drive me located?
Where are the words that protect my soul?
Wasn’t my desire to avenge Cian Reikado and my father’s death just the vestiges of a once-vital but now derelict function of my obsolete simian midbrain?
In the past, it was religion that guaranteed “I” was “I.” Everything had been laid out by God, so it wasn’t our place to question things. Now society had entirely lost the functions that religion once performed. Because once we accepted that emotions and all other phenomena occurring in the brain were just traits that happened to be beneficial to our survival at some point in the past, most ideas of morality lost their absolute basis. A morality without absolute conviction—an objective morality—was weak. History contained ample proof of this.
At any rate, today I was going to meet Miach Mihie.
I expected she would have some answers to all this.
After several more breaks, I reached the bunker just as the sun was slipping below the jagged horizon. I could see clouds gathering far off in the distance, and I wondered what elevation I had reached.
One corner of the bunker jutted out from the mountain face, a smooth panel of concrete against the rough edges of rock, with an open doorway in its center.
“Wait here, goaty.”
I used my fingerprint to lock the goat’s weapon systems and checked my own sidearm.
<list:protocol>
<p: Check the spring on the magazine.>
<p: Remove and reinsert the rounds.>
<p: Pull back the slide until it locks, then:>
<p: Check if there are any rounds in the chamber.>
<p: Carefully check the action of all other parts, depending on the type of firearm.>
</list>
“Okay. I can do this,” I muttered to myself, stepping into the reinforced concrete bunker dug into the mountainside.
“Hello there, Tuan. How long has it been, thirteen years?” came a voice from the darkness inside. The only sounds were the dripping of water and the scuffing of my feet on the ground. I pulled my gun from its holster, the sound of my clothes rubbing together loud in my ears.
“You won’t need your gun. We’re the only ones here, Tuan. Just me and you.”
One step.
Then another.
I switched my AR to light-enhancement mode, revealing the interior of the dimly lit bunker.
“I knew you’d come. I knew you were the only one who’d come.”
I had left the entrance behind me now, where the goat patiently awaited my return.
“I’m right over here, Tuan.”
Miach Mihie appeared as if out of thin air, right in front of the raised barrel of my gun.
She looked almost the same as she had the last time I saw her, when we had been little girls.
“It was a nice idea, bringing my business card. The one I gave you back in high school. I knew it was you right away,” Miach said, raising the card I’d brought from my desk back in Japan. The one I had handed to the messenger boy at the Fawn.
“I knew you would,” I said, keeping the barrel pointed at her. “Vashlov told me you were here.”
“I’m sorry about Vashlov, and about your father.”
Strangely enough, hearing it from Miach didn’t make the blood rush to my head, though I could feel the rage simmering down inside somewhere along with my memories of Cian Reikado.
“I was sure you’d say it couldn’t be helped.”
“Okay, I will. It couldn’t be helped.”
I pulled the trigger. The bullet scraped Miach’s white cheek, leaving a single red line to mark its path.
“Not from where I’m standing. No one had to die.”
“I can see that,” she said. “And I hope no one else has to leave this world.”
“Roughly six thousand people attempted to commit suicide, and of them, nearly three thousand were successful. All lifeist society has been plunged into a murderous mayhem by your one-person, one-kill declaration. And you hope no one else has to die?”
“We had to do all that, otherwise the old geezers wouldn’t push the button.”
“Wouldn’t push the—”
And then it was all clear to me.
I knew what Miach was thinking.
I knew exactly what scenario Miach had painted for the world. I stood with my mouth hanging open, gun still pointed at her.
“That’s right, Tuan,” she said. “We want Harmony.”
04
<recollection>
It was the day we took those pills.
“I’m taking those things that gave me strength along with me,” Miach said.
I had gotten a call from her and come out to the river just as the sun was beginning to set that night. She was pouring gasoline from a plastic container onto a massive pile of books lying on the riverbank. I have no idea how she’d managed to get them all there. I asked her what she was doing, realizing as I did what an obvious question it was, and yet also feeling that it was my expected role to ask regardless.
“I’m going to burn them. Every one of them.”
If that were true, then the pile of books here represented her entire library, painstakingly compiled over years of allowance. I’d never been to her house at that point, so I had no way of knowing whether these were all of her books. Yet it seemed unlikely that Miach would lie about it.
“I don’t think I could go with these still here.”
“Go where?”
Miach waved her hand at our surroundings, no, at the entire world. “To the other side, away from here. To the place people call heaven or hell. To nothing. I’m afraid these little ones would hold me back, keep me bound here. Besides, if I waited any longer, I’d be too weak to carry them.”
Miach emptied the last drop from the plastic tank she carried. She looked inside and made a face, then pointed the tank mouth toward me.