“In the end, some vigilantes and an MRS the Chechens had hired saved me. I was picked up by a Japanese adoption agency program seeking to counter the declining population problem, and came to Japan.”
“You told me,” I managed to say, my eyes and nose running. At some point I had lost the ability to keep my emotions dammed up inside me. “You told me you hated this world. The world of love-and-be-loved that tried to strangle you with kindness. But was it really so bad? Was it worse than Chechnya? Was our society a more terrible place than this bunker?”
“I didn’t know what to do,” Miach said.
Ta-ta-tap.
“When I was twelve years old, the boy living next door to me hanged himself.”
Ta-ta-tap, ta-ta-tap, ta-ta-tap.
“He said he hated this world, that he didn’t belong here, and he died. I thought about that. I knew how barbaric people could be. And I knew how broken they could become when they tried to repress that nature. I thought that this society, admedistrative society, this lifeist system was all wrong. A society that wanted me to regulate myself internally, even while people were killing themselves all around me, was just bizarre.”
It was true that Miach’s passion had given me and Cian a different view of the world and of a society based on the constant monitoring of the human body and health as a value above all others. A society where rigid self-monitoring was the only path to peace and harmony.
“That’s right, you hated the system of the world. That’s why when you asked us to die, me and Cian said yes.”
Something about the way I was speaking reminded me of how I talked back in high school. Like when I had been a little girl, eating my lunch with Miach Mihie and Cian Reikado.
“But I learned something when I left with your father, Tuan.”
“What?”
“That people can change. If people can break through the barrier of consciousness.”
Ta-ta-tap tap. Ta-ta-tap tap.
“So you didn’t cultivate this chaos because you hate the world,” I said, lowering my gun at last.
Miach continued her dance for an audience of one. “That’s right. I love it. I love it with all my being—and I want to affirm it. I want to cure the world of its infection, its ‘me’s and ‘I’s.” Miach looked serious. Her dance quickened. “I wrote most of the source code for the neural network your father and his friends installed into the midbrain of every WatchMe user in the world. There were backdoors in the WatchMe control systems of several admedistrations. Backdoors left for us. With such access, it was easy to create a hyperbolic desire for death in many people.”
All they had to do was reset the value of death as greater than the person’s will for life for the victim to choose oblivion. For those people who quite suddenly found death to be irresistibly attractive, a choice to make, there was no avoiding the erroneous value system’s effect.
“But the old folks got scared.”
“The ones running the Next-Gen group.”
“Yes, and your father was the ideologue at their center.”
“Ah yes. His proclamation that the creation of a perfect person for our society would make the soul a useless artifact. Funny, isn’t it?”
“I wasn’t laughing.” Miach stopped her dance and brought her hands together with a loud clap. I heard echoes run through the dark bunker. “I realized that’s what we had to do. There are tens of thousands of girls and boys killing themselves in the world right now. Adults too. We can never remove the barbarism of nature from ourselves completely. We can’t forget that before we are little admedistrative collectives, before we are part of a system or network of relationships, we are animals, plain and simple—a patchwork assortment of functions and logic and emotion all tied together into a bundle.”
“So you thought that if people were dying because they couldn’t get used to this world—”
“Yes. That we should give up being human in the first place.”
Ta-tap, ta-tap, ta-tap.
Miach resumed her light dance. “By which I mean, we should give up being conscious. We should give up our roughshod armor and become part of the society gnawing at our bones. We should give up being ourselves. Get rid of ‘me’ and consciousness and everything else our environment foisted on us. Only then can our society reach the harmony it was striving for.”
Ta-ta-ta-ta-tap, ta-tap, ta-tap-ta.
“They used to tell soldiers they weren’t supposed to wear boots to fit their bodies, they were supposed to fit their bodies into their boots. And we can do that, easily.”
“If the old folks would agree with you.”
Once again, Miach’s dance ceased. She let her shoulders fall with a sigh. “That’s right. The old folks think the end of consciousness is a kind of death. Even though there had been a minority living in the Caucasus mountains for thousands of years without anything like a consciousness. As long as a mature system is in place, there is no need for conscious decisions. We have a sufficiently mutually beneficial system, we have software to tell us how to live, we’ve outsourced everything possible, so what need have we of consciousness? The problem isn’t our consciousness, it’s the pain that our having a consciousness brings us when we are forced to regulate ourselves for health or for the community.”
“We don’t need a will, we don’t need consciousness. And how does this connect with the chaos in the world now?”
“It’s easy. If the world is teetering on the brink of destruction, the old folks will have no choice but to press the button.”
Of course. It was so simple.
“So you’re pushing them to a place where they’ll have to take our consciousnesses away?”
“That’s right.”
“You’ve engineered this whole situation, then?”
“That’s right. Technically speaking, it’s not an actual button. It’s a series of codes.”
Codes. A string of letters telling the world to be a certain way.
That the world is so.
“We tried to grab that authority ourselves but were unable to. That’s when the split in the Next-Gen group happened. The main group believes that the reflective consciousness, the part that says ‘I am me,’ must be respected as a vital part of humanity. The minority group, which is us, believe that in our perfected social system, only the human brain remains, and consciousness is only good for unhappiness and should be swept away. They called us heretics, which is why I had to run away, back to the Chechens who had saved me before.”
Miach and her cohorts had used the authority they had to the fullest.
They had infiltrated several admedistration servers to which they had access and were able to directly change the value system lodged in the midbrains of constituents. Yet the old guard, despite their memories of the Maelstrom, and ironically the ones who still revered the soul, retained a firm grip on the power of human consciousness. And according to Miach, it had been my dad who held the line with the most determination of all.
I remembered that day when I was eight or nine when that woman in the session chewed out my dad about caffeine. He had folded before her then, his self-respect melting like ice cream on a summer day, but here, he had believed in the human soul, and consciousness, and the existence of “me” till the end.
I felt myself growing sad. Sad about how my father had died. This was more than enough reason to want to avenge him.
“Your father was veeery stubborn,” Miach said, smiling and pointing at me. “He saw the hundreds of thousands of people dying in the worst way possible—suicide—and he pitied them, yet he still claimed we needed our human wills, our consciousnesses. I disagreed. I felt like I had to do something. I wanted to make a world with no souls, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands of souls we lose every year.”