“What is this ‘piggy bank’? A wallet, I’ve heard of.”
“Actually, I’m not sure myself. About either of them. They’re both from back when money was something you could put in your pocket.”
Ancient words. The only reason I knew them was because Miach Mihie knew them.
“If your people could only learn the value of moderation, then there would be no war here.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
While the warrior and I spoke, Étienne and his crew received the crates from the Tuareg and began examining their contents. Étienne was French. While he was a bit too macho for my tastes, he had a discerning eye for beauty in his blood, and in my experience there were no people better at finding fault with things than the French. Nestled among the wood chips inside the crates was enough contraband to send any law-abiding member of admedistrative society into a swoon. Not that there would be any lack of those willing to partake back at camp. The moment these crates hit the ground, their contents would be divvied up. That was how it always was. Of course, we only opened the crates to the mob after Étienne’s crew, our coconspirator who downloaded the contents of the memorycel in my hand from the admedistration server, and I took our cuts.
This was how I, as an adult, chose to give the finger to society.
The society that strangled you with kindness.
The society that knocked you out with a stealthy sucker punch to the soul.
All you needed to break free was:
<list:item>
<i: Pretend to accept adulthood.>
<i: Trick the system into believing you were an adult.>
</list>
Just those two things.
They say that long ago, students who wanted to behave badly had to sneak off to the lavatory or go behind the school gym in order to smoke cigarettes. Another thing I learned from Miach. What Miach didn’t know was that the lavatory didn’t cut it if you wanted to smoke a fag these days. Now you had to go all the way to the battlefield. Whether you wanted to see it as the act of a lost soul or as the act of an idiot risking their life for a little nicotine buzz, that was up to you.
I will state for the record, however, that before I got to this place I tried a lot of different things, and I lost something very important to me.
What I tried was overeating and self-starvation.
What I lost was Miach Mihie.
≡
Life.
The swarms of medicules my father and his friend unleashed on the world drove the vast majority of diseases off the face of the planet. The homeostatic internal monitoring system known as WatchMe monitored immune consistency and blood cells down to the level of RNA transcription errors. What didn’t fit was immediately removed. The little pharmaceutical factory found in every household, the medcare unit, instantly formulated the necessary cocktail of medicules for eliminating any disease-causing substances found in blood proteins. In a matter of milliseconds, the unit could pinpoint the area where it was needed most and send in the troops.
“Hey, Tuan, want to die with me?” Miach asked in her usual grand style. I looked around the room. Several of our classmates were still there, well within earshot. Miach was leaning over her chair, elbows on my desk.
Yes, it was a shocking thing for a high school girl to say, but to tell the truth, I wasn’t surprised. I’d had the feeling it was something she was going to ask me someday. It didn’t even surprise me that she chose such a public forum in which to ask. Nor would it surprise me if she had asked us to go right then. It had been clear for some time that suicide was our only way out of this place. We all agreed. Cian was standing right next to Miach, looking serious, waiting for my answer.
Now, I should explain that dying was no simple matter in those days. With the population so dramatically reduced, our bodies were considered public property, valuable resources to society, and as such they were something to be protected, or so went the publicly correct thinking.
In one of her many lectures, which she always delivered with that same nonchalant air, Miach had told us about how, a long time ago, the Catholics had been experts on the taboo against suicide. “You see, your life comes from God. You’re given it by God, whether you want it or not. That’s why mere humans weren’t allowed to throw that life away, like a shepherd doesn’t want his sheep offing themselves. People who committed suicide were reviled. They would bury them in the middle of an intersection so that they would never know the way up to heaven, not until Judgment Day. That was their punishment for betraying God’s trust.”
“I have a hard time imagining us being buried in an intersection,” Cian said with an innocent smile.
Every time Cian smiled it made me inwardly groan a little. Miach ignored her and went on.
“And the successor to that Catholic dogma? Believe it or not, it’s us, with our all-benevolent health-obsessed society. Bodies once received from God are, under the rules of a lifeist admedistrative society, public property. God doesn’t own us anymore, everyone does. Never before in history has ‘the importance of life’ been such a loaded term.”
Miach was right, of course.
And that was why we had to die.
Because our lives were being made too important.
Because everyone was too concerned about everyone else.
Of course, it wasn’t enough to simply die. We had to die in a way that made a mockery of the health regime we were supposed to uphold by law. At least, that was what we thought back then.
“A long time ago, there were kings. When people wanted to change something, they killed the king. Usually, the killing was done by everyone, but not everyone could govern because the flow of information wasn’t so good in those days. That’s why they made governments. Then, if you got angry enough, you could kill your government instead.”
The tone of Miach’s voice seemed to ring clearer as she told us this, more finely honed than usual. It had a beauty to it, enough to send shivers down my spine. It was like a blade—a blade of ice.
“But what do we do now? In a post-governmental admedistrative society, there is no one to kill. Everyone is happy, everyone governs—the basic units of governance are way too small to target.”
Miach looked out the window toward the front gates where our classmates were now stepping out into the street, on their way back home. From the third floor of the school building, you could look down on everything.
“Admedistration. The medical conclaves. A gathering of people who have reached a consensus on a particular medical system. The Harmonics. While an admedistration might have councilors, they’re nothing like members of parliament used to be in the old governments. The councilors and commissioners just don’t have the concentrated power of the old kings. We’ve divided power over such a wide area that we are effectively powerless. Even if we wanted to fight the admedistration like the students of old, there’s no good government building for us to throw our Molotov cocktails at.”
Cian frowned at that, a sudden unease coming over her. “So that’s why we have to commit suicide? That’s our attack on the system?”
Miach nodded firmly. “Exactly. Because we are important to them. Our future potential is their industrial capital. We’re the infrastructure. That’s why we’ll take our bodies, their wealth, away from them. That’s how we’ll tell them our bodies are our own. We’re no different from those who came before us; we’re still trying to fuck the system. It just happens to be the case that the best way to hurt them is to hurt ourselves.”
That was how Miach answered Cian’s worries.
Of course, I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t admit right here that most of the time how Cian and I felt was entirely subordinate to Miach’s charismatic personality. We basked in her glow, hoarding it for ourselves.