Frigid. A word spoken by Reina, the day before she died. The screaming is very loud now.
Filipa was still talking, high speed, a rata-tat-tat of words, tumbling fast. “It’s easier to be perfect if you’re from a certain socio-economic background. Perfection takes time, effort, and if you’re poor, if you’re struggling then… and Perfection can help with that too, find a way to make the pennies work, learn to let go of things you don’t need, aesthetic lifestyle, simple lifestyle. It’s made for everyone of course, but easier, so much easier, if you’re already wealthy and as an anthropologist, surely you can see — Perfection as a product creates a digital aristocracy, and the imperfect of this world are little better than the serfs.”
Silence a while. The security man in the booth behind Filipa ordered another glass of mineral water; the guard by the door watched the street.
Finally she said, “A woman died in Dubai. I didn’t know her name. She died just before we went there for a launch — a disaster as it turned out, a humiliation, a thief got in but… anyway. A woman killed herself. She had severe depression but no one was treating her, I mean, no one helped, even acknowledged it, because it’s not an illness, is it, it’s just something you deal with, right? Anyway. She had Perfection. It didn’t save her.”
Silence.
“If you aren’t perfect, then you are flawed,” she continued, staring at nothing much, a piece of ginger pinched between the end of her chopsticks, going nowhere. “Rafe is a genius, but none of this was the point of my research.”
“What was the point?” I asked, soft, in case we broke the spell.
“To make people better. Of course. To make the world a better place.”
She rolled the ginger between her chopsticks, put it back down.
“I think my brother has taken something beautiful and made it obscene,” she said at last. “That’s why I left the party. You’ve studied Perfection: what do you think?”
I opened my mouth to answer, found all the easy words were now hard, said nothing.
“‘Qui tacet consentire videtur’,” she mused, with a half-empty smile.
“‘He who is silent is seen to consent.’”
“You studied Latin?”
“Read it in a book somewhere.”
“They made me study it at school. Latin, economics, business studies, maths, further maths, piano, singing, speech and drama, computer sciences, French, Russian, Japanese, debating, journalism…”
“Your school wasn’t much like mine.”
“We were my father’s legacy. Or rather my brother was. My brother was always going to be better at that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know Latin — just the famous bits.”
“Is that famous?”
“Thomas More, just before King Henry VIII decided to cut his head off. ‘He who is silent is seen to consent’ — he refused to take an oath, but neither did he speak against it. He hoped by his silence to escape the axe. Sorta noble, sorta an arsehole.”
She laid the sliver of ginger carefully back down, tucked her chopsticks to one side, folded her hands, raised her head, looked me in the eye. “If I were to write the parameters for Perfection,” she said, firm and steady, “I would forgive all cowards.”
“If you believe so strongly that your brother has done something… with your work, then why do you continue working on it?” I asked.
“I work on treatments, not the software.”
“What do the treatments do?”
“They make people happy.”
“How?”
“They… help people feel happy about themselves.”
“That sounds like a drug.”
“It’s not. It’s… this isn’t how I wanted it to work, it’s not… not right yet, but my brother funds it. Rafe got the money and no one else would let me do the things I do, so I needed him, we had to make a bargain — he’s always making bargains you see, and I have always been a coward. You believe that, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I have. Always. It’s why I chose the treatments. He’s done something with it that is… But one day with the technology, giants on the shoulders of giants, we’ll build something… good. Happiness for everyone. One day we’ll get it right.”
Happy: to be pleased, delighted or glad.
Favoured by fortune.
The experience of pleasure, or joy.
Happiness: a lie, constructed to ensure that we never find it.
“Are you happy?” I asked, and she didn’t answer.
I pushed a couple of notes under our bowls, squeezed my hand tight said, “Come on. Let’s go walking.”
She didn’t speak, but neither did she resist as I led her away.
Chapter 43
A night-time walk through Tokyo. The electric district, almost brighter than the day, manga manga everywhere; girls with huge spoon eyes waving their neon arms above the doors, tiny pale-faced creatures in school uniform on the covers of the comics in the window; men with swords and spiky hair fighting great monsters, families of blue-eyed cats, descendants of Hiroshige’s red-ribboned cat as it plays with a string, picked out in bright, wet inks.
Bars with girls dressed in French waitress uniforms, cartoonish, black puffed sleeves and little white aprons. Teahouses where the matrons wore soft silk robes and bowed to the visiting guests — not a geisha house, not like the houses of Kyoto, the geisha were something else entirely, but a pleasant, tatami-matted alternative where the tea was hot and there was a corner for the visitors to charge their mobile phones.
Fish tanks in the windows of the restaurants, full of live, prowling monsters. A fugu chef demonstrating the range of knives he uses in the dissection of his poisonous dish — not the dissection process itself, which requires three years of training — but the delicate tools for pulling out liver, ovaries, slicing away strips of flesh, cleaning, grating, peeling, scrubbing.
“Poison: tetrodotoxin,” and it takes a moment for me to realise that it is Filipa who is speaking, not me. “Contained mostly in the liver, ovaries and the eyes. Acts in a similar manner to sarin. No known antidote. Paralyses muscles, leaving patient conscious but asphyxiating. A thousand times more potent than cyanide. Cure—”
“Respiratory and circulatory support — artificially maintaining life — until the poison is metabolised by the body and excreted away,” I concluded, and she beamed, and wrapped her arm into mine and said:
“Did you learn that in anthropology?”
“There’s many cultures where people eat poisonous mushrooms, frogs, fish and herbs to achieve a heightened state. A thousand years ago, LSD would be sanctified.”
She grinned, a genuine flicker of delight, and as we walked together through the hot night-time streets, her security never far behind, she said:
“‘Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running in them.’”