Harmony by Project Itoh Read Free Book Online

that first time. It was more of a vaguely defined longing toward death that had been rattling around inside my skull for years before I finally decided to take action.
    
    Overeating didn’t kill me. Neither did undereating.
    
    “Not again,” I mumbled, even though by then I had realized that my mom was sitting right there next to my bed.
    This is it, this is the time I die. I had been so sure of it. How foolishly optimistic I had been. All I needed was Miach and the tools—the weapons—she gave me, I’d thought, and I’d make it for sure. If she could make a device capable of mass murder out of a household medcare unit, she could do anything.
    If I couldn’t do this thing even with her help, then I’d live my entire life without being able to do it at all.
    How completely dependent on her I was.
    “You’re awake,” my mother said, then she began to cry. It was like what I’d said hadn’t even fazed her. Or maybe my throat had been too parched for her to make out the words. Who cared, anyway? I was the one that would have to live with my failure, not her.
    “What about Miach?”
    This time I was sure she heard me. I saw her frown a little, her eyebrows drawing together. I asked her again.
    Somewhere over my head, a children’s bio-monitor was softly chirping away.
    I wouldn’t need one of those if I were an adult. They wouldn’t need any external devices to tell what was going on inside me. Not with WatchMe installed. Not with a swarm of medicules tattling on everything going on beneath my skin at all times.
    “Miach … didn’t make it,” my mother said, chewing her lip. Like it was her fault.
    I wanted to vomit.
    
    Don’t do that, Mom.
    
    My mouth remained closed, but inside my thin, motionless body, I shouted: Don’t do that! Don’t feel guilty about someone else’s death! She had nothing to do with you! It was this world— the one that demanded you sympathize with everyone, even people you’d never met—that I couldn’t stand. The air reeked of kindness, with the awareness that everyone was public property. The only acceptable form of thought was a public correctness that compelled you to blame yourself for not being able to stop someone from committing suicide—even if there was no conceivable way you could have.
    But I lacked the stamina and the will to shout it out loud, so I simply muttered, “So she died.”
    My mother nodded, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Cian’s okay, though. She’s being treated at a different center.”
    “Oh.”
    The pharmaceutical regime and counseling that came next dragged me, kicking and screaming, back into society’s fold.
    
    
    
    
    
    Back to the world of constant, mandated health.
    With daily counseling and daily pills, I dug the ditch of my failure ever deeper. At least I had the common sense not to let my counselor know how I felt about it.
    It came to me as I was riding home from the center in a taxi with my mother.
    I was sitting next to her, looking out the window at the evening sun on the Sumida River. The calm serenity of the buildings lining both banks chilled me to the bone. They were all painted in pastels—pink, blue, green—all of them just a little off-white.
    There weren’t any laws against painting a building something more exciting, and yet here they were, an endless line of houses, all cast in bland, nondescript shades. None of them stood out against the others. Nothing to disturb the eye, and therefore nothing to disturb the heart.
    
    There’s nothing I can do.
    
    It was then that I learned how to give up. Miach was dead, and she had accomplished nothing. I lost all hope in the world and, at the same time, learned how to live without hope.
    I looked out the window and saw the evening sun on the twelfth