by Satoshi Hase
Arato smiled, just a little. Yuka didn’t particularly trust in Lacia, but she did trust in her big brother. He wanted to thank her, but Yuka was already digging around in his shopping bag for her ice cream.
“So she’s ours now, right? hIEs cook, don’t they?” Yuka asked with excitement. “So she’s gonna cook for us, right? Sweet, can’t wait!” Without an ounce of hesitation, Yuka was already ordering Lacia around.
“I see,” Lacia said politely. “If you wish for me to cook, I can access the culinary behavior cloud and commence immediately.”
“Is it gonna be good?” Yuka asked.
“The user review average for this behavior cloud is five stars,” Lacia told her.
“Lacia I wuv you,” Yuka said, glomping Lacia with innocent glee. Taking Lacia’s hand, she started to lead her into the house.
“Wait a minute, Yuka,” Arato frowned. “So you’re fine with her as long as she spoils you?” Everything was just going too smoothly; Arato didn’t allow events to just carry him along, though. For some reason, he took Lacia’s other hand and prevented her from following Yuka in.
But Yuka had always been good at winning him over. “hIEs have cameras in their eyes,” she coaxed. “I saw it on TV. So if something happened to Marie, Lacia must have recorded it all. The police will look at that and figure it all out.”
Arato and Lacia’s adventure would also have been recorded on the security cameras in the nearby stores and homes. So, if there really was some kind of problem, the police would surely come to check with them tomorrow.
“Yeah, that’s true,” Arato said, feeling like he was worrying too much. “We should leave this kind of thing to the police.” Honestly, it was strange to assume that whoever had caused that rain of flowers would continue attacking him in the future.
The main reason Arato could relax about this was that he didn’t actually intend to keep Lacia for very long. He just couldn’t picture her and her mysteries becoming a permanent part of the self-indulgent lifestyle that he and Yuka led without their parents around.
“You’re worrying about all the wrong stuff, Arato,” Yuka told him. “All we need to worry about right now is what she can do for me.”
“I wish my brain worked as simply as yours,” he lamented.
It was almost scary how easily a bond of common interest was forged between Yuka and Lacia.
“Things are going to be tough for you from now on, Arato,” Yuka said. “I think you used up all your luck today.”
“Please don’t say that like it’s a done deal,” he groaned, “How’re you going to feel if I actually run into some bad luck now?”
“If you’re worried, why not just ask?” Yuka turned. “Hey Lacia, if you stay here with us, are we in danger?”
“Based on the situation as I described it to you earlier, Yuka, there is no danger,” Lacia answered immediately.
Yuka nodded with satisfaction. “See? No problem.” Arato’s little sister was a little too unshakable. “If something comes up we can just think about it then. But right now, Lacia needs our help.”
Arato wasn’t really the kind of person who worried about things too much, sometimes to the extent that Ryo and Kengo would call him out about it. “You’re right,” he said, giving in. “Let’s go have some dinner.”
“I have become familiar with the contents of your refrigerator,” Lacia announced. She was very good at what she did. From the random odds and ends Arato pulled out of the fridge, she’d managed to make some damn good Chinese dishes. Arato had no idea how she did it. Nor did Yuka. So instead, they just focused on eating it.
The siblings weren’t exactly the pinnacles of humanity.
It had gotten quite late, so as soon as she was done eating, Yuka took a bath and went to bed. Lacia did all the washing and cleaning up, so there was nothing left for Arato to do.
“Sorry to have you do all this,” he apologized. “But you coming along really helped us out.”
Lacia was in the kitchen, sorting out the haphazardly stored silverware and cookware. “There is no need to worry on my account,” she said reassuringly. “Originally, hIE were mainly used for caretaking and housework.”
Lacia’s black coffin was resting against the wall of the living room. A cushion had been put under it to keep it from scratching the floor, which made the whole layout of the room seem odd.
Looking at Lacia’s back, Arato again had the sudden feeling that he had taken ownership of something that could be a big problem. As he watched her from behind, he realized the back of her suit was open, revealing a bit of her skin.
Staring at her pale back, Arato lost the ability to think about anything else. Just watching her while she worked, Arato felt a strange sensation kindling within him. Comparing her to the equipment in the kitchen, she was just so much more alive, so much warmer-looking in her white and black bodysuit. Thinking about her like that, Arato felt heat rush to his face and he fell over on his side on the sofa.
“Crap,” he asked himself, “how is this going to work?” His heartbeat was pounding loud in his own ears. He remembered the sight of her back when she had saved him the first time. He remembered her soft hand in his while they were running away together. He remembered her face in the moonlight, and the weight of her butt on his chest when he had entered the contract to be her owner. The thought had him wrestling with his own arousal.
On his side, Arato doubted that he had the strength to push himself back upright, and couldn’t stop his thoughts from the path they were running down. A blush crept up his cheeks, and he felt sweat forming on his face. From now on, Lacia would be there with him every single day. Once he realized that, it didn’t really matter that she wasn’t a human. Arato had no idea how he was supposed to deal with that fact.
“God, I’m such a GUY!” Just like Yuka had said, maybe Arato had used up all his luck. He felt as though, if he fell asleep, his heart would stop beating. If he just lay there, he couldn’t tell where his mind would start going, so he sprang to his feet instead.
“Owner, would it be easier for you if I excused myself?” Lacia was by his side. Her expression was cool as she looked down at his red and bothered face. He wasn’t sure where she had gotten them, but she had a tray with a tea set in her hands.
Figuring that he wasn’t looking too manly, stuck between sitting and standing, Arato sat back down on the sofa.
Lacia knelt and set the tray on a low table. She poured hot water from the teapot into a traditional yuzamashi cooling bowl. Neither of the Endo siblings had ever used a real tea set, so Arato had never seen anything like Lacia’s graceful movements.
“Woah, so you can do tea all proper too,” Arato said. Seeing the difference in skill levels between an hIE and the minor housework he usually did was actually exciting; it made him think of something he had learned in high school. His teacher had said that the norms of society could easily change within their lifetimes. For example, most of the things that were common sense during the economic highs of the 1960s were completely foreign fifty years later, in 2010. As the times changed, so would so many things that everyone considered normal. It was hard to track from day to day, but Arato’s world was being swept away by a massive wave of change.
Lacia tilted her head slightly, bowing to him. “Thank you. However, all hIE behaviors are downloaded from the control cloud through the network. This tea is simply a product of my body tracing a combination of motion capture and recorded data of humans taking these actions.”
Arato smiled in chagrin at being lectured on this by a machine. She was saying the same thing as his friend Ryo: hIEs were tools.
Lacia interpreted the look on his face, and responded, “It appeared you required basic information regarding hIEs.”
“Is it a problem for you if there are things I don’t know?”
Lacia politely refrained from responding to that.
To be honest, Arato understood hIEs so little that, until that moment, he hadn’t even thought of the fact
that Lacia might have belonged to someone else before she asked him to be her owner. The more he thought about it calmly, the more fear wriggled along his spine. There isn’t a human alive who can make a decision without ever giving it a second thought afterward.
“Lacia,” he asked, “where did you come from?”
Lacia poured the tea out of the pot and into a teacup. “Is that information vital to our relationship, owner?”
Arato felt like his reliance on her and the trust he felt for her had been carved deep from their first meeting. “I don’t know a thing about you, Lacia. Look, the more I know, the less we’ll have to worry about later, and I think it can clear up some worries between us.” He wanted to get closer to her. “Plus, I figure some stuff will get easier for me to understand once I know.”
And, if there was anything he could do for her, he wanted to show his thanks by doing it. But, whatever kind of response Arato had been imagining when he said all that embarrassing stuff, Lacia’s words didn’t match it.
She just spoke the facts. “You are a very kind person, but I believe you are making a fundamental mistake.” Lacia’s pale blue eyes didn’t waver. “I do not possess a soul.”
Her blunt statement caught Arato off guard. He was supposed to be the one in charge here, but she had left him speechless.
“I am merely utilizing a combination of human words and behaviors to present reactions that human users will find pleasant,” she continued. “My reactions are based on my predictions of how the reactions will be received, and are not guided by a single, consistent personality.”
As technology advanced, it was no longer humans alone that could exhibit human behavior. As long as a machine had a human figure and skeleton, they could perform exactly the same actions. The hIEs relied on the fact that, as long as their behavior patterns were optimal, they could fulfill their roles, even without hearts or souls.
“You have seen a collection of this particular hIE’s behaviors and perceived an illusion of presence behind it all, owner,” Lacia finished. “That is all.”
Arato’s head swam. His blood was boiling. He had wanted to save this girl he had met out of the blue, so he felt a surge of anger at her words, though he did understand that what she was saying was the truth.
When she had thanked him, though, it had been hard not to imagine her as a person. Having her deny that, calling herself a thing, made him angry. With the realization that this was exactly what his friends had been poking fun at him about, Arato’s illusions were stripped away. When humans interact with other humans, there was a sense of something being shared, and this allowed them to endure each others’ idiosyncrasies.
But that same understanding did not exist between Arato and Lacia, because there is nothing shared between humans and machines. Arato doubted he would have even gotten involved with Lacia if she didn’t look like a human. Fear, regret and disappointment were a swirling storm in his head. Unable to say a word, he just sat there, listening to the veins in his neck throbbing. His feet were shaking as if he was staring over the edge of a bottomless abyss.
And yet, seeing his trouble, the heartless Lacia had said: “I do not possess a soul.”
Arato looked up at the ceiling. He had been flying high, which made it all the worse when he was brought crashing back down to reality. He closed his eyes. On the back of his own eyelids, he saw the two images that had become his own starting line: the red-black explosion, and the little white dog wagging its tail.
He let out a warm sigh. The behavior of the dog, the way it wagged its tail, had saved Arato when he was small. It had given him the strength to restart his life. He’d reach out his hand to help someone he’d thought needed helping, even if that gesture was meaningless.
“Just because you don’t have a soul doesn’t mean you don’t have an impact,” he corrected her gently.
Arato was angry at himself for getting angry at her. When he was a kid, he hadn’t seen anything like a soul in that little white dog. But seeing it enjoying life had given him courage.
“It doesn’t mean you can’t move a person’s heart,” he said. Warmth overflowed in Arato’s chest, as if to fill in the hole left by his earlier weakness.
It seemed as though having his feelings shot down just made them shift all the more rapidly. Arato wasn’t by any means smart, so he always felt like he had to keep acting. He wanted to find something he could do for Lacia.
“I may have had the wrong idea, sure,” he went on. “But I can’t just sit here without worrying about what you’re feeling, Lacia.”
Since one of them lacked a heart, the normally meaningless silence that descended over them felt heavy. Lacia gave Arato a mysterious smile. “I have no feelings for you to worry about,” she reminded him.
Right, she wasn’t even capable of feeling worry in the first place; still, Arato wanted to do something for her. He felt heat warming his face, enough so that he knew anyone could see the redness of his face.
“I’m such a moron! Goddammit!” Pain and embarrassment at his own naivety pushed out of his chest in the form of a loud yell.
Moments later, light footsteps approached quickly from the hall. Yuka, in her pajamas and with a pillow in one hand, appeared with a deathly glare on her face. “Arato, I’m trying to sleep!”
Whether one sleeps soundly or not, tomorrow will always come. The next morning, as expected, Arato found Lacia still in the living room. She wasn’t just sitting around, either. After preparing breakfast for the Endo siblings, she saw them both off to school.
Yuka was always a bundle of energy, and had many friends at school. Their dad was still busy with work and hadn’t come home. Lacia kept working and in no time, she was a normal part of the Endo’s social circle. In that way, four days quickly passed by since the incident.
Arato awoke to the sound of his alarm. Reaching a hand out from under his covers, he grabbed the pocket terminal sitting by his pillow. The terminal connected him with the person who had set up a morning call for him without him even needing to ask.
〈I am preparing breakfast. Are you arising?〉 Lacia’s clear voice tickled Arato’s ear. He leaped up from his bed, so excited that it made his heart pound.
“What’s for breakfast?” He could have just gone to the living room and checked, but he wanted to keep listening to her voice.
〈I have attempted french toast,〉 she told him. 〈You mentioned that you had never tried it before.〉
Arato honestly found it extremely embarrassing how much she spoiled him. Standing, he grabbed his own head. “Are things really okay, going on like this?” he asked himself. “No, obviously they aren’t.”
In the living room, he found Yuka with a relaxed look on her face. She was munching on a piece of french toast, which had been toasted to a fox-like orange.
“Morning,” Arato said.
“Mm-hm.” With her fork in one hand, Yuka mumbled around a mouthful of food.
Lacia’s presence had brought a more normal routine to the Endo siblings’ previously laid-back lifestyle, which was nice. But because of that, Arato never felt like he got as much sleep as he would have liked to.
“How are you feeling this morning, owner?” she asked. The black and white bodysuit she had been wearing when they’d met had been replaced with a more ordinary outfit. She had also taken off the device lock that had been at her waist.
In normal clothes it was impossible to tell her apart from any other human, and Arato shifted his gaze away from her without thinking. It was embarrassing seeing her wearing his own jeans and shirt.
“Arato, it’s too early for you to get all hot n’ bothered,” Yuka grumbled at him.
Hearing that from his little sister put a damper on Arato’s morning. Still, he stole a glance at Lacia’s cool profile. She may not have been human, but there was still the fear that she wouldn’t appreciate his staring.
“We really do need to get you some new clothes,” he said, going to the fridge for some juice. Only then did
he notice there was already a teapot on the table.
He couldn’t have Lacia do every little thing for him, so he at least poured his own black tea. There hadn’t been any tea leaves in the house, so she must have mail-ordered them. The strong scent that wafted off of the cup along with the steam really helped to wake Arato up.
Lacia, standing at the electric hot plate with an apron around her waist, was gauging the right time to flip over some french toast. It smelled really good. Since she had come, mornings had become more relaxed; Arato had more time than he knew what to do with. He synced his personal terminal with the TV. The home system that monitored all the electronics in the house handled all the complicated stuff for getting the sync set up.
The 3D TV screen showed Arato data the home system decided he should see, and an e-mail he didn’t remember seeing before caught his eye. “Hey, this e-mail here,” he said. “It’s for you. How come I’m seeing it?”
The e-mail on the screen was addressed to Yuka, but for some reason it had been specially flagged so that Arato could see it, too.
Suddenly fully awake, Yuka leaned over the table. “Just open it,” she urged.
On the 3D display’s white board, Arato saw a sender name he had never heard of before. He opened the file and read it, then he felt his ability to think clearly run off somewhere.
“Yuka,” he said absently, “why don’t you sit down.”
“Uh, I AM sitting down,” she retorted.
“Okay,” he asked, “so what the hell is this model audition thing about?”
The e-mail on the screen was brief. 〈Ms. Yuka Endo,〉 it read, 〈Lacia, the hIE you recommended for our hIE Model Audition, has been selected for the Grand Prix.〉
“Isn’t that awesome?” Yuka asked excitedly. “She made it into the Grand Prix.”
She accessed the link in the e-mail, and the advertisement page announcing the Grand Prix came up on the screen. Then, as information expanded through the network, images of models in various poses were displayed. So basically, this media group was collecting hIE models, and Yuka had sent in visual data of Lacia along with an application. This e-mail was the result.