by Satoshi Hase
“There! Look at that one!” Yuka drew Arato’s attention to a photo of Lacia, wearing Yuka’s school uniform. He had no idea when Yuka had taken it.
The photos of a few other hIEs were lined up alongside Lacia’s as final candidates, but he only had eyes for her.
“Man, she’s pretty,” she sighed. “I made the right choice.”
Aside from Lacia’s photo, the other thing that caught Arato’s eye was the name of the event’s sponsor. “Hey,” he said, “aren’t they pretty famous?”
“Yeah,” Yuka agreed. “They’ve been promoting this on TV, too.”
In other words, Lacia’s photos were soon to be spread all over all sorts of media. Arato felt a headache coming on; they never had gotten to the bottom of that whole flower storm attack.
“Aren’t you gonna say anything to me, Arato?”
“You m-m-moron,” he stuttered, feeling pissed off.
Yuka had obviously been looking for some compliments, and her voice turned whiny. “Well she IS really pretty. I just thought it’d be a waste not to use that.”
“That doesn’t mean you should do this kind of thing without talking to me about it,” he fumed. “You need to think these things through!”
Lacia, the object of their debate, seemed completely fine with it all. “I don’t mind,” she said.
“See?” Yuka pouted. “It’s Lacia’s choice, and she says it’s okay.”
“She’s an hIE, she’s not gonna disagree with a human about stuff like this,” Arato retorted. An hIE wasn’t a human. As Lacia had said, they had no souls. Their words were nothing more than ideal responses to human requests.
Lacia flipped some french toast over with a spatula before turning to look at Arato. “Regardless,” she said mildly, “time cannot be turned back, owner.”
The sound of oil popping in the pan made Arato realize how hungry he was. His body was telling him to stop sweating the small stuff and focus on food. “But what are we going to do about this?” he asked no one in particular, slumping into a chair.
Lacia had been under attack when they’d met, just like him. If an enemy were looking for Lacia specifically, her location would soon be broadcast to the whole world.
“I told you about everything that happened, right?” he asked Yuka. “Well now, even though that incident never got cleared up, things are blowing up even worse. What the hell are we supposed to do now?”
Touching a finger to her lips, Yuka put on a serious expression. “I guess I’m just living in the future?” She was the type who, if you gave her a button to press, would immediately press it without looking at any instructions.
“I don’t know what the hell kind of future you’re trying to get to,” Arato muttered.
The Endo siblings heard a quiet laugh coming from nearby; Lacia was laughing. Still in her apron, she had her right hand pressed lightly to her mouth in a very dignified gesture of mirth. It was the first time Arato had seen such a bright smile on her face.
“So hIEs can laugh...” he murmured in surprise. It was the kind of expression that came deep from within the heart. Looking at that, it was hard to believe Lacia had no soul.
Phase2「Analog Hack」
Arato’s mornings had changed ever since Lacia had entered his life. In place of hitting the snooze button multiple times on his alarm before waking up in a messy rush, now Arato was gently shaken awake each morning.
After slipping on a simple shirt and some sweats, he washed his face and went to the kitchen. In the eight-tatami-mat living room, there was a table with four chairs around it.
He said, “Good morning,” and sat down.
“You’re late, Arato.” Yuka seemed to be in a good mood. She was holding a teacup with a cat on it gingerly; the cup had green tea in it.
“If you add sugar,” Lacia advised her, “it will taste like black tea.”
“Really?” Yuka perked up.
“It seems in Thailand, it is common to add sugar to this particular brand before drinking it.” Lacia’s pale violet hair swayed when she turned to look at them from where she was standing at the kitchen counter. She was a humanoid android called an hIE, and she was beautiful, even when dropping useless info bombs on them.
A painful feeling in Arato’s chest snapped him out of his daydreaming. She may not have had a soul, but her expression was perfect. Arato felt his face go red and start throbbing, like he had just been holding his breath.
Yuka narrowed her eyes a little, and put a finger to her lips. “Huh,” she decided, “let’s try it.” Then she grabbed the sugar bowl, and poured two heaping spoonfuls into the cup. Realizing that she had nothing to stir with, she stuck her chopsticks into the cup and spun them around.
“Here you go, Arato,” she said, handing her brother the cup.
“Why do I have to try it?!”
Lacia brought over a tray with rice and miso soup.
“Listen, this whole thing is your fault, so you need to do something about it. I can’t even start to wrap my head around all the crap going on right now,” Arato said. He gave thanks for the food, and raised the miso soup with fried tofu and cabbage to his lips. Lacia was trying to fix his lack of vegetables; since their mother had passed away over 10 years ago, he wasn’t used to being fussed over this way.
“There is no ‘crap’ going on,” Yuka told him, squeezing some rice dip out of a tube. It was close to mayonnaise, a good pairing with the rice. “Dad said he was totally fine with Lacia staying here.”
“Sure, he said that,” Arato said. “But did he really know what he was agreeing to?”
He had called their dad the night before, who was still absent due to work, to explain the Lacia situation. Despite being heavily involved in fundamental hIE research, their dad said he didn’t know anything about the device Lacia was equipped with. Same with the rain of flowers that happened on the day Arato became Lacia’s owner, and with whatever had been controlling Marie.
“It was great,” Yuka sighed. “He took one look at Lacia’s face and said ‘okay.’”
“As his high school aged son, I don’t think his reaction was ‘okay’ at all,” Arato disagreed. Their normally serious father had coughed and looked away as soon as he saw Lacia’s face. It wasn’t a great feeling, realizing his dad had a weakness for pretty girls.
“Come to think of it,” he went on, “the police didn’t show up after that flower thing, and it hasn’t been in the news, either.” A car had blown up, which, Arato thought, should have been enough to warrant some action. But, according to the neighbors he’d asked, all that had happened were some doors and windows getting locked, and once they were open all that was left was a broken car and Marie. Even with the storm of flowers that had fallen, a search afterward couldn’t turn up a single petal.
“You still haven’t told Ryo or Kengo about Lacia,” Yuka observed.
“Yeah,” Arato admitted, “there’s that, too.” It was true. Arato still hadn’t mentioned Lacia to his childhood friend Ryo, or classmate Kengo. The pile of problems he was facing gave him a headache.
Yuka displayed her bad manners by tapping away at the tabletop, which was also a flat-screen computer terminal, while she ate. Since the whole surface of the table was a screen, there were bowls of miso soup and rice obscuring most of the fashion magazines that came up, rendering them unreadable.
Yuka wore a sly grin as she brought an ad up onto the screen. 〈Fabion Media Group’s hIE Model Audition Grandprix — Lacia〉, it read. The ad had an image of Lacia. After seeing that the reward for the contest was way bigger than he had imagined, Arato had given up on fighting it.
“Lacia’s got her first job on Sunday,” she reminded them.
“Seriously,” Arato wondered, “what are we going to do about this?”
“Hey, luck only comes to those that laugh in the face of danger,” Yuka said breezily. “This is our big chance!”
“That sounds like the motto of an action hero.”
Lacia, the subject
of their discussion, was calm and cool. Her actions were all chosen based on what Arato and Yuka did, so she never had to fear failure. “It will not be a problem for me,” she told them. “You do not need to worry, owner.”
“Let’s just chill,” Yuka suggested. “Here, have some tea, Arato.”
“Thanks.” The green tea Arato sipped tasted very sweet. Come to think of it, this was the green tea Yuka had dumped sugar in just a minute ago.
“How is it?” she wanted to know.
“It’s actually pretty good,” he admitted.
“Huh, I’ll try some too, then.” Yuka stuck her lips out and carefully took a sip from the teacup. Her eyebrows rose with the surprise of a happy discovery. “Life’s all about trying new things,” she sighed in contentment.
Arato felt as if he was becoming just as idiotic as his little sister.
Yuka had morning duty at her middle school, so she took off early, leaving Arato alone with Lacia.
“Are you really okay with this whole modeling thing?” he asked.
Lacia had completely finished all her normal morning chores, and had sat down directly across from Arato. He had told her to find some clothes for herself, and even though the ones she had chosen were cheap, they looked great on her. Arato didn’t know what to do with his eyes.
“I have checked the contents of the documentation,” she told him. “It appears to be a standard proxy labor contract.” The content of the contract was over Arato’s head, so he had left it for Lacia to figure out; a lot of people used hIEs as secretaries to keep track of complicated paperwork.
An hIE was the property of its owner. So, the proper procedure was to contract the hIE’s owner for the labor, then the owner would send the hIE as a proxy to complete the labor on the owner’s behalf. But Arato was still a minor, so he couldn’t sign the proxy labor contract himself. That was why he had contacted his dad the night before, after not talking to him for a while.
“Dammit, Yuka, you can’t just set stuff like this off and then run away,” Arato grumbled. “I need to give her a nice, long lecture.”
“It appears to me that you spoil Lady Yuka quite a lot, owner.” Lacia had hit the nail on the head, so Arato had nothing to say.
***
“What do you mean you ‘picked up’ an hIE?” Kengo demanded. Class was over for the day, so it was just the three of them left in the classroom.
“I couldn’t turn down a girl asking me to take her home, could I?” After Arato explained the situation, Kengo looked at him like he was an idiot.
Arato firmly believed anyone would make the same choice in his place, but Kengo appeared to disagree. “A normal hIE costs as much as a car,” he argued. “And if this one is good enough to win a modeling audition in one try, she’s a high-end one. Did you even tell the police what happened?”
“Well, if she’s that expensive,” Arato said, defending his actions, “then whoever lost her will see her modeling and come to claim her.” It wasn’t as though he hadn’t worried about the implications of what he was doing. If Lacia herself hadn’t convinced him that getting her image out there could be a good thing, he would have had her turn down the audition award.
“Well, what do you know,” Ryo snarked, “Sometimes you do think things through, Endo.”
“Right,” Arato said, not rising to the insult. “Anyway, I’m gonna link up with the house. It’ll be faster for you just to see her.”
“So your hIE can handle calls on her own?” Ryo asked, looking at the screen of Arato’s pocket terminal.
Arato had given Lacia a video phone so he could call her from the classroom with his friends. A ‘now calling’ sign popped up on the card-sized terminal display. After the third ring, the terminal connected to his home machine, and Lacia’s cool gaze appeared on the screen.
〈Are these your two friends, owner?〉
Kengo and Ryo let out murmurs of surprise and leaned in for a better look. As Arato had expected, one look at Lacia herself and the way she moved, and his friends were left speechless.
Ryo, with the top buttons of his jacket open, spread his hands in surprise. “What the hell, man? After everything we’ve been through together, how could you keep something like this to yourself?”
Kengo pulled his pad terminal out of his bag and linked it up with Arato’s. “Have her say her hIE serial number, please,” he requested. “She doesn’t look like an ordinary hIE at all.”
“Lacia, do you know your serial number?” Arato asked. “Kengo’s good with machines, so he can look up some information about you.”
On Arato’s terminal screen, Lacia responded kindly. 〈My serial number is: LSLX_22S99176LF. Shall I also send my unit code?〉
Kengo’s terminal automatically wrote out the number as Lacia said it. Without a word, Kengo stood up. He had Arato stash his pocket terminal in his desk and dragged him out into the hallway.
In the hall, Arato was surprised by how excited his friends looked. “Hey, what the heck?” he spluttered.
“Do you live under a rock? The LSLX is Stylus’s top of the line model,” Kengo said incredulously. “You could have found that out in two seconds, if you had looked. She’s a super high-spec machine.”
Stylus was an American producer of high-end hIEs. Arato had heard their name, of course, but with the budget of your average high schooler, they weren’t a company he thought of often. But first, he asked about something that had caught his attention:
“What was that unit code thing she mentioned?”
“It’s something each hIE is required by law to broadcast constantly, so we can always tell them apart from humans,” Kengo answered. “If you know their code, you can track the position of any hIE. There’s no way someone wouldn’t be searching, if they lost a machine like that.”
Ryo, who they had left behind in the classroom, also stowed his terminal and joined them in the hall. He was the son of the president of a major company, so he hadn’t batted an eye at finding out that Lacia was a high-end machine.
“Well, we can’t decrypt the code, but we can trace its broadcast history.” Arato obviously didn’t understand, so Ryo explained: “hIE dealers all have the unit codes for their merchandise so they can track it if it’s stolen. So there’s no way the person who lost your hIE wouldn’t have been able to track her down already. Of course, there’s always the possibility that she’s got some mechanical condition preventing her from broadcasting the signal.”
“Even if you can’t decrypt the signal, anyone who knows the code should be able to pick out a signal that resembles it. But neither the dealer nor the previous owner have come to collect her. Plus you’ve got her face all over the net with that Grand Prix thing. It’s strange that no one has come forward yet,” Kengo said.
Kengo and Ryo took turns pointing out all the different ways Arato and his sister were completely clueless.
Arato, for his part, was surprised that his friends were digging in this deep. He thought they were taking it way too seriously. “Well, maybe she doesn’t have a dealer or a previous owner,” he told them. “Maybe I just got lucky.”
Kengo was speechless, and Ryo immediately shot down Arato’s wishful thinking. “No way. This is seriously shady stuff. I mean, what the hell is that huge coffin thing in your living room? I’ve never seen any hIE accessories like that.”
“Have a little sense of self-preservation,” Kengo urged him. “Wouldn’t you find it odd if you just ‘found’ a brand new car? Just think about it: some Ferrari just shows up out of nowhere and asks you to be its owner. Wouldn’t that freak you out? This is like some kind of urban legend.”
“How come all your analogies involve cars?” Arato asked, voicing his honest impression.
With school already over, the evening sun was shining in through the windows of the hallway.
“Kaidai, I really want to punch this moron,” Kengo said.
But Ryo, for his part, had a good head on his shoulders sometimes. “Have you told your dad about
this, Arato?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Arato responded. “He said we could keep her.” Both of his friends gave him looks that said they didn’t believe him. They had some respect for Arato’s father, who was working for a semi-public research institute.
Ryo grabbed Arato in a headlock. “Forget about that. I can’t believe you kept this from us for a whole week! Some friend.”
Arato went back to the classroom and looked at his pocket terminal, where Lacia was still waiting dutifully on the other line. 〈It seems to me your friends are worried for you, owner.〉
“They just keep an eye out for me since I tend to be careless,” he explained. Arato didn’t see anything dubious about Lacia. But his friends were obviously on guard about her, even knowing she had saved his life.
Ryo spoke, not to Lacia but to Arato; “Get her behavior cloud serial number, too.”
Before Arato could pass the request on to Lacia, she had already sent a code with over forty digits of mixed numbers and letters to his terminal.
Ryo took a photo of the code with his own terminal. “hIEs get their behaviors from different control services,” he explained. “So, with her behavior cloud serial, we can track down what company is feeding directions to our lovely lady here.”
The actions taken by each hIE were not decided within the humanoid units. Instead, each hIE would communicate with a massive behavior control cloud and receive instructions on the optimal action to take based on the data the hIE sent.
When he tracked down the information he was looking for, Ryo’s face went stony. Arato grabbed his arm. They had known each other since childhood, and Arato knew Ryo had a habit of trying to keep bad news to himself.
Just as he thought, the information on the terminal screen Ryo showed him wasn’t good: ‘MemeFrame Co., Licensed April, 2105.’
“That serial number’s one of ours,” Ryo said. Ryo Kaidai’s father was the president of MemeFrame Co., and it was MemeFrame’s behavioral control service that was currently telling the soulless Lacia ‘do this.’