by Satoshi Hase
“Ryo, I’m gonna try to get ahead of the guys. Give me some guidance,” Arato said.
〈If you’ve got any good ideas, Kaidai, let’s hear ‘em. I’d like to get to school in about 15 minutes, myself,〉 Kengo said.
On the map, Arato could see that he had almost caught up to Lacia’s signal. The guys who took her didn’t seem to have noticed they were being tailed yet, so they were still moving relatively slowly. Arato spat out a sharp breath. At some point, his forehead had gotten drenched in sweat.
Ryo gave him concise, focused directions. 〈Let’s see... Let’s use the Edogawa River. If the thieves keep heading east, they’ll need to cross a bridge. So, we can predict their route like this: considering the location of the bridges around the mouth of the Edogawa River, you should be able to head them off if you take one of the northern bridges.〉
The map on the car showed the route Lacia’s signal was moving on. A line appeared, showing the shortest route to cut off Lacia’s signal from the north.
〈Be careful, Arato. The fact that these guys are heading cluelessly toward a one-way street over this bridge tells me they don’t know the area. And if they don’t know the area, it means they deliberately came here, to a place with not many people around,〉 Ryo said. In other words, it was possible the thieves were there to meet up with some comrades.
“That’s fine. If something happens to me, call the cops for me,” Arato said.
The automatic car headed toward Edogawa river across a dilapidated bridge. Since he wasn’t actually driving the car, Arato couldn’t accelerate or push it. So, even though his feelings were rushing, the car itself continued to move smoothly.
Urayasu had been the target of several revitalization projects, but it was still mostly deserted aside from the area around the station. At the request of the residents in the area, security cameras had been installed all around. They would automatically alert the police if they spotted anyone on their wanted list.
He was in an automatic vehicle that recharged any energy it used automatically, chasing an hIE, whose every reaction was automated. Everything was automated, so Arato could do all kinds of things at once. The only thing all that automation couldn’t help with was his intense emotions.
〈Arato, I still think you really shouldn’t get involved with this hIE. They’re just tools, built to do little stuff around the house for us. All this that’s happening? This is way too big and complicated to be about a tool,〉 Ryo said.
Ryo’s face, on Arato’s retinal display, looked just as doubtful as Arato felt. Then, his eyes widened. 〈Call up your home system and have it show you the inside of your apartment. Right now,〉 he said.
Arato did as he was told, and called up a display of the inside of the Endos’ apartment. He noticed it right away. Yuka had already gone to middle school, so there was no one in the kitchen, but something that should have been there was missing. Something that usually stuck out quite plainly. Something that was Lacia’s greatest mystery, which was saying something, considering that she was one big mystery herself. That huge, powerful weapon — the giant black coffin — was gone.
“What the hell. Did you know it was gone?” Arato asked, feeling a mysterious darkness behind the vanished coffin. It was heavy enough that he couldn’t shift it a single millimeter when he tried. So, seeing that it had gone was something he couldn’t even comprehend. It felt like he had been wrong about something on a fundamental level.
Ryo’s voice was trembling with tension. 〈What if that hIE is a Red Box?〉 he asked.
It was a term they had all learned in grade school. Fifty years ago, computers had reached a technological singularity that could surpass human understanding. There were thirty-nine AIs that had far surpassed the slow evolution of human brains. They were mostly used for research and development. Using new technology, those AIs created new products far beyond anything humans could grasp. These products, produced without any input from humanity, were known as ‘Red Boxes.’
“Don’t be a moron. If Lacia was one of those, what was she doing wandering around my neighborhood?” Arato asked. He felt a strange twitching in his eye. Some Red Box thing humans couldn’t even dream of making was doing housework for him, and pretending to be his ‘big sister’ in midnight snuggle sessions? His brain couldn’t handle the thought, and he felt his head getting hot.
〈We started without a single clue, but here we are already caught up to these guys thirty minutes later. Doesn’t this feel like someone orchestrated this whole thing? Like we’re just being led along some automated path by something,〉 Ryo said.
Arato began to wonder just how crazy Ryo Kaidai, his childhood friend, was going.
〈Your hIE knows about all of us. If we’re being guided, she could be part of it. You think you’re chasing after her, but she’s actually just leading you down this path. I really don’t want to think about what that hIE is trying to put in motion, if this whole thing is part of the plan,〉 Ryo said.
Thinking wasn’t his strong point, but Arato still felt a chill from Ryo’s words. “No way! Are you saying this whole kidnapping was faked?” he asked.
Kengo seemed to have trouble keeping up too. He touched his pointer finger to his forehead. 〈So, basically, the hIE wasn’t kidnapped. Instead, this whole thing was to get Endo to follow her out there, where her co-conspirators are waiting? And when Endo goes strolling in there all clueless, they’ll grab him and all we’ll hear is his scream as it all fades to black?〉 he asked in summary.
“Does everything have to turn into an urban legend with you?!” Arato shouted. That said, since it was an urban legend involving him, Arato felt cold sweat running down his back.
〈Arato, I asked someone I know who works at MemeFrame. There was an explosion a little while ago at one of our Tokyo research labs. You saw the news about it, right? Well, apparently they had to call in a PMC to handle whatever was going on there,〉 Ryo said.
Even Arato could pick up on what Ryo was implying. But the whole discussion had gotten too big for him; he was just here chasing after some kidnappers. Trying to think about the rest of it made his brain go numb.
“There’s no proof she’s related to that at all,” Arato said.
〈You found her on the same day. And around the same time, even,〉 Ryo said. He was being serious. His eyes were dark, just like the first time he had warned Arato about Lacia.
〈The explosion at our Tokyo research labs and you seeing those flowers that could control machines and meeting that hIE all happened on the same night,〉 Ryo continued.
“Saving someone is more complicated than I thought,” Arato said, forcing himself to laugh. His eyes felt weak from tension, but he clenched his teeth and kept himself coiled, ready for action. If he didn’t, he felt that he would lose in some kind of mental battle.
Lacia wasn’t a someone. She was a something. Despite that, Arato had no problem stepping into danger to get her back. He just let the automatic car continue on the route picked out based on the information and guidance his friends had given him.
The automated cityscape that spread out before and above him seemed to dwarf his high schooler’s frame. All this talk about society and Red Boxes seemed too distant for him to comprehend. Arato felt that if he didn’t focus and follow this path he’d been put on, everything would just leave him behind.
〈So you’re seriously going in there?〉 Ryo asked, sounding very worried.
Arato had good friends, and he was grateful for that, but there was only one possible answer, even for a dumb guy like him. “A girl got kidnapped, and there’s a chance I can save her before these guys do anything bad to her,” he said. “I’m not going to turn tail and run away just because of some speculation.”
“Lacia wants me to come for her,” he added. “As her owner, I’ve got to go to her.” He was scared; scared that if he didn’t keep going forward, he would always be held back by his own hesitation.
On the map, Arato’s tracking dot had already o
verlapped Lacia’s, and he saw a white van cut across the intersection in front of him. Lacia was in that van. The instant Arato thought that, all of his doubts were blown away.
***
The man had been angry his whole life. From the time of his earliest memories, he had known that the gears which moved the world were insane. He swallowed his spit over and over again, and each time he tasted salty bile, like his stomach just couldn’t settle down.
This was his first time.
The thin, bracelet-shaped terminal on his wrist vibrated. When he looked at it, it was displaying a warning; there was a security sweep happening nearby. The program that was essentially a lifeline for the members of the Antibody Network, who did the dirty work of destroying hIEs, was functioning properly, but the man vented his frustration by slamming his fist against the interior of his automatic vehicle.
“Dammit!” he yelled. “This is useless without a navigator!”
The Antibody Network could only provide the barest minimum of information to its members when the information touched on things that could get people arrested. They could provide general information on the location of patrols, but without an actual navigator, there would be no specifics about how to avoid them and get away. And in this situation, the man could not rely on being provided a navigator, because he was using the Antibody Network without permission.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have shouted. I scared you. I scared you, didn’t I?” the man asked. Turning around, he looked at the girl in the back seat of the van; there was an opaque bag over her top half, and she was laid on her side.
She was offline, unmoving. When hIEs suffered a heavy, damaging impact, they would cease function to prevent them from going haywire due to the damage and injuring nearby humans. Once shut down, the system would run checks on its joints, artificial muscles, and communications before linking with the behavioral cloud. Only once it had confirmed that there were no abnormalities would it resume function. Taking advantage of this process, Antibody Network members regularly locked hIEs into an offline mode by covering them with bags made of transmission-blocking fiber, which prevented them from re-establishing a connection and restarting.
The Network had determined that an impact with a vehicle moving at at least twenty kilometers per hour would be enough to put an hIE in shutdown mode. When the man had aimed for Lacia, she had shoved aside her owner’s little sister and taken the blow. As one would expect of a high-class model, her reaction speed was excellent.
“I’ll wake you up again as soon as I can,” the man said, worrying that he may have done too much damage, that she would never move again. He glared at his bracelet terminal, which was incessantly spitting out warnings, and tapped his fingers against the interior of the car in frustration.
“Here, look. I’ve got a room all ready for you,” he said. He linked his pocket terminal up with the display in the vehicle, and a 3D hologram spread out over the interior of the family-sized van.
It was an image of the love nest the man had created: like a room in a doll’s house, it had been covered with a romantic floral wallpaper. There was a leather sofa, a glass table, a bar counter, and, of course, a bed with a luxurious canopy over it.
“We men have to go through a lot to find our ideal partner,” the man said, happy that he finally had someone to talk to about it.
“At first, I tried looking for a human wife,” he went on. “But my standards were just too high, and I couldn’t find a single woman who could meet them. I wasted years of my life on that, before I finally realized the answer was to design an hIE from scratch. I could just order a woman who would act the way I wanted, talk the way I wanted, and do everything I wanted,” he said.
The girl in the back seat was still laying on her side, her top half covered by the bag. Her legs were flung out awkwardly, and her skirt was in disarray. Looking at her, the man became very excited as he thought of the life that was waiting for him.
“No need to worry about money,” he said reassuringly. “I’ve got plenty at home. Unlike my brothers, I never work for businesses that are destined to fail. Renting an apartment just for you and setting up a behavior control server hardly put a dent in my account.”
His family had been disappointed in him. “Society idolizes these jobless machines,” they’d said. They’d told him that he’d get tired of having a relationship with an inhuman thing before long.
“But they weren’t completely wrong. Buying you from a dealer would have put a negative note into our relationship,” the man said confidently. “You’re supposed to be the greatest partner I can imagine. Our first meeting had to be more dramatic than picking you off a shelf.”
As his family had said, hIEs may be able to fake loving emotions perfectly, but they were still machines. So, to ensure that their relationship never felt empty, the man needed to create a story; something that would make their relationship special, and excite him whenever he remembered it.
Thinking about Lacia gave him the irresistible urge to touch her body as she lay still, covered by the signal-blocking bag.
“Guys gotta work hard to find a woman, right? Don’t you think so?” he asked earnestly. “Back when I was busting up hIEs for the Antibody Network, I was keeping an eye out for an ideal body. I figured it’d be nice to be a hero, and save her at the last minute. But those guys were just looking to blame some hIEs for stealing their jobs. Give ‘em a little money and they shut up.” The Antibody Network was a group of volunteers united only by their malicious intent. None of them ever had any idea of what their comrades were actually thinking.
“But then I met you, Lacia,” the man whispered fervently. He had known at first glance that she was the one. At first, when he had seen her in the subway, he had doubted his own eyes. But then when he saw her in person at the Fabion MG’s Shibuya live show, he had known for sure.
At that time, he’d contacted a transportation company that specialized in not leaving any trace of their movement. According to them, aside from getting caught by security cameras, most thieves were tracked down using the movement log in their automatic vehicles. The van the man was driving would definitely be found but, thanks to a little help from the Antibody Network, the data within the vehicle would be erased. No one would be able to track where he had gone. Once he had the transportation company carry him the rest of the way to his hide-out, his trail would completely vanish.
The transport company had requested that he meet them in the east side of Urayasu, where there weren’t many people to see. He was almost to the meeting spot.
“You’ve got a bad smile. You’ve got a bad, dignified way of standing,” he said accusingly. “Your hands are bad. The softness of your thighs is bad. Your eyes are bad, your tongue is bad. You’re a bad girl that makes men think bad thoughts. A bad girl like you needs a man to lock her up in a cage and keep her from doing bad things,” he finished hoarsely. His head was raised, his fingers trembling like he was drunk. He felt as though, if he didn’t move his body, it would stiffen and solidify. Lacia was beautiful, but somehow the extent to which he saw through her frightened him.
“Just a little further. Then you can analog hack me with that body of yours, all night long. We’re almost there,” the man said. hIEs had the same shape as humans, and could perform the same actions so they could automate human work. Lacia would love him automatically, and he would automatically be happy.
When she next booted up, her persona would be completely rewritten to that of his ideal partner; that thought sent the man’s libido boiling over, and he couldn’t hold himself back any longer. There shouldn’t be any problem with him getting things started a little earlier than planned.
He crawled into the back seat. Lacia was still laying on her side, with her white knees exposed. The man just knew that, under the shielding bag, she was smiling encouragingly at him.
At that moment, the man noticed through the van’s rear window that a car had stopped right behind his. He recognized the enrage
d face of the youth in the front seat. “Accelerate!” he shouted. It was Lacia’s owner. He had to brace both his hands to keep from being thrown down by the sudden acceleration of the van.
“Give it up, kid. Just go home. She’s with me now!” he yelled.
In Tokyo and its surrounding suburbs, it was considered a traffic violation to disable the autopilot function on your vehicle. Vehicles would automatically alert the authorities if you did. This fact was an extreme annoyance to the man at that moment.
“A brat like that can’t understand your true value,” he muttered. As the chassis of the car rattled on the uneven pavement, Lacia’s knees slid apart, allowing the man to get just a peek of her thighs. He feasted on her beautiful legs with his eyes. “You’re meant to fill the hole in a real man’s heart,” he said.
Then the man remembered something: kids in high school didn’t have their driving licenses, which meant that they couldn’t switch automatic vehicles to manual mode. There wouldn’t be a chance to show the boy up in a wild chase across town. Instead, the man would just have to show the boy he was a man in a way only a real adult could.
He pushed down the back seats, so the back of the van was well visible to the car behind him. Then he grabbed Lacia, still covered with the bag, and spun her around so her toned rear was facing the glass.
The van made a sudden right turn, sending powerful centrifugal force through the vehicle, and Lacia’s body rolled away. She slipped away from him, toward the trunk part of the vehicle. Then she kept sliding, while the rear hatch opened all on its own. A strong wind whipped inside the van and, without stopping, Lacia slipped out the back of the van, rolling to the cracked road below.
“Baby!” he screamed. He could do nothing but watch as she bounced onto the ground and then rolled away from him. The car behind him swerved wildly to avoid her.