by Satoshi Hase
***
Arato’s command came in the nick of time. He saw the back of the kidnapper’s van open, and a girl covered in a bag came rolling out. Even though her top half was hidden by the bag, he knew it was Lacia.
The car swerved sharply, tires screeching as they slid on the asphalt. As the car spun, sending Arato’s point of view lurching sideways, he saw Lacia, who was missing one of her shoes, standing there. She tore through the silvery bag that had covered her and threw it off, with her light violet hair dancing in the wind.
The car managed to slide to a halt five centimeters from the concrete wall of a warehouse.
Arato’s throat was so tense it hurt. Only at that moment did he realize that it had been his own command which had stopped the car from hitting Lacia.
“Lacia,” he said. Choking a little from the pain in his throat, Arato still managed to say her name. All he could think of was that Lacia had flown out of the van, right when her kidnapper was going to lay his hands on her.
Arato threw himself out of the car onto the unused harbor road, and she turned to look at him.
To either side of the four-lane road were wide buildings that must have been warehouses. They appeared to be long-abandoned, as their cracked concrete gates were slanted open. The large doors of the warehouses, which could have fit four trucks abreast, were rusted over. Surrounded by this desolation, Lacia’s beauty made her stand out.
Through the cracks in the pavement, which was made of recycled materials, grass and weeds were growing; once tools fall out of use, humans no longer find meaning in their existence. But nature has never cared what things may have originally been meant for.
“Let’s go home, Lacia,” Arato said. She stood up, and then hopped on one leg while replacing the one shoe that had fallen off.
Suddenly, the kidnapper’s van hit the brakes and skidded to a stop. The side slid open, and a well-dressed man in a brand name suit stepped out. “You’re the only one going home, punk,” he said, his face purpling with rage as he glared at Arato.
Pushed on by his own boiling emotions, Arato clenched his teeth and ran toward the man, who was walking slowly toward Lacia and hefting a heavy-looking metal pipe. The kidnapper looked like he was in his late twenties or thirties. As Arato rushed toward him, he realized that he recognized the man who had gotten violent at Lacia’s first modeling show.
Lacia glanced at him as he ran past her.
The man must have thought he could just grab Lacia and run, since he froze when Arato ran straight toward him. So Arato’s tackle caught him right in the chest, and the two went down in a tangle. Flailing his arms, Arato managed to grab the man’s hair and shirt.
Arato was berserk. He couldn’t forgive the man for playing around with Lacia like she was a doll in his van. He also wasn’t going to forget how the man had made his little sister cry. He couldn’t stand that the man had looked at Lacia as a sexual object, and more than anything, he couldn’t stand that he had tried to wave a club at him and snatch Lacia away. He punched the man with everything he had. No matter how much the man pulled at him and kicked him, Arato didn’t stop his fists.
Love is not something that can be automated, he thought. Love is wild and selfish. Punching the kidnapper had nothing to do with protecting Lacia, or getting her back.
From beneath Arato, the man punched his chest. He was yelling something about Arato being a punk. Arato was just yelling.
The man was stronger. Arato was only winning the fight thanks to his intensity and the fact that he’d happened to end up on top. A hand came up from below, gripping Arato’s throat and lifting him up. Both of them were covered in mud. Arato hadn’t hurt this bad since he had been chased around by a car the night he met Lacia. Compared to then, though, at the moment, fear was the furthest thing from his mind.
His goggles had been shaken loose from his head. Wrapping them around his right hand, Arato used the expensive precision equipment as a weapon to punch the man harder. He was rewarded with a much more satisfying feeling when he struck the kidnapper’s jaw. Now cornered, the man gave back as good as he got, bloodying Arato’s nose.
Arato finally started to calm down when he could no longer lift his arms. He was gasping for breath, and didn’t feel like he could move at all. The kidnapper was also still and wheezing.
Arato rolled himself over so that he could sit up, with his butt pinning down the man’s chest. “What the hell am I doing?” Arato muttered. All that energy and rage had been spent, and the sky was still just as high above him. In some ways, it was more of an illusion than Lacia’s human looks. His entire body was exhausted, and his face, stomach, neck, and arms all hurt like hell. He was honestly surprised by how much his feelings for her had pushed him into extreme actions. Was that just an illusion as well?
His clothes were drenched with sweat, but there was still plenty running down his face and dripping off his jaw when Lacia’s sleek legs, peeking out of her skirt, appeared in front of him. Somehow, they looked even more tantalizing than they had the night before, and Arato felt a flush of embarrassment.
“Thank you, Arato,” she said, smiling down at him when he looked up. She didn’t have a heart, so she must have said it believing it would make Arato happy. Still, as a man, he couldn’t help but feel so happy that he could cry at being praised by her.
“I should thank you too, Lacia, for guiding me here,” he said, taking the hand she offered him and allowing her to pull him up to his feet. He didn’t want to let go of her hand and stood there instead, just looking at her face.
Then he heard the sound of gravel sliding around. The kidnapper was pushing himself to his feet, blood dripping off his lips from a cut in his mouth. Coughing, he swung the metal pipe. “Wait, damn you,” he said.
Lacia looked down at the kidnapper like an empty can ready for recycling. “I believe we are done here,” she said.
“The hell we are!” the kidnapper shouted. “This is how far a real man has to go to get the girl he wants!” A blue burner flame sprang from the tip of the metal pipe. It wasn’t a pipe after all, but a tool from the van. As he looked at the flame, the man’s face changed.
Still shouting, he swung the pipe. Arato’s reactions were slow, and the flaming pipe came right at him. But before it could hit him, Lacia’s delicate hand blocked the weapon. Then, she spoke to the kidnapper. “It does not seem you are reflecting on your actions,” she said calmly. “At this rate, it appears you will not be altering the course your life is taking.”
“Transfer your ownership to me, or your owner dies,” the man snarled.
“I understand the situation,” Lacia replied. “I will alter my interaction with you.” Having made this announcement, Lacia pushed away the pipe-shaped tool, and the force of her movement sent the kidnapper back onto his ass.
Still fixing the kidnapper with her cold gaze, she walked over to one of the warehouses at the side of the road. Taking the rusted doors in her hands, she pulled them open with a screech.
Inside the dark warehouse, Arato saw something that should not have been there; just inside the massive doors, Lacia’s black coffin was waiting. As soon as he saw it, Arato lost his grip on what was happening. The coffin, which should have been sitting there in his living room, had vanished. He’d thought that his home security system camera had just been unable to see it for some reason, but no, the coffin had actually flown across prefectural borders and ended up here. He felt like he was witnessing some kind of large-scale magic show.
Behind the device, shadowed in the darkness at the back of the warehouse, Arato could make out two female hIEs he had never seen before. They walked out of the warehouse and reverently offered a silvery device to Lacia, who secured the device around her waist with flowing movements. It was the device lock she had been wearing on the first night Arato had met her.
Lacia picked up her coffin, a giant hunk of metal that seemed far too massive for her thin arms to support, lifting it off the ground and turning it on its si
de. The device began to give off a growling sound that gave Arato goosebumps. He couldn’t put a finger on what exactly terrified him in that instant, but he remembered what Ryo had said about Lacia being produced by a super-AI. About her being a product created by technology far beyond human understanding.
Standing in front of the kidnapper, Lacia looked back at Arato. “This man is dangerous. We should take this opportunity to dispose of him before he can escape,” she said. Without waiting for a response, she started walking casually toward the kidnapper, who seemed to be stunned.
Watching her now, Arato couldn’t feel any of the familial warmth he usually saw in Lacia. It was as if everything he had felt for her up to that point was nothing more than an illusion brought on by analog hacking.
“I already beat the crap out of him,” Arato said. “You don’t need to do anything.”
“Incorrect. You were able to satisfy your own emotional needs, but he has not yet altered his course,” Lacia said.
“Whatever, but there’s no need to use that thing on him!” Arato shouted.
“If he is arrested by the police, there is a high probability that he will commit a similar crime in the future,” Lacia argued, and the weak, dark flame that had still been burning in the kidnapper’s eyes flickered and died. Lacia was saying that here, where no one would witness it, she could simply use violence to eliminate the problem.
As soon as he realized this, the kidnapper’s desire for Lacia vanished. It was like someone had forced something frozen down his throat, and he wanted to puke it back up. His legs wouldn’t move.
“Lacia, you don’t have to do this,” Arato pleaded.
“This person has been stalking us. He observed our apartment from nearby on four separate occasions,” Lacia explained coldly. “He knowingly threatened to harm Yuka with his vehicle in order to draw me out. He is a major obstacle to you and your sister’s ability to live an ordinary life.”
Obviously, Arato couldn’t help but be disgusted by the kidnapper. He hadn’t even realized how close Yuka had been to being hurt by it all.
Lacia, with her superhuman strength, casually lifted her device, which weighed over 100 kg, high in the air. “This man has an understanding of how to destroy hIEs. He deliberately hindered my ability to send signals and brought me to an unpopulated location with the intent of breaking me,” she continued. “The tool he used to attack you was prepared beforehand with the specific intent to use it for violence against you.”
Arato may have been a little slow, but Lacia’s explanation made her intentions clear as day. Only tools wielded by their owners had the right to harm human beings. Arato was sure that if he commanded it, Lacia would kill a person on his authority.
Even as Arato realized this, Lacia asked the critical question. “Arato,” she said, “give me a clear order.”
Arato’s courage under fire couldn’t help him with the choice being thrust on him. “Lacia!” he said in shock, not knowing what kind of outcome he was hoping for.
The kidnapper, still on his butt, scrambled backward, his face going pale. It must have been his first time seeing anything like the giant coffin device, as his gaze was pinned to it. If Lacia brought it down, it would easily smash his head and kill him instantly. The man started to crawl away in desperation.
“This is an ideal setting for disposing of a dangerous person,” Lacia said.
“Stop!” Arato commanded her desperately. “Lacia, I’m not going to let you murder anyone.”
“The first time we met, you had no trouble giving me an order that may have cost human lives,” Lacia told him. “If this man is left alone, he will continue to cause problems that will last much longer than the threat from that night.”
“That night you weren’t aiming your weapon at a human,” Arato said flatly. Even as he said it, he felt disgust boiling up in his stomach. Even he was clearly separating hIEs and humans in his mind. Despite having come all this way for her, and having beaten a man to a pulp for her, he still couldn’t tell her to do this thing. He couldn’t bring himself to unleash the power she had showed him that night — the power that had erased the strange flower storm in an instant — at a human, much less one who was sitting right in front of his eyes.
Arato was drenched in sweat. It soaked into his clothing, and the salty wind off the bay felt cold. “You’re asking me to give you permission to kill a person,” he said numbly, and for the first time, he truly felt the weight of being Lacia’s owner.
He was sure that she could easily wipe a person away without a trace. As a Red Box, Lacia was ten thousand times, maybe a million times, better at planning the perfect crime than the kidnapper would ever be.
“That is the contract you made with me as my owner,” Lacia said implacably. “You speak your desires to me, I fulfill them automatically, and you take responsibility.” She had told him that the first night they met. Still, Arato didn’t want her to kill anyone, nor did he want to kill anyone through her. He didn’t think they would ever be able to go back to the way things were before if her hands were stained with blood.
“That’s not what I want at all!” he shouted. “What kind of person are you asking me to become?” Looking at Lacia’s back, the cold way she stood, Arato couldn’t feel a shred of humanity in her. “What are you asking me to do?!”
He doubted her. She was soulless. Every action she took was automatically selected to be whatever would make him happy. But as a man, he’d felt that he needed to save Lacia, whom he’d seen as a girl. He had convinced himself there was a girl there where there was none, and now he was doubting her.
“Did I go wrong somewhere? Am I still not understanding something?” he asked. It was like something out of a story. Except that this was reality, and Lacia wasn’t just a character in a book. If her insane, unknown power wasn’t normally sealed away, he would never have felt comfortable enough to get close to her.
It wasn’t just the kidnapper; Arato had been chased into a corner, as well. He wondered if he was being analog hacked again. This time, a human life hung in the balance. But, as if to buy some time for Arato while he hesitated, Lacia rushed forward in the space of a blink. She held the device up like a shield toward the bay.
At that same instant, there was a flash of light. Sparks flew like fireworks, pattering onto the road like rain. Now bathed in light several magnitudes brighter than the sun, Lacia’s thin body was visible as a shadow through her thin clothing.
As suddenly as it appeared, the light was gone. “Wah! Uwah!” The kidnapper was rolling in terror. His sleeve had caught fire, and his whole upper half was about to burst into flame.
Lacia opened the exterior part of her device, which was giving off violent waves of heat-haze, and expanded it. The plate-like interior started to give off a blue light.
Through the screams of the kidnapper and the howling of a typhoon-like wind, Arato made out some heavy footsteps. Beyond the distortions of the heat-haze, he could make out a red human figure. Her face had the innocent look of a young girl. Her strikingly red hair was long, and divided into two tails held back by red accessories. Her black and red armor-like bodysuit was cut like a bustier, and her hair tumbled boldly onto her shoulders, which were bare. The armor shone in the midday sun, almost too bright to look at. The blade-like device she had stuck into the road was far too massive to be lifted by a human, and Arato doubted very much that she was.
“Long time no see, dear sister!” the girl called out with an innocent wave of her hand. She was wearing an excited smile, as if she was having the time of her life. Despite being over a hundred meters away from her, Arato could hear her voice clearly — a trick no human voice could match.
The kidnapper, still sprawled out on the road, was moaning. Though the fire on his jacket had gone out, his hair was burned and his skin had been roasted red from his neck to his jawline. He clearly needed an ambulance.
“Hey, are you all right?” Without thinking about it, Arato started to run over to the ma
n’s side. Lacia grabbed him and held him back.
Perhaps from the pain, the kidnapper coughed out a large amount of saliva onto the road. His face was purple and blue with fear and rage as he screamed: “Aren’t you supposed to be my transporter?!”
The girl, apparently the target of his accusation, merely smiled even wider. “You’re way too trusting,” she chided. “Did you really think my offer to automate your desires and make them real was legit? There’s no way you could pull off a perfect theft using a flimsy system like the Antibody Network. Any volunteer can get info from there. Just look at it this way: we used you just like you used us,” she told him.
Then, she tugged her huge blade free from the road and began walking toward them with light steps. The weight of the massive device must have offset her center of gravity quite a bit, and she walked with a rolling gait to compensate. She almost seemed to be dancing, there on the other side of the heat-haze, the blade throwing up sparks as she dragged it through the asphalt.
“Hey! Who are you?” Arato asked.
“I’m Kouka, Lacia-class hIE Type-001,” she answered. “The eldest of my dear sister’s younger siblings.” The face of the girl who called herself Lacia’s little sister was that of a child at play. hIEs chose their expressions entirely based on the kind of reaction they wanted from those who saw them, and despite her smile, the girl’s words crackled with hostility.
Lacia’s device had returned to its original coffin form. Having successfully accomplished its duty of shielding them from the intense heat of Kouka’s attack, the metal device’s black face was now covered with a thin layer of white frost.
“Arato, combat with Kouka may threaten the lives of any nearby humans,” Lacia said, looking for directions from him. But between Lacia and Kouka, the kidnapper was curled in on himself, holding his head in complete despair. Arato couldn’t just write off that man’s life.
Kouka’s spinning movements suddenly sped up, and her red device started to glow. “Oh good,” she said cheerfully, “I was worried you were just going to stand by and let everything be wrapped up by these two morons punching each other.” Her giant blade met Lacia’s black coffin with a thundering roar. Sparks flew off the coffin, and Lacia’s shoes skidded along the ground. Lacia was clearly weaker than the red hIE, and she wasn’t able to fully defend herself from Kouka’s second, horizontally slashing attack. It caught her up in the air, and sent her flying like a doll hit by a baseball bat.