by Satoshi Hase
“Good afternoon,” she said. Then, looking at the 3D display, “It hasn’t even been a hundred years, yet it’s as if we’re living in a completely different world now.” Then, as if dismissing the work they were doing as trivial, she commanded, “Turn that off.”
Someone shut the machine off, and the display vanished. The girl swept her strong gaze over the room, which had been robbed of most of its light and color; without the 3D projection, the office became a boring room with nothing but a few chairs and tables. When her eyes passed over the people there, Arato got the sense that she felt like she was the only real human in the room.
“I’m Arato Endo, Lacia’s owner. I got called out here to talk about a show for her,” he said, breaking through the girl’s absolute control over the room.
“Of course. You’re a human, so you always introduce yourself first. It would be rude of me not to respond in kind,” she said, pulling a small leather case out of her bag. She handed him something white from within the case, and he was surprised to see it was a paper business card. “I am Erika Burroughs,” she said.
Arato awkwardly accepted the card, then fumbled in his pocket for his terminal to give her his ID. Asuna stopped him though, touching his arm with her fingers. “Arato, the owner doesn’t carry around a pocket terminal,” she said in a quiet voice.
“How distasteful,” Erika said without hesitation.
“Wait, ‘owner’?” Arato asked, his voice rising in surprise. “She owns this company? But she’s the same age as me!” Erika smiled at Arato, who had forgotten to close his mouth in shock. He couldn’t help but think that she looked way more like a princess than a businesswoman.
“That’s right,” she said, cold humor chilling her voice. “Even though I can’t technically ‘own’ other humans, since I own the place they live and work, you could technically think of me as their ‘owner.’”
She then turned to the adults in the office and asked, “What percentage of your lives would you say I own? Anyone?”
“I’d rather not hear, thanks,” Arato said in disgust, struggling to keep up with what was happening. “Well, what’s someone like you doing here, then?”
“I’m the one who signed off on this plan,” Erika explained. “And I came because it appears you have some complaints regarding it.”
Arato was dumbfounded.
When he didn’t respond, Erika turned to Asuna and the other Fabion members. “This room seems a little tight. Could you do something about that?”
The staff all looked at each other.
Erika sighed, apparently disappointed no one else could keep up with her pace. “After this shoot is over, why not move the office to Tokyo Bay?” she asked. “Japan’s summers are the worst, but I believe it’s fairly cool over there.”
***
At that moment, Ryo was standing on the outside of the No. 2 Landfill Island Group. Under the sunlight, he could see white marks on the road that almost seemed to have been painted by a brush around ground zero of the explosions. The bullet holes all over the place stood out vividly.
He was standing in front of a large white sheet that was being used to wall off one of the entrances to MemeFrame’s Tokyo Research Labs. No effort had been started to repair or restore the buildings damaged in the explosions; that fact gave Ryo a distant sense of unease.
A man, standing on the carved-up road and poking at the white scratch marks, saw Ryo and called out to him. “You interested in this place?”
The wind was whistling through the area, as if to show just how much of a wasteland it had become.
“You’re Ryo Kaidai, right?” the man asked. The man was in his late 40s, and had the sharp look of a businessman. He was somewhat similar to Shinohara, the researcher who had invited Ryo, but was also somewhat different.
This man was observant, confident, and talented, and Ryo knew him. His name was Ginga Watarai, and he was the head of research planning for the Tokyo Research Labs. He was the human counterpart to Higgins, the high-powered AI responsible for leading MemeFrame’s research efforts.
“Ryo Kaidai, that’s right,” Ryo said. “I’ve seen you on the news recently, Mr. Watarai.”
“And what makes you so sure that I’m Ginga Watarai?” Watarai asked.
Ryo was confused. It was strange enough to see a man who should have been plenty busy elsewhere hanging around the shut-down research labs without having him also suggesting the possibility he might be a fake.
Seeing that Ryo was unable to keep up with the strange shift in the conversation, Watarai filled in the blanks for him. “I could just be a machine wearing a human figure,” he pointed out. “It’s entirely possible I might be an hIE constructed to look exactly like Ginga Watarai.”
In other words: it was entirely possible that, having been backed into a corner by their involvement with the explosion incident, MemeFrame might begin offing inconvenient people and replacing them with hIE look-alikes. Ryo started to understand why he had been called out to this place, concealed from the world by white sheet walls.
“It’s prohibited to make hIEs that are identical to existing humans,” he said.
Watarai’s eyes narrowed in enjoyment beneath his white, slicked-back hair. “You think we wouldn’t make something like that just because it’s against the rules? Give something a human shape and a perfect human personality, and no one can tell it’s a machine,” he told Ryo, straightening up from where he had been crouching over the white marks. “Plus, thanks to the power of analog hacking, folks seeing the human figure will automatically convince themselves it’s the real thing.”
Ryo hated his own cowardice, which was screaming at him to run away. He wanted to train himself to become a fearless man who lacked for nothing. “hIEs’ personalities are just illusions, created by their reactions to what we humans do,” he said. “Our minds create the impression of something that we believe is there, when really it isn’t. Since there’s nothing strange about you being here, Mr. Watarai, I can only assume that this is the real you.”
“Illusions, huh?” Watarai repeated. “I see. Just as you said, illusions can pop up wherever we look for them. It’s up to humans to decide whether what they see is a human or not.”
Ryo, who had been trying to get a handle on Watarai’s nature, now noticed something: he had expected a simpler, more direct threat to his life. Instead, Watarai was focusing on splitting hairs about perception, stating things in a roundabout way that was seemingly aimed at deliberate misunderstanding. Apparently Ginga Watarai, the de facto head of the Tokyo Research Labs, might not be there to silence him.
“Arbitrarily assigning personalities to objects simply based on their form is caused by an error in human logic,” Ryo said. “Our internal concept of the human form is so vague that it gets easily confused. That’s why we project our feelings onto things that we think have human traits, and imagine that they have feelings in return.”
“But, setting aside this talk about heartless machines,” Ryo continued. “I assume there’s some reason you’re here to see me, Mr. Watarai?” Extreme tension made his back slick with sweat. He couldn’t figure out exactly why Watarai was there, but he could at least infer that it had to do with his own involvement with Lacia.
Watarai quirked his thin, dry lips up just a little. “So, you would say that humans should never relinquish their right to judge whether or not something is human? That’s good. Your views seem to be in alignment with ours,” he said. Apparently, Ryo had passed Watarai’s roundabout interview examination.
“Did you call me here just to figure that out?” Ryo asked, looking around. The wind was blowing through freely, but the place where they were standing, with its construction scaffolding and white sheet walls, was completely hidden from outside view. In other words: this was a cheaply-constructed secret meeting room.
Shinohara, the one who had brought Ryo there, hurriedly tried to defuse the tension in the air. “I asked Mr. Watarai if he could spare a little time because I
wanted to give you a better idea of how things are in the company, Ryo,” he explained. “This is just a standing conversation. It won’t even be recorded on Mr. Watarai’s appointment calendar.”
After hearing what happened with Kengo, Ryo had assumed that Watarai already knew about his high school friends. He’d assumed that the man was looking at him as a dangerous element who was concealing his own involvement with Lacia. That was why Ryo couldn’t let his guard down for a second.
Shinohara might not have noticed, but Ryo’s life was in danger at that moment. If Watarai decided that Ryo was an enemy to himself or to MemeFrame, or that there was a chance of Ryo leaking company secrets, it would all be over. Shinohara himself had said there would be no record of Watarai coming there. This close to the sea, it would be easy for Watarai to have Ryo erased, especially if he had one of the recovered Lacia-class hIEs lurking around to help him.
“I take it this is all about the special hIEs carrying MemeFrame’s backup data that Mr. Shinohara told me about, right?” Ryo asked. Not just that, but the fact that multiple of those hIEs had escaped the Tokyo Research Labs the night of the explosion, as well as the fact that not all of them had been recovered. They were standing on the very site of the battle against the escaping hIEs.
Watarai raised his eyebrows just a hair, as if to show that he was satisfied by Ryo’s understanding of what they were discussing. “I think, perhaps, you’re annoyed at our sudden invitation,” he mused.
“Of course not,” Ryo said with stiff politeness. “I would like to ask, though, what you intend to do once you discover where the lost hIEs have gone?” He doubted that everything would be over once they finished rounding up the Lacia-class hIEs. Without knowing who had caused the incident in the first place, it wasn’t even clear why Higgins had decided to make use of these Red Boxes in the first place.
“We’re having a private military company track them down,” Watarai said without a hint of emotion. “It won’t be long before we have them all back.”
MemeFrame obviously had image data on their own hIEs. They already knew that Lacia was a model, which would mean they also already knew that Arato was her current owner. Ryo couldn’t predict how harsh the orders being handed down to the military company were.
Watarai cut to the chase. “You need to choose your friends carefully,” he said.
Knowing that they were probably watching his expression, Ryo paused before answering and kept his voice emotionless. “I believe there are things I can learn and improve about myself with the friends I have now.” If they recorded his voice and analyzed it, they would be able to catch the slight emotional shake to his words. Still, he would be taken for an idiot if he couldn’t respond when they were asking him questions.
“Let me give you some advice, then,” Watarai said. “If you’re aiming to make it anywhere in MemeFrame, you should make sure there isn’t any dirt on your record. Considering who you are, you should already know that our company is currently divided down the middle, with Higgins in the center. How you handle things now may come back to trip you up when you’re trying to climb the corporate ladder.”
Meaning, if Ryo had any hopes for making it big in MemeFrame, he should enter Watarai’s faction. The implication was that his refusal of the offer would be dangerous for Arato and the others. It was very similar to when Kengo was pushed to join the terrorist activities of the Antibody Network. In either case, they were being treated as tools, and their human personalities were completely ignored.
Ryo felt like he was just being dragged along as he got tangled up in more events beyond his control. He felt pangs of anger stabbing through his chest; feeling the rage boiling within him wasn’t such a bad feeling, after all. It was something he had gotten used to since he was a little kid. There were even times he felt he couldn’t live without it. Anger kept his heart beating.
“Or are you just going to continue believing that your name has any bearing on your future?” Watarai asked. Ryo felt a chill run through his body as Watarai’s true, icy nature slipped into his words.
The energy needed to run a super high-spec AI was running under their feet. It wouldn’t be strange if they were standing right where the explosion had happened in the ruins of the research labs.
“Well, thanks for the warning,” Ryo finally said. “But with all your talk of ‘meaning,’ Mr. Watarai, I’d say the only one who could understand any answer I gave would be me myself.”
He doubted this was the first time MemeFrame had tried to manipulate events like this, and wondered how Arato was doing. The question was, what choice would Arato make when it was his turn to choose? But Ryo comforted himself in the knowledge that Arato would definitely attack the problem head-on when it came.
“I’ll figure out whether my buddy is ‘dirt’ on my record in ten or twenty years,” Ryo said.
Arato was a bit of a moron, thinking that personal growth meant just overcoming any trials that came his way. But if he thought things like saving Kengo and picking up Lacia counted as maturing, he was wrong. The truth was, this was a cold world where adults would meet with you in secret rooms in broad daylight and try to force you to betray your friends. Ryo’s idea of personal growth was understanding reality and finding your place in it.
“You’re a good friend,” Watarai said. “I must say, I can’t get a handle on your personality, but at least I can say it’s no illusion.”
Despite Watarai’s words, Ryo still felt like he was being targeted by a Lacia-class hIE from somewhere.
When Ryo first learned about the Lacia-class hIEs, his reaction had been to look for ways to protect human society, his father’s company, and his own place in the world. Arato had decided to take Lacia home as soon as he found her, and had dove straight into the danger that Kengo had faced. The ability to leap into the unknown, even when your heart was trembling, was a special talent of his. Ryo’s special talent was looking for compromises, unlike his friend, who didn’t think about how many other people got dragged into his problems.
“It’s true, I have a friend who’s very dear to me,” Ryo said. In the depths of Ryo’s heart, there was something like a core that stood strong even as he flinched away from the coldness of the world. He wanted to protect his friends. He wanted to protect them from these guys, as well as from Lacia and the unknown threat she represented.
“Then I take it you intend to side with him rather than us?” Watarai asked.
“Well, just hold on...” Ryo continued. “The thing is, I think he’d be able to live pretty happily, even without hIEs in his world.” Ryo was afraid for Arato; he could just picture Lacia dragging the poor, stupidly honest guy off into something crazy.
***
Arato examined his very first paper business card under a lamp, wondering if it could be considered a luxury item. Erika Burroughs’ name and phone number were written on the thick, high-quality paper. Apparently, only a limited number of people had copies of her card. Asuna had been working at Fabion MG for three years, and had done nothing but successfully carry out huge plans, but she still didn’t have one.
The sun had already gone down, and as if to mimic the ideal lifestyle laid out in the plan, Lacia was doing housework. “You were refreshingly obedient, Arato,” Lacia said as she folded up the laundry.
It was an odd feeling to be called obedient by an hIE. “What should I do with this?” he asked, indicating the card.
“There would be no point in me holding on to it,” Lacia said. “I believe she will refuse any contact that does not come from you yourself.”
“Man, she’s selfish. She’s more selfish than Yuka,” Arato grumbled.
“I’m sure she would be delighted to hear you say that,” Lacia said. hIEs spoke and acted based on how they read the reactions of the people they were interacting with, so if Lacia was saying this, then Arato was sure that Erika really would be pleased.
“Well then, maybe I should tell her she’s way worse than Yuka,” he said.
&nb
sp; “Arato, please never change,” Lacia told him with a gentle, supportive smile.
Arato’s pocket terminal vibrated, letting him know he had a new message. It was from Kengo. Since they were both worried about each other, they had agreed to message each other once a day to check in. Considering that he had participated in an actual terrorist attack, there was plenty of reason for the police to show up and arrest Kengo at any time.
〈How are things over there? Have you seen any police or anyone strange hanging out around your place?〉 the message read. Since Arato had experienced the same thing as Kengo, there was no need for any explanation. Arato asked Lacia, since she would probably be the most well-informed.
“Hey, have any police or anyone like that been around here?” he asked.
She was sorting their laundry out into individual piles on the sofa. “I have not sensed any threats in the area,” she said.
Arato sent that on to Kengo. Worry made Arato want to discuss it with another person, but Lacia couldn’t really fill that role. She was human shaped, but without a heart. Everything she said or did was nothing more than a calculated reaction to Arato’s actions, and when he stopped giving her anything to react to, silence fell easily.
He had the home system grab any news related to the Antibody Network. It had become a daily routine, so the system automatically picked summary articles aimed at kids.
“If you’d like, I can rewrite the news articles to make them easier for you to understand,” Lacia offered.
“You can do that?” he asked.
“hIEs vary our behavioral logic based on the age and personality of the person we are interacting with,” she explained. “It is quite simple for me to translate adult newspaper articles into words that you will be able to understand.”
As an hIE with secretary functionality, Lacia was able to work together with the Endos’ home system. With her processing the data, she was able to provide a larger amount of information much more smoothly than Arato would be able to get for himself using the same system.