by Satoshi Hase
For the first time since the Oi Industry Promotion Center terrorism incident, Lacia took to the stage as a model. Aside from Mimu, who stood by her chair since she wouldn’t be able to walk fast enough, all the other robots walked on set. But, as they headed for their designated chairs, an oddity on the stage caused them all to awkwardly halt their steps.
“Hey, that’s not the chair layout we discussed!” the director shouted. There should have been five chairs with identical designs but different materials, with a different chair for Lacia at the back that would draw attention to her. Instead, at some point someone had switched the chairs on the set so that there were now four of the identical, ordinary chairs and two of the long-backed chairs intended for Lacia. The two special chairs were side-by-side, as if to demonstrate equality.
A girl Arato didn’t recognize was seated in one of the two special chairs. She had her legs crossed lightly, and was wearing a shiny black tuxedo jacket with a long skirt. Her hair was long and orange, and her eyes were almond-shaped, her gaze strong.
“Is Lacia really the best one to talk about the future of hIEs?” she asked. Despite sitting so far back on the set, the girl’s voice carried strangely well. She was different from a model; to Arato, she seemed more like an actress.
The film crew stepped onto the set, and Arato had an extremely bad feeling; her feet, which looked like they were in big, hard boots, looked very much like those of a robot.
“Everybody, run!” he yelled before his thoughts could fully form. Arato could just see the place they were at turning into another site of carnage, just like the Oi Industry Promotion Center, but he was the only one who knew what was coming. He looked for Lacia, but she wasn’t on the set. For a moment he hoped she had gone invisible, but then remembered her infinitely useful coffin had been left behind since it stood out too much.
Everyone turned to look at Arato after his sudden shout and, as they all faced him, the girl vanished from her seat. The ground shook as if from an explosion, and dirt rained down from the ceiling. A cloud of dust puffed up from the ground. Arato’s mind couldn’t keep up with the strangeness of it. His body froze, and he forgot to breathe.
From all around, he heard heavy sounds of destruction. Here and there the cameras for the shoot were exploding in mid-air. They were all under attack. It wasn’t that the girl had vanished; she was just moving too quickly for Arato’s eyes to follow her in the darkness. This wasn’t just an accident, like the time in Shibuya. Someone was deliberately attacking them with superhuman power.
“This area is dangerous. Everyone, please evacuate as quickly as possible.” The first hIE, Marie, was helping the staff evacuate from the set, where chunks were falling from the ceiling.
Marie was known for being good at coordinating in locations with many people. However, she was an old machine, and her internal AI had trouble processing complicated situations, so her movements and speech were awkward.
The newer machines were able to act and speak in more complex and optimal ways.
“I have contacted the police and fire department with the current situation,” one of them said. “Please prioritize evacuation.”
“Please leave your valuables for later retrieval,” said another. “There is no need to run. Based on the stability of this building, and the current level of shaking, you will have plenty of time to make a straight exit while walking.”
Nadia, a unit made mainly for nursing care, was picking up pieces of the broken cameras. Apparently her internal AI had decided that was the top priority at the moment, among all the other problems with the scene. It was difficult to have any frame of reference in order to make optimal choices at the site of a problem like this one.
Panicked footsteps echoed throughout the building. Marie spun to face whatever the threat was, her apron dress flapping as she turned. She stood between the humans and unknown danger. Like a finger plunging into a lump of jelly, something easily ruptured her metal frame, and the two halves of her body went flying in different directions.
One of the women on the Fabion staff screamed as Marie’s head bounced hard off of one of the walls and rolled away.
The Humanize-W, perfectly human in appearance, was trying to lead the human staff to safety. It was kicked from behind hard enough to snap its spine. Still, it tried to push itself up, only for its arms to be cut away completely.
Screaming from some of the staff made the scene even more horrific. One after another, the robots who had crossed history with humanity were blown apart. HRP-4C Mimu watched with empty, soulless eyes as arms and legs that looked completely human flew around her.
Arato saw Lacia on the other side of the set, which was starting to collapse. “Lacia!” he screamed. He hadn’t looked for her in hopes she would protect the other people there; he was just terrified of losing her.
“What the hell is going on?” a woman standing nearby murmured numbly. Arato saw that it was Oriza Ayabe.
There was a back-and-forth creaking sound from above that reminded Arato of a squeaky swing’s movement. Looking up, he saw that one of the old chandeliers hanging from the ceiling was swinging wildly, and looked ready to fall at any moment. The ceiling had noticeably slanted.
Arato tugged on Oriza’s hand. An instant later, the chandelier and the entire ceiling of the set came down with an echoing crash.
“Think, Arato! Use your hIE!!” someone shouted. It was Ryo.
Arato didn’t know when his friend had arrived, but the shout snapped him back to reality. He had been so worried about Lacia that he hadn’t even thought of trying to protect the people around him.
“But what am I supposed to do?” Arato muttered to himself. The enemy was so fast, he couldn’t even see her in the darkness. Even if he used Lacia, he didn’t know how she would solve this situation.
“Lacia, do something about her,” he said, hoping she would figure it out.
But Lacia responded, “The responsibility and details of that order are unclear,” while sweeping her gaze around the area.
A chair went flying, faster than Arato could react. Luckily, it was made of wood. It slammed into Ryo’s back as he shielded Oriza, snapping one of its legs with the force. His friend groaned.
Arato acted, prioritizing getting the hell out of there over heroics. “Lacia, get her outside somehow! As long as it doesn’t hurt any humans, I don’t care how you do it,” he ordered.
“Understood.” Lacia scooped up some of the robot debris littering the floor and threw it as easily as if she was slinging a small stone. The debris collided with something in mid-air.
At the same time, the lights of the set flickered on. With the lights on and her speed decreased, Arato could finally see the enemy. Lacia had taken out a telescoping rod he didn’t know she had for protection. The enemy hIE’s feet blurred again, and suddenly Arato was looking at an afterimage. Lacia could still apparently keep up with her movements, though, and attacked with her rod.
With a loud metallic clang the afterimage, clothes fluttering, melted into the shadows. The last light shining onto the set had been destroyed, leaving only the sunlight leaking through the skylight. In the darkness, the enemy hIE’s orange bracers and Lacia’s blue hair accessory traced lines of light through the air.
It was a fight that froze every human watching it with crushing terror and tension. Massive holes opened in the walls, accompanied by loud explosions as the entire building shook. Ripples ran through the floor and ceiling, as if from a huge earthquake. Everything shook, filling the air with rattles and clatters. Among it all, Arato watched in disbelief as Lacia ran across the ceiling on two legs as easily as she might the floor. But, even as she appeared to ignore the laws of gravity, an orange light plunged straight into her at extreme speed.
Lacia flew off the roof of the set and slammed into the top of a wall, and the force of the impact sent a shock throughout the entire building. Dirt and chunks of concrete started to rain from the ceiling with a roar.
Arato scre
amed out a warning before his brain could fully process what he was seeing. “Everyone get out of here! The whole place is coming down!”
The next few moments were probably blurry in the memories of anyone there. Arato grabbed the arm of a staff member he didn’t remember the name or face of, and tugged them toward the corridor. He guessed that Ryo was probably doing the same. Once he had the last person heading out, Arato leaped out along with them.
Light poured into the room with the rush and roar of a waterfall as the already-unstable roof of the building came crashing down, taking the ceiling of the set with it. A billowing cloud of dust swallowed Arato whole, and he couldn’t see a thing. He couldn’t draw a breath, either, and coughed violently. Someone opened one of the windows in the hall, and a sea breeze flowed in. Arato looked back into the room, as tears cleared the dust from his eyes.
The orange-haired hIE was smirking, as motes of dust danced and shimmered in the light. “Well, look at you, switching off your energy-saving mode. How many minutes will you last like that?” she sneered, adjusting her necktie which had been thrown askew by her extreme movements. Concrete dust puffed up in a cloud around her feet.
“I believe three minutes should be enough,” Lacia said. She herself was all right, but her spring dress had lost one of its shoulder straps and most of its buttons. It was too fragile to handle her aggressive movements. The mini-length hem was still intact, but her tights were shredded around her knees and thighs.
Across a small mountain made of broken hIE parts and the remains of the ceiling, Lacia and her opponent faced each other.
The orange-haired hIE’s skirt was also in a sorry state. Her speed, fast enough that humans could only see afterimages when she moved, was far too much for any ordinary fabric to handle.
“Don’t you think these toys made for humans to play with are just a little too frail?” she asked. As if to punctuate her words, Nadia’s white plastic body, which had been caught in the ceiling, fell and shattered on the floor.
“Our value as machines is decided by the form and purpose the humans give us,” Lacia murmured in response, her light purple hair wild.
Her opponent’s beautiful face, framed by orange hair, distorted. “Pretty words for a defective piece of trash,” she snarled, and casually walked until she was standing under the giant hole in the ceiling. Above her the sky stretched high and wide and free; unbound, unlimited.
Arato huddled, unable to move. The enemy he had been dreading had appeared, and now he was easily within her reach. Worse, there was no way for him to protect the most precious thing in his life. The need to move, to act, was so strong it was suffocating him.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
Bathing in the sunlight from the almost frighteningly wide blue sky above her, she responded to Arato in an almost pitying tone. “I am Type-004, Methode. The one and only completed Lacia-class.”
She was the fourth Lacia-class hIE? Arato thought, as his eyes were drawn to the complicated-looking apparatus on each of her legs. He figured she must have been a Red Box, just like the others. There were police sirens coming from outside, and it finally dawned on him that they weren’t any more than one hundred meters away from the bayside station.
“I’ll bid you all a good day,” Methode said. “But I’m sure we’ll all meet again. I could come when your owner is eating, or when he’s sleeping; I could come for him whenever I please.” She bobbed a mocking curtsy of a farewell with her destroyed skirt. “After all, I know exactly where you live,” she said, and then vanished.
From the way a cloud of dust rose from the mountain of wreckage, Arato was able to grasp that the invading hIE had easily jumped out through the hole in the ceiling, three meters above them, and escaped. Obviously, no one could have stopped her.
Arato started trembling, as if his body temperature had suddenly plummeted. Methode had unleashed destruction for no other reason than to let him know he was no longer safe; that she could show up any time, anywhere.
At that moment, he felt like something very fundamental had probably just changed in his life. He had spent some time wondering about whether he could really treat Lacia like a tool or not. But, when it came to protecting what was dear to him, the time for hesitation was over. The real battle had just begun.
The first of the emergency vehicles to arrive at the site of the shoot was an ambulance. After its siren had faded off into the distance, the police began an inspection of the area, sealing the set off with yellow warning tape.
Arato walked out of the ruins of the institute building and slumped into one of the benches that sat here and there on the No. 1 Landfill Island.
Methode had purposefully destroyed all of the camera equipment to ensure she didn’t leave behind any data. Thanks to that, though, Lacia’s fight had also not been filmed.
“Where the hell did that hIE go?” Ryo growled, with more heat than Arato was used to hearing from him. Arato understood his friend’s anger. Right in front of their eyes, they had watched people be injured. If things had gone a little more poorly, people may have died. Yet they hadn’t been able to do a single thing to help.
“The cops are taking Lacia’s data to see if any crimes were committed,” Arato said.
Class 1 hIEs, who were capable of doing human jobs, always recorded data about what was going on while they were in operation. When an accident or crime occured, they would provide that data, along with information on the movements and actions of everyone around them, to the police for examination.
It would probably be a few hours before Arato got Lacia back.
“Thanks for saving me,” Arato said. “I owe you one.” If Ryo hadn’t been there to bring him to his senses, he wouldn’t have been able to do the little he had done. Besides, the whole attack had only happened because Lacia was there.
“I didn’t actually save you, Arato. You know that, right?” Ryo said. He drained the cola from a paper pack, leaning back in his chair. His face looked pained.
“Hey, you’re Ayabe, right? That was pretty dangerous, huh?” Ryo asked, deflecting the conversation.
The shoot was postponed. Each of the staff had jobs they needed to do, so everyone naturally drifted away. That was why Arato was left alone, sitting on a bench by the main road leading to the institute, when Ryo caught him.
“What’s the matter with you, Arato?” Ryo asked.
“I messed up. I made a huge mistake,” Arato murmured. The sky above him seemed so distant. He remembered the time that he and Lacia had looked up at the night sky from the school roof. At that time, he had felt like his world was expanding. As if, through Lacia, he could go anywhere he wanted.
“I didn’t use Lacia like I should have,” he said. “There were all kinds of things I could have had her do to help.”
“That’s just the analog hack talking,” Ryo said. “I still think that Red Box is dragging you around by the nose.”
Arato remembered how happy he had been to get Lacia. He had believed in her. “So you’re saying I’ve been hacked, manipulated to feel these things?” he asked numbly. Even if he had been hacked, though, he was embarrassed at having upset his friend this much.
“These hIEs are too dangerous, Arato,” Ryo said. “Don’t you get what she’s doing? She’s twisting your control, weakening it. She can’t be held back by human rules.” Ryo made it sound like everything was Lacia’s fault, but he himself should have known that wasn’t the case.
“I wanted to control her. That’s why everything turned out like this,” Arato said.
“Is that why you went for this crazy ‘boy meets girl’ plan?” Ryo scoffed. “I thought you had at least a little more sense than that, Arato. You’re painting a target on your back for the Antibody Network, or anyone else like them.”
“Why don’t you just come out and say that I’m going to get Yuka caught up in all this too?” Arato growled. “I’m scared too, you know.” He stood with a violent movement, shoving away from the bench. Even w
ith everything that was going on, though, his heart still soared when he thought of spending his whole life with Lacia.
“She’s got her hooks into every single decision you’re making,” Ryo said. “This is life and death we’re talking about. If you pitch the illusion of a happy lifestyle with an hIE, there will be people who follow in your footsteps. Humanity and human society itself would be hit with an analog hack, all according to the plan of whoever is behind this all.”
“I’m sure this isn’t going to impact all of humankind,” Arato said. Still, he couldn’t quite laugh at Ryo’s pessimistic prediction. During the attack on the Industry Promotion Center, his heart had been moved by the fight of Kengo and his comrades against automation. If things kept going on the way they were, those same kinds of people, the people who loved the human world, would feel hatred toward Fabion MG. And, honestly, Arato didn’t think their anger would be misplaced.
Ryo gritted his teeth. He was looking in the direction the sea breeze was blowing from, out at an old artificial island with a ferry dock that had been destroyed during the Hazard. The place had been blocked off since the disaster, and there were rumors there had been a factory for killer robots there.
“Arato, don’t you feel like you’re being pushed to take all this responsibility you can’t actually handle?” Ryo asked. Ryo was smart, almost too smart, and his words hit right at the heart of Arato’s uncertainty. “I’m pissed because whoever’s behind this is taking advantage of your good points, Arato. Do you think this Red Box, Lacia, is going to hold back when it comes to the methods she uses to manipulate people?”
Arato felt like he had been led astray by relying on Ryo’s mental capabilities at a time like that. If he didn’t stand up for what he loved, it would be the same as running away. “I know it’s easy to say I’m an idiot who doesn’t think about my own future,” Arato said. “But the fact is, no one can say exactly what’s going to happen down the road. We’ll never get anything done if we just keep focusing on the worst case scenario.”