by Satoshi Hase
“There’s actually a favor I’d like to ask of you, Arato,” Shiori said, firming her resolve. “Would you please return Type-005, Lacia, to our company?” she asked, watching Arato’s expression closely. Not only did she want to witness for herself the depth of the wound she was opening, she also wanted to see just how strong Lacia’s influence on him was.
Arato’s response was a simple but sincere one. “Does Lacia belong to MemeFrame?” he asked.
“She’s one of the hIEs who fled our Tokyo Research Lab on the night of the explosion in April,” Shiori admitted.
“Oh,” he murmured quietly.
Lacia was silent, just sitting there by his side.
“You aren’t surprised by my request?” Shiori asked.
“Of course I am,” he said. “But Ryo’s been telling me from the start that I shouldn’t get involved with Lacia. This actually explains it a bit. I don’t get why he didn’t just tell me straight out, though.”
The bitter image of her family continuously fleeing played out in Shiori’s mind. “My brother is apparently tired of dealing with company matters,” she told him.
Arato tapped both hands together in rhythm over and over, apparently agitated. He wore his emotions so obviously Shiori couldn’t help but pick up on them. She imagined it would be quite simple for anyone to make him happy, even if they weren’t a childhood friend like her.
“Oh, don’t worry, Arato,” she said. “Things aren’t that bad in my family.” As she casually lied, she drew his attention by pushing a plate of snacks toward him with an invitation to help himself. He followed the approaching snacks with his eyes, then reached out for them with a wide grin. The fact that Shiori got caught up in his mood and felt a little burst of happiness herself made her blush.
“I’ve often thought it would be nice if we humans had tails like dogs, but I believe there are a few people who already do,” she said. She could almost see Arato with a tail, making loud swooshing whumps as it wagged back and forth against his chair legs.
But then Arato’s face grew serious again. “I’m not going to hand over Lacia,” he said. “Sorry, but you can’t just say ‘she’s ours’ and think that’s that.”
“Arato, Lacia’s ID number is LSLX-22S99176LF, correct?” Shiori asked. She felt a pang of guilt in her heart at the thought of doubting someone precious to him, even if it did mean getting one of her rivals out of the way. Still, she wanted to face this head on, so there would be no regrets if it ended up ruining their relationship.
“If we assume that Lacia altered her own data and stole this number, we must then imagine that an actual unit exists that is the real owner of the number,” she continued.
Arato didn’t seem to understand what Shiori meant, and looked to Lacia for help. The machine, with her well-kept light purple hair, swiveled to face him and added a further explanation.
“There are two methods for verifying an hIE’s ID number,” Lacia told him. “First, it can be transmitted through radio signals, generally for crime prevention. The second way is to confirm the number physically imprinted on the hIE’s frame. It is impossible to counterfeit the physical ID number imprint without access to exact specification data, so it should be impossible for another unit to bear the same ID number as me. In such a case, one of us would obviously be a fake.”
And Arato very quickly arrived at the realization Lacia’s words guided him to. “Oh, so you think Lacia’s a fake, Shiori?”
After he listened so attentively to her honest feelings, the sight of Arato passively following along with what Lacia said put Shiori on edge. “Arato, you need to stop trusting in that Red Box so much. You are being controlled,” she said, venting her frustration.
“That’s what Ryo keeps telling me,” he said. “But I’m seriously not as dumb as you guys seem to think I am.”
Shiori could feel the conversation turning into an argument, so she bit back her response.
Arato, though, couldn’t seem to let the conversation die. “I know I’m a bit dumb. I’ll admit to that. But I’m telling you, I’ve thought this one through,” he said.
“You’re a kind person,” Shiori said, “but you’re being taken advantage of.” Even she knew how to manipulate him, and she was nowhere near as cunning as a Red Box. “Lacia doesn’t think about the world the same way we do,” she went on. “Is there really a reason you’ve thought of why you need something like that by your side forever?”
She unfolded a paper-like terminal she had prepared on the clear tabletop. It displayed a girl with brown skin. The girl was different in every way from Lacia, but she had a cute, childish face with big, round eyes. “This is the original body that bears Lacia’s ID number. She was ordered to be a replacement for the daughter of a rich man in Egypt,” she said.
Lacia looked like she was about to say something, so Shiori plunged ahead with her explanation. “Many people order hIEs to be replacements for spouses or family members who passed away,” she said. “In those cases, images and videos of the person before they passed away, as well as data from their home systems and hIE user data, are utilized to create a custom behavioral control cloud, so that the hIE can imitate the deceased perfectly.”
“Oh,” said Arato, only mildly interested.
“Replacement hIEs are meant to be as perfectly human as possible,” Shiori continued. “So the system commands normally used to control them as tools are frozen. When Lacia got kidnapped, the supplier wasn’t able to use her tracking function, correct? I’m sure Lacia picked this ID number specifically because it came with a useful built-in restriction that she could take advantage of.”
“Okay. But when I asked the service counter at the supplier, they said I was listed as the owner,” Arato shot back.
Lacia had chosen the number knowing that it wasn’t currently assigned to an owner. The meticulous planning that had gone into this made Shiori’s stomach turn.
“Due to various circumstances,” she explained, “this unit was donated to a hospital only a few months after she was delivered. The hospital was low on manpower, and didn’t have the time or resources to care whether one of their nurse hIEs had a legitimate ID number or owner.”
Apparently the owner had remarried, and his new wife wasn’t crazy about the idea of having an hIE that looked like her husband’s dead daughter. So, they had decided to let the hIE fulfill one of the goals the daughter had before she passed away and sent her to work as a nurse at the hospital.
“What’s her name?” Arato asked.
“What?” Shiori was so surprised by the question she had to ask him to repeat it.
“We’re sort of connected by fate, don’t you think? So I’d like to at least know what to call her,” he said.
“Marina. Marina Saffron,” Shiori replied.
Arato’s eyes softened. “Got it. Well, it’s good that she’s happy where she is now. I get that hIEs don’t have hearts, but it’s nice to have a positive ending to a dramatic story like that,” he said.
It was him saying things like that that made it impossible for Shiori to dislike Arato. Her face felt hot, so she reached for some tea. “Arato, I know this is an improper request, but would you please consider it?” she asked.
“By ‘it’, you mean handing Lacia over to you?” he asked bluntly.
“MemeFrame is divided right now,” she said. “It seems one of the factions has been acting to recover Lacia and her sisters in the utmost secrecy.”
According to General Manager Suzuhara, Ginza Watarai from the Computer Faction was dangerous. There were even rumors that he had orchestrated the explosion at the Tokyo Research Lab for some reason. If the rumors were true, he had gone too far.
“And you can’t do whatever it is you need to do without Lacia?” he asked.
“She may have recorded images of the culprit behind the explosion at the research labs. Without the actual unit there to confirm the authenticity of the images, though, we won’t be able to use them to pin down whoever it was,�
�� Shiori said. “We need her, Arato.”
“Okay, I can understand that,” Arato said gently. “But this whole thing is an internal struggle in the company, right? There’s no reason you should be involved in this, Shiori.”
When she had come asking for help, Suzuhara and the others had gladly given her the push she needed. These people, hanging their hopes on her prioritized human relationships and morale, supported her admittedly unpredictable actions. She felt blessed to have people like them taking a 10th-grader like her, with her naive sense of justice and weak connections, into their confidence.
“This is just the way I am,” Shiori said. “After my brother gave up, it fell to me to think of the future of our company.” When her brother had suddenly given up the fight as a child, Arato had become her only ally. However, if their friendship wasn’t enough to decide the matter, she would just have to rely on her own capabilities.
Shiori assumed the conversation was over, but Arato suddenly spoke again. “By the way, what did you mean by an ‘improper’ request? What part of it was ‘improper’?” he asked.
Shiori’s cheeks felt like they had just caught fire. It was at that moment that she realized why she had really come there. Her actual request was, ‘Please throw Lacia away and become my ally again.’
***
Just as he had told Shiori, Arato was only half-surprised by her request. After how big of a thing the Oi Industry Promotion Center terrorist attack had become, he had been preparing himself a bit for Lacia’s original creators to come looking for her. He just hadn’t expected the request to come from Shiori.
Once he had said good bye to Shiori, Arato walked with Lacia over to Shin-Koiwa Station, and then asked her to stop. Yuka looked up to Shiori Kaidai, so he didn’t want to have this conversation at home.
He wanted to ask Lacia what she thought he should do, but he had just been called out by Shiori for being controlled by Lacia.
Since it was a request from Shiori, Arato felt like he needed to make this decision as Lacia’s owner. Back when they were all in grade school, Arato had acted as Shiori’s older brother. She often came to the hospital back then, whether because she was lonely or because she was worried about Ryo, who was an inpatient there. Whenever she came, Arato would look after her in place of Ryo, who wanted some space between himself and his family. He also wanted to come up with his own answer to counter her scolding him for being dumb.
“Did you know that you were built by MemeFrame, Lacia?” Arato asked. “You could have at least told me that much.” He watched from the auto-car rental spot as an automatic truck pulled away from the supermarket in front of the station, carrying groceries. As long as the location was within a kilometer you could get an auto-car to pick up your groceries for you, so the place was always crowded around dinner time.
“I apologize for withholding information,” Lacia said, stopping on the spot. Her words startled Arato. “I desired for you to be my owner, Arato,” she confessed.
“You can’t just drop something like that on me out of the blue,” Arato said. “Besides, hIEs don’t have hearts, right?” He figured that she must have been mistaken. After all, it was Lacia herself that had explained to him the clear difference between humans and hIEs.
“I do not possess a heart, but you told me you trusted me, Arato. I require an owner like you,” she said. Lacia’s brows drew down, and the cloudy look on her face sent a pang stabbing through Arato’s heart.
He remembered Methode’s attack, and what Ryo had said to him then. “Because I’m just dumb enough to stick with you, right?” he asked. There were certain things that hurt a lot more coming from Shiori, a member of the opposite sex, than they had coming from Ryo, a fellow male. For example, having her tell him that his affection for a female hIE was nothing but an analog hack was so painful, it made him feel like he was going to lose his mind.
All the people coming out of the south exit of Shin-Koiwa Station looked at Lacia as they headed toward the nearby residential district. Among them, a few of the girls glanced at Arato, but only very rarely. He was wearing clothes Lacia had picked out for him again. He wondered when he had started leaving so many things to her, and strangely, couldn’t quite remember.
“What am I doing of my own volition anymore?” he murmured to himself. It felt a bit embarrassing to compare himself to the hard-working Shiori.
Among the human figures walking against the backdrop of the setting sun, 20% were hIEs. Of the people who looked to be in their twenties or thirties, 40% were hIEs. The population of Japan had been falling since the 21st century, and had already reached 80 million. Use of hIEs had spread to cover the labor shortage, so most of the folks driving home with groceries were hIEs, too. Living with Lacia had taught Arato all the slight differences that allowed him to tell them apart from humans.
In the highly automated city, it almost seemed that it was the humans who were just being kept around to give meaning to the machines. In comparison, Arato thought Shiori was doing the right thing in trying to cleave out her own place in the world.
“That is something you must decide for yourself, Arato,” Lacia said, leaving the choice to him, as she tended to.
Desire welled up within Arato. When you got right down to it, the reason Lacia had been by his side since April was because he wanted her there. If he didn’t want her to get stolen from him, he would need to do something about the original body that Shiori was having shipped to Japan.
But, with his mind caught up, Arato couldn’t just press ahead in that direction. It got caught on a single doubt: was this really his own decision, or was he deciding that it needed to be done because that was the conclusion he had been cornered into?
It had been Shiori’s guidance that was making his head such a mess just then. In other words, even though he knew he was easy to manipulate, it was much easier for a girl to wrap him around her finger than even he believed.
Lacia was just standing by, watching over him quietly. His brain couldn’t take much more of just standing there in silence.
“Please let me stay by your side,” she said, and moved closer to him.
Arato didn’t know if his image of her was correct or not. But he did know that he wanted to stay with her for a long time. If a little hang-up like this drove them apart, there was no way their relationship would survive for any amount of time.
“But that means we’d have to mess things up for Shiori and MemeFrame. We’d be fighting against Ryo’s company,” Arato said.
Arato had made Lacia come with him to save Kengo, and he had rushed desperately to save her when she was kidnapped. The only thing different about this situation was that the opponent was Shiori. If he couldn’t overcome this hurdle, that would just be a sign that his feelings were too weak. It was a painful thought.
“I just need to think about this a little,” he said.
“There is no time for that,” Lacia said. “Shiori Kaidai is not a fool. She would not have revealed so much information to you unless her plan was already close to fruition. Close enough that she is already trying to prepare you for after it’s all over.”
“Wait, hold on,” Arato said. “Are you saying that you think Shiori already has her hands on that unit with the same number as you?” He covered both eyes with his hands. They were still in front of the station, so this drew a few stares. Only then did he start to worry that someone might be eavesdropping on their conversation. Unable to stand still, he started walking.
“Shiori Kaidai and those she works for are suspicious of me,” Lacia pointed out. “I believe they are worried that I would come and destroy Marina Saffron if I found that they had sent one of their staff to Luxor, where the hospital is. They are most likely already having her carried to Japan.”
“Do we have any way to stop them?” Arato asked. Things were moving too fast. It was time to run first and think about what to do afterward.
“First, let’s consider what would happen if I were to be returned to MemeFrame
,” Lacia said. “Once they have a qualified service confirm that they have two units with the same ID number, we will both be sent to Stylus for an inspection. In that case, they would easily discover that I am not an ordinary hIE unit.” Arato noticed that this was probably the first time Lacia had admitted to being a Red Box.
“What happens after they inspect you?” he asked.
“It’s a legal gray area, but I think Stylus will return me to my creators — MemeFrame — should MemeFrame demand it. There are cases in which, when it is impossible to determine the basis for an AI’s actions, the rights and responsibilities for that AI are returned to the manufacturer rather than the owner. If that were to happen and you were to try and sue MemeFrame for my return, I believe that you would be silenced.”
Lacia was a product of the automated city, a machine no human could possibly understand. There was so much Arato didn’t know about her, like her goals, or why she wanted to stay by his side.
“Seems like you’re predicting my thoughts before I even have time to think them. Which one of us is the owner, here?” Arato asked.
“You’re a wonderful owner, Arato,” Lacia told him. “I believe you’re speaking of Shiori Kaidai already having the unit brought over from Egypt to compare our ID numbers, as well as my predicting that you would reject the idea of me undertaking that inspection, correct?”
Arato felt like she was deflecting him, but he couldn’t bring himself to press any harder, and Lacia’s explanation switched gears to the finer details of her plan. “When the ID service inspects the validity of a unit, they will always utilize the ID number. LSLX-22S type hIEs broadcast their ID number from a chip in our medulla oblongata. If we simply prevent the reading of this signal, as well as the number printed on the hIE’s frame, there will be no need to actually destroy the unit,” she said.
“Well, that makes me feel a little better,” Arato said. “It would be too sad for that kid, Marina, to be thrown away by her owner, have her identity stolen, and be taken to Japan, only to end up being destroyed.” Just saying it made Arato feel depressed.