by Satoshi Hase
While he was in the hospital, adults he had never met would come and check how he was doing. After dozens of adults went in and out of his hospital room without a shred of empathy in their eyes, Ryo finally realized why they were coming: they were coming to see the results of the explosion. In other words, Ryo himself had been the target. He also discovered that the same adults who had tried to kill him were frightened of his honest and easily-manipulated little sister.
Ryo couldn’t handle it all, so he pushed Shiori’s care onto Arato after the incident. It wouldn’t have surprised Ryo to hear the same “What the hell are you doing?” that he had thrown at Arato earlier coming out of Shiori’s mouth, directed at him.
He decided to leave reading Watarai’s message for later. With the incident at the airport, things were being set in motion. Ryo knew that, as soon as he’d read the message, he’d also need to make a move.
After the nightmare, he didn’t feel like rolling over and going back to sleep. At times like that, he found it best to fill his brain with information until he calmed down. It didn’t seem like he would need anything to eat soon, either, so he activated his terminal pad. Based on the information he had gathered in the terminal, he constructed a relationship chart of the main players in MemeFrame.
As a company, MemeFrame had been plagued by problems right from the start. The ultra high-performance AI that ran it, Higgins, was more intelligent than all of its five thousand employees put together. Due to this circumstance, any department that could get a direct response from Higgins would always perform the best in the company, regardless of the actual capabilities of its members. All pretense of a system tracking the performance of company employees had collapsed.
“Show me the movements of the people from the Tokyo Research Lab after the incident at the Chubu International Airport,” Ryo ordered his terminal. Ever since the explosion, he had been following the movements of MemeFrame and any related industries. It was a matter of life and death.
He would never be able to forget his days in that hospital. In a sense, his life had started within the walls of that hospital, while outside, the entire world was full of people he’d never be able to trust again.
From that moment, he had thrown away all his hopes for the future. He would try something new every once in a while, just to test his own abilities, but he would always drop whatever it was soon after. Ryo became a stranger to his own family. In his mind, he knew that there was no reason anyone would have tried to kill him aside from his connection to MemeFrame.
A large, frozen lump had formed in his chest, and refused to melt through all the intervening years.
A little white puppy came and wrestled playfully with Ryo’s feet.
“Bright, c’mere,” he said. The puppy looked exactly like the one in his dream. He had actually adopted the puppy he’d met at the hospital, but it had died in an accident after. This new one was an aIE — an animal Interface Elements. Bright wagged his little tail so hard, his whole white body wiggled back and forth. Ryo had tweaked its behavior based on his own memories, so its movements may have been exaggerated compared to the real thing.
“...All these machines we make are just afterimages of something else,” he murmured. “But it’s us humans, the ones who actually represent reality, that are in danger of fading away.”
The puppy just looked up at him, chin raised, waiting for him to pet its head. When he was younger, just after the real puppy had died, Ryo had wanted desperately to preserve that habit from the original.
Big, black eyes looked up at him. Eventually the aIE realized this wasn’t what Ryo wanted, and instead started waddling cutely toward its dinner bowl. As a machine, it obviously didn’t need to eat. It was just part of the thing’s routine. Watching it go through the motions was nothing more than a reminder that the original was dead.
“Enough. Stop,” Ryo growled. Hearing a system command, the white puppy sat down and entered standby mode. Ryo wondered if a person could go insane, living with machines so perfectly automated.
He checked his pad terminal, which was blinking again; it was a message from Arato. Apparently, he had been suspended for two weeks for driving without a license and was in big trouble with his dad. Even after everything that happened between them, Arato was still giving him regular updates on how he was doing. It didn’t matter how much distance opened between them, the hands of best friends could never be torn apart. That was the exact reason Ryo had been so afraid when Lacia had appeared in his friend’s life. He was still afraid.
He had no right to say the things he’d said to Arato. Unlike Arato, he hadn’t done anything for his wounded sister. His attack on Arato had been hypocritical. It was his fault that his sister had been left alone and gotten herself caught up in a conflict between factions, all because of the distance Ryo Kaidai had created between himself and his family.
“Sorry I’m such a horrible brother, Shiori,” Ryo murmured. He could never be like Arato. That was one of the reasons he depended so much on his best friend to be there for him.
***
Ever since the incident at the Chubu International Airport, Arato Endo’s days had been full of anger; all of it was being directed at him. First, the police had filed charges against him for switching a fully automatic vehicle over to manual mode and driving without a license. Then, of course, Ryo had been pissed about what happened to Shiori. The auto car had been a rental, so the folks at the rental company had yelled at him. It had been Methode and the mercenaries who shot at him that had done it, but on paper, all the responsibility for the vehicle’s destruction was his. Finally, when he had gotten home, Yuka had heard about Shiori getting hurt and was bawling her eyes out. She had always looked up to Shiori.
Arato had tried to take her along to visit Shiori in the hospital but, when he tried to contact the hospital to set up the visit, he had gotten a message back saying she was refusing visitation.
Yuka had made him kneel on the floor with his back straight while she gave him a lecture. “Obviously she wouldn’t want anyone to see her when she’s all covered in burns,” she said.
At school he had gotten a dressing down in the guidance office, along with two weeks of suspension. The airport police had passed the case over to the police who had jurisdiction in Arato’s hometown, and they came by for some heavy questioning. In the end, he got brought in to family court.
“Two hours of adventure, two weeks of cleanup and regret,” he muttered. Of course, if Lacia hadn’t overwritten data like she had, he wouldn’t have gotten off nearly that easily.
Lacia was doing some calculations next to him. “Including fines and reimbursements for the car and airport gate, you owe a total of 450 million yen,” she said.
They had hopped on a slow train together, and were headed somewhere far away from home.
“Lacia, I think I need to stop just going where life takes me,” he said.
Their destination was the final stop on Arato’s pilgrimage of people pissed off at him. His father had called for him to come out to the artificial city near Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture, where they were doing experiments involving next-generation urban environments.
Her messy, chestnut hair rustling, Yuka peeked up at his face. “Are you actually re-thinking your life choices?” she asked. Even his incredibly selfish sister was lecturing him. She had been sniping at him ever since the incident.
“You know,” she said, “some of that 2 million yen we had to pay for compensation from our family bank account was supposed to be for my clothes and snacks.”
“No it wasn’t!” Arato growled.
Arato was still a minor, so the request for compensation for the Mercury Benz had gone to his legal guardian: his father. Any parent would fly into a rage if they suddenly got slapped with a 390,000 yen fine, along with the compensation charges.
“Please don’t worry,” Lacia said, looking apologetic. “I will work to repay your debts, Arato.”
“That makes me feel like some
sort of pimp,” Arato mused.
“Even if everyone in the world sees you as my pimp, I do not think of you that way,” Lacia said.
“That’s not reassuring. I haven’t earned a single penny off of you!” Arato yelled.
“Arato, keep your voice down,” Yuka hissed.
Arato covered his face with his hand and looked up at the roof of the train. If an underage kid told their parents they had picked up a 450 million yen debt but not to worry because they could cover it, there wasn’t a parent in the world that would let that slide. But it wasn’t like Arato could explain that the car he was driving had been shot up by a PMC and hit by some unknown power wielded by an hIE. MemeFrame was trying to keep information on Methode under wraps, and even the PMC must’ve realized they had gone too far, since they were also keeping their mouths shut on the airport incident. Yuka was right to tell Arato to keep quiet.
The train came to a stop. Beyond the station platform, Arato could see the artificial concrete city spreading out around them. The city sat on the ruins of a new town, constructed during the 21st century. With population decline, the original had been left a ghost town. Now it was being used as the site of an experiment, testing next-generation city environments. Though the station itself was a remnant of the original town, this new city, from its greenery to its dull white and gray buildings, looked fake to Arato’s eyes.
“We have arrived,” Lacia said. She was the first of them to stand, and she started to reach for their luggage on the ground.
“At least let me take these,” he told her, hurriedly grabbing the bags himself.
“Aren’t you excited, Arato?” Yuka asked.
“Unlike you, I’m not here to play around,” he sighed. “I’m here to get a lecture from Dad, remember?”
“Well you did drive without a license and bust into an airport,” she pointed out. “You’re lucky you even made it out alive. There are all sorts of rumors going around my school because of you.”
Arato wasn’t the only one impacted by the incident from the other day. “Sorry,” he said. Stepping onto the platform, he felt as though he was stepping back into a previous era; a cleaner, purer time.
It was mid-May, and already feeling warm outside. Lacia was in a sleeveless dress. Arato couldn’t take his eyes off her pale skin, which seemed to shine in the sunlight.
After the police had finished grilling Arato and he had returned home, Lacia had laid a plastic sheet in the living room, expanded her massive device, and re-painted on the skin that had been lost from her upper half during the fight with Methode.
By that point, Arato had already forgiven her for leaving him behind and heading home. The sight of her back, covered with skin that had melted and rehardened, made him feel like the half a day’s worth of lectures he’d gotten didn’t measure up to what she had been through. Plus, it would have been difficult trying to explain to the police where the massive burns inflicted on her had come from.
“Is everything okay?” he asked.
Lacia drew close to him to whisper her response in his ear. “There is no need to worry. I still have surplus skin material available.” With that said, she walked ahead to catch up with Yuka. Halfway there, she paused and turned back to Arato as if she had just remembered something. “Thank you for your concern,” she said. “But I assure you I am a much more simple machine than you think.”
The station was completely empty. Since it was fully automated, the only person there was the station manager. There were only around thirty regular staff members working full-time on the experimental city, and no one besides the staff had any reason to use the platform. It had probably seen less than a hundred customers total.
After passing through the unnecessarily imposing station building, the three of them stepped out into a station area that had obviously been created with much larger numbers of commuters in mind, too. The bus platform was long out of use, and the timetables and signboards had all been removed. A private vehicle was illegally parked in the bus lane, as if it was no big deal.
A familiar face appeared from the stopped car. “Hey,” Ryo said, stepping around the automatic car to wait for them. He had told Arato that he wanted to check out the experimental city, so he had come as well.
Nothing had been fixed since Ryo had yelled at him in the hospital, so Arato apologized again. “I’m really sorry for everything,” he said.
“I haven’t forgiven you or anything,” Ryo said. “But sitting around stewing over that is a waste of time.”
Arato was just glad Ryo had come. Once the four of them were together, they took off walking into the city, where the emptiness of the city streets was stark. Paved roads and walkways of concrete tiles followed the gently rolling terrain, with apartment buildings placed at regular intervals along them. Inside of the original new town all vehicles were required to be autonomous, so the guard rails along the street were delicate, with a focus on form rather than function.
From the other direction, they saw a middle-aged woman carrying a plastic shopping bag stuffed with apples. That number of them must have been heavy. As they watched, the contents split the bottom of the bag and rolled out. A young boy with wide eyes walking near the woman ran over and bent to help the woman collect the fallen contents of the bag. hIEs were always helping humans like that.
Looking to his side, Arato saw Ryo make a dumbfounded face. Arato remembered the day he’d met Lacia; he and his friends had seen an hIE helping an old lady on their way home from school. It was strange to think that had been a month and a half ago.
“I know, I know. It’s an hIE,” Arato said. “I’ve been living with Lacia long enough to tell the difference.”
“They’re both hIEs,” Ryo spat.
“I guess I sort of expected something like this,” Arato said. “You remember Mikoto, the hIE that got destroyed during the attack on the Oi Industry Promotion Center? She was the mayor of this city.”
The entire city was full of normal hIEs and hIEs playing the role of human citizens. It was a massive simulation used by the Next-Generation Social Research Center for many experiments. Their long-term goal was apparently to create a city that was completely automated and automatically monitored, requiring no humans whatsoever. Despite all that, there was still a slim chance the middle-aged woman in the jersey whose bag had torn was a human.
“That lady has a hair accessory, see?” Ryo pointed. “That means she’s one of the hIEs playing a human. That accessory is actually a mini-computer with a pretty powerful AI in it.”
“Huh, she seemed really human to me,” Arato said, impressed.
“That just shows how accurate the simulation is,” Ryo said, explaining as they walked. “The hIEs playing humans here send in requests and complaints to the government just like human citizens would. The mayor, Mikoto, takes their comments and makes plans on how to respond to their concerns. Then, she has the hIEs who aren’t playing humans work according to those plans. The solutions from the government are translated directly into a reality for this society. I’ve got to hand it to Professor Endo — he never does anything small.”
As they all headed deeper into the experimental city and took in the sights, the feeling of everything being artificial faded.
“That’s how they got this experimental city running so much like a normal city,” Ryo continued. “Mikoto also takes complaints or requests from society regarding having hIEs do human work. She works a response to those comments into how the hIEs do their jobs. By repeating this process over and over, hIEs can eventually automate just about any service. The ‘human’ hIEs here even make comments on the way this city looks. Actually, they just put in a request for a new park.”
So even the hand-crafted feeling of the city was automated, Arato thought. The beauty of everyone helping each other out, such as the boy picking up the groceries the lady had dropped, was a product of these automated plans.
But Ryo seemed completely unimpressed by the heartwarming scenery of the city. �
�They’re still picking these things up!” he yelled, and then brought his foot down right next to the woman’s hand as she reached to pick up an apple.
Unlike a human, who would have flinched away from almost having their hand stepped on, the hIE didn’t miss a beat. It was strange enough to break through the illusion of humanity and reveal the machinery underneath.
Ryo looked back at Arato. “Get this through your head, Arato. All these things do is follow the instructions given by their behavioral clouds,” he said.
The mistrust Ryo felt toward him ever since the incident with Shiori weighed heavily on Arato’s mind. Despite that, he reached down and picked up one of the apples for the woman. It was fake, but reproduced so perfectly even the texture felt right. “It’s MemeFrame — your family’s company — that’s programming the hIEs to help humans out, isn’t it?” he asked. “I’d like to think that whoever decided to make them act nicely must have had good intentions.”
There’s no way a person who programmed hIEs to help humans did so for an evil purpose, or so Arato thought.
“This whole ‘being helpful’ thing is just a way to improve the optics,” Ryo said. “They want people to project compassion onto these things; to see the good side of humanity in them. That way, if you go to attack one, it’s like you’re attacking good will itself, and it puts a psychological burden on the attacker. All the companies that make behavioral clouds for the hIEs make them nice as a defense mechanism.”
Ryo turned his back on the scene of hollow, heartless compassion. “If you keep using Lacia, it’s gonna mess with your head even worse than this,” he warned.
“I just think it’s fair to have a little gratitude toward anyone who does something nice for you, no matter who they are,” Arato said stubbornly.