by Satoshi Hase
It was a basic tenet of fair human relations to judge everyone’s actions equally regardless of their nationality, personality, race, political affiliation, etc. Despite that, when an hIE moved the heart of a human, it was immediately declared to be an analog hack. Even though Arato could understand the reasoning with his head, that didn’t mean he accepted it in his heart.
He handed the fake fruit back to the hIE. As he started to follow Ryo, Yuka came running up and showed him one of the faux apples. “That lady’s pretty much human,” she said. “She gave me this as a thank-you.”
“So anyone who gives you something is a human, huh?” Arato asked.
Yuka split the inedible fruit with him. She wasn’t always able to understand what was going on around her, but she did really worry about him when it was obvious he was troubled. Behind Yuka, Lacia hovered protectively.
“This place is a lot lonelier than I would’ve thought,” Arato commented. The original new town had been built to house fifty thousand residents. Just walking through it took a while.
Lacia spoke to distract them from the journey. “It would require an immense electricity investment to regularly power enough hIEs to make the city appear lively. Due to the amount of money already going into this experimental city, all expenditures are strictly controlled,” she explained.
Now that money had entered the conversation, Arato could understand why the city didn’t look very new. He could tell at a glance that the solar panels and outdoor lighting was all well used.
“90% of the hIEs here are reclaimed units gathered by request,” Lacia continued. “If an owner tires of their hIE, it is difficult to simply discard it. Unlike a used car, most customers are not interested in taking in someone else’s used hIE, so many are given to reclamation efforts such as this.”
“Come on, don’t talk about ‘discarding’ hIEs. It doesn’t make me feel great,” Arato said. Even if it was true, hearing Lacia talk about it so casually sent a stab of pain through his heart.
“I had a feeling you would respond that way, Arato,” Lacia said.
It had only been a week since Shiori was hospitalized. Arato would have liked for time to pass a little more slowly so he could catch his breath. “Well, yeah,” he muttered.
Counting both the ‘human’ hIEs and normal hIEs in the town, there were about twenty thousand units. But, from a distance, Arato couldn’t tell this automated city apart from any normal human city. It was as hard to tell the difference as it was to tell Lacia apart from an ordinary human by sight alone.
About five minutes’ walk from the station there was a big shopping center, and beyond that was the Smart Control Center where Arato’s dad and the other staff members worked. Aside from that location and the monitoring towers used during experiments, the rest of the town was only for experimental use.
The staff members all lived in an apartment five minutes away from the shopping mall. After Arato and the others made their greetings at the control center, they were led over to the apartments. There was apparently going to be a big experiment the following day, so everyone was busy getting ready for it.
In the experimental city, the staff could recreate incidents that could possibly occur in human society and recreate them using data they had gathered. They could then observe the changes in the actions or mood of the ‘human’ hIEs in response to the incident.
In the past, the impact of various events and incidents on human society could only be gauged by collecting data after the fact from those who had been involved. However, since the artificial city comprised entirely of AIs and hIEs, it was possible to essentially stop time within the city. Thanks to that fact, it was possible to gather complicated social data in realtime as each incident happened, something that would be impossible in the real world.
According to the staff member who led them to the apartment, they were planning on carrying out one such large-scale experiment the next day. Apparently they were going to simulate an incident in which the city hall would be blown up in a terrorist attack. The aim would be to study the effect of the city administration being unable to respond while the city is threatened by a major incident.
The plan had been decided after the destruction of Mikoto the previous month, and most of the human research staff were behind it. The staff member told them it was exciting to see how the ‘human’ hIEs reacted to things; almost like watching a live drama play out. Many of the staff apparently enjoyed the feeling of watching human lives play out from a position far above them. Thanks to this, even though they were told their father wouldn’t be returning to the apartment until 8:00 PM, Arato and Yuka were hardly bored.
“Hey Arato, what do you think will happen when mysterious explosions start popping up tomorrow?” Yuka asked. She was on the veranda, gazing out at the nightscape of the hIE city and eating ice cream she had bought earlier from a nearby shop. Apparently she had only heard part of the explanation from earlier that day.
“They’re just going to be messing with that hIE data,” Arato said. “It’s not like they’re actually going to blow anything up.”
Their father’s apartment was on the 18th floor of the tallest building in the city. The apartment had two rooms, along with a dinette set and kitchen, and it was painfully obvious that someone was living there. Luggage was awkwardly stacked in the corner of the room, and Lacia started cleaning things up as soon as they walked in.
“That reminds me,” Arato said. “Dad doesn’t use an hIE, does he? He could at least borrow one to clean up his room.”
Yuka came back in from the veranda to throw away her empty ice cream cup. There was no trash can, so she threw it into a 60 liter trash bag.
Having experienced how convenient an hIE was ever since Lacia had come into his life, Arato had been wondering one thing: “I wonder how come we never had an hIE?” Thanks to the Endo’s lack of an hIE, it had never really clicked in Arato’s head that Kozo Endo, his dad, was a scientist specializing in hIE research until Lacia came along. With their mom dead and their dad always staying away for work, Arato had always taken care of the house. It would have been much easier if there had been an hIE to do it for him.
“So you’re saying you didn’t like cooking for me or buying me snacks?” Yuka pouted.
“I spoiled you like crazy,” Arato replied.
The city at night was oddly quiet, considering the number of lights from the houses they could see. According to Lacia, it was difficult for AIs to recreate realistically lively city sounds.
Suddenly, the lights in the room flicked out, and everything around the three of them was plunged into pitch darkness. There was a metallic creaking as the old door opened in the darkness. Arato turned to look at who was coming in.
A middle-aged man was standing in the entryway, with a shopping bag dangling from either hand. Light was shining in from the hallway outside the apartment, and the glow from behind made the man look shorter than he really was. The man’s face had a detached look that made his age hard to place, and his lips were twisted in a small smile as if he was thinking of something clever.
“I’m home,” he said. The man — Kozo Endo — was as unfathomable to his children as ever.
Lacia had prepared their meal, but it was mostly all ready-made. There were only small amounts of fresh foods on the store shelves, along with some artificial and frozen ingredients. There wasn’t enough to make anything fancy. For the first time in a long while, the Endo family sat down together around the dinner table. The meal consisted mainly of fried rice and soup from a powder.
Their father never did any housework, so he didn’t contribute to the meal. He just ate it. His children were used to this, though, so it didn’t surprise them.
Arato was on edge the whole time, waiting for his dad to start yelling at him. He hardly tasted a thing. But his father just kept spooning fried rice down — he wasn’t very good at using chopsticks.“I guess Ryo decided to go out to eat?” he asked.
They had asked Ryo to jo
in them, but he had declined.
“Dad, you didn’t do any cleaning, even though you knew we were coming to visit,” Yuka complained. She seemed surprised that no effort had been put into preparing for their visit, despite their father not having seen them for three months.
Arato was afraid if he spoke his dad would notice him and start tearing into him, so he kept out of the conversation.
Their father turned his attention to the new face at the family table. “You’re the hIE Arato picked up, right? Come sit under the kotatsu with us,” he said. There was nothing in the room but the kotatsu — a heated table with a blanket under it — a clothes rack, and a bookshelf, so Lacia had sat on the floor next to Arato.
“If I join you, it will be crowded,” Lacia said.
“Come to think of it,” Kozo said, “ever since this hIE showed up, you’ve been getting up to all sorts of stuff, haven’t you, Arato?” Arato figured this was it, and sucked in a breath. His legs, under the kotatsu blanket, were trembling with tension. “Your time as a student is precious,” his dad said. “Make sure to use it the best way you can.”
Apparently finished talking, their dad returned to eating. He said nothing about Arato’s unlicensed drive, or paying for the car, or Arato’s suspension, or anything about the whole airport incident.
Somehow, Arato felt disappointed. “Is that all?” he asked.
“Come on, Dad, it’s two million yen!” Yuka added.
“You do what you feel you need to do,” their dad said. “I trust you, Arato.”
Arato was taken aback by that declaration, while Yuka just sighed. “You’re going way too easy on him. Ever since Lacia showed up he’s been hot and bothered every day,” she muttered.
Their dad just laughed at that. “So you’ve been analog hacked, huh? Well, just don’t go too overboard with her,” he said. Apparently their father, a hacking specialist, had given his approval of Arato’s relationship with Lacia.
The first time Arato had shown Lacia to his dad, the old man had been visibly surprised. Compared to that, now he was taking it all in stride. Neither Arato nor Yuka could really understand all of their father’s feelings, but they could at least tell that he really did believe in Arato.
Emotions warred inside Arato. He felt a crushing debt of gratitude to his father, but all he could find words for was a pointless comment. “You were really surprised when I first picked Lacia up,” he said.
“I was,” their dad agreed. “At that moment, I honestly started believing that people or objects could be connected by fate. I never knew I was such a romantic.” He suddenly stood and walked over to the fridge to grab himself a beer, as well as some juice for Arato and Yuka. Apparently, he wanted to have a toast with them.
The sweet drink didn’t really go well with the fried rice, but Yuka threw hers back in one gulp while Arato nursed his. He could tell his father wanted to say something, so he tried to keep the conversation going.
“How many hIEs here are playing human roles?” he asked.
His dad jumped on the question. “We need a sufficient population to gather data on how changes spread through society, so we have about twenty thousand hIEs total. Of those, the ‘human’ units make up seventeen thousand, and the normal hIEs are the remaining three thousand. In a normal city, even if they have a fairly high ratio of hIEs to humans, it never goes above 20%, so we wanted to get close to that for our experiments,” their dad explained, waxing eloquent when it came to his work.
“For our experiments, we often try out different ratios to see how a higher concentration of hIEs would impact society,” he went on. “For example, we’ve tried a 50/50 mix with three thousand each of ‘human’ and normal units. We also tried an extreme version with the humans only making up 25%, but the results weren’t very reliable,” he said.
Yuka looked jealous. “If there’s that many hIEs, they would take care of everything for us, wouldn’t they? Sounds like heaven to me,” she observed.
“If we drop the ‘prejudice’ settings of the AIs in the ‘human’ hIEs, no matter how much we raise the ratio of hIEs to humans, it doesn’t really seem to impact the lifestyles of the ‘humans.’ On the other hand, if we turn the prejudice settings up, it causes all kinds of stress to society, even with a normal mix of humans and hIEs. When humans start thinking they’re being controlled by the machines, it causes backlash in human communities on a large scale,” their dad responded.
Arato agreed with his dad’s insight. He didn’t think groups like the Antibody Network would ever fade away.
“I don’t think you’ll see the ratio of humanoid robots that can steal work from humans grow more beyond 20% in your lifetimes,” their dad continued. “Right now, their only role is to secure the labor needs of our aging population; propping up the bottom of the population pyramid. Two hIEs to every ten humans is plenty for that job.”
To Ryo or Kengo, Arato’s dad may have been a person to respect, but to Arato himself, he was just a mystery.
His dad got a distant look in his eyes. “No matter how much people hate it, this world is moving steadily toward more and more automation. Thanks to automation, three hundred years after the industrial revolution, we humans have finally made things efficient enough to buy ourselves some free time. It’s thanks to automated production processes that our stores are overflowing with all the products they have. People can tailor music, pictures, even complex games to their own personal tastes, thanks to software that automates all the complex processes needed to alter them. It is only thanks to automation that humanity has become free,” he said, almost reverently.
Their father was apparently very good at eating while he spoke. His spoon never paused, and he spoke around bites of fried rice and slurps of Chinese-style soup. “To save time, humans learned to outsource their work. So, the ideal tool for a human is something that is able to understand what the human wants while still doing the work of a tool,” he continued. “But, historically, no such tool existed. So, instead, humans made other humans slaves, or they gathered their comrades and made companies and organizations to split the work. Of course, the intent behind it all was for humans who wanted more time to use other humans as tools to do their work for them.”
“Your mad scientist is starting to show, Dad,” Arato cut in. “I can sort of see what you’re saying about slaves, but the way you’re talking makes it sound like humans only decided to make friends or start societies because they didn’t have an hIE or an AI around to do their work.”
Standing at the edge of humanity, their father apparently saw humanity’s place in the world being eroded as some kind of freedom. “Well, that’s how it is,” their dad said defensively. “I mean, don’t you think we’re living the human dream right now? Our tools are easier to use and more responsive than ever before because they want to draw closer to us. Humans and tools may seem different to your eyes, but we’re all riding together on the rail that leads to more free time. Up to now, they haven’t been able to cover all our needs, so humans have felt unsatisfied with life. But with the changing of our technologies and methodologies, we’ve moved ahead and changed the human world. Now, everything we humans can do can be automated by either hIEs or AIs.”
“Don’t talk about slaves while we’re eating,” Yuka said grumpily. Sometimes Arato could see a reflection from his old memories of his mother in Yuka.
“I don’t think folks like the Antibody Network will ever agree with your way of thinking, Dad,” Arato mused. Ever since meeting Lacia, Arato had started thinking more deeply about things. It was only because of this tendency that he felt he was able to talk with his dad about the subject his dad loved most. If thinking more expanded your world, Arato’s world had certainly grown exponentially.
“You’re mistaken,” Kozo replied. “Even they want administrative services to be automated, deep down inside. These people send massive amounts of requests and complaints to the government. The only way the government could respond to them the way they’re e
xpecting is if it was automated.” Their father made a strange face, as if he was expecting them to laugh at that. It may have been a joke, but Arato didn’t think it was something he could laugh about. Still, he felt like he had come one step closer to understanding his father’s smile.
“Well, don’t give them any excuses to come bomb this place, too,” Arato said. “We wouldn’t want you getting hurt.” Of course, the Antibody Network already had any number of reasons to come blow that city up.
But Arato’s dad wasn’t looking at him; his eyes were still gazing off into the distance. Seeing that expression, Arato felt like everything about his father — the room that was cluttered but didn’t seem to be lived in, his father never coming home to them, and things relating to their family relationship — was all starting to make a little more sense.
“No matter what the question is, you’ll never know if your answer was the optimal one until after the fact,” Kozo said. “When really important choices hit you, you may not have the luxury of time to weigh your options, so always be ready to choose decisively.”
“Dad, you’re going way too easy on Arato,” Yuka complained, summing up her thoughts on several subjects with one sentence.
For the first time that evening, Arato and his father both wore the same expression — a smile of chagrin.
“Allow me to accompany you,” Lacia said, watching Arato head toward the entryway. The old apartment wasn’t equipped with a home system, so there was no AI monitoring the temperature inside. Overnight, it got fairly cold in the rooms. There was only one outlet in the room with a wireless charger attached to it, so Lacia had spent the night sitting in the corner of the room near the charger.
By the time Arato had woken up, his father had already left for work. And after everything they had talked about the night before, Arato wanted to see the automated city with his own eyes.
“I just want to take a walk by myself,” he said. “Stay here with Yuka. She’s still asleep.”
“Understood,” Lacia said with a gentle smile. “I will await your return.”