by Satoshi Hase
“Come to think of it,” Arato said, pausing, “you didn’t really jump in at any point last night when I was talking with my dad.”
“I do not believe your father enjoys the presence of an hIE in his home,” Lacia said.
“What?! Really?” Arato was dumbfounded.
“Yes,” she continued. “There was the possibility that Methode had followed us here, so I did a sensor sweep of the area. All the other staff members have hIEs in their homes, helping with their housework.”
Arato remembered that the hallway outside the apartment had been cleaned; an hIE must have taken care of it. Lacia had done her best to clean up the dirty apartment, as well.
“Well, I guess I didn’t really introduce you properly,” Arato said, and then caught himself. “I mean, not that kind of introduction.” From the way he had said it, someone could have misinterpreted him as saying he hadn’t introduced Lacia as his girlfriend. Arato blushed. Looking into her light blue eyes and imagining a long-term relationship with her, Arato couldn’t stop his heart from singing.
“Well, while we are in this city, please find an opportunity to introduce me in a way that will satisfy you,” Lacia said, seeing him off with a bright smile. Arato could still feel the awkward sense of distance between them tingling.
Outside the apartment, Arato saw ‘human’ hIEs walking toward the station. Obviously the hIEs didn’t have any real jobs to go to so, for simulation purposes, they commuted to the train station where there was a special room for them to wait until ‘work’ time was over. They were all in a hurry to get to their ‘jobs,’ so none of them stopped to speak to him.
“They sure are detailed, though,” Arato commented to himself.
An hIE playing the role of an elementary school kid came running up, a backpack dangling from her shoulders. However, there were almost no actual child-sized hIEs in the world, so instead this ‘child’ was just a mature hIE wearing childish clothing.
“Good morning,” the girl greeted Arato politely. Despite her kiddy outfit, she had a certain sense of style, and the way her school backpack pulled at her shirt made it difficult to keep his eyes off her chest. From what Arato had heard, all the clothing used by the hIEs in the city was donated.
Beyond a small park near the apartment, there was a clean road. A garbage truck was coming along, with a normal hIE helping a ‘human’ hIE to throw a particularly hefty garbage bag into the back. It was strangely satisfying for Arato to observe such human activity taking place here, like what he would have seen around his own house. Having experienced a world that didn’t need humans the night before, Arato had found it a bit too peaceful.
Suddenly, a loud crash made Arato duck down. It sounded like something massive had fallen to the ground, so he looked up at the apartment building.
“Somebody! Call an ambulance!” a woman screamed.
Tension tugged at every muscle in Arato’s body. Lacia had just gotten done telling him there was the possibility of an attack by Methode. But, before he could expect any help, he had to know what was going on. He ran toward the source of the screaming.
He saw the problem near a tree that shaded part of the apartment where his dad lived: a boy, about the same age as him, was lying face-down on the ground. An impact had deformed his skull. His body was all broken angles, and it was clear he would never move again.
Arato couldn’t breathe as a scream lodged deep in his throat. Then, he noticed that there was no blood flowing from the body. Through the breaks in the outer skin, he could see artificial muscles that looked like bunches of cords.
“He’s an hIE...” Arato muttered to himself. It was almost as if the hIE had jumped down from the apartment. “No way,” he said, shaking his head at that thought. “Why the hell would an hIE ever commit suicide?” Suddenly, Arato felt a presence behind him.
“Well, you wouldn’t see it under normal circumstances,” an unfamiliar voice said.
Turning back, Arato saw the owner of the voice; it was a tall, slender man standing there. His hair was slicked back, and there was a severe look in his eyes. He appeared to be about the same age as Arato’s father but, from the way he carried himself, Arato assumed he was a VIP.
“Do you work here?” Arato asked. Then he rushed out an introduction. “I’m my dad’s— uh, I mean, Kozo Endo’s son. I came with a friend to see today’s experiment.”
“I see, Dr. Endo’s son,” the man said. “Well then, I have a question for you since you seem to sense that something was off in this suicide. How much do you know about hIEs?”
“I know they aren’t human,” Arato said. It was such a moronic answer he blushed.
The sharp-looking man stroked his chin as if he had just encountered something amusing. “All right, let’s follow this suicide back to the behavioral control cloud,” the man said. “It’s a bit of a journey, but I believe it’s the best way to discuss the truth of the situation. You see, to us in the 22nd century, the word ‘cloud’ is a vague term referring to types of data and programs. But it was originally intended to indicate services that could easily link up software, development platforms, and hardware over a network.”
This man, who Arato had never seen before in his life, was turning out to be a pretty good teacher. “These days, every single process our computers handle is connected to the network,” the stranger went on. “We don’t really think about the fact that all the programs we’re running are being run off of the cloud, rather than just within whatever computer we happen to be interacting with. Take a look at that hIE: the decision to jump didn’t come from within. It was just following orders it received through the network from a computer more powerful than itself,” the man explained.
A large number of hIEs were gathering around the spot where the suicidal hIE had fallen. The cloud controlling them on invisible strings must have been superb, though, as none of them showed any chaos or confusion.
But Arato noticed something strange. “Wait, these hIEs are still moving. So that means the computer giving them orders already knows about the suicide, right? Is everything going to be all right with that?” he asked.
The man narrowed his eyes at Arato’s simple question. Before answering, he crouched down and took the head of the suicidal hIE in both hands. He lifted it, thumbing its eyelids open to check the artificial eyes, while its body hung awkwardly below a broken neck.
“You’re asking if the computer that keeps track of the data on the hIEs... or, no, even Higgins, the AI running the Action Adaptation Standard Class, is aware of the suicide? That’s a good question; one that touches on the very essence of this incident,” he said.
The man giving Arato a lecture while examining the corpse of an hIE was a strange scene. But, despite how complicated the subject was, the man never had to stop to think of how to say anything. He obviously knew everything there was to know about the subject.
“In order to understand this unusual situation, you have to first understand how hIEs internally utilize the data they gather,” the man continued. “All the data gathered by every hIE’s sensors are sent to their behavioral cloud, where the data is processed. At the same time, information about how the owner was using the hIE is attached as meta-data to this information, and spread across the network.” The thin man’s eyes glinted as he checked the broken hIE. He had a charisma about him that made Arato want to keep listening to what he said.
“What do you mean the data is ‘processed’?” Arato asked. “That’s a little vague.”
“The metadata is connected with the actions of each hIE,” the man explained. “The most important point of processing is the AASC created by the behavioral control cloud itself — that’s that Action Adaptation Standard Class I mentioned earlier. If we get too far into talking about how Red Boxes work there’s too much jargon for you to follow, so we’ll just keep it simple and say that the base point of all the data that humanity is using for our behavior control programs is ‘how are people using their hIEs.’”
&n
bsp; Setting down the hIE’s head, the man took a thin, pen-shaped brush tool out of his suit pocket. Apparently no longer interested in the scene of the suicide, he instead pointed the brush at the ground near his feet and sprayed a tinted black dot onto the old concrete.
“In order to improve the efficiency of cloud services, they are set up to accumulate large amounts of data and process it all at once,” the man said. “This processing normally just consists of tagging, extraction and sorting. It does not include judging or verifying any meaning behind the data, as that would place too large a load on the processing. Therefore, you could say that the behavioral control cloud doesn’t engage in the intellectual activity of ‘knowing’ anything. That gives us the answer to your question: yes, the behavioral cloud ‘saw’ the suicide, but it doesn’t ‘know’ about the suicide. However, since this situation was an emergency that required things like calling an ambulance, the AASC opened a shortcut to provide pinpoint directions to hIEs in the area. That’s why the ‘human’ hIEs are moving and reacting to the suicide already.”
Arato looked around and, just as the man had said, he saw dozens of ‘human’ hIEs looking at the site of the suicide with worried expressions. The thought that there wasn’t a single real human among them, that they were just puppets on strings being instructed to react to the suicide like a human would, made his skin crawl.
“Your father, Dr. Endo, has said that a world in which hIEs perform every bit of work we humans currently do will be a world in which humans will no longer have anything but free time left,” the man said. “But, as I have said, the world we perceive is not the same as the world perceived by the hIEs. For example...”
“...In order to improve their own quality, many hIE behavior control clouds are directly connected with clouds that provide services for humans,” the man kept rambling on, apparently unconcerned with how disturbed Arato was. “Human-facing services have been around for over a hundred years, and there are massive amounts of data taken from humans and programs for processing that information. You could say the amount of collected data is like the depth of this ink.”
He continued spraying ink out of his brush on the same place, where the small spot on the concrete was gradually growing. As the amount of ink being sprayed onto the spot increased, the dot of black became more and more defined and deep.
“Whenever a human makes a request to the cloud, both the request itself and the data that was prepared to respond to the request remain in the cloud,” the man continued. “Thanks to that, commonly-used processes accumulate a huge amount of data, while the rest are left largely sparse.”
He took the brush tool and made a few other dark dots at various positions on the ground. “So these darker, more focused points develop in various fields,” he explained. “And, it seems that clouds developed to cover these fields are starting to erode human society.”
“Wait, it’s a human?” Arato said, looking at the ink points the man was continuing to spray, which had begun to form the vague outline of a human body.
“Inevitably, humanity will begin to see itself in the cloud,” the man continued. “The more memories of human desires gather in the networks, the more a human shadow begins to emerge from it all. A hundred years of that, and suddenly the clouds have become interfaces all too proficient at linking humanity with a world beyond our imagining.”
The thought of all that data piling up for a hundred years blew Arato’s mind. He suddenly thought of Lacia, and how easy it was for her to read his every expression. Thinking of her as an overly sensitive interface somehow made sense, and he felt like his world had expanded once more.
“The basic nature of hIEs is to overlay the information they receive from the cloud with the reality they perceive,” the man said, pointing at the hIEs still watching them from a distance. “We call them ‘interfaces’ because they are machines that give the computational processes of the cloud a human form, and draw as close as they can to humanity.”
He continued, directing Arato’s eyes to the hIEs forming a crowd around them, pointing to one after another with his pen-shaped airbrush. “Just as a printer takes the data for letters and turns them into actual letters on a page, or as sound reverberates through a speaker, hIEs output the data they process as actions by a humanoid robot. That’s all they are: output devices. So, let me ask you this: how do you think this AI the hIEs have — this AI that far surpasses human knowledge — perceives the world?”
Arato only ever thought of hIEs as machines that converted data to reality, but he wondered how Lacia would respond if he asked her how she saw the world. That sense of wanting to know was less of a real scholarly interest and more the curiosity of a high schooler.
“I don’t know how something smarter than us sees the world,” Arato said. “But I think even things that are only human in form have the ability to move our hearts, and I think that can have meaning for us.”
He could hear the siren of an approaching ambulance. It was only coming to satisfy the reactions of the ‘human’ hIEs. Even knowing that the hIEs didn’t ‘know’ about the suicide on a fundamental level, Arato couldn’t fight down his uneasy feeling.
The man was watching Arato with a wry smile. “I see. So we’re the ones meant to perceive meaning in the hIEs,” he said.
The ‘human’ hIEs guiding the ambulance all wore desperate expressions, identical to those real humans would wear under those circumstances. Humans didn’t even need to worry about accidents anymore; there were robots who could do the worrying for them.
“So, why did that hIE jump, then?” Arato asked. “Was there some reason it needed to commit suicide?”
“That is the question,” the man agreed. “Normally there shouldn’t be any command routines in a behavioral control cloud that would lead to damaging an hIE. I don’t think it’s connected to this hIE’s role here in the experimental city, either.”
Even as the man spoke, something else fell in front of Arato; a pair of eyes met his on the way down. With a dull, dry thud — a sound almost too comical for the situation — a second body hit the pavement, rebounding just a little before coming to rest. Again, Arato heard a woman scream nearby.
Arato felt like screaming himself, but couldn’t. Numb from seeing the face of the falling hIE, he stared down in shock at the body. A second hIE had thrown itself off the building.
The man who had taught Arato so much about the city looked up at the apartment veranda, one eyebrow quirked with interest. “A second, huh? I see. That means this definitely wasn’t a coincidence,” the man murmured.
Even as they both looked up, a third hIE was climbing over the wall around the veranda on the seventh floor of the apartment. It didn’t seem concerned that anyone below could see it as its skirt slid up, exposing its thighs before the whole body tumbled over the wall and fell. With a dull snapping noise, it hit the ground.
“Dr. Endo is a man who gets machines to do interesting jobs, even though some humans would prefer that he didn’t. He was the one who pushed for Higgins to make things for itself in MemeFrame, as well,” the man said, and then looked down at Arato.
“I haven’t introduced myself yet, have I? My name is Ginga Watarai. I worked under Dr. Endo when he was conducting his joint research project with MemeFrame. Thanks to some good fortune, I am now the director of research at the MemeFrame Tokyo Research Labs.”
One after another, robots with human bodies were throwing themselves from the apartment, each one landing with a loud, dull thud. Human forms were falling like raindrops, human faces splitting open on the concrete. They were eerily silent as they fell, piling up on the ground in front of the apartment. It was such a bizarre scene, Arato felt like he was going to lose his mind.
Watarai turned his back on the nightmare, completely ignoring it as he continued to speak to Arato. “I also happen to be Methode’s owner,” he said.
Arato felt like the ground was rumbling under his feet, as tension tightened the muscles in his neck. Memorie
s of his meeting with Shiori floated up in the back of his mind. “Is Methode doing this?” Arato asked, terror and anger robbing him of his ability to stop and think for even an instant before charging right in. “If you know so much about hIEs, you should know what she’s capable of.”
“Oh, I know what Methode has been up to,” Watarai said. “How about you? Do you know what Lacia has been up to?”
Arato wanted to break something. He wanted to break everything. In his memories, he could still hear Ryo shouting at him in the hospital.
The dull thudding of the falling bodies rose until it sounded like a pounding storm. Arato could even feel the ground shaking as, one after another, hIEs rained from the sky. Looking back, he saw a hellscape of broken human bodies.
It wasn’t just there, at that apartment. Looking around, Arato could see them jumping from apartments all around the area. The higher the apartment, the more human figures Arato could see pouring over the verandas. It was almost as if they were all racing to see who could hit the ground faster.
There were also hIEs fighting each other to escape through the entries to the apartments. They, too, appeared to be racing; competing to see who could run away the fastest. All of them were wearing the hair accessories that marked them as ‘human’ hIEs.
“You two should run, too!” One of the hIEs saw Arato and yelled at him. “They’ve all gone crazy!”
Watarai continued to speak to Arato as if nothing was happening around them. “You don’t understand anything about what’s going on. You should return Type-005, Lacia, to me.”
Then, above the constant sound of falling bodies that had Arato’s hair standing on end, he heard an explosion. Looking toward its source, he saw that it was no simulation for the experiment; there was flames and smoke pouring from the veranda of one of the apartments.
It was the apartment where Arato’s dad lived.
“You bastard!” Arato shouted. In his eyes, the man who had introduced himself as the lead researcher of MemeFrame looked like a demon.