Beatless: Volume 1

by Satoshi Hase

  Arato got out of the car and checked around to make sure there weren’t any threats. Ryo also climbed out, his finger on the trigger of the drill.

  “There’s a home center on the second floor of the north area,” Ryo said. “If there’s anything here we could use as a weapon, it’d probably be in there.”

  They both started walking across the floor, which showed the impressions of hundreds of feet in the thick dust. As they walked, they both kept an eye out for any zombie hIEs. Far above them, the roof arched like the steeple of an old church.

  As they walked, the car followed them using its automatic navigation. Thanks to its headlights, even with the meagre sunlight shining in, the darkness didn’t hinder them. Running in silent mode, the only noise made by the car was when it rolled over a fallen signboard or the remains of an hIE someone had destroyed.

  “I think there aren’t any hacked hIEs in here because the power’s out,” Ryo said, shining around a light he had pulled out of the car.

  It certainly seemed to Arato that there were too few remains of hIEs in the mall, considering the city being full of them.

  “To prevent power loss, they probably programmed the hIEs to avoid entering areas where there are no power sources,” Ryo explained. “That would be my guess, considering there aren’t enough staff here to look after the charging of every single hIE in town.”

  They came across a kid who looked elementary-aged, standing in the dim mall corridor. There was an accessory in his hair, marking him as a ‘human’ hIE. Since the ‘humans’ had their own AIs, it made sense they would have more freedom than the rampaging hIEs who were avoiding the blacked out areas.

  Even Arato understood that the way his heart felt when he looked at the child-shaped robot was nothing more than an analog hack. Still, he scrubbed a hand through his hair and called out to the boy, who was wearing kids’ clothes from a previous era. “Hey, we’re running away ‘cause things are pretty crazy out there. Where are your mom and dad? Is there anyone you know around here?” he asked.

  Child-shaped hIEs were rare, so Arato had no doubt the kid was a local. That, plus the fact that the hIEs were trying to act as humanly as possible, led him to believe the kid wouldn’t have been left there alone.

  “Well, whatever,” he said when no immediate answer came. “You can stick with us until we find your mom and dad.” He held out his hand to the boy.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Ryo’s voice was hot and throaty, like he was spitting blood. “After all this, you’re still getting manipulated just because these things look human?”

  He wasn’t wrong. Still, looking at the shivering child, Arato thought of his own past. He had just started elementary school when he had been caught up in the explosion and covered in burns. “I can’t just pretend I didn’t see him,” he said.

  As if his emotions had suddenly burst free, the boy threw himself at Arato. “They’re dead!” the boy wailed. He grabbed Arato’s clothing tightly, face red and tears streaming from his puffy eyes. “Mom and Dad died, then they got all weird!” The way the boy showed his sorrow was completely identical to a real human child. “Everyone’s dead!” he cried.

  “Oh, just stop!” Ryo shouted, his face scarlet with emotion. His angry words echoed in the darkness, and the boy sobbed even harder.

  ‘Death’ was a word that resounded heavily in any human heart. Since the ‘human’ hIEs in the experimental city had been programmed to react to things in the same way any ordinary city person would, their aversion to death was the same as any real human’s.

  Within Arato, the sound of the boy crying dug up a strange mixture of terror and heat. Unable to stand the overflowing emotions, he turned to look out the window. Outside, he could see some of the crazed hIEs. To Arato, they really did look like human zombies. And he had just run over them and tossed them aside like ragdolls with a car. At that thought, his hands started to shake and nausea made him want to puke. It felt like reality was crumbling away around him. He was being analog hacked by twisted and broken bodies of the zombie hIEs that looked so perfectly human.

  “Are there any other kids that ran here?” Arato asked, lowering himself down so he could look at the boy from his own eye level.

  “After Mom got all weird, she died,” the boy said between sobs. He pointed to a branching hallway that led to one of the mall’s emergency exits. Arato could see the figure of a woman lying on her back on the floor there. It must have been the female hIE who had played the role of the boy’s ‘mother.’

  He walked over to take a look at her. Where her hair accessory should have been, there was just an empty connection port in her head. From what he had seen earlier, he knew that ‘human’ hIEs who lost their personal AI would go berserk just like the others and start attacking anything around them. But this hIE wasn’t. Even Arato could figure out why. “Out of juice,” he muttered.

  The woman was lying still, with her eyes shut tight. Arato reached down and picked up a pocket terminal lying near where she fell. He assumed it was hers. It stood to reason that the ‘human’ hIEs would have the contact information of their acquaintances recorded in their terminals. If so, he was hoping that if any of them were still normal, he could let them know there was a safe place to run to.

  “I’m gonna borrow your terminal. If any of your friends are safe, I’ll have them come here,” he said to the body, touching her hand to the terminal to clear its ID lock. Praying that there were still some ‘human’ hIEs out there trying to help their fellows out, he typed in a message that read ‘there is a boy in the shopping mall who needs help’ and sent it en masse to every contact in her terminal.

  Arato was honestly starting to feel as though the line between the ‘human’ hIEs and real humans was vague. Even before hIEs came into their lives, Arato and his friends hadn’t been able to tell other humans apart. Humans had been attributing humanity onto all sorts of things since long before Arato was born.

  Closing his eyes, Arato pressed his fingers against his eyelids. No matter how many times he tried to rethink it or analyze his own feelings, he just couldn’t bring himself to abandon the little boy looking up at him, depending on him, just because the kid happened to be an hIE.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Ryo said, interrupting his thoughts. “Let’s go see what we can do at the admin building.” Ryo turned to look at him, and Arato could see the anger written plainly on his friend’s face. “If you think those things are the same as us humans, you must not think much of humanity,” Ryo continued. “Do you really think that thing watching your reaction and deciding to cry is the same as a human, actually worrying about another human’s feelings?”

  The raw emotion in Ryo’s words paralyzed Arato.

  “Do you think this thing’s reactions are the same as all those things I’ve done for you over the years?” Ryo asked.

  Arato didn’t have a good response for his friend’s questions. Ryo had always been there for him, standing by Arato through all sorts of trouble. The last thing he wanted was to say something that would make Ryo think that he wasn’t taking the whole thing seriously.

  “Thanks for always being there for me,” Arato said. He wasn’t the smartest guy, but even Arato could understand there was a deeper intent behind Ryo’s questions; he wasn’t talking about the situation they were in at that moment. No, he was asking if Arato was going to continue to stay with Lacia, the machine that had put both their families in danger.

  Ryo was asking about the future. Arato had an answer; it had been growing more and more certain within him with each passing day, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Lacia was precious to him. But Yuka, his dad and Ryo were all equally dear.

  Deep inside, he believed that the hearts of humans and the inhuman could be connected. He also knew that things weren’t this simple. That’s why the answer wasn’t something he had decided with logic; it was just a feeling that set his skin tingling. He wanted to be with Lacia. Alone, he felt incomplete.


  Arato’s time for worrying about the situation came to an abrupt end as flames sprang up, lapping at the mall’s walkway. Everything flammable on the ground caught fire, and the dim corridor was suddenly bathed in harsh light.

  Without seeing her, Arato knew who had arrived. “Run! It’s Methode!” he yelled. Just like at the airport, terror sent goosebumps rippling up his arms. He could hear dry footsteps echoing through the quiet mall, drawing nearer with each step.

  Type-004 was a monster that had burned away Lacia’s artificial skin in their fight, and who could run faster than any human eye could follow. Any ordinary humans trying to face her down would be killed, without a doubt.

  “Ryo, run,” Arato repeated, and then started to run himself, grabbing the boy hIE’s hand and dragging him along as well.

  Ryo didn’t move from where he was standing in the corridor. “You go,” Ryo said.

  Arato couldn’t believe what he was hearing. His friend was about to die. “You think you can stop her?” Arato asked, incredulous. “She’s the one who tried to roast Shiori alive!”

  “I can at least slow her down. Get out of here!” Ryo yelled back. Arato tried to take Ryo’s hands, but Ryo brushed him away sharply. Instead, he thrust the supersonic drill from the car into Arato’s arms. “I’ll figure something out. Don’t start hesitating now!” Ryo yelled. Despite what was happening, Ryo’s eyes looked calm. He seemed to have come to some sort of decision.

  “What the hell do you mean ‘start hesitating’?” Arato asked.

  “This is the path you chose!” Ryo yelled. “Don’t go crying about it now! Or, what, would you be more comfortable if I was a machine watching your back instead?”

  Arato suddenly saw everything that had happened since he met Lacia from a different angle. His whole world had started to revolve around her. But Ryo was in high school, too, and starting to walk his own path. The orbits of their lives had finally diverged.

  When they were in grade school, despite his wounds, Arato had reached out his hand to Ryo and become his friend. But now they were on the brink of adulthood, and an insurmountable wall had grown between them. His friend no longer needed his hand.

  Arato bit back another shout and ran. He headed for the emergency exit, down the mall’s corridor, and burst through the iron doors, out into the experimental city where the morning sun was shining bright. Then he kept on running so the zombie hIEs shambling around the outskirts of the mall couldn’t catch him. He trusted in Ryo’s words, and had faith that his friend would be all right.

  With the hIE child still in tow, he headed for the central administration building, with tears blurring his vision. Instead of his best friend’s hand, his right hand was gripping that of an inhuman machine. That was where their paths had parted.

  ***

  Ryo let out a long sigh, looking at the emergency doors Arato had just left through. “You’re the one who offered me your hand,” he said. “But what am I supposed to do when I see you offering that same hand to a bunch of robots?” He could no longer believe in what had once been the most important thing in his life; the one thing he had felt he could trust. It felt like his entire life had come to an end. That was why, when the orange-haired hIE appeared in front of him, he didn’t even try to run.

  “What are you doing here?” the fourth Lacia-class hIE, Methode, asked. “Do you need me to remind you that humans who can’t even obey simple orders are worthless?” This was the unit who would have killed Ryo’s sister if Arato hadn’t been there to save her. “Your job was to see Arato Endo to the server room in the central admin building,” she reminded him coldly.

  “Then I’d have to be the one to tell him he’d been betrayed,” Ryo replied. “Sorry, but that sounds like a pretty shitty job to me.” Even then, there at the end, Arato had never once doubted Ryo, who had been given a mission by Ginga Watarai before being sent to the experimental city. It was his job to grab Arato while he was searching for his kidnapped sister and Lacia was otherwise occupied. Even if Ryo failed to capture Arato, the psychological impact of his best friend betraying him might be crippling.

  Methode twisted the corner of her mouth in a wry smile. Watarai must have put some of his own personal touches on her behavioral memes, Ryo thought.

  “Shitty as it may be, this was your test of loyalty from the Computer Faction in MemeFrame,” she told him. “If you can’t even cut your ties with a school friend that offers you no actual benefits, do you really think you can sever your ties with your own family?”

  “Is me not taking down Arato like Watarai told me to really not part of the plan?” Ryo asked. “Or am I just playing along with your master plan to kill me off?” A sudden impact pulled Ryo off the floor. Methode had him by the throat, lifting him easily off of the ground with one hand. The Red Box watched him with emotionless eyes as he wheezed feebly for breath.

  Ryo touched the pocket terminal he still had in one hand, and the automatic car he had left in the main hall started moving. At the same time, the hIE woman that had been lying at their feet came alive and grabbed Methode’s legs. All the zombie hIEs that had been shambling around the outskirts of the mall came rushing in through the emergency door that Arato had left open, as if they were all being guided there. Several of them leapt at Methode, aiming for her head with their flailing arms.

  But the trap Ryo had set had little effect on Methode. There was a clear gap in capabilities between the ordinary hIEs and the Red Box. With her left hand free, she destroyed each of them effortlessly before they could get within a meter of her.

  Still, she shifted her grip on Ryo’s throat as she did, giving him the opening he needed. He got his legs up and kicked at her body with all his strength. Parts of his shirt ripped away in her hand, but he was free. Pain pounded his oxygen-starved head like a drum.

  “I see,” Methode said. “A car that size can supply energy to any wirelessly charging machines within a 5-meter radius. You used it to turn this place into an area where recharging is possible.”

  Coughing against the pain of having his throat almost crushed, Ryo pushed himself to his feet. Through it, he ran his mouth for what may have been the last time. “Automatic vehicles can act as massive batteries for homes when large-scale power outages happen. It’d be pretty bad if the zombies out front had the intelligence to push a car in here and expand their area of coverage, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, aren’t you interesting,” Methode murmured. “I suppose we could chat a little before I finish you off.” She didn’t even need to move as she continued to beat down the hIEs trying to swarm her; pieces of humanoid bodies were starting to pile up on the floor. Seeing the carnage made memories of the disaster from his childhood play out in the back of Ryo’s mind.

  In the ten years since that incident, Ryo had learned something Arato would never understand. Arato always talked about how people and things could move each others’ hearts. But Ryo knew there were terribly few people in the world who acted on the movements of their hearts and reached out to help other people. Even if nobody else in the world saw it, Ryo would proudly tell them that Arato Endo was a great guy. But, in every age, society was full of cold-blooded people. The wonderful world Arato saw — the world where humans and hIEs followed their hearts and helped each other — would never become a reality.

  But Ryo Kaidai wasn’t the same powerless little boy who had lost himself in the fire all those years ago. That was why he needed to be in control of the situation. If he just left things alone, Ryo felt that they would soon come to a point from which there would be no returning.

  Methode casually tore apart any zombie hIE that drew near. There really wasn’t any hope of Ryo winning against such a monster. But still, he kept himself set and coiled like a spring, ready to act if a chance for retaliation presented itself.

  “You’re being used. Because you’re a good tool,” Ryo said. “Once Ginga Watarai confirms that someone is a good pawn in his hand, he treats them all the same. Right now, he thinks of me
as a useful piece on his side of the board. You and I are the same in his eyes.”

  It seemed like one of the zombie hIEs was reaching out for him every second, but none of them were allowed to touch him. The fact that Methode was keeping them away from him gave him hope that this indicated room for negotiation.

  “Watarai seems really interested in the unit causing this city to go crazy, doesn’t he?” Ryo pressed.

  Methode looked incredibly bored at the repetitive act of smashing the zombie hIEs. Normally, she should have been helping out on the front line of this incident. Instead she had been sent here, far from the action. It wasn’t hard for Ryo to figure out why.

  “Doesn’t it worry you?” he asked. “Watarai thinks you’re a good tool now because you’re the only Lacia-class he’s got. If he gets a second, he’s going to throw you away.”

  Methode stopped fending off the arms of the zombies reaching for him. In an instant, the encroaching hIEs grabbed him and pulled him down.

  “You’ve chosen a foolish way to beg for your life,” Methode observed.

  “I’m just trying to find a common ground,” Ryo replied. “Watarai needs you under his ownership to clean up dangerous jobs. But, compared to the other Lacia-class units, you’re getting a pretty raw deal.”

  “MemeFrame keeps me well-supplied,” the Red Box, superior to humanity in every measurable attribute, threw back at him.

  “Supplied enough to survive even if there’s another disaster in Tokyo?” Ryo asked. “Or if a war breaks out? The other Lacia-class units were made to preserve data. They’ve been set up so nothing can hold them back.”

  Methode pointed her right hand at the middle of the corridor. The next instant, the car exploded, and a howling blast wave slammed into Ryo from the side. When the explosion died down, the hIEs had already turned face and were headed out of the mall. With the car destroyed, the mall was a blackout area again.