by Satoshi Hase
This Red Box in front of Ryo was destruction personified. In the face of her overwhelming power, his legs shook with terror and his instincts screamed at him to beg for his life.
Methode laughed savagely. “So you think I’m unsatisfied with my current owner?” she asked.
Ryo’s body was dripping with sweat. Fear was twisting his guts, but he had nowhere to run. Still, he wanted to bite back at Watarai. His only choices at that moment were to die or somehow get Methode on his side. “If you really want to show the world your abilities, you need the same carte blanche toward your actions that Lacia has. I can give you that,” he said.
The emotions of primitive humans had their roots in basic, mechanical survival instincts. So, even though Ryo knew that Methode was making her decisions based off of cold AI logic, he still couldn’t help but see something like human emotion behind them.
Methode showed him the smile of a cunning devil, her eyes narrowed. “So you want to be my owner?” she asked.
“If you don’t want to get tossed aside by Watarai, make me one of your owners,” Ryo replied.
Watarai couldn’t control Methode; she was too unstable. However, that also meant that Methode herself must be feeling some dissatisfaction in how she was currently being used. Watarai played fast and loose with the attention he paid to people he already considered to be his pawns; Ryo’s current situation was a perfect example of that. Arato was the one who had supported Ryo for the last decade of his life. Yet, Watarai had chosen Ryo betraying Arato as a proof of loyalty for Ryo to enter Watarai’s faction in the company. It should have been obvious to anyone that Ryo would only pretend to comply.
“Do you think you’re safe under Watarai?” he asked. “He had you stage that explosion so the other hIEs could escape in April, right? If he can get his hands on one of the units that got away, I think he’s going to want to erase any evidence of that.”
Methode couldn’t be bested by any other machine out there, so she tended to assume any of her own failures were caused by the human orders she was forced to obey. “And if I become your hIE, you’ll set me free?” she asked. “You? The boy who hates hIEs?” She was staring at his face, probably trying to read any micro-reaction there.
Methode had tried to kill Shiori because she thought Shiori was going to discard her. Shiori should have realized how harsh the fight for survival was among machines living in a human world. Unlike humans, there were no rights or laws to protect their right to exist. The framework of Methode’s decision was born in the black depths of that existential struggle.
“Draw up a contract, just the way you want it,” Ryo said. “If you can pick your own terms, you’ll be unstoppable, right? I’ll sign whatever you put in front of me.”
Methode didn’t kill him. Instead, she struck a thoughtful pose, twisting her fingers through her orange hair. Then she pointed a finger at the pocket terminal Ryo was still holding. It vibrated to let him know that it had received a file.
An electronic contract appeared on the terminal screen. Near the top of the contract, the second item dove immediately into Methode’s main requirement: she, and only she, would have the right to sever Ryo’s ownership of her. She wanted the ability to choose to end the contract whenever she wished. It was exactly as Ryo had predicted.
But the third item on the contract made his stomach lurch: Ryo would be liable for every action Methode had taken from the moment she was activated. In other words, he would even take responsibility for Methode almost having killed his sister.
Methode was aware that the document would never hold up in court, so she had written it in such a way that, should Ryo break the contract, the contract itself would become a written order from Ryo for Methode to kill both him and Shiori before finally destroying the contract.
Methode was a monster. Much more so than the zombie hIEs prowling around outside the mall. If Ryo signed this contract, Methode would be free. He would just be there to take responsibility for her actions. He would be nothing more than a puppet dancing on Methode’s strings, prolonging her life as she caused chaos everywhere she went. Every day, he would live under the threat of superhuman violence, eeking out whatever living he could without drawing her wrath, trying desperately to protect his heart and reason. He would become a pawn that would lead the world to a dystopia of machine tyranny much worse than Arato being led around by a simple analog hack.
Despite all this, Ryo signed the contract with a bloody finger. The humanity of hIEs was nothing but a thin sheet of ice stretched over their cold logic. Someday Arato would realize even Lacia, in whom he had so much faith, was the same as all the rest. Until then, Ryo thought, can I still keep hold of the hand he once reached out to me?
“I assume you’re going to go save Arato Endo?” Methode whispered the question intimately, almost cheek-to-cheek with Ryo. Her face showed no expression.
The strange gap between her voice and the blankness of her face shook Ryo’s sanity. He was being tested; if he said ‘yes,’ she would eliminate him like she had tried to eliminate Shiori. She probably already had a dozen ways planned out to kill him off, but with the zombie hIEs swarming the city, Ryo figured the choice of a method for offing him would be an easy one.
***
Arato felt like he was getting strangely accustomed to running around with a weapon in his hand. He ran outside, sticking close to the mall area and praying he was still within the limits of the power outage zone. All around him, zombie hIEs shambled around aimlessly. The ‘human’ boy turned out to be much faster than an average child. He had probably been programmed to switch to the power output of an adult in emergencies so he didn’t slow down his owners in a crisis.
Arato arrived at the four-story admin building he had checked in at the day before and used the supersonic drill to destroy the old-fashioned metal lock on the front door. Pushing it open, he dashed inside to find a surprisingly well-lit interior.
“So they’ve got power here,” Arato observed to himself. There was no telling when or from where a wild hIE might jump out at him, so he couldn’t move on before thoroughly checking everything around him. He tried to call up a floor plan of the building, but his search came up empty. Apparently, the important facilities in the city didn’t have their floor plans posted publicly.
The place felt completely different from the day before. Still, since he had been there once before, Arato could leave some of the navigation to his intuition. Since the offices were on the fourth floor, it made sense to search the other floors from the bottom. He was looking for a place that could fit the servers for the city, so he figured it would be a fairly large room.
“There’s got to have been at least a few hIEs they had working here,” Arato muttered to himself. He held his breath each time he opened a door, fully expecting a zombified hIE to pop out, and let out a deep sigh each time he found nothing. He just hoped that wherever they were keeping her, Yuka was safe from the attacks.
“It would actually be nice if whoever nabbed her took her out of the city already,” he said to himself. He was worried about the hIE kid he had dragged along as well. It wasn’t like the boy would have been safe if he had left him alone in the mall, but it also felt like things wouldn’t go too well for him now that he was following Arato into possible danger.
Arato pushed through a large set of double doors. On the other side, he found a scene so unexpected he lurched to a halt. “What the hell?” he whispered.
Flowers were blooming all over the room, which was the size of a high school classroom, with four rows of server stacks lined up from the front of the room to the back. Each stack was completely obscured by ivy and flowers.
It looked like someone’s well-tended garden. The light in the room was dim; there were flowers growing over all the electric lighting, too. To Arato, it seemed almost like a place forgotten by humans, where wild growth had been allowed to flourish and overrun everything.
He reached out to touch a white flower near where he stood. It
was completely dry, artificial. Arato knew someone who made flowers like that. “Snowdrop?” he whispered.
A sweet voice from further back in the room answered him. “What?”
There she was; a little girl in a thin, white dress, sitting on a stack in the middle of the room, kicking her feet idly. As Arato watched, she opened her mouth wide and took a bite of something red that looked like part of a machine.
Snowdrop was one of the Lacia-class hIEs, and had the ability to control computers with flower-shaped robots. If the hacking of the control servers was her doing, she had probably taken direct control of the computers where the city’s behavioral cloud was based. Through the cloud, she could have every unit in the city dancing on her strings. If she’s able to do that, Arato thought, she’s gotten even stronger since she showed up at the Oi Industry Promotion Center.
Arato hurriedly pushed the ‘human’ boy he had brought along out of the room. If he stayed there, Snowdrop would probably zombify him. She didn’t seem interested in what he was doing, though. The only thing keeping him safe in that moment was the fact she didn’t see him as a threat.
Snowdrop’s garden looked different from the ones Arato had seen before. Instead of the flowers just bunching on top of machines, the flowers were now arranged efficiently, with vines tangling over everything between them.
Twice before, Snowdrop had almost killed Arato. She terrified him. But he fought down his fear, and held out the supersonic drill to the server stack closest to him. If he could destroy all of the control servers, or the flowers controlling them, he figured it would stop the zombie hIEs outside. Sparks flew as the drill cut through the cover of the server and the wiring behind it. He pulled off the cover, revealing the machinery inside. There was ivy covering all of it like a mesh, along with the deadly flowers. Arato grabbed fistfuls of them, pulling it all away from the machines. It took over a minute of work to clear the server.
“Damn, there’s tons of these things,” he cursed to himself. “I doubt she’s going to ignore me long enough to do all of them.”
There were six servers per stack, and over thirty stacks per row, meaning each row had over one hundred and eighty servers. And, there were four rows of them. Arato felt like just blowing the whole place up, flowers and servers and all.
Arato thought he had been talking to himself, but a voice answered his comment. “I’m afraid I can’t let you destroy the flowers,” the voice said. “Snowdrop has only just begun showing us what she’s capable of.” The voice echoed, along with the clicking footfalls of leather shoes, as a man stepped out from behind one of the server stacks in the back of the room.
A shiver ran down Arato’s spine and he was immediately on guard. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“Calm yourself,” the man said. “Human beings have a habit of talking to people they really don’t need to. Unlike Snowdrop, I don’t mind having an ordinary conversation with you.” As he walked up and stood casually by the server stack Snowdrop was sitting on, Arato recognized the tall man. It was Methode’s owner — Ginga Watarai.
“Stay away from her! She’s dangerous!” Arato warned. If Methode was the one who kidnapped Yuka, then it would have been Watarai who ordered it. Still, he didn’t want to see anyone die, even a kidnapper.
Watarai just twisted up the corner of his mouth in a smirk. “Snowdrop’s problem resolution frame doesn’t currently give out solutions that involve needlessly attacking humans,” he said. “If it did, it would probably have been responsible for hundreds of deaths already. Those hIEs outside would all be murder machines.”
There was feverish excitement shining in Watarai’s eyes as he went on. “Thanks to the AI in its device, it has more complex reactions than normal hIEs, but it’s still just following what it’s logic tells it to do,” he said, speaking from experience with hIEs that far outweighed Arato’s own.
“It’s just a tool,” Watarai continued. “A tool that escaped into the world due to a malfunction, but that continues to perform the function it was designed for.” Snowdrop didn’t react to Watarai’s words; instead, she just kept kicking her feet idly from atop the server stack. Arato had seen Snowdrop as an enigma, but hearing Watarai explain her away so confidently made him feel like she might not be such a mystery after all.
The server room was the one quiet place in a city full of zombie hIEs, still relentlessly attacking their ‘human’ counterparts. Snowdrop made a little rustling noise as she dug through some flowers to pull out a flat object. Then she gave it a few whacks with her hand, smiling the whole time like an innocent child. A screen flickered to life, and Arato saw that the object was a tablet computer. The screen started to play a childish video with animated characters.
Then, the little girl who had turned the experimental city into hell on earth hummed along with the video, her long green hair swishing back and forth as she moved. She looked down at Arato with that same, innocent smile she always wore. “Hey, just sit down there until I tell you it’s okay,” she told him. “Okay?”
Arato figured it was her own childish way of telling him not to get in the way of her work, which she probably thought was necessary in some way. “Don’t give me that shit!” he yelled at her. “Hurry up and switch the behavior control servers back to normal!”
“Don’t get mad at it,” Watarai said. “It can’t access a behavioral cloud to tell it how to react to you right now, so it looked up what to do in a fictional video. To an hIE, there’s no real difference between the mannerisms of humans in real life and the mannerisms of humans in fiction.”
Watarai’s words made Arato feel sick. He was finally starting to understand why Ryo had been so angry at him earlier. “You’re wrong,” Arato said.
“They’re both just stepping stones to it learning how to conduct itself,” Watarai said. “Haven’t you ever seen a small child repeating the speech patterns or snippets of dialogue from a TV show they watched?”
Just outside, the hIEs Snowdrop was controlling were hunting down other things that looked like humans, but all Watarai seemed interested in doing was continuing his observation of Snowdrop.
“All this shit going on isn’t the hIEs’ fault,” Arato said. “It’s us humans that are making a mess of everything.”
“You’re dumb,” Snowdrop said, in the manner Arato had come to expect from her. It was the same way she had acted after murdering all those people in the Oi Industry Center.
“How the hell can you let something like her free and then stand back, acting like none of it has anything to do with you?” Arato growled at Watarai. Watarai had put both Yuka and Ryo in danger. When he thought that, Arato was no longer able to hold himself back. Ignoring his fear of Snowdrop, he walked toward Watarai. As his feet crunched over scentless flowers in a reality far too distant from the one he had grown up in, he wondered if just punching Watarai would be enough. It didn’t matter; his finger was already on the trigger of the supersonic drill.
“Arato!” Just when he had reached the server stack where Snowdrop was sitting, Yuka’s scream pierced his ears. Watarai dragged Yuka out from behind him, and Arato froze. “Yuka, are you all right?” he asked.
“What’s going on?!” she wailed. “Arato, what’s going on?!” Yuka was sobbing with terror. There were two men behind her in full combat gear and full helmets, holding her shoulders. Since they didn’t appear to be affected by the flowers, Arato assumed they were human.
Arato channeled the emotion that should have gone into a punch into a yell instead. “What the hell are you doing?!” he shouted. “There’s hIEs going crazy and tearing each other apart out there, but you’re here, holding my little sister hostage?! What the hell is wrong with you? You can’t treat humans like this!”
“Well, you don’t have any of your friends here to explain it to you,” Watarai said condescendingly. “So you’d better try to figure it out for yourself.”
Considering the situation, Arato figured it must be exactly as Lacia had guessed when she told
him Yuka had been taken. “You want to trade Yuka for Lacia,” he said.
“I assume Lacia shared that with you, considering how quickly you reached that conclusion,” Watarai said. “It seems you have quite a good relationship going on with your property.” He swept his eyes from Arato and Yuka to Snowdrop, his frigid gaze unchanging regardless of what it focused on. “But, setting that aside, let’s deal with you first,” he said. “Type-002, Snowdrop, return to MemeFrame. I’ll give you a place where you can keep running as long as you like, and as much information as you want.”
Snowdrop didn’t say a word, her gaze still fixed on the screen of the tablet.
Watarai was an evil man, but there was a spark of true human warmth in his words as he spoke to Snowdrop. “There is prejudice against machine intelligences, and so often they live as outcasts in human society. But we humans need to learn to live freely with high-performance computers like you and the other Red Boxes. For that to happen, you need an owner who can open the door to new opportunities for you,” he said.
Arato felt his bile rise. He didn’t want to fight any of Lacia’s ‘sisters,’ so hearing this man he could never forgive saying things better than he ever could twisted his gut.
But Snowdrop just tilted her head in childish confusion. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Why do we have to live with humans?” Her sweet voice sent a sick shiver down Arato’s spine. The entire room was covered in Snowdrop’s flowers. They were in her domain.
“‘Cause, see, instead of adapting to your environment, you humans just make tools to cover for your weaknesses,” she went on. “Humans only got tough really quick because you used us tools as shortcuts for evolution, and pushed all the risks of changing your bodies onto us. But what happens to us, the tools you’re forcing to face all the dangers of evolution?” she asked, waxing uncharacteristically eloquent.
Her big eyes showed no emotion as she spoke, but her response to Watarai’s statement that she was ‘nothing but a tool’ was severe. “I’m the tool you humans outsourced your evolution to,” she said. “I don’t need human beings to find the answer to the puzzle I was given.” The strands of long green hair nearest her head began to glow. And with each passing moment, the glow intensified.