by Satoshi Hase
“You should rethink things. You can’t win this, you know,” Watarai said, while still backing his way out.
Arato didn’t need to look to know that the hIEs under Snowdrop’s control were still pouring into the room. Every single one of the suicidal hIEs was now just a puppet dancing on Snowdrop’s strings. There were three thousand hIEs in the city without their own personal AI. In fact, since the ‘human’ hIEs who had lost their AI accessory also turned into zombies, there was no telling how many thousands were now under her control.
“Don’t worry, Yuka, I’m gonna get you out of this,” Arato said. His sister noticed the broken hIEs crawling toward her and started screaming. She, along with Watarai and the guards from the PMC, were surrounded in the narrow room by ten or twenty of the zombies.
Methode still hadn’t arrived, and Watarai was clearly upset. “The only thing waiting for you and Lacia is dystopia,” he raged. “You’re blinded by this love you’re projecting onto an object. Can’t you see the danger in what you’re doing, you moron?!”
Yuka, still restrained, started lashing out with her arms and legs. “Stop it! Everyone stop saying Arato is stupid!” she screamed in between sobs. “Arato’s just fine!” she continued. “It’s fine that he’s easy to control! It’s fine that he’s easy to understand, and it’s fine that he’s easy to get all flustered! You don’t know anything about him, so just shut up!”
They were all surrounded by zombified hIEs, as the echoes of dragging footsteps filled the room. And, in the middle of it all, Watarai and his men weren’t able to move quickly due to Yuka, their captive.
“Let Yuka go! If these guys catch you, they’ll drag you down and beat the shit out of you!” Arato yelled.
Watarai’s guards were firing off their tube-like guns to restrain the encroaching hIEs. They probably didn’t know how things were outside, so they weren’t exactly aware of the astronomical number of hIEs they were up against.
The zombies were coming for Arato and Lacia as well, flailing with their broken arms at the pieces of the broken server machines that were sticking out. Piling onto the server, the zombies pounded at it until, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, it was completely unrecognizable.
Arato could only guess the attacking zombies had seen a humanoid shape in the busted server. They seemed to attack anything with even a vaguely human profile.
“What’s taking you so long, Methode?!” Watarai shrieked, though his voice was quickly drowned out in the commotion of zombies pulling down server stacks.
The zombies wildly grasping for Arato and Lacia swung their arms dangerously close. Watarai and Yuka looked terrified, and Arato didn’t doubt that his own face reflected the same fear. Only Lacia seemed calm as she whispered encouragingly to Arato, “Our help has arrived just in time.”
The number of shadowy shapes pouring in through the hole in the wall increased even further. There was a chorus of loud roars as some of the new forms entering through the hole began to knock down any zombies nearby.
“Destroy the servers!” came a shout from the hole, where a group of ‘human’ hIEs, each with a pole or tool of some sort, were forcing their way into the already-crowded server room. It looked like a riot. Since strikes and protests were a part of human society, it made sense that the ‘human’ hIEs in the experimental city could recreate those kinds of movements accurately.
To protect their own lives, the ‘human’ hIEs relentlessly attacked their fellows, who had returned from the dead as zombies. Shouts of “Get him!” “Take this!” “Stay down!” and “We can end this!” filled the room. As Arato watched, the hIEs pulled down the server stacks and pounded them to pieces.
Machines, not humans, were taking up weapons and destroying other machines for their own sakes. Is this what people call ‘dystopia’? Arato wondered. He didn’t know the answer.
In moments, the zombies crowding around had scattered and the server stacks had thinned, giving Arato a good, wide view of the scene. A group of men, the very image of an angry mob, swung tools and wooden bludgeons at the remaining servers. They all wore different uniforms or outfits that reflected their various jobs and roles in the city.
To Arato, it looked almost too much like a real human mob. While the real humans in the room watched in stunned silence, Lacia turned to Arato with a smile. “This is all connected to what you did, Arato,” she said.
A well-built man was leading the mob of men and women attacking the server room. The leader had a boy on his shoulders; apparently, he was playing the role of the boy’s father. From his perch atop his dad’s shoulders, the boy pointed at Arato and raised his voice. Arato recognized the boy — he was the hIE child Arato had taken along with him from the shopping mall.
While prying himself free of the hands of zombified hIEs, Arato couldn’t help but call out once he recognized the boy. “Thanks! You really saved us!” he yelled.
The ‘human’ hIEs of the city were all working their hardest to carve out their place in the world, even if not a single soul outside the city knew or cared. But real humans were the same; only paying attention to the things closest to themselves.
“You’ve got this! Just a little more!” Arato called. Even though he was cheering on machines, his heart was moved. Tears welled up, unbidden, in his eyes. The truth of the matter was, there was no real difference between the zombie hIEs and the ‘human’ hIEs who had come to fight them off. However, call it simplicity, but Arato found it much easier to empathize with the machines that seemed capable of understanding him, and were acting to aid him.
In the experimental city there were a number of ‘human’ hIEs equal to the human population of any similarly-sized city, and they outnumbered the normal hIEs almost five-to-one. So, it wasn’t long before the zombies were overwhelmed by the crushing force of the superior ‘human’ numbers, and swept away from Arato and Lacia.
Among all the violence, Arato saw Yuka reaching out her hand for him. She was saying something. He couldn’t hear her over the noise and shouts in the room, but he could tell she was crying for help.
“Yuka!” he yelled, and reached out with all his strength. Their fingers were almost brushing when a sudden, powerful blow dragged Arato back; one of the zombie hIEs had grabbed him. The zombie’s flailing arm struck him hard in the head, and for an instant, his consciousness spun. While he was still reeling, Yuka was dragged beyond his reach. He wasn’t about to let anyone kill his little sister, though, so he waded into the crowd, trying to push his way through.
Just then, a tan-skinned hand reached out from over his head, and took hold of Yuka’s still-outstretched hand. Then, the owner of the hand pulled Yuka from out of the crush of bodies with superhuman strength. It was so unexpected, no one had time to react. Yuka’s savior was a female hIE wearing a ‘human’ hair ornament, who stood lit from behind by the thin shafts of sunlight shining in from the hole in the wall. She was standing on top of one of the few server stacks remaining upright, holding Yuka safely in her arms. Arato saw that she was wearing a nurse’s uniform.
“What’s she doing here?” Arato asked, recognizing her childish face and big, round eyes from an image he had seen before. It was Marina Saffron, the hIE with the same unit number as Lacia, who Shiori Kaidai was supposed to have picked up at the Chubu Airport.
He was too busy struggling with the surrounding hIEs to see Lacia’s face. Still, he had an idea of what had happened, and the thought made him happy. After Lacia stole this girl’s identity, Marina had lost her place in the world. But there, in the experimental city, none of the researchers cared where the hIEs they used came from. There, Marina would be nothing more than another hIE among the twenty thousand already active there.
Zombie hIEs were dragging their way into the row of server stacks where Arato and Lacia were, obviously looking to crush them. Arato fought, with tears and sweat dripping off of his face. He flailed his arms and lashed out with his knees, resisting the zombies with everything he had. Every muscle in his
body was on fire, and his sweat was making his eyes burn. Every breath was a struggle.
“Take Ms. Yuka to a safe place,” Lacia instructed. “Things are about to get even more chaotic here.” On Lacia’s command, Marina hoisted Yuka into her arms and, using the server stacks as stepping stones, was out of the room in an instant.
Marina was one of Stylus’s high-performance units. For the price of a house, her owners had purchased an hIE that had the capabilities to act as a bodyguard. With her there, the missing pieces of the incident at the airport had finally fallen into place.
It became clear to Arato why Lacia had prioritized Yuka’s extraction a moment later, when flowers began to fall within the crowded room.
“Oh, flowers,” the little boy hIE said from his perch on his dad’s shoulders. The ‘human’ hIEs didn’t know how dangerous those flowers were. They weren’t flowers at all, but child units created and scattered by Snowdrop that gave her control over any machines they took root on. With nowhere to run, all the hIEs in the room were showered with flower petals in every color of the rainbow.
The ‘human’ hIEs, noticing that something strange was happening, stopped moving and looked up.
Snowdrop may not have had a heart, but Arato could plainly feel her malice behind the falling flowers. With her subjugated server machines being wrecked, she had waited for a large number of the remaining units in the city to gather before she started her counterattack.
“Lacia!” Arato called out. Even as he yelled, he saw her black coffin device start giving off a soft blue glow from within a large tangle of zombies. The hacked hIEs all scattered backward, as if to flee from the device. As they cleared, Arato saw that Lacia’s eyes and hair accessories were also glowing with soft blue light. It didn’t last even a tenth as long as it had with Snowdrop, but the way she glowed seemed to Arato exactly the same as when Snowdrop had.
As one, the ‘human’ hIEs in the room began to knock away the falling flowers with their hands. After clearing away any child units near their own heads, they turned to help any neighbors who couldn’t move their hands freely, slapping away any flowers that got near. It was almost as if they had all suddenly received information and abilities they hadn’t had access to only a moment before.
Suddenly, the ‘human’ hIEs, who had only been winning due to their numbers and the force of their attack, were behaving like a well-organized military troop. Using remarkable martial arts they restrained the zombie hIEs, and then they began to efficiently break down the server machines, as if they were all experts on the inner workings of the stacks. Finally, the last zombified unit that was lashing out at Arato was taken down, and Arato collapsed to the floor on his butt in relief at his sudden freedom. The end of the incident was in sight.
Lacia switched her device to its mass projection mode and aimed its barrel at Snowdrop’s last known location. The ‘human’ hIEs quickly got out of the way of the shot. Once they cleared away, Snowdrop was nowhere to be seen.
Arato slowly stood on knees that knocked with tension and exhaustion. He remembered that Ryo was still standing alone against Methode, trying to buy them time. Even if the situation in the server room was under control, the fight wasn’t over. He also still needed to make sure his dad and the rest of the staff in the city were safe.
Whether it was due to the servers being too thoroughly wrecked or because Snowdrop had retreated, the zombies had all stopped moving. Then, in the blink of an eye, everything changed.
“Huh, that’s strange,” a male hIE said, scratching at the spot on his head where his AI accessory had been torn away. All around the room, every hIE that had been rampaging stopped dead. A unit with broken bones, crawling on the floor, stopped trying to grab anybody who came near.
“Oh, the server room has been destroyed. I need to contact the city control center,” a woman hIE with a huge dent in her head said, taking a terminal out of her skirt pocket.
Arato reached down and picked up a smashed fake apple from the floor. A young hIE boy with a broken arm approached him. Arato recognized the kid as the very first hIE he had seen in the city. “That’s the one I got,” the boy said, looking at the apple. “What’s it doing here?” One after another, the hIEs who had been rampaging just moments ago began asking what they were doing in that room. It was such a human reaction, it made Arato a little sick to watch.
“They are attempting to explain to any ‘human’ hIEs near them why they are here,” Lacia explained, walking over to stand beside him. The owner ID unit in the neck of her suit was gone. In its place, Arato could see burns and tear marks in the fabric of her suit.
As crazy as it had been just moments before, everything now seemed to be back to normal. Watarai had said that hIEs were tools, overlapping between the cloud and the real world; as if to prove his words, as soon as the irregularity was removed from the servers, the hIEs recovered their normal functions. Seeing how little shock there was in the faces of the hIEs, Arato realized that he had never seen this side of hIEs before. They flipped back from insanity to normalcy so quickly that he could finally see a clear difference between them and humans.
Everything felt so unreal it almost brought a queasy smile to his lips, but Arato couldn’t smile; he could see a perfectly human foot, missing its shoe, sticking out from behind one of the unbroken server stacks. The sudden chill spreading in the room reminded Arato of an empty street after a festival has ended; all the warmth and energy gone. He knew the danger was gone, but he couldn’t get his hammering heart to slow down. With great effort, he pushed himself to put one foot in front of the other; he had to check.
The zombie hIEs had known that, if they broke the AI hair accessory on the ‘human’ hIEs, they could increase their numbers. So, they had all rushed to bash in the head of anything human-shaped they came across. Last Arato had seen Watarai and his guards, they were drowning in the zombie swarm. The guards had helmets on, but the man they had been escorting did not.
What happens when a human sustains repeated violent blows to the head? The answer to that question lay at Arato’s feet: Ginga Watarai was dead. Every joint seemed to be bent in a different, jagged angle, and his head was split wide open. He would never move again. Unlike the broken bodies of the suicidal hIEs, Watari was drenched in blood. Arato’s stomach twisted in a fitful burst of nausea as he doubled over and vomited. Once the flow started, it was quickly joined by liquid from his eyes and nose.
Arato knew that Watarai was hardly a saint. Still, he had been the one with the most knowledge and insight about the whole situation. He was Methode’s owner, and Arato had come to take Yuka back from him. They would probably also have fought so that Arato could save Ryo, too. Even though this man had kidnapped Yuka, tried to steal Lacia, and even tried to kill Arato, Arato had wanted Watarai to live. There were still things he wanted to ask him.
What do I do now? he thought. The question applied to many things. A man had just died, so they would need to contact the police. How was he going to explain this all to his father? And, he had completely lost sight of where all the incidents surrounding the Lacia-class hIE Red Boxes might end.
First of all, he decided to head outside; Yuka was still nearby, so it wasn’t the time to be squatting around. Arato raised his head, and with one sleeve, he wiped at his mouth. His breath came in thin gasps as a new shadow appeared in the room. Someone was walking toward him; somehow, Arato felt that the figure was a human. His own legs wouldn’t move. He tried to think of how he would explain the situation if whoever it was asked him what had happened. However, one look at the face of the person laid all Arato’s fears to rest; it was Ryo, his best friend.
“Ryo, Watarai’s dead,” Arato said. The words sounded far too dry when he said them out loud. Ryo came toward him, his face blank of any emotion. Behind him was Methode. The way she followed him, the distance between them, reminded Arato of himself and Lacia.
“What’s Methode doing here?” Arato asked.
“I took her from Watara
i,” Ryo said. He passed by Arato without meeting Arato’s eyes.
Watarai had called for Methode several times before he died, but she hadn’t responded. Even Lacia hadn’t been able to fight off all the zombies that had poured into the room, although she had done her best for Yuka. But, then again, it had been Lacia herself who had opened the hole in the wall that the zombies came in through. Arato wondered how much of what had happened had been according to someone else’s plan?
In that experimental city, everything, including the humans themselves, was automated. But the corpse lying at Arato’s and Ryo’s feet, and the meaning behind its death, weren’t things that could ever be automated.
Ryo chose to stand in a shadowed spot so Arato couldn’t make out his friend’s expression. “It was Watarai who started this whole thing,” Ryo spat. Methode, who had been freed into the world by what Watarai had done, as well as Lacia, held her silence about it.
Arato, being his simple-minded self, obviously couldn’t understand it. “Why did it come to this?” Arato asked.
Ryo’s response was like a flame, burning to ash something Arato had once held dear. “Because it was time for this to happen. Even I have things I want,” Ryo said. “And things I can’t forgive.”
Phase8「Slumber of Human」
Inspector Kazuma Sakamaki stared into the interrogation room, his face showing no emotion. Within the room, two detectives were sitting at either end of a metal table and questioning a young man who was sitting between them. The kid had brownish black hair, and the laid-back kind of face that almost anyone would describe as being friendly.
The air was full of light, clicking echoes as the hIE assigned to the precinct tapped out a record of the proceedings on a terminal keyboard.
One of the detectives in the interrogation — a long-time veteran in the precinct — leaned his elbows on the table and spun his pen over his fingers. The boy being questioned seemed uneasy as he looked around at the bare room.