Beatless: Volume 1

by Satoshi Hase

  Still, he reflected, Lacia was by his side. That alone made him feel safer. He didn’t want to give up the home he shared with her.

  “Wait, so you two are doing naughty stuff?” Yuka asked.

  “No!” Arato shouted.

  Lacia stepped in to cover for him. “We are not,” she said. “That function cannot be requested until my owner is at least eighteen years of age.”

  Yuka was struck dumb, blushing red to her ears.

  “There are still 203 days until Arato’s birthday,” Lacia added, her face cool.

  At that point, Yuka noticed that she was being made fun of, and let Arato have it with both hands across his cheeks. Apparently deciding that she didn’t feel like helping with the meal anymore, Yuka shoved the daikon radish and grater into Arato’s hands, and went to steal some food off of his plate.

  “By the way, did you get rid of that big thing you used to keep in the living room?” Yuka asked. It was true; Lacia’s device was no longer taking up its usual corner of the living room. After the incident at the experimental city, she had probably figured the police would be watching the apartment, and moved it to another location. Lacia was a perfectionist when it came to cleaning up after the fact.

  “That was broken, so I discarded it. No sense in letting it take up space anymore,” Lacia explained.

  Yuka was too busy nabbing food to even remember the question she’d asked. “Oh my gosh,” she crowed, “what are these? They’re amazing!”

  Lacia walked over to Arato and gently took the daikon radish out of his hands. The touch of her pure white hands made his whole body stiffen. Her pale blue eyes were a little below his own, thanks to the slight difference in their height, but he could see that there was moisture in them.

  “You’re being way too nice to him today,” Yuka complained, slumping onto the sofa as if she had lost interest in the whole scene.

  “He appears to be quite tired today, so I judged it prudent to spoil him,” Lacia replied. When Arato sat down on the sofa, Lacia followed him and put her hands on his shoulders, massaging them gently. It felt so good, he wanted to melt right into the couch.

  “Now that you mention it, I definitely do feel like my physical or mental batteries are running low,” Arato said. He could feel the idiotic relaxed expression spreading across his face.

  “You’re really letting yourself go, Arato,” Yuka whined. “What happened to your pride as a man?”

  “I’m setting that aside for now!” Arato yelled, feeling all the emotions in his body flowing into his voice. “For tonight, just let me get some spoiling.”

  The second fried oyster Yuka had been munching on fell from her lips as she opened her mouth in disbelief. “You. Are. The. Worst,” she said.

  The feeling of Lacia’s massage was truly inspiring. As he slipped under its dreamy spell, Arato felt like new neurons were firing in the back of his brain. “So this is what it’s like to be spoiled,” he murmured.

  “Hey, let me in on some of that,” Yuka said, quickly scooching over beside him. He could hear her breathing through her nose a little in wild anticipation. It’d be nice if things could just stay like this, every day, Arato thought. He knew just how special it was to have a day like this, where he could feel truly safe.

  In his state of relaxation, he almost let the letter slip through his fingers. He strengthened his grip on it before it fell though, and looked at the invitation inside; it was addressed to both himself and Lacia. She was being treated as a fellow guest, rather than as a machine.

  ***

  Kengo Suguri was enjoying a cup of tea after dinner when he was told a white envelope had come for him. The problem was, the envelope wasn’t addressed to him; it was addressed to ‘Type-001, Kouka.’

  “What on Earth?” his sister had asked in her tremulous voice when she handed it to him. “The person who gave this to me said you’d know what to do with it.” She had obviously noticed Kouka’s name on the envelope.

  The envelope was sealed with a lump of some kind of red adhesive with an elaborate sigil pressed into it. It didn’t feel right opening it himself, so Kengo took it upstairs. Olga had gone up ahead of him, and he could hear her voice through the door to her room. It sounded like she was talking to someone.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” Kengo asked of no one in particular. Once he’d thought about it though, he’d realized it was true that he seemed to share some sort of bond with Kouka, whether or not he wanted to. This was especially true considering the way she had randomly appeared at his house. Kouka had given him a contact address, but he had never used it.

  His computer and monitor flickered to life automatically when he slid open the old sliding door to his room. Digging into his drawer, he pulled out a wireless signal detector that would sniff out any unwanted signals coming or going from his room. He checked all the signals around the house. There didn’t seem to be any new, unauthorized signals.

  “Still, there’s no way I’m handing this over to her,” Kengo muttered. Recently, he had been taking a break from his activities with the Antibody Network. After the attack on the Oi Industry Promotion Center, the police had arrested several of the men who had participated. The police investigation had even come to Sunflower, the restaurant Kengo’s family ran from the 1st floor of their home. They were keeping an eye on Kengo. It wouldn’t have surprised him if they came to arrest him any day. But beyond that, he had another reason why he refused to contact Kouka.

  “You need to be a little more careful,” a voice said, and Kengo managed to swallow the shriek bubbling up in his throat. “They’ve got a laser mic pointed at your walls,” she went on, “measuring the vibrations.” These observations came from a girl with dull red hair who was seated on his windowsill, still wearing the same smile she’d been wearing the first time they’d met. It was Kouka, a Lacia-class hIE.

  Without thinking, Kengo double-checked that the door to his room was shut. “What kind of greeting is that?” she asked. “After I came all this way to see you, and even made sure to feed their mic some fake information for you?” Kengo had no response for the monster who could turn his reality to ash in the blink of an eye.

  “Actually, did you know they’re fingering me for the explosion at the airport?” she went on. “Though they’re using some random person’s name when they talk about it on the news.”

  Kengo knew what she was talking about; the news programs listed the culprit behind the airport bombing as Karea Kazumizaki. With her right there in front of him, he felt a little sorry for how glad he had been at the police finally getting on her trail.

  “Oh, don’t worry. I’ve got at least three identities, so it hasn’t really slowed me down,” Kouka reassured him. “I mean, you’re a terrorist yourself, you know.” Still sitting on his windowsill, she raised one knee and hugged it to her chest. At least on the outside, the Red Box was pretty.

  “But aren’t we forgetting something? Back when you asked me to rescue the princess at the airport, I believe you told me you’d listen to my request yourself,” she continued.

  Beyond her, the nightscape of the city sprawled outside his window. To Kengo, its lights seemed lonely as they shone on the humans, who were full of dissatisfaction. “What do you want?” he asked, wondering if there was anything a kid like him could offer as recompense to Kouka. The Antibody Network had more than enough members to fill its needs; Kengo figured there wasn’t anything in particular the group needed from him specifically.

  Kouka grinned at him as if she was enjoying the whole thing. “That invitation is for me, right? I think I’ll make the reservation for after my next battle,” she said.

  ***

  As one of the Lacia-class hIE units, Kouka’s outlook for the future wasn’t optimistic. One of her abilities as ‘the tool that ensures victory in conflict with humans’ was quantifying the capabilities of everything she observed. With those calculating powers, Kouka had arrived at the conclusion that she wouldn’t be continuing her
activities for much longer.

  In pursuit of their ultimate goals, Lacia-class hIEs expanded their frame of reference by treating all obstacles that appeared on the path to their goal as new goals to be understood and overcome. Kouka had been active since 2101, when the production of the Lacia-class hIEs had been decided. So, by the time the Lacia-class units escaped into the outside world four years later, she had already cultivated the most expansive AI of any of her sisters.

  But, because Kouka had been built using the human technology available at the time of her creation, it had only taken about two months for her to lose that advantage. She had the lowest specs of any of the Lacia-class. Kouka’s device had been used in the creation of the ultra-hard crystals that formed Emerald Harmony, the device that belonged to Snowdrop, the 2nd Lacia-class unit. Starting with Saturnus, all the Lacia-class units were controlled using Snowdrop’s artificial nerves. It was all done to achieve the namesake of the Lacia-class: Lacia herself, the greatest among her sisters. And so it had gone on: with each progressive Lacia-class unit, the technology that went into them drifted further and further from what humans — and therefore, Kouka — were capable of.

  Kouka was ‘the tool that ensures victory in conflicts with humans’; in other words, a weapon. She had been created to win, and to bring victory to her owners. The problem was that, now, she lacked the capabilities necessary to win. The person she’d chosen as her first owner had ordered her to consider the entire Antibody Network to be her owner. Unfortunately, the Antibody Network was a resistance movement against the automation of society and, even if they racked up some minor, local victories here or there, there was no hope of them actually achieving their goals.

  Kouka and Methode had both been developed as autonomous weapons that could complete their functions using only their own body and the device they were given; Kouka didn’t have the power to change the world. Unlike Snowdrop or Lacia, who had the power to control other machines, Kouka and Methode were incapable of creating a sphere of influence to boost their own powers.

  There were no cheaper owners around to give Kouka a problem to solve that was more at her own level. Well, there was one candidate, but this boy would never use a Red Box like her to achieve his goals. Kouka had not been blessed with a goal she had any hope of accomplishing.

  Kouka looked at the invitation she had just taken from Kengo. She had known it would come, this envelope addressed to her, an hIE. Higgins, the ultra high-performance AI that had developed them, had made them all too unique and powerful in their own ways. It was only natural that each unit’s owner would ask about the existence of the other units: “Are there other units like you? What kind of unit is this ‘Lacia’ you are all named after?”

  Since Kouka and the other Lacia-class units first left the MemeFrame Tokyo Research Lab, they had each gathered a wide variety of information and come face-to-face with complex problems. But Higgins’ underground containment facility, where they had been created and held before moving to the Research Lab, had been an even narrower and simpler existence than the one they’d had at the lab. From those humble roots, the Lacia-class hIEs had prepared for their ultimate goals by expanding their own fields of reference. Each new obstacle was treated as a goal to be overcome.

  And the very first obstacle any of them had encountered was her own sisters. So, whenever any of the units’ owners asked about the other units, there was plenty of information and problem awareness to share, even if they left out any of the classified stuff.

  And, once those owners learned about the Lacia sisters, they just couldn’t leave them alone, which is why it made sense that Lacia had never told her owner a single thing about the other units. As long as a Lacia-class was able to avoid any unnecessary orders, she could easily control who she would fight and who she would avoid.

  Kouka walked the lamp-lit streets; no one who saw her could tell her apart from any other human. If they hid their eye-catching devices and put on some normal clothes, there was no way in the world to tell Lacia-class units apart from humans. They could even perfect their disguise by halting the transmission of the ID signal all hIEs gave off.

  Through the function of the device she was linked to, Kouka could calculate the relative threat of any humans or vehicles around her. There wasn’t a single person or object around her at that moment that could offer her a threat. But, if she attacked the people in the area, police with a higher threat level would appear. Then, if she attacked them, still stronger SWAT and counter-terrorist teams would come. Nothing up to that point would count as a serious threat to her. But, if she continued to pressure the police after that, contracted PMCs would show up. The first rapid-response attacks wouldn’t be able to take her down, but they would lead to main battle tanks and attack helicopters being called in, or maybe the Japanese army would show up.

  No matter how powerful Kouka’s weaponry or combat prowess were, she couldn’t do anything about the fact that she was fighting alone, surrounded by enemies. The other Lacia-class units could create and execute strategies that would be impossible for humans to circumnavigate, but Kouka didn’t have that capability.

  In other words, to avoid a problem she wouldn’t be able to solve, Kouka avoided confrontations with the police and did her best to blend in with human society. Figuring out how to fit into human society had proven to be quite a complicated and multi-faceted problem in itself, though, because human society was massive, complex, and full of inconsistencies. In order to adapt, Kouka had needed to change the framework of her own thoughts, and expand her interpretation of her own basic instinct to become greater than humanity.

  Kouka watched humanity with a wide, manufactured smile. Each individual human’s capabilities were low, but each had their own specialization, and each had their own problems they were dealing with. In other words, the entire human race was always working as a massive computation device. Among the treasure trove of solvable problems the humans had, the problems of Kengo Sugiri, who was frequently in contact with Kouka, were issues of inferiority. He felt inferior to Ryo Kaidai’s general capabilities, and inferior to Arato Endo’s likeability.

  The answer to Kengo’s problem could also be useful for Kouka, grappling with her inferiority to the other Lacia-class units, or so she believed. She sat down on the edge of a fountain. Using her device’s ability, she calculated the capabilities of each person who passed by, then predicted their most likely problem-solving methods based on age and gender. As she considered all this, Kouka knew there simply wasn’t time for her to solve Kengo Sugiri’s problem.

  Whoever had sent the invitation already knew how they wanted to deal with Kouka and her sisters. They would have to know there was a strong possibility that the Lacia-class units would fight each other at the event, so that had to be part of their plan. And, if more than a single one of her sisters combined their efforts to take down Kouka, even running away would be beyond her capabilities.

  〈Who is Karea Kasumisaki waiting for?〉 Kouka’s transmitter, which had been programmed to pick up transmissions with certain keywords, suddenly relayed a signal. The voice belonged to an adult male. Karea Kasumisaki was a new identity that Kouka had received as payment for helping out during the incident at the airport.

  〈She may have met up with someone when she shook us off her tail. I seriously don’t think that explosion at the airport was her work alone.〉 The voice matched up to one saved on Kouka’s list; it was one of the detectives from the 2nd Cyber Security Department, who had been chasing her for a while. The blame for the explosion of the cargo plane had been shifted off Methode and MemeFrame and dropped right in her lap. Once the police started looking for her, it was only too easy to find her anywhere a security camera could scan her face.

  By Kouka’s own calculation, it would be impossible for her to completely shake off the police’s suspicions. Lacia’s help was her lifeline. Just as she had predicted before leaving the research labs, the unsolvable problems blocking her path were looming larger wit
h each passing day.

  In the grand scheme of things, Kouka knew she was destined to lose. That made her remaining time more precious as it shrank with each passing moment. With her back up against the wall, she pushed her thought processes down new paths, actively using repeated trial and error to expand her own horizons. So, the human world that had once been worthless to her had transformed into a veritable mountain of precious resources.

  Kouka was pushing the limits of her decision-making framework desperately, like the flailings of a person about to drown. If she were to wax poetic like a human, she might call this her golden time.

  ***

  After Lacia pointed out that the police were continuing to tail them, even when they rode in a car, Arato found he couldn’t relax. Ever since the incident at the experimental city, she had been pointing out police tails and surveillance; there were a lot of eyes focused on him. When he thought about it, though, maybe there had always been people watching them. Perhaps Lacia was only informing him now because she finally trusted him with that information.

  The party from the invitation was being held at the mansion of Erika Burroughs, the CEO of Fabion MG. It was a ten minute drive from the nearest train station.

  Arato had a bad premonition, but he rented an automatic car from Mizunokuchi Station and let it take them up a long and winding road. Word of him totaling a luxury car must have gotten around the rental businesses, as they would no longer let him rent any cars newer than ten years old.

  His terminal, which was linked up with the car, notified him that they had arrived at their destination. A heavy wrought-iron gate that looked like something from another era was blocking their path.

  On the other side of the gate, a path cut through carefully tended vegetation, heading uphill. Arato could only make out the roof of the mansion beyond the path. After a moment’s wait, an hIE in an apron dress that looked like some sort of uniform appeared and pushed open the three meter iron gate.