by Satoshi Hase
Come to think of it, would getting hit by a van really be enough to shut Lacia off? Arato had seen her shrug off harder blows than that in her fights against Methode and Snowdrop. What if she got kidnapped on purpose? Arato wondered. His feelings, so elated just moments before, slid down into dark regret, like he was falling into withdrawals after a drug high.
He couldn’t meet Lacia’s eyes, afraid that he would see something deep and dark in them.
“Let’s return home for the evening,” Lacia said. “We are not currently prepared to head right for the center of the Network, and the police are unusually active tonight, due to the destruction of Kouka.”
When they arrived home, Yuka was crying, and wanted to know how things were at Kengo’s place. Arato couldn’t tell her that he’d met some mercenaries while trying to track down the Antibody Network, so he kept his answers vague. Of course, that only upset her more.
The next morning, Yuka told him she was going over to Olga’s place, so she’d be back late, and then left. Arato decided to skip school. Kids would probably ask him what had happened to Kengo, and he wasn’t up to answering their questions.
When noon rolled around, he finally got tired of sitting around and decided to head out. However, just when he was heading for the door, the intercom rang.
“Yes? Who is it?” he asked.
Looking at the feed of the camera in front of the door, he saw two men standing outside. One of them was a giant, standing at almost two meters tall. The other was about Arato’s height, and was wearing a suit. Just one look at them made Arato think that they had come with the intention of using their muscles, more so than their heads or their words. Normal guests didn’t stand at the ready, as if they were expecting the resident of the house to try and make a run for it, like that.
After a good thirty seconds of silence, Arato finally heard a response from the two men. “We’re with the police,” one of them said. “Arato Endo, yes? We’re here to ask you some questions about Kengo Sugiri.”
Arato was annoyed with himself for not predicting that this exact thing would happen. Kengo had been arrested; obviously the police were going to want to talk to the boy who everyone at school knew to be his best friend.
There was no way to get out of it, so Arato opened the door to the two officers standing there. “Can I see Kengo?” he asked them.
In response, one of the men told him there were some things they needed to get out of the way first, and pulled an emblem out of his pocket. He showed it to Arato in the way most police would present their badge.
Arato’s pocket terminal vibrated. He took it out, and found that the officer’s information had been sent to his device. The officer’s name was Kazuma Sakamaki, and he belonged to the National Police Agency, 2nd Cyber-Security Department.
“Is Lacia home right now?” Sakamaki asked.
“I think so,” Arato said, trying to think ahead as he went to check the living room. Lacia should be aware of what was happening, through the transmitter in the skin behind his right ear.
Lacia wasn’t there, when he looked around the living room. Instead, his right ear vibrated as she spoke to him. 〈I believe it will be safer for me not to accompany you, so I’ve moved for the time being,〉 she explained succinctly. 〈The 2nd Cyber-Security Department is only looking for character references at the moment, so please go with them. I do not believe they will keep you for longer than three hours, but I will be busy this afternoon, so please have the police provide you with some take-out for dinner.〉
〈“The police do take-out?”〉Arato checked the remaining token charges on his pocket terminal. He just had enough for some lunch, and decided to trust that things would work out if Lacia said so.
Again, her voice vibrated into his head. 〈There are several members in the 2nd Cyber-Security Department, including Inspector Ryuji Himemiya, who is currently at your door, who are equipped with cybernetic implants. If they have aural implants, they will be able to hear you speaking even if you keep your voice low when you speak to me. Please be careful,〉 she warned.
Arato wished she’d have told him that earlier. When he went back to the door, the Inspector she had mentioned, Himemiya, grinned down at him.
“If you’re bringing me in as a character witness, could you take me to the same station Kengo’s at?” Arato asked. He didn’t think they’d do it, but felt that he should at least try making the request.
Officer Sakamaki and Inspector Himemiya exchanged a glance. It was Sakamaki who responded, “We’ll think about it, as long as you cooperate.” His voice was flat.
The two officers led Arato out of the apartment complex and over to a disguised squad car parked nearby. They drove him to their Head Office, which was fairly close to both the high school and Kengo’s place. Apparently, this was where they had taken Kengo for his interrogation.
The station was made of old but sturdy concrete. Under the clear blue sky, heading into the gray building while flanked by two police officers put a damper on Arato’s spirits. It wasn’t like he had been arrested, but being escorted into a police building wasn’t a great feeling.
Due to the increase in terrorist attacks, police stations were no longer being built with long, straight hallways. That way, if an hIE with a suicide bomb or something exploded, the blast wouldn’t be able to spread straight through the corridor without being interrupted.
After having taken countless turns, Arato was summarily thrust into an interrogation room. It was his second time in a place like this; the first had been to record his testimony for Watarai’s case in Tsukuba. He was led over to a seat facing the table in the room, and sat down. The explanation the police gave him about how their interview was going to be recorded was the same one he’d heard the time before.
The big difference was, this time there was a white-board sized terminal in the room with him. Officer Sakamaki, who had entered with Arato, pointed at the screen, causing the image of a long-haired girl to pop up on the display. She looked to be in her twenties, with almond-shaped eyes and sharp eyebrows. Though it was a still image, Arato could tell the woman had a strong personality.
“Do you want to ask me about her?” Arato asked, feeling confused. “Sorry, I’ve never seen her before.”
Instead, another image appeared next to the first. This time it was a woman with curly hair in her thirties. She looked over-worked, with bags under her eyes.
“I don’t know her either,” Arato said, and then stared at the two images. There was something off about them. The profile of the women was almost too perfect, and there was nothing behind their faces. “These aren’t photos, are they?” Arato asked, voicing his doubts. “Are they composites?”
“They’re witness sketches,” Sakamaki said. “They’re made using a drawing assistance program when we do interviews. Pretty accurate, right?”
Having been told what the sketches were, Arato began to compare them more calmly. “They look about the same height,” he observed.
“These women were seen loitering around your apartment,” Sakamaki said. “Let’s see another.”
The next image was of a distracted-looking woman in flashy clothes, who seemed like she might work in the entertainment sector.
“Now let’s see when these folks were seen,” Sakamaki said.
“During weekday afternoons and late at night,” Arato replied, reading off of the screen.
“We see this kind of thing in cases where criminals are using hIEs,” Sakamaki explained. “So, we assumed that the hIE we’re interested in would be putting on the same kind of act, and put together a few image patterns to test.” As he spoke, the three sketches began to alter themselves on the screen: eyebrows shifted; eyes changed shape and grew smaller; lips moved and twisted. It was all very subtle, but it added up to make a face that froze Arato in place.
“...Lacia?” he choked out.
“That’s right,” Sakamaki said. “hIEs can do things with their facial muscles that we humans could never m
atch.”
Arato suddenly knew what they wanted to talk to him about. Until that moment, he had never doubted what Lacia was up to when he was at school.
“As her owner, were you aware of this?” Sakamaki asked. “Were you aware that, while you were at school or late at night while you were sleeping, your hIE was witnessed wandering around your apartment in these amazing disguises?”
Anger boiled inside Arato, who knew that Lacia could hear the whole thing through the transmitter in his right ear, yet apparently had nothing to say. But still, he had promised to trust her.
“I think we can make one big assumption based off of this,” Sakamaki said. “Though I wonder if you’re going to be willing to hear me out? What I’m thinking is, the Lacia you know only exists when she’s around you. When she’s not with you, she wears a completely different face and gets up to things that you, her owner, aren’t aware of.”
“I mean, she goes out shopping and stuff, but I don’t know anything about her putting on disguises,” Arato said, feeling defensive.
This Sakamaki seemed like a nice guy, but it was all an act. “If we go on with this assumption, it all makes sense,” he said persuasively. “What if this hIE called Lacia has another owner besides Arato Endo? A puppet like her can’t dance if no one’s pulling her strings, and since it isn’t you telling her to do whatever it is she’s doing, doesn’t it suggest that she’s dancing to someone else’s tune?”
The two officers paused to observe Arato’s reaction before continuing. “These sketches are based on human witnesses, since no security cameras have any images of them,” Sakamaki went on. “The only place they exist is in human memory. The only way I see that happening is if Lacia erased everything she could, except the data being stored in human brains, where no machine can get at it. We’re still checking around about these sketches, but that’s the only explanation I can think of.”
Lacia was silent. Arato chose to believe that she was just waiting to see how he would react.
“We think your hIE may have been directly involved with Kouka’s terrorist attack,” Sakamaki said, cutting to the chase.
The accusation was actually a relief to Arato. Clearly, the officers had the wrong idea. Arato had seen how little Lacia had reacted when Kouka was destroyed, but of course the men from the 2nd Cyber-Security Department wouldn’t know about that.
They didn’t know that, in fact, Lacia knew about all of it before it happened. It amazed Arato that a simple high schooler like him was able to come face-to-face with trained mercenaries and police detectives and come out without a scrape, all thanks to the preparations Lacia put in place.
Sakamaki was staring at Arato’s face, gauging his reaction. “Arato Endo,” he said. “Can we have permission to search your apartment? We asked your father, and he said he was alright with it as long as we got your consent.”
Arato took a deep breath to give Lacia time to say something if she wanted to. She stayed quiet, though, apparently choosing to leave the decision in his hands. “Yes, please do your search,” he said. “And let me know if you find anything.”
Officer Sakamaki’s face betrayed no emotion. “I’m glad you’re willing to cooperate, but anything we find will be part of an ongoing investigation,” he said. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to just show it to you.”
“If Lacia’s as good as you say she is, I doubt she’d have left anything behind,” Arato said. “Anything she did leave would probably be meant as a message for me.”
“Ah, youth,” Sakamaki chuckled.
For some reason, even the thought that Lacia always had the upper hand made Arato happy. He loved her, even though, as her owner, he probably should have been feeling a little bit of danger in the fact that she was regularly misleading other people in ways he knew nothing about.
Perhaps she was using this as an opportunity to convey some truth to Arato through the mouths of other humans, something he wouldn’t have understood if she had told him outright. She was just analog hacking the people who saw her, using their perceptions of her. The more Arato found out about hIEs, the more he discovered that they were extremely shady machines that manipulated humans, using them like gears in their maneuvers to create the perceptions they wanted.
“Alright if we keep ahold of your terminal?” Sakamaki asked. “We’ve seen this technique we call a ‘shadow owner’, where a second owner sends an hIE that already had another owner as a front for thefts and other crimes. At times like that, there are often clues left in the personal belongings of the original owner.”
The night before, Arato’s terminal had contained the data he had received from the HOO mercenaries. Using the kidnapper’s testimony he had recorded, Lacia had already been working on tracking down the center of the Antibody Network. The data was like a timed puzzle that had to be seen at just the right time, but it was already gone.
Arato pulled his terminal out of his pocket and handed it over to Officer Sakamaki. “Can I see Kengo now?” He figured he should at least ask, as this seemed like it might be his only chance to.
Sakamaki flicked his eyes to the large Inspector Himemiya, who answered him gravely. “I’m afraid we’re not ready to make that deal yet,” he said. “But, while we’re taking a look at your terminal, you’re free to go relax outside if you like.” He jerked his thumb toward the door, and Arato headed out of the room.
Outside of the interrogation room was a narrow hallway. It was devoid of any decoration, aside from windows that only opened upward. Arato wondered if they were positioned this way to prevent suspects from taking suicidal leaps out of them.
Beyond the windows, he saw the blue skies of high noon spreading out above him. Even though morning and night looked completely different, for some reason the sky smelled the same as it had the night before to Arato.
Next, he looked around to see if anyone else was in the hall, and saw someone that he had been missing so badly, even though they had just seen each other just the night before.
It was Kengo, who was obviously struck speechless by the sight of Arato, as well. “What the hell are you doing here?” he finally asked. There were a lot of things Kengo had wanted to say to Arato, but couldn’t for fear of being recorded. So, he just looked at Arato, tears in his eyes.
For Arato, seeing Kengo in the hallway was like a miracle. It was as if a little piece of that everyday existence, which he had been fighting so hard to reclaim, had appeared there with him for just a moment. “I came to see you,” he answered.
“You moron!” Kengo grumped playfully, despite his serious circumstances. “If you were a cute girl saying that, making that face, maybe I’d be happy about it.”
“Sorry, next time I’ll bring Lacia,” Arato joked back.
“You’re the only one I know who could call her a ‘cute girl’ with a straight face!” The tension seemed to have left Kengo, and his snappy wit was once again in fine form. Behind Kengo, an officer was standing by on guard, ready to restrain either of them if necessary
“Olga’s been calling Yuka,” Arato said. “Got anything you want us to tell her?”
“No need,” Kengo told him. “If I’ve got something to say to my family, I can just say it right to them.”
“Oh, yeah,” Arato mumbled in embarrassment.
Kengo laughed. “I’m fine, you know,” he said, his tone suddenly serious. “Things are fine like this.” Kengo had obviously deduced that Arato had relied on Lacia to get him there. Kengo had probably also covered for Arato and Lacia, which might be the only reason that Arato hadn’t been arrested, as well.
The nearby officer was clearly listening to them. Considering what Lacia had said about implants, it would have been dangerous for her to speak over the transmitter. Unlike the time during the Oi terrorist attack, Arato couldn’t save his friend just now.
“Why are you worrying about me?” Arato asked. “I think you’ve got things backwards.”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet? Unlike you, I prefer human
s,” Kengo said, and then slowly turned his back on Arato. Kengo probably had all kinds of things he wanted to say to Arato, but the one thing he would never say was, ‘help me.’
Arato had made a contract with Lacia. Kengo, on the other hand, never tried to use Kouka to improve his own situation. Kengo was being escorted by the officer back inside his own interrogation room, even as Arato had these thoughts. Then Arato realized that Inspector Himemiya had shown up at some point to escort him back inside, as well.
“Feel better?” the inspector asked, handing him back his terminal.
“A little bit, yeah,” Arato said with a nod.
“Good,” Himemiya said. “We’re going to head over to search your place now. Alright if you accompany us?”
Arato had already told them they could search the place, so he was about to nod, when Lacia’s voice came in through his ear.
〈Please turn down his offer and have Ms. Yuka accompany him on the inspection instead,〉 she said. 〈I have a request for you.〉 There was a rushed feeling to her voice that made Arato think she had encountered an unexpected wrinkle in her plan.
“Uh, actually my sister’s going to be there in a bit, so why don’t you have her show you around?” Arato asked. He thought the lie sounded natural. Still, he had to fight against his tension at the thought of being caught, and his face went stiff. The only thing that gave him the confidence to pull it off was the thought that Lacia never would have had him do anything she didn’t think he had a high probability of getting through.
“Alright,” Himemiya said, after a heavy pause. “I’ll head to your house. If your sister isn’t there, I’ll contact you. This is my personal ID. If anything happens, you can get a hold of me or our hIE receptionist, twenty-four hours a day.”
The inspector’s response seemed like a letdown to Arato after all that tension, but he handed his terminal over to the inspector so he could input his personal information. Then Himemiya handed Arato back his terminal and told him that he could leave.
It was only then that Arato realized something. He and Kengo weren’t being treated as a criminal and a witness: they were being treated as youth. Humans made connections with other humans, built communities, and then connected those communities to create the massive system known as human society. Within the confines of human society, young humans were perceived as requiring protection from overly harsh treatment. Arato and Kengo were currently enjoying the benefits of that social norm.