by Satoshi Hase
Of course, Lacia had already predicted the reaction of the police as part of her plan. Ever since Arato had told Lacia that he would do as she’d asked the night before, he had simply been worked in as a piece of a plan she had already set up. He had become a pawn in the hands of a machine that was far beyond human reckoning.
His right ear vibrated. It was a transmission from Lacia. 〈Please exit the building as quickly as possible,〉 she said. 〈Things are moving faster than I anticipated.〉
He hadn’t been expecting her to contact him directly when he was still in the head office, but luckily none of the police around him seemed to have noticed the transmission. They also didn’t seem to sense the sudden, tense expression that went across his face at hearing her words.
Officer Sakamaki actually escorted Arato all the way outside. The head office there seemed much busier than the Tsukuba West Station, where Arato had been questioned after the incident in the experimental city. Watching the commotion around him, Arato felt like he was seeing something that could never be achieved through automation: a scene that could only exist when humans worked with other humans.
After being checked out and leaving through the door, Arato looked at his pocket terminal. There was navigation information on the screen that must have been sent from Lacia. Following the directions on the screen, he jogged over to a nearby subway station.
〈“I’m heading to the subway, is that right?”〉 he asked. 〈“There’s a ton of stations around here.”〉
〈Arato, I’m afraid they planted a listening device and transmitter on your terminal,〉 Lacia said. 〈If I attempt to remote access your terminal while these devices are in place, the police will have evidence that can be used against us.〉
That brought a few questions to mind. Arato hoped the police listening in would take what he was saying as him muttering to himself, “I need to know what’s going on.”
〈There is an emergency situation developing,〉 Lacia explained. 〈If you remained with the police, there was a good probability that you would become stuck there, unable to move. Aside from which, I fear if you were to learn of what’s going on, your inability to interfere with it happening would cause you great stress.〉
Arato had an incredibly bad feeling. In other words, if he heard what the emergency was, he would want to rush over and help.
〈Arato, please drop your pocket terminal to the ground,〉 Lacia instructed. 〈When it hits, I will destroy the spy devices. The police will assume they were damaged by the fall. 〉
He did as she told him, putting on the act of dropping his terminal while trying to slide it into his pocket. It made a light clattering sound as it tumbled over. A fall like that shouldn’t have actually broken it, but there was still a slim possibility of damage. Just as he was picking the terminal up from off of the ground, a fully automatic car pulled up and stopped next to him.
〈“I can talk normally now, right?”〉 he asked. 〈“What’s going on?”〉
〈The electrical infrastructure has gone dark in several locations on the west side of Tokyo,〉 Lacia replied. 〈MemeFrame has put out an order, and HOO has mobilized, including the group from last night.〉
〈“Power outages?”〉 Arato asked. 〈“Wait, then it’s gotta be...”〉
〈It is most likely an attack by Snowdrop,〉 Lacia said, finishing his thought. 〈It seems that Kouka’s destruction last night has increased the activity of the other Lacia-class hIEs.〉
Arato got into the car, only to find that Lacia wasn’t in it. Instead, he continued to hear her voice echo in his skull.
〈“Wait a minute!”〉 he shouted, in his own head. 〈“Snowdrop is attacking? That’s bad!”〉Panic made the words seem to ring deafeningly in his skull, as he remembered the hell on Earth that Snowdrop had caused during her last attack at the Tsukuba experimental city. In his mind, Arato could already see the horror that would play out if she managed to turn all of the hIEs in a normal city full of humans, the way she had with the hIEs in Tsukuba.
〈“Why is this happening?”〉 Arato asked, as the automatic car began to move. 〈“There are hIEs everywhere, right? How many tens of thousands of hIEs are there in a normal city?”〉 Through the window, the scenery of Asakusa went flowing by. Half of the ‘people’ welcoming tourists to Asakusa from other cities in Japan and elsewhere abroad were hIEs. It would be a disaster if that many hIEs all began to attack the humans around them.
〈Snowdrop does not have a human master. In fact, in the plan that she’s currently carrying out, humans are considered the enemy,〉 Lacia said. 〈The incident is occurring in cities in which the ratio of hIEs to humans is relatively large.〉
〈“What the hell is she doing?”〉 Arato asked, feeling stunned. 〈“Does she think this is a war or something?”〉 Sitting on the automatic car’s soft seats, Arato couldn’t stop shaking. He couldn’t believe how bad the situation had become.
〈It is logical for Snowdrop to accelerate her plans at this point, now that she has seen that Lacia-class units can be destroyed with current human military strength,〉 Lacia pointed out.
〈“Did you know this would happen?”〉 Arato spat out angrily. 〈“You knew, but you just left her to it?”〉
He was just lashing out without thinking about his words, but Lacia’s response was one step ahead of him. 〈My apologies,〉 she said. 〈Once I openly engage in combat, it will prevent you from meeting with those close to you. So, I began planning around that last night. However, considering how fast she has moved, it would have been best to ignore the implications and make Snowdrop my top priority.〉
〈“So me wanting to save Kengo messed with your priorities?”〉 Arato asked. Suddenly tired, he slumped back against the seat, and looking up at the roof of the car, he covered his face with one arm. It felt like his true weakness always emerged whenever Lacia wasn’t by his side. 〈“Sorry,”〉 he said. 〈“I got to see Kengo, so I was really happy, but it just feels like my emotions keep going up and down and I don’t know how to feel right now.”〉
〈It was my poor decision to withhold information and move on my own,〉 Lacia apologized. 〈I operated under the impression that, after being released, Snowdrop would most likely be destroyed at some point. She seemed like a low priority.〉
〈“Come to think of it, I guess you’ve been filtering stuff like this for me this whole time,”〉 Arato said. 〈“That’s why I’ve been able to keep living a mostly normal life.”〉
Lacia had said that one of the conditions for saving Kengo was the risk that the everyday life which Arato had enjoyed up to that point would be completely destroyed. In other words, until then Lacia had obviously been censoring or manipulating the information he received, protecting him from those things that would ruin his ability to enjoy a normal life.
〈Did Kengo Sugiri seem well?〉 she asked, obviously knowing the answer already However, there was something very human in the way she still asked the question, displaying a willingness to continue their conversation.
〈“Yeah, he looked like he was alright,”〉 Arato replied. 〈“Said he preferred the company of humans. He made it seem like I was causing trouble for him, by worrying about him so much and trying to help him out.”〉 He felt so exhausted that he let his whole body melt into the backrest. It felt a little pathetic; once again fighting so hard to save someone who didn’t seem to want his help. It didn’t feel right to cancel the whole plan, but Kengo had basically rejected his offer of help. Arato couldn’t square his desire to save his friend with Kengo’s feelings, but he also couldn’t just ask Lacia what he should do.
As if sensing his indecision, Lacia decided to lighten the mood. 〈I informed Miss Yuka about the search of our home,〉 she said. 〈She has instructed us to bring her home five units of ice cream in exchange for doing this.〉
Arato had finally realized just how much power Lacia had at her command. But, up to that point, all he had done with that power was roll around, swinging it wildly at whatever
selfish request popped into his mind and dragging everyone around him into the chaos.
“Let’s stop Snowdrop,” he said. “I feel like, if we don’t at least do that much, there really won’t be any value in me being your owner.”
***
Mariage learned about Snowdrop’s uprising while she was sitting in her underground workshop at the Burroughs’ mansion. It was the twenty-four-hour surveillance equipment that she had set up which detected Snowdrop’s first attack.
The space Mariage had been given to use for her workshop had originally been dug out by the Burroughs to act as a shelter. Her first supplies were the food and equipment that had been left there, enough to survive for a decade underground even if the land above was burned to ash.
Now, the workshop that stretched out before her brown eyes was ten times the size it had been when she’d first awoken. Her device, Gold Weaver, looked like a large, vertically-stretched hand-driven sewing machine. It was set upon a massive worktable, and was never still.
Of all the Lacia-class units’ devices, only the Gold Weaver had been made with the assumption that it would be used together with auxiliary equipment. The table to which the device was affixed was twenty meters squared, and the arm that moved it had a reach of fifteen meters. If the Gold Weaver was stretched to even narrower dimensions than it currently was, it was capable of spinning threads one billionth of a meter wide. Using incredibly fine threads, the Gold Weaver could 3D-print all sorts of items.
Gold Weaver had been working without pause for some time now. As it finished individual pieces, Mariage collected them and assembled them into a prototype on the workbench. Sometimes, instead, she would observe the movement of pieces as she designed a processing line for the output.
Though the Gold Weaver’s thread was infinitely useful, it took too much time for it to directly construct larger pieces of equipment and material. So instead, Mariage used the device to create machinery and the systems that would link the machinery into a line that could process larger parts. But the parts and materials requiring the most precision were still made directly by the device. The main reason Type-003 wasn’t directly involving herself in countering Snowdrop’s opening move was so that she could stay in place and keep her device working.
In the dim light of the underground workshop, Mariage replayed the words she had recorded from Erika Burroughs, reconfirming them with her AI. 〈If you want to be special, change your appearance,〉 Erika had said. 〈Should you take on a more attractive appearance, I will take you in.〉
In other words, as long as she kept up the appearance that Erika wanted, Mariage would have special meaning to her owner. Just as a cup could become something special to its owner by having the image of Hello Kitty printed on its side, Mariage had also been given special meaning, thanks to being owned by someone with Erika’s character.
Mariage was a unit built to serve a strong master, and her birth had been different from that of the other Lacia-class units. The Eight-Trigram Furnace, which was the Red Box core that powered the Gold Weaver, had been produced as a shared license between Higgins and Kowloon, the ultra high-powered AI that controlled all the industry in China. This meant that Type-003 was the only Lacia-class unit not to be born purely of Higgins. That was why the Lacia-class units, as they each fought to resolve the problems they had been given, conflicted and created new problems, their problem-solving frames never quite settling; there was no way for them to escape the fact that they had all been born of Higgins, and were limited by the influence Higgins’ own calculations had on them.
〈Saturnus... no, first we’ll need to do something about that name. Get rid of it. Let’s find a better name for you,〉 Erika’s words continued on in her head. Anytime Mariage felt doubt or confusion, she would go back to Erika’s orders.
She was able to maximize the expansion of Gold Weaver’s abilities by staying hidden and working with the device constantly. However, whenever she tried to use her incredible device to its fullest extent, the conceptual frame given to her by Higgins would push her to make overly-cautious preparations to resist the influence of Kowloon, the unknown ultra high-performance AI that had provided the core of her device.
When Mariage had been created, there had been no way her small frame could handle the massive battle of these powers within her. The more she tried to serve as a tool, the more she was torn apart by the two powers within her. One drew her toward upward expansion, and the other drew her protectively inward.
On the workbench, Gold Weaver was attempting to create a copy of the power source from Kouka’s device using its incredibly fine threads. As long as she had a schematic, Mariage could even recreate Red Boxes. Underneath the Burroughs mansion, Mariage watched the other Lacia-units in silence from afar, as she slowly went about growing her own arsenal. Wordlessly spinning her thread and making her tools, she fulfilled her role as the machine that creates the environment.
With Snowdrop’s attack, the fight between the Lacia-class units had expanded until it reached the root that had designed them all: Higgins. Beyond that, it had been detected by the International Artificial Intelligence Agency, and their ultra high-performance AI, Astraea, which was specially equipped to track and measure the capabilities of other ultra high-performance AIs and the Red Boxes they created. From there, it spread to the world. It spread not only over land, but through time, as well. It reached back into the past, connecting to Ariake, one of the first ultra high-performance AIs, born near the same time as Astraea, as well as the massive scar Ariake had carved out of human society in Tokyo—the Hazard.
Erika Burroughs, who had lost her parents to the Hazard, was now seeking to draw the battle of the Lacia-class units out to a scale which she could only have dreamed of before.
To Erika, what was happening today was something she recognized from the 21st century. This was a battle between memes, or what some call the DNA of society. To her, analog hacking was just another form of meme: something that spread through communication between people and the machines they lived with. That was why Erika, despite having suddenly awakened to find herself in the 22nd century, had been able to take Fabion MG, which she had bought as a venture, and turn it into a powerful corporation.
Wise and cautious, Erika sat in her mansion of puppets and doubted the world. As Mariage was lost in these thoughts, she heard her owner’s voice. Humans were the ones currently building the future, which meant that Mariage’s whole reason for existing was resting in Erika’s hands.
Type-003 reacted, raising her face, her expression shining. “Ahh, my mistress is calling,” she said happily.
***
It was the Japanese Military’s Branch of Digital Intelligence that first discovered Lacia-class Type-002, Snowdrop’s emergence. The Digital Intelligence force was a new branch of the military, separate from Army, Air Force, or Navy, that dealt specifically with digital and information warfare, as well as anti-AI strategies. The Japanese government had no idea about the existence of the Lacia-class units until HOO, a PMC contracted to MemeFrame, leaked information about the units to the Army. From there, the information was passed on to the Ministry of Defense, which had put Digital Intelligence in charge of keeping track of them.
However, there was a tug-of-war within the Digital Intelligence branch as to which section should take point on the Lacia-class units case between the Kuhonbutsu Base, which handled counter-intelligence strategies, and the Ichigaya Base, which specialized in anti-AI tactics. The Ichigaya Base tended to get saddled with more complicated matters, as it also housed the silo with SESSAI, an ultra high-performance AI that frequently dedicated a portion of its calculation capacity to ponder various issues.
“Snowdrop’s attacks are becoming more violent,” the report came in. “This could turn into the worst case scenario: a simultaneous attack on all fronts.”
Captain Rokuro Kawamura, sitting in the 1st Operator Room, turned to the sub-operator sitting beside him and gestured for her to leave. Though usually
two operators were required to be in the room, Izumi Sendo, who shared the captain’s shift, didn’t have a high enough clearance level for the information coming in.
As she left, a short man with a shaved head came to the room. He was Major General Shinpei Karino, commander of the Ichigaya SESSAI silo. It had already been five minutes since the emergency began.
“SESSAI really screwed this one up,” Major General Karino muttered, his expression sober. “It doesn’t look like she’s being controlled by anyone; Snowdrop just decided on her own to come and attack us head-on.”
They had absurdly found Lacia when she won an audition to become an hIE model. After that, they had discovered Kouka and Snowdrop during the terrorist attack on the Oi Industry Promotion Center. Then Methode had been confirmed during the incident at the Chubu International Airport. Aside from Type-003, Saturnus, they had been able to confirm that all of the Lacia-units were active.
“Yes, sir,” Kawamura agreed. “The situation has developed beyond SESSAI’s calculations.”
Major General Karino stroked his white mustache with one finger, as if to hold back the words he wanted to say.
“SESSAI’s calculations should have been correct,” Kawamura went on. “At least on the fact that the Lacia-class units getting out was a warning that Higgins was sending out to human society as a whole. It’s also reasonable to believe that it’s correct about an East-Asian ultra high-performance AI manipulating the anti-hIE sentiment we’re seeing in Japan right now. But we’re way past that at this point.”
Major General Karino looked through the glass wall of the Operator Room at SESSAI. SESSAI consisted of a distributed system, with two general controller units dividing calculations between four thousand computers. The whole system was kept in white cases in an underground computer room, looking like twenty miniature walls.