Beatless: Volume 2

by Satoshi Hase

  “The networks you humans keep making and my flower garden can’t work together,” Snowdrop said. “One of them has to go.”

  She stood atop the tall metal tower, feeling the strong wind blowing past her. “I can’t do anything with you,” she said, addressing humanity at large. “So just stop. You’re all wasting your time.” She had already manufactured five tons of child units. With that many, she could completely seize an area with a radius of ten kilometers.

  To Snowdrop, who was trying to create her own framework for the world, human society itself—an ambiguous frame that was nothing more than a haphazard collection of human processes—was a problem that needed to be solved. By both analyzing herself and the fact that she needed no human owner to function, Snowdrop had reached the conclusion that any attempt to coexist with humanity was not the correct direction to take. The problems humans always wanted to solve had nothing to do with Snowdrop’s own puzzles.

  Therefore, Snowdrop had decided to attack the infrastructure that humans depended on. From there, she could begin to expand her own world.

  ***

  Erika Burroughs held a teacup in one hand as she watched Snowdrop’s flowers transform Mitaka into a living nightmare. Recon units made by Mariage were giving her a real time view of the disaster.

  “Doesn’t matter what era we’re in,” Erika commented. “This is what always happens when the things we humans build up come tumbling down.” The desire to live, to not lose what they already had, is a strong motivator that has humanity running desperately on their own two feet, despite living in an automated world.

  Mariage, who had returned from her underground workshop, handed Erika an old-fashioned transmitter from the 21st century. It had a Hello Kitty design on it—rare, for the modern day.

  “You have a call from Mr. Shinguji,” Mariage said.

  Like MemeFrame and HOO, Fabion MG also had ties to the Antibody Network. The terrorist network, hIE manufacturers, and even the government, were all linked by economic bonds. Allowing humans who were dissatisfied with their lives to vent their frustration by acting as hIE-destroying volunteers was a beneficial outcome for those looking to maintain a stable, healthy economy.

  “‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit,’” Erika murmured, quoting the King James Bible. “So, are they going to turn Kouka into a martyr?”

  Erika leaned back on a chaise lounge chair and waved her hand dismissively. “Tell him I don’t feel well,” she ordered. “I don’t feel like playing along with the game of assigning meaning to things, today.”

  The living room, devoid of any humans aside from Erika, was being filled with the voices of people picked up by the recon units.

  “Are you sure?” Mariage asked.

  “I can turn down a call,” Erika said. “We’re nothing alike, he and I. Money is the only thing that ties us together.”

  The system of human perception that assigns value to things was extremely susceptible to movements of the economy on which it was based. Erika was well aware of how it all worked, and used that knowledge to great effect on Fabion MG’s consumers.

  “Nothing ever changes,” Erika said with a sigh. “The 21st century or the 22nd century, it makes no difference. Our perceptions of the things in our lives are all based on economic algorithms that were solved a long, long time ago.”

  “Ms. Erika, do you hate the world of humanity?” Mariage asked, after ending the call and returning.

  Even knowing quite well that the machine asking the question had no heart, Erika answered honestly. She didn’t worry about what she said; it was just like talking to a doll or stuffed animal, after all. “Absolutely,” she replied. “I awakened to a world in which everyone dear to me is dead, I’m treated like a strange artifact, and everywhere I look, there are things that offend my senses.”

  Despite her words, Erika wore a broad smile. “This isn’t my world at all. I’d like to share with everyone the feeling of seeing the world they know shatter,” she said, watching Snowdrop’s attack with excitement in her eyes.

  “Absolutely splendid,” she observed. “I want you and your sisters to usher this world into a new era.” And, even in the future beyond that future, as long as there are still humans in the world, they will always be bound by economy.

  In the displays from the recon units, Erika could see Snowdrop’s flower garden completely obscuring the substation. The machines under her control had chased all the humans out of an area stretching from Mitaka to Kichijoji. Humans were no longer needed in the new world inside that boundary.

  “If that is your wish, I will lend my aid,” Mariage said, speaking out of turn when she saw her mistress’s delight.

  “I’m afraid your form is too plain,” Erika said dismissively. “Even in this modern age, people still hold to the morals regarding their dealings with humanoid figures of eras past, as if they are the objective truth of the world. I suppose it is her distaste at this that made the ‘tool to whom we’ve outsourced evolution’ refuse to choose a human owner. Or perhaps it is as Snowdrop said, and her offering signals that the whole world should simply die.”

  Through the display, Erika was seeing a machine for which all of human history and culture, and even economy, held no worth. She presumed that Lacia would have informed Arato Endo of the attack, by now.

  Lacia’s owner wouldn’t be able to let this slide. Though even Lacia wouldn’t be able to clean it all up by herself, especially not if she was still trying to protect the image of the character her owner seemed to think she was.

  Since Erika had deliberately declared that the conflict should be done out in the open in front of all of the Lacia-class units, Kouka had been taken down, Snowdrop had flared up, and Methode and Lacia were heading out to stop her. It was going almost exactly as Erika had predicted it would. Plus, Arato had become aware of the true destination of the Lacia-class units. Erika was dying to see what that boy would do now that he knew that answer.

  ***

  〈“She wants to end the human world? Seriously?”〉 Arato exclaimed, urging the car to speed up as it headed toward the place Lacia had given him as being Snowdrop’s current location. Of course, even he knew that he was still rushing in without thinking, just as he always did. But, this wasn’t something he could ignore.

  〈I will meet up with you,〉Lacia said.

  Arato had gotten used to letting vehicles carry him wherever they wanted to, most likely guided directly by Lacia. In a small Asian district of Kinshicho, the car stopped to pick up a beautiful woman in a business suit. Arato didn’t realize it was Lacia until he got a good look at her from up close.

  “I believe this is your first time seeing me in an outfit like this,” she said. It may just have been her makeup, but she looked like she was in her late twenties. As she sat next to him, the scent of a perfume he had never smelled before filled the cabin of the car.

  Arato couldn’t come up with anything witty to say. Suddenly, the images of Lacia in disguise the police showed him seemed to weigh heavily on his mind. He was starting to realize just how much he didn’t know about Lacia.

  Since he was taking too long to respond, Lacia pushed the conversation ahead on her own. “The area in front of Mitaka Station is currently under attack by Snowdrop,” she explained. “As she has many hIEs and vehicles under her control, it is currently impossible to calculate the extent of the casualties.”

  “I’m kind of starting to worry,” Arato said. “We’re going to face off with Snowdrop, but it doesn’t look like you brought your device along.” Once he’d thought about it, he realized he hadn’t seen her carrying it for quite a while.

  “I have a plan in place, so please don’t worry about it,” Lacia replied.

  “You have a plan?” Arato repeated. “So you can beat her?” Snowdrop was hardly an easy opponent. Arato had already seen her create numerous hellscapes before his eyes.

/>   “That is my aim,” Lacia said. “Though things may be advancing faster than anticipated.”

  Arato was having trouble keeping up, and the feeling only grew stronger when the car suddenly began to accelerate. There was a squealing noise from the tires as the vehicle leapt forward. Then, ahead of them in the middle of the road, Arato saw a woman with orange hair. She was there, and then gone. Arato felt a jolt, then his entire field of vision flipped upside-down.

  The world seemed to be spinning, in vertical motion and with extreme velocity. Arato felt a strange sense of freedom, as well as the sensation of flying. He could see the car he had just been riding in right below him. It had been split down the center, and he had been thrown free of it, high into the air. The ground below him grew larger with lightning fast speed, and he was sure that hitting the ground from this height would kill him.

  He was fully prepared to end the fall by landing on his head, but instead an impact to his back halted him. “Thanks, Lacia,” he said, placing his hand down to push himself up, and encountering something soft. It felt so much like flesh that he jerked his hand back automatically.

  Lacia had used her own resilient body as a cushion for his fall, or so he had thought. His eyes widened as he realized that he didn’t recognize the female body underneath him. Instead, Lacia was above him, looking down at the female hIE that had gone into its stasis mode from the impact, eyes open. Arato realized that Lacia had manipulated a nearby hIE to break his fall.

  “Arato, please run,” Lacia instructed, hefting a large laser rifle she had gotten from somewhere.

  “Where?” Arato asked, momentarily frozen in shock. Then, standing up from the pavement, he awkwardly pulled the hIE who had cushioned his fall up with him, too.

  Lacia pointed her rifle at the road and pulled the trigger. The ground where the muzzle of the rifle was pointing exploded with heat.

  Arato heard a voice he recognized from beyond the cloud of dust kicked up by the blast.

  “How cruel. You didn’t hesitate a bit before pulling that trigger,” the voice said.

  Arato’s head was still spinning from his close brush with death and, following its orders, he screamed. “Ryo! That’s you Ryo, isn’t it? What the hell are you doing?” His friend had brought Methode there to kill him, even though Snowdrop was out there mercilessly killing people that very moment.

  Arato saw the silhouette of an orange-haired figure in a bodysuit through the thinning cloud of dust; Methode had shielded Ryo from the blast.

  Why are they attacking us? Arato thought, in a panic. “Why are you stopping us!” he shouted. “Snowdrop’s attacking a whole city!”

  Ryo’s voice, echoing from beyond the dust cloud, was icy. “Snowdrop is an obvious threat that can be destroyed,” he said. “Lacia, on the other hand, is devouring our society in a way that’s much more difficult to prevent, and that makes her the greater threat by far.”

  As he spoke, Methode again blurred and vanished, showing off her incredible prowess. Lacia quickly sent the car and hIE she had been controlling as shields, but they were instantly thrown apart, pieces dancing in the air as if they had been caught up in a blender. hIEs that were in nearby shopfronts rushed over to aid Lacia. The spectacle made passers-by on Showa-dori, once known as the ‘electric street’, stop and stare in shock.

  “Think about what you’ve seen today,” Ryo growled. “Arato, do you understand the meaning behind how unnaturally safe you’ve been? Are you going to pretend you still haven’t noticed all the things and people you’ve stepped on as you try to show the world just how stupid you are?”

  Covering his face with both arms to protect it from the storm of shattered hIE pieces flying at him, Arato had no choice but to listen to Ryo’s verbal onslaught. “Okay, so Lacia messes with some data,” Arato said defensively. “But she’s not using it to screw things up like Snowdrop is.” Even to his own ears, the excuse sounded pathetic. But he had to trust in Lacia. He had made a promise.

  “That thing you’re with has put political pressure on massive organizations like the police and MemeFrame. One of those was a company with big contracts with the Chubu International Airport, that just about went bankrupt due to that attack,” Ryo said.

  Arato wondered where his friend had gotten all that information. He also wondered why no cars seemed to be coming, despite him standing in the middle of the road. Lacia was most likely controlling the traffic, he supposed.

  Lacia shot the laser rifle at the overpass above them. The intense heat of the laser sliced through the outer wall of the road, and chunks of it rained down on Ryo.

  “This way, Arato!” Lacia called, grabbing his hand and heading for the Sobu Main Line Overpass nearby. The weapon she was using looked to be the same as Kouka’s. Apparently Kouka hadn’t had a monopoly on the design.

  It was also clear to Arato that Lacia was aiming at Ryo to keep Methode in check. “Stop, Lacia! If you actually hit him he’ll die!” Arato shouted.

  The two of them ran across a skybridge toward the entrance to the electric city. Arato couldn’t see Methode anywhere. Chunks of recycled asphalt flew up as the material couldn’t handle the pressure of Methode’s superhuman steps. Though Arato couldn’t track Methode’s movements with his eyes, Lacia apparently could as she aimed and fired the laser rifle again.

  “Even on a weekday there’s going to be a ton of people here,” Arato said. The thought of this battle—between one machine that moved too fast for humans to see and another firing off a giant laser—happening on a crowded street threw Arato’s mind into a panic. Some passersby seemed to think that they were shooting a movie or something, as they took out their pocket terminals and started filming the scene.

  “Close quarters combat with Methode would be suicide,” Lacia said. “At the moment, the only thing in our favor is that she has not yet resorted to the indiscriminate murder of bystanders.”

  When they reached the Akihabara Station building, Lacia threw the laser rifle away and ran inside.

  “What the hell are you doing, Ryo?” Arato muttered, unable to understand what was happening. Why did Ryo feel the need to take things this far? “Even that bastard Watarai didn’t have Methode go crazy like this where people could see.” As they pushed their way through the crowd, he couldn’t fight back the tears of self-pity that were forming in his eyes.

  “Considering how Snowdrop is currently running wild, I imagine MemeFrame will soon move to restrain Methode,” Lacia said. “It appears that she wishes to settle things with me before this happens.”

  Arato looked at Lacia’s back as she ran ahead of him, providing guidance through the crowd. At some point, she had wound a metallic device lock around herself.

  The scenery around them changed as they exited the Yamanote Overpass through the electric city’s exit. Since it was an entertainment district, the sky was full of flashy floating displays and guiding lights. Arato watched as pedestrians around them stopped to look around, confused by the sounds coming from the explosion nearby in Showa-dori Street.

  Akihabara had changed its look often throughout the ages. Due to the decreasing number of children, Shohei Elementary School, which had been just north of the station, had closed its doors at the beginning of the 21st century. Now the main street of the area, Chuo-Dori Street, served as a red light district.

  “We’ll pick up my device on Chuo-Dori,” Lacia told him, running through a display for an hIE sex shop that certainly lived up to the legacy of the old electric city. The machine running the display detected Arato’s underage ID, and the image swerved to avoid him.

  Lacia leaped out onto the six-lane street. Arato, following behind her, was struck by an oddity: he saw the normal crowd of pedestrians that he would have expected on a weekday in the area near the station, but not a single car was moving on the road.

  Instead, every car on the street was lined up to either side of the road, as if awaiting the procession of a queen. Passing through the middle, as if the vehicles lining eithe
r side were acting as its guards, a large truck approached them. The back of the truck opened, revealing a black coffin and two hIEs who had been manipulated into delivering it. Once again, Lacia had taken over other machines and used them to move her device around.

  The black device reacted to Lacia’s presence, lighting up with a blue glow from within.

  Then Arato heard a gunshot. One of the delivery hIEs’ heads blew away in pieces, its body falling to the floor of the truck with a sharp thunk. It must have been a sniper round, shot from a distance. Another shot rang out and the other hIE in the truck crumpled. There was no one left in the truck to pass the device to Lacia.

  “Over here, Arato!” Lacia said, shoving him into the shadow of a building. The bullet that passed through the place where he had just been standing blew a large hole in a nearby car, and Arato saw several pedestrians walking along the big street suddenly tumble over unnaturally. Lacia grabbed him and held him close, shielding him with her body. He felt her body shake, as if she’d been shot twice.

  With his face pressed against her breast, he heard her voice. “Those are rifle rounds,” she said. “If one hits you, you will die.” Pushing away from him, Lacia reached out and grabbed something that Arato couldn’t see. Then, as if pantomiming a jiu-jitsu skill on the air itself, she flipped her arms around toward the ground. There was a loud crash, and suddenly a soldier appeared, his back pressed hard into the ground. Arato realized that they were being attacked by human soldiers in optical camouflage.

  An unmoving humanoid figure was suddenly kicked out of the front seat of the truck. Apparently some of the other camouflaged soldiers had taken out the hIE that had been driving. With invisible soldiers in the cabin, the truck carrying Lacia’s device squealed away quickly. They had most likely switched it to manual operation in order to protect against the automatic controls being manipulated. In just moments, the truck—its back door still open—had put a significant amount of distance between them.