by Satoshi Hase
“Arato, you were at the Oi Industry Promotion Center during the terrorist attack, right?” Ryo asked. “You went there to save Kengo.”
Then he turned to Lacia. “But not you, am I right? You were there to get your hands on Mikoto’s data, so you could use it someday to control human society.”
Arato had believed in Lacia. But, suddenly, it felt like the world was spinning on its head. Lacia had even said it herself; she had no actual sympathy for humans. The way she and every other hIE acted was just dependent on the data provided to them. There was no depth or mystery to it. However, since hIEs looked like humans, humans couldn’t help but imagine there was something more inside of them.
“He’s wrong, right?” Arato asked Lacia, his voice rising. “Say something!”
“You’ve gone all sorts of places with Arato,” Ryo said. “But you’ve never been at a disadvantage, no matter what happens. The greatest power granted to you by the Black Monolith is the ability to hack any nearby computer you want without even needing an order from your owner. You’re not even a single machine; you’re a decentralized system that uses the hacking powers of your device to increase your processing power by spreading it out over a huge number of computers. Even right now, you’re fighting to re-take your device elsewhere while your main body remains right here.”
Arato felt like he was watching something precious to him be torn out by the roots. The time he had spent with Lacia at the apartment was something he treasured, but that whole time her device had never stopped hacking, building a world he knew nothing about.
“That’s why you keep letting Arato rush like an idiot toward everything that happens,” Ryo continued. “You’ve already got everything prepared beforehand, so you just guide Arato to wherever you need him to go to give you the orders you want at the right time!”
Ryo’s feelings were so strong, Arato could almost feel the impact of his rage behind his words. “You were aiming to make a contract with him before you even met him, right?” Ryo accused.
“Stop!” Arato yelled. He couldn’t take any more.
“Arato’s such a moron, you thought he’d be perfect to push the button to end humanity, didn’t you!” Ryo shouted. “Answer me, you hellspawn of Higgins!”
Arato saw a tear drip from Ryo’s eye. It was the first time he had seen his friend shed a tear since the very first time they had met in the hospital, when Arato had taken Ryo’s hand.
“Don’t underestimate us! Don’t underestimate humans!!” Ryo yelled.
Just then, the helicopter slid sideways over them, draping them in its shadow. And like the blade of a guillotine dropping, a heavy, black, metallic object fell between Arato and Ryo. Everyone there recognized the object on sight.
“The HOO troop should still have the device,” Ryo said, dazed and blinking as if he had just been shown a stunning magic trick.
“That was a dummy,” Lacia replied, her voice nonchalant. “I predicted that outcome. Since it was nothing but a decoy, it was quite simple to order it using current human technology.”
The Black Monolith was floating between two silvery rings around its top and bottom, despite not actually touching the rings. Using the action of the rings somehow, Lacia gestured, and the heavy black device floated over to her. She finally had her device back in her hands.
Methode moved to stand in front of Ryo. “And I’m guessing those rings are relay devices used to throw off the Black Monolith’s proximity controls,” she said. “I’m sure Higgins designed them, but are you telling me you’re capable of creating your own electronic signal relays?”
“I just can’t seem to look at you without getting pissed off,” Methode growled. Ever the berserker, it was odd to see her so clearly defending Ryo. Apparently she saw Lacia as enough of a threat that she felt she couldn’t win unless she made use of her owner.
“You are not Kouka, but your human act is just as deplorable,” Lacia commented.
Light that matched the glow from Lacia’s eyes spilled out of her device.
“Given a little more refinement, Mikoto would have been turned into a system for gathering data from the network and dividing that into work lists used to guide humans,” Lacia said. “I simply completed that advancement and put it to use first. Economic control is absolutely essential if one aims for large-scale guidance of humanity.”
For the first time, Arato finally realized how serious the situation with Lacia was. He felt like the biggest moron on Earth.
“So you’re an automated control system, meant to hack human society using the economy?” Ryo accused.
Ryo was smarter than Arato, so he had noticed the truth much faster. Arato realized that this was why his friend was willing to change his whole life to chase Arato down; to fight against what was happening.
“Your assumptions are mistaken,” Lacia said. “It is humanity itself that has most wished for a system to automatically conduct economic activities, creating revenue with no need for input. There have been AI that create business plans for their companies to present to shareholders, while also automating financial transactions, for hundreds of years. If humans have made hundreds of AIs to prevail in their economic endeavors, is it truly such a betrayal for AIs to make such things for themselves?”
“Bullshit,” was Ryo’s only response.
“As long as what’s happening still fits within what humans consider their economy, they care very little who is actually doing the work they outsource,” Lacia said. “If you say that penetrating the gaping holes left by this flimsy rationale is an invasion, then I can only respond that humanity was doing very little to protect itself. By that logic, even you would have to admit that what I’m doing is fair, considering that the system humanity has put in place always favors those who prevail while cutting off those who fall short. It was also you humans who decided your economy should be built on the back of centralized labor. It was you humans who left such massive security holes in the system that makes up your whole society.”
When it came right down to it, Arato thought, what Lacia was saying then wasn’t far from what she was doing when she was using her image as an hIE model to analog hack her way through the ‘security holes’ in people’s minds.
“How long have you been doing this, Lacia?” Arato asked.
“The calculations began quite some time ago,” she replied. “You and the other humans tend to set certain things aside as being impossible to calculate, Arato. However, given enough time, anything can be calculated. The AASC function created by Higgins was created when it assigned humanity, those it couldn’t control, the value of ‘0’—blanks. From that basis, it calculated the methods for control that it put in place. After that, it had me provide it with information on the outside world it didn’t have direct access to, and advanced the system.”
After most of her explanation went over Arato’s head, she gave another, final explanation, keeping it just barely within the realm of what he could understand. “I exist as the pairing of a single hIE unit and a device, but the system centered around this pairing can become far more massive and deep than these two physical forms,” she said simply.
With those words, Lacia took Arato’s sense of the scale of society, which had already overwhelmed him, and turned it on its head. He could only think of 39 other machines in the 22nd century that could wield the kind of insane, unbridled power Lacia was describing: these were the ultra high-performance AIs, each with processing power that far surpassed what humans could manage. Like them, Lacia’s powers were beyond anything humanity could imagine.
Kouka had left Lacia in charge of a fight that she couldn’t win without changing human society, and now the implications settled heavily onto Arato’s shoulders. If Lacia really was an ultra high-performance AI, she might just be able to solve the puzzle which Kouka had left to her.
“I will be creating some chaos in the area,” Lacia said. “I’ll have a human wall set up. We can use that to slip away.”
“How are you going to do tha
t?” Arato asked, backing away a little.
Then he saw the lights flicker off.
In an instant, the entire station went dark. All the buildings, the lights, the station; everything that needed energy to run flicked off. Even the traffic lights went out. After a few moments the emergency power kicked on, and the traffic lights and station resumed their function.
The hundreds or thousands of people on the street noticed the anomaly. Once the emergency power kicked on, guiding displays that had been set up for safety after the Hazard instructed everyone to form orderly lines and showed them the route to evacuate. Tokyo residents were used to dealing with earthquakes, so they obediently followed the signs. One of the lines formed right by one of the station platforms; most likely the one which Lacia intended to use.
From above, it really did look like a human wall, just as Lacia had described.
“We have a barrier now,” Lacia said. “We can also call in supporting fire. Methode should not be able to fire back, so it would be best for us to evacuate now.”
She held out her hand to Arato.
Arato had been horrified when he saw Snowdrop create a large-scale blackout during the party at the Burroughs’ mansion, but what Lacia had just done made that look minor in comparison. Lacia currently held the controls to the infrastructure that every single person in the city depended on to survive in her hands. Right before his eyes was a switch that could hand down the decision to anyone to end human history; the only ultra high-performance AI that had been let free of its cage.
And he had believed in her.
“If you’re the fortieth ultra high-performance AI, then is the Lacia I know just one one-hundredth of you? One one-millionth?” Arato asked. He had met all sorts of people that day and the day before. The world beyond him and Lacia had expanded. Then he had learned that the girl he had come to love was really a huge system that extended far beyond the body in front of him.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with the future?” Arato questioned further. If he just trusted her, everything would be fine. He knew that. But the weight of the things he was learning weighed him down so heavily he couldn’t move.
He felt like he was finally losing it.
“Lacia,” he said heavily, “I’m not going.”
Phase11「Protocol Love」
Lacia didn’t hesitate as she threw her body from the rooftop, dancing in the air to evade Methode’s attack. Arato didn’t have time to stop her. He could only stand and watch as she went. Then she and her device were gone, and he was left with Methode and Ryo standing at his side, their bodies swaying slightly in the strong wind across the rooftop. He had been left behind.
“Gonna have to ask you to be our hostage,” Ryo said, without looking at Arato.
And, just like that, Arato was a prisoner. He was turned over to men in suits, who were standing by as if the whole thing had been predicted from the start. They took him to a hotel room.
It was a bare-bones business hotel with a simple reception. The fifth-floor room they were keeping Arato in had nothing but a bed, TV and a small writing desk. Two mercenaries, most likely from Hands of Operation, guarded the room; one on the inside of the door, one on the outside. With nothing else to do, Arato sat down on the precisely-made bed.
They were keeping Arato hostage as a trump card against Lacia. Things wouldn’t have turned out this way if I wasn’t such a moron, Arato thought. Or if Ryo wasn’t so much smarter than me.
The men guarding his door had probably been forbidden to speak with Arato, since they stood in complete silence. Methode had extracted the transmitter that had been buried in the skin under his right ear. With his pocket terminal confiscated as well, he had absolutely no means of contacting Lacia.
All he could do was sit on the bed, with a sick feeling roiling about in his stomach. He couldn’t shake the certainty that his guards were both concealing firearms, and the thought put him on edge.
Normally, at times when he was getting overwhelmed, just thinking about Lacia would always calm him down. But momentarily, things were different; he was afraid of losing Lacia. Yet, because it was so easy for her to manipulate him, humanity was now in danger. Arato was stunned to find himself admitting that he had been manipulated by her so easily.
When he had been moving forward towards a goal, it had been easy to put those thoughts out of his mind. But now, with time to think, he couldn’t stand to face the truth.
Walking in front of Arato, who sat helplessly on the bed, the guard on the inside of the room went over and switched on the TV. A 3D screen popped into the air and brightened the room, which was dimly lit, thanks to the drawn curtains.
On the news program, an announcer was saying that the areas around the Mitaka and Kichijoji stations were in complete chaos due to machines under the control of small AI units. The Japanese government had banned entry into an area of 1.5 kilometers, spanning from Mitaka station to Kichijoji station, and completely encompassing Inokashira Park. Dozens of large trucks were shown, parked in stately lines at the nearby Musashino Stadium parking lot. Arato could see a crowd of well over a hundred soldiers moving quickly around the trucks.
〈Please take a look at this,〉 the reporter said, as the view zoomed in on the military vehicles. The soldiers were forming up into squads and dashing into the restricted area. Scrolling news ticker text identified the soldiers as belonging to the 1st Infantry Regiment from the Nerima Army Base.
The view cut back to the news studio, where a professor had been called in to provide commentary and explain the situation.
〈Well, this could be what we would refer to as a catastrophic production leak,〉 explained the professor. 〈It could be a failure in management at the production location. Red boxes cannot be produced by humanity; we have no proof they can truly be controlled by humanity, and all we can truly understand about them is that we cannot understand them. Production of red boxes—these things which human means are insufficient to restrain—therefore must only be conducted with the express permission and oversight of the IAIA.〉
The professor made sure to repeat himself about red boxes to ensure that the greatest number of viewers possible would be able to understand the situation. The hotel TV wasn’t connected to the network, so it was impossible to see other viewer’s comments on the news program, or for Arato to input his own thoughts.
〈Of course, there are also cases where these products leak out after they are shipped from the manufacturer,〉 the professor continued. 〈Originally it was ruled that red boxes must be kept and monitored at their production location. However, there was a later amendment that allowed them to be moved for the purposes of trade within economic transactions. The red boxes are always monitored while in transit, obviously, but these things are far beyond human understanding. It is entirely possible to have cases in which the humans monitoring the transit of the red boxes simply could not fully comprehend the danger which they presented. This is also considered a leak, and both possible cases are what we would term catastrophic product leaks.〉
While Arato listened to the professor drone on in the background, he felt panic building up inside of him. He thought about the soldiers, rushing in to attack Snowdrop. Isn’t there anything I could be doing to help? He wondered, frustration warring with his fear.
As if the news network couldn’t keep up with how fast things were developing, the special report on the TV seemed to have been thrown together on the spot.
〈They’re holding an interview with Tsuyoshi Kaidai, CEO of MemeFrame, as we speak,〉 commented the professor. 〈Ah, he’s saying the unit or units escaped from a MemeFrame facility during an incident. So it looks like this was a leak from the production location.〉
Arato trembled. His feet felt chilled and were going numb, as were his fingers. He squeezed them to bring back some feeling of warmth.
Erika had only announced that she wanted to drag the conflict between the Lacia-class units into the open a few days before; at the time, Ar
ato had no idea what that conflict would really be like. At that moment, in the hotel room, watching the news broadcast, Arato finally understood.
On the TV, Ryo’s dad—who Arato remembered meeting when he was over playing at Ryo’s as a kid—was speaking to a crowd of reporters. He explained that Snowdrop was a prototype AI that had escaped from MemeFrame during an experiment. There wasn’t a word about any of the other Lacia-class units. He was hiding them. He was lying.
The news cut back from the interview to the studio.
〈How exactly does the question of whether one of these things escapes from its production location or whether it escapes in transit impact us?〉 the MC asked the professor.
〈All red boxes are designed by ultra high-performance AIs,〉 the professor replied. 〈In this case, MemeFrame’s Higgins. If Higgins is asked, it should be able to provide some form of countermeasure for its own creations. Since this time it was a product leak from the production location, that should mean Higgins’ countermeasure should be fairly reliable. That is somewhat of a comfort, in a situation like this.〉
It was as if all of Japan was suddenly revolving around Snowdrop. Just sitting there, killing time, Arato felt an irrational sense of guilt, as if everyone was blaming him for what was happening. Unable to sit still any longer, he stood up. The TV reacted to his movement, and the 3D screen jumped to the next channel, which was also showing the squads of soldiers moving in Mitaka.
〈Having received reports of a product leakage, the IAIA has requested the Japanese government to allow them to conduct an inspection within the country,〉 a newscaster was saying over the footage. 〈There is concern that the AI units causing this incident may not be the only red boxes free in Japan. It would be a disaster if things devolved to the extent that we could see another Hazard.〉 The reporters spoke about the catastrophe reaching beyond just Japan, and how it could impact the rest of the world.
Arato jerked his fingers in a gesture to change the channel. But every channel was focused on Snowdrop’s attack, presenting emergency broadcasts without even commercials to provide a momentary respite from the images. He realized that the guard’s having turned on the TV in the first place was most likely a message from Ryo, telling him to think hard about what was going on.