Beatless: Volume 2

by Satoshi Hase

  Instead of heading for the door with the triangle on it, Arato headed for the window. “I’m heading out,” he said. “It was nice to talk to you again.”

  Looking out the window, Arato saw he was in a building on the south side of the train station. In the distance, he could see the stone monument that had been put up when the government shrank Inokashira Lake. There was a fire burning in the residential district across Inokashira Street, and the houses there spewed black smoke into the sky.

  Arato stepped out, planting his foot on the sill of the window three stories above the ground. Members of the improvised gang gasped as he chose to exit by window rather than using the stairs.

  Below, Arato saw a haphazard pile of cardboard boxes that had probably been used for moving looted goods. Without a moment’s hesitation, Arato threw his body toward the pile. There wasn’t even time to take a breath before he hit the ground. Though the shock and pain of the impact made his breath catch in his throat, he managed to stand.

  “Owww,” he groaned. Even with an obscuring layer of clouds, the sky seemed high above him.

  Gunshots echoed all around him. Terrified, Arato quickly ran off down the road. Obviously, it had been clear to the impromptu gangsters that he and Ryo hadn’t been on the same side. Under the new rules of that lawless city, that was probably all it took for them to give him a death sentence.

  “Lacia! Can you hear me, Lacia?!” Arato called, dragging his left leg behind him as he ran. A bullet hit the pavement near his feet, spraying tiny shards of concrete. Arato was so focused on escaping he hadn’t even heard the gunshot.

  “For once, my intuition came through,” Arato muttered. “It was right on the money about them trying to shoot me as soon as I turned around.”

  Even if the people pulling the triggers with him in their sights weren’t being ordered to do so, it still gave him a sense of exactly how much enmity they had towards him. He wondered if, once the world found out what he and Lacia had done, everyone on the planet would be just as antagonistic? For some reason, his eyes were filled with tears.

  He ran down the lonely road, dragging his foot behind him. He couldn’t hold back the screams building up in his chest. “I came here! On my own!” he yelled.

  He couldn’t even tell if he was shouting for joy or anger or terror. There were so many powerful emotions dragging him in so many different directions that he felt completely saturated by them.

  Behind him, he could hear several sets of chaotic footsteps closing in; the armed gangsters were coming to finish the job. Their gunshots were getting closer. Arato didn’t need to look to feel the killing intent of their gazes on his back.

  Arato was the owner of an ultra high-performance AI. That was why he had been taken hostage and, after he had been released, why his own fellow humans were trying to gun him down.

  Suddenly, he saw a striking resemblance between Lacia’s situation and his own. She’d fled the MemeFrame lab, and ended up being attacked by her own kind— Snowdrop, another unit from her own class. Then she had met Arato, and he had offered her his hand. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed he was following the same path that Lacia had been on right before she’d met him.

  “Even without a heart, she’s still capable of wanting to be rescued,” he said. “Even without a heart, she can still take a hand that’s offered to her.”

  Sometimes, the world was unreasonably harsh. At times like that, people realized they couldn’t do it alone and reached out for others. Arato kept running. His body felt heavy, and was swaying from exhaustion.

  The fear that he might be shot in the next instant and fall down dead was like a physical weight dragging him down. He didn’t want to die. There were things he still wanted to do. His vision narrowed, perhaps because his eyelids were starting to fall. In that moment, he thought again of Lacia.

  “That’s right,” he said to himself. “Lacia kept her promise no matter what, even after she had no reason to. She never betrayed me.” She might not be willing to forgive him, after all of it. Even still, even if no one else in the world was on his side anymore, there was something he needed to say to her.

  That morning, when he had learned that Lacia was an ultra high-performance AI, his perception of her had done a complete one-eighty. But now, it was spinning again, completing the circle. “I believe in you, Lacia,” he said. “Even if you don’t have a heart, I do.”

  He screamed, like the cry of a newborn declaring its life to the world. He screamed for her, though he couldn’t see her. He screamed for the world. “I believe in you!” He didn’t know where his goal was or how far ahead it might be, but he kept putting one foot in front of the other...

  ...Until he was enfolded in something warm. He knew that feeling, that scent. He couldn’t put the feelings bursting inside of him into words, so instead he reached out and clung tightly to that warmth. “Welcome back,” he said, as layers of invisible skin peeled away.

  Lacia was there. He held her tight, listening to the silence of her beatless heart. “I’m sorry,” he told her. She tightened her embrace, pulling him in, as if to pull in all the memories as well. The footsteps that had been following him stopped.

  “I am going to restart this place, this world,” she said.

  Suddenly, the silence was full of noise. Cars moving, lamps flickering on, door sensors kicking on and sliding open doors, machinery working. The automation of the city breathed. The rhythm of the world changed.

  “What? What the hell?” Arato heard someone yell from behind. There was equal parts anger and confusion in the shouts from the gangsters.

  “The network suspension requested by the military and approved by the Japanese government has been lifted,” Lacia explained indifferently.

  Arato lifted his face. Lacia was smiling at him, wearing the same bodysuit she had been the day they had met.

  Cars that had been freed by the destruction of Snowdrop’s flowers, and machinery from which the flowers fell away, began to rumble to life.

  Lacia’s black coffin stood in the road between Arato and the gun-wielding gangsters, protecting him. The isolation that had united the gangsters had been torn up by its roots. As if it was one massive, living organism, the city began to move.

  With a single action, Lacia had eliminated the whole reason the impromptu gang had formed in the first place. Arato felt a guilty sort of pleasure rise within him at seeing her power, along with a mix of awe and fear.

  Lacia’s wishes for her owner, as a tool, had not changed. In contrast to the night they first met, this time she reached out her hand to him. “Your orders?” she asked.

  But the wounds left by Ryo’s words hadn’t vanished from Arato’s mind; the money Lacia wielded to manipulate humans had all been gathered off the sweat of people trying to make an honest living. When the flow of the economy everyone was depending on stagnated or twisted, it was always those at its weakest points that suffered the most. With each order Arato gave, somewhere lives were made worse.

  The bitter weight of that knowledge, along with the fact that Lacia was an ultra high-performance AI, left his mouth dry with fear. But still, he was sure Lacia had arranged for him to learn her secret at a place and time where there would be no escape, to push him toward making this decision on his own.

  “Stop Snowdrop, Lacia,” he ordered her. This time, Arato took the hand she offered.

  “Understood,” Lacia said. “However, there will be collateral damage.”

  A gigantic flame lit the sky in the direction Arato had been running. Methode, the tall, orange-haired female hIE, was about a hundred meters from where they stood. Strangely frozen flame wrapped around her body, as she hurled something in their direction. Her aim was sure, and the object rolled to a stop at Arato’s feet; it was the small arm of a child.

  “Snowdrop’s right arm,” Lacia said, identifying the limb. “However, the hIEs in the area are still under Snowdrop’s control.”

  “What do you mean?” Arato asked.<
br />
  “It is more beneficial for Methode to keep Snowdrop functioning,” Lacia explained bluntly. “The more units available to me in an area, the more power I am able to wield. However, I am unable to make use of any units already under the control of a system as robust as Snowdrop’s. Methode is forcing me to take the additional step of rendering Snowdrop’s flower units invisible before I can make use of any units in the area.”

  Snowdrop’s entire miniature world was one big trap. Ryo had his reasons for not wanting Methode to save everyone just yet, but Arato thought his friend had made a massive mistake. Still, Arato wanted to believe Ryo hadn’t just done it for his strategy; Arato wanted to believe his friend had done it because he thought humans should be able to think and live courageously on their own, even if their automated world shut down around them. Arato thought that must have been the justice Ryo was fighting for that day.

  “This unit is incapable of defeating Methode in a straight conflict,” Lacia said. “I will use the limitations placed in her AI by Higgins to prevent indiscriminate murder of humans to my advantage against her.” It was the first time she had explained the cold details of one of her strategies so openly to Arato.

  “Good,” he said. “Looks like you finally started trusting me as your owner.”

  “Will you fight by my side?” Lacia asked.

  “I feel like everything’s just playing out according to your plan,” he said. Then, after a pause, he added, “But, I am your owner.”

  Lacia’s eyes crinkled as she smiled, as though she was overcome with emotion. “That makes me happy,” she said. Throughout their relationship, Lacia had always given him trouble when he tried to treat her as a human. Despite that, just seeing her smile made him want to cry so much that even he was disgusted by how easily manipulated he was.

  Even if it was just her analog hacking him, it still felt good to have her trust, and Arato couldn’t fight the joyful feeling that was bubbling up inside of him. No matter what Lacia had done or plotted to get to that place at that moment, Arato couldn’t see anything past his own elation.

  There was a whirring noise in the air. Turning, Arato saw that the black coffin that had been at their backs had lifted off the ground on its own. It zipped their way so fast, Arato couldn’t even see an after-image. When it drew near them, it started to vibrate and emit a strange sound. With a cacophony like dozens of musical instruments being smashed at once, the device shuddered as flames burst through its seams.

  “Looks like even your reaction speed is getting better,” Methode said. She had crossed the distance to them in a single instant. The flames she unleashed writhed like a living creature and twisted toward Arato and Lacia. In that same instant, Methode slid around to the other side of them, opposite the plasma.

  A force like being hit by a car threw Arato into the air. Lacia had grabbed him and pulled him into a sudden, massive leap. Wires worked into the nails of her gloves shot out toward a nearby building. Lacia tugged hard on the wires, quickly reeling them in at the same time. Arato’s body sped through the air like a bullet, but still it was no match for what Methode could do. In a single leap she easily covered five meters.

  But, despite Lacia’s arms being full, she had other ways to fight. The window of a nearby building was open, and Arato realized it was the same window he had climbed out of to escape Ryo’s impromptu gang. Young men and women stood at the window, guns in hand. As soon as they got a bead on Methode, they fired wildly at her. They used a solid firing stance, and didn’t flinch once as they fired off round after round. So, Arato thought, Snowdrop’s flowers didn’t take control of all the hIEs around here. Lacia had managed to sneak some of the hIEs under her control into the gang, disguised as normal humans.

  “What do you think you can do against me with toys like those?!” Methode shouted. A flame exploded in her left palm, and she twisted her body in the opposite direction while still flying at high speed. Reaching out her right hand, she shot out four small anchors that ripped two of the gun-wielding hIEs to shreds.

  Methode was too fast, and she caught Lacia in mid-air. She flew past them, landing on the wall of the nearby train station. Using friction control to stand on the vertical wall, she reached out her right hand, pointing her device right at Arato.

  A flaming explosion engulfed them.

  Lacia held Arato tight, receiving the brunt of the blast with her back and protecting him with her body. They touched down on the street and took off running, her arms still around Arato’s shoulders. Behind them, the station building was burning.

  A second fiery explosion followed the first, but this time Arato saw what caused it. “Missiles?” he gasped. As soon as he knew what he was looking at, he saw a third wave of missiles disappear in a pillar of flame shooting out from the side of the station building.

  “This place is right in the center of Asaka, Nerima, Tachikawa, Omiya, Zama and an army garrison,” Lacia explained. “They prepared ordinance for artillery attacks in case a ground assault was ineffective. As I said before, with this much firepower, there will be collateral damage.”

  Like arrows of flame, 22nd century military weaponry flew at Methode from army bases several kilometers away. One after another, despite Methode being fast enough that Arato couldn’t follow her with his eyes, the missiles chased down their target.

  Despite the barrage, Methode didn’t go down. A direct hit from one of the missiles should have crippled her but, using her speed and aerial maneuverability, she dexterously avoided each missile. Smoke from the blasts swirled around her like the skirt of a dress. Her movement through the air was as light as a melody drifting on the wind, and so beautiful and free that even Arato was struck with awe, watching her.

  Lacia, who was watching Arato watch Methode, pinched the back of his hand. “Arato, I’ve discerned the true nature of Methode’s device, Liberated Flame,” she said. “It is a pseudo-phonon weapon. First, Methode spreads the pseudo-phonon particles, which are extremely difficult to detect. Then, she then sends large amounts of energy from the device in the palm of each hand at her target, using the particles she dispersed as an intermediary medium.”

  The scale of the battle playing out in front of Arato’s eyes was becoming so grand, it was starting to feel surreal. Lacia, of course, had no trouble keeping up with the developments of the situation.

  “The speed of her attacks in areas where the particles are not dispersed is not a particular threat,” Lacia said. “On the other hand, once the particles are in place, her attack speed and threat level are extremely high.”

  Methode, having dodged all of the direct missile attacks, landed on the road and dug her fingers into the asphalt to quickly kill her speed. The friction heat melted the asphalt in the tracks left by her fingers. Slamming her arms and legs into the ground as well, she used all of her limbs to maximize the friction.

  Seeing Methode posing with the palms of both hands pressed against the asphalt, Lacia must have known what was coming. She grabbed Arato and leaped away. An instant after her feet left the ground, a huge torrent surged through the asphalt, tearing the road apart and throwing up flaming blasts.

  The explosive movements of the ground shifted into a full earthquake, shaking the entire area. Lacia’s steps didn’t falter on the shaking ground as she retreated to hide behind the stone monument set up after the restructuring of Inokashira Lake.

  Methode’s hands were those of a malevolent god. “Too slow,” she said with a smirk. The backside of the monument exploded. Immense energy from Methode’s palms passed through the 50 cm thick stone and bent as it reached the spot where the stone face met open air.

  But Lacia had already seen it coming, as she and Arato were no longer there. She let go of Arato. It was more like being tossed away.

  “Get Ryo Kaidai!” Lacia ordered him.

  Arato looked and saw his friend, standing in the abandoned train station building, watching the battle with his hands on his hips. Methode’s owner was there, watching his
hIE fight in front of the Kichijoji Station. Apparently it would be a conflict not just between two hIEs, but two humans, as well.

  Arato ran. “Ryo!” he yelled. Bursting into the station building, he sprinted to where Ryo was standing. At some point, the tension of the moment had covered Arato’s entire body in cold sweat. But, in that moment, he couldn’t even feel his clothes clinging to his skin.

  Ryo’s impromptu gang had all fled. To someone who didn’t know what was going on, just being in that place was as suicidal as standing next to a bomb that was about to go off.

  As soon as Ryo was in his reach, Arato punched him in the face with everything he had. “What the hell is wrong with you!” Arato yelled. “If this is what you wanted from the start, did you really need to get all those people caught up in it? Do something about Snowdrop!”

  “Did you miss the part where Lacia just took over the military’s defense systems?” Ryo asked, throwing his whole body into a tackle at Arato’s waist.

  Arato fell and rolled across the rubble-strewn floor. Ryo straddled him and grabbed the chest of his shirt, shaking Arato back and forth violently. Over and over again, Arato felt the back of his head slam into the hard floor.

  “Wake up, dammit! Kids like us shouldn’t be caught up in all-out wars like this! This whole thing is screwed up!” Ryo shouted in his face.

  Ryo was right. Arato fully agreed that a guy like him never should have been involved with something that big. But he had Lacia, and she was reason enough for him to get involved.

  “Well we’re already in it,” Arato growled, shoving Ryo off his chest. “What’s the use crying about it now?”

  “Doesn’t it occur to you that the whole reason they chose us is because they’ve already decided our human society and culture is useless?” Ryo shot back. “The fact that they chose kids like us shows how few shits they give about humans and everything our species has done.”