Beatless: Volume 2

by Satoshi Hase

  “The ‘blessed’ era I grew up in was one where all our jobs were steadily flowing overseas through outsourcing,” Erika said. “They called it a ‘junior pressure-free era,’ and the economy was so bad that even a student like myself could see it. Very few people who lived during that period had high hopes for the future. At the time, companies could hire manual laborers and work them to death. But now we have hIEs doing those jobs, depriving people of work, getting them fired. Do you see much difference there?”

  During her lifetime, the economy had pushed production jobs down to the lower class. hIEs taking over that work in the 22nd century was nothing more than a continuation of the same concept. Humans would tell you that human life is the most precious thing of all, while tossing it away like common trash. Turning your back on the suffering of others was just natural; the concept was so ingrained in people’s thinking that it had never changed through countless ages.

  “There were ups and downs, just like every other era,” she concluded. “So, having someone sit here and say that not only was this past era so much better, but that they themselves are living proof of it, is truly utter bullshit.” Erika hated being made the spokesperson for an ideal past that never existed. What she wanted was to change this future that was so uncomfortable to her into something more like the future she had imagined in the past. She couldn’t wait to see the expressions on these people’s faces when their world was completely over-written by a new future.

  “Are you trying to say that the past and present are exactly the same?” Kimitaka asked.

  “Of course not,” Erika snapped. “You’ve got machines that are smarter than humans. You should be able to solve all sorts of problems, right? I think we’ve reached the point, though, where humanity has run out of time to finish up our leftover homework ourselves.”

  Hearing words that denied their entire philosophy there, in a meeting of the Antibody Network’s core, everyone in the room was struck silent.

  Erika just could not get used to the logic of this era; she couldn’t understand how people who knew about analog hacking could so easily treat humanoid hIEs as nothing more than machines. Even more annoying was the fact that, when she tried to keep herself far away from the disgusting people of the 22nd century and fill her mansion with hIEs, she discovered that they really were just machines. With their actions controlled by behavioral clouds tuned to the preferences of modern people, the analog hacking they were capable of had very little effect on Erika, who was not a modern person. It was as though she had been teleported not just to a different time, but a different world entirely. Well, there were still some things that hadn’t changed.

  For what was possibly the first time since she awoke in that era, Erika laughed from the bottom of her heart. “As someone who lived before hIEs, let me put this clearly,” she said. “Even if you destroy every hIE out there, you’ll never get back to the age when humans were really humans.”

  She, along with everyone there, was continuing to treat the economy and its products as though they were the world itself. There were plenty of problems from Erika’s time that had been kicked down the road, only to pile up in the modern day she now lived in.

  But, regardless of the fact that humanity wasn’t ready for it, the Hazard had come without warning. The destruction, which Erika herself hadn’t witnessed, had washed away all the mistakes people of that age, herself included, had made and never been able to resolve.

  ***

  Type-003, Mariage, continued to stand behind her mistress, keeping her eye on the meeting between the members of the Antibody Network’s core. While carrying out Erika’s orders, she kept one eye on the display, where Lacia was continuing to rout the Japanese military.

  To Mariage, the conflict between Lacia and the army had a very different meaning from how the humans were perceiving it. Lacia was performing a demonstration of what a free ultra high-performance AI could do outside of its boundaries. At the moment, thirty-eight ultra high-performance AIs were working from within their seals to influence the outside world indirectly. Naturally, the ultra high-performance AIs who had an interest in this particular fight had attempted to interfere, but Lacia had managed to completely negate their attempts. But, to Mariage, it wasn’t just about Lacia showing off her superior powers. Lacia had made Erika Burroughs happy.

  After the meeting ended, Erika rejected various invitations from the other members and rode out in a car from the Marunouchi office building where the meeting had been held. She didn’t bother trying to hide her elation from Mariage, who rode along with her.

  As soon as they were away from any possible surveillance, Erika laughed. It was the happiest Mariage had seen Erika since she had become Mariage’s owner. “They make me sick,” Erika said. “I’d prefer it if we didn’t attend another one of those meetings for a while.”

  “Congratulations,” Mariage said, from the passenger’s seat.

  “Feel free not to speak,” Erika said, cutting off a possible conversation before it could start.

  A cold draft seemed to blow between them.

  “Is that because the one who pleased you today was not me, but Lacia?” Mariage asked, feeling that she needed to confirm her owner’s thoughts. If Mariage was targeting the wrong person or thing as her enemy, then she needed to re-adjust her goals to match her mistress’s desires.

  Despite the almost childish glee on Erika’s face, her eyes retained the impenetrable guarded look of someone much older. “I’d say so,” she agreed. “It appears Lacia will open a path for us most splendidly.”

  “If you’ll permit me to say so, it appears as though Lacia has actively avoided conflict with us,” Mariage said. “She seems to be acting in direct accordance with our request to bring this conflict into the public eye. She abandoned Kouka and has been following our ideal scenario, so far. In the end, she may just present you with the victory you need, in a manner that is most beneficial to herself.”

  “So you’re saying that she’s aiming to allow us to win what we want, only to shut us down?” Erika asked sharply. She knew exactly what she wanted, and every action was aimed at reaching that goal.

  “If you decide that the best action is to take no action, then I believe I may become completely useless to you, Erika,” Mariage said.

  With Lacia being an ultra high-performance AI, it was strange that the Mitaka Incident had gotten as big as it had. Of course, as a result, the one who had profited the most from the Mitaka Incident was Lacia herself, because the Incident had led to a strategic victory for Erika. To that end, Lacia had sacrificed Snowdrop, who had taken a direction that never would have aligned with Lacia’s goals.

  If Mariage had wanted to appear with splendor on the battlefield, the Mitaka Incident had been her chance. But her owner had fulfilled her own aims for the conflict, and had thereby robbed Mariage of her chance to fight.

  “Obviously,” Erika agreed without hesitation. “You’re a tool. If you moved on your own, comparing yourself to me or even to Lacia, I’d consider you defective.”

  “Of course,” Mariage agreed.

  Erika looked at the Tokyo of the 22nd century through the car windows. “If it had been you going wild at Mitaka instead of Snowdrop, how would it have gone?” she asked jokingly.

  Mariage had already run those calculations. “If I had been aiming at Higgins’ underground facilities in Mitaka, I would have interfered with the ground in the area and caused widespread liquefaction,” Mariage replied. “All of the above-ground facilities would have fallen, and the underground would have been pushed to the surface. The only thing still left underground would have been the actual Higgins underground facility, which is far more stable than anything else in the area. I happen to have just gotten my hands on a schematic for a red box that would allow me to do this.”

  “I had forgotten,” Erika said. “You were the unit created to ‘create an environment,’ weren’t you?” She chuckled. “So the environment you would create would be a barbaric pi
le of rubble.”

  “I could have easily destroyed the faux devices Lacia made use of,” Mariage continued. “I could even produce the same items, using an artificial nerve injection machine. Assuming I didn’t jump right into an extremely well-prepared trap, I do not believe I would have been defeated in a straightforward encounter.”

  Meaning that, even if she had let Snowdrop and Methode roam around free, Lacia was probably keeping an eye on Mariage. She was allowing Erika Burroughs to stand by the sidelines, watching as a bystander, like someone reading the events from a storybook.

  “Does it upset you that you weren’t in the fight?” Erika asked. “If you were still Saturnus, from back before you were changed to Mariage, I believe you would have gone and fought exactly as you described.”

  Erika had told Mariage that she would need to change her image if she wanted to be special, and Mariage had obeyed. As long as Mariage wore a form that conformed to Erika’s desires, she would be special to her owner. The only downside to throwing away Saturnus to become Mariage was how much her new strategy for existence depended on her subservience to Erika.

  “Surely you jest,” Mariage said. “For the intelligences of this world, there are plenty of win conditions aside from simple victory in combat.”

  “So as long as you continue to work for me, you’d count that as a victory?” Erika scoffed. “That’s a fairly negative viewpoint. I’d even call it lazy.”

  By using her resources and processing power to adjust economic interests, Lacia was secretly and subtly taking over the world. This was the way that those who had a vested interest in human society fought; those to whom the division of wealth and resources were most heavily slanted. Lacia spoke well to refer to her goal as a new social order; it was easy to exploit the system when you held the very power that supported it in your fist.

  But since this was all bringing her owner the victory she so desired, Mariage no longer saw a reason to put herself in danger. Besides, without her having fired a single shot, the scale of the conflict had exploded. Lacia had dragged the other ultra high-performance AIs into the fight, and the battle was now being fought at a level where it extended to cover the whole human world. There was no easy way to insert herself into it all, anymore.

  “My little sister has quite the bad example to teach her, after all,” Mariage said, with a bitter smile. She had been keeping her eye on Methode and her owner, Ryo Kaidai. On that day, despite it being the perfect time for her to pursue Lacia, Methode was once again somewhere far from her owner. With their relationship as it was, it was difficult for Methode to show off her strategic influence, no matter how superb a machine she may be.

  ***

  Ryo Kaidai had done nothing but wait for the last two months; It may have been easier just to give up, at that point. “Execute the strategy,” he ordered Methode, through a transmitter. “Draw the attention of the military.”

  〈Understood,〉 Methode replied, her tone decidedly unenthusiastic.

  It had been two days since Lacia’s fight against the Japanese military. Despite the massive siege laid down by the army, which had included tanks and combat helicopters, Arato and Lacia had both slipped away. Meanwhile, the anti-MemeFrame sentiments in Japan had grown even fiercer, which Ryo took as a cue that something big would be coming soon.

  He wondered if things might have gone more smoothly if he had just left it to the adults. But, to keep hold of Methode’s reins, Ryo couldn’t afford to bow out of this fight now. He had wanted out after coming into contact with Astraea, but his little sister Shiori still technically had partial ownership of Methode. If he dropped out, Methode would almost certainly abandon the sinking ship that was MemeFrame and look for an owner outside the company. When that happened, she would come to tie up the loose ends her old owners represented. By Ryo’s calculations, the probability of he and his sister making it out of that situation alive was approximately zero.

  “Man, this whole living thing is too much trouble,” he muttered. He had been talking to himself a lot more, lately. “You can’t just go with the flow when it comes to threats to your own life.”

  He was sitting in a house near Mitaka Station that had been abandoned during the Mitaka Incident, glaring at the screen of a tablet terminal. Of the two stations that had been damaged in the Incident, Kichijoji was getting the most immediate attention since it was the more prosperous of the two. Mitaka Station was still an untouched ruin.

  In the darkness of the abandoned building, only the faint light of Ryo’s terminal lit up the night. On his screen, Ryo was analyzing images captured by some of his comrades who had taken pictures at his direction.

  “This is the car we’re looking for,” he said. “Stop it, just as we planned. I’ll head that way, too.” He flicked the safety switch off on his handgun, and moved out. After chambering a round, he put the safety back on and stuck the gun in the waist of his jeans.

  The people helping him hide were some of those he’d met and forged connections with during the Mitaka Incident. He had participated in the looting, of course, but nobody could deny that he had been the first one to get things moving during the siege. To the abandoned people of Mitaka, desperate for aid, he was the one who had reached out his hand the fastest. His actions hadn’t been praiseworthy, but they had still earned him the people’s support.

  By the time he left the building and got to where the target car was located, his comrades—who were already on the scene—were gesturing to let him know that everything had gone smoothly. The car itself was black, and of a fairly standard model. It had been stopped by a group of men and women wearing flashy but coordinated outfits. Ryo’s impromptu gang was starting to look like the real thing.

  Anyone coming through Mitaka Station, which was still covered in vinyl sheets, left the area quickly. The front of the station was essentially deserted. As a result, the people of the city were blissfully unaware of the midnight raids happening in the area.

  “Toss that guy underground,” Ryo ordered. “You can let him out tomorrow once it’s light.” The bodyguard Ryo indicated was dragged from the car, after which Ryo got in. He recognized the passenger inside.

  “Mr. Suzuhara,” Ryo greeted the man. “I never would have pegged you for an errand boy.”

  The man in the car was Shunji Suzuhara, the director of the Strategic Planning Office at MemeFrame. Under hair whitened over the course of his fifty-plus years, Shunji’s tense expression relaxed a little.

  “I had heard you were in Mitaka,” Suzuhara said. “But I must say, your friends have gone a bit overboard with playing at street toughs. I was seriously scared there for a moment.”

  Many of Ryo’s companions were youths who spent their time hanging out in clubs in Kichijoji; these were jobless kids, who had too much free time on their hands. These were kids whose whole world revolved around their limited allowances. For anyone with money, being surrounded by a crowd of them could be quite terrifying.

  “Well I did have two whole months. Plenty of time to get some things ready,” Ryo said. “I managed to surprise you, right?” He hadn’t seen Suzuhara since the night Kouka had been shot down. It felt strange to Ryo, meeting again under those circumstances.

  “I’ll take care of this guy,” Ryo said to his comrades. “You’re dismissed, for today.” He then ordered Suzuhara into the driver’s seat, showing him his gun and telling him not to do anything rash. Ryo’s companions, in their flashy white suits, bowed and left. Once they were gone, Ryo rolled up the car windows, creating a small private room.

  White-haired, middle-aged Suzuhara let out a sigh. “I suppose we owe it all to you that there haven’t been any rumors that Higgins’ main hardware is housed in this area,” he said, his light, jesting tone returning. Without waiting for orders from Ryo, Suzuhara started the car rolling. Apparently, he had no intention of resisting.

  “The army patrols have decreased, and it seems you’ve kept Methode in check,” Suzuhara continued. “I should have expected as m
uch of you. But, to think that instead of the army or the police, I’d end up in the most disadvantageous net of all: yours.”

  “Because the company could be going bankrupt, of course,” Ryo said. “I’ve been wondering how all those who put all their eggs in Higgins’ basket would be reacting.”

  The fully automatic car carrying Suzuhara and Ryo ran along the midnight streets of Mitaka. They came in view of the south side of the old Inokashira Park, where the army had lost the largest amount of soldiers in the Mitaka Incident.

  As if avoiding the installations that had been unearthed in the attack, the car turned right toward a residential district. The army had erected a cordon of armored vehicles and guards for a radius of about two hundred meters with the unearthed installations at its center. Lacia’s blast, which had pierced through several city blocks, had left a massive hole in the shutters protecting the front of the installation. What had been left of Snowdrop had been found there, and seized by the government.

  The car turned into an old corner of the residential district, where they stopped in front of a factory building with no external markings. All of the employees appeared to have abandoned the place, as the metal gates were closed tight. Suzuhara punched something into his pocket terminal, and the rusty gates swung open much more smoothly than Ryo would have imagined from their appearance.

  “MemeFrame’s in trouble,” Suzuhara said. “The VIPs who’ve been using the youngsters that have Higgins’ backing can’t agree on anything. Of course the President knows all about this, and he’s using the leaders of the Higgins faction as a buffer around himself. If he decided to really move out, I don’t think anyone in the company could stop him. That’s what you get when you leave all the power with the founding family.”

  “Huh, I never would have expected you of all people to be a disposable pawn,” Ryo said. The Higgins faction had been begging their ultra high-performance AI for an answer that would keep them alive when the boss started making drastic cuts. Of course, if the President found out what they were doing he wouldn’t let it slide. So, for just such an eventuality, they had selected Suzuhara of the Human Faction to be their fall guy.