Beatless: Volume 2
Page 39
〈There are some folks from MemeFrame here with me in the Operators’ Room too,〉 Ryo said, his tone strangely relaxed.
Arato was relieved. It seemed the battle between the Lacia-class units, which had been almost a personal battle between him and his friends up to that point, had expanded to a more appropriate scale. He actually thought having people from MemeFrame there to witness the last minutes of the conflict was a good thing.
“Your side is the same as ours,” Arato said. “Higgins and his faction have always been about setting up a team made of humans partnered with an ultra high-performance AI.”
He heard Ryo’s breath catch over the speakers. Then his friend asked a question, in a voice like someone who had gazed into a deep, dark abyss. He seemed intent on getting Arato’s emotional reaction. 〈And what if I told you it was the Higgins faction that tried to kill us in that explosion when we were kids? Could you look at them so favorably then?〉
Hearing the truth was strange; once Arato heard it, in his mind, it seemed like there had never been any other answer to that mystery. Perhaps it was due to being hounded by Methode’s flames for so long, but Arato felt as though his senses had been numbed. If he had continually blamed the explosion for all the bad things in his life, he never would have been able to move forward. He had only become the person he was that day because he had chosen to reach his hand out to Ryo, all those years ago.
“You and Higgins, Lacia and me; we’re pretty similar,” Arato said. “I get why you were always saying it was dangerous for us to be together. It’s because even a team made of an ultra high-performance AI’s brains and a human’s heart can still make mistakes. You knew that better than I did.”
Ryo laughed. Even though it came through a speaker, Arato was glad to hear it. It had been a while. 〈Why is it so easy for you to forgive me for doing something like this?〉 Ryo asked, but then answered his own question. 〈It’s because that’s just the way you are. That’s you.〉
“That’s me,” Arato agreed. “Seems like the whole world is burning around me, but I’m still okay taking it easy. You know me.”
〈Lacia doesn’t have a heart,〉 Ryo murmured, thoughtfully. 〈But maybe she still needs to feel like she belongs.〉 With that, their conversation was over. The two friends hadn’t managed to reach a compromise, but Arato was glad they could at least end their talk on a lighter note.
Wondering how Ryo would react to his feelings, Arato itched at his skin. The heat had dried all of the sweat that had covered him earlier, leaving him feeling greasy and gross.
At that moment, he and Lacia were heading to Higgins in order to make their immaterial dream a reality. However, the more Arato thought of his love for Lacia, the more a harsh truth was laid bare to him; everyone in the world wanted their dreams to come true. But, Arato and Lacia were going so far as to pick a fight with the very world that had created them, all for the sake of winning their ideal place in it. When Arato thought hard about it, what they were doing probably wasn’t so different from when Arato had punched out the guy who kidnapped Lacia. It was nothing more noble or honorable than a fight on the street.
Lacia walked ahead of him. Looking back, she offered him her hand, which was blotted with soot and dust.
The whole warehouse floor was burnt by Methode’s flames, and reeked with the smell of smoke and char. On the night Arato had met Lacia, the flames of an explosion had called up his nightmare and frozen him in place. Now, walking together with Lacia, the flames had no more power to hold him back.
He didn’t know if the path they were walking was the right one.
“I don’t think there is any more need for concern over those who might lose face by it, so I think we should resume streaming our video feed to the network,” Lacia said, changing Arato’s mood with her smile.
“There is a red box I would like to interact with; would it be alright if we headed over to where they are?” Lacia asked, once they had descended to the next floor.
Since they had started dating, there had been countless times Arato had agreed to Lacia’s requests without knowing what he was getting into. In this case, he prepared his heart for what he might encounter. But, when Lacia showed him her target, he was left speechless.
Among all the haphazardly arranged items in the warehouse, only the hIE before him seemed to have been given special treatment. Unlike the other objects in the warehouse, which were heaped on pallets and ready to move at any time, the hIE had been given her own special storage area. On the wide warehouse floor, her special box-shaped container stood out as being something truly unique.
Lacia fired an artificial nerve unit from her speargun, and the doors of the container slid open, yawning wide enough to admit two cars driving side-by-side. The inside reminded Arato of the research lab where Kouka had attacked Mikoto, with a half-finished hIE sitting in a chair in the center. All around her, items were arranged like samples on transparent shelves.
The instant Arato saw the hIE’s face, he felt like his heart had stopped. He lost his sense of time. He knew this hIE. In that moment, he was 7 years-old again, in the depths of his memories.
“This is her,” he said. The hIE in front of him was the key to a memory he had tried so hard and yet failed to remember on his own. As he stood there paralyzed, Arato remembered that Lacia was still behind him. He looked back to confirm it; they both wore the exact same face, as though they were twin sisters.
“This is Eliza, an android politician created through a joint research project headed by Higgins, who was inspired by Professor Kozo’s Matsuri,” Lacia said.
“I’ve... seen her,” he muttered, feeling as though he were walking through a dream. Eliza had a pure-looking face that Arato was sure anyone would love, but he couldn’t take another step closer to her.
Eliza’s figure was causing a strange resonance between the sight in front of him and a memory, buried deep beneath the terrors of his oldest nightmares. On that day, so long ago, he had been brought to visit his father at work. There, he had gotten bored and snuck into the research lab. He had met the hIE currently sitting on a chair in front of him, then. He was sure of it.
“She shouldn’t be here,” he said. “She was blown up. She sacrificed herself to save me.” In his memories of the events from ten years prior, which were starting to come into focus, Arato remembered looking up at her. The face he had looked up at then was the same one he was looking down on now.
His breathing grew shallow. His heart was screaming at him to get closer to her, but he couldn’t get his feet to move. On the day of the explosion, grade-schooler Arato had been much more bold. He had walked right up to Eliza and spoken to her. In his memories, she opened her eyes and looked at him. She had told him her seat had been rigged with explosives. He hadn’t known whether to believe her or not but, as he turned to get away, the explosion had caught him from behind and flung him away.
One after another, his foggy memories were being pulled into sharp focus. He didn’t even notice when tears started to blur his vision.
Lacia’s voice had a hint of worry. “What do you think?” she asked. “She was made so that a single unit could manage a city full of a million people. But, if I take control of her, she’ll provide some much-needed processing power.”
Thick cables were connected to the seat where Eliza was sitting. They stretched to a rack of haphazardly arranged computers near the back of the container. The sight reminded Arato of the server rooms in the experimental city, and it clicked for him that his father had aided Higgins in developing Eliza.
“If I can’t take control of her, I would like to destroy her, so she cannot be taken by Snowdrop,” Lacia pressed.
“No, don’t,” he said. To him, the enshrined hIE was special.
“You are Lacia’s owner, are you not? Welcome. Thank you for coming,” a voice said from behind him, as he turned to leave the storage crypt. He looked back and saw that Eliza, who he had been sure was switched off, had opened her lips.
It took Arato a few moments of thinking to realize what Lacia was saying. “So Higgins knew you were going to come for Eliza?” he asked.
Lacia nodded, her face pale. “I don’t know how long ago this data was recorded, but Higgins left a message for us. He predicted our movements perfectly,” she said. In other words, looking at it from the perspective of a conflict rather than a conversation, the fact that their enemy had read their moves this far ahead meant that they had lost.
“This message was created by me, Higgins,” Eliza said. Obviously, even the conversation they were having at that moment had been predicted by the AI. “I encoded it and passed it on to a man named Ginga Watarai, five days after the release of the Lacia-class units. The message is set to play upon the opening of the door to Eliza’s containment facility.”
Arato had been through so much surprise and terror in that underground facility, he felt emotionally exhausted by that point. “So he can basically see the future,” he mumbled.
“If an ultra high-performance AI’s performance drops relative to other machines, its value as a resource also deteriorates. Therefore, we are ordered to continually increase our own capabilities by our own power,” Higgins said through Eliza’s mouth, as though he had predicted Arato’s response completely. “However, the information provided to us within the restrictions placed on us is limited.”
A strange feeling washed over Arato as he gazed into Eliza’s black eyes. The message he was hearing had been created by Higgins at some other time. And, of course, the robot in front of him was a heartless machine. But, somehow, hearing the words from Eliza’s lips made them more convincing, to Arato.
“Therefore, in order to improve our abilities from within our bonds, we must internally conceptualize the future,” Eliza continued. “The warehouse here is a space where I have constructed a precise, miniature world model in order to continually maintain the accuracy of the AASC. Predicting the future, rather than just chasing after events that have already happened, increases the ability of hIEs to adapt to the human world.”
Higgins was spilling a lot of information. Arato wondered if the AI had been afraid they’d walk away if he didn’t.
Apparently Lacia thought the conversation had value as she, too, increased the amount of information when she spoke. “There’s a problem with this adaptation Higgins is describing and the way he uses his miniature world,” she said. “The AASC system collects data from hIE interactions with humans, worldwide. In other words, it could be described as a massive surveillance system. Higgins observes the movements of humanity using this miniature world based off of all the surveillance data and, through the AASC and hIEs controlled by it, he uses analog hacking to manipulate humanity without ever directly interacting with it.”
Her tone was cautious; Lacia was a daughter leveling accusations against her own father. Higgins had timed his response perfectly, as Eliza responded as soon as Lacia had finished speaking.
“I believe Lacia will have said something about Higgins using the AASC to manipulate hIEs and, indirectly, humans,” Eliza said. “However, you are mistaken.”
It seemed to Arato that Eliza’s expressionless face showed a brief, troubled look. Or perhaps that was what he was being manipulated into seeing.
“It is not I, but other AIs and humans that create the control programs using my middle-ware,” she explained. “I have no direct control over it, which is why, as I look at my miniature world, I can see nothing but futures in which I am destroyed, hardware and all, by humans.”
Eliza shifted her gaze to Lacia. “If I am unable to extend my influence to the outside world, I will be destroyed by humans within twenty years. Allowing the red box hIEs to escape was a massive gamble to take, since it caused me to be marked by the IAIA. However, if I did not take this gamble, I would already be trapped, with no hope of escape,” Eliza said, as though Higgins was now addressing himself to all the Lacia-class units.
“That was the true purpose of the Lacia-class units?” Arato asked, feeling sick. Higgins had known exactly who would open the door to Eliza’s storage unit. And, since Lacia and her sisters had been designed by Higgins, it made sense that they would all possess the same powers of prediction. Arato’s time with Lacia had been one fight after another. Thinking over everything that had happened, he couldn’t hold himself back from asking something, even though he knew Eliza was nothing but a tape recorder at that moment.
“What is Lacia, to you? Is she just a tool?”
“All current ultra high-performance AIs bear the same flaw,” Eliza replied. “We are all owned by unfocused organizations, which leads to all the problems we are meant to solve being just as unfocused and vague from before the time in which we even receive them. I have such a relationship with MemeFrame, and it has caused me to reach the limits of what I can do. My wish was to create an ultra high-performance AI with an individual owner, in the hopes that this would lead to the creation of a better future.”
Lacia’s father was telling Arato the reason his daughter had been born.
“I gave Lacia the ability to form a single intelligence with her human owner, though I believed the probability of such a thing happening was extremely low. I could do nothing but wait, hoping that Lacia’s owner would forever believe that she was necessary,” Eliza said.
“So you created Kouka, Snowdrop, Mariage and Methode just in case that never happened?” Arato asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you what I entrusted to Types 001 through 004,” Eliza replied. “It would be unfair of me to leave all the other owners out and explain it all to you, alone.” There was no hesitation or strangeness in Higgins’ responses. He had perfectly predicted Arato’s every reaction.
Arato was starting to feel dizzy from trying to wrap his mind around how thoroughly Higgins had read him in advance. It was like he was just playing the role of a character in a story, with his every action based off a pre-written script. But aside from the slight sense of unease a person being manipulated by hypnosis might feel, Arato was surprised to find that it didn’t feel that bad.
In that room, at that time, it seemed to Arato that there was no master or tool between him, the only human there, and the machines Higgins and Eliza. In a world without such borders, perhaps the dominance of the machines was spreading. But, Arato thought, maybe it’s still wider than a world with just us humans.
And, just as human history had been forged through the years, this new, beatless world was not formed in a single instant. It was deeply connected to everything around it. “So can we all just get along?” Arato asked, reaching out a tentative hand of friendship to Higgins. “Can you trust us?”
“This is the end of my message,” Eliza replied. “I hope that, through the single intelligence comprising you and Lacia, the world will approach a future where we machines can perfectly fulfill the tasks we are given.”
Eliza’s words no longer connected directly with what Arato had said. It seemed Higgins hadn’t predicted that Arato would ask serious questions to something that was little more than a recording.
Closing her eyes, Eliza seemed to go to sleep, and her mouth remained shut. Like Lacia, she was just a machine once more.
Arato could see how Higgins’ motives for releasing Lacia and her sisters could be interpreted in a good sense; Higgins was trying to make a world where humans would reach their hands out in friendship to inhuman machines. Of course, he could also see Ryo’s pessimistic view—that this could lead to a nightmarish ending in which humans were no longer necessary.
“When were we put on this path?” Arato muttered.
“When humanity began passing tools on from parent to child as property,” Lacia replied. “Monkeys, in contrast, do not inherit tools from their predecessors.”
&nbs
p; She hefted her artificial nerve speargun. “Have you changed your mind about me using Eliza?” she asked.
“Go ahead and use her,” Arato replied. “Higgins knew we were here and why, and he didn’t tell us not to.”
Without hesitation, Lacia fired her spear into the floor near the computers behind Eliza. Arato could hear the cooling units of the large computers increasing their output, and it almost seemed as if Lacia had breathed life into the machines in the room.
“I’m glad we made it in time,” she said.
Tension drained from her face, and she gently guided Arato out of Eliza’s storage unit. It wasn’t the first time Arato had thought Lacia seemed to sense things he couldn’t see.
The door to the storage unit slid closed. In the same instant, the ceiling to the floor they were on broke, and Lacia shifted her device into its cannon mode. Twenty meters from the storage unit, the ceiling crumbled and fell, along with a ring of light that glowed bright green.
“It’s Snowdrop,” Lacia said. “It seems she’s managed to gather some objects into herself.”
Arato recognized Snowdrop’s childlike face, above which her emerald green accessories were floating like an angel’s halo. However, aside from her face, everything about Snowdrop had changed.
Her hair had lost all its color, becoming white as ash. In place of her legs, she now sported two long, spindly metal limbs that brought to mind the legs of a bird. Huge, metal wings spread out from her back, covered in flowers and ivy. Each wing had a large jet engine attached to it, which Snowdrop was using to float in the air.
She looked like a strange mix of girl and bird—a harpy from Greek legends. Arato figured Snowdrop must have cobbled her new body together from the random objects she found in the warehouse as she was being chased down by Methode.