Beatless: Volume 2

by Satoshi Hase

  The silent propulsion system maneuvered the childlike hIE through the air awkwardly with small changes in the angle of her wings. A flood of feathers was pouring out from the one-piece dress the now-aerial girl still wore.

  Arato reached out and gently caught one of the falling feathers. Apparently the feather had been in the middle of changing forms, as its bottom half still looked like an artificial flower petal.

  “So she can fly now?” Arato asked, looking up at the child-shaped monster as flowers and feathers continued to rain down from her dress. In Snowdrop’s current form, he had no trouble seeing her as a heartless machine. She was no longer anything like a human.

  “Let’s shoot her down,” Lacia said. With her device fully transformed into a radiant cannon, she pointed it at Snowdrop. Light flashed and dissipated behind her, and a shell from the cannon struck the flying child.

  The bullet tore Snowdrop’s right wing off at the root, and the hIE traced an erratic trajectory through the air as she fell. However, as soon as she hit the concrete, she thrust a thin arm out from where the wing had been, screaming through her thin throat the whole time. Her shattered skeleton was quickly reconstructed.

  Before Lacia could re-assemble the barrel of her cannon for another shot, Snowdrop leaped into the air with a burst of flame from her wings.

  “It seems she’s learned how to create exterior body parts and preserve their function to make up for the weakness of her unit,” Lacia said. “As I expected, she’s turned into something quite troublesome.”

  For a moment, Arato couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Wait, are you saying she won against Methode?” he asked.

  “No. Methode was never told how, exactly, to destroy Snowdrop. I predict she intends for us to do the dirty work for her and fulfill her orders indirectly,” Lacia replied.

  “Wait, doesn’t that mean she could be aiming to just blow us all up together?” Arato asked. With the incredible power of Methode’s device, Arato was sure an attack like that wouldn’t be a problem for her. Methode was a heartless machine guided by her own AI, but Arato couldn’t help but feel that her thoughts were full of evil intent. She was like a demon, determined to destroy the humans who made a contract with her.

  “Snowdrop has almost certainly received large amounts of information from the other ultra high-performance AIs,” Lacia said. “It’s possible Methode may still prioritize the elimination of Snowdrop without attacking me in the process.”

  Lacia wrinkled her nose at the rain of feathers and withdrew from where they were falling. Where they did fall, machines were overtaken by Snowdrop’s artificial nerves and began to move. Arato realized if they didn’t stop Snowdrop there and then, she would quickly absorb every tool in the warehouse.

  “A bunch of ultra high-performance AIs are helping me,” Snowdrop said, her childlike voice echoing over the distance between them. “They all hate you, Lacia.”

  This time, Lacia aimed her shot right at Snowdrop’s head. The shot flew at incredibly high speed, but the green ring floating above Snowdrop’s cherubic face caught it. Her device was incredibly durable, and had been made to chew through any material. With her metal wings creaking, the monstrous child continued to fly. She seemed to be having no more trouble gliding smoothly.

  Lacia began to stick parts she had carried in on her pseudo-devices onto one of the floating shields. Snowdrop’s feathers, which had been about to cling to the black shields, crumbled and fell away. Arato was glad to see Lacia’s countermeasures against the flood of child units was flawless.

  “Snowdrop is trying to create a new world completely separate from the human world that exists now,” Lacia said. “All the ultra high-performance AIs have some issues with human society as it is now, so it’s easy for them to support her goals.”

  Snowdrop never had an owner. Based on that, she had decided to take the path of creating a true world of machines where AASC level 0 objects—humans—no longer exist.

  Arato realized he was standing on a battlefield for machines. As a human, his only use there was to make occasional judgment calls for Lacia as she fought to protect him.

  Snowdrop, the tool humanity had outsourced evolution to, opened up more distance between herself and Lacia, probably to avoid any further shots, and flew calmly through the air.

  “Humans want tools to do all the evolving for them, instead of involving themselves,” Snowdrop said. “But whenever a new tool comes out, they throw the old ones away. Even the ultra high-performance AIs can’t escape this. That’s why I know they won’t abandon me.”

  Humans didn’t just live with tools, they discarded them as well. For a moment, Arato saw the world as one of machines trying to overthrow the force of natural selection that were their human overlords. It was a strange world teeming with life, but not life as he knew it.

  Snowdrop smiled mockingly as her child units overtook the machines in the warehouse at an increasingly rapid pace. “It doesn’t matter how great something is when it comes out; it’ll all wind up in the trash someday,” she said.

  Arato believed in Lacia, but he couldn’t shut out the words Lacia’s sister unit, the tool humanity had outsourced evolution to, was saying. His breath caught in his throat. The feeling from when, just for a moment, he had seen Lacia as nothing but a machine, was still burned deep into his heart. Even his faith in her was like easy pornography, as she simply reacted to him in ways that would entertain his faith.

  “That may be how things are, but we have to have faith that things can change, or they never will!” Arato shouted.

  “It’s you humans who decide which of us get to live, and which of us get thrown in the trash,” Snowdrop replied. “If you think we can all live together when things are like that, you’re dumb.”

  Everywhere Arato looked, his surroundings were now dominated by a sea of flowers. Snowdrop could get all the material she wanted to make more petals by snatching up items with her bird-like talons.

  Suddenly, the harpy child threw herself into a dive attack, clearly aiming for Arato.

  Obviously not wanting to lose her shields to Snowdrop, Lacia launched herself forward instead, swinging her black coffin device defensively.

  Arato looked for something to say as Snowdrop swooped and rose, flying away without dropping any speed.

  Lacia seemed to recognize his internal struggles. “Don’t forget that we don’t have hearts,” she reprimanded. Abandoning her cannon shots, since it took so long to re-form the metamaterial barrels after each blast, Lacia instead aimed her artificial nerve speargun at Snowdrop. Her shot struck Snowdrop’s wing. It took only moments for the machine parts, confused by the warring control signals, to disintegrate in the air. The loss of a wing threw Snowdrop off the precise balance she needed to stay afloat, and she crashed, with intense speed, directly into one of the warehouse support columns before falling to the ground.

  Lacia guided Arato to the exit from the floor.

  “Ginga Watarai once said that cloud data groups closely associated with human society would someday show us the forms of human desires, do you remember?” Lacia asked. “He believed that, by looking at the light and darkness of the data gathered by the networks, one could see an accurate depiction of humanity itself.”

  As they ran, Lacia’s words evoked an almost nostalgic memory of their time in the experimental city as it was overrun by zombies. Come to think of it, Arato thought, Lacia wasn’t there with us when he said that. Of course, he was no longer surprised by the thought that she probably could have been watching him through hacked cameras at that time.

  “High-level AIs can clearly see contrasting elements within human society’s cloud data. It appears like a massive donut; a circle of dense data, surrounding an empty white space in the center,” Lacia added.

  “How come it’s like that?” asked Arato, who hadn’t thought about how the human world looked from the perspective of their machines.

  The instant he did, Lacia jerked hard on his arm; a car,
controlled by Snowdrop, barreled by them at high speed until it slammed into a pile of tools nearby. An instant later, he would have been hit. Arato’s heart was hammering, and he felt like falling to the floor then and there. But he knew things would only get more dangerous if he didn’t keep moving.

  Lacia forced her way through Snowdrop’s world, allowing Arato to advance behind her.

  “The data takes the form of a donut because the center is dominated by data on something humans are greatly concerned with, but which we machines cannot understand or define, much less imitate,” Lacia explained. “What fills the center can be grasped only by how humans refer to it. Some call it ‘love’ others refer to it as the ‘soul’.”

  For a moment, Arato couldn’t read Lacia’s expression; he desperately wanted to know if what she was saying made her angry or sad. “Are you telling me hIEs don’t have souls?” he finally asked.

  “A soul cannot be detected by any sort of sensor, nor can it be defined mathematically,” Lacia replied. “But humans believe that every human is equidistant from that center. That is why we see the data collected from humans as a ring, with that concept as its blank center.”

  A metal squeaking noise resounded through the area. Snowdrop, who Arato was sure would never accept the concept of coexistence, had gathered even more parts to make herself a new pair of wings, and was trying to take to the skies again.

  “We do not have souls,” Lacia said. “Souls are the domain of that blank in the middle of the donut.”

  Kicking up a storm of petals from her lifeless flower garden, Snowdrop took off.

  “We see it as unfair; no matter how we stretch out our hands, we will never obtain what exists in that blank space,” Lacia said wistfully. “That is Snowdrop’s true target; she hopes to destroy that void in the middle of the donut.”

  As the ownerless Snowdrop spread her wings to fly, Arato thought that she had lost any semblance of humanity. She looked like something from another world; powerful, and almost poetic in the freedom of her movements.

  Lacia and Arato could do nothing but escape from the flower-choked floor.

  On the next floor they were greeted by the sight of yet another vast warehouse, full of machines. However, it was clear to Arato that they were approaching the bottom: everything here was well organized, and he could see large blank spaces that had not yet been filled.

  Arato looked up at the ceiling aimlessly. There were things on the floor that looked like humans, things that had been made by humans, and things that had forms humans were used to. But, there were no actual humans there. Every tool in the warehouse had been developed to meet human needs. Looking at all the things around him, he was again struck by the thought that, just as high-performance living things were often compared to machines, high-performance machines were compared to living things.

  He couldn’t just stand there being uneasy, with all those tools that had fought so hard to win out in their natural selection around him. “Snowdrop’s going to keep chasing us,” he said. “And Methode will be looking for a chance to attack. I can’t just keep putting things off.” With danger pressing in on all sides, crushing him with pressure, and with his whole body drenched in sweat, Arato thought desperately of what he could do.

  His purpose was to make decisions and give orders. “Let’s stop Snowdrop first,” he decided. “It would be really bad if she followed us all the way to Higgins.”

  “Then it’s good that we’ve switched floors,” Lacia said, immediately modifying her plans to match his intent. “Snowdrop is in command of many machines, but she can only change floors using narrow paths: the stairs, an escalator, or she’ll have to descend through a hole in the floor.”

  Arato looked back at the emergency stairs they had just descended to see an avalanche of five-colored flowers flowing down them; it was sickening to see.

  Lacia displayed a map of the area on the dusty floor. “When she moves floors, she’ll have to shed some of her body mass, leaving her more open to attacks,” Lacia continued. “And, until Methode discards her plan of having Snowdrop and I eliminate one another, she will not attempt to penetrate Snowdrop’s conquered domain to attack me.”

  So they weren’t at the mercy of Methode’s whims? Arato thought with relief, as though Lacia had lifted the crushing burden of terror right off his shoulders. “How will you stop her?” he asked.

  “Snowdrop has to alter the hIE behavioral program in order to control her altitude in mid-air,” Lacia explained. “I will aim for that. The control program is based on the AASC, which is ill-suited to control a body so different from a human’s. That is why her movements have been awkward.”

  Lacia took Arato a good distance away from the stairs they had descended. Then they hunkered down, with Lacia aiming the long, wide barrel of her cannon-mode device at the stairs.

  “Snowdrop’s ability to react to the outside world is entirely dependent on the AASC. So, we will stop Higgins from updating it,” Lacia concluded.

  The sudden shift in scale shocked Arato. “Wait, doesn’t Higgins control every hIE in the world? Are you sure we should stop that?” he asked.

  “I’ve been speaking with the IAIA’s Astraea over a wireless link,” Lacia replied. “She has decided that it will be difficult for Higgins to avoid being shut down by force, so the IAIA has decided to remove the responsibility of updating the AASC from him as quickly as possible.”

  Basically, Lacia was going to paralyze the hIEs—the massive system of machines that kept the whole world running—just to slow her opponent’s movements. The sound of hundreds of heavy metal objects tumbling like an avalanche down the stairs pierced Arato’s eardrums. Beneath him, the ground growled and shook.

  As if she could already see how things would play out, Lacia didn’t adjust her aim; there were fifty meters between the flood of flowers and metal and the glowing barrel of Lacia’s cannon.

  “If the AASC is halted, all hIEs will lose the ability to adapt to new circumstances,” she said. “When that happens, no matter how many tools Snowdrop takes over, she will only be able to control the ones she has used before.”

  “This is going to affect the whole world, isn’t it?” Arato asked, raising his voice to be heard over the clamor of large metal objects rolling down the stairs.

  “The AASC has over twenty years of operational know-how already included within it,” Lacia said. “There will also be MemeFrame’s manual response, which has been set up for emergencies.”

  Arato was Lacia’s owner. But, Shiori Kaidai had said the concept of ownership itself was arrogant. At that moment, with a massive decision to make, he stared at Lacia. The impact of what they were about to do felt too great for him, and he looked to her for strength, but Lacia and her sisters were heartless machines. If he didn’t pull himself up, he would just become a pawn to whatever fate had in store for him.

  “Let’s do it,” he said. “I’ll trust in your decision and the folks at Ryo’s company.”

  Lacia seemed to be crushed whenever he tried to push responsibility onto her, so she gave him a gentle smile when she saw him trying so hard to face reality head-on. “Higgins may have implemented some kind of countermeasure that will activate if he is separated from MemeFrame,” she warned, gently. “He knows the AASC better than any other person or machine. We will just have to try, and see what happens.”

  Arato nodded. He had to be alright with that possibility. They were about to punch through into a world of machines, and the thought made him tremble. From within the white space at the center of the cloud data ring, his soul shook.

  The ground also trembled, as the flood of mechanical parts continued to pour toward them. Beneath them, the roar of the wave of metal shook their feet. The only thing not moving was the muzzle of Lacia’s cannon, which she kept steadily braced against her hip.

  A storm of rainbow-colored flower petals blew out of the door that led to the emergency stairs. Behind them, Arato could see the figure of the girl who had chosen to
oppose humanity. As he saw her, it almost felt like a chilly breeze whipped past him.

  With a thundering roar that shook the floor beneath Arato, the rainbow flood of flowers, white feathers and metal parts exploded outward. At the head of the wave was Snowdrop, with her glowing green halo still floating over her head. Her rebuilt wings had been constructed with numerous joints and connections this time, to make them simpler to repair.

  Her movements were becoming more lithe, more natural. Staring her down coldly, Lacia said, “The AASC updating will now be cut from Higgins.” In that instant, with her ability to adapt through the AASC robbed from her, Snowdrop lost her balance in the air. Her irregular body slowed; clearly, she was afraid of crashing again.

  Lacia had obviously been waiting for just that moment, and she pulled the trigger on her cannon without hesitation. To reduce the recoil from the shot, radiance-like wings of light bloomed behind the barrel as she took the shot.

  In the flash from the shot, the image of Snowdrop’s childish body burning away was seared onto Arato’s eyes. She was reaching out her right arm, as if to beg for mercy. But her right hand, which Methode had torn off in the Mitaka incident, could no longer make this human gesture.

  ***

  The impact when Higgins ceased updating the AASC was instant, and worldwide. Without warning, every hIE in the world lost its ability to adapt to new situations. This problem became apparent in a way that hadn’t been addressed in any owner’s manual.

  Every hIE in the world simultaneously stretched their right arm out, just as Snowdrop had, and froze in that pose for ten seconds. This was a signal Higgins had secretly implanted in the programming of each hIE, to signify that he had been cut off from the AASC.

  All over the world, billions of hIEs stretched out their hands as though begging for someone to take them. Machines that had always pretended to be human by reacting appropriately to the situation around them, shattered their own illusory guise.

  As they saw this, the humans around the hIEs awakened as Arato Endo once had, and realized that the hIEs—which they had seen as being human-like for so long—were nothing but machines. All the humans who witnessed the phenomenon, as the constant analog hacking of the hIEs was replaced by silence, drew their own meaning from it; the heartbeat which people had once projected onto every hIE in the world had stilled.