Beatless: Volume 2

by Satoshi Hase

  “Take care of Shiori for me,” Ryo said. Then he pulled out his trump card, to make up Suzuhara’s mind. It was a piece of metal about a millimeter thick he had hidden in the collar of his jacket. He hadn’t been able to work it down into a needle like Lacia, but the properties were similar.

  “This is the artificial nerve unit I brought with me. Take it with you, in case anything happens while you’re escaping,” he said. Having handed it over, Ryo no longer had any ability to directly influence Higgins. The thought that the item could no longer be taken from him and put to evil use was like a burden coming off of his shoulders. It was charming; the thought that other humans existed so that each individual could accomplish things they could never do alone.

  “Just have some faith in Arato and me,” Ryo said, despite never having believed in his fellow humans himself.

  “We have to keep swimming, no matter how bad it gets. We can’t give up and drown. You seem to want to take your place as an adult, so I’d say even more so that you can’t choose death, here,” Suzuhara said. As the man who had acted as Shiori’s patron in the company, his words were persuasive.

  Suzuhara turned to Tsuyoshi Kaidai’s image, still floating in the air. “I’m going to head out now. Is that alright, Mr. President?” he asked.

  〈From what I understand, before we had ultra high-performance AIs, the old would outsource the problems we couldn’t solve to the young. We managed to pay our debt to society enough to keep the IAIA from crushing the company. Next, I suppose we just need to have some faith, as Ryo said. I don’t think that sounds too bad,〉 Tsuyoshi replied, gazing down not at Suzuhara, but at Ryo, through the video screen.

  His father showed him a small, wry smile. It was a more human expression than Ryo ever remembered seeing on his father’s face. Then the transmission was cut off, but not before Ryo had felt his father’s trust in him. His eyes filled with tears, though he didn’t fully understand why.

  Suzuhara walked to the other side of a thick partition, probably to give Ryo some space and pretend he hadn’t seen his tears. With Suzuhara away, there were no longer any MemeFrame employees in the Operators’ Room.

  As soon as he confirmed that fact, Higgins abruptly stopped counting down. His voice rang down from the ceiling again, as it had when he had accepted Tsuyoshi Kaidai’s order. 〈Are you sure it was a good idea to give away the artificial nerve unit? After I shut down, it’s quite possible the mass-produced Koukas will destroy me. Or, if the amalgamation of Type-002 and Type-004 is able to take control of my hardware, she will gain capabilities far beyond anything you humans could imagine.〉

  “I know what you’re up to,” Ryo said. “You weren’t actually planning on accepting what your owner ordered you to do. You just gave up on negotiating with him.”

  Higgins had no heart. He also had no loyalty, no good memories, no bonds.

  〈Among the forty ultra high-performance AIs created thus far, there has never been a single one who has seen humanity as the enemy, or attempted to eliminate humans,〉 Higgins pointed out. 〈If Snowdrop takes over my hardware, one such AI will be born.〉

  MemeFrame’s decision had been a fair compromise, from the perspective of a company possessing resources in human society. Negotiations with ultra high-performance AIs and the cleanup when those negotiations broke down were best left to the IAIA.

  It was a correct answer, but coming from a completely different frame of reference from what Higgins desired. Through his interactions with the Higgins faction, Higgins had been able to make accurate predictions, but only because of the company and the position he held there. What ultra high-performance AIs wanted was an answer far beyond that—beyond anything humanity could imagine. That was the reason each of the Lacia-class units had chosen young men and women as their owners who were free of any positions in society.

  And that was also why Ryo was still standing there. “Listen, I get that things tend to turn out for the worst when you leave them to humans, but I think it’s best for humans to finish this story you started,” he said.

  It had honestly been a relief to Ryo when Lacia had been fatally wounded. He had wanted to pull the incident with the Lacia-class units and ultra high-performance AIs back into human hands up until he had contracted with Methode.

  But, at the same time, he had understood human limitations. Without relying on Ryo or any of the other humans in MemeFrame, Higgins had searched for his own answer by releasing the Lacia-class units into the outside world. But the answer Higgins was seeking was beyond the ability of Ryo, or any other human, to even conceive of.

  There were eighty minutes left until Higgins completed all of his shutdown sequences and went silent. It wouldn’t be long until the mass-produced Koukas reached Higgins’ hardware and destroyed it, either. And, at most twenty minutes away, the chimera of Snowdrop and Methode was approaching, as well. Higgins was trying to shut down, but he could easily be destroyed or overtaken instead and turned into an enemy of humanity. Either one of those options could easily spell the end of Ryo and every other human.

  But Ryo felt there was still some hope left. When he’d tried to get Yoshino moving, he had needed to rely on the hierarchy of the company, in the end. But Suzuhara and his father had believed in him, which gave him the courage to stand in that place, preparing for the final choice.

  He was sure that there was just one person out there who could give Higgins the answer he wanted. At the very least, he knew there was one person who existed far outside the logic Higgins understood, who could trust the ultra high-performance AI unconditionally. One guy stupid enough to see a whole different face of the world to which Ryo was blind.

  Higgins started counting down again.

  Ryo couldn’t fight back the memories of his best friend that came swimming up, and he closed his eyes. “Arato,” he said. “You answer this guy’s question.”

  ***

  All over the world, hIEs had lost the ability to adapt to new information, thanks to the IAIA removing Higgins’s responsibility for updating the AASC.

  Humanity had lost control of their own society with the Hazard, and were now being led around by the nose due to the ongoing fight between ultra high-performance AIs. People had been told for so long that a fight between AIs would mean the end of humanity, and some seemed surprised that it hadn’t happened yet.

  After a while, people began to doubt. The hate riots against hIEs and AIs that many had expected failed to materialize. Billions of people worldwide had fresh memories of seeing all the hIEs stop, with their right hands outstretched. They had been told it was the sign of the AASC updates stopping, but each person around the world sought their own interpretation of the gesture.

  Tens of millions of people began to take an interest in what was going on, and ask pointed questions. It was something, even if only one percent of them actually put their ideas to action.

  The phenomena reminded people of how Type-001, Kouka, had pushed her unsolvable problem onto humanity right before she had been destroyed. What started as mere interest became a wave, a movement spreading through the network, gathering the interest of all who saw it.

  Some experts, like Kozo Endo—who had developed the android politician Mikoto and who had experience working with Higgins—spoke positively about the phenomenon, saying that the phenomenon was simply a new rule from the ultra high-performance AIs. He called it the ‘have faith in humanity’ rule, created by Higgins and a brand new ultra high-performance AI known as Lacia, in order to bring an end to the Hazard.

  There were others who feared that the whole thing was an elaborate analog hack. Still, in a state of extreme stress and yearning for peace of mind, people found some comfort in the thought of a brand new relationship between humans and AIs.

  It was as if each individual person was standing alone, each supporting their shaken society in their own way. Human society had become too advanced to quickly reject any concept. It was the trust humans felt toward other human figures that had been t
he basis for human culture, traditions and coexistence throughout the ages. It was the human image itself that tied it all together.

  The fact that humans were constantly outsourcing their interactions with the outside world to machines had not changed. There had been no changes to the concepts of the inheritance or trading of property. However, people were beginning to realize that humans and machines had an influence on each other and together were rolling like a wheel towards the future, bit-by-bit.

  Humans could not abandon their machines.

  The Hazard was passing humanity by, and doing so much more calmly than expected.

  Kengo Sugiri was moved from the juvenile detention center, where he had been locked up, to the Digital Intelligence’s Kuhonbutsu base. Since Arato Endo was in the middle of assaulting Higgins’ underground facility, the military wanted to hold one of his classmates. If worse came to worst, they were prepared to use Kengo as a hostage to negotiate with Arato.

  “We’ve been able to open a line to Higgins’ underground facility,” a man who introduced himself as Chujo said, as he showed Kengo into a dark, narrow room.

  Humanity was possibly facing its final days, so the military couldn’t be choosy about its methods. Kengo understood.

  Chujo nodded toward a chair in the room, directing Kengo to sit. Once Kengo was sitting, he saw two soldiers appear soundlessly to take up positions behind him.

  “The trick to life, kid, is to not let yourself get backed into a corner. I know you don’t have a job to worry about, but how about we offer you a special deferment on that whole business at the Oi Industry Center you got caught up in?” Chujo asked.

  “You want me to be your in for Endo and Kaidai for a while, right?” Kengo asked in reply. In his own opinion, Kengo had never possessed any special qualities; he’d always felt as if life was just tossing him around. Therefore, his current position felt unreal, and Kengo felt as though he were simply an observer, watching someone else’s life unfold.

  “You know, even you trying to use me like this is all part of Lacia’s manipulations,” he said. “Endo was all buddy-buddy with the police last I checked, so it’s not impossible for her influence to have gotten this far.”

  “Is there anything wrong with being manipulated?” Chujo asked, his face expressionless. The middle-aged man looked nothing like what Kengo would picture for an officer in Digital Intelligence.

  “I guess not,” Kengo admitted. At this point, he was so used to being dragged along with the flow that he no longer had the willpower to get angry.

  “Right? Normal humans can’t resist the tide of events. You’re the same and, though I’m sure you can’t tell, I’m the same as well,” Chujo said. He spoke comfortably with Kengo, and had an eminently forgettable face.

  “But I feel for you, and for the things you and Kouka were fighting for. Ordinary humans get swept up in anger and hate just the same as they get caught up in anything else. But that’s what makes it okay,” Chujo continued. “Like I said, that’s what ordinary humans do. Normal fights between normal humans just keep going on and on. And that’s how I’d prefer it to stay.”

  In the post-cloud world, you didn’t need the super-human powers or charisma of a genius to make waves that gathered people to your cause. The practice of a select few moving society had been replaced by large numbers of ordinary people, all of whom were accessing the same services.

  Of course, individual inspiration was still involved in the successes society achieved, but one did not need to put in large amounts of effort, nor have a special aptitude that would dramatically reduce the necessary work, to have a chance at changing the world.

  “I’m not all that upset at being caught up in all this,” Kengo said; big changes were happening in the world, even in himself. “I got caught up in this because Kouka came to my place but, honestly, it’s not like I hate those guys,” he added. He wasn’t there with Arato and Ryo on the front line in Higgins’ underground facility, but he still felt connected to what they were doing.

  “Did you see a little of yourself in Kouka?” Chujo asked, as they sat in the darkness. “She was destroyed, disassembled, and copied by the Antibody Network. Of all the Lacia-class units, it seems to me that she got the raw deal.”

  “Do you know what I felt when I found out about the mass-produced Koukas?” Kengo asked. He didn’t see Kouka as having lost since, in the end, she’d gotten a chance to fight in the final battle. Though Kengo was probably the only one in the world who saw it that way, he thought of the current situation as being an extension of her challenge to humanity.

  “I felt like she had won,” he said, answering his own question. “Sure, because of her, the high-and-mighty Lacia-class units were taken down from their thrones and turned into just another mass-produced robot. But she’s also there, fighting in the last battle through her copies. That’s not a raw deal; it’s exactly what she wanted.”

  “By that logic, would you say that your having been caught up in that terrorism stuff and ending up here wasn’t a raw deal?” Chujo asked.

  Kengo’s family had cried when he was arrested. Sunflower, the family restaurant, would probably die out once his father passed away. Before, Kengo had thought it was normal to hate the thought of being just another face in the crowd. He had since realized that hating the era he had been born into was just the sort of thing an ordinary guy would do.

  “I don’t know,” Kengo admitted. “But one good thing did come out of that. I joined up with the Antibody Network because I blamed hIEs for how my dad was treated by his customers, and how he lost his confidence. But at this point, I’ve stopped feeling like we need to get rid of all the hIEs in the world.”

  Different people could see the same event as a failure or a success. In Kengo’s memories, he saw Kouka heading out towards the battle she would never return from, seeming to melt away into the red of the setting sun.

  “Even if the guy next to you is doing better than you, or things go wrong, or you feel like there’s no meaning to what you’re doing, we humans can keep on working,” Kengo said. “If I wanted to fix things in the restaurant, I should have helped out there instead of signing on with the Antibody Network.”

  Kouka’s image was burned into the back of his mind, seeming to blur everything he saw with heat haze.

  “Everyone’s just an idiot like me,” Kengo went on. “It doesn’t matter if the Hazard’s happening, or whatever; there’s still more folks out there, just doing their jobs, than there are those dancing on the strings of any machine. It’ll still be us humans who decide which way the world is going.” It was Kengo’s answer as an ordinary human. And, because it was ordinary, it was something a huge amount of ordinary humans could get behind.

  However Chujo, who was sitting directly across from Kengo, didn’t even shift an eyebrow at the sentiment. “The ultra high-performance AIs are twisting our world,” he said.

  “Maybe the only reason everyone is so afraid of the Hazard is that we’ve just failed to figure out what the norm should be in interacting with tools like the AIs,” Kengo said. Even in his own mind, Kengo was pulled along by the flow. He didn’t have the same faith that Arato Endo or Ryo Kaidai had but, as an ordinary kid, he couldn’t hear about his friends getting caught up in a battle with the whole future of humanity in the balance and not want to join in.

  “Higgins isn’t the only one fighting with everything he’s got, there. There are some humans fighting hard, too. Have a little faith in my friends,” Kengo said. The question of whether or not the value of an action engendered worth, or faith, was at the very center of the changes happening in the world. It was a question that had the power to decide the very outcome of this final conflict.

  ***

  Arato stood slowly. “Wish me luck,” he said. Lacia still sat with her eyes closed, as though asleep, but Arato couldn’t just wait there. He had done so few things for her: he had told her he loved her; he had believed in her; he had told her about his dreams. That was all he
had been able to do for Lacia, right up to the very end. So, even though she herself had stopped moving forever, he would finish the work she had started.

  He couldn’t fulfill the purpose they had come there for if he just kept sitting there, he told himself. “I came here to tell Higgins that you and I are dating, right?” he asked. His voice came out as a whisper. The inside of his mouth was completely dry.

  There was a good probability the security system from there on was still active, so Arato thought it would be good to bring something along for self-defense. The first thing that caught his eye was Lacia’s device, which had lost its whole front half. He felt a stirring of light in his heart at the thought that Lacia might still be living on within her device, even if her hIE unit had been shut down.

  He took the grip in his left hand and tried to lift it. Even putting all of his strength into the endeavor, the best he could do was get it a millimeter or two off the ground. And, of course, Lacia’s pseudo-device metal plates were beyond his ability to control. Only the artificial nerve speargun seemed like something he could use.

  “Man, it’s heavy,” he said, with a grunt.

  Lacia had swung the thing around as if it was a slightly large handgun, but the speargun felt too heavy in his hands. As soon as he took it up, a screen appeared from the main part of the gun. The screen suspended itself in the air in front of Arato, showing him a simple operation manual for the weapon. It felt like the gun had been waiting for him to pick it up.

  “So you even planned ahead for this, huh?” he murmured.

  According to the manual, if Arato used the foregrip sticking out from the main part of the weapon, he would be able to maintain a fairly steady aim, even though he’d have to pull with both of his arms to activate the trigger. Unfortunately, his right arm was stuck in place due to the first-aid coating that had been put on his serious burns.

  Still, just the thought that Lacia had planned ahead for him like that made him happy.