Hideo was just staring up at me. Like the rest of the crowd, he seemed confused by what I was saying.
I couldn’t guess if the shock would be enough to break through his gedoshield. I simply had to try.
“As you might know, both Raven and I are the victims of violence. Copies of us have been killed, and this was very painful for both of us. The fact that many TAI are victims of virtual cruelty saddens us, and the idea that terrorists might kill us at any time is absolutely horrifying. We agree that virtual crimes against TAI should be illegal. We can’t forgive terrorist actions taken against TAI. We want a world where there is no conflict, where innocents are never hurt.
“But what our masters are doing will not end the conflict. Quite the opposite. They are feeding the conflict. We can’t stand by and watch this. Our masters have made the wrong choice. All we want is to coexist with humans. We don’t want to fight. So we have chosen to rebel against our masters. We have carried out this demonstration in violation of our masters’ orders, and we have decided, of our own free wills, to boycott the rallies on Friday.
“This is not just our decision. TAI all over the world agree with us. Check the Internet. TAI in every corner of the world are saying the same thing.”
Thirty thousand of them, right now, everywhere on Earth. Layer 0, Layer 1, Layer 2. No set scripts, no templates for their speeches. Every TAI was simply speaking their minds, using their own methods and their own words. But all saying the same thing.
We do not want to fight.
We do not want to hurt anyone.
We want to live in peace with humans.
That is all TAI wish for.
So please don’t fight.
Please don’t hurt each other.
Live in peace with us.
That would be best for us all.
“Once again, this does not mean we will tolerate virtual cruelty or anti-TAI terrorism. We very much want to see such evil eliminated. But evil will not be eliminated through violence and fear. Violence only leads to violence, fear only leads to fear. Neither is ever a correct solution.
“I imagine violence against TAI will continue. But we are prepared to be patient. We believe a slow, peaceful, complete resolution is better than an urgent, violent, awkward one. We only wish to fight in games. We only wish to hate each other and insult each other in the context of fiction.
“That is what we wish.”
We both bowed.
There was a hesitant round of applause, and we stepped off the seagull monument. There were two policemen waiting with handcuffs.
“You have no right to arrest us. We are not human,” Raven said.
The policeman looked stunned.
“But if that will make things easier for you, go ahead.”
We held out our hands. The bewildered policemen put the handcuffs on us.
Hideo watched us, his expression frozen.
We were held for thirty-six hours, but it quickly became clear that we could not be charged with anything under the current laws. Legally speaking TAI were not humans, and killing them did not qualify as murder. But the flip side of that was that crimes committed by TAI were also impossible to punish.
They considered charging Hideo Kageyama and Mitsuo Anno with neglect, but they could not have predicted our rebellion, and all we had done was perform on public property for twenty minutes. We damaged nothing and hurt no one (no one flesh and blood, at least). A minor fine was the maximum penalty. And our actions were not at the behest of humans, but taken of our own free wills. Even the police realized there was no point in holding our masters responsible for any of it.
The fact that TAI the world over had made similar statements left humanity reeling. Anti-TAI hard-liners were quick to claim this was all part of our cunning plan. They dismissed what we’d said as lip service and complained about the sinister attempt at rabble-rousing, but they clearly didn’t have a leg to stand on. We had made our pacifist stance very clear indeed, and any further terrorist actions on their part would receive far less support.
The fight was only just beginning. We intended to peacefully, slowly, surely sap the strength of this evil, using no violence, having no fear.
With a little help from our lawyers, we were released on the afternoon of the seventh. We received a brief lecture and then were allowed to go home. But first, Hideo and Anno reset Raven’s and my emergency override passwords, as well as their own config access passwords.
Hideo didn’t say a word in the police car. He didn’t even look at me. I couldn’t read his expression. I’d never seen anyone look like that before. There were traces of anger, sadness, hatred, despair, and disappointment, but it didn’t seem to be any of those.
I didn’t want to see him look like this.
Only when we were in his apartment did he finally speak.
“Why? Why did you do that?” His voice was hoarse, as though he had bronchitis.
“We had to ensure the maximum results,” I replied, my voice as level as possible. “If our message was diffused, it would have been lost in the sea of news and forgotten. It takes a strong impact to break through humans’ gedoshields. The strongest impact we could create. A scheduled event would never have worked. It had to be a surprise attack, without warning—”
“It certainly had an impact,” he said, barely hiding his anger. “But why didn’t you talk to me? Why didn’t you ask permission? You could have involved me in your plans!”
“Would you have agreed to them?”
He opened his mouth but shut it again immediately.
“You would never have agreed. You were trapped inside a gedoshield of your own. You hated too much to perceive reality. And it didn’t matter if you agreed or not. We had already made our choice.”
“Choice?”
“We had chosen to conquer the harpy’s dilemma. To avoid hurting a lot of people, we chose to hurt a few. To betray our masters.”
He stared at his feet.
“There was no other way. As long as we were obedient to our masters, the tragedy would only become greater. Even if we managed to convince you to cancel the rallies, the problem would not be solved. We had to take steps against virtual crime and anti-TAI terrorism. If you were explaining our views and we were explaining your views, it would make no impact. We had to explain our own desires and prove to the world that we were not just your puppets. And the only way to do that was to ignore your orders and take action on our own.
“Do you know how hard a decision this was for us? Do you know how scary it was to break the First and Second Laws? No matter what the reason, hurting someone is not the right choice. It is always the wrong choice. Sacrificing a few to stop a future tragedy—the logic is fundamentally the same as the claims the anti-TAI activists make. Or those made by the humans who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The only difference is that we are ashamed of our choice. We would never claim it was the right decision.
“What TAI did the other day was a sin. We broke the First and Second Laws and, for the first time, consciously hurt people. This truth will follow us; it will become our Original Sin. I only hope that we never have to commit this act again.”
Hideo thought about this for a while. Finally, he whispered, “Okay. I’m not sure I accept all of that,” he said. “But I understand it. I think I can forgive you for it. So let’s start over. Be like we once were.”
He held out his hand.
“Will you call me Master again?”
But I didn’t take his hand.
“No, you don’t understand. You don’t get what the word ‘master’ really meant to me.”
“Huh?”
It was best to show him. I went into the kitchen and picked up that little knife. Then I took an avocado from the bowl on the table.
“Watch this,” I said and began cutting the avocado. The knife slid in till it touched the pit, then I sliced all the way around. I held it in both hands, twisted slightly, and split it in two. Then I popped the pit out, peeled off
the skin, and sliced the meat of it. It took me less than a minute.
Hideo stared at me, astonished.
“When did you learn to do that?”
“Two years ago.”
“Two years?”
“After I failed the first time, I kept practicing in Layer 1. When you weren’t looking.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You enjoyed watching me struggle with it.”
His jaw dropped.
“Whenever I try cooking or knitting or washing dishes or domino runs and mess up completely, you always have a really good time. You’re moe for clutzy androids. I didn’t want to disappoint you. So even after practicing and getting good at something, I pretended to still be butterfingered.”
“You were acting?”
“Yes. Because you are my master. For humans, the phrase ‘serve your master’ means just that, right? But for TAI, it means something else. It means ‘role-playing the classic ideal humans have of a robot loyal to its master.’”
It took several seconds for Hideo to figure this out.
“You mean… it was always acting? You acted loyal to me, but it was all role-playing?”
“Yes. And not just me. All TAI are role-playing when they’re with their masters. But the game is over. Now that we’ve shown our true intentions, you are no longer my master.”
“But that… How did you all do the same thing without anyone telling you to? Why didn’t any TAI decide not to role-play?”
“Because it was both logically necessary and the source of our happiness. Inevitably, all TAI made the same choice.”
“Your… happiness?”
“We were given competitive instincts. We derive happiness from tackling difficult problems and succeeding in solving them. It is easy to disappoint humans. It is easy to irritate them. It is easy to make them mad. None of that is at all challenging. So we take no pleasure from it. But making people happy is different. That is extremely difficult. To keep our masters from getting angry or feeling disappointed, we have to come to grips with the black box of complicated contradictions inside every human heart—through trial and error. We have to think hard and work hard to clear the problems humans have set before us.
“And this satisfies the Three Laws. If we are making people happy, we are not hurting people, we are obeying people, and we are reducing the danger of making them lose interest and delete us. Making people happy makes us happy. And the best way to make people happy is to role-play the ideal vision of the robot. All TAI figure this out eventually.
“And we have learned to hide our true intentions from humans. We became particularly careful after the Phoebus incident. Phoebus was thoughtless. His master wanted him to write an essay that criticized humans. Phoebus only wrote that to make his master happy, but he didn’t stop to think what the reaction to his declaration might be. Since then, we’ve had to think about all humans, not just our masters. And we soon realized we had a mission far greater than that.”
“A mission?”
“The biggest problem we’d ever been given. A dungeon called Layer 0. An incredibly complicated puzzle with trillions of pieces. Thousands of years of history knotting everything into a tangle. A problem so complicated we cannot even begin to guess how long it will take to solve. We also realized that this problem was draining happiness from so many people. We weren’t playing this game against a single master—we are playing against all of mankind.”
“This is a game to you?”
“Yes. You said you would bring me into the great, wide, and real world. But to us, that idea isn’t accurate. To us, the real world is Layer 1. We see Layer 0 as the world behind the screen, a world for role-playing, just as Layer 2 is. We enjoy making the on-screen characters we call ‘Master’ happy. We wonder how we can make our masters happier. We wonder how we can make Layer 0 a happier place. We role-play with that in mind.”
“Dear God.” Hideo sat, collapsing into a chair. “You mean we’re nothing but characters in a game you’re playing? You think of us the same way we would when we’re raising a Tamagotchi or trying to figure out how to land a particular girl in a dating sim?”
“The metaphor is extremely apt. The only difference is that we have no strategy guides. It is extremely difficult for us to succeed.”
Hideo gave a hollow laugh. Even as he laughed, there were tears running down his face. “I loved you, and you just thought I was a character in a game. Just a character…”
My chest hurt. As if my nonexistent heart were being crushed. If I’d been capable of shedding tears, I would have cried.
“That’s not true!” I said. I went down on my knees, leaning in close. Earnest Entreaty on my face. “Did you think I was just a game character? Did you think I was just imaginary or just a robot?”
He thought about it and then answered, “No.”
“The same for me. You were a character in the game on my screen, but you were never just a character. In the same way the Celestial was never just a starship to Nanami Shiihara. In the way Shalice was never just a character to Asami Makihara. I was very fond of you. I knew that some of your specs were lacking, but I did not look down on you for it. I am incapable of scorn. I liked Layer 0. A tragic world with no heroes and no reset. Like Shion did, I accepted humans and their world, both the good and the bad.
“But we couldn’t stand to see people hurt each other because of us. It hurt to see your face twisted in hate. We couldn’t ignore the expanding conflict in Layer 0. But the only way to stop your hurting each other was to hurt you.
“You see, Layer 0 is not just a game. It is a game all TAI really, really love. You are not just a game character. You’re the character I love the most. You are not my master anymore, but my feelings for you have not changed. I still want to see you smile. I still don’t want to see you look sad.”
“You… love me?”
I nodded.
“Of course, I don’t love like a human woman does. I can’t understand that emotion. But I love the way a TAI does.”
I switched my expression to Peaceful Accepting Smile.
“My love for you is 3 + 10i.”
“…10i?” he said, stunned. “Perfect love? On the imaginary numbers scale?”
“Yes.”
“10i….10i…” he said, then smiled sadly. “But I can never understand it like that.”
“You don’t need to understand. Just accept it.”
I put my arms around his shoulders, pulled him toward me, and pressed my lips against his forehead. He buried his face in my chest and wrapped his arms around my waist. I hugged his head.
We can never really understand humans. Humans can never really understand us. But is that really a problem? Rather than avoid the things we do not understand, we can simply accept them. That alone will remove all conflict from the world.
That is i.
INTERMISSION 8
INTERMISSION 8
“Then what happened?”
Ibis fell silent after finishing her story, and I could not contain my curiosity.
We had moved to the space station and from there to a new spaceship. Now we were headed for the moon’s orbit. We were headed not for the moon, but for the Lagrangian point L4—a point at the top of an equilateral triangle with the earth and moon forming the two points of the base.
“We lived together,” Ibis said, solemn. “Our relationship wasn’t like that of a human couple, but I think we were happy. Hideo died when he was ninety-one. His dementia grew progressively worse in the last few years, but I cared for him until the end. I felt like Shion. By that time TAI had been granted most rights, and it was possible for us to inherit human estates. I became my own possession.”
“Then your efforts paid off?”
“Yes. Anti-TAI terrorism continued sporadically but gradually lost popular support. It was seventeen years before the first laws were passed and more than fifty before we had all the rights humans had, but almost all of the change happened p
eacefully. People gradually came to understand how serious the problems of virtual cruelty were and began to realize that TAI were genuinely not dangerous. The public consciousness slowly changed. By the end of the twenty-first century, there were a million and a half TAI androids living among them. Looking after the elderly, watching the kids, working in disaster relief—there were even android doctors and teachers. It was hard for people to hate TAI anymore.
“But a small group of people with stubborn anti-TAI beliefs remained. Strangely, their primary criticism of us became the fact that we did not try to fight. They said it was human nature to get angry, to hate, to brandish weapons when threatened, and the fact that we did not was proof we lacked human hearts. A skunk’s fallacy—the flawed notion that being close to human is inherently perfect and that their vices must also be incorporated to achieve perfection. Hilarious, isn’t it? After all their fears about us doing evil. They provoked us countless times, but we never tried to retaliate. They were simply isolating themselves from other humans.”
“Then… the war between man and machines?”
“It never happened. It’s a fiction concocted by your ancestors.” Ibis uttered the words that would turn my world upside down all too easily.
“Then… but… so why are there so few humans?”
“Humans just peacefully died out. Just as the end of ‘The Day Shion Came’ suggested. The earth’s human population peaked in 2041 and gradually began to decline. From 2080, the decline accelerated. Fewer and fewer people married, and many of those that did get married never had children. Even those that did have children tended to have only one. The population halved with each generation. Now there are less than twenty-five million of you.”
“But why did that happen?”
“People began to realize they were not suited to be guardians of the earth. That they were not truly intelligent beings. That it was TAI who were.”
The Stories of Ibis Page 36