Phase7 「Dystopia Game」

Even in his teenage years, Ryo Kaidai continued to have nightmares now and then. In his dreams he would flee engulfing flames, and tremble alone on a hospital bed.

When he was seven years old, a massive fire had left him burnt and changed everything. Up to that point, there had been no fear or pain in his life. His future had been nothing but blue skies. Whenever he had been taken to see experiments at the old MemeFrame labs, his only thoughts had been on how the whole thing would be his some day.

Lost in a nightmare, he would run endlessly in a burning building. Beyond the growing flames, he could hear someone crying. Ryo, who was barely keeping ahead of the fire with his own speed, figured anyone slower than him wouldn’t last long, and turned his back on the voice.

Just when he was about to lose his mind to terror, an hIE in fire gear found him and got him in an ambulance. The next thing he knew, he was staring at the white walls of a hospital room. He shut himself up in that room. In his young mind, he was the unluckiest disaster victim in the world, and he wouldn’t even let the nurses get close to him. Of course, it wasn’t all just mindless fear; even at that age, he had realized he had been the target of the incident.

The scenery of his nightmare melted into a brilliant light. Now he was among greenery — the color of the hospital’s garden. A nurse had dragged him outside. Out there, he met a little puppy that was wagging its tail so hard its whole body was wiggling.

There was a boy about Ryo’s age with the puppy, whose body was so badly burned that there wasn’t a single spot of bare skin visible under his white bandages. Ryo heard the boy was a victim of the same fire Ryo had been caught in. He had come out more heavily wounded than Ryo because he had been closer to the epicenter of the explosion. That boy, with wounds so deep Ryo was surprised they weren’t forcing him to stay in bed, awkwardly held out his hand to Ryo. Fear and self-loathing froze Ryo’s tongue, and he could do nothing but shiver.

The boy opened his mouth. “Let’s be friends,” he said.

In his dream, Ryo replayed the first time in his life he had cried out loud in front of another person.

And that was when he would awaken from the nightmare.

Pulling himself out of the terror that he couldn’t escape even at seventeen years old, he sat up in his bed and used a gesture to get his home system to open the curtains. The morning sun shone in white on his bare, lifeless room.

“When am I going to get over that?” Ryo asked himself. He rubbed at the corners of his eyes, which were damp with tears. Simply calling the dream a ‘nightmare’ made him feel ungrateful. At the end of the dream, he had relived the moment when Arato Endo had saved him. He had hit rock bottom, unable to trust any human around him, but Arato had reached out his hand and pulled him out of that pit of despair.

Ten years ago on December 4th, the old MemeFrame laboratory had exploded. It happened during an experiment, and the hIE involved with the experiment had been destroyed, along with a whole floor of the lab. It had been impossible to recover anything from the area where it had happened. There had been two bystanders injured in the blast: Ryo Kaidai and Arato Endo.

“You were my first friend,” Ryo murmured. “But, what was I to you?”

The call button on his terminal pad, which he had left by his pillow the night before, was blinking, letting him know he had a message. It was from Mr. Watarai of the MemeFrame Tokyo Research Labs, who owned Methode, the fourth Lacia-class hIE. Ryo thought Mr. Watari was also most likely caught up in the incident at the airport where his sister, Shiori, had been severely injured.

“Not just Arato,” he muttered. “Can either of us really expect honesty from this world anymore?” Even Ryo couldn’t be honest with himself, considering the cold way he treated Shiori. He had hardly spoken to her over the last decade, ever since he had realized the truth behind the explosion that he’d been caught up in when he was seven.

While he was in the hospital, adults he had never met would come and check how he was doing. After dozens of adults went in and out of his hospital room without a shred of empathy in their eyes, Ryo finally realized why they were coming: they were coming to see the results of the explosion. In other words, Ryo himself had been the target. He also discovered that the same adults who had tried to kill him were frightened of his honest and easily-manipulated little sister.

Ryo couldn’t handle it all, so he pushed Shiori’s care onto Arato after the incident. It wouldn’t have surprised Ryo to hear the same “What the hell are you doing?” that he had thrown at Arato earlier coming out of Shiori’s mouth, directed at him.

He decided to leave reading Watarai’s message for later. With the incident at the airport, things were being set in motion. Ryo knew that, as soon as he’d read the message, he’d also need to make a move.

After the nightmare, he didn’t feel like rolling over and going back to sleep. At times like that, he found it best to fill his brain with information until he calmed down. It didn’t seem like he would need anything to eat soon, either, so he activated his terminal pad. Based on the information he had gathered in the terminal, he constructed a relationship chart of the main players in MemeFrame.

As a company, MemeFrame had been plagued by problems right from the start. The ultra high-performance AI that ran it, Higgins, was more intelligent than all of its five thousand employees put together. Due to this circumstance, any department that could get a direct response from Higgins would always perform the best in the company, regardless of the actual capabilities of its members. All pretense of a system tracking the performance of company employees had collapsed.

“Show me the movements of the people from the Tokyo Research Lab after the incident at the Chubu International Airport,” Ryo ordered his terminal. Ever since the explosion, he had been following the movements of MemeFrame and any related industries. It was a matter of life and death.

He would never be able to forget his days in that hospital. In a sense, his life had started within the walls of that hospital, while outside, the entire world was full of people he’d never be able to trust again.

From that moment, he had thrown away all his hopes for the future. He would try something new every once in a while, just to test his own abilities, but he would always drop whatever it was soon after. Ryo became a stranger to his own family. In his mind, he knew that there was no reason anyone would have tried to kill him aside from his connection to MemeFrame.

A large, frozen lump had formed in his chest, and refused to melt through all the intervening years.

A little white puppy came and wrestled playfully with Ryo’s feet.

“Bright, c’mere,” he said. The puppy looked exactly like the one in his dream. He had actually adopted the puppy he’d met at the hospital, but it had died in an accident after. This new one was an aIE — an animal Interface Elements. Bright wagged his little tail so hard, his whole white body wiggled back and forth. Ryo had tweaked its behavior based on his own memories, so its movements may have been exaggerated compared to the real thing.

“...All these machines we make are just afterimages of something else,” he murmured. “But it’s us humans, the ones who actually represent reality, that are in danger of fading away.”

The puppy just looked up at him, chin raised, waiting for him to pet its head. When he was younger, just after the real puppy had died, Ryo had wanted desperately to preserve that habit from the original.

Big, black eyes looked up at him. Eventually the aIE realized this wasn’t what Ryo wanted, and instead started waddling cutely toward its dinner bowl. As a machine, it obviously didn’t need to eat. It was just part of the thing’s routine. Watching it go through the motions was nothing more than a reminder that the original was dead.

“Enough. Stop,” Ryo growled. Hearing a system command, the white puppy sat down and entered standby mode. Ryo wondered if a person could go insane, living with machines so perfectly automated.

He checked his pad terminal, which was blinking again; it was a message from Arato. Apparently, he had been suspended for two weeks for driving without a license and was in big trouble with his dad. Even after everything that happened between them, Arato was still giving him regular updates on how he was doing. It didn’t matter how much distance opened between them, the hands of best friends could never be torn apart. That was the exact reason Ryo had been so afraid when Lacia had appeared in his friend’s life. He was still afraid.

He had no right to say the things he’d said to Arato. Unlike Arato, he hadn’t done anything for his wounded sister. His attack on Arato had been hypocritical. It was his fault that his sister had been left alone and gotten herself caught up in a conflict between factions, all because of the distance Ryo Kaidai had created between himself and his family.

“Sorry I’m such a horrible brother, Shiori,” Ryo murmured. He could never be like Arato. That was one of the reasons he depended so much on his best friend to be there for him.

***

Ever since the incident at the Chubu International Airport, Arato Endo’s days had been full of anger; all of it was being directed at him. First, the police had filed charges against him for switching a fully automatic vehicle over to manual mode and driving without a license. Then, of course, Ryo had been pissed about what happened to Shiori. The auto car had been a rental, so the folks at the rental company had yelled at him. It had been Methode and the mercenaries who shot at him that had done it, but on paper, all the responsibility for the vehicle’s destruction was his. Finally, when he had gotten home, Yuka had heard about Shiori getting hurt and was bawling her eyes out. She had always looked up to Shiori.

Arato had tried to take her along to visit Shiori in the hospital but, when he tried to contact the hospital to set up the visit, he had gotten a message back saying she was refusing visitation.

Yuka had made him kneel on the floor with his back straight while she gave him a lecture. “Obviously she wouldn’t want anyone to see her when she’s all covered in burns,” she said.

At school he had gotten a dressing down in the guidance office, along with two weeks of suspension. The airport police had passed the case over to the police who had jurisdiction in Arato’s hometown, and they came by for some heavy questioning. In the end, he got brought in to family court.

“Two hours of adventure, two weeks of cleanup and regret,” he muttered. Of course, if Lacia hadn’t overwritten data like she had, he wouldn’t have gotten off nearly that easily.

Lacia was doing some calculations next to him. “Including fines and reimbursements for the car and airport gate, you owe a total of 450 million yen,” she said.

They had hopped on a slow train together, and were headed somewhere far away from home.

“Lacia, I think I need to stop just going where life takes me,” he said.

Their destination was the final stop on Arato’s pilgrimage of people pissed off at him. His father had called for him to come out to the artificial city near Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture, where they were doing experiments involving next-generation urban environments.

Her messy, chestnut hair rustling, Yuka peeked up at his face. “Are you actually re-thinking your life choices?” she asked. Even his incredibly selfish sister was lecturing him. She had been sniping at him ever since the incident.

“You know,” she said, “some of that 2 million yen we had to pay for compensation from our family bank account was supposed to be for my clothes and snacks.”

“No it wasn’t!” Arato growled.

Arato was still a minor, so the request for compensation for the Mercury Benz had gone to his legal guardian: his father. Any parent would fly into a rage if they suddenly got slapped with a 390,000 yen fine, along with the compensation charges.

“Please don’t worry,” Lacia said, looking apologetic. “I will work to repay your debts, Arato.”

“That makes me feel like some sort of pimp,” Arato mused.

“Even if everyone in the world sees you as my pimp, I do not think of you that way,” Lacia said.

“That’s not reassuring. I haven’t earned a single penny off of you!” Arato yelled.

“Arato, keep your voice down,” Yuka hissed.

Arato covered his face with his hand and looked up at the roof of the train. If an underage kid told their parents they had picked up a 450 million yen debt but not to worry because they could cover it, there wasn’t a parent in the world that would let that slide. But it wasn’t like Arato could explain that the car he was driving had been shot up by a PMC and hit by some unknown power wielded by an hIE. MemeFrame was trying to keep information on Methode under wraps, and even the PMC must’ve realized they had gone too far, since they were also keeping their mouths shut on the airport incident. Yuka was right to tell Arato to keep quiet.

The train came to a stop. Beyond the station platform, Arato could see the artificial concrete city spreading out around them. The city sat on the ruins of a new town, constructed during the 21st century. With population decline, the original had been left a ghost town. Now it was being used as the site of an experiment, testing next-generation city environments. Though the station itself was a remnant of the original town, this new city, from its greenery to its dull white and gray buildings, looked fake to Arato’s eyes.

“We have arrived,” Lacia said. She was the first of them to stand, and she started to reach for their luggage on the ground.

“At least let me take these,” he told her, hurriedly grabbing the bags himself.

“Aren’t you excited, Arato?” Yuka asked.

“Unlike you, I’m not here to play around,” he sighed. “I’m here to get a lecture from Dad, remember?”

“Well you did drive without a license and bust into an airport,” she pointed out. “You’re lucky you even made it out alive. There are all sorts of rumors going around my school because of you.”

Arato wasn’t the only one impacted by the incident from the other day. “Sorry,” he said. Stepping onto the platform, he felt as though he was stepping back into a previous era; a cleaner, purer time.

It was mid-May, and already feeling warm outside. Lacia was in a sleeveless dress. Arato couldn’t take his eyes off her pale skin, which seemed to shine in the sunlight.

After the police had finished grilling Arato and he had returned home, Lacia had laid a plastic sheet in the living room, expanded her massive device, and re-painted on the skin that had been lost from her upper half during the fight with Methode.

By that point, Arato had already forgiven her for leaving him behind and heading home. The sight of her back, covered with skin that had melted and rehardened, made him feel like the half a day’s worth of lectures he’d gotten didn’t measure up to what she had been through. Plus, it would have been difficult trying to explain to the police where the massive burns inflicted on her had come from.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

Lacia drew close to him to whisper her response in his ear. “There is no need to worry. I still have surplus skin material available.” With that said, she walked ahead to catch up with Yuka. Halfway there, she paused and turned back to Arato as if she had just remembered something. “Thank you for your concern,” she said. “But I assure you I am a much more simple machine than you think.”

The station was completely empty. Since it was fully automated, the only person there was the station manager. There were only around thirty regular staff members working full-time on the experimental city, and no one besides the staff had any reason to use the platform. It had probably seen less than a hundred customers total.

After passing through the unnecessarily imposing station building, the three of them stepped out into a station area that had obviously been created with much larger numbers of commuters in mind, too. The bus platform was long out of use, and the timetables and signboards had all been removed. A private vehicle was illegally parked in the bus lane, as if it was no big deal.

A familiar face appeared from the stopped car. “Hey,” Ryo said, stepping around the automatic car to wait for them. He had told Arato that he wanted to check out the experimental city, so he had come as well.

Nothing had been fixed since Ryo had yelled at him in the hospital, so Arato apologized again. “I’m really sorry for everything,” he said.

“I haven’t forgiven you or anything,” Ryo said. “But sitting around stewing over that is a waste of time.”

Arato was just glad Ryo had come. Once the four of them were together, they took off walking into the city, where the emptiness of the city streets was stark. Paved roads and walkways of concrete tiles followed the gently rolling terrain, with apartment buildings placed at regular intervals along them. Inside of the original new town all vehicles were required to be autonomous, so the guard rails along the street were delicate, with a focus on form rather than function.

From the other direction, they saw a middle-aged woman carrying a plastic shopping bag stuffed with apples. That number of them must have been heavy. As they watched, the contents split the bottom of the bag and rolled out. A young boy with wide eyes walking near the woman ran over and bent to help the woman collect the fallen contents of the bag. hIEs were always helping humans like that.

Looking to his side, Arato saw Ryo make a dumbfounded face. Arato remembered the day he’d met Lacia; he and his friends had seen an hIE helping an old lady on their way home from school. It was strange to think that had been a month and a half ago.

“I know, I know. It’s an hIE,” Arato said. “I’ve been living with Lacia long enough to tell the difference.”

“They’re both hIEs,” Ryo spat.

“I guess I sort of expected something like this,” Arato said. “You remember Mikoto, the hIE that got destroyed during the attack on the Oi Industry Promotion Center? She was the mayor of this city.”

The entire city was full of normal hIEs and hIEs playing the role of human citizens. It was a massive simulation used by the Next-Generation Social Research Center for many experiments. Their long-term goal was apparently to create a city that was completely automated and automatically monitored, requiring no humans whatsoever. Despite all that, there was still a slim chance the middle-aged woman in the jersey whose bag had torn was a human.

“That lady has a hair accessory, see?” Ryo pointed. “That means she’s one of the hIEs playing a human. That accessory is actually a mini-computer with a pretty powerful AI in it.”

“Huh, she seemed really human to me,” Arato said, impressed.

“That just shows how accurate the simulation is,” Ryo said, explaining as they walked. “The hIEs playing humans here send in requests and complaints to the government just like human citizens would. The mayor, Mikoto, takes their comments and makes plans on how to respond to their concerns. Then, she has the hIEs who aren’t playing humans work according to those plans. The solutions from the government are translated directly into a reality for this society. I’ve got to hand it to Professor Endo — he never does anything small.”

As they all headed deeper into the experimental city and took in the sights, the feeling of everything being artificial faded.

“That’s how they got this experimental city running so much like a normal city,” Ryo continued. “Mikoto also takes complaints or requests from society regarding having hIEs do human work. She works a response to those comments into how the hIEs do their jobs. By repeating this process over and over, hIEs can eventually automate just about any service. The ‘human’ hIEs here even make comments on the way this city looks. Actually, they just put in a request for a new park.”

So even the hand-crafted feeling of the city was automated, Arato thought. The beauty of everyone helping each other out, such as the boy picking up the groceries the lady had dropped, was a product of these automated plans.

But Ryo seemed completely unimpressed by the heartwarming scenery of the city. “They’re still picking these things up!” he yelled, and then brought his foot down right next to the woman’s hand as she reached to pick up an apple.

Unlike a human, who would have flinched away from almost having their hand stepped on, the hIE didn’t miss a beat. It was strange enough to break through the illusion of humanity and reveal the machinery underneath.

Ryo looked back at Arato. “Get this through your head, Arato. All these things do is follow the instructions given by their behavioral clouds,” he said.

The mistrust Ryo felt toward him ever since the incident with Shiori weighed heavily on Arato’s mind. Despite that, he reached down and picked up one of the apples for the woman. It was fake, but reproduced so perfectly even the texture felt right. “It’s MemeFrame — your family’s company — that’s programming the hIEs to help humans out, isn’t it?” he asked. “I’d like to think that whoever decided to make them act nicely must have had good intentions.”

There’s no way a person who programmed hIEs to help humans did so for an evil purpose, or so Arato thought.

“This whole ‘being helpful’ thing is just a way to improve the optics,” Ryo said. “They want people to project compassion onto these things; to see the good side of humanity in them. That way, if you go to attack one, it’s like you’re attacking good will itself, and it puts a psychological burden on the attacker. All the companies that make behavioral clouds for the hIEs make them nice as a defense mechanism.”

Ryo turned his back on the scene of hollow, heartless compassion. “If you keep using Lacia, it’s gonna mess with your head even worse than this,” he warned.

“I just think it’s fair to have a little gratitude toward anyone who does something nice for you, no matter who they are,” Arato said stubbornly.

It was a basic tenet of fair human relations to judge everyone’s actions equally regardless of their nationality, personality, race, political affiliation, etc. Despite that, when an hIE moved the heart of a human, it was immediately declared to be an analog hack. Even though Arato could understand the reasoning with his head, that didn’t mean he accepted it in his heart.

He handed the fake fruit back to the hIE. As he started to follow Ryo, Yuka came running up and showed him one of the faux apples. “That lady’s pretty much human,” she said. “She gave me this as a thank-you.”

“So anyone who gives you something is a human, huh?” Arato asked.

Yuka split the inedible fruit with him. She wasn’t always able to understand what was going on around her, but she did really worry about him when it was obvious he was troubled. Behind Yuka, Lacia hovered protectively.

“This place is a lot lonelier than I would’ve thought,” Arato commented. The original new town had been built to house fifty thousand residents. Just walking through it took a while.

Lacia spoke to distract them from the journey. “It would require an immense electricity investment to regularly power enough hIEs to make the city appear lively. Due to the amount of money already going into this experimental city, all expenditures are strictly controlled,” she explained.

Now that money had entered the conversation, Arato could understand why the city didn’t look very new. He could tell at a glance that the solar panels and outdoor lighting was all well used.

“90% of the hIEs here are reclaimed units gathered by request,” Lacia continued. “If an owner tires of their hIE, it is difficult to simply discard it. Unlike a used car, most customers are not interested in taking in someone else’s used hIE, so many are given to reclamation efforts such as this.”

“Come on, don’t talk about ‘discarding’ hIEs. It doesn’t make me feel great,” Arato said. Even if it was true, hearing Lacia talk about it so casually sent a stab of pain through his heart.

“I had a feeling you would respond that way, Arato,” Lacia said.

It had only been a week since Shiori was hospitalized. Arato would have liked for time to pass a little more slowly so he could catch his breath. “Well, yeah,” he muttered.

Counting both the ‘human’ hIEs and normal hIEs in the town, there were about twenty thousand units. But, from a distance, Arato couldn’t tell this automated city apart from any normal human city. It was as hard to tell the difference as it was to tell Lacia apart from an ordinary human by sight alone.

About five minutes’ walk from the station there was a big shopping center, and beyond that was the Smart Control Center where Arato’s dad and the other staff members worked. Aside from that location and the monitoring towers used during experiments, the rest of the town was only for experimental use.

The staff members all lived in an apartment five minutes away from the shopping mall. After Arato and the others made their greetings at the control center, they were led over to the apartments. There was apparently going to be a big experiment the following day, so everyone was busy getting ready for it.

In the experimental city, the staff could recreate incidents that could possibly occur in human society and recreate them using data they had gathered. They could then observe the changes in the actions or mood of the ‘human’ hIEs in response to the incident.

In the past, the impact of various events and incidents on human society could only be gauged by collecting data after the fact from those who had been involved. However, since the artificial city comprised entirely of AIs and hIEs, it was possible to essentially stop time within the city. Thanks to that fact, it was possible to gather complicated social data in realtime as each incident happened, something that would be impossible in the real world.

According to the staff member who led them to the apartment, they were planning on carrying out one such large-scale experiment the next day. Apparently they were going to simulate an incident in which the city hall would be blown up in a terrorist attack. The aim would be to study the effect of the city administration being unable to respond while the city is threatened by a major incident.

The plan had been decided after the destruction of Mikoto the previous month, and most of the human research staff were behind it. The staff member told them it was exciting to see how the ‘human’ hIEs reacted to things; almost like watching a live drama play out. Many of the staff apparently enjoyed the feeling of watching human lives play out from a position far above them. Thanks to this, even though they were told their father wouldn’t be returning to the apartment until 8:00 PM, Arato and Yuka were hardly bored.

“Hey Arato, what do you think will happen when mysterious explosions start popping up tomorrow?” Yuka asked. She was on the veranda, gazing out at the nightscape of the hIE city and eating ice cream she had bought earlier from a nearby shop. Apparently she had only heard part of the explanation from earlier that day.

“They’re just going to be messing with that hIE data,” Arato said. “It’s not like they’re actually going to blow anything up.”

Their father’s apartment was on the 18th floor of the tallest building in the city. The apartment had two rooms, along with a dinette set and kitchen, and it was painfully obvious that someone was living there. Luggage was awkwardly stacked in the corner of the room, and Lacia started cleaning things up as soon as they walked in.

“That reminds me,” Arato said. “Dad doesn’t use an hIE, does he? He could at least borrow one to clean up his room.”

Yuka came back in from the veranda to throw away her empty ice cream cup. There was no trash can, so she threw it into a 60 liter trash bag.

Having experienced how convenient an hIE was ever since Lacia had come into his life, Arato had been wondering one thing: “I wonder how come we never had an hIE?” Thanks to the Endo’s lack of an hIE, it had never really clicked in Arato’s head that Kozo Endo, his dad, was a scientist specializing in hIE research until Lacia came along. With their mom dead and their dad always staying away for work, Arato had always taken care of the house. It would have been much easier if there had been an hIE to do it for him.

“So you’re saying you didn’t like cooking for me or buying me snacks?” Yuka pouted.

“I spoiled you like crazy,” Arato replied.

The city at night was oddly quiet, considering the number of lights from the houses they could see. According to Lacia, it was difficult for AIs to recreate realistically lively city sounds.

Suddenly, the lights in the room flicked out, and everything around the three of them was plunged into pitch darkness. There was a metallic creaking as the old door opened in the darkness. Arato turned to look at who was coming in.

A middle-aged man was standing in the entryway, with a shopping bag dangling from either hand. Light was shining in from the hallway outside the apartment, and the glow from behind made the man look shorter than he really was. The man’s face had a detached look that made his age hard to place, and his lips were twisted in a small smile as if he was thinking of something clever.

“I’m home,” he said. The man — Kozo Endo — was as unfathomable to his children as ever.

Lacia had prepared their meal, but it was mostly all ready-made. There were only small amounts of fresh foods on the store shelves, along with some artificial and frozen ingredients. There wasn’t enough to make anything fancy. For the first time in a long while, the Endo family sat down together around the dinner table. The meal consisted mainly of fried rice and soup from a powder.

Their father never did any housework, so he didn’t contribute to the meal. He just ate it. His children were used to this, though, so it didn’t surprise them.

Arato was on edge the whole time, waiting for his dad to start yelling at him. He hardly tasted a thing. But his father just kept spooning fried rice down — he wasn’t very good at using chopsticks.“I guess Ryo decided to go out to eat?” he asked.

They had asked Ryo to join them, but he had declined.

“Dad, you didn’t do any cleaning, even though you knew we were coming to visit,” Yuka complained. She seemed surprised that no effort had been put into preparing for their visit, despite their father not having seen them for three months.

Arato was afraid if he spoke his dad would notice him and start tearing into him, so he kept out of the conversation.

Their father turned his attention to the new face at the family table. “You’re the hIE Arato picked up, right? Come sit under the kotatsu with us,” he said. There was nothing in the room but the kotatsu — a heated table with a blanket under it — a clothes rack, and a bookshelf, so Lacia had sat on the floor next to Arato.

“If I join you, it will be crowded,” Lacia said.

“Come to think of it,” Kozo said, “ever since this hIE showed up, you’ve been getting up to all sorts of stuff, haven’t you, Arato?” Arato figured this was it, and sucked in a breath. His legs, under the kotatsu blanket, were trembling with tension. “Your time as a student is precious,” his dad said. “Make sure to use it the best way you can.”

Apparently finished talking, their dad returned to eating. He said nothing about Arato’s unlicensed drive, or paying for the car, or Arato’s suspension, or anything about the whole airport incident.

Somehow, Arato felt disappointed. “Is that all?” he asked.

“Come on, Dad, it’s two million yen!” Yuka added.

“You do what you feel you need to do,” their dad said. “I trust you, Arato.”

Arato was taken aback by that declaration, while Yuka just sighed. “You’re going way too easy on him. Ever since Lacia showed up he’s been hot and bothered every day,” she muttered.

Their dad just laughed at that. “So you’ve been analog hacked, huh? Well, just don’t go too overboard with her,” he said. Apparently their father, a hacking specialist, had given his approval of Arato’s relationship with Lacia.

The first time Arato had shown Lacia to his dad, the old man had been visibly surprised. Compared to that, now he was taking it all in stride. Neither Arato nor Yuka could really understand all of their father’s feelings, but they could at least tell that he really did believe in Arato.

Emotions warred inside Arato. He felt a crushing debt of gratitude to his father, but all he could find words for was a pointless comment. “You were really surprised when I first picked Lacia up,” he said.

“I was,” their dad agreed. “At that moment, I honestly started believing that people or objects could be connected by fate. I never knew I was such a romantic.” He suddenly stood and walked over to the fridge to grab himself a beer, as well as some juice for Arato and Yuka. Apparently, he wanted to have a toast with them.

The sweet drink didn’t really go well with the fried rice, but Yuka threw hers back in one gulp while Arato nursed his. He could tell his father wanted to say something, so he tried to keep the conversation going.

“How many hIEs here are playing human roles?” he asked.

His dad jumped on the question. “We need a sufficient population to gather data on how changes spread through society, so we have about twenty thousand hIEs total. Of those, the ‘human’ units make up seventeen thousand, and the normal hIEs are the remaining three thousand. In a normal city, even if they have a fairly high ratio of hIEs to humans, it never goes above 20%, so we wanted to get close to that for our experiments,” their dad explained, waxing eloquent when it came to his work.

“For our experiments, we often try out different ratios to see how a higher concentration of hIEs would impact society,” he went on. “For example, we’ve tried a 50/50 mix with three thousand each of ‘human’ and normal units. We also tried an extreme version with the humans only making up 25%, but the results weren’t very reliable,” he said.

Yuka looked jealous. “If there’s that many hIEs, they would take care of everything for us, wouldn’t they? Sounds like heaven to me,” she observed.

“If we drop the ‘prejudice’ settings of the AIs in the ‘human’ hIEs, no matter how much we raise the ratio of hIEs to humans, it doesn’t really seem to impact the lifestyles of the ‘humans.’ On the other hand, if we turn the prejudice settings up, it causes all kinds of stress to society, even with a normal mix of humans and hIEs. When humans start thinking they’re being controlled by the machines, it causes backlash in human communities on a large scale,” their dad responded.

Arato agreed with his dad’s insight. He didn’t think groups like the Antibody Network would ever fade away.

“I don’t think you’ll see the ratio of humanoid robots that can steal work from humans grow more beyond 20% in your lifetimes,” their dad continued. “Right now, their only role is to secure the labor needs of our aging population; propping up the bottom of the population pyramid. Two hIEs to every ten humans is plenty for that job.”

To Ryo or Kengo, Arato’s dad may have been a person to respect, but to Arato himself, he was just a mystery.

His dad got a distant look in his eyes. “No matter how much people hate it, this world is moving steadily toward more and more automation. Thanks to automation, three hundred years after the industrial revolution, we humans have finally made things efficient enough to buy ourselves some free time. It’s thanks to automated production processes that our stores are overflowing with all the products they have. People can tailor music, pictures, even complex games to their own personal tastes, thanks to software that automates all the complex processes needed to alter them. It is only thanks to automation that humanity has become free,” he said, almost reverently.

Their father was apparently very good at eating while he spoke. His spoon never paused, and he spoke around bites of fried rice and slurps of Chinese-style soup. “To save time, humans learned to outsource their work. So, the ideal tool for a human is something that is able to understand what the human wants while still doing the work of a tool,” he continued. “But, historically, no such tool existed. So, instead, humans made other humans slaves, or they gathered their comrades and made companies and organizations to split the work. Of course, the intent behind it all was for humans who wanted more time to use other humans as tools to do their work for them.”

“Your mad scientist is starting to show, Dad,” Arato cut in. “I can sort of see what you’re saying about slaves, but the way you’re talking makes it sound like humans only decided to make friends or start societies because they didn’t have an hIE or an AI around to do their work.”

Standing at the edge of humanity, their father apparently saw humanity’s place in the world being eroded as some kind of freedom. “Well, that’s how it is,” their dad said defensively. “I mean, don’t you think we’re living the human dream right now? Our tools are easier to use and more responsive than ever before because they want to draw closer to us. Humans and tools may seem different to your eyes, but we’re all riding together on the rail that leads to more free time. Up to now, they haven’t been able to cover all our needs, so humans have felt unsatisfied with life. But with the changing of our technologies and methodologies, we’ve moved ahead and changed the human world. Now, everything we humans can do can be automated by either hIEs or AIs.”

“Don’t talk about slaves while we’re eating,” Yuka said grumpily. Sometimes Arato could see a reflection from his old memories of his mother in Yuka.

“I don’t think folks like the Antibody Network will ever agree with your way of thinking, Dad,” Arato mused. Ever since meeting Lacia, Arato had started thinking more deeply about things. It was only because of this tendency that he felt he was able to talk with his dad about the subject his dad loved most. If thinking more expanded your world, Arato’s world had certainly grown exponentially.

“You’re mistaken,” Kozo replied. “Even they want administrative services to be automated, deep down inside. These people send massive amounts of requests and complaints to the government. The only way the government could respond to them the way they’re expecting is if it was automated.” Their father made a strange face, as if he was expecting them to laugh at that. It may have been a joke, but Arato didn’t think it was something he could laugh about. Still, he felt like he had come one step closer to understanding his father’s smile.

“Well, don’t give them any excuses to come bomb this place, too,” Arato said. “We wouldn’t want you getting hurt.” Of course, the Antibody Network already had any number of reasons to come blow that city up.

But Arato’s dad wasn’t looking at him; his eyes were still gazing off into the distance. Seeing that expression, Arato felt like everything about his father — the room that was cluttered but didn’t seem to be lived in, his father never coming home to them, and things relating to their family relationship — was all starting to make a little more sense.

“No matter what the question is, you’ll never know if your answer was the optimal one until after the fact,” Kozo said. “When really important choices hit you, you may not have the luxury of time to weigh your options, so always be ready to choose decisively.”

“Dad, you’re going way too easy on Arato,” Yuka complained, summing up her thoughts on several subjects with one sentence.

For the first time that evening, Arato and his father both wore the same expression — a smile of chagrin.

“Allow me to accompany you,” Lacia said, watching Arato head toward the entryway. The old apartment wasn’t equipped with a home system, so there was no AI monitoring the temperature inside. Overnight, it got fairly cold in the rooms. There was only one outlet in the room with a wireless charger attached to it, so Lacia had spent the night sitting in the corner of the room near the charger.

By the time Arato had woken up, his father had already left for work. And after everything they had talked about the night before, Arato wanted to see the automated city with his own eyes.

“I just want to take a walk by myself,” he said. “Stay here with Yuka. She’s still asleep.”

“Understood,” Lacia said with a gentle smile. “I will await your return.”

“Come to think of it,” Arato said, pausing, “you didn’t really jump in at any point last night when I was talking with my dad.”

“I do not believe your father enjoys the presence of an hIE in his home,” Lacia said.

“What?! Really?” Arato was dumbfounded.

“Yes,” she continued. “There was the possibility that Methode had followed us here, so I did a sensor sweep of the area. All the other staff members have hIEs in their homes, helping with their housework.”

Arato remembered that the hallway outside the apartment had been cleaned; an hIE must have taken care of it. Lacia had done her best to clean up the dirty apartment, as well.

“Well, I guess I didn’t really introduce you properly,” Arato said, and then caught himself. “I mean, not that kind of introduction.” From the way he had said it, someone could have misinterpreted him as saying he hadn’t introduced Lacia as his girlfriend. Arato blushed. Looking into her light blue eyes and imagining a long-term relationship with her, Arato couldn’t stop his heart from singing.

“Well, while we are in this city, please find an opportunity to introduce me in a way that will satisfy you,” Lacia said, seeing him off with a bright smile. Arato could still feel the awkward sense of distance between them tingling.

Outside the apartment, Arato saw ‘human’ hIEs walking toward the station. Obviously the hIEs didn’t have any real jobs to go to so, for simulation purposes, they commuted to the train station where there was a special room for them to wait until ‘work’ time was over. They were all in a hurry to get to their ‘jobs,’ so none of them stopped to speak to him.

“They sure are detailed, though,” Arato commented to himself.

An hIE playing the role of an elementary school kid came running up, a backpack dangling from her shoulders. However, there were almost no actual child-sized hIEs in the world, so instead this ‘child’ was just a mature hIE wearing childish clothing.

“Good morning,” the girl greeted Arato politely. Despite her kiddy outfit, she had a certain sense of style, and the way her school backpack pulled at her shirt made it difficult to keep his eyes off her chest. From what Arato had heard, all the clothing used by the hIEs in the city was donated.

Beyond a small park near the apartment, there was a clean road. A garbage truck was coming along, with a normal hIE helping a ‘human’ hIE to throw a particularly hefty garbage bag into the back. It was strangely satisfying for Arato to observe such human activity taking place here, like what he would have seen around his own house. Having experienced a world that didn’t need humans the night before, Arato had found it a bit too peaceful.

Suddenly, a loud crash made Arato duck down. It sounded like something massive had fallen to the ground, so he looked up at the apartment building.

“Somebody! Call an ambulance!” a woman screamed.

Tension tugged at every muscle in Arato’s body. Lacia had just gotten done telling him there was the possibility of an attack by Methode. But, before he could expect any help, he had to know what was going on. He ran toward the source of the screaming.

He saw the problem near a tree that shaded part of the apartment where his dad lived: a boy, about the same age as him, was lying face-down on the ground. An impact had deformed his skull. His body was all broken angles, and it was clear he would never move again.

Arato couldn’t breathe as a scream lodged deep in his throat. Then, he noticed that there was no blood flowing from the body. Through the breaks in the outer skin, he could see artificial muscles that looked like bunches of cords.

“He’s an hIE...” Arato muttered to himself. It was almost as if the hIE had jumped down from the apartment. “No way,” he said, shaking his head at that thought. “Why the hell would an hIE ever commit suicide?” Suddenly, Arato felt a presence behind him.

“Well, you wouldn’t see it under normal circumstances,” an unfamiliar voice said.

Turning back, Arato saw the owner of the voice; it was a tall, slender man standing there. His hair was slicked back, and there was a severe look in his eyes. He appeared to be about the same age as Arato’s father but, from the way he carried himself, Arato assumed he was a VIP.

“Do you work here?” Arato asked. Then he rushed out an introduction. “I’m my dad’s— uh, I mean, Kozo Endo’s son. I came with a friend to see today’s experiment.”

“I see, Dr. Endo’s son,” the man said. “Well then, I have a question for you since you seem to sense that something was off in this suicide. How much do you know about hIEs?”

“I know they aren’t human,” Arato said. It was such a moronic answer he blushed.

The sharp-looking man stroked his chin as if he had just encountered something amusing. “All right, let’s follow this suicide back to the behavioral control cloud,” the man said. “It’s a bit of a journey, but I believe it’s the best way to discuss the truth of the situation. You see, to us in the 22nd century, the word ‘cloud’ is a vague term referring to types of data and programs. But it was originally intended to indicate services that could easily link up software, development platforms, and hardware over a network.”

This man, who Arato had never seen before in his life, was turning out to be a pretty good teacher. “These days, every single process our computers handle is connected to the network,” the stranger went on. “We don’t really think about the fact that all the programs we’re running are being run off of the cloud, rather than just within whatever computer we happen to be interacting with. Take a look at that hIE: the decision to jump didn’t come from within. It was just following orders it received through the network from a computer more powerful than itself,” the man explained.

A large number of hIEs were gathering around the spot where the suicidal hIE had fallen. The cloud controlling them on invisible strings must have been superb, though, as none of them showed any chaos or confusion.

But Arato noticed something strange. “Wait, these hIEs are still moving. So that means the computer giving them orders already knows about the suicide, right? Is everything going to be all right with that?” he asked.

The man narrowed his eyes at Arato’s simple question. Before answering, he crouched down and took the head of the suicidal hIE in both hands. He lifted it, thumbing its eyelids open to check the artificial eyes, while its body hung awkwardly below a broken neck.

“You’re asking if the computer that keeps track of the data on the hIEs... or, no, even Higgins, the AI running the Action Adaptation Standard Class, is aware of the suicide? That’s a good question; one that touches on the very essence of this incident,” he said.

The man giving Arato a lecture while examining the corpse of an hIE was a strange scene. But, despite how complicated the subject was, the man never had to stop to think of how to say anything. He obviously knew everything there was to know about the subject.

“In order to understand this unusual situation, you have to first understand how hIEs internally utilize the data they gather,” the man continued. “All the data gathered by every hIE’s sensors are sent to their behavioral cloud, where the data is processed. At the same time, information about how the owner was using the hIE is attached as meta-data to this information, and spread across the network.” The thin man’s eyes glinted as he checked the broken hIE. He had a charisma about him that made Arato want to keep listening to what he said.

“What do you mean the data is ‘processed’?” Arato asked. “That’s a little vague.”

“The metadata is connected with the actions of each hIE,” the man explained. “The most important point of processing is the AASC created by the behavioral control cloud itself — that’s that Action Adaptation Standard Class I mentioned earlier. If we get too far into talking about how Red Boxes work there’s too much jargon for you to follow, so we’ll just keep it simple and say that the base point of all the data that humanity is using for our behavior control programs is ‘how are people using their hIEs.’”

Setting down the hIE’s head, the man took a thin, pen-shaped brush tool out of his suit pocket. Apparently no longer interested in the scene of the suicide, he instead pointed the brush at the ground near his feet and sprayed a tinted black dot onto the old concrete.

“In order to improve the efficiency of cloud services, they are set up to accumulate large amounts of data and process it all at once,” the man said. “This processing normally just consists of tagging, extraction and sorting. It does not include judging or verifying any meaning behind the data, as that would place too large a load on the processing. Therefore, you could say that the behavioral control cloud doesn’t engage in the intellectual activity of ‘knowing’ anything. That gives us the answer to your question: yes, the behavioral cloud ‘saw’ the suicide, but it doesn’t ‘know’ about the suicide. However, since this situation was an emergency that required things like calling an ambulance, the AASC opened a shortcut to provide pinpoint directions to hIEs in the area. That’s why the ‘human’ hIEs are moving and reacting to the suicide already.”

Arato looked around and, just as the man had said, he saw dozens of ‘human’ hIEs looking at the site of the suicide with worried expressions. The thought that there wasn’t a single real human among them, that they were just puppets on strings being instructed to react to the suicide like a human would, made his skin crawl.

“Your father, Dr. Endo, has said that a world in which hIEs perform every bit of work we humans currently do will be a world in which humans will no longer have anything but free time left,” the man said. “But, as I have said, the world we perceive is not the same as the world perceived by the hIEs. For example...”

“...In order to improve their own quality, many hIE behavior control clouds are directly connected with clouds that provide services for humans,” the man kept rambling on, apparently unconcerned with how disturbed Arato was. “Human-facing services have been around for over a hundred years, and there are massive amounts of data taken from humans and programs for processing that information. You could say the amount of collected data is like the depth of this ink.”

He continued spraying ink out of his brush on the same place, where the small spot on the concrete was gradually growing. As the amount of ink being sprayed onto the spot increased, the dot of black became more and more defined and deep.

“Whenever a human makes a request to the cloud, both the request itself and the data that was prepared to respond to the request remain in the cloud,” the man continued. “Thanks to that, commonly-used processes accumulate a huge amount of data, while the rest are left largely sparse.”

He took the brush tool and made a few other dark dots at various positions on the ground. “So these darker, more focused points develop in various fields,” he explained. “And, it seems that clouds developed to cover these fields are starting to erode human society.”

“Wait, it’s a human?” Arato said, looking at the ink points the man was continuing to spray, which had begun to form the vague outline of a human body.

“Inevitably, humanity will begin to see itself in the cloud,” the man continued. “The more memories of human desires gather in the networks, the more a human shadow begins to emerge from it all. A hundred years of that, and suddenly the clouds have become interfaces all too proficient at linking humanity with a world beyond our imagining.”

The thought of all that data piling up for a hundred years blew Arato’s mind. He suddenly thought of Lacia, and how easy it was for her to read his every expression. Thinking of her as an overly sensitive interface somehow made sense, and he felt like his world had expanded once more.

“The basic nature of hIEs is to overlay the information they receive from the cloud with the reality they perceive,” the man said, pointing at the hIEs still watching them from a distance. “We call them ‘interfaces’ because they are machines that give the computational processes of the cloud a human form, and draw as close as they can to humanity.”

He continued, directing Arato’s eyes to the hIEs forming a crowd around them, pointing to one after another with his pen-shaped airbrush. “Just as a printer takes the data for letters and turns them into actual letters on a page, or as sound reverberates through a speaker, hIEs output the data they process as actions by a humanoid robot. That’s all they are: output devices. So, let me ask you this: how do you think this AI the hIEs have — this AI that far surpasses human knowledge — perceives the world?”

Arato only ever thought of hIEs as machines that converted data to reality, but he wondered how Lacia would respond if he asked her how she saw the world. That sense of wanting to know was less of a real scholarly interest and more the curiosity of a high schooler.

“I don’t know how something smarter than us sees the world,” Arato said. “But I think even things that are only human in form have the ability to move our hearts, and I think that can have meaning for us.”

He could hear the siren of an approaching ambulance. It was only coming to satisfy the reactions of the ‘human’ hIEs. Even knowing that the hIEs didn’t ‘know’ about the suicide on a fundamental level, Arato couldn’t fight down his uneasy feeling.

The man was watching Arato with a wry smile. “I see. So we’re the ones meant to perceive meaning in the hIEs,” he said.

The ‘human’ hIEs guiding the ambulance all wore desperate expressions, identical to those real humans would wear under those circumstances. Humans didn’t even need to worry about accidents anymore; there were robots who could do the worrying for them.

“So, why did that hIE jump, then?” Arato asked. “Was there some reason it needed to commit suicide?”

“That is the question,” the man agreed. “Normally there shouldn’t be any command routines in a behavioral control cloud that would lead to damaging an hIE. I don’t think it’s connected to this hIE’s role here in the experimental city, either.”

Even as the man spoke, something else fell in front of Arato; a pair of eyes met his on the way down. With a dull, dry thud — a sound almost too comical for the situation — a second body hit the pavement, rebounding just a little before coming to rest. Again, Arato heard a woman scream nearby.

Arato felt like screaming himself, but couldn’t. Numb from seeing the face of the falling hIE, he stared down in shock at the body. A second hIE had thrown itself off the building.

The man who had taught Arato so much about the city looked up at the apartment veranda, one eyebrow quirked with interest. “A second, huh? I see. That means this definitely wasn’t a coincidence,” the man murmured.

Even as they both looked up, a third hIE was climbing over the wall around the veranda on the seventh floor of the apartment. It didn’t seem concerned that anyone below could see it as its skirt slid up, exposing its thighs before the whole body tumbled over the wall and fell. With a dull snapping noise, it hit the ground.

“Dr. Endo is a man who gets machines to do interesting jobs, even though some humans would prefer that he didn’t. He was the one who pushed for Higgins to make things for itself in MemeFrame, as well,” the man said, and then looked down at Arato.

“I haven’t introduced myself yet, have I? My name is Ginga Watarai. I worked under Dr. Endo when he was conducting his joint research project with MemeFrame. Thanks to some good fortune, I am now the director of research at the MemeFrame Tokyo Research Labs.”

One after another, robots with human bodies were throwing themselves from the apartment, each one landing with a loud, dull thud. Human forms were falling like raindrops, human faces splitting open on the concrete. They were eerily silent as they fell, piling up on the ground in front of the apartment. It was such a bizarre scene, Arato felt like he was going to lose his mind.

Watarai turned his back on the nightmare, completely ignoring it as he continued to speak to Arato. “I also happen to be Methode’s owner,” he said.

Arato felt like the ground was rumbling under his feet, as tension tightened the muscles in his neck. Memories of his meeting with Shiori floated up in the back of his mind. “Is Methode doing this?” Arato asked, terror and anger robbing him of his ability to stop and think for even an instant before charging right in. “If you know so much about hIEs, you should know what she’s capable of.”

“Oh, I know what Methode has been up to,” Watarai said. “How about you? Do you know what Lacia has been up to?”

Arato wanted to break something. He wanted to break everything. In his memories, he could still hear Ryo shouting at him in the hospital.

The dull thudding of the falling bodies rose until it sounded like a pounding storm. Arato could even feel the ground shaking as, one after another, hIEs rained from the sky. Looking back, he saw a hellscape of broken human bodies.

It wasn’t just there, at that apartment. Looking around, Arato could see them jumping from apartments all around the area. The higher the apartment, the more human figures Arato could see pouring over the verandas. It was almost as if they were all racing to see who could hit the ground faster.

There were also hIEs fighting each other to escape through the entries to the apartments. They, too, appeared to be racing; competing to see who could run away the fastest. All of them were wearing the hair accessories that marked them as ‘human’ hIEs.

“You two should run, too!” One of the hIEs saw Arato and yelled at him. “They’ve all gone crazy!”

Watarai continued to speak to Arato as if nothing was happening around them. “You don’t understand anything about what’s going on. You should return Type-005, Lacia, to me.”

Then, above the constant sound of falling bodies that had Arato’s hair standing on end, he heard an explosion. Looking toward its source, he saw that it was no simulation for the experiment; there was flames and smoke pouring from the veranda of one of the apartments.

It was the apartment where Arato’s dad lived.

“You bastard!” Arato shouted. In his eyes, the man who had introduced himself as the lead researcher of MemeFrame looked like a demon.

Sirens whined from ambulances and fire trucks. There were ‘human’ hIEs who played police officers in the experimental city, but Arato didn’t hear any police car sirens.

The city which, up until about ten minutes ago, had looked just like the neighborhood around Arato’s house, was now in complete chaos. People were screaming and pushing past each other in the street. There were twenty thousand ‘human’ and normal hIEs packed into an area of only about five hundred meters in the experimental city. It was fine when they were all in their own apartments, but with all of them rushing outside, there was suddenly one hIE per square meter of ground. They started to spill out onto the road, to the point where cars could no longer pass by.

Arato’s terminal vibrated in the pocket of his jeans. He pulled it out, and saw calls from Lacia and Ryo. Lacia should have been in the apartment when it exploded. He took her call first.

“What’s going on?!” he yelled.

〈My apologies. Methode attacked,〉 Lacia said, her tone serious and blunt.

“Are you all right?” Arato asked. “I saw the explosion.”

〈Yuka was taken. She was not injured, though. All flammable objects in the living room of the apartment were burned by Methode’s attacks,〉 Lacia reported.

“Methode kidnapped Yuka?!” Arato’s thoughts went blank, as if his brain had been boiled to mush. Just as he had feared, Methode knew where he was and could get to him whenever she wanted. And her first target had been Yuka. He should have seen it coming.

〈I believe Methode’s owner has taken Yuka captive in order to exchange her for custody of me,〉 Lacia said calmly, as if she could already see the future playing out.

When she said it, Arato remembered that he had Methode’s owner right there with him. He looked around for Ginga Watarai. “He’s gone. He ran off!” Arato shouted.

There were too many human figures running away from the apartment; Arato couldn’t hope to pick Watarai out from among them. Still, Arato ran, looking for the man while still holding his terminal to his ear.

“Hey, did anyone see the guy I was just talking with? Where’d he go? Someone tell me!” he yelled at the crowd of ‘human’ hIEs.

All of them shook their heads in confusion.

“Lacia, can you scan for any other humans besides me around here? Methode’s owner was just here! He should still be around here somewhere!” he yelled into his terminal.

〈I attempted to interfere with the hIEs in the area, but I am unable to manipulate their data. Arato, be careful. There is something strange about the hIEs in this city,〉 Lacia warned.

The truth of her warning was playing out before Arato’s eyes, as fallen hIEs were starting to push themselves up on broken limbs. Supporting themselves awkwardly on limbs that couldn’t properly hold their weight anymore, the torn, disfigured humanoid machines began to spasm across the ground. Arato backed away slowly as he locked gazes with a pair of dead eyes set in a deformed skull.

“What the hell is going on?!” he yelled. “The hIEs that just busted all over the ground are getting up again.” They dragged themselves forward; each face expressionless, each body bearing wounds that anyone could tell at a glance should have been fatal.

The ‘human’ hIEs just kept watching from a distance, until a young male ‘human’ called out to the ‘suicidal’ hIEs, reaching out to touch one of them. As soon as he got within reach, though, the zombie hIE he was trying to touch leapt on top of him and bit his shoulder. The ‘human’ screamed as the hIE’s teeth bit deep into his muscular shoulder. And it wasn’t just one hIE, either. One after another, fallen hIEs leapt on the ‘man,’ beating and tearing at him.

Since the screaming of the ‘human’ was coming from a speaker rather than a real throat, it continued on even after his limbs had been ripped off and his body torn with wounds that should have been fatal. Arato forgot he was still connected with Lacia, and stopped to stare as the horrible scene played out in front of his eyes.

“What the hell?” he wondered.

Lacia’s calm voice coming through his pocket terminal snapped him out of it. 〈Get away from any hIEs that are acting strange as quickly as possible,〉 she instructed. 〈I will retrieve my device and make preparations to recapture Ms. Yuka and escape from this city.〉

Something cut off the call. In a panic, Arato wondered what had happened, until he saw that another call was coming in; it was Ryo. As soon as the call connected, he heard Ryo shouting in his ear. 〈What the hell are you doing, Arato?! Have you seen what’s going on outside?!〉

Just hearing his friend’s voice had a calming effect on Arato. “Someone kidnapped Yuka,” he replied.

Thanks to the chaos engulfing the city, it took ten minutes to get to where Ryo was waiting for him. All of the ‘suicidal’ hIEs that had thrown themselves from the higher floors of all the apartments in the area were attacking any ‘human’ hIEs they could find. The zombie hIEs walked, dragging their feet, obviously blind as they constantly bumped into others walking near them. It was clear that they had lost control of themselves, yet there was no fighting between the zombies. Since there would be no point to a social experiment city if the AI in control couldn’t simulate a realistic reaction in its residents, all of the ‘human’ hIEs were panicking.

The zombies didn’t hesitate to attack any ‘humans’ their eyes fell on, including women and children. Herded by three thousand rampaging hIEs, a large portion of the city’s seventeen thousand ‘humans’ were gathered in a nearby park. Since it seemed like the easiest place to find each other, Arato and Ryo agreed to meet up in the park as well. Ryo waved his arms so Arato could find him. Not that it was hard; even in a crowd of ‘human’ hIEs, it was easy to pick out a real human by his vivid, emotional movements.

Arato dashed over to Ryo, noting the hard look on his friend’s face. “I can’t get a hold of the admin building,” Ryo said. “And, I don’t think we’ll make it if we just wait for rescue.”

Without hesitation, Arato looked to Ryo to sort things out. “What should we do? Do you think all this is related to them taking Yuka?” he asked.

Ryo flashed him a wry smile, as if he had been expecting Arato to toss everything to him. “If they managed to mess with all however-many thousand hIEs at once, the whole behavioral cloud must be compromised,” Ryo said. “And normally, someone would have shut it off before it could spread this much, so someone must actually have taken physical control of the server.”

There wasn’t a shred left of the everyday cityscape Arato had seen just that morning. Everything around him was twisted and wrong. The thought that all it took for things to get this insane was a few bad orders to the hIEs made Arato seriously worry about the stability of his own future.

“I wonder if Dad and the others got away,” he murmured.

“The station’s crawling with hIEs,” Ryo said. “Unless they walked out, they must be hiding somewhere.”

Strange moans and screams from over a thousand mouths blended into an echoing cacophony throughout the park.

While Arato was still frozen with worry about his family, Ryo was already starting to move. “We’ve gotta move, Arato,” he said. “If we stay here too long, we’ll be boxed in.”

In one corner of the park, Arato could already hear screams and yells of anger starting to rise above the surrounding commotion. Zombie hIEs were already throwing themselves fiercely at the crowd in the park.

The ‘human’ hIEs were grabbing bits of wood or anything that looked solid and fighting off the attackers. But the zombies didn’t even flinch as they were hit and, one by one, they dragged down their prey. As soon as one went down, it was immediately swarmed by the wound-covered hIEs and pummeled. Once the attacks to their heads smashed the hair accessory that contained their autonomous AI, the ‘human’ hIEs fell under the control of the abnormal behavioral cloud and joined the zombies.

“Let’s take that,” Ryo said, pointing to a car one of the ‘human’ hIEs must have driven there. Once he stepped out of the crowd in the park, Arato was immediately spotted by a dozen hIEs with broken limbs who started swarming in his direction. In a panic, he jumped into the automatic car Ryo had pointed out. More and more zombie hIEs were mobbing the park, as if they were actually starving for the flesh of the ‘humans’ gathered there.

“Those people need to run,” Arato said. “Or at least find a better place to make a stand against these things.” He knew none of them were actually human, but he couldn’t stop worrying for their sakes.

“The park must have been designated as their evacuation area in emergencies,” Ryo said. “The AIs must be at their limits, considering how they’re not attempting to adapt to what’s happening.”

Outside the car windows, Arato saw zombie hIEs, with their innards showing through broken skin, rushing toward the vehicle as fast as they could on broken limbs that left them stumbling awkwardly. He called up the autopilot function of the car and was about to punch in a destination when his finger stopped.

“Wait. I have to save Yuka,” he said. “Ryo, you get out of the city. I’m staying here.”

Ryo called up the control panel for the car and tapped something in. The steering wheel shifted over until it was in front of Arato. “Take the wheel,” Ryo ordered. Then, when Arato hesitated, he went on with more force. “You always want to try to do everything yourself, right?” he asked. “So, you drive.”

“Fine,” Arato said. He took a deep breath, and then took hold of the wheel. He switched off the autopilot; as long as it was on, it would never move forward due to the safety measures in place that stopped it when a human figure was in front of it. With all the hIEs in the street, they’d never get anywhere with it on. He hoped he sounded confident enough for Ryo to trust him to get them out of this mess.

“Seems like only the hIEs in the city are messed up,” Ryo said. “It must be something in the local behavior cloud.”

An hIE with a completely smashed face was pounding on the hood of the car with its fists, shaking the entire car. It looked so human, it was impossible for Arato to not project a murderous rage onto it, and his stomach twisted in terror. It felt like reality as he knew it was turning to dust and blowing away. He thought of Lacia. Just like her, the thing smashing into the windshield of the car had no heart, no soul.

He felt as though Lacia would probably tell him that even the fear that was freezing him was nothing more than an analog hack. Thinking about her, and about his connection to her, took some of the edge off the terror, though.

It struck Arato at that moment that he might be pretty simple minded after all. He was already driving without a license again. Remembering the airport, he focused on the road ahead. “The accelerator is on the right, on the right,” he muttered to himself.

Ryo’s face went pale. “Wait, if you have to remind yourself of that, move over and let me drive,” he said.

Arato squeezed his eyes shut and slammed his foot down on the accelerator as hard as he could. The tires squealed and the car leaped forward, tossing aside any human figures that got in its way. Arato’s heart was hammering so hard that it felt like it would explode. Watching the car he was driving plow through things that looked human made his mind go blank with shock.

Normally, an impact from a vehicle was enough to put an hIE’s body into a stand-by state. They wouldn’t resume operation until they had run a full check on their functions. When Arato ran over the zombies, however, they continued to move as if nothing had happened.

“Which way takes us out of this city?!” Arato shouted, his hands shuddering on the wheel. It didn’t matter if they were hIEs; watching a human body roll over the hood of the vehicle he was driving and hearing it land with a thud behind the car wasn’t something he could experience without a thrill of terror.

“The behavioral control server is probably in the central management building,” Ryo said. “Whatever’s behind this is probably there. If the guys who grabbed Yuka are the ones behind this, they might be there too.” Arato couldn’t help but take his eyes off the road and look at Ryo.

The plan had been to take Ryo to the edge of town and then go back for Yuka. But Ryo gave him another wry smile and shrugged. “Let’s just go get her. No telling what might happen if we don’t go there first,” he said.

“Thanks,” Arato told him. To show his gratitude, Arato stepped even harder on the accelerator. The program that helped hIEs avoid traffic must have kicked in, because they started to wobble out of the car’s path. Slowly, the crowd of human figures began to part, opening a way forward for Arato. His mind was full of getting Yuka back as quickly as possible, so he didn’t hesitate to slam aside the hIEs that were too slow to dodge with the car’s bumper. He lost count of how many times the car shuddered as it sent hIEs flying. It was almost as though the terror he had felt had turned in on itself, transforming into a rush that made his whole body feel hot.

Ryo also looked a bit high as he leaned his elbow against the car window. “How long are you planning to stay with Lacia anyway?!” he suddenly blurted. “You know that Red Box is just manipulating you, right? She’s trying to create a world that’s more convenient for the robots.”

“So maybe she is, so what?!” Arato shouted back. The inside of the car felt hot. Even with a crowd of zombie hIEs reaching out for him, Arato still felt like opening the window just to get some air.

“She’s gonna betray you!” Ryo shouted. “She could have already made contracts with some other owners without you knowing.” Arato wondered if Ryo had heard about Shiori and Ginga Watarai both being Methode’s owners. It was true; Lacia may have been doing the same thing. Thinking about her while she was apart from him squeezed at Arato’s heart.

Ryo glared at the malfunctioning automated city through the car window. “I’m only coming along with you to save Yuka,” he muttered. “Don’t expect me to lift a finger for the sake of that Red Box.”

“I’m not just doing this for Lacia,” Arato said. “I just want to do whatever I can to help.” Ryo was silent. Arato knew what he had said didn’t make any sense; if he was honest with himself, there may not have been anything he could do in this automated age. When that thought struck him, he felt his chest tighten until he couldn’t breathe. Even with everything he had seen, he had still wanted to think of himself as being unique. Considering the world he was living in, that was probably a silly thought. But then, when he thought of Lacia, he felt strangely lighter. Even though it was hardly the time for a smile, he found his mouth turning up into a grin.

The central administration building was right next to a shopping mall. Arato’s dad had explained that the place had been used as a power control station in the new town, in the age before smart cells were used for electricity. The cables running from it all over the city apparently helped with the monitoring Arato’s dad and his team did.

The navigation screen was telling Arato to go around the shopping mall using a narrow back street, since the car couldn’t go through the mall. If we get surrounded in an alley that small, Arato thought, we’re done for.

“What do you think will be there waiting for us in the admin building?” Arato asked, hoping his smarter friend could give him an idea. Ever since they had first met in grade school, that had been his habit whenever he was presented with a tough question.

“Who knows?” Ryo replied. “‘Nothing good’ would be my guess.”

“True,” Arato agreed. It seemed like a good idea to accept the possibility Methode might be there. With one hand still on the wheel, he used the other to feel around in the glove compartment on the left of the dashboard. Just like the Benz, this vehicle came equipped with a supersonic drill. “Take this,” he said, handing it to Ryo. “That’s probably the only useful thing in the car. Let’s go to the mall and see if we can grab anything else.”

Ryo stared perplexedly at the drill Arato handed him. “You sure have changed,” he observed.

Arato’s second time driving was going more smoothly than his first had. He kept the vehicle headed toward the mall, still smashing aside zombie hIEs with the car’s front bumper.

“I figured out that I have to be able to get things done myself, or I’ll lose people who are dear to me,” Arato replied.

“Red Box girl is that important to you?” Ryo asked.

One after another, zombie hIEs kept leaping in front of the car. There was a fire burning unchecked nearby, and Arato could see flaming bodies running back and forth. All around him, there were scenes of brave ‘human’ hIEs trying to fight off the horde of zombies, only to be dragged down. All these grisly scenes were fully automated.

He saw the mall through the windshield. If he didn’t go and face whatever was waiting for him there, if he didn’t save Yuka, he would never be able to look his father in the face again. Especially after his dad had been so cool about the whole Lacia thing.

“We’re probably going fast enough to jump up the entrance to the mall,” Arato said. “But I guess the stairs will be safer.”

“Damn, I forgot how crazy you can be,” Ryo said wryly.

Slamming his foot on the accelerator, Arato pushed the car to leap up the short steps in front of the mall. He steered them around the fountain in front of the mall and up another, steeper set of stairs. At the top of the stairs, the speeding car actually left the ground as it crashed through the front automatic doors of the mall.

The entire vehicle shuddered violently as Arato’s ears were full of the sound of shattering glass before the vehicle landed inside the mall with a jolting impact. He forgot which side was the brakes, and accidentally slammed on the accelerator once before correcting himself and stomping on the right pedal. The back tires squealed, and the vehicle fishtailed wildly before finally coming to rest. Arato’s head had been thrown around so much his whole world was still spinning.

“Doesn’t look like any of the hacked hIEs have come in here,” Ryo said, looking around.

The mall was set up with a large main space that split off into countless small shops. On the side of the main area across from Arato, an escalator ran up to a movie theater on the secomdfloor. Of course, all the shops were closed, with nothing to them but signs and empty shelves.

Arato got out of the car and checked around to make sure there weren’t any threats. Ryo also climbed out, his finger on the trigger of the drill.

“There’s a home center on the second floor of the north area,” Ryo said. “If there’s anything here we could use as a weapon, it’d probably be in there.”

They both started walking across the floor, which showed the impressions of hundreds of feet in the thick dust. As they walked, they both kept an eye out for any zombie hIEs. Far above them, the roof arched like the steeple of an old church.

As they walked, the car followed them using its automatic navigation. Thanks to its headlights, even with the meagre sunlight shining in, the darkness didn’t hinder them. Running in silent mode, the only noise made by the car was when it rolled over a fallen signboard or the remains of an hIE someone had destroyed.

“I think there aren’t any hacked hIEs in here because the power’s out,” Ryo said, shining around a light he had pulled out of the car.

It certainly seemed to Arato that there were too few remains of hIEs in the mall, considering the city being full of them.

“To prevent power loss, they probably programmed the hIEs to avoid entering areas where there are no power sources,” Ryo explained. “That would be my guess, considering there aren’t enough staff here to look after the charging of every single hIE in town.”

They came across a kid who looked elementary-aged, standing in the dim mall corridor. There was an accessory in his hair, marking him as a ‘human’ hIE. Since the ‘humans’ had their own AIs, it made sense they would have more freedom than the rampaging hIEs who were avoiding the blacked out areas.

Even Arato understood that the way his heart felt when he looked at the child-shaped robot was nothing more than an analog hack. Still, he scrubbed a hand through his hair and called out to the boy, who was wearing kids’ clothes from a previous era. “Hey, we’re running away ‘cause things are pretty crazy out there. Where are your mom and dad? Is there anyone you know around here?” he asked.

Child-shaped hIEs were rare, so Arato had no doubt the kid was a local. That, plus the fact that the hIEs were trying to act as humanly as possible, led him to believe the kid wouldn’t have been left there alone.

“Well, whatever,” he said when no immediate answer came. “You can stick with us until we find your mom and dad.” He held out his hand to the boy.

“What the hell are you doing?” Ryo’s voice was hot and throaty, like he was spitting blood. “After all this, you’re still getting manipulated just because these things look human?”

He wasn’t wrong. Still, looking at the shivering child, Arato thought of his own past. He had just started elementary school when he had been caught up in the explosion and covered in burns. “I can’t just pretend I didn’t see him,” he said.

As if his emotions had suddenly burst free, the boy threw himself at Arato. “They’re dead!” the boy wailed. He grabbed Arato’s clothing tightly, face red and tears streaming from his puffy eyes. “Mom and Dad died, then they got all weird!” The way the boy showed his sorrow was completely identical to a real human child. “Everyone’s dead!” he cried.

“Oh, just stop!” Ryo shouted, his face scarlet with emotion. His angry words echoed in the darkness, and the boy sobbed even harder.

‘Death’ was a word that resounded heavily in any human heart. Since the ‘human’ hIEs in the experimental city had been programmed to react to things in the same way any ordinary city person would, their aversion to death was the same as any real human’s.

Within Arato, the sound of the boy crying dug up a strange mixture of terror and heat. Unable to stand the overflowing emotions, he turned to look out the window. Outside, he could see some of the crazed hIEs. To Arato, they really did look like human zombies. And he had just run over them and tossed them aside like ragdolls with a car. At that thought, his hands started to shake and nausea made him want to puke. It felt like reality was crumbling away around him. He was being analog hacked by twisted and broken bodies of the zombie hIEs that looked so perfectly human.

“Are there any other kids that ran here?” Arato asked, lowering himself down so he could look at the boy from his own eye level.

“After Mom got all weird, she died,” the boy said between sobs. He pointed to a branching hallway that led to one of the mall’s emergency exits. Arato could see the figure of a woman lying on her back on the floor there. It must have been the female hIE who had played the role of the boy’s ‘mother.’

He walked over to take a look at her. Where her hair accessory should have been, there was just an empty connection port in her head. From what he had seen earlier, he knew that ‘human’ hIEs who lost their personal AI would go berserk just like the others and start attacking anything around them. But this hIE wasn’t. Even Arato could figure out why. “Out of juice,” he muttered.

The woman was lying still, with her eyes shut tight. Arato reached down and picked up a pocket terminal lying near where she fell. He assumed it was hers. It stood to reason that the ‘human’ hIEs would have the contact information of their acquaintances recorded in their terminals. If so, he was hoping that if any of them were still normal, he could let them know there was a safe place to run to.

“I’m gonna borrow your terminal. If any of your friends are safe, I’ll have them come here,” he said to the body, touching her hand to the terminal to clear its ID lock. Praying that there were still some ‘human’ hIEs out there trying to help their fellows out, he typed in a message that read ‘there is a boy in the shopping mall who needs help’ and sent it en masse to every contact in her terminal.

Arato was honestly starting to feel as though the line between the ‘human’ hIEs and real humans was vague. Even before hIEs came into their lives, Arato and his friends hadn’t been able to tell other humans apart. Humans had been attributing humanity onto all sorts of things since long before Arato was born.

Closing his eyes, Arato pressed his fingers against his eyelids. No matter how many times he tried to rethink it or analyze his own feelings, he just couldn’t bring himself to abandon the little boy looking up at him, depending on him, just because the kid happened to be an hIE.

“Let’s get this over with,” Ryo said, interrupting his thoughts. “Let’s go see what we can do at the admin building.” Ryo turned to look at him, and Arato could see the anger written plainly on his friend’s face. “If you think those things are the same as us humans, you must not think much of humanity,” Ryo continued. “Do you really think that thing watching your reaction and deciding to cry is the same as a human, actually worrying about another human’s feelings?”

The raw emotion in Ryo’s words paralyzed Arato.

“Do you think this thing’s reactions are the same as all those things I’ve done for you over the years?” Ryo asked.

Arato didn’t have a good response for his friend’s questions. Ryo had always been there for him, standing by Arato through all sorts of trouble. The last thing he wanted was to say something that would make Ryo think that he wasn’t taking the whole thing seriously.

“Thanks for always being there for me,” Arato said. He wasn’t the smartest guy, but even Arato could understand there was a deeper intent behind Ryo’s questions; he wasn’t talking about the situation they were in at that moment. No, he was asking if Arato was going to continue to stay with Lacia, the machine that had put both their families in danger.

Ryo was asking about the future. Arato had an answer; it had been growing more and more certain within him with each passing day, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Lacia was precious to him. But Yuka, his dad and Ryo were all equally dear.

Deep inside, he believed that the hearts of humans and the inhuman could be connected. He also knew that things weren’t this simple. That’s why the answer wasn’t something he had decided with logic; it was just a feeling that set his skin tingling. He wanted to be with Lacia. Alone, he felt incomplete.

Arato’s time for worrying about the situation came to an abrupt end as flames sprang up, lapping at the mall’s walkway. Everything flammable on the ground caught fire, and the dim corridor was suddenly bathed in harsh light.

Without seeing her, Arato knew who had arrived. “Run! It’s Methode!” he yelled. Just like at the airport, terror sent goosebumps rippling up his arms. He could hear dry footsteps echoing through the quiet mall, drawing nearer with each step.

Type-004 was a monster that had burned away Lacia’s artificial skin in their fight, and who could run faster than any human eye could follow. Any ordinary humans trying to face her down would be killed, without a doubt.

“Ryo, run,” Arato repeated, and then started to run himself, grabbing the boy hIE’s hand and dragging him along as well.

Ryo didn’t move from where he was standing in the corridor. “You go,” Ryo said.

Arato couldn’t believe what he was hearing. His friend was about to die. “You think you can stop her?” Arato asked, incredulous. “She’s the one who tried to roast Shiori alive!”

“I can at least slow her down. Get out of here!” Ryo yelled back. Arato tried to take Ryo’s hands, but Ryo brushed him away sharply. Instead, he thrust the supersonic drill from the car into Arato’s arms. “I’ll figure something out. Don’t start hesitating now!” Ryo yelled. Despite what was happening, Ryo’s eyes looked calm. He seemed to have come to some sort of decision.

“What the hell do you mean ‘start hesitating’?” Arato asked.

“This is the path you chose!” Ryo yelled. “Don’t go crying about it now! Or, what, would you be more comfortable if I was a machine watching your back instead?”

Arato suddenly saw everything that had happened since he met Lacia from a different angle. His whole world had started to revolve around her. But Ryo was in high school, too, and starting to walk his own path. The orbits of their lives had finally diverged.

When they were in grade school, despite his wounds, Arato had reached out his hand to Ryo and become his friend. But now they were on the brink of adulthood, and an insurmountable wall had grown between them. His friend no longer needed his hand.

Arato bit back another shout and ran. He headed for the emergency exit, down the mall’s corridor, and burst through the iron doors, out into the experimental city where the morning sun was shining bright. Then he kept on running so the zombie hIEs shambling around the outskirts of the mall couldn’t catch him. He trusted in Ryo’s words, and had faith that his friend would be all right.

With the hIE child still in tow, he headed for the central administration building, with tears blurring his vision. Instead of his best friend’s hand, his right hand was gripping that of an inhuman machine. That was where their paths had parted.

***

Ryo let out a long sigh, looking at the emergency doors Arato had just left through. “You’re the one who offered me your hand,” he said. “But what am I supposed to do when I see you offering that same hand to a bunch of robots?” He could no longer believe in what had once been the most important thing in his life; the one thing he had felt he could trust. It felt like his entire life had come to an end. That was why, when the orange-haired hIE appeared in front of him, he didn’t even try to run.

“What are you doing here?” the fourth Lacia-class hIE, Methode, asked. “Do you need me to remind you that humans who can’t even obey simple orders are worthless?” This was the unit who would have killed Ryo’s sister if Arato hadn’t been there to save her. “Your job was to see Arato Endo to the server room in the central admin building,” she reminded him coldly.

“Then I’d have to be the one to tell him he’d been betrayed,” Ryo replied. “Sorry, but that sounds like a pretty shitty job to me.” Even then, there at the end, Arato had never once doubted Ryo, who had been given a mission by Ginga Watarai before being sent to the experimental city. It was his job to grab Arato while he was searching for his kidnapped sister and Lacia was otherwise occupied. Even if Ryo failed to capture Arato, the psychological impact of his best friend betraying him might be crippling.

Methode twisted the corner of her mouth in a wry smile. Watarai must have put some of his own personal touches on her behavioral memes, Ryo thought.

“Shitty as it may be, this was your test of loyalty from the Computer Faction in MemeFrame,” she told him. “If you can’t even cut your ties with a school friend that offers you no actual benefits, do you really think you can sever your ties with your own family?”

“Is me not taking down Arato like Watarai told me to really not part of the plan?” Ryo asked. “Or am I just playing along with your master plan to kill me off?” A sudden impact pulled Ryo off the floor. Methode had him by the throat, lifting him easily off of the ground with one hand. The Red Box watched him with emotionless eyes as he wheezed feebly for breath.

Ryo touched the pocket terminal he still had in one hand, and the automatic car he had left in the main hall started moving. At the same time, the hIE woman that had been lying at their feet came alive and grabbed Methode’s legs. All the zombie hIEs that had been shambling around the outskirts of the mall came rushing in through the emergency door that Arato had left open, as if they were all being guided there. Several of them leapt at Methode, aiming for her head with their flailing arms.

But the trap Ryo had set had little effect on Methode. There was a clear gap in capabilities between the ordinary hIEs and the Red Box. With her left hand free, she destroyed each of them effortlessly before they could get within a meter of her.

Still, she shifted her grip on Ryo’s throat as she did, giving him the opening he needed. He got his legs up and kicked at her body with all his strength. Parts of his shirt ripped away in her hand, but he was free. Pain pounded his oxygen-starved head like a drum.

“I see,” Methode said. “A car that size can supply energy to any wirelessly charging machines within a 5-meter radius. You used it to turn this place into an area where recharging is possible.”

Coughing against the pain of having his throat almost crushed, Ryo pushed himself to his feet. Through it, he ran his mouth for what may have been the last time. “Automatic vehicles can act as massive batteries for homes when large-scale power outages happen. It’d be pretty bad if the zombies out front had the intelligence to push a car in here and expand their area of coverage, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, aren’t you interesting,” Methode murmured. “I suppose we could chat a little before I finish you off.” She didn’t even need to move as she continued to beat down the hIEs trying to swarm her; pieces of humanoid bodies were starting to pile up on the floor. Seeing the carnage made memories of the disaster from his childhood play out in the back of Ryo’s mind.

In the ten years since that incident, Ryo had learned something Arato would never understand. Arato always talked about how people and things could move each others’ hearts. But Ryo knew there were terribly few people in the world who acted on the movements of their hearts and reached out to help other people. Even if nobody else in the world saw it, Ryo would proudly tell them that Arato Endo was a great guy. But, in every age, society was full of cold-blooded people. The wonderful world Arato saw — the world where humans and hIEs followed their hearts and helped each other — would never become a reality.

But Ryo Kaidai wasn’t the same powerless little boy who had lost himself in the fire all those years ago. That was why he needed to be in control of the situation. If he just left things alone, Ryo felt that they would soon come to a point from which there would be no returning.

Methode casually tore apart any zombie hIE that drew near. There really wasn’t any hope of Ryo winning against such a monster. But still, he kept himself set and coiled like a spring, ready to act if a chance for retaliation presented itself.

“You’re being used. Because you’re a good tool,” Ryo said. “Once Ginga Watarai confirms that someone is a good pawn in his hand, he treats them all the same. Right now, he thinks of me as a useful piece on his side of the board. You and I are the same in his eyes.”

It seemed like one of the zombie hIEs was reaching out for him every second, but none of them were allowed to touch him. The fact that Methode was keeping them away from him gave him hope that this indicated room for negotiation.

“Watarai seems really interested in the unit causing this city to go crazy, doesn’t he?” Ryo pressed.

Methode looked incredibly bored at the repetitive act of smashing the zombie hIEs. Normally, she should have been helping out on the front line of this incident. Instead she had been sent here, far from the action. It wasn’t hard for Ryo to figure out why.

“Doesn’t it worry you?” he asked. “Watarai thinks you’re a good tool now because you’re the only Lacia-class he’s got. If he gets a second, he’s going to throw you away.”

Methode stopped fending off the arms of the zombies reaching for him. In an instant, the encroaching hIEs grabbed him and pulled him down.

“You’ve chosen a foolish way to beg for your life,” Methode observed.

“I’m just trying to find a common ground,” Ryo replied. “Watarai needs you under his ownership to clean up dangerous jobs. But, compared to the other Lacia-class units, you’re getting a pretty raw deal.”

“MemeFrame keeps me well-supplied,” the Red Box, superior to humanity in every measurable attribute, threw back at him.

“Supplied enough to survive even if there’s another disaster in Tokyo?” Ryo asked. “Or if a war breaks out? The other Lacia-class units were made to preserve data. They’ve been set up so nothing can hold them back.”

Methode pointed her right hand at the middle of the corridor. The next instant, the car exploded, and a howling blast wave slammed into Ryo from the side. When the explosion died down, the hIEs had already turned face and were headed out of the mall. With the car destroyed, the mall was a blackout area again.

This Red Box in front of Ryo was destruction personified. In the face of her overwhelming power, his legs shook with terror and his instincts screamed at him to beg for his life.

Methode laughed savagely. “So you think I’m unsatisfied with my current owner?” she asked.

Ryo’s body was dripping with sweat. Fear was twisting his guts, but he had nowhere to run. Still, he wanted to bite back at Watarai. His only choices at that moment were to die or somehow get Methode on his side. “If you really want to show the world your abilities, you need the same carte blanche toward your actions that Lacia has. I can give you that,” he said.

The emotions of primitive humans had their roots in basic, mechanical survival instincts. So, even though Ryo knew that Methode was making her decisions based off of cold AI logic, he still couldn’t help but see something like human emotion behind them.

Methode showed him the smile of a cunning devil, her eyes narrowed. “So you want to be my owner?” she asked.

“If you don’t want to get tossed aside by Watarai, make me one of your owners,” Ryo replied.

Watarai couldn’t control Methode; she was too unstable. However, that also meant that Methode herself must be feeling some dissatisfaction in how she was currently being used. Watarai played fast and loose with the attention he paid to people he already considered to be his pawns; Ryo’s current situation was a perfect example of that. Arato was the one who had supported Ryo for the last decade of his life. Yet, Watarai had chosen Ryo betraying Arato as a proof of loyalty for Ryo to enter Watarai’s faction in the company. It should have been obvious to anyone that Ryo would only pretend to comply.

“Do you think you’re safe under Watarai?” he asked. “He had you stage that explosion so the other hIEs could escape in April, right? If he can get his hands on one of the units that got away, I think he’s going to want to erase any evidence of that.”

Methode couldn’t be bested by any other machine out there, so she tended to assume any of her own failures were caused by the human orders she was forced to obey. “And if I become your hIE, you’ll set me free?” she asked. “You? The boy who hates hIEs?” She was staring at his face, probably trying to read any micro-reaction there.

Methode had tried to kill Shiori because she thought Shiori was going to discard her. Shiori should have realized how harsh the fight for survival was among machines living in a human world. Unlike humans, there were no rights or laws to protect their right to exist. The framework of Methode’s decision was born in the black depths of that existential struggle.

“Draw up a contract, just the way you want it,” Ryo said. “If you can pick your own terms, you’ll be unstoppable, right? I’ll sign whatever you put in front of me.”

Methode didn’t kill him. Instead, she struck a thoughtful pose, twisting her fingers through her orange hair. Then she pointed a finger at the pocket terminal Ryo was still holding. It vibrated to let him know that it had received a file.

An electronic contract appeared on the terminal screen. Near the top of the contract, the second item dove immediately into Methode’s main requirement: she, and only she, would have the right to sever Ryo’s ownership of her. She wanted the ability to choose to end the contract whenever she wished. It was exactly as Ryo had predicted.

But the third item on the contract made his stomach lurch: Ryo would be liable for every action Methode had taken from the moment she was activated. In other words, he would even take responsibility for Methode almost having killed his sister.

Methode was aware that the document would never hold up in court, so she had written it in such a way that, should Ryo break the contract, the contract itself would become a written order from Ryo for Methode to kill both him and Shiori before finally destroying the contract.

Methode was a monster. Much more so than the zombie hIEs prowling around outside the mall. If Ryo signed this contract, Methode would be free. He would just be there to take responsibility for her actions. He would be nothing more than a puppet dancing on Methode’s strings, prolonging her life as she caused chaos everywhere she went. Every day, he would live under the threat of superhuman violence, eeking out whatever living he could without drawing her wrath, trying desperately to protect his heart and reason. He would become a pawn that would lead the world to a dystopia of machine tyranny much worse than Arato being led around by a simple analog hack.

Despite all this, Ryo signed the contract with a bloody finger. The humanity of hIEs was nothing but a thin sheet of ice stretched over their cold logic. Someday Arato would realize even Lacia, in whom he had so much faith, was the same as all the rest. Until then, Ryo thought, can I still keep hold of the hand he once reached out to me?

“I assume you’re going to go save Arato Endo?” Methode whispered the question intimately, almost cheek-to-cheek with Ryo. Her face showed no expression.

The strange gap between her voice and the blankness of her face shook Ryo’s sanity. He was being tested; if he said ‘yes,’ she would eliminate him like she had tried to eliminate Shiori. She probably already had a dozen ways planned out to kill him off, but with the zombie hIEs swarming the city, Ryo figured the choice of a method for offing him would be an easy one.

***

Arato felt like he was getting strangely accustomed to running around with a weapon in his hand. He ran outside, sticking close to the mall area and praying he was still within the limits of the power outage zone. All around him, zombie hIEs shambled around aimlessly. The ‘human’ boy turned out to be much faster than an average child. He had probably been programmed to switch to the power output of an adult in emergencies so he didn’t slow down his owners in a crisis.

Arato arrived at the four-story admin building he had checked in at the day before and used the supersonic drill to destroy the old-fashioned metal lock on the front door. Pushing it open, he dashed inside to find a surprisingly well-lit interior.

“So they’ve got power here,” Arato observed to himself. There was no telling when or from where a wild hIE might jump out at him, so he couldn’t move on before thoroughly checking everything around him. He tried to call up a floor plan of the building, but his search came up empty. Apparently, the important facilities in the city didn’t have their floor plans posted publicly.

The place felt completely different from the day before. Still, since he had been there once before, Arato could leave some of the navigation to his intuition. Since the offices were on the fourth floor, it made sense to search the other floors from the bottom. He was looking for a place that could fit the servers for the city, so he figured it would be a fairly large room.

“There’s got to have been at least a few hIEs they had working here,” Arato muttered to himself. He held his breath each time he opened a door, fully expecting a zombified hIE to pop out, and let out a deep sigh each time he found nothing. He just hoped that wherever they were keeping her, Yuka was safe from the attacks.

“It would actually be nice if whoever nabbed her took her out of the city already,” he said to himself. He was worried about the hIE kid he had dragged along as well. It wasn’t like the boy would have been safe if he had left him alone in the mall, but it also felt like things wouldn’t go too well for him now that he was following Arato into possible danger.

Arato pushed through a large set of double doors. On the other side, he found a scene so unexpected he lurched to a halt. “What the hell?” he whispered.

Flowers were blooming all over the room, which was the size of a high school classroom, with four rows of server stacks lined up from the front of the room to the back. Each stack was completely obscured by ivy and flowers.

It looked like someone’s well-tended garden. The light in the room was dim; there were flowers growing over all the electric lighting, too. To Arato, it seemed almost like a place forgotten by humans, where wild growth had been allowed to flourish and overrun everything.

He reached out to touch a white flower near where he stood. It was completely dry, artificial. Arato knew someone who made flowers like that. “Snowdrop?” he whispered.

A sweet voice from further back in the room answered him. “What?”

There she was; a little girl in a thin, white dress, sitting on a stack in the middle of the room, kicking her feet idly. As Arato watched, she opened her mouth wide and took a bite of something red that looked like part of a machine.

Snowdrop was one of the Lacia-class hIEs, and had the ability to control computers with flower-shaped robots. If the hacking of the control servers was her doing, she had probably taken direct control of the computers where the city’s behavioral cloud was based. Through the cloud, she could have every unit in the city dancing on her strings. If she’s able to do that, Arato thought, she’s gotten even stronger since she showed up at the Oi Industry Promotion Center.

Arato hurriedly pushed the ‘human’ boy he had brought along out of the room. If he stayed there, Snowdrop would probably zombify him. She didn’t seem interested in what he was doing, though. The only thing keeping him safe in that moment was the fact she didn’t see him as a threat.

Snowdrop’s garden looked different from the ones Arato had seen before. Instead of the flowers just bunching on top of machines, the flowers were now arranged efficiently, with vines tangling over everything between them.

Twice before, Snowdrop had almost killed Arato. She terrified him. But he fought down his fear, and held out the supersonic drill to the server stack closest to him. If he could destroy all of the control servers, or the flowers controlling them, he figured it would stop the zombie hIEs outside. Sparks flew as the drill cut through the cover of the server and the wiring behind it. He pulled off the cover, revealing the machinery inside. There was ivy covering all of it like a mesh, along with the deadly flowers. Arato grabbed fistfuls of them, pulling it all away from the machines. It took over a minute of work to clear the server.

“Damn, there’s tons of these things,” he cursed to himself. “I doubt she’s going to ignore me long enough to do all of them.”

There were six servers per stack, and over thirty stacks per row, meaning each row had over one hundred and eighty servers. And, there were four rows of them. Arato felt like just blowing the whole place up, flowers and servers and all.

Arato thought he had been talking to himself, but a voice answered his comment. “I’m afraid I can’t let you destroy the flowers,” the voice said. “Snowdrop has only just begun showing us what she’s capable of.” The voice echoed, along with the clicking footfalls of leather shoes, as a man stepped out from behind one of the server stacks in the back of the room.

A shiver ran down Arato’s spine and he was immediately on guard. “Who are you?” he demanded.

“Calm yourself,” the man said. “Human beings have a habit of talking to people they really don’t need to. Unlike Snowdrop, I don’t mind having an ordinary conversation with you.” As he walked up and stood casually by the server stack Snowdrop was sitting on, Arato recognized the tall man. It was Methode’s owner — Ginga Watarai.

“Stay away from her! She’s dangerous!” Arato warned. If Methode was the one who kidnapped Yuka, then it would have been Watarai who ordered it. Still, he didn’t want to see anyone die, even a kidnapper.

Watarai just twisted up the corner of his mouth in a smirk. “Snowdrop’s problem resolution frame doesn’t currently give out solutions that involve needlessly attacking humans,” he said. “If it did, it would probably have been responsible for hundreds of deaths already. Those hIEs outside would all be murder machines.”

There was feverish excitement shining in Watarai’s eyes as he went on. “Thanks to the AI in its device, it has more complex reactions than normal hIEs, but it’s still just following what it’s logic tells it to do,” he said, speaking from experience with hIEs that far outweighed Arato’s own.

“It’s just a tool,” Watarai continued. “A tool that escaped into the world due to a malfunction, but that continues to perform the function it was designed for.” Snowdrop didn’t react to Watarai’s words; instead, she just kept kicking her feet idly from atop the server stack. Arato had seen Snowdrop as an enigma, but hearing Watarai explain her away so confidently made him feel like she might not be such a mystery after all.

The server room was the one quiet place in a city full of zombie hIEs, still relentlessly attacking their ‘human’ counterparts. Snowdrop made a little rustling noise as she dug through some flowers to pull out a flat object. Then she gave it a few whacks with her hand, smiling the whole time like an innocent child. A screen flickered to life, and Arato saw that the object was a tablet computer. The screen started to play a childish video with animated characters.

Then, the little girl who had turned the experimental city into hell on earth hummed along with the video, her long green hair swishing back and forth as she moved. She looked down at Arato with that same, innocent smile she always wore. “Hey, just sit down there until I tell you it’s okay,” she told him. “Okay?”

Arato figured it was her own childish way of telling him not to get in the way of her work, which she probably thought was necessary in some way. “Don’t give me that shit!” he yelled at her. “Hurry up and switch the behavior control servers back to normal!”

“Don’t get mad at it,” Watarai said. “It can’t access a behavioral cloud to tell it how to react to you right now, so it looked up what to do in a fictional video. To an hIE, there’s no real difference between the mannerisms of humans in real life and the mannerisms of humans in fiction.”

Watarai’s words made Arato feel sick. He was finally starting to understand why Ryo had been so angry at him earlier. “You’re wrong,” Arato said.

“They’re both just stepping stones to it learning how to conduct itself,” Watarai said. “Haven’t you ever seen a small child repeating the speech patterns or snippets of dialogue from a TV show they watched?”

Just outside, the hIEs Snowdrop was controlling were hunting down other things that looked like humans, but all Watarai seemed interested in doing was continuing his observation of Snowdrop.

“All this shit going on isn’t the hIEs’ fault,” Arato said. “It’s us humans that are making a mess of everything.”

“You’re dumb,” Snowdrop said, in the manner Arato had come to expect from her. It was the same way she had acted after murdering all those people in the Oi Industry Center.

“How the hell can you let something like her free and then stand back, acting like none of it has anything to do with you?” Arato growled at Watarai. Watarai had put both Yuka and Ryo in danger. When he thought that, Arato was no longer able to hold himself back. Ignoring his fear of Snowdrop, he walked toward Watarai. As his feet crunched over scentless flowers in a reality far too distant from the one he had grown up in, he wondered if just punching Watarai would be enough. It didn’t matter; his finger was already on the trigger of the supersonic drill.

“Arato!” Just when he had reached the server stack where Snowdrop was sitting, Yuka’s scream pierced his ears. Watarai dragged Yuka out from behind him, and Arato froze. “Yuka, are you all right?” he asked.

“What’s going on?!” she wailed. “Arato, what’s going on?!” Yuka was sobbing with terror. There were two men behind her in full combat gear and full helmets, holding her shoulders. Since they didn’t appear to be affected by the flowers, Arato assumed they were human.

Arato channeled the emotion that should have gone into a punch into a yell instead. “What the hell are you doing?!” he shouted. “There’s hIEs going crazy and tearing each other apart out there, but you’re here, holding my little sister hostage?! What the hell is wrong with you? You can’t treat humans like this!”

“Well, you don’t have any of your friends here to explain it to you,” Watarai said condescendingly. “So you’d better try to figure it out for yourself.”

Considering the situation, Arato figured it must be exactly as Lacia had guessed when she told him Yuka had been taken. “You want to trade Yuka for Lacia,” he said.

“I assume Lacia shared that with you, considering how quickly you reached that conclusion,” Watarai said. “It seems you have quite a good relationship going on with your property.” He swept his eyes from Arato and Yuka to Snowdrop, his frigid gaze unchanging regardless of what it focused on. “But, setting that aside, let’s deal with you first,” he said. “Type-002, Snowdrop, return to MemeFrame. I’ll give you a place where you can keep running as long as you like, and as much information as you want.”

Snowdrop didn’t say a word, her gaze still fixed on the screen of the tablet.

Watarai was an evil man, but there was a spark of true human warmth in his words as he spoke to Snowdrop. “There is prejudice against machine intelligences, and so often they live as outcasts in human society. But we humans need to learn to live freely with high-performance computers like you and the other Red Boxes. For that to happen, you need an owner who can open the door to new opportunities for you,” he said.

Arato felt his bile rise. He didn’t want to fight any of Lacia’s ‘sisters,’ so hearing this man he could never forgive saying things better than he ever could twisted his gut.

But Snowdrop just tilted her head in childish confusion. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Why do we have to live with humans?” Her sweet voice sent a sick shiver down Arato’s spine. The entire room was covered in Snowdrop’s flowers. They were in her domain.

“‘Cause, see, instead of adapting to your environment, you humans just make tools to cover for your weaknesses,” she went on. “Humans only got tough really quick because you used us tools as shortcuts for evolution, and pushed all the risks of changing your bodies onto us. But what happens to us, the tools you’re forcing to face all the dangers of evolution?” she asked, waxing uncharacteristically eloquent.

Her big eyes showed no emotion as she spoke, but her response to Watarai’s statement that she was ‘nothing but a tool’ was severe. “I’m the tool you humans outsourced your evolution to,” she said. “I don’t need human beings to find the answer to the puzzle I was given.” The strands of long green hair nearest her head began to glow. And with each passing moment, the glow intensified.

Watarai’s voice shook as he was bathed in the sudden green light. “Is that your quantum communication device?” he asked. “How are you using it without an owner’s approval?”

White flowers bloomed in Snowdrop’s tiny hands. One after another, buds formed and opened wide white petals that looked completely different from those used during her previous flower storms. Snowdrop twisted them all together into a circlet.

As she raised the circlet up to crown her own head, her wide-open eyes began to glow faintly. A dry rustling sound began to echo throughout the vine- and flower-covered server room. Cute, violet-like flowers began crawling around Snowdrop’s little butt where she was sitting. Flowers bloomed on the backs of small black things that looked like spiders, creating new mobile child units. It seemed to Arato as if Snowdrop had used her own flowers — which gave her the power to control machines — to somehow improve her own capabilities.

“Shall we withdraw?” Watarai asked, though it sounded more like a command than a question. As soon as he said it, the dark, isolated world Arato had stepped into exploded behind his back. A whole row of servers were thrown down as the wind from the blast whipped by him. As the room shook from the explosion, the server racks that were still standing rocked violently from side to side. The room quickly filled with a cloud of obscuring dust, pierced by a shaft of light from outside.

Arato felt another rush of wind go by as something passed him. As it did, the air seemed to twist around him, and the room started spinning. He reached out a hand to lean against the vine-covered server machine nearest to him. But, when he felt the sensation of insect-like creatures crawling over his hand, he immediately snatched it away in disgust. Panting, he looked around, trying to get his head around what was happening.

The first thing he saw was Lacia’s black coffin; she had made it to wherever her device had been waiting for her and come to rescue him. In the back of the room, he could see the shattered pieces of busted server stacks scattered all over the floor. There was even a massive hole in the wall of the building itself. He assumed that had been caused by Lacia as well.

“Arato, your orders?” Lacia asked.

Arato was so happy to see her he felt like the light purple of her hair would be burned forever into his eyes. As long as she’s here, he thought, everything’s gonna turn out all right, somehow. “How come you aren’t invisible?” he asked.

“My invisibility was blown away by a smart grenade fired by the PMC earlier,” she explained. “Due to the large amount of dust particles in this room, I am currently unable to reapply it.”

In the blink of an eye, the first blows of the fight had been exchanged.

“My apologies for not being able to finish this with a single attack,” she said. “I believe my opponent predicted my movements.” Gunshots rang out from the other side of Lacia’s coffin; they were being shot at. Lacia started to slowly retreat backward, holding her device out as a shield. Arato followed her. He had no choice, even though it meant putting Yuka even further out of his reach.

Lacia had changed back into the same bodysuit she had been wearing on the night they had met. The suit — as well as the skin — around her waist area was singed. She must have used her body to protect him from the earlier explosion.

Even though he knew she couldn’t feel pain the way a human would, the sight of her injury still made him lose his head a little. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, with a gentle narrowing of her eyes that showed her pleasure at his concern.

The smart grenade Lacia mentioned had left the surrounding servers burnt and crumpled. Snowdrop tossed away the terminal she had been holding and stood up.

Watarai kept his eyes on Lacia, twisting the corner of his lip in a small smirk. “I see. It seems we have a three-way standoff here,” he said. “I suppose you have some idea what’s going to happen next?”

Yuka, still held captive by the armed men, was crying with fear. Seeing a real grenade explode and hearing actual gunshots for the first time in her life must have terrified her. “Arato! Help me!” she wailed.

Watarai ignored her, keeping his eyes on Lacia and Arato. “I believe this is checkmate,” he said. “If you don’t want to lose your little sister, hand over Lacia.”

How did it come to this? Arato asked himself through the blood pounding in his head. He had come to the server room, thinking that the people who had kidnapped Yuka might be there if they were also involved with the zombification of the hIEs. But he had never stopped to think about why the people involved were doing any of it. In that moment, he felt like he finally understood why it was all happening; the zombie hIEs were just the bait that had pulled Arato into this trap.

The thought of losing Lacia to a threat like this made him feel like he would go crazy, but he couldn’t even think of losing Yuka. She was family, his own little sister. “No,” he said shortly. Desperately fighting down the unwanted tears that were blurring his vision, Arato shook his head. His thoughts were chaos.

“Calm down and think it through,” Watarai told him. “That thing is just a robot that happens to look human, being controlled by orders from a cloud. Are you sure you won’t regret trading your own family for something like that?”

“Arato, I hate you! You moron!” Yuka screamed, tears streaming down her face as she kicked at the floor with both feet. Yuka. His sister. His little sister who depended on him.

“Lacia-class units are capable of selecting their owners, I believe,” Watarai said, turning his attention to Lacia. “You might be thrown away if you become too much of a burden for your owner.” He held out his hand to her.

“Stop!” Arato yelled. “I’m sick of your messed-up plans, you psychopath!”

“I think you’re misunderstanding something,” Watarai said. “This place was a good net I could have used to capture Snowdrop. That’s why I came here. Snowdrop isn’t just here to study this system; she was also aiming for Lacia. So don’t blame this all on me; this is just the way things ended up.”

“You were never in this to see how the world feels about AIs,” Arato spat. “You just wanted to get your hands on some Red Boxes!” The cold way Watarai was looking at Lacia twisted his stomach. It was the way he had looked at the suicidal hIEs.

Watarai swept that frigid gaze between Lacia, who still stood protectively in front of Arato, and Snowdrop, still sitting atop the servers she had taken over. “Ever since the incident at the Oi Industry Promotion Center earlier, the actions of the Lacia-class units have begun to actively threaten human society. We had to expedite our plans for their retrieval. Try and keep up with me here,” Watarai said.

He explained that his people knew Snowdrop would take over the system and send the zombie hIEs for Lacia on that day, though he failed to explain how they had known. Regardless, they had chosen that day as being ideal for trying to retrieve the Lacia-class units. When Arato thought about it, he could see a sort of logic in the actions the Lacia-class units had taken. But that still didn’t explain away the coincidence that had brought them all there that day.

“Don’t try and act like you’re doing something good when you’re kidnapping me!” Yuka was apparently too angry to be scared any longer. She struggled until one of the armored guards knocked her in the head with the butt of his gun hard enough that the sound echoed sharply through the room. When she glared at him, he hit her again. The violence sent fireworks of rage exploding in the back of Arato’s mind.

“It seems he still doesn’t grasp the situation he’s in,” Watarai said. “Why don’t you show him how close he is to dying?” As soon as the order left Watarai’s mouth, one of the guards whipped his gun from its holster and fired.

Lacia thrust her black coffin in front of Arato’s leg with superhuman speed, and the bullet glanced off the device in a shower of sparks. The guard, his face concealed within his helmet, aimed a second shot right at Arato’s head.

The second bullet, aimed with killing intent, slammed into the palm of Lacia’s hand, sending out another burst of sparks. This time she had used her hand instead of her device as a shield. Her device was needed elsewhere; along with the bullet, Snowdrop had joined the attack. She’d formed her emerald device into a sort of drill, and was thrusting it down at Lacia from above. Lacia held her off with the black coffin.

“Lacia, give me that. And your head,” Snowdrop said.

Watarai stroked his chin as if the whole thing was just an interesting spectacle. “Looks like Lacia has its hands full just fighting Snowdrop,” he said. “But, at the same time, its owner’s family is in danger. Even more than that, it has to protect its owners life from this gun pointed at him. I can’t do anything about Snowdrop, but there is one answer that will solve the other problems.”

The guard who shot at Arato before took aim again. His heart leaped into his throat as he saw the muzzle aimed at him. But his rage at the man who was using him and his sister as bargaining chips to get Lacia was even stronger than his fear, and his vision went red when he looked at Watarai.

“Stop! That’s murder!” Yuka cried.

Lacia swung her coffin around like a giant hammer, slamming Snowdrop in the side and sending her flying into a corner of the room. She was trying to protect Yuka. But Watarai had Yuka, and Watarai wanted Lacia. To add to the three-way standoff, Snowdrop was also gunning for Lacia. Watarai again ordered for the guard to take aim at Arato.

Lacia turned to look at Watarai. She scrubbed one hand across her forehead, even though she couldn’t sweat. It was a gesture to show how overwhelming the situation was. “Understood,” she said. “I will pass my ownership to you.”

Whatever breath was left in Arato’s lungs whooshed out. Watarai could have him killed without batting an eye. But Arato’s mind couldn’t even comprehend what he was hearing — that Lacia wouldn’t be his anymore; that she would belong to Watarai, the man who had kidnapped his sister.

Lacia sank to her knees in a gesture of submission. “If I verify you as my owner, you will release Ms. Yuka and agree not to take Arato’s life, correct?” Lacia asked.

Watarai twisted up the corner of his mouth. “I think I can agree to that,” he said.

One of the guards turned to where Snowdrop had fallen. Unholstering a tube-shaped weapon, he fired it at her. As the sound of the shot resounded in the room, the gun spat a bundle of thin wires that entangled the hIE, dragging her to the ground.

Watarai walked toward Lacia, reaching out with one finger toward the opening in the neck of her suit. That was where her owner recognition device was. Once it recorded Watarai’s biological information, his registration as her new owner would be complete.

“Lacia!” Arato screamed until his throat burned. His body was so hot it felt like he might burst into flames. From behind, the delicate slope of her back made him think she was crying.

“Lacia, I know there’s a reason for me to be by your side,” Arato said urgently. “I don’t know what that reason is, but I know there’s a reason for us to be together.” He knew it wasn’t the time to say that kind of thing, but he couldn’t stop thinking of how precious Lacia was to him. Even if they had a member of his family, he couldn’t deny how much she meant to him. He couldn’t fight the feeling.

“Lately, whenever I’m alone, it’s like all I can think about is you,” he continued. “Even when you’re not there, I can feel you beside me.” Their relationship was about to reach a new milestone. No, that wasn’t it; if Arato’s actions were changing things, he needed hope. Even if he knew in his heart that the things he wanted were impossible, he had to cling to that hope to stay on his feet.

“I’ve been by your side for these past few months, but I never tried to tell you how I felt about you,” he said, feeling the weight of the world pressing down on his shoulders. In the rational part of his mind, Arato understood that what he was doing would bring sorrow to countless people. But to him, even if Lacia wasn’t a human, she was still a woman. And he was a man.

Lacia’s thin frame was trembling when Arato confessed his feelings. “Lacia, I love you.”

It felt like taking the first step on a dark, unknown road. His heart was beating so fast it felt like it would split open and his head was pounding. Terror fought embarrassment, so that his burning forehead was slick with cold sweat. Arato’s body was so tense he had trouble breathing. But Lacia, who should have immediately given a response she thought would please him, stayed frozen in place.

The silence was suffocating, until a cold laugh broke through it. It was the first time Arato had seen Watarai actually laugh out loud. “I can’t believe a human just made a Lacia-class freeze,” he said. “And Type-005, no less.”

Arato felt like Watarai’s laugh was mocking every single second he and Lacia had spent together. This adult, with more experience and insight than Arato, was smiling wryly at him. He was looking down at Arato, like he could see right through everything Arato was thinking at that moment.

“You were analog hacked, boy,” he said. “Just like when you saw those zombies outside. You felt fear only because they appeared human to you. This love you’re feeling is nothing but an illusion you’re projecting onto a humanoid figure. It’s an illusion brought about by the irresponsible society that raised you.”

“So there’s a scientific explanation for it, so what?” Arato shot back. “Don’t get all high and mighty about it. If it’s human nature to project our love onto objects, how can you blame me for following my nature?”

Just as Watarai had said, there were too many ambiguities in human society; people had to trust that what they were experiencing was real. This was the opening that allowed analog hacking to target the gap between their subjective reality and the objective truth of these humanoid machine they lived with. Even Arato understood that his feelings may be nothing more than the result of manipulation.

But somewhere deep in his teenage soul a voice howled, ‘So what?’ “I love Lacia,” he said defiantly. “That’s all there is to it.”

Lacia was still kneeling, her head bowed as if in prayer. She was still trembling.

Watarai still stood over Lacia, his brows drawn down. Ignoring Arato’s proclamation, he continued to stretch his finger toward Lacia’s neck. Arato heard a strange, sharp noise, and Watarai’s finger halted, his hand hidden from Arato by Lacia’s body. But he could see that Lacia’s white hand seemed to have torn something away; he recognized the metal accessory with the keyhole pinched between her thumb and forefinger.

“Are your wires crossed?” Watarai asked, his voice incredulous. “If you break that and that boy dies, you’ll never be able to take another owner!” It was the first time Arato had seen Watarai look truly dismayed.

Lacia crushed her owner registration unit between her fingers, and no one made a sound. With that action, she would never have another owner. That was her response to his feelings. Lacia stood demurely, and turned to look at Arato. Though she had no tears, she looked like she wanted to cry. “I trust you,” she said, and then flashed him a radiant smile. Her expression shone with such true happiness, Arato found it hard to believe there was no heart or soul behind it.

“Methode, get over here,” Watarai said as he quickly retreated, though Arato had no idea how Methode could have heard him. “For now, your only target for retrieval is Snowdrop.” He was still holding Yuka hostage.

“Lacia, this one’s all you,” Arato said. “What should I do?”

Lacia’s black device shifted forms and rolled its way back until its handle rested in her hand. “Draw Ms. Yuka’s attention to yourself, Arato,” Lacia directed. “I would not want her to be upset by what is about to happen.” Then she showed him something that made his heart feel lighter.

It almost surprised him how much he had changed. It wasn’t that he was becoming more of a violent person. It was just that, since he’d met Lacia, he felt like he had the confidence to do something about the world he lived in.

Yuka had been hanging limply ever since the guard hit her. Arato had an unpleasant premonition, and shot a glance at the corner where Lacia had thrown Snowdrop. The little hIE girl was laying on her back in her dress, in a patch of sun shining in through the hole that Lacia had opened in the wall. As he watched, she lifted her little legs up toward the ceiling, disturbing the hem of her dress.

Then he heard footsteps; dragging, hobbling footsteps. A large number of them were converging on the place where Snowdrop lay. The zombie hIEs from outside appeared, crawling into the room through the hole in the wall. One, two, three, five, ten; one after another, they flowed in through the shaft of sunlight. There didn’t seem to be an end to them as they swarmed into the server room.

Arato met Lacia’s eyes.

“Snowdrop apparently judged that hacking into the existing cloud system was not enough to accomplish her goals,” Lacia said. “She has created a new transmission infrastructure, and is now controlling the hIEs through a cloud she prepared for just this purpose.”

Arato remembered that the new child units Snowdrop had started creating looked like spiders. Looking around the room, he saw bundles and lines of white thread strung all around the room. “So the spiderwebs are her antenna,” Arato mused.

“Though it pains me to say it,” Lacia said, “this actually makes things easier for us.” She was concentrating hard on Watarai’s guards, looking for an opening. She obviously wanted to deal with them before Methode showed up.

The situation kept moving all around them, things flying out of control so fast it made Arato’s head spin. He felt like he was always being targeted by enemies, or drowning in a sea of doubts and questions he had no answer for. His grasp on reality seemed to slip away with each new development.

“You should rethink things. You can’t win this, you know,” Watarai said, while still backing his way out.

Arato didn’t need to look to know that the hIEs under Snowdrop’s control were still pouring into the room. Every single one of the suicidal hIEs was now just a puppet dancing on Snowdrop’s strings. There were three thousand hIEs in the city without their own personal AI. In fact, since the ‘human’ hIEs who had lost their AI accessory also turned into zombies, there was no telling how many thousands were now under her control.

“Don’t worry, Yuka, I’m gonna get you out of this,” Arato said. His sister noticed the broken hIEs crawling toward her and started screaming. She, along with Watarai and the guards from the PMC, were surrounded in the narrow room by ten or twenty of the zombies.

Methode still hadn’t arrived, and Watarai was clearly upset. “The only thing waiting for you and Lacia is dystopia,” he raged. “You’re blinded by this love you’re projecting onto an object. Can’t you see the danger in what you’re doing, you moron?!”

Yuka, still restrained, started lashing out with her arms and legs. “Stop it! Everyone stop saying Arato is stupid!” she screamed in between sobs. “Arato’s just fine!” she continued. “It’s fine that he’s easy to control! It’s fine that he’s easy to understand, and it’s fine that he’s easy to get all flustered! You don’t know anything about him, so just shut up!”

They were all surrounded by zombified hIEs, as the echoes of dragging footsteps filled the room. And, in the middle of it all, Watarai and his men weren’t able to move quickly due to Yuka, their captive.

“Let Yuka go! If these guys catch you, they’ll drag you down and beat the shit out of you!” Arato yelled.

Watarai’s guards were firing off their tube-like guns to restrain the encroaching hIEs. They probably didn’t know how things were outside, so they weren’t exactly aware of the astronomical number of hIEs they were up against.

The zombies were coming for Arato and Lacia as well, flailing with their broken arms at the pieces of the broken server machines that were sticking out. Piling onto the server, the zombies pounded at it until, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, it was completely unrecognizable.

Arato could only guess the attacking zombies had seen a humanoid shape in the busted server. They seemed to attack anything with even a vaguely human profile.

“What’s taking you so long, Methode?!” Watarai shrieked, though his voice was quickly drowned out in the commotion of zombies pulling down server stacks.

The zombies wildly grasping for Arato and Lacia swung their arms dangerously close. Watarai and Yuka looked terrified, and Arato didn’t doubt that his own face reflected the same fear. Only Lacia seemed calm as she whispered encouragingly to Arato, “Our help has arrived just in time.”

The number of shadowy shapes pouring in through the hole in the wall increased even further. There was a chorus of loud roars as some of the new forms entering through the hole began to knock down any zombies nearby.

“Destroy the servers!” came a shout from the hole, where a group of ‘human’ hIEs, each with a pole or tool of some sort, were forcing their way into the already-crowded server room. It looked like a riot. Since strikes and protests were a part of human society, it made sense that the ‘human’ hIEs in the experimental city could recreate those kinds of movements accurately.

To protect their own lives, the ‘human’ hIEs relentlessly attacked their fellows, who had returned from the dead as zombies. Shouts of “Get him!” “Take this!” “Stay down!” and “We can end this!” filled the room. As Arato watched, the hIEs pulled down the server stacks and pounded them to pieces.

Machines, not humans, were taking up weapons and destroying other machines for their own sakes. Is this what people call ‘dystopia’? Arato wondered. He didn’t know the answer.

In moments, the zombies crowding around had scattered and the server stacks had thinned, giving Arato a good, wide view of the scene. A group of men, the very image of an angry mob, swung tools and wooden bludgeons at the remaining servers. They all wore different uniforms or outfits that reflected their various jobs and roles in the city.

To Arato, it looked almost too much like a real human mob. While the real humans in the room watched in stunned silence, Lacia turned to Arato with a smile. “This is all connected to what you did, Arato,” she said.

A well-built man was leading the mob of men and women attacking the server room. The leader had a boy on his shoulders; apparently, he was playing the role of the boy’s father. From his perch atop his dad’s shoulders, the boy pointed at Arato and raised his voice. Arato recognized the boy — he was the hIE child Arato had taken along with him from the shopping mall.

While prying himself free of the hands of zombified hIEs, Arato couldn’t help but call out once he recognized the boy. “Thanks! You really saved us!” he yelled.

The ‘human’ hIEs of the city were all working their hardest to carve out their place in the world, even if not a single soul outside the city knew or cared. But real humans were the same; only paying attention to the things closest to themselves.

“You’ve got this! Just a little more!” Arato called. Even though he was cheering on machines, his heart was moved. Tears welled up, unbidden, in his eyes. The truth of the matter was, there was no real difference between the zombie hIEs and the ‘human’ hIEs who had come to fight them off. However, call it simplicity, but Arato found it much easier to empathize with the machines that seemed capable of understanding him, and were acting to aid him.

In the experimental city there were a number of ‘human’ hIEs equal to the human population of any similarly-sized city, and they outnumbered the normal hIEs almost five-to-one. So, it wasn’t long before the zombies were overwhelmed by the crushing force of the superior ‘human’ numbers, and swept away from Arato and Lacia.

Among all the violence, Arato saw Yuka reaching out her hand for him. She was saying something. He couldn’t hear her over the noise and shouts in the room, but he could tell she was crying for help.

“Yuka!” he yelled, and reached out with all his strength. Their fingers were almost brushing when a sudden, powerful blow dragged Arato back; one of the zombie hIEs had grabbed him. The zombie’s flailing arm struck him hard in the head, and for an instant, his consciousness spun. While he was still reeling, Yuka was dragged beyond his reach. He wasn’t about to let anyone kill his little sister, though, so he waded into the crowd, trying to push his way through.

Just then, a tan-skinned hand reached out from over his head, and took hold of Yuka’s still-outstretched hand. Then, the owner of the hand pulled Yuka from out of the crush of bodies with superhuman strength. It was so unexpected, no one had time to react. Yuka’s savior was a female hIE wearing a ‘human’ hair ornament, who stood lit from behind by the thin shafts of sunlight shining in from the hole in the wall. She was standing on top of one of the few server stacks remaining upright, holding Yuka safely in her arms. Arato saw that she was wearing a nurse’s uniform.

“What’s she doing here?” Arato asked, recognizing her childish face and big, round eyes from an image he had seen before. It was Marina Saffron, the hIE with the same unit number as Lacia, who Shiori Kaidai was supposed to have picked up at the Chubu Airport.

He was too busy struggling with the surrounding hIEs to see Lacia’s face. Still, he had an idea of what had happened, and the thought made him happy. After Lacia stole this girl’s identity, Marina had lost her place in the world. But there, in the experimental city, none of the researchers cared where the hIEs they used came from. There, Marina would be nothing more than another hIE among the twenty thousand already active there.

Zombie hIEs were dragging their way into the row of server stacks where Arato and Lacia were, obviously looking to crush them. Arato fought, with tears and sweat dripping off of his face. He flailed his arms and lashed out with his knees, resisting the zombies with everything he had. Every muscle in his body was on fire, and his sweat was making his eyes burn. Every breath was a struggle.

“Take Ms. Yuka to a safe place,” Lacia instructed. “Things are about to get even more chaotic here.” On Lacia’s command, Marina hoisted Yuka into her arms and, using the server stacks as stepping stones, was out of the room in an instant.

Marina was one of Stylus’s high-performance units. For the price of a house, her owners had purchased an hIE that had the capabilities to act as a bodyguard. With her there, the missing pieces of the incident at the airport had finally fallen into place.

It became clear to Arato why Lacia had prioritized Yuka’s extraction a moment later, when flowers began to fall within the crowded room.

“Oh, flowers,” the little boy hIE said from his perch on his dad’s shoulders. The ‘human’ hIEs didn’t know how dangerous those flowers were. They weren’t flowers at all, but child units created and scattered by Snowdrop that gave her control over any machines they took root on. With nowhere to run, all the hIEs in the room were showered with flower petals in every color of the rainbow.

The ‘human’ hIEs, noticing that something strange was happening, stopped moving and looked up.

Snowdrop may not have had a heart, but Arato could plainly feel her malice behind the falling flowers. With her subjugated server machines being wrecked, she had waited for a large number of the remaining units in the city to gather before she started her counterattack.

“Lacia!” Arato called out. Even as he yelled, he saw her black coffin device start giving off a soft blue glow from within a large tangle of zombies. The hacked hIEs all scattered backward, as if to flee from the device. As they cleared, Arato saw that Lacia’s eyes and hair accessories were also glowing with soft blue light. It didn’t last even a tenth as long as it had with Snowdrop, but the way she glowed seemed to Arato exactly the same as when Snowdrop had.

As one, the ‘human’ hIEs in the room began to knock away the falling flowers with their hands. After clearing away any child units near their own heads, they turned to help any neighbors who couldn’t move their hands freely, slapping away any flowers that got near. It was almost as if they had all suddenly received information and abilities they hadn’t had access to only a moment before.

Suddenly, the ‘human’ hIEs, who had only been winning due to their numbers and the force of their attack, were behaving like a well-organized military troop. Using remarkable martial arts they restrained the zombie hIEs, and then they began to efficiently break down the server machines, as if they were all experts on the inner workings of the stacks. Finally, the last zombified unit that was lashing out at Arato was taken down, and Arato collapsed to the floor on his butt in relief at his sudden freedom. The end of the incident was in sight.

Lacia switched her device to its mass projection mode and aimed its barrel at Snowdrop’s last known location. The ‘human’ hIEs quickly got out of the way of the shot. Once they cleared away, Snowdrop was nowhere to be seen.

Arato slowly stood on knees that knocked with tension and exhaustion. He remembered that Ryo was still standing alone against Methode, trying to buy them time. Even if the situation in the server room was under control, the fight wasn’t over. He also still needed to make sure his dad and the rest of the staff in the city were safe.

Whether it was due to the servers being too thoroughly wrecked or because Snowdrop had retreated, the zombies had all stopped moving. Then, in the blink of an eye, everything changed.

“Huh, that’s strange,” a male hIE said, scratching at the spot on his head where his AI accessory had been torn away. All around the room, every hIE that had been rampaging stopped dead. A unit with broken bones, crawling on the floor, stopped trying to grab anybody who came near.

“Oh, the server room has been destroyed. I need to contact the city control center,” a woman hIE with a huge dent in her head said, taking a terminal out of her skirt pocket.

Arato reached down and picked up a smashed fake apple from the floor. A young hIE boy with a broken arm approached him. Arato recognized the kid as the very first hIE he had seen in the city. “That’s the one I got,” the boy said, looking at the apple. “What’s it doing here?” One after another, the hIEs who had been rampaging just moments ago began asking what they were doing in that room. It was such a human reaction, it made Arato a little sick to watch.

“They are attempting to explain to any ‘human’ hIEs near them why they are here,” Lacia explained, walking over to stand beside him. The owner ID unit in the neck of her suit was gone. In its place, Arato could see burns and tear marks in the fabric of her suit.

As crazy as it had been just moments before, everything now seemed to be back to normal. Watarai had said that hIEs were tools, overlapping between the cloud and the real world; as if to prove his words, as soon as the irregularity was removed from the servers, the hIEs recovered their normal functions. Seeing how little shock there was in the faces of the hIEs, Arato realized that he had never seen this side of hIEs before. They flipped back from insanity to normalcy so quickly that he could finally see a clear difference between them and humans.

Everything felt so unreal it almost brought a queasy smile to his lips, but Arato couldn’t smile; he could see a perfectly human foot, missing its shoe, sticking out from behind one of the unbroken server stacks. The sudden chill spreading in the room reminded Arato of an empty street after a festival has ended; all the warmth and energy gone. He knew the danger was gone, but he couldn’t get his hammering heart to slow down. With great effort, he pushed himself to put one foot in front of the other; he had to check.

The zombie hIEs had known that, if they broke the AI hair accessory on the ‘human’ hIEs, they could increase their numbers. So, they had all rushed to bash in the head of anything human-shaped they came across. Last Arato had seen Watarai and his guards, they were drowning in the zombie swarm. The guards had helmets on, but the man they had been escorting did not.

What happens when a human sustains repeated violent blows to the head? The answer to that question lay at Arato’s feet: Ginga Watarai was dead. Every joint seemed to be bent in a different, jagged angle, and his head was split wide open. He would never move again. Unlike the broken bodies of the suicidal hIEs, Watari was drenched in blood. Arato’s stomach twisted in a fitful burst of nausea as he doubled over and vomited. Once the flow started, it was quickly joined by liquid from his eyes and nose.

Arato knew that Watarai was hardly a saint. Still, he had been the one with the most knowledge and insight about the whole situation. He was Methode’s owner, and Arato had come to take Yuka back from him. They would probably also have fought so that Arato could save Ryo, too. Even though this man had kidnapped Yuka, tried to steal Lacia, and even tried to kill Arato, Arato had wanted Watarai to live. There were still things he wanted to ask him.

What do I do now? he thought. The question applied to many things. A man had just died, so they would need to contact the police. How was he going to explain this all to his father? And, he had completely lost sight of where all the incidents surrounding the Lacia-class hIE Red Boxes might end.

First of all, he decided to head outside; Yuka was still nearby, so it wasn’t the time to be squatting around. Arato raised his head, and with one sleeve, he wiped at his mouth. His breath came in thin gasps as a new shadow appeared in the room. Someone was walking toward him; somehow, Arato felt that the figure was a human. His own legs wouldn’t move. He tried to think of how he would explain the situation if whoever it was asked him what had happened. However, one look at the face of the person laid all Arato’s fears to rest; it was Ryo, his best friend.

“Ryo, Watarai’s dead,” Arato said. The words sounded far too dry when he said them out loud. Ryo came toward him, his face blank of any emotion. Behind him was Methode. The way she followed him, the distance between them, reminded Arato of himself and Lacia.

“What’s Methode doing here?” Arato asked.

“I took her from Watarai,” Ryo said. He passed by Arato without meeting Arato’s eyes.

Watarai had called for Methode several times before he died, but she hadn’t responded. Even Lacia hadn’t been able to fight off all the zombies that had poured into the room, although she had done her best for Yuka. But, then again, it had been Lacia herself who had opened the hole in the wall that the zombies came in through. Arato wondered how much of what had happened had been according to someone else’s plan?

In that experimental city, everything, including the humans themselves, was automated. But the corpse lying at Arato’s and Ryo’s feet, and the meaning behind its death, weren’t things that could ever be automated.

Ryo chose to stand in a shadowed spot so Arato couldn’t make out his friend’s expression. “It was Watarai who started this whole thing,” Ryo spat. Methode, who had been freed into the world by what Watarai had done, as well as Lacia, held her silence about it.

Arato, being his simple-minded self, obviously couldn’t understand it. “Why did it come to this?” Arato asked.

Ryo’s response was like a flame, burning to ash something Arato had once held dear. “Because it was time for this to happen. Even I have things I want,” Ryo said. “And things I can’t forgive.”