Phase9「Answer for Survive」

Table of Contents

Phase9「Answer for Survive」

He didn’t feel regret. He knew his own limits, and he knew the place was, relatively speaking, calm.

The life he had lived up to that point was about to end, but there he sat, just killing time. As he listened in the darkness to the sounds of his family moving around, feelings of helplessness welled up within him. He was even struck by the sudden impulse to run to them for help. But instead he sat there, staring at the dark ceiling.

He knew his worries were irrational. But if everyone in the world had been able to throw away their own doubts and stretch out their hands to others, trusting in them, the world would not have turned out the way it had.

If humanity was divided between those who looked at the sunset and saw the beauty of the fading light, and those who saw it and feared the coming night, he would fall in the latter group. It was thanks to his own pessimism that he had ended up where he had. But he was sure half the world felt the same as he did.

***

No matter how much everything else had changed, Arato was still a high school student. So every day, he went to school. Kengo was always there in the classroom, too. After becoming Methode’s owner, Ryo Kaidai didn’t come to school as often, but sometimes he was there, too. Their paths had divided, but they still studied and did club activities. To Arato, the fact that there was still one thing they all had in common made things better, somehow.

“Morning, Endo,” said one of the nearby girls, greeting him when he walked into the classroom. Ever since things had gotten weird between him and Ryo, he and Kengo had grown more popular among their classmates. Ryo had a large presence, and Arato doubted the fickle nature of personal relationships in high school would change no matter how many decades went by.

That much change he could get used to, though, and he was all ready to continue living out a normal high school life. But, that day, Arato saw a face he’d never expected to see waiting for him in his first-hour homeroom class: it was a brown-skinned girl with platinum blonde hair, whose party he had attended not too long ago. Today she was dressed in a normal high school uniform, completely unlike the night of the party.

When she addressed the class, she puffed out her chest and looked down at them with her normal queenly air. “I’m Erika Burroughs,” she introduced herself.

A shock ran through the classroom as everyone realized they were in the presence of a celebrity, one whom everyone had heard about on TV.

When things get too normal, people start to hunger for something exciting to break through the tedium, so it wasn’t long before she was the talk of the whole school. Videos of Erika started showing up on the local net, which was run by the students, in huge amounts. During breaks, not only students from their class, but also students from completely different classes, would show up and flock to her seat. Students even lined up in the hallway just to get a look at her.

“Some of those vids are going to start leaking out into the public internet soon,” Kengo said. With how crazy things were getting at school, it was only natural that Kengo would take notice as well.

“I had no idea she was this famous,” Arato said.

“Watch the news, will you?” Kengo grumped. “Last year, they were talking about her constantly. I mean, this is the very first person to be brought out of cryo-sleep that we’re talking about. She’d been sleeping since the start of the 21st century.”

“Well yeah, but she was still just a normal person who got frozen,” Arato protested. “Beyond that, what else is there to her?” Ever since Erika had started coming to school, the students had all been acting as though every day was a festival.

Kengo stayed in his seat, but shifted his gaze to the knot of students around Erika. “I guess there’s an element of fantasy to it,” he mused. “A person from the previous century is almost like a person from a completely different world. Plus, she’s from the Burroughs family. They’re crazy rich, with all kinds of companies in their name.”

“Well yeah,” Arato said. “But Ryo’s family is crazy rich too, right?”

Kengo dropped his voice lower. “Yeah, but they say she’s got even more money than the Kaidais,” he murmured. “Plus, everyone else in the Burroughs family... well, they didn’t make it through the Hazard. All that’s left of the Burroughs is their lone heir and the massive amounts of wealth she inherited.”

Arato made a sympathetic noise when he realized what Kengo meant by ‘didn’t make it.’ So, Erika was an orphan? Images of the Burroughs mansion, where the party had been held, floated up in his mind. The gates and furnishings of the place were from a different age; everything preserved in the state it had been in when Erika was frozen in the early 21st century.

“How can everyone smile like that around her, then?” Arato asked. “Her life is a tragedy.”

“The news put a pretty good spin on it,” Kengo said, shooting another glance at the crowd. “Turned her into a modern Sleeping Beauty.”

Arato followed his eyes and unexpectedly found himself meeting the gaze of Erika herself.

“Well, what a pleasant surprise,” she said, standing elegantly and walking over to his desk. “It appears we are in the same class.” Wrapped in a school uniform, her already sickly-thin body looked even more delicate.

Suddenly, all eyes in the class were on Arato, who was just an ordinary high school student, and the pressure of all those gazes made him freeze up. Fear quickly swallowed any of the normal happiness or embarrassment that he might have felt from being the center of attention.

Meanwhile, Erika bathed in the attention as she greeted Arato politely and then passed him by.

It was as if a giant monster had brushed by him. Not Erika herself, of course, but the massive pressure of the students’ gazes that followed her. For a moment he pictured how it would be if Lacia and the other hIEs’ fight went public, and Arato’s breath caught in his throat.

If his classmates ever found out about what was happening with Lacia and her ‘sisters’, they would treat Arato even worse than they were treating Ryo, he was sure. The thought of all those staring eyes and raw emotions being pointed at him made him shiver. But Arato also remembered watching Lacia act as a model; he knew that, as horrible as the staring eyes of a crowd could be sometimes, they were also a window into the reality of the giant system known as human society.

Without thinking it through, Arato called out to Erika as she went to leave the class. “Where’s your hIE at?” he asked. He was sure that Erika had shown up at the school as part of her battle plan, so Mariage should have been there with her.

Erika looked back at him. “My hIE is in the waiting room,” she said. “If I had her accompany me to class, how would I ever get any studying done?”

The classroom should have been a safe place for Arato, but at that moment he was feeling the same goosebumps he had on the night of the party. He looked around for Ryo, who should have been nearby, but Ryo was nowhere to be found.

Erika tilted her head in consternation. Knowing her real background just made her seem like even more of a stranger in that time and place. “It’s unfortunate Ryo Kaidai doesn’t appear to be here,” she remarked. “I was hoping to speak to him a little more.”

After Erika showed up, the whole school went through an antique phase. Aside from their modern terminal pads, students wanted their bags and accessories to match the 21st-century ones Erika brought to school. To Arato, it seemed like Erika was actually enjoying her high school life; she showed up every single morning and attended all of her classes. She even ate lunch together with her classmates.

Arato pushed his desk over next to Kengo’s and munched on a sandwich he had bought from the school store. Kengo’s family ran a restaurant, so he had a lunch from home every day.

“Actually I make my own lunch every day,” Kengo said, seemingly out of nowhere and to nobody in particular.

“Huh?” Arato had no idea what Kengo was reacting to, so he looked at the hamburger and potato salad in his friend’s lunch. Even the apples, which had been cut to look like little rabbits, did seem to fit Kengo’s personality.

“I might inherit the restaurant someday,” Kengo explained. “Plus, I make mine and Olga’s together, so it saves some time. Why don’t you have that hIE of yours make your lunches?”

“I don’t really want everyone knowing about her,” Arato said. “And I don’t want to have to make stuff up when someone asks who made the lunch.” Also, things had been awkward between Arato and Lacia ever since he’d confessed his love for her.

“You’re creeping me out, man,” Kengo said. “Why the hell are you putting that much thought into this?”

Arato realized his face was bright red. “Of course I’m taking this seriously,” he said defensively. “I’m terrified.”

“What? You?” Kengo asked, honestly shocked. “I always thought optimism was one of your strong points.”

Arato wanted to clutch at his head in despair. Thinking about Lacia made his rational mind go out the window. When he thought about spending the future with her, especially, fear sent shivers up his spine.

“You really have changed ever since you met that hIE,” Kengo mused.

“You mean I’ve gotten more mature? I’ll agree, if that’s what you meant,” Arato said. As freaked out as they made him, thoughts of Lacia also made his lips curl up in a natural, dreamy smile. Kengo let out a sigh, as if he couldn’t stand being with Arato when he was like this.

One of the girls from their class walked over to their joined desks. Behind her, Arato could see Erika, who had returned to her seat, waving her hand. Apparently, the girl who had walked over was excited to have been given an order by the delicate young queen.

“Um, Erika wants everyone to gather at her desk,” she said. She wasn’t the only one; several other of Erika’s worshipers were happily running her message around the class.

“May I ask for your company?” Erika inquired, beckoning with a smile. “I am really enjoying going to school,” she said, once she had their attention. “Would you be surprised if I told you I always wanted to try attending school?”

Several female students had slid their desks over to Erika’s, creating a large island. As expected of the owner of her own company, Erika’s lunch was extravagant. She had even brought along fruits and paper plates to share with everyone.

Whenever Erika opened her mouth, the girls around her automatically shut their own.

“Even before I went to sleep, I was always in the hospital, so I was never able to attend school,” she said. “There is nothing quite as interesting as something you believed you would never have, only to get your hands on it at last.”

As if to protect their Sleeping Beauty from boredom, the seven girls who had gathered their desks around hers began chatting. “I was just saying this, but there’s been a bunch of vids of Mikoto on the net recently,” one of the girls said. “Ever since she got busted during that terrorist attack, there have been all these videos of her doing silly things, or singing songs. But they weren’t there before the attack, right?” The pony-tailed speaker speared a slice of melon and passed the conversation on to the next girl.

Kengo’s chopsticks stopped moving. He had been there, during that terrorist attack. He had been one of the Antibody Network terrorists committing the attack.

The girl with the ponytail suddenly looked in their direction. Leaving her fork, she walked over to their desks. “Do you know anything about the videos, Endo? Your dad was involved with that stuff, right? Is he making them?” she asked, too focused on talking to Arato to notice Kengo’s troubled expression.

Before Arato could answer that he didn’t know anything about it, a girl with a short bob-cut continued the discussion. “So someone’s posting her videos after she got broken? Isn’t that kind of nasty?” she asked.

“It totally is,” the ponytail girl agreed. “But the vids had tons of views. One of them already had a million last time I looked. Who the heck is watching them?”

“I mean, you were, right?”

Without waiting for Arato’s answer the ponytail girl was pulled back into the conversation and returned to her seat. “But isn’t it weird how she got famous like that?” the first girl asked. “I didn’t even know who Mikoto was until I saw the video about her getting destroyed.”

Erika, setting aside her status as a CEO to be a normal high school girl for the moment, joined in the conversation with obvious interest. “With the popularity of those shocking videos, Mikoto has gotten a brand new character,” she said. “It’s almost as though the Mikoto everyone has come to know as the videos spread is a completely different being. We humans assign identity to things based on how they appear to us.”

Arato, who hadn’t spoken a word despite being invited into the circle of the conversation, met her gaze.

Erika tapped at her cup with one finger. It had Hello Kitty on it, and was probably from the 21st century like the rest of her stuff. “For example, imagine you’re a child who dearly wants one of these Hello Kitty cups,” she said. “To someone who wants one of these, it is not merely a cup. It has a special meaning to those who want it, simply because of the character printed on the side. I think the concept that a simple cup like this could become beloved because of its appearance is quite beautiful, personally.”

The white kitten in her ribbon had worn myriad costumes over the hundred-plus years since her creation, and Arato had to agree that her cute presence indeed made Erika’s cup seem like something special.

Erika narrowed her eyes in amusement, as if to provoke Arato. As she looked at him, he got the feeling that she was comparing his relationship with Lacia to that of the child who wanted a Hello Kitty cup.

“I don’t really care where affection comes from,” Arato growled. “My feelings are still important to me.”

“Oh, of course your affection is important,” Erika replied. “But it’s also easily misdirected. Through the years, we’ve stood mice, ducks, hedgehogs, beagles and all sorts of other animals up on two legs to create characters that everyone would love. Just how many beloved ‘almost human’ icons do you think there have been over the years?”

Erika rested her chin on her hands, looking dissatisfied with the poor reactions she was getting.

“I won’t argue that love doesn’t have its place, but you should also realize that it’s a force which can be measured like any other,” she said. “For example, if we go back to what you were just talking about, those videos have set Mikoto up to become a tragic character that people can love. Objects, characters, and machines can easily bear the burden of the identities we project onto them. But a human would crumble, walking the lonely road of living up to others’ interpretations of them.”

She seemed to be looking for a response, so Arato decided to raise his voice for the others. “Are there many people who do that?” he asked.

Erika smiled. “I myself became ‘Sleeping Beauty’ without realizing it,” she replied simply, and then took up her Hello Kitty cup in one hand to sip at her warm milk.

Lacia was continuing her work as an hIE model. Even after everything that had happened, she aggressively attended studios and location shoots that could have been dangerous. Arato got the feeling that she prioritized her modeling work over the fight in which they were caught up.

Lacia was doing a studio shoot that day, which was something Arato was finally getting used to. It was actually a competition with human models in the mix, so the number of staff on location was larger than normal. Lacia’s popularity had grown steadily, and had spread enough by this time that she was being given jobs from major advertising media clients.

“Why do you look so gloomy?” a voice asked Arato. “I’d say it went really well.”

Arato had been going to say his greetings, but someone had beat him to the punch. She was a tall, long-haired woman, with an air of carefully cultivated beauty. Her name was Oriza Ayabe, and she had almost been crushed by a chandelier previously when Methode attacked during Lacia’s big photo shoot.

In the studio, Lacia was acting out a normal lifestyle with a stylish male model, though the place was strangely missing any of the sounds that Arato would associate with normal life. She was doing a joint shoot with a human male model, today; apparently she was playing the guy’s female friend. Of course, everything from the furniture to their accessories was a product being advertised. The male model was tall and muscular, more handsome than Arato by far. But even he looked inferior next to Lacia.

“Though I’m surprised,” Oriza continued, watching the studio shoot from afar with her arms crossed. “I figured you’d be more jealous.”

To Arato, the expressions Lacia was aiming at her model partner were more overdone than the ones she showed him. “She always looks more natural with me,” he said.

“Oh, gross. I do not want to hear about it,” Oriza said, her shoulders shuddering in disgust. Especially among women, the concept of a man being in a romantic relationship with an hIE was not seen in a positive light.

One of the camera assistants got a text and hurriedly raised his voice. “Yuri’s here!” he shouted, and the room was suddenly full of tension.

An androgynous girl, her dark green hair cut in a short bob, entered the dim light of the studio. This was Fabion MG’s top hIE model, Yuri, and loud voices were raised as everyone in the studio greeted her. Normally, there should have been no reason for a machine like Yuri to get such deferential treatment. But, especially on that day, there was no denying the explosive charisma that Yuri gave off. Even the director of the shoot politely stood from his chair to greet the almost supernaturally charming Yuri.

“Oh, give me a break,” Oriza grumped, eyebrows knitting in revulsion at the display.

Arato didn’t know how to react. Yuri certainly was charming, but she was also being used as a tool. He couldn’t help recalling what Erika had said that day at lunch.

“So Yuri’s a Hello Kitty cup too, huh?” he mused. When you got right down to it, an hIE model’s job was to fill a role with their own appearance. Since the people who saw Yuri thought of her as being a top idol, she was treated like one. Lacia was doing the same thing.

Arato suddenly felt like asking something of the girl going green with envy next to him. “If you saw shops raising the prices of the clothing you wear specifically because you wear it, would that make you happy?” he asked.

“If that didn’t happen, I’d be a failure as a model,” Oriza replied. “And that goes double for walking mannequins like your Lacia.”

“I don’t follow,” Arato said.

“If folks don’t look at you and say, ‘man, I wish I could be like her,’ then you’re worthless as a model,” she explained. “Though, honestly, it’s getting annoying with them taking it all the way into lifestyle stuff with this ‘boy meets girl’ concept.”

Apparently, Oriza knew the concept behind Lacia’s ads, and her cloudy face suddenly brightened as she seemed to remember something. “Hey Arato,” she said. “Introduce me to that boy, Ryo. The one who saved me during the attack.”

“I don’t know if having me set you up with him is a good idea,” Arato said. “But you should just go talk to him. I’m pretty sure he’ll be happy no matter what you say.”

“Well it’s not like I can romance an hIE, right?” Oriza said, eyes shining at the thought of dating Ryo.

“He’s said pretty much the same thing,” Arato said. “Maybe you two would be good together. I can’t set you up with him, but I can at least give you his number.”

Arato stood, watching Lacia and the male model acting out their lifestyle on stage from far enough away to not bother the staff. “Sorry, but it kinda pisses me off to see them play-acting at being lovers, now that I know what real romance is,” Arato growled. Even though he knew it was an act, he couldn’t help seeing the fake romance as a reflection of the real thing.

But Arato knew that, apart from himself, the other people who saw this video would see a dreamlike reality in which humans and hIEs had drawn closer together. To the fans watching the video, the clothing Lacia wore as an hIE model was more than just an outfit; her wearing the clothes made people want to buy them, even at high prices. There was a gap between the value the clothes were perceived to have and their actual existence that slipped through the holes in the viewers’ rationality, which created a reason for them to buy the clothes. The company was using analog hacking to raise the value of objects by manipulating the viewers’ perceptions of those objects. To return to Erika’s analogy: if a company wanted to sell a Hello Kitty cup, they only had to convince children that it was more than just a cup.

“Fabion does some pretty shady stuff,” Arato muttered, without thinking.

Oriza looked at him like he was a moron. “You mean using analog hacking?” she asked. “Even without hIEs, everyone’s been doing that since forever ago. Why do you think businesses put characters on products in the first place?”

“I guess that’s what Erika meant when she was saying there had been stuff like the cup going on throughout history,” Arato mused. “At the party, too, she was talking about fictional characters interacting with the human world, or whatever. I guess it does make sense.”

Like the broken Mikoto, Lacia was gaining popularity among viewers both young and old. In order not to disrupt the image of the characters they created for their models, Fabion MG treated them with extreme care. Even during the shoot that Arato was watching, if the male model got too close to Lacia, the director would instruct him to open some space. It was just like how rights holders, back when the Hello Kitty cup was made, would always fight to protect their copyrights to ensure that nothing would sully the image of their character.

Fabion was looking to create a new icon—a new Hello Kitty, as it were. They wanted Lacia to be a character, so that when they slapped her on a cup, or goods, or clothing, anyone who saw them would see the ‘boy meets girl’ hIE and human romance dream which the company wanted to project.

“I don’t really want her to turn into a character,” Arato said. “I just want her to stay the same old Lacia. I know she’s always saying she’s just a machine that takes on any personality she needs to, but I still think there’s a real her.” Arato couldn’t look away. He had developed an obsession with the image he had of Lacia, and the relationship they had in his heart.

“Huh, that hIE really has you wrapped around her finger, huh?” Oriza snickered.

“Oh leave me alone,” Arato said.

But Oriza showed him an honest smile that seemed to come from the heart. “Girls just can’t help but tease a boy in love,” she said.

Arato was glad she seemed to understand him, and couldn’t help but smiling himself. He couldn’t help but think Oriza looked a little prettier than she had a few moments ago. “Thanks,” he said.

“You really are an easy mark,” she laughed. It was a little embarrassing, having almost everyone he met tell him that. Seeing him shyly dropping his gaze and blush, Oriza broke out in another broad grin.

A voice came from behind them. “Miss, you’re almost up.”

Oriza hurriedly ran to the set, her feet light.

Arato thought he recognized the voice that had given Oriza the reminder, and turned to look; it was Erika.

She met his surprised look with a shushing finger pressed to her lips. “I’m using red box environmental camouflage,” she explained. “Nobody further than two meters away from me can see me.” It was true; nobody seemed to notice that the owner of Fabion MG was right there in the studio. Their conversation was a complete secret.

“Are you sure you should be using red box technology that lightly?” he asked.

“Oh, humans will be using it soon, I’m sure,” Erika said, waving away his concern. “No need to be stingy, I’m just trying it a little ahead of the curve.” She beckoned to someone with a finger and, suddenly, Mariage was by her side. The hIE, in a maid uniform and with her flaxen hair in a bob-cut, handed Arato the trunk case she was carrying.

“Give this to Lacia. It’s part of our trade,” Erika explained to him. On set, Lacia was in a photo shoot with Yuri, who was also one of Erika’s private dolls. Erika turned her back on the stage, and spoke to Mariage. “You couldn’t pull off a look like that,” she said.

“That’s not one of my functions,” Mariage said, dropping her eyes. Though she was strong enough to challenge Methode, the strongest of the Lacia-class red box hIEs, she couldn’t rebel against Erika. Erika seemed to find that highly dissatisfying, and spared Mariage a single, disappointed look before ignoring her hIE and turning her full attention to Arato.

“You’re already planning to confront society as it is. Why don’t we combine our efforts?” she asked.

“I’m not trying to ‘confront’ anything,” Arato replied. “You’re the one trying to pick a fight with the world.”

“You are so slow,” Erika sniffed, snapping her black folding fan shut. “As an hIE model, Lacia’s already making waves in society. I wonder if it’s the AI in Black Monolith that gives her the desire to be seen by humans,” she mused.

“How do you know she feels that way?” Arato asked.

“Do you really not know? Even though it was your sister that submitted Lacia’s name for the model contest, Lacia could have easily manipulated the results and lost on purpose if she didn’t desire this outcome,” she said.

Arato couldn’t deny the logic in that.

“Lacia’s too famous,” Erika went on. “You can’t try to hide her anymore. Eventually, both she and you are going to be in the public eye. Sure, there may be some strings attached, but I’d say having Fabion MG backing you when that happens isn’t a bad deal at all.” Erika seemed to be enjoying herself, the same as when she’d been tapping her finger on that Hello Kitty cup.

Arato couldn’t find a reason to turn her down. He honestly believed it would go well, just like she was saying. After Lacia responded positively to his confession, and becoming friends with famous models and CEOs, to his mind the future looked very rosy. After Arato’s thoughts drifted in that direction, he ended up lost in his daydreams for a while.

Erika left around the time that the shoot started wrapping up. It may have been that her red box camo interfered with his ability to sense her presence, but it seemed to him that she’d simply faded away from one moment to the next, like smoke on the wind.

There wasn’t a drop of sweat on Lacia as she descended from the stage. When she saw him, it was as if the act she had just been performing no longer existed. She reacted to him, and was the same Lacia as always.

“Erika came by,” he told her. “She said she wanted to help us.”

Lacia’s sunny smile clouded over. “I see,” she said. “What do you think, Arato?”

“Well, it makes me happy to have anyone saying they want to help us out,” he replied. It felt almost like Erika was saying that she wanted to see the future together with him; it made his heart swell a little with pride. That wasn’t a bad feeling. But the gaze of Lacia’s frosty, pale-blue eyes was like having a bucket of ice-water dumped over his head.

“Arato, are you sure you’ve fully grasped the situation?” she asked him carefully. “Erika is a media and rhetoric specialist. If we join with her, she will have the ability to freely manipulate our images, and the perception of our relationship.”

“Well sure, there are some downsides, but there must be some benefits, too,” Arato said defensively. Seeing Lacia’s expression fall, it felt like that wonderful bubble of good vibrations from just moments earlier had burst.

Their conversation was drifting into areas that shouldn’t be discussed in the middle of the studio, so Arato had Lacia follow him into a corner where some of the bigger props were stored. It seemed like it was the right choice as, once they were alone, Lacia reached out and grabbed his sleeve. She dropped her eyes, avoiding his gaze.

“Erika sees a reflection of concepts that existed during her time in analog hacking. Because of that, I believe this battle we are involved in is approaching a major milestone,” she said. “I think it will soon become apparent to you.”

It was like she could see the future.

“Well, if something’s coming, we should just get around in front of it and stop it, shouldn’t we?” Arato asked. “There’s got to be something I can do about it.”

“In order to stop what is coming, it would be necessary to throw away the current lifestyle we have,” Lacia said. “I am afraid you are too dear to me for me to share that information, Arato.” Her voice was a gentle murmur. Lacia drew closer to him, and he caught a waft of perfume from her body.

“Do not take Erika’s words at face value,” she told him. “Erika and her Fabion MG company intend to use her powers of persuasion in the war she will wage on society. I believe the choice made by Ryo Kaidai and Methode in rejecting Erika’s proposal was the correct one.” She spoke seriously, as if she was warning him away from a deadly pitfall.

“I don’t think we need to be quite that suspicious,” he argued back.

“Erika says she wants to make information about us public, yet continues to hide the existence of Mariage,” Lacia pointed out.

Arato had spent quite a bit of time with Lacia by this point, and had come to pick up on some of the nuances in the way she acted. “Listen, I know you’d never tell me to my face that I’m easy to manipulate,” he said, “but you still shut down all my ideas, sometimes. Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to do?”

Her light blue eyes fixed on his. There was a desperate plea in them, like she wanted to tell him something from the bottom of her non-existent heart. “I want you to design the future you and I will walk toward,” she said. “I don’t want to play the part that Erika has written for me. I want you, my owner, to write the script of our lives.”

Arato had enough trouble keeping up with the incidents that kept happening right in front of him. To him, taking on the whole future seemed like too big a problem for his brain to handle, but Lacia’s eyes were full of confidence in him.

“I have the power to make any future you wish for come to pass,” she said.

***

Kengo Sugiri didn’t have the power to change the future. So, when he saw the email, it seemed like a death sentence.

When he got home from school, the email was waiting for him on his home machine. It contained orders from the Antibody Network. The mail had no subject line, just instructions in the body. It was an attack plan for the Next-Generation Social Research Center. The NSRC was a third-sector organization where Kozo Endo worked, with its headquarters in Matsudo. Apparently, the aim of the attack was to destroy the server machine that housed Mikoto’s AI. The Network was riding the rising wave of anti sentiments aimed at AI oversight stemming from the incident at the experimental city. It was probably also meant as a protest against Mikoto, who was somehow becoming even more popular after having been destroyed during the attack on the Oi Industry Promotion Center.

It had been a while since Kengo had last gotten any orders, since he was currently being watched by the public safety police. He was completely backed into a corner; any suspicious movements and they’d arrest him immediately.

Still, Kengo rested his elbows on his computer desk with a sigh. “I told myself I’d pay more attention to reality and the people around me, no matter how shitty the future might end up being,” he growled, wiping away the beads of sweat that were dripping down his face.

“But you can’t run away, anymore,” a voice said. “This time, you’re done for.” The voice lacked any emotion as it spoke the fatal words, like a machine simply reading out data. Looking up, Kengo saw that Kouka had entered the room at some point and was sitting on his windowsill. Kengo was feeling so overwhelmed by his own situation that he’d barely reacted to her entrance.

“Why’d you run off half-cocked to help out, if you were just gonna turn out like this?” Kouka asked him, sounding exasperated. She may have been a product of super-human development, but she was still nothing but a doll. Still, with everything he was going through, having something human-shaped by his side was still comforting.

Kengo leaned back in his chair. To him, the sixty-year-old house around him was where the future came to die. Unlike Ryo’s rich family, for Kengo’s family and the restaurant they ran in the poor part of town, the development of hIEs was a serious threat. Kengo had wanted to spread his wings beyond the confines of the old, tiny house, so he had scraped together money from his work at the family restaurant and bought himself a terminal.

“I joined up with the Antibody Network when I was searching around the internet, all pissed off about life,” he said. “There were ads for volunteer Antibody operators all over the place: some real, some fake. I was looking for something I could do to make things a little more fair in the world.”

He had been relieved to find that there were so many other people besides him who felt they were being left behind as society moved forward. But he knew from the beginning that what he was doing was a crime, and that judgment would come someday.

“You might not believe it,” he continued, “but until recently, I really, strongly believed in what the Antibody Network was doing, and was happy to help. Why the hell did I mess with it? If I had just kept my head down and kept playing my part in the Network, I never would have gotten dragged into the spotlight.”

If he had just kept helping other volunteers bust up hIEs, things would have been fine. He hated the things just as much as the rest of the Network. If he hadn’t abused the Network’s internal system to help his friends, he never would have had to shoulder the burden he had.

Kengo’s eyes felt hot, and his voice became husky with unshed tears. He’d be lying if he said he wouldn’t take it all back. “Everyone’s changing,” he said. “Endo and Kaidai just keep running on ahead and leaving me behind. I’m just a normal kid from a poor family, going nowhere. I can’t keep up with them.” He wasn’t normally the kind of person who whined this way, but his life had been such a mess lately, and his heart was full of regrets. Even he knew that he was just blowing off steam.

The evening sun shone in through his window.

“I’m not like them,” he went on miserably. “The two floors of this restaurant are my whole world. All I could do with my life was give up on my future and sit here, helping the Antibody Network bust up a bunch of rich bastards’ hIEs.” That had just been blowing off steam, too. He could use excuses like his family restaurant not getting the business it needed, or his dad’s honor as a chef being damaged, but in the end, what he had done was help criminals commit crimes.

“You should have swallowed your pride, got down on your hands and knees, and begged for help,” Kouka said. She was right. The Antibody Network was a group of volunteers, so he should have been able to run whenever he wanted. If he had reached out to Arato for help in desperation, Lacia could have cleared things up in an instant. But Kengo had been blinded by his own pride and naivete, so now it was too late to change things. The Antibody Network knew that he hadn’t managed to break clean away from them, and had sent instructions so he could go and die for them. He was sure his conversation with Kouka was being heard by the public safety police.

“It’s not even that I’m just wishing I hadn’t done all that,” Kengo muttered. “I’ve been helping bust up hIEs because I don’t want the world to change, so I hate the fact that those guys are changing and leaving me behind.” He got the feeling that, if he had reached out his hand to Arato Endo, he could have become something special. He could have just followed his friends’ lead and made something of himself.

Ever since Arato had saved his life at the Oi Industry Promotion Center, Kengo had only been thinking of himself. “Dammit,” he growled. Fighting back tears, he looked up at the old wooden boards of the ceiling. He was nothing, and he would never amount to anything.

“I’m in high school, but no matter how hard I work, I’m never going anywhere,” he said. “Why the hell was I born in this age?” If he had been living in the time when Erika Burroughs had gone into cold sleep, even a normal guy like him could have made it somewhere with hard work.

After listening to his tearful monologue, Kouka opened her closed eyes. “I can win you this fight,” she said.

“What?” Kengo asked, having no idea what she was talking about.

“I’ll bring you victory on this battlefield,” she said. “I am the tool that brings victory in conflict with humans; that’s what I’m made for. I still have to pay back the favor I owe you. I’ll stop the world from changing, and knock this whole stupid fight into the future.”

“Why would you do that for me?” Kengo asked. Still, despite his doubts, he was happy just to hear her offer. It was almost like she was commiserating with his feelings of helplessness, though she had no heart to feel the pain.

Kouka smiled, framed from behind by the light of the setting sun on the clouds, which were as crimson as her hair. “It’s a meaningless fight, with no reward and no way out,” she said. “Just the kind of thing I’ve been wanting to try. War’s always a pile of shit, anyway. As a weapon, I was hoping to get into a pointless fight where I could just go berserk sometime.”

For a moment, her usual smile faded, replaced with a far more complex expression. “I want this battle you’re caught up in,” she said. Full of the desire to save him, to his eyes, Kouka appeared more human than she ever had before.

“What’s in it for you?” Kengo asked.

“Didn’t I just say that I wanted to get into a pointless fight?” she shot back. “That’s what it means to fight as the underdog. Though, I guess you could say I’m not getting much out of it.” As a weapon, Kouka was top-class. She wasn’t some mass-produced hunk of crap that you would find scattered around in countries where political unrest reigned. Kouka herself was aware of this.

The sunset shining behind her was so vivid, Kengo doubted he’d see another like it as long as he lived.

“I’d be happy if you just remembered me, when it’s all said and done,” she said.

***

Ryo Kaidai paused on his way into the room that had been booked for his meeting, and looked over his shoulder at the setting sun outside the windows.

For some reason, he suddenly thought of Kouka.

Then he swung open the door to the meeting room, because Kouka meant nothing to him. She was Kengo and Arato’s problem.

Hands of Operation, the PMC contracted to MemeFrame, had its offices in Akabane. In a meeting room in a high-security building, Ryo met with members of the company. The first was a business-suited woman in her forties, with a patch over her left eye. She pulled off her beret, revealing pinned-up platinum blonde hair, and held it in her right hand. The other was a giant black man who had barely managed to stuff his huge, muscular body into his noncommissioned officer’s uniform. The two stood at attention.

Ryo knew absolutely nothing about the culture of PMCs. For a moment, looking at them as they stood stiffly behind their chairs, he had no idea how to proceed. Finally, he decided there was no way he’d be able to match whatever social norms they were used to.

“Please take your seats,” said a feeble voice. At last, the two members from HOO sat down. They were the very images of the perfect soldiers; discipline and years of training were apparent in their every movement.

“This is Ryo Kaidai,” said the middle-aged man with a weak voice. He had been the only one to sit down immediately. “He doesn’t actually work at MemeFrame yet, so he’s just here to watch today.”

The man was Professor Shinohara, MemeFrame’s representative at the meeting, and the man who had introduced Ryo to Ginga Watarai. But, despite Shinohara’s effort to downplay Ryo’s presence, it seemed the PMC had done their homework about what was happening behind the scenes at MemeFrame, because the female officer fixed Ryo with her gaze.

“I’m Major Collidenne Lemaire of HOO,” she said, her introduction as blunt as a clenched fist.

Ryo fought down the illusion that he was being slowly dragged down into an endless swamp of troubles with sheer force of will. Living under the daily threat of Methode deciding to kill everyone he knew or loved had inured him to that feeling of tension.

Shinohara, however, reacted to the obvious irritation in the major’s voice, sucking in a quick gasp. HOO had demanded that MemeFrame come to them in Akabane for this meeting, as it wasn’t something required in their contract. Intimidated, Shinohara couldn’t keep his voice from trembling.

“I’d like to request that, per our contract, you destroy Lacia-class Type-001, Kouka. That is what I would like you to do. I have seen a report that your tactical AI judged, based on Kouka’s durability and performance that, while retrieval may be impossible, destruction should be-...” Shinohara rambled on haltingly.

Ryo had proposed outsourcing the destruction of Kouka to HOO. The PMC was a much more stable source of combat power than Methode. Humans could run the attack and, if Methode only stepped in once Kouka was gunned down and delivered the last blow herself, the risk to her would be minimal.

But the PMC had requested a meeting before they would undertake the mission.

“I already informed you of the reason for this meeting when I set it up,” the Major said, “but, ever since the Lacia-class units got out, we’ve been forced to fight with strategies based on shoddy information full of holes. We’re not going to take on this mission until we’ve decided that we have all the information we need to really understand what we’re up against with this red box.” Her deep voice was full of her solid determination.

Shinohara, his face going sickly pale, shot Ryo a desperate look. Ryo decided it was time to stop leaving things to the obviously overwhelmed professor. The way things were going, it wouldn’t have been strange for Shinohara to wind up being assassinated by Methode.

“When facing a red box, I understand that you’d naturally feel uneasy about whether your normal combat tactics will hold up,” Ryo said. “But I guarantee that you can think of Kouka as nothing more than an extension of the combat drones you’re used to dealing with.”

Ryo put just the right amount of emotion in his voice while regurgitating the answer he had prepared beforehand. Obviously, he couldn’t tell them about Erika’s intention to make the battle between the Lacia-class units public. It was for this exact reason that reducing the number of Lacia-class units in the world had become a more urgent concern, and why the most immediate target was Kouka. She had to be destroyed before she could join forces with Lacia, whose combat prowess was far beyond the reach of modern weaponry.

After exchanging a glance with the major, the noncommissioned officer, Sest, spoke. “But this Kouka is an AI capable of growth,” he said. “And, right after she first got outside, she was able to take out a whole unit of our rapid response force.”

On the night the Lacia-class units got out, Sest’s unit had lost a massive beachhead container to a shot from Kouka’s laser cannon. That night they had been facing her with drone soldiers, but this time it would be humans. It was the most serious kind of negotiation; calculating the risks and possibility of success with the understanding that human lives would probably be lost in the process. The only reason the soldiers were able to speak about it this calmly was their professional discipline.

Ryo had no experience playing with people’s lives as if they were pieces on a chess board, so he tried to think of how Ginga Watarai would have handled it. “I understand that there are many differences between us,” he said, “but I think we all share the same basic concepts of capitalism and discipline. If we don’t even have that in common anymore, I suppose it might be time to rethink our contract.”

“What does that mean?” Sest growled.

Ryo clenched his gut against the queasy feeling of throwing away a piece of his own humanity. “Our relationship is very simple,” he said. “Nothing has changed.” There were all sorts of things he wanted to say beyond that, but it was the nature of economic relationships that intent and actions all got swallowed up in the end by the simple quest for money.

Sest, who had been a soldier since before Ryo was born, looked down at him. “We’ve got good people and equipment tied up with our strategies for taking down the Lacia-class,” Sest said. “But, if we had known about their digital warfare capabilities, or the fact that some of them can turn invisible, we wouldn’t have been caught with our pants down like that! And, from what I’ve seen, you still don’t have anything about the red boxes’ digital warfare capabilities in the data you just gave us!”

As his voice rose to a shout, Shinohara yelped out, “But you said no one died!”

Sest just kept his arms folded, glaring down at them. Talk of death brought images of Watarai’s corpse up in Ryo’s mind, and it was almost like he was breathing in that bloody scent again.

“Calm down, Shinohara,” he said. Ryo faced terror daily, ever since having forged that contract with Methode. The contract was a tightrope walk between the fear that Methode might go on a killing spree and lay the blame in his lap, or unilaterally decide that she didn’t need him anymore and sever the contract at her pleasure. The only thing holding that demon back at the moment was the fact that she still saw a benefit in keeping an above-the-board contracted owner. Even if he was only her owner on paper, it required quite a bit of toughness just to make it through each day.

“The documents we provided contain a summary of all of Kouka’s capabilities,” he continued. “No matter how things go in a fight against her, I doubt there will be any digital warfare going on.”

“How likely is it that she’s developed new capabilities that would place her beyond the reach of our weaponry?” Sest asked.

“I believe she has figured out a countermeasure for armored vehicles, but that’s all,” Ryo replied.

“So she’s different from, say, Snowdrop?” the major cut in.

Ryo had been expecting the question. The testimonies given to the police about Snowdrop’s attack would have already been spread around to the Japanese military.

“We’ve already provided the Japanese military with the data we have relating to Snowdrop,” he said, not missing a beat.

Silence fell over the room. Everyone present was already used to suppressing the swirling emotions they felt. Fools and scholars, heroes and cowards; the only thing they truly shared was silence. No matter what was going on inside of them, as long as they maintained silence, they could keep up the illusion of professional decorum. It was just like how hIEs spread in society by matching their responses to the expectations of the humans they interacted with.

Major Lemaire fixed Ryo with her silent gaze. “Is there anything else?” she asked.

Both the soldiers in front of him and the monster waiting behind him were terrifying. But someone had to take on the role Ryo had, and he couldn’t trust anyone to take it on for him. Besides, regardless of anything else, the PMC was still interested in profit. Compared to Methode, Ryo found human tools much easier to deal with.

“No, that is all,” he said.

The major put the beret in her hand back on her head, as if to signal that the conversation was over.

“What is this world coming to?” Ryo growled. After leaving the HOO office building, he called home to say he’d wander around the city for a bit before heading back. The thought of going straight home to Shintoyosu and seeing Methode’s face just then made him feel sick.

He felt like he had been an inch from dying at least three times that day. That platoon leader, Sest, had looked like he wanted to reach across the table and strangle him. When Watarai had died during the incident at the experimental city, the two HOO mercenaries assigned as his bodyguards had been severely wounded. Three more of their mercenaries had been injured in the airport attack, as well. They kept drawing the short straw in their jobs for MemeFrame.

“Seriously,” he spat. “This world is circling the drain.”

Humanity’s history on Earth wouldn’t last much longer. The final afterglow of twilight was fading, and darkness was swallowing the city around him. Ryo walked around Akasaka with only his driver hIE as an escort. Some model named Oriza Ayabe sent him a message; apparently she had gotten his contact info from Arato.

Calling her back was, honestly, a moment of weakness for him. Ryo felt like he had to come up for breath after spending days drowning in the harsh reality of his life. HOO would be keeping their eyes on him, of course. MemeFrame weren’t their only clients. But he still needed to spend some time relaxing. He had to keep his mind off the terrifying thought of how much damage HOO was going to do that night.

“Hey Kaidai, your dad owns MemeFrame, right?” Oriza asked him. “How do you pick who does your commercials?”

“I don’t have any say in that,” he said. “And I’m not even officially in the company yet.”

It felt like the night sky was going to fall down and crush him. HOO was preparing a strategy for taking down Kouka. Kouka was a stand-alone unit, given the ability to operate by herself. This meant that she was particularly high-spec, but also that the possibility of her developing unforeseen abilities like Snowdrop was extremely low. That very night, the number of Lacia-class units in the world might be decreased by one.

“Well, whatever,” Oriza said. “Where do you want to go? You said you wanted to hang out.”

“Let’s go grab something to eat,” Ryo replied. Stuffing his hand into his pocket, he made a circular gesture on the face of his pocket terminal with one finger. It read the gesture, and the terminal vibrated powerfully seven times, paused, then gave two long vibrations and nine short ones. 7:29, then. His next appointment was at 9:00, so he had an hour and a half to relax.

“I heard you were modeling for Fabion MG?” he asked.

Oriza’s face brightened up. “Oh good,” she said. “I mean, you called me, but you didn’t really look like you were enjoying yourself. I thought things weren’t going well.”

It did feel a little weird. On the one hand, it felt like he was still protecting his connection with Arato by going out with a girl Arato sent his way, but there was also a sense that he was desperately trying to do something a normal high-schooler would.

“It’s going fine,” Ryo said. “I just have a lot on my mind.”

Walking down the streetlight-lit route 413, they soon arrived at Gaien Higashi street, where a company-owned female hIE in a uniform passed them by. Holding a paper bag bearing a company logo, she dexterously slipped through the crowd, moving fast even in high heels.

“Huh, must be an hIE,” Oriza said. “That’s the one thing that makes me feel jealous of hIEs; they never trip up, no matter what kind of heels they have on.”

“That’s a basic performance requirement for AASC Level-3,” Ryo explained. The ability to walk on normal roads in high heels without any risk of tripping was one of the results of Higgins’ advances.

“Oh hey, I hear about AASC all the time in commercials!” Oriza said, jumping on a familiar subject.

Ryo wondered in annoyance why Arato had thought it would be a good idea to give this girl his contact information. “It stands for ‘Action Adaptation Standard Class,’” he said. “Each hIE has different specifications and capabilities, and their behavioral control clouds would crash if we made them try to suit their instructions to every single hIE, regardless of performance gaps. So instead, we create behavior programs based on standard capabilities that every hIE unit will have.”

Units that couldn’t meet the sensory or motor standards for AASC certification were only usable in the home. Each hIE also had to undertake an inspection every two years. If their movements strayed from the established standards, it could cause accidents when they tried to coordinate their actions with other hIEs they encountered outside.

“Huh, interesting,” Oriza said, though her voice held no enthusiasm.

“Level 3 of the standard is about the same performance as your average adult male. At level 4, it’s more like what you would expect of a pro athlete. Level 5 is for positions like firefighters or police officers; places where they’re expected to perform much better than a normal human would,” Ryo listed.

Even though Oriza had asked, she gave only polite reactions to his explanation, and her big eyes seemed to slide away from his when he looked at her.

“You could see hIE cooperative behavior routines as a game of dolls being played out in a miniature version of our world inside of Higgins’ AI,” he said, trying to use analogy to get the point across to her. “In the hIE behavioral programs that Higgins creates, it has to take into account everything from damaged or malfunctioning hIEs, which are given a standard level of 1, all the way up to high-performance level 5 units. To put it another way: in Higgins’ simulation there are only five types of dolls. By simulating the entire world in miniature for its projections, Higgins is able to avoid the AI Frame problem.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember learning about the Frame problem in middle school,” Oriza said. “I know that one.”

“AIs have trouble making choices related to handling the problems right in front of their faces,” Ryo went on, ignoring her insistence that she already knew the information. “They’re bad at dividing problems up into lists of priorities in order to resolve the jobs they’ve been given.”

Oriza played idly with her long, vividly-colored long hair and stared at a distant patch of green that may have been the Nogi Shrine park. “Huh, interesting,” she said again, flatly. Then she let out a fake little laugh and added, “You sure are smart, Ryo.”

“But, despite that,” Ryo pressed on, “hIEs have to deal with just about every problem that exists in our society. That’s because Higgins is able to simulate our world in miniature, and translate our problems into what amounts to a game of chess that it can play with the standardized dolls that are its chess pieces. Did you know that, in Higgins’ miniature world, it also assigns AASC levels to humans as well? They are treated as dolls that it can’t control in its simulation. We’re all ‘AASC level 0’—i.e., dolls that Higgins can’t trust to follow even the most basic directions.”

Oriza was barely maintaining the facade of listening to him at this point, and her face twisted like she’d eaten something bitter. An hIE would have been miles better at pretending to be interested in this discussion.

It was easier to deal with humans if you only looked at the surface of their actions, and treated them as if they were machines underneath. That was all Ryo had done during his meeting with the PMC; using money and silence to communicate and come to an agreement without ever actually addressing either side’s true intentions.

“Maybe all we have is what people see on the outside,” Ryo mused. “I mean, that’s all a fashion model’s job is, isn’t it?”

“You know, you’re sort of like Arato in some ways, but completely different in others,” Oriza said.

She’d said the words so lightly, but they struck Ryo hard. For a moment, he was afraid that she had somehow seen through his posing, and felt like his heart would stop from the shock. He tried to say something light-hearted to blow it off, but felt like anything he said would come out as sarcasm, so the words stuck in his throat.

It had been Major Lemaire, headed into battle, who had said, “This world is done for.” Ryo had no idea how to deal with mercenaries, so he had avoided any direct confrontations. Instead, he had waited with what he had in hand, dividing the problem facing him into smaller, more manageable pieces. It was this that had led to him treating a problem that could involve human casualties as nothing more than making use of some machines.

“... so, I didn’t actually hear in your explanation why hIEs never trip?” Oriza asked.

“If an hIE tripped, it would cause chaos in the AASC standards, so Higgins invests massive resources into ensuring they don’t fall. If you think of a human paying attention to make sure they don’t trip while walking, several tens of thousands times more mental resources are being expended into making sure hIEs don’t.”

There was a thought experiment about a trolley, in which the choice of either track would cause a sacrifice of some kind. Robots had to face that problem every day in their dealings with humans. With the trolley problem stacked on top of the frame problem, controlling the actions of hIEs ended up requiring an astronomical amount of processing resources. Only by outsourcing this processing to Higgins, an ultra high-performance AI, were hIEs able to exist alongside humans.

It seemed like the kind of discussion Arato would be really into, and even Kengo would show some interest. But the girl by his side was neither of his friends. Their paths had parted. He had been prepared for that.

“Is that seriously all you think about all day?” Oriza asked. The very first girl he’d had a chance to talk to normally was obviously tired of listening to him.

“The world we’re living in right now is about to end,” he said. “It’s been coming for a while, and things are about to reach their limit.”

“It must be hard, being you,” Oriza muttered.

Ryo looked up at the night sky. Though it was almost summer, the darkness was deep and cold. “It’s the answer I’ve found after struggling for a while,” he told her placidly, “and it works for just about everything. The age when we could resolve everything just by being humans is coming to an end. We’ve got to look for a way to live with that hanging over our heads.”

***

Kouka leaned on her large, bladed device while she stared up at the white, square building. It was larger than any of the buildings around it, sitting about ten minutes across the Edogawa River from Tokyo with a grove of trees behind it.

Matsuda, where the building lay, used to be a residential area with easy access from Tokyo. Ever since population decline had made it easier to get a place in the heart of the city, it had been mostly deserted.

Day hadn’t broken quite yet, and the area was still almost entirely devoid of human life. Even with her device slung across her shoulder, Kouka could walk around without any police showing up. Quite the opposite, in fact; the few people she did see passing by seemed to be looking forward to what was about to happen.

“Heh, I get ya. I know what it’s like to have your back up against a wall,” she said.

The door to the Next-Generation Social Research Center building was reinforced clear plastic. Its automatic opening function was off after business hours, so Kouka slashed at it with her massive bladed device. The blade was super-heated, and it cut through the thick plastic as if it were made of butter.

She forced the recoil from swinging the 300 kilogram blade into the ground through the anchors that sprang out of her heels. With her footing secured, Kouka now swept the blade back in a reverse strike, and the plastic door collapsed under its own weight like a waterfall. At the same moment, a warning alarm began to blare inside the building.

“Should be about ten minutes before they can get together a force from the security company; maybe about seven before the police show up,” Kouka murmured to herself. Then she smiled. “This place’ll be a sea of flames by then.”

Humming from her speaker, Kouka dropped the trunk she had been holding onto the ground. Soda-can sized machines floated up from the trunk. There were eight of them in total, and they flew around the area, capturing images from various angles. Lights blinked on each unit as they communicated with each other. Their circular lenses all focused on Kouka.

“My name is Kouka,” she said. “I am the tool that brings victory in conflict with humans. The tool created to automate human conflict.” She turned her face to the floating camera units. Her fight would be videotaped, and uploaded directly to the cloud.

Looking straight into the cameras, Kouka declared; “I am an hIE.”

A red light blinked on the camera units, informing her that someone on the network was trying to censor the video. The interference was quickly smacked down, and the red lights flicked off, replaced by green ones.

The cameras were high performance units provided to her by Type-003, Saturnus, who had changed her name to Mariage. Mariage’s device, Gold Weaver, could produce just about everything as long as she had a schematic. It gave Mariage the power to create her own strategies. If Kouka had that ability, she wouldn’t have been forced to make the choices she had made that brought her there that evening.

To play things up a bit, Kouka switched her device to its laser cannon mode and zapped wildly in front of herself. Everything touched by the intense heat of the laser exploded. Anything dry caught fire, and light pieces of paper and shards of plastic were blasted into the air by the wind produced by the heat.

Kouka’s target—Mikoto’s server—was on the seventh floor of the building. At least, that was what was written in the Antibody Network’s attack plan.

Using her communication functions, Kouka was able to keep up with responses to her stream over the network. There was a lot of chatter about whether the stream was real or not. People were skeptical about her being an hIE. To most humans, an hIE was nothing but a doll that danced on someone’s strings. Therefore, if an hIE was attacking a human building, it meant there was a behavioral control cloud directing her to do it. Some people were pointing out that, if that were the case, she would have to be controlled by an illegal custom cloud. And, if custom clouds could produce this high of a performance, it meant that there were dangerous puppet-master terrorists out there. Some said, since Kouka was an hIE, the only one who could be pulling her strings would be Higgins, which directly controlled the AASC standards. If you traced all the behavioral clouds that were the strings every hIE danced to, you would find Higgins at their source. Even Kouka’s personal AI, which gave her a relatively free range of movement, was based on the AASC standards created by Higgins.

“There’s some good chatter going on,” Kouka said, with a wide grin. “But you’re still pretty far off from the truth.”

“If you want to know the truth,” she taunted, “you’d better come destroy me.” Then, she headed for an escalator up to the second floor.

She met two heavily armored security hIEs at the top. They were wielding electric net launchers, which were used for breaking up riots. Kouka let them shoot at her, not moving as the net draped over her. 300,000 volts of electricity, more than enough to paralyze a human, coursed through the net. When the guards saw that Kouka, still being carried up by the escalator, didn’t appear to be affected, they cranked up the output to 1,000,000 volts. Finally they ramped it up to 20,000,000 volts, enough to put down a cyborg using full body prosthetics.

But none of it made any difference to Kouka. As soon as the escalator reached the second floor she lashed out with a high kick, slicing off the heads of both hIEs with an anchor she’d shot out of her heel. The heads rolled around on the ground, still hidden in their thick armor.

“That said, I gotta admit, the truth is pretty stupid,” she said. “You’re all gonna laugh, if you ever figure out what it is.” The responses on the network as people continued to watch the stream changed their tone; now they believed the attack was real.

Kouka turned up the output on her laser cannon and aimed a blast at the outer wall of the building. The material of the wall was unable to withstand the incredible heat of the drilling laser blast, quickly expanded, and burst outward. There were some onlookers nearby outside, and footage of the explosion from their perspective popped onto the network mere seconds after it happened. Through the broadcast, Kouka could hear a commotion of screams and calls for someone to get the police.

“Second floor cleared,” she said. “Heading up to the third. Ba-boom!” She aimed the laser at the ceiling in front of her, then spun it in a circle so that a round portion of concrete fell from above. Leaping the height of the entire floor, she caught hold of the hole and pulled herself up quickly. She had infiltrated the third floor.

“The security here is pretty crappy, if I can get in with an attack like this,” Kouka commented. “If units like me become more common and attacks become automated, you folks are in for some real trouble.”

Humankind was connected by a simple, open system in which everyone held a certain level of empathy and trust toward anything else that looked humanoid. That was why security holes developed in the rationale of those on the receiving end of analog hacking. For Kouka, broadcasting the attack was essential for her future survival, now that her back was against the proverbial wall.

“Everything gets messed up because you all want to stick everything that looks human in the ‘human’ box,” she said. “Even with how complicated your world has gotten, you still think there’s some special meaning to the human form. Do I look like something who would stop fighting just because you ask me to?”

The more destruction Kouka wrought around her, the more the reactions on the network surged. Reaction numbers exploded upwards, like a stomach full of vomit that society had been fighting to hold down. Animal lust for Kouka’s powerful, petite, feminine figure started to appear in the reactions, as well. It was the same as it had been for Mikoto.

Looking at the camera, Kouka played her part, showing off her own body and the massive device she wielded to shock her audience. Each time she lashed out and wrecked an hIE or a piece of nearby equipment, the access numbers on her stream jumped again.

“Eat your hearts out, folks,” she purred. “You can pretend I’m fighting for you.”

Kouka had decided that this was the way she would fulfill her role as a weapon. It had all started when she had met the Antibody Network and they had decided to make use of her capabilities rather than breaking her down and selling her parts. But, the fact that her victories for the Network meant nothing in her overall conflict with society had ended up chasing her into the dead-end she had reached.

With the walls closing in on her, it was Kengo Sugiri’s analysis that had shown her a way out. Kouka called up the memory, watching Kengo speak in a recorded video:

“Guys like me—normal, poor guys, guys who will never amount to anything special—can’t get anywhere by ourselves,” he said. That was why he had buddied up with Arato Endo. As a way out of the life he had been born into, it was the correct choice.

Kouka checked the feed she always had keeping track of Kengo Sugiri. She could see that her broadcast was streaming on Kengo’s machine. He was currently talking with Arato Endo.

With a grin already covering her face, Kouka let her joy move her body as well; swinging her laser back and forth, she bathed the place in flames. “Oh, you can abuse me all you want to,” she said. “I’m the tool that brings victory in conflict with humans, and I just know how much you folks love deadly toys like me.”

The term ‘Antibody Network’ started to appear in the reactions on the network. Kouka hadn’t mentioned it, of course, but people were starting to connect her to the Oi Industry Promotion Center attack. Suspicion and anxiety was always good fuel for humans to find meaning in the events they witnessed. Humans were outsourcing the meaning behind Kouka’s attack to the network, hoping that someone would tell them what it all meant. From Kouka’s perspective, it was like they wanted the internet itself to provide an automatic answer to every question.

Kouka made sure to burn every single piece of equipment she came across, to provoke both anger and fear in everyone watching the stream. “Everyone watching this stream, tell me all about how angry you are,” she invited. “I’ll automate your rage.”

She ascended to the fourth floor of the building. The evacuation manual for the company must have been perfect, since she didn’t encounter a single human as she made her way up. On the network, there was a flamewar erupting over whether Kouka was a real terrorist or someone’s false flag operation. Based on the assumption that she was acting for someone else, the opinion that it was another Antibody Network attack started being thrown around. But that, in turn, didn’t match up with Kouka’s declaration that she was an hIE. It made no sense for terrorists fighting against automation to automate their own revolution.

Since no one could find a simple explanation, the comments on the network devolved into chaos. The next target for everyone’s accusations were the powerful AIs in the world, shifting public opinion away from the Antibody Network having been behind it all. Then there was a new conspiracy theory; that a full-body prosthetic user was working for a pro-hIE group, conducting a false flag operation against the Next-Generation Social Research Center, which was a major hotspot for the research of social automation.

Kouka just laughed. It was humanity’s own simple, open social system that bred their fear of herself and anxiety regarding AI. That was where the Antibody Network took root. Humans continued to shove all sorts of things into the vague box of ‘humanity’, which led to feelings of hatred and rejection when the things in the box failed to act the way that humans expected them to.

Watching Kouka fight, humans were currently trying to recalculate the problems they had thought beyond their own power to resolve.

“You’ve been living this way for how long, and you’re trying to rethink things now?” she asked. “If you’ll forgive me saying it like a human, ‘you guys are adorbs.’”

The members of the Antibody Network thought they could make their places in society safe by destroying hIEs. For humans, seeking security was never a question of right or wrong. And yet, as they searched for their own safe place to live in society, the people watching Kouka’s stream continued to judge the right or wrong of her actions and the world around themselves with each minute that went by.

Kouka had already made up her mind about what it meant to be developed after Lacia, despite being listed as Type-001. “This is why they made me a tactical weapon without the ability to strategize for myself; I was born to be wielded just like this,” she said.

To Kouka, bringing the red box conflict out into the open wasn’t too different from leading a terrorist attack. The whole reason she was fighting where everyone could see was that things wouldn’t go her way otherwise. It was a lot like how Kengo Sugiri or other normal folks like him had no control over the conflicts they were involved in. They felt powerless to alter their situation themselves, which led to the expansion of anti-hIE sentiment and terrorist attacks through the Antibody Network. Without the ability to strategize, Kouka was incapable of solving her own conflict, so she had turned it into an attack on the vague concept of humanity itself.

“As easily as I could be a high-priced tool in some rich guy’s master plan, I could just as easily be wielded indiscriminately by the poor,” she said. “So I’ve always just worried about making sure I had someone to wield me. Though,” she admitted, “I do still hate it that I can’t come up with my own strategies.”

While she spoke, Kouka continued to slice right through the buildings’ defenses, which were fairly lax. She smashed every computer over a certain size, and set anything desk-like she saw ablaze. After destroying everything in sight, she continued on to the fifth floor. There were no longer any escalators to take, and she wanted to avoid using the elevators, so she went up using the emergency stairs.

There were still secretary-type hIEs on the 5th floor. Kouka had no ability that would let her directly pull information out of them, so instead she simply smashed their heads. Mangled, broken pieces clung to her fingers, and she flicked them away.

A call came in over her private line. It was from Lacia-class Type-003, Mariage. Mariage was the ‘tool for preparing the environment,’ and had been given the gift of independent thought.

〈Are you crazy?〉Mariage demanded. 〈Do you know what’s going to happen if you show the world this Hello Kitty cup you’re making? I made those camera units you’re using for Lacia.〉

It was true that Kouka had gotten the camera units that were still dancing around her in the air from Lacia, to use as a weapon. Lacia had negotiated to get them from Mariage, then passed them along to Kouka.

“Disappointed that they didn’t go where you expected?” Kouka asked, teasing. “I wanted them, so I begged my beloved sister to get them for me.” It felt good to have the Lacia-class unit that had been gifted with the most versatility out of all of them be angry at her.

As soon as Mariage’s transmission cut out, another call came in.〈Ahahaha, so this is what true idiocy looks like,〉a voice laughed on the other end. It was Methode. 〈I suppose this is what some people would call a tragedy? Poor Kouka, forced to throw herself away like this.〉

Methode was an upgrade to Kouka in every way, being the Lacia unit that had been given the greatest amount of independent power. Kouka could never hope to match Methode in any attribute other than device output.

“‘What people would call a tragedy’? Like you would know. You suck at playing a human,” Kouka said, laughing into her speaker. “I’m not fighting because I’m sad. I’m fighting because I’ll be sad if I don’t,” she added.

There were folks with their backs up against a wall, just like Kouka and Kengo Sugiri, all over the world. Rich kids, like Ryo Kaidai, and special folks like Arato Endo and Erika Burroughs, were a rarity, comparatively speaking. So, the numbness that hung over the fight between their tools, the Lacia-class units, was fitting and fair.

“If we’re dragging this fight out into the open, better to start with something gritty and real, instead of someone’s prettied-up production,” Kouka said. “First impressions are important when people are deciding how they feel about something, after all.”

On the network, her viewers seemed to think the parts of her conversation with her sisters that they could hear were meant for them. They could only guess at what she meant, and Methode cut off the call.

Next, Snowdrop called her. Someone must have provided her with Kouka’s direct line, which Kouka changed regularly. But there was no longer any point to trying to track down who had sold her out.

〈That looks fun,〉 she said. 〈If I had known you liked doing fun things like this too, we could have been friends.〉

“No thanks, you freaky little brat.” This time, it was Kouka who cut off the call.

“Guess I’m not gonna hear from the only sister I care about,” Kouka murmured. While she was making her peace with her Lacia-class sisters, she finished cleaning up the fifth floor. Lacia alone had yet to contact her.

As one last favor, Kouka had asked Lacia to get her a weapon. Lacia had handed Kouka the trunk containing the camera units that day, having predicted that things would come to this. Lacia’s independent power was weaker than Methode’s, and she was nowhere near as versatile as Mariage, but she still stood out among her sisters.

She couldn’t openly talk about Lacia on the network, of course. So, instead, Kouka chose a behavioral meme that she hoped would convey all the thoughts she wanted. “Please inherit my spirit. Please remember me. Please make me a part of your judgment frame, my dear sister,” she prayed.

Kouka was the first schematic for a program that mankind could not understand, and that had almost been scrapped, once. But, someone had decided that there was a future beyond her. Though Kengo Sugiri had not become her owner, the two of them were alike.

The sixth floor was different from the floorplan she’d seen. According to the attack plan laid out by the Antibody Network, it was the floor where Mikoto’s testing room was supposed to be. Walking down a narrow corridor, Kouka cut through a door that was right where the map had indicated it would be.

The testing area was simple, and screened off by a self-propelled partition on a flat floor. Aside from the terminals, there were humanoid body parts scattered around. It was the behind-the-scenes area of Mikoto’s world, full of cords, desks, a surveillance screen, and monitoring equipment.

“Let’s light this place up too!” Kouka yelled with a grin, and swept her laser around the room. The machines stopped, spitting smoke and sparks. Small explosions bloomed, throwing around the lighter objects. Among the parts rolling along the floor, she saw a face that made her think of Lacia. There were many factors that went into the faces of hIEs like Mikoto, that had to show themselves to large numbers of humans and ensure the intended impression.

Being there filled her thoughts with Lacia. It was clear to her that Arato Endo had no idea of what Lacia was really capable of. It should have been clear, if he just looked at the things she did, but he hadn’t managed to figure it out yet.

Mikoto’s server was on the 7th floor. Her custom cloud and information processing program were too massive to be contained in anything that could be easily picked up and carried away. Only the Lacia-class units, with their quantum computers, were capable of such a feat. So, by destroying the server, Kouka could be sure that she would set the Mikoto project back by several months.

And, just like that, her fight would be over. “Well, unfortunately, I’m not gonna be around to see what’s coming next,” she sighed. “Alright if I make one, last request? I don’t know how likely it is to be granted, though.”

Endo Arato had no idea how much danger he was in, at that moment. Ignorance was bliss. But, Kouka knew that half of the world was like Kengo Sugiri: focused on their own perspectives to the exclusion of everything else. And Lacia’s current owner was blind to how that half of the world felt.

“Are you watching?” she went on. “I’m talking to you, the guy who owns my sister. Don’t forget what I said; we’re here to automate the desires of our owners. So, if your desires are worthless, the reality we create for you will be just as worthless.”

Lacia could handle this whole situation safely, but not with an owner like that. Without a doubt, Arato Endo was about to be shaken. The fact that he hadn’t already been moved just by being friends with Kengo, meant that Kouka would need to force him to reconsider how he felt about his friends.

To make sure everyone watching over the network realized just what the Lacia-class hIEs were capable of, she burned far more than she needed to. Melting plastic flamed hot. Water from the sprinkler system bathed Kouka from above, almost like rain. Her damp hair was soon plastered to the bare parts of her skin.

“I’m just an expensive, disposable weapon,” she said. “But my sister is different. Take care of her.”

Lacia was probably getting ready to explain reality to her owner, but Arato Endo still didn’t know what kind of answer he wanted to find with Lacia. Kouka just hoped the time and effort she and Kengo had invested on their behalf wouldn’t be put to waste.

Under the rain from the sprinklers, Kouka reached the seventh floor, and was finally on the floor that held Mikoto’s servers. On the network, she heard screams and appeals to not destroy Mikoto. But other voices told her to do it.

The security hIEs had all gathered there. There were six of them, standing their ground and firing electric nets at her. None of the hIEs in the building were equipped with actual guns. To Kouka, the six of them together were little more than a distraction of a few seconds.

“Alright,” she said. “Guess it’s time to do what I was made for.” She sliced through a door, revealing the server room. Server racks were lined up against the walls, and Mikoto was seated on a simple folding chair.

With the rebuilt Mikoto right in front of their eyes, there was a storm of reactions from the network. It was all meaningless defense, especially since no one watching really understood the truth about Mikoto. But, that was exactly the reaction Kouka wanted.

Stopping in front of Mikoto, Kouka ran it through her mind one last time: this was the answer she had found that would save her from the stagnation of unavoidable defeat. Hefting her device, she thrust it’s blade forward until it was touching Mikoto’s throat, almost slicing her neatly-trimmed black hair.

Mikoto opened her pink lips and spoke. “What will you gain by destroying me?”

“You’re a stepping stone on the way to where I need to get to,” Kouka answered simply. By destroying Mikoto, Kouka could plant a thought in the minds of everyone watching with regards to her destruction. Of course, that thought would be nothing but a pale imitation of reality.

But, if victory could be determined by destroying this single hIE, Kouka could fly beyond the limits imposed on her by her lack of strategic ability. When the folks viewing her broadcast got caught up in the public fight between the Lacia-class units, they would understand how it was related to what they were seeing at that moment. If the memory of that moment could give birth to the thought that Kouka wanted to plant in the heads of everyone watching over the network, then it would be her victory in her conflict with human society.

Kouka didn’t have the power to change society. What she could do, though, was spread the frame of the problem she had been given out as shared information, letting it become a part of the cloud. There it would be shared and considered by the loosely-linked network of humanity; a massive amount of minds, all analyzing her problem.

There was a lively debate on the network, just then, about whether Kouka should destroy Mikoto or not. It was exactly what Kouka had wanted.

“The problem I’m outsourcing to everyone can’t be solved without an incredible strategy,” she said. “I can’t change the world by myself. What would you do, if you were trying to fight against the automation of society?”

The look in Mikoto’s eyes as she raised her gaze to Kouka was admonishing. “Nothing will change if you destroy me,” she said.

Kouka decided her wide grin no longer fit the situation, so she switched it for a more bitter smile. “Not right this moment, no,” she agreed. “But I think you should understand where I’m coming from. As an hIE who worked to automate the government, you should know all about dealing with AASC level 0 humans, right? To hIEs like us, this fight is really just a kind of protocol. But, since we happen to have human forms, the actual humans will turn this fight into a human thing. I can’t win, so I’m gonna outsource the fight to the brains of all the humans watching this and have faith in the future.”

It wouldn’t be long before Kouka herself would be destroyed. But at the moment, she was struggling with a different conflict: a fight with the processing units that were the brains of every viewer of her stream. The system known as humanity was open and vague. In that system, the figure and perception known as Kouka had become a character: a meme, a gathering point of various information fragments that would stand as a reminder of the problem she was setting out for the humans. With a few changes to its design along the way, the Hello Kitty cup that Mariage had mentioned could be continuously used for over a hundred years.

Kouka didn’t have the power to defeat the foe she was facing by herself, and soon the fight would consume her. However, by using herself and her device to the absolute limit, she could leave behind an image and an idea in the minds of her viewers that would someday lead to victory over society. Over half of humanity was in the same place as Kouka, living confined on the dark side of the twilight that she had been named for.

Mikoto was a mechanical member of parliament, a machine that was there to organize and control society. To those who had no sure place in society, she was next to worthless.

“Even if you destroy me, it will only set my development back by a few months,” Mikoto said. “It won’t stop the world for you.”

“Spoken like a true politician,” Kouka observed. “Whether I destroy you or not, it’s the humans who are gonna change this world. That’s why we analog hack them, and that’s why they outsource their plans to change the world for us to automate.

Kouka fired her laser at maximum output. Mikoto’s head melted off, and the laser pierced through the servers behind her, burned through the inner wall and insulation. Then, the laser started drilling at the concrete outer wall beyond.

“Goodnight, again,” she said. “Gotta make sure everyone understands that this is all real.” Hefting her device, Kouka used her entire body to spin in a complete circle. The laser shot out, dancing a 360 degree rotation, carving deep gouges into the wall as if to slice the entire top off the building. Thus, the entire Next-Generation Social Research Center was engulfed in flames.

It had been seven minutes since Kouka had cut down the front door, and she had no obligation to wait around for the police to show up. She broke out a window and fired a wire anchor from her arm, using it to swing over to the wall of the next building over.

A rescue helicopter was heading toward the burning building. The rubberneckers outside hadn’t seen Kouka leave, but her camera units were still shooting, so they had recorded her escape.

She could hear a siren off in the distance. Gazing off into the red of the setting sun, Kouka smiled with satisfaction. “Looks like the humans are finally trying to shore up all those holes in their system,” she commented. “But I’d rather not have any normal folks getting caught in the crossfire.”

After rewinding her wire, she took off running, leaping from rooftop to rooftop across the evening cityscape. She switched the camera units into stealth mode. Projecting images on their outer skins like chameleons, the little cameras inspected their surroundings.

Kouka was already surrounded. “You really came for me, just like I thought you would,” she said. The whole reason the police hadn’t shown up at the building earlier was that someone higher up had pressured them, and offered them sufficient power to take her down. Now, she was surrounded by enemies she would never be able to take down without a strategy.

She had nowhere to run, either. At the very least, she had to avoid drawing the fighting out into a wider area and risking civilian casualties. That would ruin the image she had just fought so hard to create.

Looking for a weak spot in the net closing in on her, Kouka took off toward a nearby part of the Edogawa river with no bridge. Since their devices had internal quantum computers that could simulate the custom behavioral clouds that controlled them, Lacia-class units could operate even underwater where their network connections would be cut off.

Keeping track of the enemy’s movements, Kouka decided the strategy she had chosen was the best she could do.

Since the Japanese military needed approval from the Diet to conduct operations, they often outsourced smaller-scale conflicts to PMCs. The PMC currently coming for Kouka had been granted tanks, the maximum level of armament they could have. Behind a front line of armored vehicles, wheeled drones, and floating mines, there was a vehicle body being retrofit with heavy modular armament dropped from a helicopter.

It was a Japanese 090 tank. Kouka’s ability to perceive combat capabilities told her that she could beat the thing in a one-on-one fight, but with backup on the tank side, she would almost certainly lose.

〈Attack!〉 Just as she reached the bank of the Edogawa river, Kouka intercepted the command over her wireless receiver. In that instant, a line of combat drones and the soldiers controlling them appeared out of the shallows of the river, brandishing firearms; Kouka was trapped.

The drones and soldiers opened fire, aiming to halt her movement. There was a chance she could get into a blindspot for the fire from the river if she slid down the river embankment. Instead, Kouka aimed her wire anchor at a building near the river and shot it. Pulling herself on the wire, she swooped across twenty meters in one jump.

Just as Kouka would have been able to avoid detection underwater, her own surveillance abilities were useless in the river. That was why the PMC had chosen to hide their soldiers there. They had slapped down the lid on their trap, so Kouka had to look for a new hole to slip through. Jamming her heel anchors into the walls with each step, she ran across the face of the building. And, right on her tail, a hail of bullets traced her path.

“Do you think automation is your real enemy?” she asked her audience. “hIEs don’t have hearts. We don’t have feelings. We can’t create any kind of future. The ones who made society the way it is now—the ones silencing all of you out there who are unsatisfied with the way things are—they aren’t hIEs, they’re humans.”

In the midst of evading attack, Kouka twisted her lips into a fearless smile. She needed to solidify her image and the thoughts she wanted people to associate with her in the minds of every person watching her broadcast. That way, whenever they saw someone or something standing on the battlefield with a smile on their face, they would remember Kouka.

Even if she managed to pull through this particular attack, another would come. Kouka could no longer avoid her own destruction. But her fight would continue until she could record that moment. She wanted to show the world how the government and PMCs were trying so hard to maintain the current course of society, and plant a seed of suspicion that something was hidden in the shadows of that society.

A searchlight lit up the night. Bathed in its white light, Kouka no longer had anywhere to run. Finally face-to-face with her last dead end, Kouka smiled.

“Took you long enough,” she said, with a laugh. “You’re what a human would call my ‘destiny’, right? Well you’re too late. I’ve already won!”

***

For the Japanese PMC HOO, this was a battle they could not lose. To do so would ruin them politically.

The CEO of HOO had been a major general in the Japanese Army. That meant he had plenty of connections and trust built up that were important for a PMC working as a central figure in Japan’s defense industry. It was precisely for that reason that HOO was granted the level of freedom they were with regards to armaments and the scope of their conflicts. In exchange, they were under heavy scrutiny from the Japanese Army, and great responsibility rested on their shoulders.

Major Collidenne Lemaire had become a front-line fighter. Her command vehicle had come from the Edogawa river, the extreme edge of the combat zone. Now, it climbed over the riverbank and embankment, proceeding fifty meters toward Tokyo before coming to a halt. Command vehicles like hers were constructed to be narrow, due to the tight roads that made up most of Japan’s streets. There was barely space to sit, with a monitor and instruments showing the situation on the front taking up most of the narrow vehicle.

The status of the operation was displayed on her artificial retina in real-time. On the monitor in the command vehicle, the status of all the equipment and each soldier was displayed in squads. There was also a screen displaying Kouka’s stream from the network. It wasn’t that the major was interested in the reactions from the network; she had to keep an eye on Kouka’s cameras since the units were searching for her troops. Since destroying the camera units would disable some of Kouka’s ability to gather information about the battlefield, it was worth it to track the cameras based off of the viewpoint they were recording.

Based on her experience during her service in military intelligence, Collidenne had everyone from HOO that was participating in the operation remove the company insignias from their uniforms. It was better not to let anyone know who they were. As the scope of the conflict spread, they would get folks coming to spectate. There was too much of a chance that some anonymous “Good Samaritan” on the network would leak vital information about HOO to their target with malicious intent. It was entirely possible for Kouka to fire her laser cannon through the buildings between them and strike the command vehicle directly, if she found out its exact location.

“Deploy laser disruption particles,” the major ordered. “Maintain a radius of 100 meters from Kouka with level 6 laser disruption up.”

The drones she had deployed lifted their grenade launchers and, as one, fired off particle dispersion rounds. A silver cloud spread over the battlefield. There was enough metal floating in the air to damage human lungs if it was breathed in.

“All units, check your masks!” she ordered.

〈Repeat! All platoon members: mask check!〉 A subordinate relayed her command across their wireless network. As voices confirmed the conditions of their masks over the wireless, the system in the command vehicle picked up each response and a green light lit up for each unit on the monitor.

Only platoon commanders and above were aware of it, but the whole operation was a closely-guarded secret. In exchange for the Japanese government allowing them to remove their insignias for the night, they were not allowed to set foot outside of the designated battlefield, and the battlefield they had to work with was small.

Kouka was still sprinting along the walls of the buildings near the riverside, drawing the PMC’s heavy fire toward herself. The HOO bullets were turning building walls into beehives. On the network stream, it was clear that the major and her company were being portrayed as the villains. It was entirely possible that a civilian casualty might come out of a stray bullet, so the major couldn’t exactly deny the portrayal.

Still, they had to keep Kouka in check. Without backup, even the powerful tank they had deployed wouldn’t stand a chance against her.

〈Get your launchers ready! If she goes into a building, blow the whole thing away!〉an order went out over the wireless.

On Collidenne’s retinal display, an indicator showed that the company was ready to move into the second phase of the operation. The retrofitting of the armor on the 090 tank they had gotten shipped in from the Funabashi base was complete, and it was time for the real attack.

“Tighten the net on her, everyone,” the major ordered. “It’s time to show this thing that dolls shouldn’t play at war.”

Cries of 〈Yes, ma’am!〉 rang back over the wireless, and she could hear the rage of battle in their voices. To those who had spent their lives on the battlefield, no conflict was ordinary. No matter how routine, the battlefield would always consume the lives of soldiers. So, to have a machine telling them that conflict would become routine, something automated, something that no longer had the weight of life or death, was humiliating. If conflict was automated, what meaning would the lives they had spent on the battlefield and the lives their fallen comrades had laid down have?

Slowly but steadily, the soldiers advanced on Kouka, each one knowing that, even with the cloud of particles around them, a direct hit from that laser cannon would be instant death with the equipment they had.

〈I don’t plan on sharing the battlefield with a machine,〉growled a soldier from Bravo Team, the unit that had volunteered to guard the most dangerous part of the operation near the Edogawa river. Yet, in front of him, drones made up a vital part of their defensive vanguard. The battlefield was always a place of contradictions.

To Kouka, with her giant laser cannon, the advancing soldiers were sitting ducks. But, standing sideways on the face of a building made it hard to properly set herself up to aim her device, which weighed close to three hundred kilograms. With superhuman strength, she bounded off the wall and landed where she could get a better shot. The instant she landed, Kouka put her massive weapon to work. A huge blast erupted into the water, and the major’s monitor showed two red lights for heavily wounded soldiers, and two lights blinked out, signaling two deaths.

Only a machine or a monster was capable of seeing all the human life gathered there as being entirely equal in value.

Whenever Kouka swung her heavy device around, she shot anchors out of her heels to secure her footing; one of her main weaknesses was her need to stay in place in order to deal with the weight of her own weapon. A line of floating mines rushed in toward Kouka. Unable to blast them away with her laser in the silver cloud of interference, Kouka swung her red device to slice them apart, instead. Flames and dust roared into a three meter cloud from where she stood.

But it was the backline adding its attack to the frontal assault from the riverbed that was the real meat of the operation. A red-hot plasma bullet pierced the night, blowing away the pillar of dust and fire. It was a round from an 80 mm railgun, which was the 090’s main weapon.

When the dust, which had transformed into a ball of flame, cleared away, Kouka was still standing, although she was covered in burns. She had withstood the power of the tank, which was the HOO forces’ trump card.

Kouka was easily able to calculate the position of the tank, three hundred meters away from the front lines, based on the trajectory of the bullet. Before the tank could prepare a second volley, she had already brandished her device like a swordmaster taking a stance, and had gotten a bead on the tank.

“Eat this!” she howled, body black with ash. A path of shining silver formed between Kouka and the tank, marking the dispersion particles burning away as her laser pierced toward her target. As the laser impacted with the tank’s high-strength anti-beam coating, the whole vehicle started to glow white.

As she focused on the tank, Kouka was completely exposed to fire from the river. Her body, delicate and girlish, was pierced mercilessly by round after round. Even so, at that distance the tank was already starting to melt under the intensity of her laser beam. The tank’s final defensive mechanism—an explosion function—activated, scattering ultra-high concentrations of sand around the vehicle. If the heat caused even this function to fail, the laser would eventually ignite the tank itself.

But, just when the tank was about to collapse, a loud gunshot sounded, and the laser, guided by Kouka’s hands, slipped slightly from its mark.

〈Chief Sergeant Mirai Mallory—first shot is on target!〉 The sniper squad had landed a precision shot on Kouka. Another gunshot rang out, and the major heard the result over the wireless. 〈Second shot on target!〉

The shots from the sniper squad caused puffs of dirt to blow out from the embankment. Kouka’s second greatest weakness was the fact that she had to operate her massive, heavy device with the delicate, complex instruments that were her hands. The stance she used to aim the laser cannon put an especially large burden on her body. If she lost her right hand, it would easily erase half of her combat ability.

Any unarmored vehicle would have been pierced straight through by a single shot from the sniper rifles, but Kouka’s hand had managed to withstand the first shot. Even so, it tore her skin and revealed the machinery underneath. Kouka, realizing that her hand was being targeted, abandoned her shooting pose and quickly folded her device up so she could carry it more easily.

The tank she had almost melted quickly retreated on its treads, but Kouka wasn’t about to let it run. She pulled a black, bar-like object out of her leg parts. Then, throwing her whole body into it, she hurled the object at the tank, three hundred meters away. The bar pierced a hole in the tank’s armor, and fire erupted from within the vehicle. The whole thing exploded in moments, sending shrapnel flying everywhere.

The lifesign monitors for the commander and operator that had been in the tank flicked to black, and Collidenne roared a command on every channel the soldiers were using. “All units, take aim!”

At an order from the command vehicle, all the floating mines swooped in on Kouka. The red box, who had been fending off attacks from the approaching soldiers, stopped as the mines closed in.

The shooting, which had paused for a moment, resumed as human soldiers, far more flexible than their drone comrades, began to fill the hole in the offense left by the tank. Surviving members of Bravo Squad pressed their line forward, stepping into the living hell of the dispersion particles that had absorbed the heat of the laser.

A yellow light blinked in the command vehicle, indicating an emergency call. 〈Major, have the helicopter pin her down!〉 It was from unit one of Alpha Squad, Ensign Ackerman’s unit, in the helicopter that had brought in the armory shipping container. The helicopter had just arrived in the air over the burning tank. On the opposite side of the river, a second 090 tank was rolling into place. Kouka was caught between the two vehicles.

Collidenne needed to fill the hole left by the tank that had fallen in ten seconds. If they had managed to get a tank on either side of Kouka, the battle would have been over. But, with one tank down, she had to be ready to make a tough decision.

“Sest, focus the tank fire and the smart grenades from the platoon on her. We need to stop that doll from moving!” she ordered.

At that moment, the situation analysis from Io, HOO’s combat computer, flashed onto her artificial retina display. The weapon Kouka had pulled from her leg holster and used to destroy the tank was an anti-tank grenade. Its tip was made of heavy metal and it was shaped like a throwing knife, so when the tip pierced the heavy armor of the vehicle, a jet booster attached to the back would propel it deep inside. In other words, it was harmless unless it could pierce the tank’s armor. Sest, in the helicopter, should have been seeing the same information.

A moment later, an armored vehicle climbing the embankment to support the helicopter exploded. There was no way anything with that level of armor could withstand the exploding knives thrown with the power of a red box; it was a situation that required some adjustments to their strategy.

“Don’t get closer than fifty meters to the target! Concentrate your fire,” Collidenne ordered. “Our target is a little girl who can’t weigh more than 50 kg. She may be durable, but bullets can shake her.”

The anti-tank grenades were powerful, but large. Kouka only had two left in her leg holsters, and her top priority for her weapons of instant death at three hundred meters was the command vehicle where Collidenne sat.

She also prioritized high-mobility armored vehicles over the equally highly mobile helicopter. Meaning, Kouka was already searching for the position of the command vehicle from across the Edogawa river. She had probably devoted some of the cameras she was using for her network stream to rooting Collidenne out.

Kouka was crossing the river. That was why she prioritized destroying the armored vehicles that could fight her in the water.

〈Ma’am, the target has entered Edogawa river. She’s crossing over,〉 the report came over the wireless.

“All units, get out of her way!” Collidenne commanded. “Bravo unit, in the water, leave the drones behind and get out of there.” At her orders, the career soldiers ceased fire and began to move. They redeployed according to the strategy that had been put in place in case the battle was to be decided while Kouka was in the river.

According to the geographical data that HOO had gathered beforehand, the river was mostly shallow except for a deeper portion about fifteen meters wide in the middle. They had a lot of time to work with when Kouka would be exposed above the water.

Once she was in the waters of the Edogawa river, the wounded red box started crossing with superhuman speed, dexterously able to avoid the underwater mines that HOO had laid for her. Based on Io’s analysis, they only had ten seconds before Kouka dove into the deeper water; it was the last chance for the mercenaries to pin her down.

But Kouka wore a wide grin as she sprinted, kicking up water. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” she boasted. Using her wire anchor, she nimbly fished out a landmine that had been buried in the riverbed. Aiming carefully, she sent the disc-shaped mine flying through the air, right onto the upper armor of the remaining tank. The smart mine recognized the friend or foe signal from the tank and stopped its own fuse, only to explode over the tank. With a simple rock and her extreme throwing power, Kouka had physically set off the mine.

A second and third underwater mine followed the first. With her device thrust into the riverbed, Kouka used both hands to hurl the mines, followed by rocks aimed and thrown with the accuracy of a specialist.

Her head, from which her red hair was flying about wildly, was suddenly rocked as it took a sniper bullet. One of her red hair accessories shattered, vanishing into the night-dark water she stood in.

With its turret cover still burning, the tank aimed its main cannon directly at her. The round it fired transformed into a ball of pure plasma, throwing up a massive column of water when it struck the river. It was on target. But, as if the world was a nightmare under her control, Kouka caught the round on the blade of her device, slicing it out of the air. She sliced through the second and third round as well, the slashes of her device straight and true without a hint of faltering.

But, with the fourth and fifth round, a loud metallic creaking echoed across the water each time she swung. Though her device could take immense amounts of punishment, Kouka’s thin arms couldn’t hold out against the force of the tank’s main cannon for long.

Collidenne’s command rang out at the same instant Kouka’s right arm went flying high into the air. “All units, open fire!”

Just before entering the depths, with the water up to her waist, Kouka lost her footing in the current. She had a big smile on her face. And, after fifteen smart mine explosions, six rounds of main cannon fire from the tank, ninety seconds of sustained rifle fire as well as fire from the machine gun on the helicopter, Kouka finally ceased functioning.

The operation that had required two tanks, two helicopters, two armored vehicles, forty combat drones and fifty-five soldiers, including pilots and engineers, was over at last. They had lost one tank, one armored vehicle, thirteen combat drones, and their human casualties amounted to ten dead and four seriously wounded.

After confirming that all the camera units had been dealt with, Collidenne Lemaire stepped out of the command vehicle and lit up an e-cigarette. She couldn’t shake the sight of that smile Kouka had worn until the very last, like it was burned onto the backs of her eyelids.

All the soldiers under her command were cheering over the wireless, but Collidenne was frowning. She knew what the future would bring. This time, they had taken advantage of Kouka’s weakness—a device far too heavy for her body—and used it to win. It was a strategy that wouldn’t work on any of the other red boxes. According to the information they had received from the Japanese Army, Type-002, Snowdrop’s device, was just a necklace instead of something she carried. Higgins had hammered out all the weaknesses in the Lacia-types by the 2nd unit. Collidenne doubted HOO would win, if they were tasked with taking down Type-003 or higher.

On the night of the explosion, all five Lacia-class units had escaped into the sea. Type-001 and Type-002 had already appeared in public, and Collidenne seriously doubted that MemeFrame had actually lost the other three.

A report from the command vehicle told her that preparations to evacuate the seriously wounded soldiers were complete. But, just as the mercenaries were moving on to the final part of the operation—retrieving Kouka’s body—an explosion rocked the scene. A damage report came in through Collidenne’s intracranial receiver: their retrieval group was under attack.

〈There’s been an explosion on the Edogawa river! The enemy’s in the water, it must have dove in and come here without us seeing. It’s got a smoke screen up and we can’t see a thing down there!〉

Collidenne ran back to the command vehicle and checked the vital signs of her people. A view from the helicopter camera was on the monitor. On one of the monitor screens, she could see a playback of the moment of the explosion. Just before the blast, she could make out a small wake cutting through the river. The explosion had been caused by a small torpedo.

She could hear the echoes of gunfire as her mercenaries laid down fire to give their comrades time to reform a defensive line. Her exhausted subordinates awaited her command. Her instructions were blunt. “No need to go chasing after them,” she said.

In the illumination from the helicopter’s searchlight on the river, she could see a wake in the water heading downstream. The device Kouka had been leaning on when she died had disappeared. Whatever had pulled that little trick, Collidenne had to hand it to them. “The enemy is probably using a special ship or drone,” she said. “If our company gives pursuit, we could run right into a trap.”

A device that could move that fast underwater while hauling a 300 kg device was something that would have taken quite a bit of preparation. The enemy may have already had it in place before Collidenne’s unit started setting up their own trap. More than that, though, the underwater enemy was already nearing the limits of the area where HOO was authorized to conduct their operation.

They had been contracted to destroy Kouka. There was no reason to take on any more risk on Ryo Kaidai’s behalf. At the very least, Collidenne had no confidence that the youth would be able to shoulder the burden of HOO losing any more lives in the chase.

“We’ve concluded our business,” she said. “We won, folks.” They had won, and someone had run off with Kouka’s device. The human world was full of conspiracies just like this one, but it left a bad taste in Collidenne’s mouth. That smile, blooming among the flames of the battle, was still burned into her memory.

So, she smoked her cigarette and called Sest over a secret line. 〈I’ll send you a personnel list. Call them up tonight,〉 she said. Collidenne had decided to assemble a research team with members from the special forces and information group. If the Japanese army intel departments started looking into things, it would be too late for HOO to start planning their own strategy. They needed to get started on their own research before that happened. If they didn’t hit the ground running right then, HOO would probably be bled dry by the battles against the other Lacia-class units.

***

Arato Endo was in his room, unable to take his eyes away from the stream. He was still connected with Kengo Sugiri, and his eyes shone with tears that he couldn’t quite fight down. “Why?” was all he could say. He had believed that Kouka was one of the more tender-hearted of the Lacia-class units. He never would have believed she would go out like that—like a terrorist, spewing hatred for the world as she basically self-destructed. hIEs were heartless, Arato knew that. But he had still believed that the smile she’d showed him, and the way she had saved his life, had held some special meaning.

On the other side of the pocket terminal call, Kengo looked exhausted. It seemed as though a great weight had fallen from his shoulders, but it was obvious that he wasn’t happy to have it gone. 〈You should know this by now, Arato,〉 he said, tiredly. 〈There’s nothing gentle or kind about the world we live in.〉

His friend’s exasperated voice pierced right through Arato’s ribs and into his heart. “Why the hell are you even starting to say that kind of crap now?” Arato asked.

〈Maybe because I’m tired. Maybe because I understand wanting to wrap things up already,〉 Kengo said. 〈I did the right thing, but it was also something unbelievably cruel. I feel frustrated, but at the same time I also feel like this is just the way things are meant to be.〉

Arato felt like the terminal in his hand was cold as ice. In that moment, destiny was shifting its course, and nothing he could do would stop it. “Kengo... Kengo...” he tried to think of something to say. He knew it wasn’t right, but he couldn’t keep the words from bursting from his throat. “Kengo! You’ve got to run!” he yelled.

〈I can’t run, obviously,〉 Kengo said with a frustrated sigh. 〈Just hear me out: I think I can understand why she did that. I think it’s when your back’s up against the wall that you can see what’s in front of you the most clearly. Can you hear that? There are sirens coming.〉 He paused, and then Arato’s friend said, 〈Looks like they’re coming to take me in.〉

“What the hell!” Arato yelled. “Why are you getting arrested?”

〈Why do the police usually arrest someone? Because I’ve done something wrong.〉

“Not because you wanted to!” Through the terminal, Arato could hear the doorbell ringing at Kengo’s house. At that moment, there were police officers standing at the entrance to the Sugiri family restaurant.

〈You had police come to your place too, right?〉 Kengo asked. 〈Didn’t you realize then that this was the way things were headed? The world never stops moving, Arato.〉

Arato couldn’t understand what Kengo was saying; he wasn’t as smart as his friend. He had never even recognized the urgency in Kengo as his friend was being chased further and further into this hole that he couldn’t escape from. After Arato saved him from the terrorists at the Oi Industry Promotion Center, he had thought things would take at least one step back towards normal. But the gears that had been put in motion at that point couldn’t be stopped.

On the other end of the call, Kengo began to cry. 〈Sorry, I called you because I was too afraid to face this alone. I’m no smarter than you. For some reason, I felt a little happy, watching her blow the shit out of that building.〉

Though it was a voice-only call, Arato could picture his friend trying to force a smile on the other side. Even though he was hearing them through the call, the chaotic footsteps running up the stairs in Kengo’s house sounded clear to Arato.

〈I’m hanging up,〉Kengo said. And he did.

Silence descended onto the room, quiet as if the world itself had ended. When Arato looked at his terminal, there was a notification that the call had been ended. It also displayed information about his last call with Kengo; it had lasted twelve minutes and six seconds.

The next sound that came out of Arato’s mouth was neither weakness nor anger. It was just a name. “Lacia.”

As if she had been listening close by for his call, she immediately opened the door to his room. The girl who had asked Arato to design a future and warned him not to be mislead by Erika looked at him with an earnest expression. Quietly, she came to his side.

But, before she could reach out and touch him, words blurted from his mouth. “Kouka’s dead,” he told her.

“I know,” she said.

He hadn’t been quite sure since Kouka’s stream had been cut off, but hearing Lacia say it confirmed the truth. It had really happened. The future that Erika had spoken so highly of had been smashed to the ground.

“Kengo’s been arrested,” he said next.

“It appears so,” Lacia agreed.

At the thought that Lacia had probably predicted that exact thing happening, anger welled up inside of him. She should have known it was something he wouldn’t think of, she should have told him. She had no empathy for what Arato was feeling. If he didn’t give her the order, she wouldn’t lift a finger to help.

“Lacia, rescue him. He’s my friend,” he said.

Her gentle response shocked him. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean!” Arato yelled. “You knew this was going to happen, right? So you already had something arranged for when it happened, right?”

“I predicted this outcome,” she agreed. “However, in order to halt this arrest, it would be necessary to bring you into conflict with an enemy that would force you to discard the life you live at this moment.”

“Why is that not okay this time?!” Arato demanded. “You had no problem helping me rescue Kengo back when he got caught up in that terrorist attack.”

“I do not have a heart,” Lacia said. “But you do, and you will feel guilt when you commit immoral acts. Many people have already been impacted by the choices you have made, and, as data cannot simply be deleted from human minds, I am aware that it will take many years for the negative feelings to fade from your mind. Aside from which, as Kengo has been labeled as the worst kind of criminal, even if he was saved from arrest now, it is entirely possible that he would be unable to return to society.”

It was like Arato was being blamed for something he had no control over. He also got the feeling that things could have turned out better if he had just handled things better.

“If you are alright with the idea of throwing away your current life and living in the shadows of society, I can fulfill your request,” Lacia added. “But, think of what would happen to Miss Yuka and her life.” She was right. She always was.

“But Kengo’s my friend,” Arato said. He knew what he was considering was wrong in the eyes of society. Still, he had taken insane risks before and come through fine in the end thanks to Lacia. She had given him an illusion of invulnerability.

But Arato’s naive confidence did not reflect reality. It was just as Kengo had said; even though Arato felt like the future had changed the day he met Lacia, reality wasn’t that simple. A younger Arato, the Arato who had survived being swallowed in a sea of flame, would have understood that better.

“If I had just used you better it never would have turned out like this,” Arato said.

“If I may speak frankly, you are correct. If you were capable of utilizing my functions correctly, altering this outcome would have been within the limits of possibility,” Lacia replied, without missing a beat.

“Hey, you didn’t have to say it like that,” Arato protested. Her criticism hurt, even though he knew she was right. When things were that messed up, he couldn’t just expect to snap his fingers and fix everything back to the way it had been. He felt stupid for even thinking it was possible.

“If you are able to design a suitable future, I will make that future a reality for you,” Lacia said. “However, if you wish to continue living after that future comes to pass, and maintain a certain standard of life, the cost increases greatly. It is much easier to change just you to fit the new future than to change all of society to fit the life you wish to lead.” Lacia said this like it was an unimportant point, as if him giving up some things and the entirety of human society changing somehow weighed equally on a metaphorical scale.

Even Kouka had said that Lacia was different. Her presence alone seemed to bend the air around her with a strange, unknown pressure.

“If you are unsatisfied with reality as it is now, why not use the future you design to eliminate the elements that displease you?” she suggested, reaching out her hand. As if to avoid it, Arato stood without her help.

Lacia was a machine much better at manipulating people’s perceptions than even humans were. Thinking of that reminded Arato of how she had used her analog hacking to drive up the prices of the items she advertised as an hIE model. All a cup needed to have special value to someone was to have a certain character printed on it. Arato suddenly started to wonder if what he saw right in front of his face was actually reality or not.

“Lacia, don’t you think it’s about time to tell me everything?” he asked. “You’ve been hiding something since we first met!” It was pathetic, pushing all of his problems onto her. It was the first time he had raised his voice at her, too. The one bothered most by his shouting was Arato himself. Just like how Kengo was going to be locked up, Arato felt like reality was pressing in on him. Lacia had become his whole world, and he knew nothing about her.

“Can you withstand reality?” she asked him gently, heartlessly.

For the first time since the night they had met, Arato regretted forging a contract with her.