Upon their entering the prison grounds, a security Amicus softly tried to convince them to turn back, but Echika flashed her ID card to enter the parking lot. As soon as she got out of the share car, the incessant snow blocked her field of vision. It was already starting to pile up. Echika could only pray the motorway wouldn’t close before they took Lexie into custody.
“How are you going to take the professor out of here?” Harold asked.
“We’ll have to be smart about it and convince both her and the guards. Leaving her isn’t an option.”
Since Lexie had been able to openly participate in the meeting, the prison was clearly under the control of the Alliance. They couldn’t afford to leave her here. The thought alone was enough to remind Echika of how dire the situation really was.
Echika and Harold entered the dark entrance hall, where a single prison guard stood at attention. He glanced at them with drowsy eyes and instantly said, “I’ll show you the way,” before turning on his heels. Echika exchanged dubious glances with Harold. They’d never called ahead and informed the penitentiary of their arrival, and of course, they weren’t personally acquainted with this guard, either.
In other words…
“What about the improvements to the thought manipulation system? You started the testing phase on it, yes?”
“It’s going well. Feels like I have a kingdom of my own to rule over.”
Echika got chills. Did that mean the entire penitentiary was being used to facilitate thought manipulation system experiments?
“That explains things, honestly.” Harold nodded. “When I was going through maintenance the other day, the professor was online. She told me she got along with the guards.”
“Right…” A bitter taste lingered in Echika’s mouth. “That much was true. She’s getting along with them swimmingly.”
After having lost Farasha Island as an experimentation ground, the Alliance must have decided to use the penitentiary as their next site. That would explain how Lexie was able to get an online environment. And since the other inmates weren’t allowed to remove their isolation units, did that mean she was only experimenting on the guards?
This was so much to take in that it felt like there was a constant buzzing in her ears. Why was it that everywhere they went seemed to be firmly under the control of the Alliance?
“Investigator Hieda.”
“I’m fine.” Echika shook her head, trying to regain her composure. “What?”
“If it’s all right with you, would you let me speak to the professor alone?” Harold was almost frighteningly calm. “The Alliance has likely predicted what we’ll do, so we can’t stay here for long even if we keep our GPS positions offline. I’ll keep my conversation brief and get her to follow me.”
Echika glanced at the Your Forma’s time display. It had been two hours since she’d logged out of the meeting. Harold was right—the Alliance had probably started a counterattack, and he was much more proficient at negotiating than she was.
“I’ll keep watch at the visiting room door, then. How long do you need?”
“Five minutes will do.”
The two nodded to each other and followed the guard.
The tasteless visiting room was reminiscent of a deserted cafeteria. As Harold stepped inside, the guard closed the door behind him. The LED ceiling lights were mostly out, casting a heavy gloom over the rows of tables. Only the table closest to the center of the room was lit up, as if under a spotlight shining down on an actor.
“—And here I was, expecting Investigator Hieda to come in.”
Sitting under that light was Professor Lexie Willow Carter, resting her chin against her hand. Her bright brunette hair looked black under the poor lighting. Her prisoner’s uniform bared her neck, where the choker-type network isolation unit she’d had on the last time he’d seen her was now removed. In other words, she had no intention of even keeping up the act anymore.
“I had her wait outside.” Harold glanced at the guard. He was standing against the wall, a vacant look in his eyes, and he didn’t seem inclined to speak at all. “I thought I could convince you by myself.”
“What, did you assume I would tell Echika something she doesn’t need to know about your emotional engine? You’re overthinking things.”
Lexie gestured toward the chair across from her with a jerk of the chin, so Harold approached it and took a seat. Once again, he faced his mother with an expression that was the very image of unhappiness. Her night-colored eyes fixed on him from behind her silver-rimmed glasses. As always, there wasn’t a trace of guilt or conflicted emotion in her gaze.
Harold had realized a long time ago that she had long since discarded all semblance of ethics. But he always thought this stemmed from her partiality toward robotics, and he believed she didn’t harbor any real lust for intellectual crimes.
But if she was part of the Alliance, then his evaluation of her was wrong.
“I didn’t expect Greg would slip away from Totoki, being the dumb oaf that he is… But what really surprised me was Investigator Hieda masquerading as him. No one could even tell the difference!” Lexie chuckled, amused. “Steve’s skills are as impressive as ever.”
“When did you join the Alliance?” Harold cut to the chase.
Even with his emotional engine curtailed, there was a hint of scorn to his voice. He placed his right hand on the table, while stuffing his left hand—where he kept his wristwatch wearable terminal—into his pocket. He’d activated its recording application, just in case, and he needed to keep it out of Lexie’s sight.
“Oh, don’t glare at me like that. I’ll blab. No point in hiding it anymore anyway.” She shrugged like a child being scolded. “After I was incarcerated here, Talbot approached me to invite me into the Alliance. Though apparently, he didn’t want to, and the higher-ups had to twist his arm into doing it.”
His higher-ups—in other words, the still unknown ringleaders of the Alliance.
“Who are the ringleaders?”
“You know I can’t answer that,” she said, scoffing. “I’ve never met them.”
Was she telling the truth? “Why did the ‘higher-ups’ want you?”
“They needed a skilled technician. They’re trying out all sorts of things, not just the thought manipulation system.” Given how the Alliance won over Farasha Island’s investors, this did stand to reason. “And since I have to slog through this fifteen-year sentence, well, it makes sense I’d go along for the ride, doesn’t it? It’s suffocating here—the work is monotonous, and the people are boring.”
“So you made this place your ‘kingdom’ to keep yourself entertained in prison?”
“Only recently. At first, the Alliance had me create a defensive cocoon for Mnemosynes, and I was focused on that. You heard about it in the meeting, right? The Mnemosyne bulwark.”
This was what the Mnemosyne muddling program installed in Talbot and Greg was called; Harold’s theory about it being a unique defense mechanism wasn’t off the mark. But even so.
“Professor, your field is robotics.”
“Well, I’m a genius, so I can handle anything.” Her explanation came across not as frivolous bragging but as an attempt to dodge the question. “Thanks to you guys messing things up at Farasha Island, improving the thought manipulation system became a priority, and I was relegated to that project.”
“And they turned this penitentiary into your new testing ground?”
“That was probably their idea, yes. A nice closed space, with no one looking in from the outside.”
Her words were fluent and indifferent, but something felt off to Harold. If Lexie had really helped the Alliance to escape the tedium of this place, she’d have broken out the moment she had the guards obeying her every word. But she hadn’t done that, which felt oddly uncharacteristic of her.
“Were the bulwark and the thought manipulation system really that interesting to you?”
Lexie raised her brows. “What do you mean?”
“You’re selfish and self-indulgent. You won’t take on work that doesn’t intrigue you.” Harold tried to read Lexie, peering into the face of the “mother” he’d never been able to analyze. “What’s so appealing about this? As far as I know, you’re not the kind of person who would derive pleasure from controlling people. Humans are not Amicus, and you care nothing for them.”
“People can change.” Lexie’s smile gradually melted away. “Oh, but yes… Now I remember. I always did hate this part of you.”
Lexie languidly took off her glasses and leaned against her chair. Unusually enough, she seemed to be choosing her next words carefully. The gaze of her upturned eyes felt utterly bottomless.
Silence. All he could hear was the distant hum of the air conditioning.
She was hiding something, he was sure of that, but he couldn’t read into what it was. Much like Echika, he’d never been able to fully understand Lexie, but this time, he couldn’t come up anything approaching a conclusion.
Was he becoming even more of a useless machine? Or was he overlooking something his system couldn’t possibly predict?
“By the way…how’s it going suppressing your emotional engine?”
Lexie put her glasses down on the table and blatantly changed the subject. Harold operated the terminal in his pocket and paused the recording.
“If you really decide that you don’t want your emotional engine, come to me and ask to have it removed again.”
What she’d told him the other day replayed in his memory.
“I don’t need your help, for the time being.”
“Oh, don’t get all stubborn on me.” Her white teeth flashed between her lips. “If I had a mirror here, I’d get you to see exactly how you look. It’s clear from your eyes that you’re trying to get me to talk. A machine with perfect control over its emotions wouldn’t make a face like that.”
It was a petty provocation. He could tell, to an irritating degree, that he wasn’t capable of fully suppressing his emotional engine. Ever since returning to the investigation, he’d been persistently trying to conduct himself like a mass-produced Amicus. To feel nothing, to think nothing, and to simply carry out necessary tasks.
And that had resulted in disaster.
The first time it happened was when Kai temporarily abducted Echika in the TFC. Once he realized she was taken hostage, his grip on the emotions he’d kept so thoroughly suppressed momentarily slipped. And because his thought processing was so terribly delayed, he’d ended up pushing Bigga away when he hadn’t intended to.
It got worse when he started working alongside Echika again. No matter how many times he would rewrite the code for his emotional engine, it would automatically repair and express itself against his will.
It felt like his entire core had been creaking and groaning this whole time. Still, to the vast majority of onlookers, his behavior hadn’t seemed unusual yet.