“Grr... I said, don’t move!” said Murat, stepping farther back, still using Ronnie as a shield. Once he reached a gravestone large enough to hide behind, he pointed the grenade launcher at them. He was a little over ten meters away, probably figuring it was a safe distance from them, but still close enough to land a hit with the grenade launcher.
Just as I anticipated, thought Tessa, He’s going to try to shoot from there.
“You’ve humiliated me for the last time,” Murat yelled. “I’ll take you all down!”
《I see...》 Al started to say, just as Murat fired the grenade at him. The round went flying with a pleasant plunk, striking the Alastor right in its central mass... and that was it. The grenade just bounced off Al and spun through the air, trailing smoke before falling to the ground... where it simply went silent.
“Huh? What?! Hey!” While Murat stared in confusion, Ronnie stamped as hard as he could on the other man’s foot. Murat’s grip loosened in pain and Ronnie dashed off. By that point, Al had already gotten in close. Tessa found herself closing her eyes, but she still heard the awful crunch of the Alastor’s fist breaking his nose.
“It’s kind of like a safety mechanism—the grenades won’t detonate unless they’re a far enough distance from the launcher. That’s why it hit but didn’t explode, right?” Ronnie asked, using Murat’s own belt to bind the collapsed man’s hands behind him.
“Yes,” said Tessa. “From fifteen meters or more it would be dicey, so I wouldn’t want to test it, but... Really, Ronnie, I’m impressed that you know so much about grenades.”
“I use grenade launchers a lot in games, so I looked them up out of curiosity,” he told her. “I’m more surprised a girl like you knows about them, Tessa.”
“Oh, well...”
“So, anyway...” said Ronnie, looking at the Alastor. The two-meter-tall robot was pulling the unconscious hooligans into one place. “What is that thing? As an innocent child dragged into all this chaos, I feel like I’m owed an explanation.”
Tessa wasn’t sure how much to tell him. Of course, she felt bad about having put him in danger, but she worried that telling him too much would just make more trouble for him.
“It’s okay. I won’t tell anyone,” he promised.
“You really won’t?”
“I really won’t. So tell me.”
“When you urge me on that enthusiastically, it makes it harder to trust you...” said Tessa.
“Aw, c’mon,” Ronnie replied, looking genuinely disappointed.
Tessa just smiled at him. “I’m kidding. He’s my dear friend, and Bani’s only son.”
“Huh?”
Al finished bringing the unconscious men together and said, 《Colonel. Shall I take care of the unexploded ordnance?》
He’s gone back to saying “colonel” in the chaos, Tessa realized. She didn’t want to object and open a new can of worms, though. So instead, she just said, “Yes, please.”
《I’ll detonate it over there. Keep your heads down, just in case.》 Al picked up the grenade lying on the ground and walked to the outskirts of the graveyard.
Ronnie watched him go. “Hey,” he said, “what did he mean by ‘colonel’?”
“It’s like a nickname,” Tessa said dismissively. “Don’t worry about it.”
“But this morning, you said your friends call you Tessa.”
“Ah ha ha...” She laughed uncomfortably as Al stepped outside of the graveyard. He threw the undetonated grenade on an arc down an uninhabited path, took aim with the gun mounted in his right arm, and fired.
There was a deafening explosion. Smoke rose beyond the treetops. Tessa knew that Al’s fingers probably weren’t dexterous enough to disarm a grenade, so he’d had to use more forceful means to neutralize it.
Al then returned to Tessa with the swagger of someone who’d taken out the trash. 《It’s disposed of.》
“Well done,” she praised him. “I need to talk with these people about what to do with the guns, then acquire fuel... and talk with the chief about a few things.”
《I suspect my presence could cause trouble, and as I also have little power remaining, I’ll hide in the underbrush outside the village. Farewell.》
“Ah... wait, Al!” Tessa called as Al was about to leave.
《Yes?》
“Bani’s grave is right there. Don’t you want to talk to him?”
The Alastor that contained Al’s mind turned around and was silent for a while. 《Shall I interpret that as a joke?》
“It’s not a joke,” she told him.
《Then I do not understand,》 said Al. 《Is Bani Morauta not dead?》
“He is, but...”
《It is not possible to talk to someone who no longer exists. Yet you recommend that I do. It’s a difficult metaphor. Could you explain it to me in terms that are easier to understand?》
“It’s not a metaphor. It’s... um...” How to explain it? Tessa wondered, racking her brain.
But Ronnie chimed in first. “It’s Al, right? When you visit a grave, you’re basically talking to yourself.”
《Talking to myself?》
“Having a conversation with the dead person inside your mind,” Ronnie explained. “You think, ‘If I said this, what would he say back?’ It’s like running a simulation. And imagining that stuff helps you realize things about yourself. What you want to do, how you’d like to live, what you’re worried about, what dilemmas you’re facing. It’s basically how you work through that stuff.”
《Is a self-diagnostic not sufficient to check my own condition?》
“It’s not a diagnostic,” Ronnie told him. “It’s introspection.”
《Introspection?》
“You think about your life and come face-to-face with yourself. Tessa instinctively realized that you needed that, and that’s why she recommended it.”
《Hold, please.》 Al went silent for about ten seconds. On the other side of that satellite collection, somewhere on the Earth, he must have been using considerable processing power to grasp Ronnie’s words. 《May I use statistics?》
“Like Bézier statistics? If that’s how you do things, it’s probably all right. What the human brain does is pretty similar,” Ronnie said doubtfully. “The important thing to do is imagine that he’s here. If that Bani guy who raised you was here, what would he think of you? All these silly-looking stone monuments are just a symbol to help you visualize that.”
Tessa gazed in wonderment. She’d thought Ronnie was a very mature boy, but he clearly had some quality beyond it. That he could explain something like this to an AI at his young age...
《Thank you, Ronnie. I understand.》
“That’s good,” Ronnie said agreeably. “Well, I’ll be back later.”
《Indeed. Could I have some time, Colonel?》
“What? Ah... of course,” Tessa agreed.
Al knelt down in front of Bani Morauta’s gravestone and then fell silent.
Tessa had been hesitant to ask how long ‘some time’ would be, and in the end, she and Ronnie ended up having to take Murat and the others back to town without Al’s help. First, they returned to town, borrowed a spare sheet of corrugated iron, returned, placed the tied-up men on top of it, then dragged them back to town on the motorcycle. By the time that was done, the men who’d gone out fishing had returned to the village. They wanted to go check out the graveyard, and Tessa had to struggle to invent reasons to prevent them from going. She talked to them about what to do with Murat and his crew, purchased some of the gasoline she needed, made a bit more small talk, and finally returned to the graveyard around evening.
Al was still kneeling in front of the grave when she did. She wondered at first if he’d locked up due to power loss, but the data on her terminal showed her that the Alastor was still active. What is he saying to Bani in that artificial mind of his? she wondered. No one could know the answer to that question. Al was likely running calculations never before run in human history, but that was territory into which no one had any right to tread.