After her cruel cackling filled the air for a while, she wiped away her amused tears and yelled, “Right! That’s right! That’s the truth!!! Thank you! That’s exactly what I wanted to know! See? My eyes were right. It was my eyes that saw the truth. Humans are just bags of meat—machines that just happen to be made of organic materials. Life isn’t precious at all! It’s just an illusion, a construct. There’s no soul.”
Yukari said nothing.
“Back in the old days, people believed that the earth was flat, that it rested on top of a turtle, and the oceans flowed into space. But that was just a fantasy born of ignorance. In the old days, people assumed that the heavenly bodies revolved around the earth. In reality, Earth is just another planet revolving around the sun. Way back then, people figured that we were created as humans from nothing. The truth is, people are just another species of monkey, yet people still think they have souls, that they’re alive. It’s yet another delusion to be destroyed one day, just like the geocentric theory. A fantasy concocted by humans desperate enough to believe they’re special. When actually, humans are merely a little more sophisticated than machines, operating with a low level of complexity. Humans are hallucinating that they’re alive. There are no such thing as souls or life. That’s the truth, plain and simple.”
Yukari still said nothing.
“So, see? I was right. There was nothing wrong with my eyes. Yes, that’s what I always wanted to know. Life, the soul—everyone said they were precious, so I always wondered whether these things I couldn’t feel at all really existed. I wanted to know whether it was my eyes that were messed up or it was the world that was wrong. No matter who I chopped up and into how many pieces, I could never find the answer. But now, finally, you’ve given me the answer. I was right all along. Not everyone else. Not the world. Humans aren’t precious. They’re not special beings that have souls. They’re objects that operate with a little more complexity than machines. Just mobile bags of meat—that’s what humans really are. Life, souls—such things never existed.”
“What makes you think that?”
Yukari’s words held deep gravitas despite how quiet she was.
The girl crowed back triumphantly, “What makes me think that? It’s obvious, isn’t it? You said it yourself, Marii Yukari! There’s no difference between robots made by humans and humans themselves!”
“So?”
The girl shrugged as if struggling to explain a simple thing to a hopeless child and opened her mouth—only to look around suspiciously, as if she’d heard something.
Yukari’s voice boomed throughout the factory as she urged her to go on nonetheless. “That is what I said. There’s no difference. But how do you get from Point A to Point B?”
“Because, see… Ugh, don’t you get it? That’s what it means, right? Robots aren’t alive. They don’t have souls. So if humans are the same, then that means that—”
“Why do you think that?”
This time, the sound was clear. Rustle, rustle. So light and dry. A big bug might make a sound like that running over a hard floor. For a second—in my dazed state of mind—I thought I was imagining things.
But the girl seemed to hear it too. She looked around again. She wasn’t smiling anymore. Her body froze stiff. “What was…that?”
Yukari paused and answered unnaturally, “What was what?”
The girl was furious. “Don’t play dumb with me! I told you to come alone. Did you tell the—”
“Oh! No! I came alone, just like I said! But…well, it did feel a little tricky, but I was scared, so, you know, alone normally means not with other people… So anyway, as we were saying. How do you get from humans being like robots to the conclusion that they’re not alive? Why don’t you think robots have souls?”
“Th-that’s—obvious, isn’t—” The girl twitched and stepped back.
What was going on? What was happening?
Yukari’s voice sounded closer now. “This might be rude of me to say, but I don’t think your eyes are any different from normal people’s eyes. You just want to think you’re special, but in fact your eyes are normal. They’re not like mine at all.”
“Y-you have some nerve…!”
“I don’t know anything about life or souls. That’s beyond me. So I’m just answering the question you asked me: No. In my eyes, there’s no major difference between humans and robots. So—”
“What the hell is that?!” the girl shrieked, cutting off Yukari. She went on as if talking to herself, panic oozing from her voice. “M-model robots? No—how—that couldn’t—what the hell?! It’s some kind of trick, isn’t it? They’re remote-control or wind-up…”
Before we knew it, the rustling sound could be heard from every direction.
“Stay away!” the girl screamed. “K-keep those away from me! What the—Stop them, now! Make them stop moving! Make them stop coming!!!”
What in the world was happening? I did my best to look around. But I couldn’t check my surroundings when I could only move my eyeballs. All he could do was look and listen harder, and given that I’d been drugged, I’m not so sure the information I gained from that was processed correctly.
But okay—
The girl whipped her head at me. The expression on that face of hers I saw was unmistakably gripped by fear. Our eyes met. She swung up her right arm. It turned out to have in it a saw or some kind of jagged cutting tool like that. The blade was already crimson for some reason. (Seeing that, a chill shot through my body.) It swung down at me as I lay helpless.
Just then, her right hand became empty. Something had knocked the saw out of it. She stumbled, righted herself, and ran. She immediately disappeared from my field of view, but the sound of her footsteps stopped right away. All I could hear was that dry rustling sound, growing, growing, filling the air. Thumping, thumping, coming from everywhere…
“Stop! Stay away! Please! Make them stop!” she pleaded.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to be so scared. It’s really okay, all right? They’re not going to treat you badly,” Yukari said.
“Th-this makes no—what—what—what is this? What are they? What the hell are they?”
“I don’t know how they look to you, but these are all my friends. So please, calm down, will you?”
“Your friends? What the hell? What do you—what are you—you—”
What in the world was happening? I moved my eyes desperately to get it in view. Then, something made it into the corner of my eye. A black shadow, drawing nearer. Something trying to peer into my face. For a second I thought the girl had come back, but the size was too different. It was as small as a gnome or fairy. I looked at it as hard as I could. There was something my brain was rejecting, but I wanted to see it anyway.
So I looked.
It reminded me of one of those models I’d seen at Yukari’s house, in the yard, on the fence, decorating everything. A 1/144-scale plastic model robot.
But it couldn’t have been a plastic model. The parts composing its body had too much life to be plastic, like the skin of a living thing. However I looked at it, it was alive. And anyway, if this was a plastic model robot, it wouldn’t peer into my face with concern and slap my cheeks. So if it wasn’t a plastic model—and it couldn’t have been something real…
Oh, I get it; that’s how it is.
Some kind of shriek in the distance, I thought to myself vaguely: This must be a hallucination. A drug-induced fantasy. Her “special anesthetic” or whatever was clouding my consciousness. All these senseless things just looked like senseless things and this wasn’t reality—
Yeah, that’s what it was, a dream. So I had to hurry and wake up. I didn’t know how long I’d been dreaming, but I had to wake up and save Yukari—
And with that, the world went black.