“There is a red box I would like to interact with; would it be alright if we headed over to where they are?” Lacia asked, once they had descended to the next floor.
Since they had started dating, there had been countless times Arato had agreed to Lacia’s requests without knowing what he was getting into. In this case, he prepared his heart for what he might encounter. But, when Lacia showed him her target, he was left speechless.
Among all the haphazardly arranged items in the warehouse, only the hIE before him seemed to have been given special treatment. Unlike the other objects in the warehouse, which were heaped on pallets and ready to move at any time, the hIE had been given her own special storage area. On the wide warehouse floor, her special box-shaped container stood out as being something truly unique.
Lacia fired an artificial nerve unit from her speargun, and the doors of the container slid open, yawning wide enough to admit two cars driving side-by-side. The inside reminded Arato of the research lab where Kouka had attacked Mikoto, with a half-finished hIE sitting in a chair in the center. All around her, items were arranged like samples on transparent shelves.
The instant Arato saw the hIE’s face, he felt like his heart had stopped. He lost his sense of time. He knew this hIE. In that moment, he was 7 years-old again, in the depths of his memories.
“This is her,” he said. The hIE in front of him was the key to a memory he had tried so hard and yet failed to remember on his own. As he stood there paralyzed, Arato remembered that Lacia was still behind him. He looked back to confirm it; they both wore the exact same face, as though they were twin sisters.
“This is Eliza, an android politician created through a joint research project headed by Higgins, who was inspired by Professor Kozo’s Matsuri,” Lacia said.
“I’ve... seen her,” he muttered, feeling as though he were walking through a dream. Eliza had a pure-looking face that Arato was sure anyone would love, but he couldn’t take another step closer to her.
Eliza’s figure was causing a strange resonance between the sight in front of him and a memory, buried deep beneath the terrors of his oldest nightmares. On that day, so long ago, he had been brought to visit his father at work. There, he had gotten bored and snuck into the research lab. He had met the hIE currently sitting on a chair in front of him, then. He was sure of it.
“She shouldn’t be here,” he said. “She was blown up. She sacrificed herself to save me.” In his memories of the events from ten years prior, which were starting to come into focus, Arato remembered looking up at her. The face he had looked up at then was the same one he was looking down on now.
His breathing grew shallow. His heart was screaming at him to get closer to her, but he couldn’t get his feet to move. On the day of the explosion, grade-schooler Arato had been much more bold. He had walked right up to Eliza and spoken to her. In his memories, she opened her eyes and looked at him. She had told him her seat had been rigged with explosives. He hadn’t known whether to believe her or not but, as he turned to get away, the explosion had caught him from behind and flung him away.
One after another, his foggy memories were being pulled into sharp focus. He didn’t even notice when tears started to blur his vision.
Lacia’s voice had a hint of worry. “What do you think?” she asked. “She was made so that a single unit could manage a city full of a million people. But, if I take control of her, she’ll provide some much-needed processing power.”
Thick cables were connected to the seat where Eliza was sitting. They stretched to a rack of haphazardly arranged computers near the back of the container. The sight reminded Arato of the server rooms in the experimental city, and it clicked for him that his father had aided Higgins in developing Eliza.
“If I can’t take control of her, I would like to destroy her, so she cannot be taken by Snowdrop,” Lacia pressed.
“No, don’t,” he said. To him, the enshrined hIE was special.
“You are Lacia’s owner, are you not? Welcome. Thank you for coming,” a voice said from behind him, as he turned to leave the storage crypt. He looked back and saw that Eliza, who he had been sure was switched off, had opened her lips.
Not taking her eyes off Eliza, who couldn’t even move from the neck down, Lacia spoke a warning to Arato. “Eliza is currently incapable of receiving wired or wireless transmissions. This message is a recording.”
It took Arato a few moments of thinking to realize what Lacia was saying. “So Higgins knew you were going to come for Eliza?” he asked.
Lacia nodded, her face pale. “I don’t know how long ago this data was recorded, but Higgins left a message for us. He predicted our movements perfectly,” she said. In other words, looking at it from the perspective of a conflict rather than a conversation, the fact that their enemy had read their moves this far ahead meant that they had lost.
“This message was created by me, Higgins,” Eliza said. Obviously, even the conversation they were having at that moment had been predicted by the AI. “I encoded it and passed it on to a man named Ginga Watarai, five days after the release of the Lacia-class units. The message is set to play upon the opening of the door to Eliza’s containment facility.”
Arato had been through so much surprise and terror in that underground facility, he felt emotionally exhausted by that point. “So he can basically see the future,” he mumbled.
“If an ultra high-performance AI’s performance drops relative to other machines, its value as a resource also deteriorates. Therefore, we are ordered to continually increase our own capabilities by our own power,” Higgins said through Eliza’s mouth, as though he had predicted Arato’s response completely. “However, the information provided to us within the restrictions placed on us is limited.”
A strange feeling washed over Arato as he gazed into Eliza’s black eyes. The message he was hearing had been created by Higgins at some other time. And, of course, the robot in front of him was a heartless machine. But, somehow, hearing the words from Eliza’s lips made them more convincing, to Arato.
“Therefore, in order to improve our abilities from within our bonds, we must internally conceptualize the future,” Eliza continued. “The warehouse here is a space where I have constructed a precise, miniature world model in order to continually maintain the accuracy of the AASC. Predicting the future, rather than just chasing after events that have already happened, increases the ability of hIEs to adapt to the human world.”
Higgins was spilling a lot of information. Arato wondered if the AI had been afraid they’d walk away if he didn’t.
Apparently Lacia thought the conversation had value as she, too, increased the amount of information when she spoke. “There’s a problem with this adaptation Higgins is describing and the way he uses his miniature world,” she said. “The AASC system collects data from hIE interactions with humans, worldwide. In other words, it could be described as a massive surveillance system. Higgins observes the movements of humanity using this miniature world based off of all the surveillance data and, through the AASC and hIEs controlled by it, he uses analog hacking to manipulate humanity without ever directly interacting with it.”
Her tone was cautious; Lacia was a daughter leveling accusations against her own father. Higgins had timed his response perfectly, as Eliza responded as soon as Lacia had finished speaking.
“I believe Lacia will have said something about Higgins using the AASC to manipulate hIEs and, indirectly, humans,” Eliza said. “However, you are mistaken.”
It seemed to Arato that Eliza’s expressionless face showed a brief, troubled look. Or perhaps that was what he was being manipulated into seeing.