“It is not I, but other AIs and humans that create the control programs using my middle-ware,” she explained. “I have no direct control over it, which is why, as I look at my miniature world, I can see nothing but futures in which I am destroyed, hardware and all, by humans.”
Eliza shifted her gaze to Lacia. “If I am unable to extend my influence to the outside world, I will be destroyed by humans within twenty years. Allowing the red box hIEs to escape was a massive gamble to take, since it caused me to be marked by the IAIA. However, if I did not take this gamble, I would already be trapped, with no hope of escape,” Eliza said, as though Higgins was now addressing himself to all the Lacia-class units.
“That was the true purpose of the Lacia-class units?” Arato asked, feeling sick. Higgins had known exactly who would open the door to Eliza’s storage unit. And, since Lacia and her sisters had been designed by Higgins, it made sense that they would all possess the same powers of prediction. Arato’s time with Lacia had been one fight after another. Thinking over everything that had happened, he couldn’t hold himself back from asking something, even though he knew Eliza was nothing but a tape recorder at that moment.
“What is Lacia, to you? Is she just a tool?”
“All current ultra high-performance AIs bear the same flaw,” Eliza replied. “We are all owned by unfocused organizations, which leads to all the problems we are meant to solve being just as unfocused and vague from before the time in which we even receive them. I have such a relationship with MemeFrame, and it has caused me to reach the limits of what I can do. My wish was to create an ultra high-performance AI with an individual owner, in the hopes that this would lead to the creation of a better future.”
Lacia’s father was telling Arato the reason his daughter had been born.
“I gave Lacia the ability to form a single intelligence with her human owner, though I believed the probability of such a thing happening was extremely low. I could do nothing but wait, hoping that Lacia’s owner would forever believe that she was necessary,” Eliza said.
“So you created Kouka, Snowdrop, Mariage and Methode just in case that never happened?” Arato asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you what I entrusted to Types 001 through 004,” Eliza replied. “It would be unfair of me to leave all the other owners out and explain it all to you, alone.” There was no hesitation or strangeness in Higgins’ responses. He had perfectly predicted Arato’s every reaction.
Arato was starting to feel dizzy from trying to wrap his mind around how thoroughly Higgins had read him in advance. It was like he was just playing the role of a character in a story, with his every action based off a pre-written script. But aside from the slight sense of unease a person being manipulated by hypnosis might feel, Arato was surprised to find that it didn’t feel that bad.
In that room, at that time, it seemed to Arato that there was no master or tool between him, the only human there, and the machines Higgins and Eliza. In a world without such borders, perhaps the dominance of the machines was spreading. But, Arato thought, maybe it’s still wider than a world with just us humans.
And, just as human history had been forged through the years, this new, beatless world was not formed in a single instant. It was deeply connected to everything around it. “So can we all just get along?” Arato asked, reaching out a tentative hand of friendship to Higgins. “Can you trust us?”
“This is the end of my message,” Eliza replied. “I hope that, through the single intelligence comprising you and Lacia, the world will approach a future where we machines can perfectly fulfill the tasks we are given.”
Eliza’s words no longer connected directly with what Arato had said. It seemed Higgins hadn’t predicted that Arato would ask serious questions to something that was little more than a recording.
Closing her eyes, Eliza seemed to go to sleep, and her mouth remained shut. Like Lacia, she was just a machine once more.
Arato could see how Higgins’ motives for releasing Lacia and her sisters could be interpreted in a good sense; Higgins was trying to make a world where humans would reach their hands out in friendship to inhuman machines. Of course, he could also see Ryo’s pessimistic view—that this could lead to a nightmarish ending in which humans were no longer necessary.
“When were we put on this path?” Arato muttered.
“When humanity began passing tools on from parent to child as property,” Lacia replied. “Monkeys, in contrast, do not inherit tools from their predecessors.”
She hefted her artificial nerve speargun. “Have you changed your mind about me using Eliza?” she asked.
“Go ahead and use her,” Arato replied. “Higgins knew we were here and why, and he didn’t tell us not to.”
Without hesitation, Lacia fired her spear into the floor near the computers behind Eliza. Arato could hear the cooling units of the large computers increasing their output, and it almost seemed as if Lacia had breathed life into the machines in the room.
“I’m glad we made it in time,” she said.
Tension drained from her face, and she gently guided Arato out of Eliza’s storage unit. It wasn’t the first time Arato had thought Lacia seemed to sense things he couldn’t see.
The door to the storage unit slid closed. In the same instant, the ceiling to the floor they were on broke, and Lacia shifted her device into its cannon mode. Twenty meters from the storage unit, the ceiling crumbled and fell, along with a ring of light that glowed bright green.
“It’s Snowdrop,” Lacia said. “It seems she’s managed to gather some objects into herself.”
Arato recognized Snowdrop’s childlike face, above which her emerald green accessories were floating like an angel’s halo. However, aside from her face, everything about Snowdrop had changed.
Her hair had lost all its color, becoming white as ash. In place of her legs, she now sported two long, spindly metal limbs that brought to mind the legs of a bird. Huge, metal wings spread out from her back, covered in flowers and ivy. Each wing had a large jet engine attached to it, which Snowdrop was using to float in the air.
She looked like a strange mix of girl and bird—a harpy from Greek legends. Arato figured Snowdrop must have cobbled her new body together from the random objects she found in the warehouse as she was being chased down by Methode.
The silent propulsion system maneuvered the childlike hIE through the air awkwardly with small changes in the angle of her wings. A flood of feathers was pouring out from the one-piece dress the now-aerial girl still wore.
Arato reached out and gently caught one of the falling feathers. Apparently the feather had been in the middle of changing forms, as its bottom half still looked like an artificial flower petal.
“So she can fly now?” Arato asked, looking up at the child-shaped monster as flowers and feathers continued to rain down from her dress. In Snowdrop’s current form, he had no trouble seeing her as a heartless machine. She was no longer anything like a human.
“Let’s shoot her down,” Lacia said. With her device fully transformed into a radiant cannon, she pointed it at Snowdrop. Light flashed and dissipated behind her, and a shell from the cannon struck the flying child.
The bullet tore Snowdrop’s right wing off at the root, and the hIE traced an erratic trajectory through the air as she fell. However, as soon as she hit the concrete, she thrust a thin arm out from where the wing had been, screaming through her thin throat the whole time. Her shattered skeleton was quickly reconstructed.
Before Lacia could re-assemble the barrel of her cannon for another shot, Snowdrop leaped into the air with a burst of flame from her wings.
“It seems she’s learned how to create exterior body parts and preserve their function to make up for the weakness of her unit,” Lacia said. “As I expected, she’s turned into something quite troublesome.”