All over the world, hIEs had lost the ability to adapt to new information, thanks to the IAIA removing Higgins’s responsibility for updating the AASC.
Humanity had lost control of their own society with the Hazard, and were now being led around by the nose due to the ongoing fight between ultra high-performance AIs. People had been told for so long that a fight between AIs would mean the end of humanity, and some seemed surprised that it hadn’t happened yet.
After a while, people began to doubt. The hate riots against hIEs and AIs that many had expected failed to materialize. Billions of people worldwide had fresh memories of seeing all the hIEs stop, with their right hands outstretched. They had been told it was the sign of the AASC updates stopping, but each person around the world sought their own interpretation of the gesture.
Tens of millions of people began to take an interest in what was going on, and ask pointed questions. It was something, even if only one percent of them actually put their ideas to action.
The phenomena reminded people of how Type-001, Kouka, had pushed her unsolvable problem onto humanity right before she had been destroyed. What started as mere interest became a wave, a movement spreading through the network, gathering the interest of all who saw it.
Some experts, like Kozo Endo—who had developed the android politician Mikoto and who had experience working with Higgins—spoke positively about the phenomenon, saying that the phenomenon was simply a new rule from the ultra high-performance AIs. He called it the ‘have faith in humanity’ rule, created by Higgins and a brand new ultra high-performance AI known as Lacia, in order to bring an end to the Hazard.
There were others who feared that the whole thing was an elaborate analog hack. Still, in a state of extreme stress and yearning for peace of mind, people found some comfort in the thought of a brand new relationship between humans and AIs.
It was as if each individual person was standing alone, each supporting their shaken society in their own way. Human society had become too advanced to quickly reject any concept. It was the trust humans felt toward other human figures that had been the basis for human culture, traditions and coexistence throughout the ages. It was the human image itself that tied it all together.
The fact that humans were constantly outsourcing their interactions with the outside world to machines had not changed. There had been no changes to the concepts of the inheritance or trading of property. However, people were beginning to realize that humans and machines had an influence on each other and together were rolling like a wheel towards the future, bit-by-bit.
Humans could not abandon their machines.
The Hazard was passing humanity by, and doing so much more calmly than expected.
Kengo Sugiri was moved from the juvenile detention center, where he had been locked up, to the Digital Intelligence’s Kuhonbutsu base. Since Arato Endo was in the middle of assaulting Higgins’ underground facility, the military wanted to hold one of his classmates. If worse came to worst, they were prepared to use Kengo as a hostage to negotiate with Arato.
“We’ve been able to open a line to Higgins’ underground facility,” a man who introduced himself as Chujo said, as he showed Kengo into a dark, narrow room.
Humanity was possibly facing its final days, so the military couldn’t be choosy about its methods. Kengo understood.
Chujo nodded toward a chair in the room, directing Kengo to sit. Once Kengo was sitting, he saw two soldiers appear soundlessly to take up positions behind him.
“The trick to life, kid, is to not let yourself get backed into a corner. I know you don’t have a job to worry about, but how about we offer you a special deferment on that whole business at the Oi Industry Center you got caught up in?” Chujo asked.
“You want me to be your in for Endo and Kaidai for a while, right?” Kengo asked in reply. In his own opinion, Kengo had never possessed any special qualities; he’d always felt as if life was just tossing him around. Therefore, his current position felt unreal, and Kengo felt as though he were simply an observer, watching someone else’s life unfold.
“You know, even you trying to use me like this is all part of Lacia’s manipulations,” he said. “Endo was all buddy-buddy with the police last I checked, so it’s not impossible for her influence to have gotten this far.”
“Is there anything wrong with being manipulated?” Chujo asked, his face expressionless. The middle-aged man looked nothing like what Kengo would picture for an officer in Digital Intelligence.
“I guess not,” Kengo admitted. At this point, he was so used to being dragged along with the flow that he no longer had the willpower to get angry.
“Right? Normal humans can’t resist the tide of events. You’re the same and, though I’m sure you can’t tell, I’m the same as well,” Chujo said. He spoke comfortably with Kengo, and had an eminently forgettable face.
“But I feel for you, and for the things you and Kouka were fighting for. Ordinary humans get swept up in anger and hate just the same as they get caught up in anything else. But that’s what makes it okay,” Chujo continued. “Like I said, that’s what ordinary humans do. Normal fights between normal humans just keep going on and on. And that’s how I’d prefer it to stay.”
In the post-cloud world, you didn’t need the super-human powers or charisma of a genius to make waves that gathered people to your cause. The practice of a select few moving society had been replaced by large numbers of ordinary people, all of whom were accessing the same services.
Of course, individual inspiration was still involved in the successes society achieved, but one did not need to put in large amounts of effort, nor have a special aptitude that would dramatically reduce the necessary work, to have a chance at changing the world.
“I’m not all that upset at being caught up in all this,” Kengo said; big changes were happening in the world, even in himself. “I got caught up in this because Kouka came to my place but, honestly, it’s not like I hate those guys,” he added. He wasn’t there with Arato and Ryo on the front line in Higgins’ underground facility, but he still felt connected to what they were doing.
“Did you see a little of yourself in Kouka?” Chujo asked, as they sat in the darkness. “She was destroyed, disassembled, and copied by the Antibody Network. Of all the Lacia-class units, it seems to me that she got the raw deal.”
“Do you know what I felt when I found out about the mass-produced Koukas?” Kengo asked. He didn’t see Kouka as having lost since, in the end, she’d gotten a chance to fight in the final battle. Though Kengo was probably the only one in the world who saw it that way, he thought of the current situation as being an extension of her challenge to humanity.
“I felt like she had won,” he said, answering his own question. “Sure, because of her, the high-and-mighty Lacia-class units were taken down from their thrones and turned into just another mass-produced robot. But she’s also there, fighting in the last battle through her copies. That’s not a raw deal; it’s exactly what she wanted.”
“By that logic, would you say that your having been caught up in that terrorism stuff and ending up here wasn’t a raw deal?” Chujo asked.
Kengo’s family had cried when he was arrested. Sunflower, the family restaurant, would probably die out once his father passed away. Before, Kengo had thought it was normal to hate the thought of being just another face in the crowd. He had since realized that hating the era he had been born into was just the sort of thing an ordinary guy would do.
“I don’t know,” Kengo admitted. “But one good thing did come out of that. I joined up with the Antibody Network because I blamed hIEs for how my dad was treated by his customers, and how he lost his confidence. But at this point, I’ve stopped feeling like we need to get rid of all the hIEs in the world.”
Different people could see the same event as a failure or a success. In Kengo’s memories, he saw Kouka heading out towards the battle she would never return from, seeming to melt away into the red of the setting sun.
“Even if the guy next to you is doing better than you, or things go wrong, or you feel like there’s no meaning to what you’re doing, we humans can keep on working,” Kengo said. “If I wanted to fix things in the restaurant, I should have helped out there instead of signing on with the Antibody Network.”
Kouka’s image was burned into the back of his mind, seeming to blur everything he saw with heat haze.
“Everyone’s just an idiot like me,” Kengo went on. “It doesn’t matter if the Hazard’s happening, or whatever; there’s still more folks out there, just doing their jobs, than there are those dancing on the strings of any machine. It’ll still be us humans who decide which way the world is going.” It was Kengo’s answer as an ordinary human. And, because it was ordinary, it was something a huge amount of ordinary humans could get behind.
However Chujo, who was sitting directly across from Kengo, didn’t even shift an eyebrow at the sentiment. “The ultra high-performance AIs are twisting our world,” he said.
“Maybe the only reason everyone is so afraid of the Hazard is that we’ve just failed to figure out what the norm should be in interacting with tools like the AIs,” Kengo said. Even in his own mind, Kengo was pulled along by the flow. He didn’t have the same faith that Arato Endo or Ryo Kaidai had but, as an ordinary kid, he couldn’t hear about his friends getting caught up in a battle with the whole future of humanity in the balance and not want to join in.
“Higgins isn’t the only one fighting with everything he’s got, there. There are some humans fighting hard, too. Have a little faith in my friends,” Kengo said. The question of whether or not the value of an action engendered worth, or faith, was at the very center of the changes happening in the world. It was a question that had the power to decide the very outcome of this final conflict.