Pausing at the door to their apartment, Yuka shot him a cheeky grin. “Come to think of it, Shiori’s coming over tomorrow, isn’t she?” she asked. With their dad out of the country, Yuka had begun inviting friends over to their house more often.
Shiori Kaidai had completely recovered from her injuries. Neither she nor Arato spoke again about what had happened in her hospital room, but things were still awkward when the two of them were alone. Lacia being gone had left an unhealing wound on Shiori’s heart, just as it had on Arato’s.
From what Shiori told him, the IAIA was still keeping Higgins’ hardware shut down. In his place Lacia, who had been discovered in a containment facility, had been placed in charge of updating the AASC.
Lacia was now breathing life into the hIEs, giving them the standards of their movements. When Arato thought that, he felt closer to the hIEs than ever before. It felt like the world really was approaching the future he had ordered Lacia to create.
Even after their parting, Arato still felt like she was guiding him. Sometimes, he dreamed that she would come back to him some day. But in the meantime, he saw her all the time in little habits that the hIEs displayed. She may not have had a heart but, because of that, he felt like she was capable of existing in everything around him. It was a new heartbreak each time, yet always the same.
Yuka had disappeared from the hallway.
It was an autumn night, and Arato had to clench his teeth against the cold that was sinking into his skin. If humanity truly was a unit made up of a body, its environment, and its tools, then humanity was passing out of the harsh summer, full of freedom and cruelty, and into a time of abundant harvest.
They were all being guided by a massive analog hack. Ryo’s sense that this would lead to a dystopia where humans were no longer in charge of the world was most likely correct. But, Arato believed that linking hands with machines that only shared their outward appearance with humans would lead them all to a much more expansive new world.
Arato gazed out at the city nightscape from the apartment hallway, as if searching for Lacia’s face out in the darkness. Suddenly, for no discernible reason, he felt like she was there, just over in the elevator hallway.
He heard light footsteps approaching, and his body temperature rose as anxiety, hope and doubt all washed over him at once. The long breath he let out turned into a white cloud that was swept away by the wind.
The sound of footsteps and breathing, exactly as he remembered them, made his whole body go numb. In his head, he knew it wouldn’t be her. But even if it was a lie, she had promised to make dinner for him again. The closer she got, the more her presence made him remember the real Lacia’s. It was a miracle. The ground felt unstable beneath his feet.
He turned and looked at her. Her light purple hair and light blue eyes were the same; her clear expression was a perfect match for his vivid memories of her. No matter how or where he looked, she was Lacia from head to toe. Her cheeks were red from the cold, as she approached and looked straight up at Arato, just like she always had.
“Lacia, is it you?” he asked.
He couldn’t instantly link her appearance to joy. Lacia’s main hIE unit had shut down for the last time while leaning against his shoulder, after receiving mortal wounds in Higgins’ facility. The device that had acted as her digital brain was locked up somewhere else in the world, updating the program that moved the world’s hIEs. So, in his heart, he knew that this hIE was simply a different unit that had been created to look like Lacia and copy her presence and habits.
“Yes,” she replied, and it was in the voice that had been carved deep into Arato’s heart.
He’d thought he would never be able to see her again, and couldn’t stop the happy beating of his heart in response to her answer. Of course, she was just another Hello Kitty on a cup, analog hacking his feelings with her form. He was aware of this, but he couldn’t keep the warmth and pain of love from blooming in his heart. Arato was a boy capable of loving something based on perception alone.
Loving Lacia had given him that gift. There, in Arato’s heart, was the human love for machines Higgins had been searching for. All Arato needed to do was give this machine that was nothing but an empty form his own heart.
“Lacia, Lacia,” he murmured. Arato knew that she might have been sent by someone, to some nefarious end. But he chose to believe that Lacia had sent her to him to show him that their time together hadn’t come to an end. Inside of him, the fear that this joy and love could be torn away from him again mixed in a storm with the inconsolable sorrow he’d felt without her. From the start, there had been nothing to differentiate Lacia from any other hIE aside from her form. From the start, she had told him she had no heart.
“This body is not a red box: simply a customization of an off-the-shelf body made to match the original. Is that still acceptable?” she asked, gripping the chest of her autumn coat, and looking up at him through eyelashes wet with overflowing tears. Her crying was probably a reflection of his own; his heart was so weakened by the sight of her that he couldn’t stop the tears.
Humans created their tools and continuously adjusted their shapes and colors. Though reality was a savage battleground of natural selection, guided by the forms they themselves had created, humans and their tools were working towards filling the world and life itself with diversity.
The boy-meets-girl story playing out between Arato and the hIE who looked like Lacia had begun from the first day mankind had started using tools. It wasn’t just due to Arato’s simplemindedness.
She may not have had a heart, but she had a smile. “Will you be my owner?” she asked. Just like the night they had first met, Arato thought she looked especially cute when she smiled.
A soulless, heartless machine could still move the human heart. They were two completely different existences, but the power that linked them drew both of them closer to the blank unknown at the center of the donut. That power was love.
Erika had once told Arato that, even as soon as a hundred years prior, the thought of anyone actually loving a machine would never have been treated as anything less than insanity.
But, Arato thought, if love like this can make me this happy, then maybe the world I live in now really has made some progress since then. He could feel the very instant he took the first step toward a new future.
Lacia was there waiting for him, her breath white in the cold. He made his decision and reached his hand out to her. “Welcome back. Let’s go home,” he said.
I trust in your smile. I won’t care whether you are soulless or not.
The End