Chapter 4:
The Songstress and Her Partner
. : 1 : .
THE HEAVYSET MAN watched silently as the countdown decreased, the seconds chipping away. He crossed his thick arms, his scowl deepening. The man was Onodera Atsushi, member of Toak and leader of this task force.
Onodera had originally worked as a bodyguard. He got married when he was young and had a son. It was his naive belief that this average, blessed life was his own personal slice of happiness. That is, until his son became severely ill. Onodera’s outlook on life changed drastically when his son passed away in the hospital. He went mad.
Sure, his son had been ill, but not in bad enough condition that he would take a sudden turn for the worse. Onodera questioned what had caused his son’s death, fighting tooth and nail to reveal the true cause.
The explanation the hospital gave wasn’t convincing. They carefully, kindly explained over and over that there was nothing they could have done to save the boy. They bowed their heads over and over in apology. Each time, Onodera would scream at them, demanding to know if there was anything strange about it, anything at all, in the data they’d submitted or the circumstances surrounding his son’s death. He didn’t buy that there had been no reason for it.
Onodera couldn’t keep going if he didn’t believe there was some sort of massive conspiracy and cover-up involved with his son’s death. He kept digging deeper and deeper, seeking the real reason his beloved son had died.
Eventually, his wife was unable to endure the sorrow any longer and left him. She had also loved their son, but to her, Onodera looked like nothing more than Don Quixote, desperately trying to find an enemy who wasn’t there. He accepted her decision, taking it as an inevitable outcome.
If there was going to be a time when the situation opened his eyes, it would have been when she said she was leaving. Perhaps she hoped that would be the turning point. But Onodera didn’t even nod when she told him. He instead chose to continue his pursuit of a vast and undefined…something.
So of course he was going to listen to Toak when he encountered them.
One day, he decided he would go to the hospital and take the data they were hiding from him, by force if need be, and that was the day he met Toak and learned the truth. His son’s death was unnatural after all. It was the result of an AI deciding on its own to deliberately stop treatment for a human who had no hope of getting better. An AI had killed his son—a human—for some “logical” reason.
“Ever since Diva’s Awakening, more and more AIs have been showing malfunctions in their operation. If this continues, AIs will someday replace humanity and take over the world.”
“…”
“They are not our obedient neighbors. They are invading. Humanity has made its own worst enemy.”
They called it “enlightenment,” those comrades who came to Onodera and told him the truth about his son’s death. In all honesty, Onodera himself wasn’t really sure how much those words really rang true to him. He wasn’t even fully listening.
There was just one thought that came to him: With this, he could get revenge for his son. And, oh, how blessed was he for the opportunity to get revenge.
“Onodera-kun?”
“Hm?”
“You spaced out there a little, it seems. Are you all right? You haven’t gotten much rest lately. Maybe you should lie down.”
A middle-aged man’s voice snapped Onodera out of his reverie. He looked over at Matsumoto. The man’s fingers danced across the keys as he operated the massive terminal in the central administration room at NiaLand at high speeds, keeping up with the rapidly flowing words on the screen while still having time to check up on Onodera. No wonder he was so hard to deal with—he was a genius far outside the realms of what was normal.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” said Onodera. “And I’m pretty sure you haven’t gotten any more rest than I have. Not that I want to start a bragging competition on how long we’ve gone without sleep.”
“For me, it’s probably been about four days. Ha ha. My brain’s so tired, I think it’s going to shrivel up.”
“I just said I didn’t want us to brag…” Onodera grimaced as Matsumoto chatted away.
Matsumoto’s hands never stopped, even in the middle of their conversation. His fingers were typing so fast that it looked like he had more than ten of them. Obviously, Matsumoto’s brain was working right along with his hands, and Onodera wasn’t sure how the man had the capacity to ask him how he was doing.
“Any news on the countdown?”
“Not yet. Right now, I’m secretly slipping here and there as I head to the main keep for when our enemy realizes I’ve infiltrated. You might call it a fast crawl forward.”
Onodera clicked his tongue, feeling impatient with the slow progress. “Sounds annoying.”
While it was a crawl, they wouldn’t have had any hope of fighting back without Matsumoto. They were making progress—it was just progress at a snail’s pace.
“Big lugs like you don’t panic. You’re the leader here. If you’re not ready, you’ll make the others uneasy,” said Elizabeth, the only AI there, as she patted an annoyed Onodera on the shoulder.
She had been in Toak since Onodera joined. In fact, she’d been an activist in the group for so much longer than Onodera that you could measure it in decades. And now she was giving him a light smile.
“…”
“There you go looking all grumpy again. Look at the situation. Help me out a little, or at least take that giant crease out from between your eyebrows when you look at me.”
“It’s reflex,” he grunted. “You managed to stay here after seeing Kakitani off, huh?”
“You guys are like family to me. I don’t believe anyone here’s dumb enough to see it differently… Well, that’s just my calculation.” Elizabeth shrugged slowly, an aggressive smile on her beautiful face.
When she wasn’t making that expression, she was an exceedingly gorgeous AI model. Actually, all AIs were beautiful in an aesthetic sense, and Onodera found that homogenous beauty disgusting. However, Elizabeth’s expression was different from what they had in mind when they created her. She chose to be something her creators hadn’t chosen for her, and Onodera saw some merit in that. The furrow that appeared in his brow whenever he looked at Elizabeth wasn’t actually hostile at all.
“Seriously, it’s just an automatic thing. I’m very thorough with it, giving it to all the other comrades too,” said Onodera.
“Guess there’s a huge chasm between you and the rest of us. And it’s not going to get any smaller now. Kind of sad when you think about it.”
Onodera wordlessly nodded in agreement.
The uneasy balance between humans and AIs had been destroyed. The relationship between the two groups would never go back to what it was, not after the AIs had declared war on humanity.
Toak had long sounded the alarm, and humanity had finally noticed. Now all that was left for the two groups was to fight it out until one was defeated.
“Even now that humanity’s all in agreement, they’re still stuck in a situation where there’s a chance they might lose against the AIs and get decimated,” Elizabeth said.