Beatless: Volume 2 Page 4

  Oriza was barely maintaining the facade of listening to him at this point, and her face twisted like she’d eaten something bitter. An hIE would have been miles better at pretending to be interested in this discussion.

  It was easier to deal with humans if you only looked at the surface of their actions, and treated them as if they were machines underneath. That was all Ryo had done during his meeting with the PMC; using money and silence to communicate and come to an agreement without ever actually addressing either side’s true intentions.

  “Maybe all we have is what people see on the outside,” Ryo mused. “I mean, that’s all a fashion model’s job is, isn’t it?”

  “You know, you’re sort of like Arato in some ways, but completely different in others,” Oriza said.

  She’d said the words so lightly, but they struck Ryo hard. For a moment, he was afraid that she had somehow seen through his posing, and felt like his heart would stop from the shock. He tried to say something light-hearted to blow it off, but felt like anything he said would come out as sarcasm, so the words stuck in his throat.

  It had been Major Lemaire, headed into battle, who had said, “This world is done for.” Ryo had no idea how to deal with mercenaries, so he had avoided any direct confrontations. Instead, he had waited with what he had in hand, dividing the problem facing him into smaller, more manageable pieces. It was this that had led to him treating a problem that could involve human casualties as nothing more than making use of some machines.

  “... so, I didn’t actually hear in your explanation why hIEs never trip?” Oriza asked.

  “If an hIE tripped, it would cause chaos in the AASC standards, so Higgins invests massive resources into ensuring they don’t fall. If you think of a human paying attention to make sure they don’t trip while walking, several tens of thousands times more mental resources are being expended into making sure hIEs don’t.”

  There was a thought experiment about a trolley, in which the choice of either track would cause a sacrifice of some kind. Robots had to face that problem every day in their dealings with humans. With the trolley problem stacked on top of the frame problem, controlling the actions of hIEs ended up requiring an astronomical amount of processing resources. Only by outsourcing this processing to Higgins, an ultra high-performance AI, were hIEs able to exist alongside humans.

  It seemed like the kind of discussion Arato would be really into, and even Kengo would show some interest. But the girl by his side was neither of his friends. Their paths had parted. He had been prepared for that.

  “Is that seriously all you think about all day?” Oriza asked. The very first girl he’d had a chance to talk to normally was obviously tired of listening to him.

  “The world we’re living in right now is about to end,” he said. “It’s been coming for a while, and things are about to reach their limit.”

  “It must be hard, being you,” Oriza muttered.

  Ryo looked up at the night sky. Though it was almost summer, the darkness was deep and cold. “It’s the answer I’ve found after struggling for a while,” he told her placidly, “and it works for just about everything. The age when we could resolve everything just by being humans is coming to an end. We’ve got to look for a way to live with that hanging over our heads.”

  ***

  Kouka leaned on her large, bladed device while she stared up at the white, square building. It was larger than any of the buildings around it, sitting about ten minutes across the Edogawa River from Tokyo with a grove of trees behind it.

  Matsuda, where the building lay, used to be a residential area with easy access from Tokyo. Ever since population decline had made it easier to get a place in the heart of the city, it had been mostly deserted.

  Day hadn’t broken quite yet, and the area was still almost entirely devoid of human life. Even with her device slung across her shoulder, Kouka could walk around without any police showing up. Quite the opposite, in fact; the few people she did see passing by seemed to be looking forward to what was about to happen.

  “Heh, I get ya. I know what it’s like to have your back up against a wall,” she said.

  The door to the Next-Generation Social Research Center building was reinforced clear plastic. Its automatic opening function was off after business hours, so Kouka slashed at it with her massive bladed device. The blade was super-heated, and it cut through the thick plastic as if it were made of butter.

  She forced the recoil from swinging the 300 kilogram blade into the ground through the anchors that sprang out of her heels. With her footing secured, Kouka now swept the blade back in a reverse strike, and the plastic door collapsed under its own weight like a waterfall. At the same moment, a warning alarm began to blare inside the building.

  “Should be about ten minutes before they can get together a force from the security company; maybe about seven before the police show up,” Kouka murmured to herself. Then she smiled. “This place’ll be a sea of flames by then.”

  Humming from her speaker, Kouka dropped the trunk she had been holding onto the ground. Soda-can sized machines floated up from the trunk. There were eight of them in total, and they flew around the area, capturing images from various angles. Lights blinked on each unit as they communicated with each other. Their circular lenses all focused on Kouka.

  “My name is Kouka,” she said. “I am the tool that brings victory in conflict with humans. The tool created to automate human conflict.” She turned her face to the floating camera units. Her fight would be videotaped, and uploaded directly to the cloud.

  Looking straight into the cameras, Kouka declared; “I am an hIE.”

  A red light blinked on the camera units, informing her that someone on the network was trying to censor the video. The interference was quickly smacked down, and the red lights flicked off, replaced by green ones.

  The cameras were high performance units provided to her by Type-003, Saturnus, who had changed her name to Mariage. Mariage’s device, Gold Weaver, could produce just about everything as long as she had a schematic. It gave Mariage the power to create her own strategies. If Kouka had that ability, she wouldn’t have been forced to make the choices she had made that brought her there that evening.

  To play things up a bit, Kouka switched her device to its laser cannon mode and zapped wildly in front of herself. Everything touched by the intense heat of the laser exploded. Anything dry caught fire, and light pieces of paper and shards of plastic were blasted into the air by the wind produced by the heat.

  Kouka’s target—Mikoto’s server—was on the seventh floor of the building. At least, that was what was written in the Antibody Network’s attack plan.

  Using her communication functions, Kouka was able to keep up with responses to her stream over the network. There was a lot of chatter about whether the stream was real or not. People were skeptical about her being an hIE. To most humans, an hIE was nothing but a doll that danced on someone’s strings. Therefore, if an hIE was attacking a human building, it meant there was a behavioral control cloud directing her to do it. Some people were pointing out that, if that were the case, she would have to be controlled by an illegal custom cloud. And, if custom clouds could produce this high of a performance, it meant that there were dangerous puppet-master terrorists out there. Some said, since Kouka was an hIE, the only one who could be pulling her strings would be Higgins, which directly controlled the AASC standards. If you traced all the behavioral clouds that were the strings every hIE danced to, you would find Higgins at their source. Even Kouka’s personal AI, which gave her a relatively free range of movement, was based on the AASC standards created by Higgins.

  “There’s some good chatter going on,” Kouka said, with a wide grin. “But you’re still pretty far off from the truth.”

  “If you want to know the truth,” she taunted, “you’d better come destroy me.” Then, she headed for an escalator up to the second floor.

  She met two heavily armored security hIEs at the top. They were
wielding electric net launchers, which were used for breaking up riots. Kouka let them shoot at her, not moving as the net draped over her. 300,000 volts of electricity, more than enough to paralyze a human, coursed through the net. When the guards saw that Kouka, still being carried up by the escalator, didn’t appear to be affected, they cranked up the output to 1,000,000 volts. Finally they ramped it up to 20,000,000 volts, enough to put down a cyborg using full body prosthetics.

  But none of it made any difference to Kouka. As soon as the escalator reached the second floor she lashed out with a high kick, slicing off the heads of both hIEs with an anchor she’d shot out of her heel. The heads rolled around on the ground, still hidden in their thick armor.

  “That said, I gotta admit, the truth is pretty stupid,” she said. “You’re all gonna laugh, if you ever figure out what it is.” The responses on the network as people continued to watch the stream changed their tone; now they believed the attack was real.

  Kouka turned up the output on her laser cannon and aimed a blast at the outer wall of the building. The material of the wall was unable to withstand the incredible heat of the drilling laser blast, quickly expanded, and burst outward. There were some onlookers nearby outside, and footage of the explosion from their perspective popped onto the network mere seconds after it happened. Through the broadcast, Kouka could hear a commotion of screams and calls for someone to get the police.

  “Second floor cleared,” she said. “Heading up to the third. Ba-boom!” She aimed the laser at the ceiling in front of her, then spun it in a circle so that a round portion of concrete fell from above. Leaping the height of the entire floor, she caught hold of the hole and pulled herself up quickly. She had infiltrated the third floor.

  “The security here is pretty crappy, if I can get in with an attack like this,” Kouka commented. “If units like me become more common and attacks become automated, you folks are in for some real trouble.”

  Humankind was connected by a simple, open system in which everyone held a certain level of empathy and trust toward anything else that looked humanoid. That was why security holes developed in the rationale of those on the receiving end of analog hacking. For Kouka, broadcasting the attack was essential for her future survival, now that her back was against the proverbial wall.

  “Everything gets messed up because you all want to stick everything that looks human in the ‘human’ box,” she said. “Even with how complicated your world has gotten, you still think there’s some special meaning to the human form. Do I look like something who would stop fighting just because you ask me to?”

  The more destruction Kouka wrought around her, the more the reactions on the network surged. Reaction numbers exploded upwards, like a stomach full of vomit that society had been fighting to hold down. Animal lust for Kouka’s powerful, petite, feminine figure started to appear in the reactions, as well. It was the same as it had been for Mikoto.

  Looking at the camera, Kouka played her part, showing off her own body and the massive device she wielded to shock her audience. Each time she lashed out and wrecked an hIE or a piece of nearby equipment, the access numbers on her stream jumped again.

  “Eat your hearts out, folks,” she purred. “You can pretend I’m fighting for you.”

  Kouka had decided that this was the way she would fulfill her role as a weapon. It had all started when she had met the Antibody Network and they had decided to make use of her capabilities rather than breaking her down and selling her parts. But, the fact that her victories for the Network meant nothing in her overall conflict with society had ended up chasing her into the dead-end she had reached.

  With the walls closing in on her, it was Kengo Sugiri’s analysis that had shown her a way out. Kouka called up the memory, watching Kengo speak in a recorded video:

  “Guys like me—normal, poor guys, guys who will never amount to anything special—can’t get anywhere by ourselves,” he said. That was why he had buddied up with Arato Endo. As a way out of the life he had been born into, it was the correct choice.

  Kouka checked the feed she always had keeping track of Kengo Sugiri. She could see that her broadcast was streaming on Kengo’s machine. He was currently talking with Arato Endo.

  With a grin already covering her face, Kouka let her joy move her body as well; swinging her laser back and forth, she bathed the place in flames. “Oh, you can abuse me all you want to,” she said. “I’m the tool that brings victory in conflict with humans, and I just know how much you folks love deadly toys like me.”

  The term ‘Antibody Network’ started to appear in the reactions on the network. Kouka hadn’t mentioned it, of course, but people were starting to connect her to the Oi Industry Promotion Center attack. Suspicion and anxiety was always good fuel for humans to find meaning in the events they witnessed. Humans were outsourcing the meaning behind Kouka’s attack to the network, hoping that someone would tell them what it all meant. From Kouka’s perspective, it was like they wanted the internet itself to provide an automatic answer to every question.

  Kouka made sure to burn every single piece of equipment she came across, to provoke both anger and fear in everyone watching the stream. “Everyone watching this stream, tell me all about how angry you are,” she invited. “I’ll automate your rage.”

  She ascended to the fourth floor of the building. The evacuation manual for the company must have been perfect, since she didn’t encounter a single human as she made her way up. On the network, there was a flamewar erupting over whether Kouka was a real terrorist or someone’s false flag operation. Based on the assumption that she was acting for someone else, the opinion that it was another Antibody Network attack started being thrown around. But that, in turn, didn’t match up with Kouka’s declaration that she was an hIE. It made no sense for terrorists fighting against automation to automate their own revolution.

  Since no one could find a simple explanation, the comments on the network devolved into chaos. The next target for everyone’s accusations were the powerful AIs in the world, shifting public opinion away from the Antibody Network having been behind it all. Then there was a new conspiracy theory; that a full-body prosthetic user was working for a pro-hIE group, conducting a false flag operation against the Next-Generation Social Research Center, which was a major hotspot for the research of social automation.

  Kouka just laughed. It was humanity’s own simple, open social system that bred their fear of herself and anxiety regarding AI. That was where the Antibody Network took root. Humans continued to shove all sorts of things into the vague box of ‘humanity’, which led to feelings of hatred and rejection when the things in the box failed to act the way that humans expected them to.

  Watching Kouka fight, humans were currently trying to recalculate the problems they had thought beyond their own power to resolve.

  “You’ve been living this way for how long, and you’re trying to rethink things now?” she asked. “If you’ll forgive me saying it like a human, ‘you guys are adorbs.’”

  The members of the Antibody Network thought they could make their places in society safe by destroying hIEs. For humans, seeking security was never a question of right or wrong. And yet, as they searched for their own safe place to live in society, the people watching Kouka’s stream continued to judge the right or wrong of her actions and the world around themselves with each minute that went by.

  Kouka had already made up her mind about what it meant to be developed after Lacia, despite being listed as Type-001. “This is why they made me a tactical weapon without the ability to strategize for myself; I was born to be wielded just like this,” she said.

  To Kouka, bringing the red box conflict out into the open wasn’t too different from leading a terrorist attack. The whole reason she was fighting where everyone could see was that things wouldn’t go her way otherwise. It was a lot like how Kengo Sugiri or other normal folks like him had no control over the conflicts they were involved in. They felt powerless to alter their situa
tion themselves, which led to the expansion of anti-hIE sentiment and terrorist attacks through the Antibody Network. Without the ability to strategize, Kouka was incapable of solving her own conflict, so she had turned it into an attack on the vague concept of humanity itself.

  “As easily as I could be a high-priced tool in some rich guy’s master plan, I could just as easily be wielded indiscriminately by the poor,” she said. “So I’ve always just worried about making sure I had someone to wield me. Though,” she admitted, “I do still hate it that I can’t come up with my own strategies.”

  While she spoke, Kouka continued to slice right through the buildings’ defenses, which were fairly lax. She smashed every computer over a certain size, and set anything desk-like she saw ablaze. After destroying everything in sight, she continued on to the fifth floor. There were no longer any escalators to take, and she wanted to avoid using the elevators, so she went up using the emergency stairs.

  There were still secretary-type hIEs on the 5th floor. Kouka had no ability that would let her directly pull information out of them, so instead she simply smashed their heads. Mangled, broken pieces clung to her fingers, and she flicked them away.

  A call came in over her private line. It was from Lacia-class Type-003, Mariage. Mariage was the ‘tool for preparing the environment,’ and had been given the gift of independent thought.

  〈Are you crazy?〉Mariage demanded. 〈Do you know what’s going to happen if you show the world this Hello Kitty cup you’re making? I made those camera units you’re using for Lacia.〉

  It was true that Kouka had gotten the camera units that were still dancing around her in the air from Lacia, to use as a weapon. Lacia had negotiated to get them from Mariage, then passed them along to Kouka.