Outbreak Company: Volume 8 (Premium)

by Ichiro Sakaki

  What to do?

  I looked to the other two with me for help. But when I met Minori-san’s eyes, she only shook her head; and Hikaru-san offered nothing but a resigned shrug. Myusel, Loek, and Romilda weren’t currently involved in our training. If Lauron couldn’t get the hang of working the figure, there was no point in them being here.

  Silent, I swallowed what threatened to be a very, very long sigh.

  Petralka wasn’t here either right now, so I couldn’t have Lauron imitate her. Even if she was and I did... it wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t get us anywhere.

  “Sob...” Lauron sniffled again, tears in her eyes. Beside her was the Petralka doll, standing stone still.

  Hikaru-san, chin in hand, was looking at Lauron as if he was having some sort of brainstorm.

  “Hey,” he said, suddenly turning to me and Minori-san. “How about we call it quits on this training for now? We’re just going in circles.”

  “Huh? But...” I glanced at Lauron.

  In fact, I had already considered simply giving up. If it really was impossible for Lauron, we could drop her and try to find someone else—but when I had made the hint of the suggestion, Lauron had only cried even louder, looking as if that would be the end of the world.

  She cried because she couldn’t make the doll work. But if we told her she didn’t have to work the doll anymore, she cried too.

  As I’d realized from the conversation at school, the other dwarves might not know what exactly was going on, but they still had high expectations for Lauron. She probably knew that perfectly well, and that was part of why she was afraid of being let go.

  But Hikaru-san said, “I don’t mean in the sense of kicking Lauron out. She’s able to recreate movements she’s seen once, no problem. So as far as routine duties like waving at people from a balcony, I think she should be fine. Later, we can have Her Majesty teach Lauron more ‘movement patterns,’ and just put them together.”

  “That’s...”

  Well, exactly right. From some distance away, it would be impossible to tell the two of them apart. The problem would be when she had to interact at close range with another person. But when she could just replicate specific movements, Lauron was perfect.

  “At the moment, I think our problem is somewhere other than actual control of the doll,” Hikaru-san said. “So I think we should focus on that issue, rather than on her puppetry.”

  Lauron fell quiet and looked at Hikaru-san, blinking.

  “She can only memorize her ‘responses.’”

  “Ah...” So Hikaru-san had noticed it, too.

  “Shinichi-san, I’m guessing you’ve figured this out yourself.”

  “Yeah, more or less.”

  “It’s the same thing that gets criticized sometimes about the Japanese educational system. This idea that memorization makes you ‘smart,’ even if you don’t actually understand the content. Lauron, I think it’s safe to say, has an incredible memory.” Then Hikaru-san gave a bit of a sigh. “That’s helped her get by so far. Memorizing everything. Be it at work or whatever else, she can just imitate what other people do. But for that exact reason, she hasn’t improved, either. She can’t respond to things in her own way. She isn’t very good yet at digesting things and understanding them for herself.”

  “I see...”

  “She gets that it’s not the same thing as memorizing. She just doesn’t seem to understand how. A copy machine can replicate an original down to the smallest detail, but it doesn’t know anything about what the original says. You could copy a million poems from Goethe or Heine on it, and it would never be able to write a poem itself. You could print out Einstein’s whole theory of special relativity, and the copy machine could never develop a new theory from it. That’s where Lauron is at right now.”

  “Yeah, I get that, but...”

  That was all logical, as far as it went. But what did it mean? What were we supposed to do about it?

  Hikaru-san was blunt: “Right now, we need to be focusing not on increasing the fidelity of the copies or enabling the machine to make more copies—but on teaching that copy machine to think for itself.”

  He added, “Cosplay and 2D creation are both the same way.”

  “Huh? How’s that?”

  “A cosplayer who has no love for the character he’s cosplaying, or a creator who doesn’t love the work he’s creating, they’re going to get torn down by the fans, right? So, what is that love?”

  “Well, uh...”

  It came down to how well the person grasped the character or the work.

  Like, if someone was cosplaying a character I loved, but the cosplayer didn’t love them, and I saw the cosplayer doing something or acting in a way that character would never do or act, it would shatter the illusion. It would make me angry, like the character was being disgraced.

  Can you imagine some pure, sweet bishoujo squatting on her haunches and smoking a cigarette? Unpleasant, right? Even if it were just a cosplayer, I would probably still end up shouting at them, “My precious ●● would never do that!”

  “I get it. It’s understanding by absorbing actual examples—deductive, not inductive reasoning.” This came from Minori-san.

  “Remind me what that’s about, again,” I said. I was embarrassed to admit that while I knew I had heard those words before, I couldn’t remember exactly what they meant.

  “Inductive reasoning is taking a set of facts—call them A, B, C, and D—and trying to determine truth by looking for the common factors,” Minori-san said. “It’s like how we’ve been showing Lauron a lot of Her Majesty doing this and that, in hopes that she’ll be able to figure out the ‘Her Majesty-ish-ness’ from there.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “Deductive reasoning, on the other hand, is when you take a series of propositions and use them to find the truth. Syllogism is probably the most famous example. Like, you take the major premise ‘All humans die,” and add a more specific premise like, ‘Kanou Shinichi is a human,’ to reach the conclusion ‘Kanou Shinichi will die.’”

  “Why do I have to be the subject of your syllogism?”

  “Details, details,” Minori-san said. “The point is, we can tell Lauron what to do, or say when she’s made a mistake, because we understand something about the empress, but that understanding comes from more than a collection of facts or examples. It’s because we understand Her Majesty’s personality and circumstances that we can say ‘This seems like something she would do’ or ‘There’s no way she would do that.’”

  “I get it. Yeah, you’re right.”

  So, say, you could have an overarching premise like “arrogant girls often shout,” combined with a more specific premise like “Petralka is arrogant,” to reach a conclusion like “Petralka often shouts.” I think that’s how it works, anyway.

  Even if you had never actually seen Petralka shouting, from the fact that she was arrogant, you could predict that she would often shout.

  Hikaru-san picked up the thread. “So instead of worrying about the doll itself, I think we need to start with an understanding of the ‘character’ Lauron is playing, and how she would act in a given situation. If what the doll does doesn’t match up with what Her Majesty would do, it’ll never fool anyone.”

  “So you’re saying...” I looked at Lauron. “...we need to teach Lauron how to play Petralka—that she needs to understand her as well as we do, or better?”

  “That’s the idea,” Hikaru-san said.

  Getting Lauron on close terms with Petralka was all well and good, but if the problem was really about teaching her to think for herself instead of just copying, well, that sounded awfully difficult to do. Wasn’t that on par with asking her to change her personality?

  “Of course—” Hikaru-san was looking at Lauron again; he sighed once more. “I’m not saying we don’t have a long road ahead...”

  He couldn’t quite hide the hint of fatigue in his voice.

  “You’ve worked hard today, Master.”
/>
  We were all back home, resting in the living room. Myusel had thoughtfully brought us hot tea and sweet snacks even though we hadn’t asked for them.

  “Thanks, Myusel...”

  “Not at all.”

  She probably just considered this part of her job, but a little bit of kindness like this really went a long way toward taking the sting out of my exhausted heart. The treats she’d made today were a little less sweet than usual, but still plenty sweet enough, and most importantly, you could grab them in your hands and just eat them. In its own way, it showed how accurately she had read our feelings and situation.

  That talent, or whatever you wanted to call it—it would be great if Lauron could pick up some of it, too.

  “How is Lauron-san?” Myusel asked.

  Minori-san, Hikaru-san, and I looked at each other—and then we all sighed.

  “S...Sorry...” Myusel said, sensing the grim atmosphere.

  “Don’t worry, Myusel, you don’t have to apologize,” I said quickly. “It’s not your fault—you’re just being thoughtful.”

  “But that girl... I really wonder if she can go on like this.” This whisper came from Minori-san, who had leaned as far back in her chair as she could. “It’s really incredible, the way she can control magical dolls so smoothly. I’m sure no one’s better than her on that score. But...”

  “Hmm...” There was nothing I could say to that; I couldn’t agree or disagree.

  We had settled on getting her to understand Petralka personally, but there were no promises it would go well. We had already put no small amount of time and effort and resources into this body-double project, and we would all have hated to see it all go to waste.

  That suggested the need for a plan B. Like, maybe we could have several magic-users all controlling the Petralka puppet at once. A team, if you will. If they learned to work well together, maybe they could make the doll look just as realistic as Lauron did.

  “I think that personality of hers is a problem, too,” Hikaru-san said with another sigh. He took a sip of the tea Myusel had so kindly brought and shrugged. “I can wink at the way she’s so quick to cry... But I’m not so sure about how her magic dissipates the moment she starts crying. Maybe if we could at least get her to see a performance through to the end even when she’s crying, it’d be okay. But with the magic cutting out as soon as she gets upset, I’m worried about what will happen when we really need her.”

  What if the doll was involved in a meeting with a foreign dignitary—and Lauron started crying in the middle of it, causing her magic to vanish?

  “Yeah, that is a problem...” I frowned as I considered this worst of bad scenarios.

  Was the real issue not Lauron’s abilities, but her psychological makeup?

  “Lauron Selioz...” I murmured, taking a bite of one of the chocolate-ish baked goods Myusel had brought.

  To me the question was, why did Lauron cry? Why did her magic stop working when she cried? Was she that afraid of people getting angry at her because she couldn’t do the job? Or was she worried about being embarrassed?

  Come to think of it, Romilda had used words like “obsessive,” “way serious,” and “inflexible” to describe her. That had led me to picture her as someone stubborn and particular, but it was hard to reconcile that with the real Lauron and her frequent bouts of tears.

  “Hrmmm...”

  When it came down to it, I didn’t really know that much about Lauron, the girl. If this was a problem of personality—a psychological issue—maybe it would be best to start from that perspective?

  “Maybe we need to get closer to Lauron, get her to open up to us a bit...”

  Our relationship so far had really been dictated by our work. “Work friends” sounds great and all, but it was really just a way of saying that your job was the only thing you had in common. Which meant it could also be a wall that prevented us from really getting close.

  If by becoming real friends with her we could break through that wall, she might explain to us why she cried so much.

  And then maybe, just maybe, we could find a solution.

  “Shinichi-san, you...” Hikaru-san was almost muttering to himself, regarding me coldly. “...really do want to expand your harem, don’t you?”

  “Why does everyone keep accusing me of that?!” I groaned.

  “What, you mean you really don’t? I’m sure Romilda said you picked out Lauron specifically to add her to your collection...”

  “Well, I didn’t!”

  Curse that Romilda! What was I supposed to do if my reputation took a beating it never recovered from?!

  ...Okay.

  Obviously, I understood that neither Romilda nor Hikaru-san exactly meant it. From the slightly sadistic smile on Hikaru-san’s face, I could tell that he especially wasn’t really being serious. And neither was Minori-san, who was listening to our conversation and laughing.

  But there are people in life who will take every joke seriously...

  “Is... Is that really true...?”

  No! Myusel! It’s just a joke, don’t take it seriously! I’m begging you, don’t look so shocked!

  “N-No!” I shouted. “It’s a scurrilous lie! Hikaru-san and Romilda are just joking! I’m not interested in any harem!”

  ...All right, maybe just a little interested. But even I wasn’t stupid enough to admit that right at this moment.

  “It’s true,” Hikaru-san said with a smile. “Shinichi-san isn’t the type to go for just any girl willy-nilly.”

  “D-Darn straight!” I nodded.

  I should have known, though, that a little imp of a cross-dresser like Hikaru-san would never offer me help like that without a catch.

  “Shinichi-san is very particular. He only likes loli girls.”

  “Now just a—”

  “He likes them so much that he’ll chant Yes Lolita! No Touch! in front of everyone.”

  Arrrrrgh!

  I mean, yes, I did do that once!

  “But that was about being a gentleman... I mean, I do like lolis, but I don’t only like lolis, so...”

  My protestations fell on deaf ears.

  “I think the only loli you really need is the empress—but oh, I see. Your harem is your harem, and you want it to be all lolis, don’t you? Is it the smooth, undeveloped—”

  “I told you, it’s not true!!” I wailed, keenly aware of Myusel watching me. “Look, if you say something like that in front of Petralka, I’m gonna be executed, okay?!”

  And so the day drew to a close with no definitive solution to our problems.

  I got a night’s sleep, but unfortunately, that didn’t mean I was going to just conveniently have a great idea in the meantime. I headed to school still sighing.

  Should I start by changing the relationship between us and Lauron? Get to know her and then think of the best way to help her?

  “But where would I even start...?”

  It was break time in the classroom. I looked around and saw students playing with action figures. It was just like I’d seen before. Lately, several of the students—mostly dwarves—had started playing with the figures during down time. Apparently they were certifiably popular.

  It wasn’t all fighting. Some of them were using the cameras on their 3Tses to record the figures moving around to make what amounted to short films. If this world had had video-sharing sites, I’ll bet we would have seen plenty of uploads of figures having dance battles.

  I looked out listlessly over the scene. Compared to Lauron’s work, the figures were jerky and awkward in the hands of the students. And yet—they seemed somehow more alive than when Lauron was moving the doll. I guess you could chalk it up to a difference in understanding—or maybe it had to do with the puppeteer’s motivation.

  Like, say you were working an anime-based figure. You wouldn’t just replicate what the character does in the show; you would naturally do other things, too. But those motions would seem to “fit” that character. And they would fit because
you understood the character.

  Makes sense, right?

  So how did the other kids achieve that understanding?

  They didn’t have to be super accurate, or very detailed. Likeness wasn’t about absolute accuracy.

  Didn’t my dad say something like that once...?

  Likeness. What you might call believability, in a story. My dad, the light novel author, told me that the exact replication of reality wasn’t the highest form of believability. Sometimes deliberately mixing in a little lie actually made things more plausible.

  And why would you include a lie?

  You want to evoke likeness because you want readers to enjoy the work. Likeness makes the whole thing feel right to your audience. In other words...

  Just doing what you’re told. Sticking to what’s been decided. Mechanically... machines actually do the most precise job of all. A copy machine. But the machine doesn’t understand. Machines—don’t have goals.

  They don’t have motivation.

  The desire to enjoy, and to allow others to enjoy. That was the motivation behind how the students moved the action figures. Pure and simple.

  They worked backwards from the goal of enjoyment to find the best way to achieve it.

  So what about Lauron?

  “Does it have to do with... her sense of the goal?”

  “Bam!”

  I was interrupted by a student shouting. I looked in their direction and saw Romilda leading a whole gaggle of dwarves, all surrounding a desk where they were playing with action figures.

  Suddenly curious, I watched them more closely. A figure of a pink-haired girl was rolling around on the desk as if the movement were no big thing. Beside her was a golden-haired girl holding a gun. And standing just in front of the gun was a figure of a girl with black hair. It looked like they were acting out some kind of battle.

  “We have no choice but to die!”

  I recognized the line one of the students was reciting. “...Rental☆Madoka, huh?”

  The dwarves were re-creating a scene from the show. As I recalled, next, the pink-haired girl—the protagonist, Madoka—would shoot the golden-haired girl, and that would be the end of the scene.