by Diana Jean
Yuriko went back to flipping through her emails, needing the distraction. “Well, Kathleen seemed pretty sure too.” Yuriko felt embarrassed, like she had gotten on her knees and begged. She had argued, as if she could change Kathleen’s mind. It was ridiculous and she was a fool.
Ai pressed her shoulder to Yuriko. “Do you want to know why I had been so sure?”
Yuriko started deleting emails at random. Maybe she could focus if so many weren’t clogging her inbox. “If you think it was because Kathleen was showing more ‘affection’ toward me than she was to you, you are mistaken. Apparently I am just an easy subject to ease her loneliness. A convenience. It didn’t mean anything. I don’t mean anything.”
Ai’s shoulder was warm, pressing harder against Yuriko until she looked up. “That wasn’t why I was so positive in my conclusions.” Her eyes were bright, glassy in the city lights. “I had thought that before, I admit. But over the past week, I came to a more … concrete conclusion. One that was, or so it seemed, flawless.”
She reached up, moving a piece of Yuriko’s hair that had fallen across her face. She tucked it neatly behind her ear, fingers warm and soft. She trailed down Yuriko’s hair, tugging gently at the ends of the strands.
“We are the same. You could say it is a coincidence, I could say it is fate, and Kathleen would say that computers shouldn’t believe in fate.” She grinned. “I was made to look and act like you. The cortex scan found in Kathleen this image of a perfect companion and compiled it all into data and inputted it into my appearance and personality. The cortex scan isn’t random. It isn’t biased. It reads and analyzes data more accurately than I can. All it saw was what was perfect, absolutely perfect for Kathleen.” Her hand dropped. “And it made a copy of you.”
Yuriko stared, trying to absorb what Ai was saying. She made it seem like simple fact, but her conclusion was too fantastical for fact. Too much like destiny and fairytales. Ai might look like Yuriko, might even act like her, but that was random. Ai was a computer program; she didn’t see the world as random. Her mind was too ordered to understand chance.
“You are wrong,” Yuriko stated.
Ai stepped forward, tugging at the edges of her sleeves and obi in frustration. “I realize this now,” she said emphatically. “And I wish I had … just more time. I need more data. I need to analyze more. Try coming at this from a different angle … perhaps a new perspective. A new method … ”
“Ai, it doesn’t matter how much time you have. People aren’t computer programs. Things might seem like they should work out.” She swallowed, squeezing her eyes shut momentarily. “They might even seem perfect. But people don’t always make sense. We do things that might seem right, but are actually wrong. We do things that feel wrong, but we know are right.”
She looked at Ai. She stood in the middle of the sidewalk, wearing Yuriko’s yukata, hair becoming a little messy from a night out. She looked defeated, confused. She looked human. She looked like Yuriko.
Yuriko straightened herself, dusting off her yukata from where it had touched the bike rack. “You have all the time in the world, Ai. Your program will be given back to Kathleen, after all. She’ll review it and revise for as long as the PLC project has a budget.” She reached out, feeling like she should touch Ai’s face or hair. Yet she didn’t want to. Instead, she tugged at Ai’s yukata, though it really didn’t need straightening. “I feel like I should say that I’ll miss you, Ai. But then, I know I’ll see you every day for years to come. You just might look a little different.”
They stood there in silence for a moment. The group of guys drinking beer had moved on. A family walked past them, a child sleeping in the woman’s arms. There was a shriek of laughter down the street. They could still hear the fireworks exploding over the river.
“Kathleen is calling me again,” Ai murmured.
“You should go find her. She’ll need someone to help her home.”
Ai looked up at Yuriko. She looked sad, but then she blinked and she stepped away. She lifted her wrist to her mouth, though there was no phone there. “Hey, sorry. Got a little sidetracked. No, don’t worry. I’ll meet you.” She nodded to Yuriko, then turned and walked away.
chapter TWENTY-SIX
The morning went seamlessly. Kathleen woke early to shower and put on her normal business attire. Two men from Engineering arrived in the morning with a padded box. Ai changed back into the horrid default clothes she had arrived in. Then she sat in the molded compartment and powered down. The men sealed her in, giving a cursory nod to Kathleen, and then left.
Kathleen only spent enough time to put on her shoes and lock the door before she left, catching the next train to her office. She missed the morning rush and she was glad to have a seat for the ride to work. Before she had even gotten off the train, she received a message that Ai had been officially decommissioned and updates would be forthcoming.
Arriving at the office, she had a quick meeting with Fukusawa and the rest of her team about what would be happening next. Then she had a longer meeting with Tamura about the upcoming weeks.
“I’ll need you to travel with the PR team to participate in their public presentations.”
Kathleen was surprised. “You will?” It hadn’t been mentioned before that when the beta went live, Kathleen would have to do presentations outside of the company.
Tamura nodded. “Since you got exclusive access to this product, I’ll need you out in the field promoting it. Everyone will appreciate your expertise.”
Kathleen felt a bit light-headed. “I don’t know … I wasn’t prepared for this when I was recruited.”
Tamura waved a flippant hand. “It will not be difficult. You’ll only have to perform a few scripted presentations and PR will feed you only questions you have prepared for. Otherwise, you’ll be meeting with other division heads of the company.” She tapped on her wrist and Kathleen felt her phone buzz with incoming mail. “This is your itinerary for the next two months.”
Kathleen’s eyes widened. Nagoya, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Sapporo … she wasn’t even sure where all these cities were exactly, but she knew they were far away from Tokyo. There were also various notes saying alarming things like “vid meeting with Hong Kong” or “online chat with Seoul.” She looked up, feeling overwhelmed.
Tamura was checking her wrist, like she hadn’t just dropped a bomb on Kathleen. “The company will reimburse all expenses and, for the most part the PR team and myself will do the heavy lifting.” She glanced at Kathleen. “You are just there as technical support, really.” She put her arm down. “If this beta promotion goes well, we will probably bring you abroad for the worldwide release. Just a warning.”
Kathleen returned to her desk, feeling a little out of breath. She wasn’t hungry for lunch, spending the next hour instead combing through the alarming itinerary. She would be eating dinner with the CEO of the company in two weeks and she prayed that she was only required to sit there and not have to actually speak.
Fukusawa tapped on her door and she looked up, wondering if she looked like a deer in the headlights. “Uh, yes?”
He held out an envelope. “The data from PLC 00 arrived.”
Kathleen stood up, quickly taking it from him. PLC 00 was the name they used in the office for Ai. It was a little strange to receive a physical envelope with the small data drive inside it. But Kathleen knew that sending all of Ai’s programming over the Internet would be a breach of security. “Thank you. I’ll start on it now.”
He nodded and left her. Kathleen dropped the drive onto her desk. Most computer chips were small enough that they required tweezers to pick up. This actually managed to be the size of Kathleen’s thumbnail. Though she knew there was quite a bit of data inside of it. She wondered what Ai looked like now. Had they totally stripped her down, looking into her mechanical workings for wear and tear? Was Yuriko the one slowly taking her apart?
Kathleen plugged the drive into her desk computer, which automatically synced up with her pho
ne. The first thing she noticed was that it was all a mess. Her ordered lines of code were practically buried under revisions and new data. Some of it was from Kathleen, much of it was from Ai, making changes and updates as she went. The PLC couldn’t change their basic functions, or any codes having to do with safety, but she was meant to learn, taking in new information and using it to change her actions and reactions.
As Kathleen buried herself in it, she found little blips of memories. The patch from when Ai broke down in Akihabara. The automatic enforcements from when Kathleen had gotten ill and Ai broke some of the rules in the cause of health. She skipped past it all, looking for the beginning of the data collection. The moment when Ai first opened her eyes and had to take in the world around her. The moment when she first looked at Kathleen. She translated the code in her head.
No obstructions. Seek USER KATHLEEN. USER KATHLEEN found. Examine user.
Acquire more data. Speak.
“Doing okay there, Kathleen?” Emotion: NONTHREATENING.
Things started sparking off from there. No longer linear, but like a bush growing wildly. Kathleen could even see moments in which Ai reflected on past memories and edited them, bringing new conclusions from data gathered later.
It felt like going through an old journal entry. It seemed so familiar, but there were so many new things to discover. Or rediscover. Kathleen had only been with Ai for a rather short time, but she felt achingly nostalgic. Nastukashii, Ai probably would have supplied.
Kathleen remembered when she had gone to Akihabara and seen the old game she had worked on. When she played through, it had felt like she was catching up with old, forgotten friends. It felt a little more intimate, looking through Ai’s data. It didn’t make her sad, or even miss Ai. Maybe because, like an old computer that needed a new battery, Kathleen could just put this chip into any suitable device and Ai would live again. Of course, it wouldn’t be the same unless Kathleen received a new PLC body. However Ai’s physical form had never really pleased Kathleen.
Ai created different data files for each person she met. Kathleen’s was the largest, bursting with input and revisions. She also kept files of people Kathleen hadn’t even realized she met. There was the clerk on the convenience mart named Junosuke and two servers at a cafe, Naomi and Kaoru. These were small files, just enough so that Ai would act appropriately when she met them and lightly review them whenever meeting a new stranger.
There was a file for Yuriko. Kathleen wasn’t surprised to see it. What did surprise her was the number of revisions in Yuriko’s file. Code had been rewritten dozens of times. Memories reviewed so often that just by glancing through it, several popped up without prompting.
Yuriko’s face, soft, eyes pensive. She was reaching out with one hand.
“And you’ve always needed someone to take care of you.” It was translated into English, by default.
Her hand touched another’s face. NON-USER MICHIKO, it was identified.
Another memory. This was darker. Input was flowing in, but there was no output.
Yuriko’s was very close. Looking at Ai seriously.
“Ai, you need to stand and follow us.”
Ai moved and notes were taken. Kathleen’s arm around her waist. Yuriko before her. They were in a train station, then on a train.
Kathleen’s voice, though Ai wasn’t looking at her. “I think I’ve managed to dodge a panic attack. Thank you for coming.”
Then, a movement, at the time unanalyzed. Later data overlapped it.
USER KATHLEEN stabilized by means of NON-USER YURIKO.
The next was sound only, the visuals black.
“Will I see you in the morning?”
“If you like.”
“Good.”
“I need more data. More analysis.”
Compress data. Filed under USER/NONUSER EVALUATION.
“If you reach out to Kathleen, she will undoubtedly reach back, even if she isn’t sure why yet.”
Yuriko’s face filled the screen, eyes wide. Kathleen didn’t need Ai’s evaluation to read the expression.
NON-USER YURIKO emotion: HOPE.
Kathleen left Yuriko’s file. Decided to see what this USER/NONUSER EVALUATION file contained. It looked like a whole new program—like Ai was creating a new code for herself but would only get so far, then suddenly cut it off. Then pick it up again later. Kathleen checked the dates of the progress, seeing it form from only bits and pieces, until, just yesterday, Ai seemed to have run a full simulation of it.
However Ai was a simulation herself. She couldn’t just disregard her own code and run another. She seemed to have placed it, almost like a blanket, over the original programming. Where it conflicted, she tweaked the new code, causing many small crashes and reboots. If this happened yesterday, then Kathleen would have noticed, right? Maybe not while she was at work, but the time stamp said most of these occurred during the evening. They would have been at the festival. Kathleen would have ….
Ai had left Kathleen with Yuriko. Kathleen had not been keeping track of her during these few hours.
She didn’t know why she would run it, especially with such high risk of total failure. It had been labeled as a total failure, put back into the file. What did it do? What was the purpose?
There was a small vid file present, put in there like an afterthought.
Ai was reaching up to Yuriko’s face, stroking her fingers down her long hair.
NON-USER YURIKO emotion: FRAGILE.
Response emotion: COMFORT.
“We are the same,” Ai said, voice tender.
Import USER/NONUSER EVALUATION.
Yuriko’s voice spoke, shaking, defeated.
“People aren’t computer programs.”
USER/NONUSER EVALUATION file failed.
chapter TWENTY-SEVEN
In Hiroshima, Kathleen found out that Fukusawa was a hilarious drunk.
With only a few drinks, the mild-mannered computer nerd turned into a swaggering sass pirate. There was no other way to describe it. He would sit next to Kathleen or someone else from the group and say, very loudly. “You know what your problem is? Your last name is impossible to pronounce.”
“Schmitt?”
He grimaced. “It’s just terrible for any Japanese person. Where are the vowels? What does your country have against vowels?” He slammed his fist onto the table, nearly knocking over his beer. Luckily, Mitsu-chan was there to save it.
“Just call her Ka-chan!” she piped up.
Kathleen would roll her eyes, but she would be laughing or smiling as Fukusawa would go across the entire room and tell people just how wrong they were. No one took it seriously, not with a hot plate of okonomiyaki sitting in front of them. Kathleen’s was a wonderful pile of noodles, pork, eggs, brown sauce, and mayo. Mitsu-chan had described it as a Japanese pancake. However Kathleen had never seen a pancake stacked about five inches high and filled with noodles. It didn’t matter; she was going to eat it all.
When she learned that Mitsu-chan would be joining the tour, Kathleen had been very grateful to have another familiar face besides Fukusawa. She quickly found the PR team to be an excitable bunch. The leader was Rei Hamasaki, who was just as hyper as Mitsu-chan that she immediately insisted that everyone call her Hama-chan. She had traveled the world it seemed, being fluent in about ten different languages.
“I once spent a year in the Bahamas. That’s when I was working for Limited Tech and I was trying to get sponsors in the Caribbean. Wonderful place, except one morning I found a scorpion in my bathtub.”
“What?” Kathleen asked. They were currently outside the convention center in Fukuoka, enjoying the warm weather and mild breeze.
She nodded, finishing up a cigarette. “So I threw it out the window. Told my roommate about it later and she was like, ‘Did you get the second one?’” She grinned. “Apparently, if you don’t properly plug your bathtub, a mating pair of scorpions will probably move in.”
Hama-chan’s second in comm
and was Suzu Aoki, whose English was very poor, but was fluent in Japanese, Mandarin, and Thai. She was quiet, compared to Hama-chan but Kathleen often saw them in private conference, sometimes just in the corner of the room, between questions, quickly talking to another.
Other members on the team were Yoshi Tashiro, the intern from China who loved to practice his English with Kathleen, Minoru Kono, an older man who often ordered for everyone at the restaurants, Takahashi Mutō, who became fast friends with Fukusawa, and Ayame Thorn, who was from Australia and served as second translator to Hama-chan.
They were on the shinkansen to Sapporo when Ayame turned to Kathleen and asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”
Kathleen was stunned. She had been staring out the windows, possibly getting a little too excited to see real snow again. “W-what?”
Ayame had large green eyes and wavy blond hair. She didn’t look Japanese, at least not to Kathleen. But she spoke Japanese so well, that it was alarming to hear her switch to her Australian English. “Do you have a girlfriend?” she repeated.
“Ah … um, no … I don’t.”
Ayame tilted her head. “Oh, a boyfriend then?”
Kathleen shook her head. “No, I … why do you ask?”
Ayame shrugged. “Do you wanna go out sometime?”
Kathleen was more than a little stunned. She had talked a lot with Ayame over the past weeks. Being the two foreigners amongst the Japanese had formed a bond between them. Kathleen did like Ayame, she was funny and smart and always seemed to notice whenever Kathleen was feeling a little stressed from all the travel. Also, Kathleen had to admit, she was very pretty.
It was strange that Kathleen’s first instinct was to say something like, “Sure, why not?” Because it all sort of felt like the same situation in which Kathleen would get a boyfriend back when she lived in America. Easy, simple. However Ayame wasn’t some boy from Kathleen’s hometown, she had to remind herself.
Then she thought of Yuriko. She thought of how inky black her hair was, and just as silky. She thought of her eyes, blue and open. She remembered the yukata she wore to the hanabi. How it made her skin look so pale, her neck longer. She remembered her voice, breaking.
