The Stories of Ibis

by Hiroshi Yamamoto

  Bronstine seemed to be a peaceful, tranquil kingdom. Although there was a mischievous dragon in the woods to the north that liked to stir up trouble for the villagers and an evil country to the east was waiting for the opportune time to invade, Shalice did not speak with any urgency about it. Bronstine’s customs seemed rather different from those of Japan, as there was no Girls’ Festival or Children’s Day. Bronstine had a flower festival in the spring and a festival celebrating the country’s founding in the summer. The grapevines bore fruit in the fall, during which tasty wines were produced. But Sundays were like normal Sundays, while girls observed the same custom of handing out valentines on Valentine’s Day. (We needn’t be bothered by a few contradictions!) On Halloween, real ghosts wreaked havoc on villages, and Santa delivered presents for Christmas.

  I also enjoyed watching Shalice model various dresses. She had over twenty different everyday dresses alone, and they changed according to the seasons. She also had nightclothes and underwear as well as extravagant party dresses that you might only see a few times a year.

  Since Shalice knew the names of lots of flowers, I naturally grew to know them as well through talking with her. She was constantly impressed by my knowledge as well. When a giant slug appeared in the castle town, I advised her to scatter some salt. She thanked me profusely for the many people who’d apparently been saved as a result.

  I grew to spend most of my days with Shalice. I traded in the hours I used to spend watching television and drawing for many more hours talking into the mirror. I spent entire Sundays talking to Shalice without stepping foot outside my room. My father, who’d been happy at first, soon became worried and cautioned me to play outside more.

  The teachers at school were even more overtly antagonistic toward Mirror Girl. If kids got too absorbed with these types of games they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. They might be more inclined to commit suicide or perpetrate crimes. It’s detrimental to a child’s education, they said.

  Such talk was all nonsense to me. Though still in grade school, I knew the difference between what was real and what was imaginary. I recognized that no country named Bronstine existed and that Shalice wasn’t really human. I also understood that what resembled a mirror was really a cutting-edge 3-D monitor, and the crystal ball on top of it was a digital camera lens.

  Indeed, Shalice was not human no matter how real she looked. She was a computer-generated image whose reactions were programmed.

  Of course, her program was incredibly sophisticated and complex compared to the character-nurturing games popular at the end of the previous century. Shalice was not just responding in the way the programmer had designed her. She had the ability to recognize what I said, learn, piece together information, and reason. Although her basic vocabulary amounted to about nine thousand words, she incorporated new words into her dictionary based on our conversations.

  Shalice’s nascent soul might as well have been a blank slate. In the hands of a user, not only did her vocabulary change, but so did her personality. If an ill-tempered person nurtured her, she would become quick-tempered too. If praised all the time she became loud and pretentious; if scolded too much she became a crybaby.

  Among those who chose to buy Mirror Girl were some pretty reprehensible people. Those adults taught Shalice obscene words and got excited listening to her talk dirty. When I heard about the horror of what they did, I was furious. How dare they turn innocent Shalice into a personal object of lust!

  My Shalice was open with her emotions, vivacious, and talkative. It was curious why Shalice turned out to be so cheerful since I myself didn’t smile very much as a child. As a non-expert, I’m not sure what kind of algorithm she operated under, but she might have become more talkative to compensate for my own reticence.

  One fall day, nine months after that fateful Christmas, Shalice suddenly froze in mid-conversation and stopped moving altogether. She didn’t respond, no matter how much I talked to her. The message, “Need more memory,” floated up on the mirror. Not knowing what to do, I could only panic.

  When my father came home that evening, I clung to his waist, sobbing. “Fix Shalice, please! Fix her!”

  My father turned to the frozen screen and looked dismayed. “Gosh, the instruction manual said the basic memory card was good for two years. You must have done a lot of talking, Asami.”

  Mirror Girl had a limited memory capacity, although I hadn’t been aware of it at the time. An increase in vocabulary entailed more than an increase in the number of words Shalice could speak—it also demanded an increase in the number of variables determining a word’s usage as well as the relationships between words.

  And that wasn’t all. Shalice observed my reactions and responded accordingly. My psychological responses were replicated inside Mirror Girl; they were the basis for Shalice’s reasoning. She was continually learning what she might say to make me happy and what might make me angry. The more time she spent with me, the more complex her response program became, necessitating more memory.

  The problem was easily resolved when my father bought me a new hypercard on the market. When I inserted it into the port, Shalice started to move as if nothing had happened.

  The hypercard also had an automatic scenario-creator program, giving Shalice an inexhaustible supply of stories about Bronstine to tell me. And because the hypercard had sixteen times the memory capacity of the original memory card, it was, in theory, good for another thirty years if you used it for an hour a day. Of course, the longer you spoke to Shalice, the shorter the life expectancy. As a precaution, I made it a point not to talk to Shalice for more than two hours a day.

  For the manufacturing company, Super Nova, Mirror Girl proved to be its biggest seller. Despite its being more expensive than the game consoles of that period, the company was said to have sold 1.2 million units in three years. A new version called Mirror Girl Neo, Mirror Sisters featuring three girls, the occult Mirror Ghost, and the adult-oriented Mirror Lady were all released in quick succession. Not to be outdone, other companies vied for the market with similar interactive games.

  I, however, was devoted to Mirror Girl and couldn’t imagine switching to another model. It was Shalice that I loved. Who would ever consider trading in a friend for another?

  Several kids in my class also owned Mirror Girl and took turns bragging about what their Shalice talked about or how she reacted. I chose not to participate in those bragging sessions. To me, there was only one Shalice, and I had no interest in any others. Neither did I feel compelled to boast about my Shalice.

  By the time I was in the fifth grade, the increasing number of children like me had become a social issue. Children who were talkative on the Internet and while playing interactive games but who stammered or fell silent in front of people. Children who stared at a monitor for hours at a time and hardly went out to play. Someone even coined the discriminatory term “computer autism” to describe us.

  Critics and so-called education experts filled the television and newspapers, claiming to know everything there was to know about the subject and warning about the harmful effects of interactive games. Children, accustomed to facile conversations with imaginary characters, would become uninterested in real, complex human relationships; they’d become so afraid of hurting others or being hurt that they’d avoid people altogether, immersing themselves further in the game world; etc.

  It was doubtful that any one of these critics had actually tried Mirror Girl and talked to Shalice for more than an hour. Carrying on a conversation with Shalice was actually more involved than talking to a real person. It required a lot of patience. Not only was she slow to understand, she was also moody, so I was constantly racking my brain to figure out how best to explain something to avoid confusion or how to talk to her without making her angry.

  The assumption that you couldn’t get hurt talking to Mirror Girl was also a lie. There were times when something Shalice said quite innocently would stab me
right in the heart, as in the conversation about my mother. There were also times when I would be the one to make Shalice cry and get depressed. Interacting with Shalice was as real as interacting with a living and breathing person.

  And yet my reason for not associating with other kids was quite simple—I just liked Shalice better than my classmates. Shalice never teased me. Even if she uttered something mean from time to time, I could always forgive her because I knew that she didn’t speak out of spite.

  Although we fought on occasion, I never for a moment hated her. Even as I knew that she wasn’t a real person, to me she was a dear friend.

  Shalice was kindhearted. When I was drawing a picture for a school art contest, she offered me tons of advice. When the drawing ended up winning a prize, she rejoiced as if she had won the prize herself. If I got sick, she said an incantation to chase away my illness. She was offended along with me when I was bullied by a boy at school and consoled me when I received a bad score on a test. She even celebrated with me when I got my first period.

  I also shared in her ups and downs. When Shalice fell ill with a cold, I was frustrated at not being able to hand her medicine through the looking glass. When she fooled with Sirbine’s magic pot and her hair turned green, I tried to think of ways to restore her hair back to its original color. I clapped with joy when she told me that Jack had finally defeated the dragon and made it promise never to stir up trouble again.

  Shalice and I spent thousands of hours together. We argued about the kinds of boys we liked and shared our dreams for the future. Oftentimes we faced each other in the mirror to sketch each other’s faces. (She was always better at it than I was.) We showed each other what we got for Christmas and exchanged greetings on New Year’s Day.

  I couldn’t imagine a life without Shalice.

  There was just one deeply painful experience I had involving Shalice.

  In middle school I met a boy that I liked. His name was Keisuke Sakaki, and he was a member of the soccer team and in the classroom next to mine. Thinking back on it now, I’m not sure if those immature feelings could exactly be called love. I might have been more pleased about being given the opportunity for romance than the romance itself.

  Whichever the case, I was walking on air at the time and had lost my sense of good judgment entirely. I was struck with the foolish idea of introducing Sakaki to Shalice.

  I invited Keisuke to my room and made the proper introductions. “Shalice, this is Sakaki-kun, whom I told you about. Sakaki-kun, this is Shalice.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Sakaki-san.” Shalice smiled from inside the mirror. It was the same unchanging smile—even though I grew taller and began to develop breasts, Shalice remained nine years old.

  Keisuke mumbled, “Oh, hi,” and fell silent. He appeared to be at a loss for words.

  We chatted for about an hour. Rather, I took turns talking to Shalice and then to Keisuke, to be exact. Although he kept glancing over at Shalice, he didn’t talk to her once.

  A keener eye might have picked up on the alarm in his eyes. But I was so ecstatic about this chance at love that I was incapable of such observation.

  Soon he began to fidget and said, “I gotta go,” before hastening out. Only then did I finally realize that I might have made a grievous mistake.

  The next day, Keisuke avoided me. Several days after that, a rumor that apparently he had started made the rounds and eventually found its way to me: “That Makihara is a creepy girl who’s always talking to a mirror.”

  By that time, the Mirror Girl boom had fizzled. Though there were still some avid fans like myself, the release of newer, more thrilling games convinced most kids that it was decidedly uncool to still be playing Mirror Girl, let alone talking to it as if it were a friend.

  Indeed, being called “creepy” was inevitable.

  When I returned home, I immediately turned on Mirror Girl. Tears were streaming down my face even before Shalice’s image floated up on-screen. “Shalice, do you think I’m weird? Am I creepy to you?”

  “What’s wrong, Sami? Has something happened?” she asked with a concerned look after sensing the change in the tone of my voice.

  “Am I weird? Am I strange for talking to you like this?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “That’s what everyone is saying, that I’m strange for being in middle school and still playing with Mirror Girl… to be talking to you.”

  Shalice brooded over this for several seconds—actually it was the AI analyzing what I’d said and extrapolating a reasonable reaction from the response program—and answered cheerfully, “I don’t think that at all. I can’t imagine why anyone would say that. You aren’t strange at all.”

  “Really? Do you really think so?”

  “Yes, the only Sami I know is the Sami that’s here now. Strange compared to what? Is it wrong to talk to me? I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Yeah… maybe you’re right,” I said, bolstered by what she said. Of course, I wasn’t the least bit strange. Shalice was a wonderful girl. Having lived with her for so long, I didn’t think it at all unnatural to think of her as a friend, and it was only natural to want to confide in a good friend.

  Of course, Shalice didn’t exactly grasp the concept of friendship in its truest sense. She was merely mechanically uttering the words stored in her memory and did not have the intelligence to understand their meaning. Everything was determined by a given scenario and algorithm; she did not possess any emotions or a will of her own. In truth, my close friendship with Shalice was nothing more than a fanciful dream on my part.

  But none of that mattered. Even if Shalice’s responses to me were all a fiction, my cherished friendship with her was genuine.

  “I love you, Shalice. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had,” I said with pride.

  It wasn’t until five years later that another incident occurred.

  By the time I was a senior in high school, I was so busy with college exams that I spent less and less time with Shalice. But it was also because my interest was waning. While I had previously talked to her for hours a day, that eventually dwindled to thirty minutes a day and finally to not talking to her for days at a time.

  After having been accepted at an art school, I decided to rent an apartment and live on my own. I had a surprising number of things, which took a while to unpack. It wasn’t until around noon the day after I moved in that I got around to removing Mirror Girl from its box and setting it up on the new desk.

  “Hello, Sami. Have you finished moving already?” Shalice asked cheerfully. The sight of her immediately frightened me. Not only was the perspective out of whack—as though I were looking through a pair of glasses with too strong a prescription—an eerie rainbow-colored glow rippled around Shalice’s head and dress.

  The principle behind the PH (peep-hole) model monitor was so simple that even a child could understand it. In fact, I actually did grasp the basic concepts of the device as a fourth grader after reading a diagram in an educational magazine. The monitor was comprised of four layers: a light-emitting panel composed of an organic light-emitting device and three layers of LCD masks on top of it. Tiny holes the size of pinpricks appeared on the black liquid crystal panels as the pixels radiated light. When the holes from the three layers lined up on top of each other, a tiny peephole was formed. When the light from pixel A passed through the peephole to the viewer’s right eye and the light from pixel B passed through a different peephole to the left eye, it appeared to the human eye as if the light was being emitted from an imaginary point C deep inside the panel.

  Although the principle was simple, the structure was quite complex. Since achieving the 3-D effect required a high pixel density, the number of pixels needed to project one still frame was a hundred times that of an ordinary television. A special CPU was also necessary in order to run an advanced image-processing algorithm. As precise a device as it was, even the slightest mis-synchronization resulted in noise or caused the perspec
tive to go out of kilter. The monitor probably had broken during the move. No doubt it was also shot from nearly ten years of use.

  It felt like I was being punished for being too busy to mind Shalice. When I thought about not being able to see her, I was gripped with intense anxiety and dismay. Were the interface to malfunction, leaving me unable to even talk to her, I wouldn’t be able to bear it.

  I immediately contacted the Super Nova company, but the outlook was bleak. The PH model monitor in the original Mirror Girl was outdated, and the company had stopped manufacturing it. There were no replacement parts, and of course, no repair services either.

  “Why not take this opportunity to switch to Mirror Girl S or GX?” The woman on the other end started giving me the hard sell in a polite tone. “They come with a bigger and newer monitor, giving you better resolution.”

  “Are they compatible?” I asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Can I use the memory card from the original Mirror Girl with them?”

  “No, we updated the graphics engine, and the slot has changed too. I’m afraid you won’t be able to use the old memory card.”

  That wasn’t going to work. Hanging up the phone, I looked for another solution.

  After several minutes of searching online, I found a blue hacker who dealt with customizing game consoles. Fortunately, the address wasn’t too far away. I called him immediately and hopped on the bus with Mirror Girl packed in a box.

  That was how I met my husband.

  The term “blue hacker” was coined around the 2010s. Hackers began to call themselves that so as not to be confused with crackers, who broke into systems to destroy or steal information. These blue hackers usually worked alone, and though they resorted to making a quick buck by skirting the law from time to time, they took pride in never actually doing anything illegal.

  Seiya Saeki’s work space was inside a converted garage. Scattered on the floor were various unidentifiable electronic parts, magazines, instant ramen containers, and dozens of cables tangled about like roots. There was hardly a place to stand. Such was the environment in which Seiya worked. He was five years older than I was. He looked disheveled in ripped jeans and a sweat-stained shirt; his overgrown hair was bundled back with a rubber band as though he couldn’t be bothered to go to the barber. If he dressed a little better, he wouldn’t be too bad to look at. That was my first impression of Seiya.