When Isezaki’s son came to see him, he sighed. “He’s always been like this. A total dictator. Always made Mom cry. Then when she got sick and couldn’t leave the hospital, he wouldn’t go see her. Even at her funeral, the only thing he did was haggle over rates with the funeral home director. The flowers are too showy, we don’t need to release any doves, so drop the price… I think I turned out as well as I did by using him as a negative example of how to live. I was desperate to be someone people liked and admired, and all I had to do was be his exact opposite. He was the perfect anti-teacher.”
The only person Isezaki had no trouble with was Shion. He’d flung all kinds of insults in her direction, but she never once dropped her standard smile, and his rage came up empty. It started to get to him.
Realizing the futility of it, he gradually stopped talking to her. When Shion came to change his sheets or bathe him or change his clothes, he didn’t complain at all. He just let her work. We were all quite relieved, assuming she had won.
But at the end of August, something happened.
By that time, Shion’s work was going smoothly enough that I did not always need to be with her. While she was changing sheets or moving people into wheelchairs, I was often working in a different room.
That afternoon, Isezaki came back from rehabilitation and said he felt sick and wanted to lie down. Komori had come back earlier and was already in bed, apparently asleep. Without questioning it, I told Shion to put Isezaki in bed and went next door to examine the resident in 207.
A moment later, I heard Isezaki bellow, “Wait! Stop!” followed by a loud clatter. I hurried back down the hall.
When I reached the door to 206, I froze. The wheelchair was upended, and Shion and Isezaki were collapsed in a heap on the floor. Shion was under Isezaki, and he appeared to be unharmed but was shouting, “Damn it! Let go of me!” and pushing at her with his good hand, trying to get away.
I quickly helped him up and sat him on the edge of the bed. Shion stood up as if nothing had happened and righted the wheelchair. Several other nurses came running from the nurses’ station. They peered anxiously into the room.
“What happened?”
“This thing!” Isezaki roared, thrusting a trembling finger at Shion. “It suddenly went crazy! It knocked me over!”
“I did not,” Shion said. “When I tried to stand him up, he suddenly started thrashing around. I tried to support him, but I was too late.”
“Liar! Killer robot! You nearly crushed me!”
“What is going on here?” Okeya said, looking from one to the other. “Which of you are we supposed to believe?”
I looked at Shion. Her faint smile had vanished. She was staring at Isezaki with a look of confusion.
“Well, Shion?”
“I….” I had never heard her hesitate before. “I… did nothing wrong.”
She did not sound very confident. For a moment, I doubted her. Had she really done it? Had something changed inside her that made her lose control?
“I’m gonna sue you all,” Isezaki roared. “You’re all responsible for using this diabolical machine!”
“Give me a break, Isezaki!” We all turned to look. Komori had sat up in bed. “Is this your idea of fun? Framing a robot for a crime it didn’t commit?”
“What?”
“You thought I was asleep, did you? Thought there were no witnesses? Sorry, but I saw everything. I saw you throw yourself out of the chair and start shouting. I saw Shion desperately try to catch you.”
Isezaki turned white as a sheet.
A scornful smile formed on Komori’s lips. “You’re going to sue, are you? Go ahead, try it. I’ll testify on the side of the facility. Tell the court you deliberately knocked yourself over. You’ll never win!”
Isezaki’s eyes were wide-open, his mouth flapping like a goldfish.
Komori ignored him and turned to Okeya. “Can I change rooms? I think breathing the same air as this son of a bitch is bad for my health.”
“We’ll look into it,” Okeya said. She put her hand on her hip and looked down at Isezaki. “Isezaki, we do not possess infinite patience. If you ever attempt something like this again, we will have to consider evicting you from the premises.”
I wasn’t even sure if it was actually possible to evict a resident. I had certainly never heard of it happening. But the threat seemed to work. Faced with our open contempt, his shoulders slumped. He suddenly looked much smaller.
“Let’s go, Shion,” I said and tried to pull her out of the room. But she resisted. “Shion?”
As if she couldn’t hear me, she shook off my hand and took a few steps toward Isezaki. She knelt down next to the bed, peering up at his face. He avoided her gaze, embarrassed.
“Isezaki,” she said.
“Shion, let it go!” I ordered. Shion did not budge.
She kept staring up at the old man with those innocent glass eyes.
“Isezaki. Please tell me. Why did you do this?”
“Shion!”
“Why did you do this?” There was no trace of scorn or reproach or anger in her voice. She simply wanted to know. Wanted to know what his actions meant.
He did not try to answer.
That Friday, I discussed the incident with Takami and voiced a question I’d been wondering about for some time. On her first day, Shion asked if Takami was a woman. She had the ability to wonder if information she had received from humans was incorrect. This was a sign of her intelligence, but at the same time, it allowed her to reject things people told her. She had learned to ignore things said by people with dementia.
And now she had not obeyed my order to drop the subject after the Isezaki incident.
“She wasn’t programmed to follow my instructions? You just told her to obey me?”
“Right.”
“Then she might not always obey me?”
Takami nodded, slowly. “It is possible. As she learns and her cognitive functions advance, there is the potential she will decide to follow her own judgments instead of the instructions she is given.”
“Then what about prioritizing the safety of the residents?”
Takami did not answer immediately.
“Be honest with me. Well? Is it possible she will decide something is more important than the safety of the residents and become a danger to them?”
“I can’t say…” He hesitated. “I can’t claim it’s impossible.”
“You kept that from us?”
“No, I explained at the beginning. Shion is not 100 percent safe.”
“But you said she would prioritize the safety of the residents. Why wouldn’t we think she was programmed to do that?”
“I apologize if I created such a misunderstanding.”
“Blaming it on your communication skills again?” I snapped. There was an awkward silence. But he had tricked us.
“Look, her actions are always logical. She will not hurt anyone without good reason.”
“You don’t get it. There are people here who are on the brink of death. Any number of people who say things like, ‘I wish it would just be over.’ What if she believed them? What if she logically decides the best course of action is to take one of their lives?”
That got to him. “I… I wish I could guarantee that won’t happen.”
“How can we make sure it doesn’t?”
“We just have to teach her. Teach her the value of life, the morality of caregiving. We can’t order her not to hurt people; she has to arrive at that conclusion herself.”
“And I have to be the one to teach this?”
“I guess so.”
I sighed again. It was hard enough teaching human children why they should not kill. And I had to teach a robot. I already had my work cut out for me teaching her about humor.
But I couldn’t pull out now. I was going to make Shion a great caregiver if it was the last thing I did. Was I investing too much of myself in this robot? Maybe I was. But I absolutely did not want to se
e her become a killer. It would put the seniors in danger and would be a tragedy for her.
I hesitated a moment longer, then proposed something I’d been thinking about for a while.
“I have a favor to ask.”
“What?”
“Give Shion permission to go out.”
Takami’s eyes widened. “To… go out?”
“Yes. When her work is done, she shuts down. When we turn her on, she starts working. She has no private time like the rest of us. She only changes her uniform when it gets dirty. She never wears anything else. Her entire life revolves around her job. Isn’t that sad? If your life was nothing but work, how would you feel? You’d go crazy, wouldn’t you?”
“But robots aren’t like people.”
“Are you trying to create a heartless machine here? Trying to leave Shion half-finished forever?”
“I think she’s being very helpful as it is.”
“No. She’s lacking the single most important thing a caregiver can have.”
“What?”
“Motivation.” I stared right into Takami’s eyes, folded my hands over my heart, and said proudly, “I chose to work here because I love old people. Because I genuinely wanted to help them, I went to school, took the exams, and became a nurse. That’s not true for Shion. She does what we tell her to do, but she has to want to help the seniors.”
“But…”
“You said it yourself a moment ago—she has to arrive at a conclusion herself. The same goes for the job itself.”
“Th-that’s… a really lofty goal,” Takami said, shaken. “And what does it have to do with going out?”
“There is no direct link. But I think the first step toward growing a heart is to treat her like a human. Take her out of the lab, out of the facility, and expand her point of view. Her body may be that of an adult, but her heart is that of a child who has just started to walk. Reading books and watching TV isn’t enough. She needs to know more about the world. Obviously, I’m not going to leave her unattended. I will be with her the whole time. Can it be done?”
“I don’t think there are any rules against it, but… hmm…” He trailed off in thought.
“Then what is the problem?”
“There’s a financial one. If we give Shion free time, then we have to do the same with all other models. If robots all need free time, then the amount of time they can spend working is reduced. Our budgets were all calculated based on robots that could work sixteen hours a day. But if they can only work eight hours a day, just like humans, then the expense dramatically increases. A company that would have bought ten now needs twenty.”
“Aha.”
“And will it end at going out? If robots understand that they’re working, then will they want rooms of their own? Salaries? What if they go on strike?”
“Wow,” I said, embarrassed. I had only been thinking about Shion; the potential implications had not occurred to me.
“But… it might be worth trying. If it doesn’t go well, we’ll just have to return her to an earlier save.” He stood up. “I’ll consult my superiors.”
4
It was another two weeks before permission to bring Shion out was granted. In mid-September, on my day off, I had Shion change into normal clothes and took her out into the town. Takami came with us.
It was a clear, sunny Sunday. We had Shion walk in front of us and followed several meters behind her. We were hoping to let her decide where she wanted to go rather than follow us around.
“This is so exciting!” Takami said, weirdly cheery.
“Is it?”
“It’s like we’re on a date!”
Yeesh. His communication skills really were appalling.
None of the passers-by realized that Shion was a robot. She wandered aimlessly down the hill toward the train station, occasionally stopping to look at something. Children playing in the park, ants on the sidewalk, the engine of a bike parked by the side of the road, contrails streaming out from behind an airplane—there was no clear pattern as to what drew her attention. When she passed an elementary school, she spent an awfully long time staring at a sign warning kids not to talk to strangers. When we asked if something puzzled her, she answered, “Not really.” It was hard to tell what she was thinking.
We turned into the shopping arcade near the station. She stopped in front of a pachinko parlor for a good five minutes, staring at the monitor advertising their new machines. At last she asked, “What does kakuhen reach mean?” Neither of us knew enough about pachinko to answer her. Near the station someone handed her a packet of tissues with an ad for adult entertainment on it, which confused her. “Why did they give this to me?” she asked. The tissues were easy enough, but it took a while to explain the ad.
She stepped into a shopping center. She walked straight past all the boutiques and makeup stands. She was not as interested in her appearance as human women were. Anxiety—whether from inferiority complexes or aging—was a major reason we spent so much time thinking about cosmetics and clothing. Shion would not age and had no such complexes, so why should she be interested?
But that did not explain why she stopped at the juice stand and spent a long time observing the staff operating the juicers. She did not eat and had no taste buds, so it could not have been that she wanted to try some. We asked, but once again she claimed no particular interest.
At last Shion stopped in front of a toy store. She seemed fascinated by the episode of Advent of the Metal God X-Caesar they were showing on the TV in the window. The heroine leaped into the cockpit, screamed, and the theme music slammed on, light exploded everywhere, and a dragon-shaped robot began transforming into a human-shaped one.
“Do you think she likes it?” Takami asked.
“Because it has robots in it?” I wondered aloud. It seemed unlikely.
“Has she seen this before?”
“Some of the seniors like anime, so she’s watched a little with them.”
“Oh…Toki, was it?”
“Yeah.”
“I never miss an episode, myself. It got a little boring there for a while, but once they introduced Dark Regard in the third season, things really got exciting again. When Tajiri’s the animation director, the pictures really pop. Say, do you think Master Dukaos is really Karin’s Synthclone? I’m dead sure that’s just a red herring, but—”
Before I could beg him to stop, Shion turned around.
“Kanbara…”
“Yes? What is it?”
“There’s something I’d like to buy.”
I was taken aback. I’d promised to buy her something if she saw anything she liked, but I had not expected that to be a toy.
“This,” she said, holding up an X-Caesar toy.
The next day…
“Toki, I have something to show you,” Shion said in the lounge after breakfast.
“Oh, is that…?” Toki’s eyes gleamed. Shion was holding out the X-Caesar, grinning. “The one from the commercial! And Caesar Blue. Good taste.”
“Kanbara bought it for me yesterday. You like blue best, don’t you, Toki?”
“Well, yeah…”
“You transform it like this.”
Shion demonstrated. She had opened it at a café a few moments after buying it and read the manual. You opened the belly, rotated the dragon’s head 180 degrees, and turned it and the tail into the robot’s legs. Then you moved the dragon’s hind legs to the center of it and formed the arms. Finally, you closed the belly again, opened the head, and turned the wings into a cape. There were enough steps that I quickly forgot them, but Shion got it at once. At first she struggled to actually transform it smoothly, but after practicing for a few minutes she could do it in no time at all. It was like watching a magician at work. In less than thirty seconds, the dragon became a man.
“Very nice,” Toki said as he inspected the robot from all angles. “The proportions are just like the anime, and they even worked in the Lightning Flare.”
“Try transforming it yourself.”
“Can I?”
Shion nodded. “You can borrow it.”
Toki immediately set about trying to transform it. But it was immediately obvious he could do no such thing. It required two hands to manipulate the robot’s parts, and Toki only had the use of his left hand. It didn’t take him long to give up.
“Ah, this is awful. Awful!” He looked really disappointed.
“You’ll have to work hard in rehab,” Shion said, her smile large.
Toki glared at her. “You tricked me. A robot tricked me,” he muttered. “Augh! Such an obvious trap! I walked right into it. But I do want to transform this myself…”
“So you’ll come to rehab?”
“Okay! Okay, I will. And if I can learn to transform this on my own, you’ll give me a reward?”
“Will a kiss on the cheek do?”
I had taught her that line. As expected, it was ideal.
“A kiss from a beautiful android?” Toki cried. “My God, you know me so well!”
He was really worked up now.
“Just you watch me. I’ll get that kiss from you in no time.”
It appeared he had found his motivation.
Shion and I left the lounge and gave each other a surreptitious high five.
But a few days later, the facility head summoned me and Shion and rebuked us. The physical therapist had complained about what happened with Toki. Claimed it was inappropriate of us to have provided the man with such a strange motivation.
This made no sense at all. Toki was like a man transformed, enthusiastically throwing himself into his rehab. We should be getting praise, not a reprimand.
I tried to protect Shion at first, but she volunteered that it had been her idea, and this made things worse. The facility head yelled at me for carrying out a robot’s idea.
The Stories of Ibis Page 21
