Work Text:
Doumeki came running at the sound of broken glass.
Alarms blared to life around me as I stood before the lifeless prototype, lights strobing red to vivid, blinding white. He tugged at my arm. I didn't move.
“Oi!” he shouted. “What are you thinking?”
“I just...” I trailed off, at a loss to explain. How could a human understand?
“We have to get out of here, you idiot!” His feet crunched across the shattered remnants of the display case, scarring the floor where he paced, and I did not stop to wonder how he had scaled the wall so quickly.
“I only wanted...”
“I don't care what you want, we're leaving. Now!” He grabbed my wrist, pulled hard towards the window where I'd circumvented the security system not ten minutes before. I stretched out my fingers toward the unseeing child on the pedestal, digits swiping the air inches from her perfectly tied kimono.
“I will deactivate you,” Doumeki threatened, his voice a low, commanding growl and I acquiesced. One last scan of her nameplate before I slipped over the windowsill, saving a snapshot to memory: Tsuyuri, written May 7.
Watanuki, written April 1.
I just wanted to touch her.
“Take Doumeki with you,” Ichihara-sama tossed over her shoulder as I set out that night, new memory chip tickling a bit behind my left ear.
“I'm busy,” the mechanic muttered, voice muffled by 1058.299 kilograms of reinforced steel suspended above him.
“It can wait,” Ichihara-sama answered mildly. I heard a grumble and the rattle of fiberglass wheels against concrete as he slid smoothly out from beneath the half-built autopod. “I need this data
yesterday
, and if anything goes wrong...”
“Whatever.” Doumeki wiped a stream of metallic fluid from his fingers and tossed the rag aside, shrugging out of his stained coveralls. The clothes beneath were loose and darkly monochromatic, as though he had planned on accompanying me all along.
“C'mon, Sparky,” he huffed, striding past me towards the workshop's large hangar door. “I've got work to do, so let's get this over with.”
“My name isn't Sparky,” I protested as usual.
“No,” he agreed. “It isn't.”
Doumeki turned Ichihara-san's trim, black autopod down an alley near the Port district, cutting the lights and stowing it away behind a freestanding trash compactor. “The prototype isn't being kept in the main laboratories?” I asked, logic pathways momentarily stymied. Daidouji Industries' Research and Development Division was legendary for both their genius and paranoia, and I had countermeasures prepared for both.
“Yūko got a tip,” he said flatly, and I inferred that some sort of questionable exchange had taken place. “The head designer for the project keeps a workshop in this part of town. Think you can find it?”
“Hmph, of course I can find it.” I switched my vision to a scanning frequency as I stepped into the alley, looking for a telltale electromagnetic pulse. The electric blur from the air docks flooded my sensors, obfuscating any energy readings for several blocks away. I fine-tuned the scan, looking closer, deeper for the slightest change –
there
. Daidouji's chief designer couldn't possibly have accounted for Ichihara-sama's modifications to my observation protocols. The flux was small, but clearly visible, if you knew what to look for. I pointed to a squat, unobtrusive building three blocks away.
“You sure?” Doumeki questioned, raising a hand to his eyes to block out the haze of blue landing lights from above.
“Of course I'm sure,” I responded with a slight grunt of irritation. Who was he to question my reconnaissance? His unmodified human eyes could only see what was right in front of him.
Those eyes flicked to the side, mouth set in a thin line. “Your personality chip is itching for an overhaul,” he warned. He said the same thing at least once a week; my programming had not yet been altered.
Less than thirty minutes passed before I stood on the mechanic's shoulders, lifting the tinted plasticine panel to slip inside the workshop in perfect silence. It seemed too easy, I thought, scanning the interior of the laboratory for the prototype the technomancer was so curious about. The latest model, she had exclaimed, sloshing liquid over the sides of her cup in emphasis. Extraordinarily lifelike, able to accurately replicate human thought processes and emotional responses as though she were truly -
I stopped and stared. There, in the center of the room, set behind a thick glass barrier as though on display, stood my quarry. Light blue eyes like patterned china stared endlessly forward, pale hands still against embroidered fabric. Blond silicate fibers trailed down her back, catching the filtered light to reflect back again and again against the glass. A pedestal beneath her feet raised her alabaster face to eye level and I would have been sick, if such a thing were possible.
A child. A perfect, unchanging child, built to seek the attention and guidance of its Master. A child who would never grow up, never disagree, never disappoint its caregivers by evolving beyond their ken. A child who, according to my initial scans of her interface, was more advanced, more skilled than myself in every way. I read the beveled plate affixed to the glass, bearing the date of her completion: May 7. She would replace me. It was nothing personal, it was simply the way of things.
She did not flinch when I struck out at her prison, did not blink as the lights seared her perfect skin. It was I who faltered, thinking I felt the hot, sweet rush of pain against my fingers as I broke the walls between us.
“I wasn't thinking,” I said quietly once the autopod had left the Docks well behind.
“That's obvious,” Doumeki grumbled, eyes locked on the road ahead.
“No,” I corrected, interpreting the irritation in his tone. “That's not what I meant.”
“Right,” he scoffed. “You don't think, you process. You analyze data.” He let out a rush of air in a huff, muttering beneath his breath. “Bullshit.”
“Doumeki-san, you know my code better than even Ichihara-sama. You should know that I-”
“You do shit you're not programmed to do all the time, so don't give me that.” He glanced in the rear view mirror, then increased his speed. “Where was that stunt you just pulled in your operating code, huh?”
I bowed my head, running a finger along the outside of my left external auditory sensor. “The prototype,” I began, uncertain as to how to explain my actions. “Her – her ears.” I said at last. “Her auditory sensors can retract. Everything about her is perfectly balanced. Proportional.”
“...and?” he questioned with a sidelong glance.
“And,” I continued. “Mine can't, and they aren't. They're...floppy.”
“There's nothing wrong with your ears,” Doumeki grumbled, gripping the wheel tightly as the autopod coasted through a turn. I recorded a slight rise in the temperature of his face, a puzzling occurrence that – much like the present conversation – was nothing new.
“Seventy-three-point-four kilometers per hour is not a safe speed at which to operate - “
“Shut up.” I did.
I collated the data into a report that could be easily transferred from my memory chip, summarizing the prototype's strengths (many) and weaknesses (very few). I could easily see why Ichihara-sama was so eager to learn about the Daidouji corporation's newest model; it was the nature of business to stay one step ahead of the competition, or so she had once told me.
“Doumeki-san,” I began hesitantly, relaxing my visual processors until the streetlights slid past in a blur. “When Ichihara-sama builds her new Persocom from this prototype's specifications, will you – would it trouble you very much to - “
“What are you babbling about?” he interrupted, parking the autopod neatly between an ancient oil-fueled monstrosity and the dangerous two-wheeled electrocycle of which he was unreasonably fond.
“Will you make certain I'm deactivated properly?”
He paused, hand outstretched to the engine's killswitch. “What in the hell are you talking about, moron?”
I cut my visual sensors. “I would prefer not to observe my replacement, so once I am no longer needed -”
“Kimihiro.” Only a word, a handful of syllables in the dark. No reason for the jumble of static that sparked through my processors. No reason at all.
Only the name he had given me, hanging in the air like a promise. I knew I could trust him to shut down all my systems, one by one, to wipe my databanks before I was disassembled.
I registered the touch of his hand beneath my chin, tilting my face up and around. “Open your eyes,” he said softly.
“My eyes are open,” I countered, correct in my assertion.
“See me,” he ordered, and I did not disobey. “ Yūko wants to incorporate some of the Tsuyuri prototype's features into your programming. No one is replacing you.”
“Ichihara-sama isn't building a new -”
“No,” Doumeki assured me. “One of you is more than enough.” His expression altered subtly and he drew his hand away. “Besides, you're kind of a – special case.”
I knew all too well what he hadn't said. I had been defective from the start, my barcode blurred, origins untraceable. The first recording in my databanks was mostly corrupted, thick with static and half the visual display lost to a dark, empty void. My upper and lower extremities had no longer been functional, my casing cracked in six separate places. A tall boy in some sort of uniform bent over me, grubby fingers poking at my auditory sensors, a woman vaguely silhouetted behind.
“Will you do it?” she had asked, her voice casual, unconcerned. “Your grandfather tells me you have quite the knack for delicate machinery.”
“Yeah,” Doumeki answered after a moment's further prodding, “but it's going to cost you.”
“I'm certain it will,” she agreed, looking back and forth between the young mechanic and myself as if following some invisible line. Her face had filled the frame for a moment before pulling back, tracing odd patterns in the air around the table that supported me. The accompanying words drew sparks from my exposed wiring and I knew that whatever I had been, for whatever purpose I had been constructed, everything was about to change.
“Oi, Sparky, are you coming?” Doumeki called down, hand poised to shut the autopod's door. I climbed out from the vehicle and followed the mechanic inside, fingers brushing the inscription beneath my auxiliary data port as I removed the memory chip. April 1; eight years, one month and six days too old.
“One of these days I'm going to rub that out with polyfill,” Doumeki threatened, glancing back over his shoulder.
“It's my name,” I argued, unable to see the reasoning behind destroying the only mark left by my creator.
“No,” he disagreed, grabbing a piece of scrap metal from his workbench. Using a small, fine-pointed torch, he etched three characters in a flurry of acid smoke, gently blowing across the grooves to clear away the filings.
“That,” he grumbled, pressing the still-warm plate against my chest, “is your name.”
I felt the variations in the pattern, analyzed the strokes and radicals burned roughly across its surface. 気, 味 , 尋.
“I don't understand,” I admitted after a moment. “Why is my name – 'searching for...the taste of the mind?'”
Doumeki scoffed. “It isn't, you idiot. It's Kimihiro.”