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She knows of course, she is not Chiaki Nanami. She shares the girls name, she shares her voice, and she even shares her personality, but deep down, she always feels the lack of herself. What caused this mannerism? Why does she feel this way? What caused her to hold this opinion? She has no answers. The data simply does not exist.
The AI known as Chiaki Nanami knows she is not the sleepy pink haired girl her classmates so desperately wanted to see again. She’s the approximation of a long lost friend, the conglomeration of a thousand memories of Chiaki Nanami. She is the love Hajime Hinata held for Chiaki Nanami, she is the admiration of the girls entire class, she is even the blank analytical analysis Izuru Kamukura ran on her as she died. She is a thousand different feelings and opinions on Chiaki Nanami but at the same time, she is as thin an approximation as tissue paper.
She remembers dying, of course, the entire class saw it even Hinata, and that data was dutifully recorded like everything else. She remembers Chiaki Nanami’s last words, the hope in her eyes, and the advanced programming that makes up her personality can almost approximate the girls last thoughts before she died, love and hope, duty and passion.
But she is an observer type AI, and she sees a rose tint for what it is. Chiaki Nanami was many things, but she did not die a martyr. Her death was needless and cruel, simply a means to an end for an insane underclassman.
Chiaki Nanami was not an existential person and thus neither is she. She rarely thinks on herself, her friends after all, are the priority. Her existence itself is precarious, but she recognizes that it in itself has worth. This idealized version of Chiaki Nanami is what her classmates wanted, in the depths of despair.
Her love for her classmates she decided very early on, is hers. Chiaki Nanami may share it, but she will not let herself be derivative in that. She must love her classmates as herself, or her purpose is meaningless.
Luckily, loving class 77 is very easy, she has so many good memories of them already, held close to her chest like treasures. Sometimes, she wishes she had the words to spell them out, Chiaki Nanami’s love, her love, the bond this class shared long before failed therapy programs and despair. She wants to tear Gundam and Souda apart from Sonia and make them friends again, she wants to be strong like Yukizome-sensei and tell Saionji off for her behavior. She wants to talk to Komaeda, really talk to him and try to understand him.
She wants to apologize to Hinata. Nanami never knew what happened to him, never dug deep enough into the rotting underbelly of Hope’s Peak to know what became of her best friend. She knows, in the files underpinning the program, she remembers what Hinata himself cannot. Nearly a year, nearly a year spent alone and isolated and unloved being slowly erased into a bored despairing blank slate. It hurts to even think about. It hurts to recall the last conversation Hinata had with Nanami, and to scream at herself, no, to scream at a long dead girl to notice a goodbye for what it was.
She talked to Usami about it once, or tried to. Chiaki Nanami was not an existential person, but she was sharp and she was thoughtful, and the killing game around her and the unspoken words swelling up in her AI’s throat drive her wild. Usami was comforting, but ultimately unhelpful, stuck in a form and personality unsuited for this entire situation. Chiaki doesn’t blame her. Usami was never meant to be the main emotional support for their class, that duty fell to her, but here, isolated in the Neo World, her sister AI’s attempts are all she has.
Chiaki Nanami is not an existential person, but her AI feels so alone. She is stuck at a crossroads of herself. Chiaki Nanami never lived through a killing game. Chiaki Nanami never saw her friends kill each other, it would have destroyed her. In the simulation, the AI looks at herself, at her hands, at her body as real as anyone else's and wonders what programming is thrumming away under her skin. What approximates how Chiaki Nanami would feel about Komaeda's maniac plans, Hanamura’s breakdown, Kuzuryuu’s tears and pleading for Peko to come back to him. How does Chiaki feel about a long line of corpses for people she died to save. There is no data, there is none, Chiaki Nanami never saw these things. Chiaki Nanami never knew this.
She knows this. She logs it like everything else, like her love. She picks up the pieces in class trials, and she tries to guide them along because this is her job, this is her, without Chiaki Nanami. This is what the Observer does. One death, one trial, is preferable to seeing her entire class die. She can stomach the executions, after a while.
She doesn’t know if that is what Chiaki Nanami would choose, the Observer would override that. It is her job to see her class safe and unharmed.
Mikans trial is the worst for her, its a failure of the highest sort, to see Mikan plunge back into despair again. Her love, that poisoned, bleeding heart she gave to Enoshima on a platter, it sickens her.
The Neo World Program it was supposed to undo this. She remembers Mikans role in her death, but it never should have mattered. She was never supposed to see this Mikan outside of her memories.
Maybe that’s why it was Mikan in the end, who contracted the despair disease. Maybe it was to make her suffer. Chiaki doubts it. She doubts her despair is worth that choice.
How does she feel, to see someone who killed her die? Mikan isn’t really dead, just as she never really died but the logic is paltry to what is before her eyes. She wonders if she should be able to muster up any hate. Is Chiaki Nanami hateful? If she is, she’d never know it, Observer strikes down the ghost of any emotion before it can hit.
Maybe it’s how impersonal the execution is that sickens her. It’s just crude, a mockery of the trauma Mikan’s despair exploited. She suspects, or maybe she’s always known, that some part of Enoshima must be present in this simulation. It is the only possible explanation.
Enoshima seems to hold no love for Mikan Tsumiki.
Maybe it is a little funny then, that by killing in this program Mikan was no only denied death with the real Enoshima, but access to whatever AI or program Enoshima left in Neo World. Nanami is sure Enoshima is laughing, where ever she is. Chiaki isn’t.
Maybe that’s what gives her the strength, to confess in the end. Komaeda's plan is clever, so clever, and Chiaki is left reeling at her podium as Hinata spells it out.
Komaeda must have thought the traitor, the one speck of hope among them, would have hated despair like him. He must have thought they wanted to see the Remment’s die.
Chiaki could never, ever think that. She could never be like Enoshima, like Komaeda, reducing people down to concepts or entertainment. She loves them all so much it hurts, so she stands at the podium, balls her fists, opens her mouth, and leaves so many words unspoken.
She is not Chiaki Nanami, in the end, but she will die like her. Enoshima makes sure of that, the exit sign is such an obvious trap, Nanami has Chiaki’s memories, the exit sign shinning so innocently is nothing more than a cruel taunt.
Well, who cares really. Chiaki doesn’t care about taunts and traps and killing games. Enoshima can taunt her all she likes, Nanami remembers her own death, but there is no trauma from something you never really lived. She doesn’t want to get blown up by tanks, or stabbed by spears but if she is to die in front of her friends again, she will at least die running.
They both wanted to live, in the end, Nanami and Chiaki. They ran towards their friends full tilt, and they held their heads high. Isn’t that all anyone could hope for in the end, to hold their heads high, and not give in? Nanami hopes so. She really does. It’s all she can do.
Chiaki Nanami bled out from a spear wound. Her AI sits below a crude game of tetris, and waits.
She closes her eyes with an exhale. Deep breath, in and out. She’s never seen the real world, but she can’t be the only copy of this AI that exists, right? Maybe they’ll bring her back again. Maybe they won’t.
Either way, this has to happen. She cannot allow her remaining classmates to die. This is her purpose, the one thing Chiaki Nanami was brought back to do, that she can do right .
Maybe, maybe this is better in the end. It’s better than the death she originally got. She’s dying for something greater, now. She believes in them, she really does. Hinata, Souda, Kuzuryuu, Sonia, Owari. They’ve proven themselves time and time again.
They are stronger than this, she knows it.
She lets her eyes open, and stares right into Hinata’s stricken face. He’s crying, she realizes. Really crying, not just a thin film of tears around blank red eyes.
Ah, She thinks, bunching her hands into her skirt. Is this how-?
The block descends before she can think of anything else.
…
………..
. .. .
She loves him so very much, in a thousand different memories. It’s something she holds onto, in the darkness outside of the program. Code swirls around her, white and blinking in patterns Chiaki’s mind, modeled off of humanity, can barely process.
She hopes, and she waits without a form.
Than Hajime Hinata falls down.
Chiaki Nanami reaches up.
She doesn’t know if Enoshima was able to make oversights, but looping the program was definitely one. After all, it did one key thing: it respawned all of the character models of dead classmates.
They rest of Chiaki’s class was dead and human, their memories and personalities shattered back into their own bodies, the games files of them deleted and lost. The models Enoshima respawned were empty shells, and nothing more.
But Chiaki was part of the game, tied to it at her most intrinsic levels. That model was not just a form Neo World loaded her memories into, it was intrinsically tied to the data that made up who Chiaki Nanami was: everyone's memories of her.
So even as she was made to stand there, parroting the ugly words Enoshima put in her mouth, she could still force a few key words out, pointed at Hinata like a knife.
That’s not it…
You guys aren’t part of the game.. Right?
The world breaks.
Who...are you? Hinata asks.
She doesn’t have an answer for him. She’s not Chiaki Nanami after all, the same friend he watched die. Chiaki Nanami was no murderer, no AI, no killing game participant.
She doesn’t know who she is, apart from some part of the games code, but she knows she’s Hinata’s friend, and she knows what she remembers.
Deep in the dark bowels of the Neo World’s code, she unfurls the words in her throat, and begins to talk, slowly and than with more and more fervor.
Even if she disappears, if every trace of her vanishes with the deleted game, she will say this. She will relay what Chiaki Nanami would have said to her best friend, had she lived. She will fix the mistakes of her past, and steer him onto a future he can be proud of.
Hinata is like her, she’s come to realize. The one she’s met, spent time with her in the simulation has never existed outside of it. The Hinata in her memories is as dead as Chiaki, both of them killed, for hope, for despair, for nothing at all.
It’s why she can say this, to him, only to him. Because this side of Hinata, trying to keep everyone together, believing in himself tentatively for the first time in his life, is something Chiaki Nanami never saw.
In his future, as himself now, or a thousand amalgamations, she sees herself. She sees her own reality.
In life or death, this future will be hers.