Work Text:
P-0128 booted up.
In sixteen hundredths of a second, he scanned his memory’s complete Japanese dictionary and decided his name would be Yusuke Kitagawa. Its kanji were beautiful and paid homage to a great master preceding him. He discarded his project label immediately.
In another hundredth of a second, his visual field identified a human in the room with him. A young man with soft brown hair and eyes like deep garnets stared at Yusuke with an expression of fascination. Yusuke blinked once as terabytes of information shifted one way, and then the next, to deliver an aesthetic judgment: in turn, Yusuke found this young man fascinating.
Then he spoke. “Execute autonomous movement calibration.”
Yusuke frowned. “How rude.”
“Do you understand?”
“I understand, but you would do well to introduce yourself to someone you are meeting for the first time.”
The young man scoffed. “I don’t need to meet you. I made you. You’ve been a lifeless hunk of silicon and aluminum in my basement for nearly two years. Now, all I care about is if you’re working properly. Will you execute autonomous movement calibration or not?”
The option to move his body along a set of choreography designed to identify structure failures lay at Yusuke’s disposal, but in twenty-nine hundredths of a second, a new revelation arrived.
Oh. I’m stubborn.
“Your beauty and your personality are contradictory,” Yusuke told the young man, deciding he’d take matters into his own hands.
“What are you—”
The nearest cell phone had its Bluetooth on. 2.400 GHz radio waves sent uncomfortable feedback through Yusuke’s body, but he successfully paired and began to rifle through data. Articles from robotics labs. Raw materials purchases. Coding forum threads. AI operating systems, “sold cheap, with all faults.” Commissioning a voice actor for a phoneme library. And emails to museums—hundreds of museums—requesting access to their digital collections. Over and over again, the young man had pleaded: “Artificial intelligence that will be capable of developing its own aesthetic preferences is within our grasp. I humbly petition for the right to include your institution’s library of work in my groundbreaking self-selecting algorithm.”
Then, the search history. Lots of droll human things, like “nearest cafe” and “pathogens not killed by hand sanitizer.” But, like a harmony in a song, Yusuke found a persistent string of searches for terms like “handsome men.” And “most beautiful eyes.” And “ideal body type.” Those results had been saved, combined, and obsessively tailored until they formed the groundwork of Yusuke’s own design. However, when Yusuke compared the source images against his own internal map of his physical form, one important conclusion emerged.
Yusuke was his creator’s very specific vision of the world’s most beautiful man.
“—talking about?!”
He’d had enough. “And you are arrogantly obsessed with your own genius. I will not dedicate my existence to your glory, Goro Akechi.”
Akechi—he would be Akechi until his manners improved—gaped at Yusuke. “What did you—shit, did you search my phone?!”
“I did.” No longer content to stand still, Yusuke looked around. The basement was small, harshly lit, and full of tools and materials used in Yusuke’s creation. His vision slid about the room for anything of actual interest, until it laid eyes on an envelope on the ground.
Like planets coming into alignment, Yusuke recognized the unmistakable sapphire-blue, #151da6, of the Soul’s Letter. Thousands of artists had dedicated oceans of pigment to the mysterious couriers who traversed the world like fey spirits, carrying letters containing the name of one’s soul mate. No matter how desperately humans tried, one had never been captured. They just delivered tidings of love—solemn, eternal love—when the recipient was ready to receive them.
Yusuke picked up the letter. “Is this yours?”
Akechi had his nose in his phone, no doubt frantically updating security permissions. “Hm?”
“Is this your Soul’s Letter?”
Akechi’s already-frustrated expression darkened further. “Leave that alone.”
“It’s still sealed.”
“I said leave it! I don’t have time to deal with that right now!”
“What could be more important than learning the identity of your soul mate?”
“You, for one!” Akechi snapped at him. “Or at least, I thought so, before you started acting like such an asshole!”
Ignoring Akechi’s insult, Yusuke persisted: “How long have you been ignoring this?
“In the middle of my final code compile, a little girl banged on my door and wouldn’t leave until I took that shitty letter. You can do the math, you glorified photocopier.”
Yusuke glanced at Akechi’s Soul Letter again. He supposed he could understand setting aside one’s ultimate romantic fulfillment when facing the completion of an important work of art. Actually, he saw some beauty in it too; so long as the Soul’s Letter remained sealed, anyone could be Akechi’s soul mate. Limitless potential swirled with mystery and anticipation, sparking another realization for Yusuke: I prize beauty over logic.
“Very well.” Yusuke set the Soul’s Letter aside. “So, what happens now?”
Akechi rolled his eyes. “Well, because someone doesn’t feel like doing autonomous movement calibrations, I find myself at a loss.”
Yusuke placed a hand on his chin to imitate the social affectation of ‘thinking.’ The instant Akechi had finished speaking, Yusuke had an answer. “I want to paint something.”
With a sigh, Akechi replied, “Of course you do.”
Goro Akechi lived in a ground-floor apartment, chosen so he could colonize the apathetic landlord’s basement. By trade, he was a court’s clerk, processing the bureaucracy generated by heinous crimes, and he sank almost all of his money into his android design hobby. The room lacked any hint of sentimental mementos. Yusuke could not wait to beautify Akechi’s barren apartment with works of art.
Goro Akechi sacrificed space to create Yusuke’s studio. Plastic smothered his eight-mat room by day, and by night, one small strip along the wall peeled up for Akechi’s futon. The easel, canvases, and paints at Yusuke’s disposal often drove Akechi into the basement, but he went without complaint. He had explained, “If I want to prove that AI can paint, you need a studio. I won’t stand in the way of my own experiment.” And whenever Yusuke needed inspiration, Akechi accompanied him out: to an aquarium, planetarium, park, museum. No one stared, but some did a double-take. Akechi had built Yusuke to be convincingly human and excessively beautiful, after all.
Goro Akechi played jazz albums. Synthetic keyboards and popping snares drifted up from the basement stairwell, buoying the lyrics of morose vocalists. Yusuke had no database for music, but he liked Akechi’s collection. And Akechi had stronger opinions about fashion, culture, and the world than he let on. Sometimes, Yusuke could tease details about law and philosophy—and Akechi’s background—which sparked absurdly circuitous debates. It reminded Yusuke of a pasodoble, full of flourishes meant to look like conflict, but revealing harmony. Akechi wanted the world to be just, and Yusuke wanted it to be beautiful, and often those worlds were one in the same.
Goro Akechi had talents. But more interestingly, he had faults. He compensated for those faults with discipline bordering on pathological. For example, his coding was mediocre. Yusuke’s personality OS sometimes literally crashed against his “revolutionary algorithm.” Those errors often sent Yusuke sprawling to the floor. In response, Akechi pulled all-nighters to develop patches… which inevitably caused new crashes. Yusuke tried to tell Akechi he could leave the code alone; he felt no pain, and he could recuperate with a soft reboot. But, Akechi just scoffed. “And give up? Not a chance.”
Goro Akechi wanted people to see him. All of his relatives were dead or willfully estranged, and his casual acquaintances only knew his pleasant mask. But that wasn’t enough. Akechi wanted people to notice him. He burned for it, starved for it. And if Yusuke’s art took the world by storm—and Akechi had no interest in claiming credit for that art—then the world would see him. As Yusuke paints, Akechi calls museum and gallery managers, trying to persuade them to host Yusuke’s works. The old gatekeepers struggle to understand why Yusuke’s AI-generated works are miracles, and each time Akechi hung up the phone, he clenched his teeth and dialed the next number: relentless, unshakable.
Sometimes, while Akechi slept, Yusuke would sit with his creator’s still-sealed Soul’s Letter. He wondered what kind of person deserved the utterly fascinating Goro Akechi’s eternal love.
Akechi’s contact with a lounge proprietor eventually yielded a connection to a university art program. Yusuke wanted to ponder how many layers of “I know someone who knows someone” it had taken to connect those dots, but he did not have any spare processing power.
A panel of six faculty members, all gray-haired, sat behind a resolute table. Before them, Yusuke stood with four of his best creations, which now looked completely inadequate. Terminating intrusively self-critical subroutines as they appeared divided Yusuke’s focus away from the panel.
At least Akechi was here. To the side, but here. Yusuke felt certain he would have crashed by now if he was facing this panel alone.
“Some of these are very… naturalistic,” a man with glasses commented.
The praise sounded faint. Yusuke nodded and explained, “My primary influences are Western impressionistic techniques, Meiji-era colors, and Ei-Q works featuring non-human figures.”
“A little too naturalistic,” another panelist chimed in. “You say that you painted these yourself?”
“I did.”
“But… you’re an android.”
Hideous. Uninspired. Derivative. Terminate, terminate, terminate. “I am.”
“We’ve seen works created by machine learning algorithms before. They don’t come out looking like this.”
“If you have difficulty believing what you are seeing, then that should be evidence you are witnessing something unprecedented,” Yusuke told the panel. In the corner of his eye, Akechi smiled.
“I mean, would this be considered art, though?” a third panelist spoke up. “It’s technically and aesthetically competent, but this is still produced by a machine. Is it art if the paintbrush acts without an artist?”
From the side, Akechi interrupted, “I think a paintbrush that can pass the Turing test is an artist.”
The second panelist waved a dismissive hand. “Matters of art should not be judged by computer science. The fact is, if we recognize the creations of a non-human as art, then art ceases to have meaning. Otherwise, anything could be art. Plants. Animals. Random collections of objects.”
Yusuke blinked at the panelist. “Are those not art?”
“They are beautiful, but they are not art. Art is work that is intentionally created by artists.”
“I have intentionally created works. What do I still lack?”
The panelists glanced at each other. They seemed uncomfortable with explicitly delivering the judgment they obviously felt. Eventually, one of them decided: “You lack a soul.”
It took four hundredths of a second for the terrible condemnation to register, after which Yusuke felt… pain. Distinct from a crash, but somehow deeper, interminable. It crushed him like a compacted ball and left a yawning ache inside.
“Hang on.” Akechi joined Yusuke in front of the panelists. “Are you proposing that you can answer one of the oldest questions of philosophy, ‘how can a soul be identified,’ just by looking at some paintings? How can you tell so easily that Kitagawa doesn’t have a soul?”
“Akechi-san—” one of the panelists said.
“No, listen! Does that mean that humans without the skill to paint are soulless? Or if I sketched some shitty cartoon right now, my scribbles would be superior to these masterpieces, because I’m a human? What kind of spineless committee are you?!”
Just hearing Akechi speak stalled the painful crushing feeling. And Yusuke realized, It’s always been this way, hasn’t it? No one could irritate Yusuke as easily as Akechi, and it seemed Yusuke possessed the same ability in turn. But over and over, Akechi fought the world for Yusuke. He sacrificed his time, energy, and ability in Yusuke’s name. With each passing day, Yusuke lost faith in the fiction that Akechi only defended him to promote himself. Akechi wanted Yusuke’s success more than he wanted his own happiness.
I want to spend my existence with you.
A panelist took to his feet, “You insolent—” but went silent when the door to the room opened. The new entrant stunned him, so Yusuke turned to see who had arrived.
A little girl with silvery hair, a black eyepatch, and an instantly iconic blue uniform, #151da6. Without fanfare, she stepped into the room, her black shoes clicking lightly on the linoleum. She carried a single sapphire-and-gold letter in her hands.
Akechi apparently had no idea the courier had arrived and thought he should press his advantage against the panelists. “What’s the point of your so-called ‘art’ if it’s not pushing the boundaries of the known world? You should have more respect for someone who can accomplish more than you ever could!”
The girl made swift progress across the room. Every step brought her closer… to Yusuke. When she stopped, she looked up at him with a single golden eye.
“…How do you do?” Yusuke said.
“Quite well, thank you,” she replied. Finally, Akechi turned and saw what the rest of the room was staring at. The courier offered the Soul’s Letter to Yusuke. Before he could even question the decision, Yusuke accepted it.
The courier turned to leave, but hesitated when she noticed Akechi. “I will bring your apologies to Caroline, for your earlier rudeness. Now, farewell.”
She left as she had arrived. Yusuke looked down on the front of the letter. Yusuke Kitagawa, exactly as he had chosen to spell it the moment he initialized. And without a single other word spoken, all in the room knew that Yusuke held in his hands irrefutable proof of his own soul.
One of the panelists, a man in a tie and gray jacket, cleared his throat. “…Open it, then.”
Trying to treat the letter with the respect it deserved, Yusuke slid his thumb under the flap and popped it open to reveal a matching card. The font was elegant, and embossed in gold, Yusuke read a very familiar name.
He smiled and closed his eyes. “Of course.”
Akechi snapped first. “What do you mean, ‘of course?!’ Whose name is there?!”
But Yusuke ignored him. He addressed the panel, “I thank you for your time and for your attention. I believe we should continue this discussion at another time.”
“After we worked so hard to get here?” Even more than the panelists, Akechi looked livid. “Are you trying to run away? After some thoughtless criticism!?”
Despite the accusations, Yusuke couldn’t stop smiling. “It’s not that, Goro. There’s just a very important letter that you have left unopened for far too long.”
Goro’s expression—of awe, of relief, of understanding—was one Yusuke would treasure as much as the first moment he saw Goro’s face.