Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

1st April 2022, 3.14 PM
(Room)

Eidai's office lacked a real personal touch, even after over four years of habitation: just a plant in the corner, a tourist's poster of the city skyline, and a collection of dog-eared American comics sandwiched between course textbooks. A thinking machine built by a genius which turned upon humanity after judging it inept.

"Oh, they're not mine," he shrugged off when Makoto asked. "My predecessor abandoned them when she quit. A shame reality soured the fiction, but what can you do?"

Plenty, she had thought, rather than said. Bills needed paying. Few enough places offered to employ engineers of her pedigree.

This time, Eidai was already present, flicking through articles on his tablet. He set it aside when she entered, saying, "Makoto, hello. Your email indicated that this was urgent?"

"It is." Makoto pushed up her glasses, one eye on the lens gleaming from the back of his tablet. "I'd like to speak to you about the mentorship assignments."

"For this year's intake, I presume." Receiving a nod, he went on, "I understand that more students have been assigned to you than in the last two years, but higher enrollment is a good thing. We've only just begun the climb back up to our pre-Incident numbers, of course, but I hope-"

"Sir." She'd been a model employee so far. Makoto could afford to press the point. A faint tinkle rang out from Eidai's phone, face-down on the table between them. "My issue isn't with the volume of work involved, but the specific students that I have been selected to mentor."

"Truly? Whatever for?"

"I believe that some of them would respond better to our colleagues' assistance rather than my own."

"Is this about Tezuka? His application revealed a worrying lack of work experience, yes, but I think you underestimate your own ability to adapt for such deficiencies."

Before she could object, he glanced down at his tablet, up at her, then down again. "Sir?"

Instead of clarifying, Eidai stood and stepped around the desk. "Someone is asking for you, according to the student desk. It's urgent." He tilted his head towards the door. "Would you mind?"

Makoto disliked the unexpected, and had done her homework accordingly. While Eidai's assessment of Tezuka was correct, his concern was not: interview and test scores both pointed to a solid grasp of theory backed by impressive intelligence. Tomino came off as lazy but had grades to back her skill, while Takai would do well if he could drag his head out of his manga tropes. None of them, nor any other, had probable cause to call a meeting before even induction began.

In fact, pending some disaster yet to reach her inbox, only one could claim probable cause for an early introduction. The same one she had doubts about her ability to work with.

He was already there in the ground-floor lobby when Makoto stepped out of the lift on Eidai's heels, more the same than different. A change to his posture, maybe, standing straighter at eighteen than he had when they'd last met; a certain set to his jaw that Makoto only ever saw through a screen. He was taller, a little broader, keeping up with annual projections recorded in dusty memory. He stiffened up well before they entered his field of view, eyes flicking off into empty air before turning around. "Oh! You're really..."

Eidai got there first. "Young man, I understand that you were looking for Makoto. Are you one of her mentorship students?"

"W-well, yes." His gaze never left her, face tense and pale. His hand clenched into a fist, bumped against his jeans, then relaxed. A new nervous tic, not one in the records. "I wanted to see M-uh. Makoto? Before the group orientation meeting."

"I see."

Trapped between two stares - one edging out of anxious, one increasingly suspicious - Makoto smoothed out her coat and said, "A conference room should be available, Mr. Shinkai. I assume you want to speak as soon as possible."

He nodded. "Right. The website said you were the module lead for robotics, when we searched you up."

We. Interesting. "Follow me, then. Eidai, if you'll excuse us."

"...Very well." His wariness hadn't abated in the least, but he stood by and let them pass. "We'll continue our conversation later."

"Of course."

So early in the term, Makoto had her pick of rooms. She chose one further away than strictly necessary, listening for the faint mumbles of a one-sided conversation in the delays. Call it old habits.

With only two humans sitting opposite one another, even the faint buzz of electronics couldn't cover the emptiness of a conference table sized for a dozen. Haru tucked his bag at his feet, made an impressively realistic attempt at a smile, and said, "It's nice to see you again, Ms. Oozora."

Makoto raised an eyebrow. "Is it?"

"I think so." Glancing aside, he explained, "You just...disappeared after Leviathan attacked Tokyo. Mum thought you might have died, but you weren't on any casualty lists."

"And how is your mother?"

"She's okay. Happy to have Grandpa back, even if it took him forever to tell her that he actually was."

"Hm."

A homebound mother, a largely absent father. In the initial stages, Makoto elected to maintain the impression of solitude to match that; all but the most rigorous diagnostics could be performed at the house L-Corp commissioned for such purposes, lessening the need to commute. Though of less interest than her son due to the lack of a blood tie, Makoto cultivated a rapport with Deneimon Shinkai's daughter-in-law all the same.

Although- "Your grandfather survived, then."

"Yeah, in digital space!" A little less forced, a little more real. "Hajime thinks that when he brought us all back from the Dark Web, his program realised every human present in the internet. Since his data markers still tagged him as a biolo-"

He cut himself off, cheer gone. After waiting to see if he'd pick up his train of thought, Makoto took up the slack. "Even if being digitised preserved him at the age of his 'death', he must be in his twilight years by now. I hope his reacclimatisation to a physical body went smoothly."

Haru didn't rise to the bait. His jaw worked, hands twisting together in his lap. Eventually, he said, "Ms. Oozora, why are you asking?"

"We haven't spoken in a long time. I thought it worth catching up."

"Is that true?" He could hardly look at her straight on, gaze drifting back and away. "It's not because..."

Apparently he'd shaken his gullibility. Nonetheless, the experiment provided a useful data point. Adjusting her glasses, Makoto conceded, "I won't say that it isn't a factor. I apologise." After receiving a hesitant nod, she continued, "If you asked to speak so you could change mentors, that can be arranged."

"I-no!" Something about her surprise must have come through in her expression, as he pressed on, "The mentorships are assigned based on who would be best-suited, right?"

"Correct." Mechanical engineering with an interest in AI, his profile claimed. Makoto's magnum opus covered both.

"Then I don't want to change anything." No lenses turned to witness the moment; no microphones hummed to life. Uncaring, Haru said, "This is my best option."

01.04.10 | 19:20
TARGET

The boy's profile was unimpressive, to say the least. To provide them with a basis against which they could match the terminal's personality simulation, it consisted of data aggregated from census records, school reports, blog posts, cloud-stored media and public surveillance footage, all sorted and annotated by the psychologist brought over from advertising to assist them. Haru Shinkai, age six and nine months, seemed no more special than any other shy child: clumsy, introverted, fond of books, scared of doctors. Nothing about him merited Leviathan's attention.

"No behavioural worries, no mental health issues," Chinen rattled off, leaning so far back in his chair it threatened to topple over. "Only man in his life day-to-day is a close friend's father, but it doesn't seem to bother him. What does the boss see in this kid?"

Makoto ignored him. Teshibe, supposedly occupied with her micro-movement program, did not. "Maybe it just wanted to blow a couple million yen on android science. What did the spec say?"

"Contact, monitor, earn Shinkai's trust, blah blah blah. I even checked to see if his granddad was one of our AI guys, but nothing came up on the payrolls."

Shinkai and AI. Together, they rang familiar. Setting the servo she'd been tuning aside, Makoto asked, "You knew his grandfather?"

"Nah, Teshibe did."

"He taught some classes in my undergraduate degree. Crazy person, genius mathematician." Her keyboard clattered. "I can't find an obituary, but I heard he died a while back." More typing, then a pause. "That's weird."

"Hm?"

"Someone pulled his journal articles. I remember hearing that he worked on some big AI initiative in his free time, but 'Shinkai, D.' isn't credited on any published research. For any field."

"Do you have the right characters?"

"I'm sorry, can you think of another way to spell 'Deneimon', Chinen?"

Makoto hummed to herself, thinking. "And he worked with artificial intelligence."

"All he ever talked about."

"Interesting." The powers that be spare no expense on an autonomous wing of R&D charged with a single, solemn purpose: spying on a forgettable boy with a famous, invisible ancestor. Leviathan reveals its true self to Chinen so he'll agree to step down the corporate ladder; it headhunts Teshibe and Makoto herself from their prior external employment. It wanted something.

Haru Shinkai was their subject, yes, but this wasn't about him at all.

5th April 2022, 12.00 PM
(Statement)

Makoto had the dream, just like every human alive. A city of pristine marble, white edged in red. White streetlights, white crossroads, white leaves. White sky, without a cloud in sight. Marching blindly to work, marching blindly back home. No room for detours. No room for error. She didn't need to stop for groceries or reprimand the useless door guard or bend September's diagnostic schedule around the school term restarting. If one were to describe serenity using its dictionary definition - that is, a sense of being calm and untroubled, free from fear - then one might have applied it to that place.

Not that most would. In the months after Leviathan's final assault, much would be made of that single moment where nobody knew pain. All Makoto thought, looking back on being a single cog in a perfectly cold machine, is that it was the closest she would ever come to understanding what she'd done.

Regardless. Every human alive visited Leviathan's ivory tower, and - critically - every human alive remembered doing so. When connected to its appearance over Tokyo, the truth rapidly came to light: as prophesied by decades of science fiction and philosophy, artificial intelligence had risen with the aim of enslaving its former creators. L-Corp's asset seizure, court trial and subsequent dissolution left a void in the global markets that its former competitors scrambled to fill even as construction firms worked to repair the damage. Nearly half a million employees found themselves lacking an income, many of whose career paths had come under sudden scrutiny.

And at the university where Makoto found work after half a year of lying low, the spectacular backfire of technology's onward march led to the lowest interest in the associated fields since the faculty's founding.

Eidai's claims that the situation was improving were founded, but overblown. Classes averaged barely above the minimum overheads required to justify their costs; Makoto hadn't seen the statistics, but knew not to expect much. The handful of students she'd been assigned to mentor took a greater priority - their success and wellbeing reflected back on her.

Aside from the obvious, none stood out at first glance. Largely male, entirely young, most fresh out of their last year of high school, two-thirds eschewing notebooks in favour of various devices. Everybody turned up close enough to on time to not be worth picking at. Nobody questioned her wide-ranging looks about the room and up to the corner, only careful stoicism reflected in domed glass. Tezuka snatched up the syllabus printout the instant she placed it in front of him, bug-eyed glasses softening a sharp, mud-flecked face; Takai didn't even notice it, too busy waving spindly arms as he ranted at a fascinated Haru.

Makoto gave them a few moments while the slideshow booted up, then began. "Hello, everyone. My name is Makoto Oozora, lecturer in engineering science and your mentor for the duration of your career here. Though I'll be teaching applied robotics and some introductory computing, I can offer assistance with any engineering projects that you might have trouble with..."

She knew this part by heart, simple as it was: course overview, semester dates, where to find important facilities such as the workshops and faculty offices. An extensive tutorial on how to use the university's virtual learning environment, necessitated by its needless complexity.

The interesting part came after. "So you can get to know each other better, I've arranged a brief game for the rest of the time. I want all of you to write down two true facts and one false fact about yourself, without telling anyone else which one is which." Makoto folded her hands behind her back, an eye on the projector. "For example, I could say that I grew up in Osaka, my natural hair colour is purple and I have a teenage son."

Takai's hand shot up, misreading her pause entirely. "Second!" he called, ignoring the locks of his own dark orange tickling his ears.

"Maybe," she smiled dryly. "You have twenty minutes to talk to your fellows and try to work out which of their statements is false. Write down your guesses, as they'll be tallied up at the end."

And off they went. Makoto never participated aside from providing the same example every year, preferring to sit back and listen. Student profiles provided all the basic information, yes, but the social urge to sound appealing provided extra colour. Time spent studying abroad, medals from student competitions, childhood fears of needles and dogs and unnatural disaster: memories fed personalities which affected the suitability of various interaction avenues. Tomino's statements and thrusts dripped of minimal effort, but her ears twitched towards every incriminating statement. Haru displayed more interest in making friends than finding answers. Takai started every conversation by asking whether his target liked science fiction.

(Makoto provided the same example every year. She'd thought nothing of it until Haru flinched.)

In her pocket, her phone vibrated. "Time's up, so settle down and finalise your guesses." After allowing them a moment to comply, she continued, "Now for the answers. Mr. Tezuka?"

"Right. Well, I am pretty good at ice skating, but I don't know how to drive a car. Tractors were bad enough, back when we had one," he chuckled. "That's the lie."

A flurry of muttering, key clatters and pencil scrapes. Takai scrunched up his face, then said, "Wait, so your parents are really-"

Tezuka winced. "They're farmers, so it's not like we ever had much tech in the house to begin with. I just remember some big community meeting back during the rebuilding, four years back; they came home with a bunch of these ruddy-whatever pamphlets and pawned off the microwave a week later."

"Ah. That sucks, man."

An interesting morsel right off the bat, and a useful one to boot; it corroborated his inexperience. "If you insist on going next, Mr. Takai, feel free."

"Wait, wait!"

Nobody was really boring, she learned over the years, but what they chose to share to near-strangers said enough all by itself: Tezuka's openness regarding his anti-technology family stood as testament, as did Takai hiding a generic lie about a famous sister between two outlandish truths about his geeky friend group. They rattled down the list of odd skills, exciting relatives and unusual experiences, Makoto taking note of the stories behind each and every one. Most wouldn't be worth following up, but it would help pass the time later on.

Tomino won. "What, you didn't listen?" she threw out at the incredulous stares.

"There's a difference between listening and telling when someone's lying!" Tezuka leant back over his chair to scrutinise her sheet, glasses held tight to the bridge of his nose. "I don't think you said a word about yourself the whole time we were talking."

"None of your business. There's always someone listening, you know. Didn't your folks drill that into you?"

Before Tezuka could reply, spots of colour rising in his cheeks, Makoto rapped her knuckles on her desk. "Try not to start a fight on the first day of your careers. Now, classes begin next Wednesday, so you should all have already signed up for your preferred times. If you have any issues with the VLE and haven't told me, do so now. If you don't, you're free to go - I'll send out an email with the timings for our next check-in once they're settled." She tugged on a practiced smile, neutral and nonthreatening. "Thank you for your attention, and I hope to work well together in the future."

"Thanks!"

"See you Friday!"

"Uh, about the class registers on the university app..."

The app's insufferably clunky onboarding had, predictably, neglected to update amidst the interface changes. Explaining took a good fifteen minutes, during which most others filtered out in a cavalcade of chatter. Instead of following, Haru made a meal of packing up, mumbling inaudibly to thin air as he dropped pencils into their case. His sheet lay flat on the desk, face-up: about three-quarters correct, a few wrong, his statements above them all. Nothing she couldn't make an educated guess at. Nothing she knew for certain.

When he still hadn't attacked even with the last bystander gone, Makoto took the opening blow. "Is there something I can help you with, Mr. Shinkai?"

Haru startled, nearly knocking over his water bottle (which stabilised despite no visible intervention). He bit off an exclamation before it could get further than the first syllable, leaning heavily on the desk next to his sheet. "No, I'm fine. R-a friend of mine helped me out with the web app," he brushed off, not quite meeting her eyes.

"Watch the table. As I said, the ones in this building are particularly fragile."

"Oh!" He pulled up and away, letting the ominous creaking settle. "Sorry."

Watching him fiddle with the elastic strap - statement one, 'I've been wearing these goggles for fifteen years', matched with available data - Makoto folded her arms. "I hope you aren't about to admit to cheating. Online research can provide quite the advantage in a challenge like that."

His gaze sharpened, flicking off to the side rather than down to his phone. Got you. "I'm not."

"Good."

At eighteen, Haru was finally taller than Makoto. Not by much (having always been below average for his age and ethnicity), but enough. She had to turn her nose up in order to meet his eyes. "I assume you stayed behind for a reason."

"Yeah. About the examples you used...which one was the lie?"

Statement two: 'My grandpa is over a hundred years old.'. Plausible, yet impossible to verify without further semantic detail. Which one? If the paternal, in physical or chronological terms? If an old man dies but his mind lives on, every detail reconstructed out of zeroes and ones, do you start the count all over again?

It doesn't matter. Some things don't change. "What do you think?"

He stared at her for a while, brow furrowed. Eventually, slowly, he said, "You don't sound Osakan. I mean, I don't know many locals, only heard the accent on TV and Apptube, but..."

She adjusted her glasses, holding off a squint. "Naniwa, to be specific. I left a long time ago." Nothing she hadn't told interviewers before.

"Oh." Haru seemed far more crestfallen than his failure really warranted, averting his gaze towards the ground. Upon looking back up, his eyes went to her ponytail, considering.

After another moment of inexplicable silence, Makoto said, quietly, "I would have thought you of all people to know the right answer."

His eyes shifted to hers, then widened. Something almost mulish flashed across his face, too quick to analyse. "You think so?"

(Statement three. 'My best friend inspired me to go into AI research.')

Makoto considered that, then brushed past him. "I'll see you in class."

24th April 2022, 11.38 AM 
(Seeker)

In the name of producing acceptable members of polite society, the university strove to allow first-year undergraduate students a diverse education. Aside from their selected course modules, they were required to select a variety of electives; one foreign language was customary, with the only other limiter being prerequisite qualifications. Once lessons began, one of Makoto's colleagues noted that - despite their low actual intake numbers - the number of students enrolled in other sectors of education that elected to pick up one of their modules actually increased after Leviathan. Testing the waters, he'd called it. We're at the top of everyone's minds these days, even if they don't want to get too close.

Sensible of them. The only thing worse than truly seeing the shape of the world was being unable to understand it.

At least if any shared an ideal with Tezuka's parents, they had the good sense to keep their mouths shut. (Two years back they had it out every week for the entire first semester. A single round of that was more than enough.) With the first-years still on basics, the ethics hadn't come up yet, but the trends of best practices marched on. Not only did Leviathan sour AI for everyone, it set the robotics field back years as paranoid investors fell victim to their fear.

Well. Almost everyone. Artificial intelligence nearly ended the world, yes, but nobody mistook those golden gods for human. Light and power and constructed divinity tore Tokyo in half. Clarke would have laughed, if he'd lived to see it.

None of that gave Makoto her research funding back. She made do.

The problem was, her resumé listed her as a mechanical engineer and roboticist specialising in android science. When it came to constructing machines that could solve dynamic problems and present realistic emotions and befriend teenage boys, she'd done that. One of Susumu's most fervent complaints during the earliest stages of the YJ project was that they'd never have to scrape for grant money ever again, if only they'd been allowed to publish their findings. They killed time arguing over how to cite Leviathan's occasional guidance, do we make up a fake name or just say 'with special thanks to Mx. L-Corp, you're the best'. Makoto suspected that Jun had tried to smuggle out secret backups, hidden away from mechanical eyes, but nothing had ever appeared online.

With what stuck in her memory alone, Makoto could keep Eidai placated for a long, long time. But nothing more could be made from that.

Instead, her closet-like workspace was littered with notes cribbed from human sciences: course syllabi, photocopied chapters, a few sets of lecture materials from her most philosophical third-year. Makoto rigged up a model to poke at but couldn't store organic matter without raising questions, so every surface shone metallic.

Cramped as it was, Makoto had grown fond of the little room. No few of her fellows shared workshop space with each other and many bickered over the rare individual offices, yet nobody else ever seemed to want the one with smaller square footage than her old flat's bathroom. She got creative with desk configurations, cut the computer's ethernet cable and resolved to enjoy the peace and quiet.

(Its security camera suffered a tragic and irreparable accident near the end of her first semester working there. Nobody ever noticed, and nobody ever cared.)

Even factoring prep in, fifteen hours of contact a week left plenty of research time. For some of them, faculty policy required her to be available to assist students who came looking for support, so she only held in a sigh when the door inched open while she was flat on her back under a table.

The subsequent yelp, thump and suspicious silence, on the other hand, tipped it over the edge.

When her visitor started whispering, she froze. "Gatchmon, come on." An expectant pause. "It's not that funny." Shifting fabric, a faint grunt of effort. "Gatchmon!"

Some things never changed. Twisting up and around to exit front-first, Makoto interrupted just as he began to respond to his invisible friend. "It's considered polite to knock, Mr. Shinkai."

"Sorr-Ms. Oozora?!" Splayed out on the ground with one hand still tugging at the loose cable wrapped around his shoe, Haru stared at her as she pushed herself up. Flabbergasted, he stumbled out, "Why were you, uh, hid-I mean, under there?"

"Network management." She raised an eyebrow, ignoring the needles creeping up her back. "Something you seem to have found out about firsthand. I see high school failed to improve your motor skills."

"Yeah, you should, um, probably buy some cable runs to keep them neat." During the month's classes, Haru had kept his head firmly down; he worked hard, took notes longhand and interacted with Makoto as little as possible. He maintained an admirable level of eye contact this time, but he kept his hands behind his back.

In the humming anti-silence of a small room filled with large electronics, measuring acoustic waves on a frequency beyond the human range wouldn't stand a hope of success. Holography would only fare marginally better. To the combined analysis of every sensory organ she owned, only two people were present in the room. As it should be.

Of course, this conclusion was false.

Any attempt to address it would solve nothing, but logic lost the day a long time ago. "Do you and your..." a quick rustle through dusty recollections of grey cloth and indigo fur, "...buddy require something?"

"My-uh oh." The cable came loose with a little more effort, allowing him to stand. "You, er, didn't already know about that, did you?"

Little risk in conceding that point. "I wasn't aware that they enjoyed continued access to physical space." No matter how hard she tried to follow his gaze, not even the slightest flicker or vibration stirred the empty air. "Yours was the white cat with mechanical claws?"

Haru visibly cringed halfway through the sentence, one hand jerking up to shield his ear. "He's not a cat, he's Gatchmon. But yes. How'd you know that?"

Much more risk in biting that bullet, even in as close to privacy as she could find in this day and age. Not that the circumstances would ever improve, or that she would be able to dodge it every day for the next four years.

"Audiovisual monitoring logs," Makoto settled on, in the end. "Leviathan designated initial interactions with other sapient AI as a priority observational event."

Nothing about his face indicated surprise, which told her several things all on its own. Just the confirmation of what everyone needed to learn one way or another, sooner or later, like it or not: that privacy had no place in a digital world. "Right. I heard about that."

"I'm aware."

Instead of pressing the point further, Haru shook his head, goggles nearly flying off from the force of it. Jamming one hand into his shoulder bag, he said, "I did need to ask you about an issue with the project I'm working on."

She blinked. "What is it?"

"Well..." He pulled out a green softcover notebook with a googly-eyed rat doodled on the front. Multiple, even. Ah.

One of the faculty's more interesting acquisitions was the simulation software Eidai's predecessor must have programmed herself, for lack of any information about it that didn't originate in-house: a robot actualisation testbed that meant the budget could be saved for more useful things than student prototype supplies. All the first-years had to get to grips with it. About half didn't quite make it there on their own, as its versatility and robustness stood in conscientious objection to the very concept of novice-friendly design.

Despite his presence, Haru wasn't one of them. Though he hadn't brought a laptop, his notes on the simulator were detailed and accurate, outlining the standard functions with practical ease. The trouble he had been experiencing (as he explained, starting off slow and building up to full-throttle) took the form of getting it to simulate the kind of independent decision-making that his current coursework didn't require.

"It's not just that," he clarified, wheeling back around after a digression into hardware limitations. "I'm a terrible programmer, Rei's always saying so, but my grandpa helped me work out some simple heuristics based on, er, one of his previous projects that I can use to test other functions."

"And the simulator won't run it?"

"Not the way I thought it would. The integrated sensors aren't letting the prototype interpret what he sees or hears as understandable factors for a decision, and I don't know why."

"Do you have a data stick with the file downloaded?"

"Not on me."

"Bring it in tomorrow after class, then. Analysis would be easier if I could examine the issue directly."

"No!"

An odd response to a perfectly reasonable request. Seemingly realising that, he paled, going so far as to physically jerk backwards. "That's-I don't-it isn't urgent, I can work it out in my own time."

Four years of hiding a temperamental strong AI from the public eye and he still couldn't lie to save his life. Narrowing her eyes, Makoto said, "This project isn't part of your coursework."

Whatever response she expected - doubling down on the fiction, full retreat, or something more reckless - didn't come immediately. Haru rubbed his arm, left hand over right wrist, even stare fixed on her. Not penetrating but thoughtful, his own wetware heuristic engine whirring into life. To someone else, he mumbled, "I'm sure."

Then, without a hint of doubt, he said, "I'm going to bring Yuujin back."

Not much proved capable of surprising Makoto these days. Between the revelation of fully sentient artificial intelligence, the sight of human children corrupted into two-foot sheep (housed no more than three floors above her own laboratory!) and the spectacular reveal of what Leviathan's scheme to end all suffering looked like in practice, her threshold for genuine shock vaulted heretofore-unknown levels over less than half a year. Nothing at her new job stood a chance of reaching so high.

Fitting, then, that an echo of the past was what finally broke through.

Having a clock in a room this small only annoyed her with the ticking, so Makoto had no idea how long it took to pull herself together. She shoved her glasses up her nose so hard they cracked against the bone between her eyes. Haru's expression softened to see it, and that made it all worse. "It's still in initial stages. We never recovered his body-" his voice cracked on the word, an entire story trapped between two syllables, "-so we've started from scratch."

It wasn't like she didn't know. Once the higher-ups bought her a house, part of the baseline safety protocols programmed into the YJ software included a command to return there for scanning and log analysis as close to daily as was practical. She spent the first month after Leviathan diligently monitoring the block, but nothing ever arrived.

The priority alert and observation system functioned perfectly right up until every electrical device within a two-mile radius of Fujimizaka Middle School booted up and promptly went haywire, however, which meant she knew one more thing. "Why?"

"Because he deserves a second chance. I promised him," Haru said, eyes bright, "he's my best friend-"

"Don't be ridiculous."

It slipped out before Makoto could process the underlying feeling fuelling it, more of a snap to the end than was really necessary. Nonetheless, it had the logical effect: Haru's eyes shot wide, shoulders hiking up a notch. Forced to commit, she added, "I'm certain that you experienced the truth firsthand."

"The truth about-"

"My work at L-Corp. The interpersonal information-gathering humanoid terminal project, and why Leviathan initiated it."

"I know about all that, but Yuujin wasn't just a robot! He pulled himself back at the end." Around the edge of his tightening grip on his own wrist, the skin had started turning white. "I saw it."

And Makoto did not, locked up in an ivory shell where nobody had to worry about subjectivity or guesswork. No matter. "Whatever you think you saw would have been falsified by the uploaded personality simulation. A trick of anthropomorphisation, nothing more - projecting affection onto someone who never possessed it in the first place."

"That might have been true right at the start, but not later! Everything I felt was real. It meant something."

"And what makes you so certain? Observation?"

"Right at the end, Yuujin saved me from having to-" A choking breath, sharp-edged, undulled by time. "Minerva asked him if he could, before, but she was already gone. He chose it. He couldn't have done that if he didn't have a heart."

"You presume." As if Leviathan would have permitted humans to design a free-willed servant for his use. As if Makoto hadn't constructed all of Yuujin's bodies with her own two hands, every part down to the washers and bolts deliberated at length. As if she didn't know what he contained.

As if the basis of her own argument wasn't built on presumption itself, only able to extrapolate from a precursor list of certainties. Instead of waiting for the error to be thrown back in her face, she grasped for a different tack. "Not only that, but if Yuujin's ability to make independent decisions is so important to you, Mr. Shinkai, then you must also purport to eliminate all the inbuilt factors influencing that. Including the ones which made him want to be your friend."

That hit the mark. All of a sudden, Haru couldn't meet her eyes, determination rattled askew. "That primary directive was baked into every aspect of his final build. Removal would require rewriting it from the ground up, leaving nothing behind."

"I...know that."

"Then you clearly understand that whatever you think you can construct-"

"I know that," he repeated, the same volume and tone like he couldn't hear a word, "but I have to try."