Ch.193Work Record #029 – Can’t Take My Eyes Off (3)

I walk through the fragments of androids as I leave the production wing. There was no need to completely destroy the facility. I had already killed all the hidden androids, and the Transparent Eye was now in my possession.

Kay, who had been listening to my voice through the communication line, made a sound of disbelief. The first time she had reacted this way was also because of my eloquence. This time was no different.

“Huh, your skill at sweeping the board with bluffs hasn’t changed a bit. To think you could make the Transparent Eye willingly enter an isolated storage device! Now what we need to do is…”

She probably knew more than I did, but I had already introduced her as someone who knew absolutely nothing about the Transparent Eye. I needed to be the one to explain the plan.

“Our work here is done. Now we just need to retrieve the main body, hand it over to Belwether, and that’s it. Please verify there are no backups in the facility network, and let Coco’s father know everything’s fine.”

“Confirmed! I don’t think there are any backups on the facility network. I mean, who would upload a program like the Transparent Eye to any network, even an intranet?”

It made perfect sense—if network integration had occurred, the entire city might have fallen to the Transparent Eye. Coco’s father, who had been quietly listening to our conversation, chimed in.

“So, um… what exactly did you do? I mean, I heard everything, and a lot of what you said made sense… but looking at the results, it’s beyond comprehension.”

“I made an incomplete copy of the Transparent Eye dream. A dream of becoming the perfect original Transparent Eye. And I made myself appear to be the person who could fulfill that dream. You’ve experienced something similar, haven’t you?”

It was essentially the same as when I had threatened him by suggesting that Belwether might implicate him in matters related to Jerome, while offering to help him get away with it if he provided the hacker’s identity.

At my mention of his own experience, he began to recall our first conversation. After a moment of confusion, his thoughts seemed to coalesce, and he spoke with an irritated tone.

“Damn. You can not only create an exit strategy, but also make your preferred exit strategy appear to be the only possible one. You crafty bastard.”

“And I put all my effort into making that carefully crafted exit strategy succeed. If I were truly a bad person, I’d just say, ‘You do this, you do that. I’ll supervise,’ and leave it at that.”

It wasn’t anything extraordinary. Just a simple sequence of thoughts. Anyone who took thirty minutes to think it through carefully would reach the same conclusion I did. At best, I’m just exceptional among the ordinary.

So I take away those thirty minutes. I present the conclusion, prevent others from thinking independently, and keep talking incessantly—that’s how my strategy works. That’s what I’m good at.

Is this what Chance meant when he said I was like those pre-war politicians? I wasn’t sure, but I decided to take it as such. Coco’s father sighed.

“Well, I should be grateful you’re telling me this at all, even if it’s after the fact. You won’t expose the location of this hideout, will you?”

“Of course I will. I’m going to report to Belwether that I found the Transparent Eye here. You’d better find a new hideout.”

This wasn’t something I could compromise on. Belwether would naturally investigate the location where the Transparent Eye was found, and Coco’s father would be discovered.

He made a disgruntled sound for quite some time, but he knew there was no better alternative. If he left now, all he would lose was his hideout.

“Fine, I’ll have to relocate. If I leave now, I’ll only lose the hideout, but if you had contacted Belwether before notifying me, or hadn’t contacted me at all, it would have been disastrous.”

“You and Coco would have been captured by Belwether on charges of harboring the Transparent Eye, or Belwether might have burst in while you were trying to save Coco from being consumed by it.”

“Are you making it look like the only exit strategy again?”

“It’s a habit.”

To be precise, this actually was the only exit strategy right now. Still, I smiled as if admitting fault, then jumped up through the ceiling hatch of the production wing and entered the lobby.

Hiding behind the reception desk, I threw a grenade at the android remains. A heavy explosion echoed, leaving only scorch marks and small, burnt fragments of androids on the floor. Kay walked down to meet me.

She was smiling as if feeling bittersweet. She approached me, stood on her tiptoes, patted my shoulder a couple of times, and said:

“To me, your call sign will always be Icarus. Not just any Icarus, but the version who knows that no matter how high he flies, his wings won’t burn from solar heat.”

I recalled the elaborate Icarus story she had told me. She had said that Icarus died because the people of that era, those who created the story, didn’t know enough.

What killed Icarus was anxiety and ignorance—ignorance that the sky would be hot, and anxiety about ascending to the heavens… where gods were believed to dwell. In this era, both were absent.

Far from ignorance, the pain came from knowing everything until no mystery remained, and without anxiety, technology raced ahead of humanity. People were just trying to keep up.

“Oh, right. You didn’t like metaphors much. What I mean is…”

“Didn’t I tell you not to be self-deprecating? You’re implying that Kay is barely maintaining the status quo while I’m the only one making progress. That’s not true at all.”

Now, instead of habitually lying, she had learned to distinguish between situations that required lies and those that required truth. Instead of refusing help from anyone, she was utilizing all the assistance she needed.

If my development meant improving my own abilities, then Kay’s transformation was also development. She had long since moved beyond maintaining the status quo. I wanted to believe it was in a good direction.

“You might not like metaphors, but you’re smart. Still… I’m not sure! I don’t know if it’s good that I’ve stopped spouting nonsense all the time. How do you know?”

I’d heard something similar from Ms. Eve. They seemed to find it fascinating how everything was so clear to me. I got on the motorcycle with her and we headed toward LA, leaving the research facility behind.

“I set a clear standard for myself. I took one of the many things that person you saw in the hospital room said. ‘Slaves obey, machines produce… only humans enjoy.’ That’s what I chose.”

The fastest way to progress, the most efficient way to work, was to do things in a way I could enjoy. And my preferences are rather childish. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.

Especially people I know—I can’t stand by and watch them suffer losses, bleed, or lose their lives. I’m the type who demands a happy ending, shouting and cursing if necessary. So everything was simple.

I just needed the strength to grab that happy ending by the collar and bring it before me. If I could overcome my general lack of ability, I could pull everything in a direction I could enjoy. And that’s what I would do.

“Since then, I’ve started doing things I enjoy. Like keeping the Night Watch office feeling like a family, or becoming a better freelancer. You have no idea how enjoyable it is.”

“Ha! A computer… no, a hacker like you doesn’t know? It’s like breaking through a security system today that you couldn’t crack yesterday. It’s incredibly thrilling! Well, I got addicted to that and ended up like this…”

It was only natural that I enjoyed watching her gradually regain some of her boldness, rather than seeing her lose her daring and spout nothing but frivolous jokes. She continued:

“But why do you keep pretending to be a hedonist? You talk that way, but you’re always helping others with problems they should solve themselves. How many hours did you sleep yesterday?”

“If you asked how many hours I’ve slept this week, it might be a single-digit number… but I’m telling you, this is enjoyable. In a sense, I am a hedonist.”

The motorcycle slid across the wasteland toward the road. The truck line running on the wasteland road gradually came into view. Belwether’s transport trucks.

Though called trucks, they were essentially heavily armed combat vehicles. As we approached the road, powerful searchlights pierced the dawn darkness and began illuminating us.

When I immediately presented my freelancer license, the searchlights turned off, and the unmanned turrets mounted on the trucks returned to their original positions. Only after the trucks had passed did we get on the road and drive.

Land vehicle transport was dangerous, but it was cheap enough to justify the risk. Upon arriving in downtown LA, we headed straight to Kay’s apartment. It was time to face her anxiety.

Opening the apartment door, and then another screen that blocked the view inside, I finally saw the interior. A massive tumor had grown in her home.

Not metaphorically—it literally looked like a huge tumor. In the middle of what should have been the living space stood a server computer, towering like a growth, making “tumor” the only appropriate description.

Kay took a trembling deep breath. She held up another storage device similar to the one she had given me. Looking at the server computer containing the Transparent Eye, which couldn’t even recognize inside from outside, she said:

“Really, yeah, like you said, I feel like going outside and throwing a grenade in here, then forgetting everything… but I can’t do that. I need to take this out and hand it over to Section Chief Dewey Novak.”

Though she said it jokingly, nothing could be more certain. Simply unplugging the server computer and smashing it with a hammer would kill the Transparent Eye forever.

At the same time, Kay’s chance for atonement and Section Chief Dewey Novak’s opportunity to end his meaningless pursuit of the Transparent Eye would also be lost forever.

To kill the Transparent Eye, we first had to keep it alive. And not just alive, but intact. Kay bit her lip and said:

“Last time when I tried to extract it, it resisted. That’s what it figured out. When I mentioned uploading to a connected storage device, it almost realized it was trapped in a sandbox.”

She had said she was running the sandbox containing the Transparent Eye in a way that closely resembled reality. The ability to connect storage devices meant this wasn’t reality but some kind of device.

I thought it might be fine if there was no external connection function, but Kay… was ruminating on her failure every time she looked at the Transparent Eye. She firmly believed something would go wrong.

So I willingly extended my hand to her. After a moment’s hesitation, she placed the storage device in my hand. It was just an ordinary, everyday file download task. I connected it to the server computer.

This time I did it confidently. The Transparent Eye existed in reality. It hadn’t been captured by Belwether or started an android uprising—it had been trapped in Kay’s home for years. Not anymore.

Through a simple repetitive task, it would be recovered by Belwether. Whether they would study it or destroy the storage device by stomping on it… that would depend on Belwether’s mood and thoughts. That was all.

The download began, and the LEDs on the server computer started flashing busily… when I heard Chance’s voice in my head. He told me why he feared the Transparent Eye.

“Cover the side of the server computer, Agent Arthur Murphy. The LEDs indicating operational status have started flashing in a pattern. There’s a possibility it’s sending some kind of signal.”

Suddenly… no. It might be similar to how anomaly formers send abnormal stimuli through vision to paralyze those who make eye contact.

Having realized it was in a sandbox and that the device had no external connection, it was trying to make contact with the outside world somehow. It was almost unbelievable.

The Transparent Eye would know about anomaly formers. With that level of adaptability, and knowing it was being transferred to another storage device, it would be terrifyingly dangerous if it could do this.

Of course, not to me. In my head were Chance and Aegis. The Transparent Eye was powerlessly downloaded to the storage device, like a dangerous criminal who had become a harmless old man after decades in prison.

I handed that storage device to Kay. This simple, trivial act had been something she feared for years. Though her fear was irrational, I could empathize.

What mattered was taking steps away from the confirmation bias that she would ruin everything. I handed Kay the storage device containing the original Transparent Eye. She took a deep breath.

“When I think that I couldn’t do this, and couldn’t find this copy for years, living so stupidly all that time, I feel like punching myself in the jaw. Arthur, can I ask one more favor?”

“Anything except asking me to apologize.”

Kay’s finger pointed at the server computer that had been the Transparent Eye’s prison, looking nothing like the rest of her home. She spoke as if releasing pent-up frustration:

“Can you smash it with your fists? I should have a big hammer in the back room…”

Since she seemed to want to see it, I didn’t ask her to bring the hammer. I extended both hands to grab the server computer fixed to the floor, and gently applied force to my metal coil-replaced tendons.

Slowly, the fixings came loose. I lifted the stacked servers horizontally, gripped the middle with both hands… and tore it apart sideways. I didn’t bother calculating how many kilograms it weighed. It wouldn’t make much difference in destroying it.

I wasn’t sure if it was right to demolish this server computer, which she had surely saved money to buy, simply for the satisfaction, but if this was Kay’s pleasure, I was happy to smash it.

After two gestures, I put down the server computer, now reduced to a pile of rags. We transferred it to the garbage bag Kay had brought. She finally let out a big sigh.

“Now my home finally looks like a home. What time was Belwether’s check-in again, Arthur?”

“7:30 AM. And I have Section Chief Dewey Novak’s contact information.”

All that remained was to wait for a couple of hours. Everything seemed to be going too smoothly, which made me tense.

The last time I had this feeling, my records at Belwether had been deleted, and I had been thrown onto the streets as a twenty-two-year-old with no history.