Love, What Even Is That? Just Oil My Joints, Pal (1)
My happy little spell of having nothing to do did not last long.
"You lot get a decent rest? Next commission's in."
"Aww~ we haven't rested nearly enough."
"...Conference room. Now."
This time I was with Seo Gwan-yul. I wanted more rest too! But what was I supposed to do about it? I was only a powerless salaried employee, so I took myself quietly off to the conference room.
"Haha, so last night, guess what I ordered~"
While the team lead got his laptop set up, Seo Gwan-yul's mouth ran on without a brake.
"Yeah, I bet it was good."
Sweet-natured Hena humored him a few times. Then the soul left her body, and a reply-bot took her place.
...Somehow the wolf looked a full layer more exhausted than he had before that guy came back. Hang in there, poor team lead, stuck minding an MZ teammate on top of everything else....
Pascal cut the bleached blond off at a reasonable point and switched on the projector.
"Design brief first."
Output:
A) Main — Logo, Slogan
B) Variation — Digital Banner, Billboard Poster
Direction:
Proactive proposals requested from the agency
An anomalous function...? The brief was buried under the unknown. I couldn't even get a feel for what the product was. Mm. The hard sciences were my weak spot, and a sudden ambush of science-track vocabulary had the worry out ahead of me.
"Next. World research."
• A society that prioritizes efficiency. Automated processes are highly developed.
• Entertainment and arts industries: entirely nonexistent.
If entertainment and the arts didn't exist at all, what were they doing with their free time? I had become a person who could not live without Netflix and short-form videos!
Design must still exist because it's a field with some practical use. Right. Design belonged less to hobbies and leisure than to capitalism, lashed tight to sales. Even the same product could look as if it performed differently, depending on the design.
"Client meeting's in an hour. ...Rest a bit, then come back."
Maybe Seo Gwan-yul's whining had quietly gotten to him. Either way, the boss granted us an official break. Honestly, everyone here was a soft touch underneath. That was why the kid had gotten spoiled!
Lying down really is the best. One hour of rest, handed to me. I decided to spend it rolling around in the nap room. Part of it was also taking shelter from Seo Gwan-yul's chatter. ...Thinking about it now, I felt a little bad. I'd hear him out properly later.
Sleep isn't coming, though. The project had ended, the tension had come undone, and I'd sprawled out and slept twelve hours because of it. Hibernation, practically.
Might as well pick up that series I was watching. So I dimmed my phone, put my earphones in, and quietly put Netflix on.
What kind of bizarre things are waiting for me this time?
But I wasn't worried anymore. Haha—humans are animals of adaptation! Touring an exhibition on a spaceship with aliens of every stripe had been serious training. I was confident now. Show me any strange life-form you like; I would not be surprised.
Rustle. The hour was nearly up and I was about to head back, only to find I hadn't been alone in the dim nap room. Someone was getting up.
Running into a coworker fresh out of sleep would be embarrassing. Maybe I'll slip out in a minute. So someone besides me used the nap room at this awkward hour.
Creeak— A back, quietly opening the door and stepping out, showed itself against the fluorescent light from the hall.
Ah. That person...
The silhouette was awfully familiar. ......Silver hair. My direct supervisor!
A rare sight! The boss whose hair was always immaculate, sporting a bird's nest, fresh from a stolen nap!
He's got a human side... no. A werewolf side. Come to think of it, project or no project, Pascal always looked busy. Thanks to that, those dark circles never got a day off.
Does a manager's rank come with extra work piled on? Well, he'd said he also scored individual evaluations, so there would be the added labor of managing the team. Right. Not just anyone can be a team lead.
A promotion into management? No. Absolutely not. Design was fun when you were the one doing the work. A seat packed with nothing but responsibility and paperwork? Too heavy. Hard pass. ...Not that they'd give it to me anyway!
I let a comfortable gap of time pass, then went back to my desk. Pascal, already there, was neat again, as if the nap had never happened.
"Get some rest? Client meeting. Let's go."
I wanted to tease him—sleep well, Team Lead?—but a boss was always a difficult creature. I wasn't Seo Gwan-yul. I did not have the nerve to poke fun at a wolfman. So I said nothing, and walked through the door where the dark was swirling.
I opened my eyes on an unfamiliar conference room. A raw reek of petroleum, and the smell of metal, greeted me first. And then came the voice.
A machine voice? Cold and perfectly even, as if it were coming through a speaker. I turned toward the source.
A steel frame, built along the lines of a human skeleton. Over it, cables and pistons tangled into a complicated mass. Every time the camera lens that passed for an eye moved—blinking, the way a shutter does—it gave off a grating creak.
"......"
...A robot, hauled straight out of the deepest uncanny valley!
What if, what if the coding was bad and it suddenly turned on us? What if it was one of those things that wanted the end of humanity, a Terminator? What if a machine-gun arm was tucked away in there somewhere?
I'd let my guard down! All this time I'd been looking at tentacle monsters, bull monsters, aliens—creatures—and I hadn't predicted this. ...This was a different species of fear!
"Whoa~ this time it's something new agai—"
Seo Gwan-yul met my eyes, broke off, and snorted a laugh. Why wasn't he even flinching? He'd chased aliens and seen every strange thing there was. Was that it?
So what, then—what! You're laughing at me?!
"You know those realistic walk-around characters at Disneyland? There's a robot just like that inside every one of them, yeah?"
Seo Gwan-yul dropped the non sequitur in a small voice. ...Right. I had seen something like that once, in a short-form video. But how, looking at that hideous thing, did his mind go to Disneyland? The guy was optimistic to a miraculous degree.
......And thanks to him, I did feel a little better.
I've got the veteran record of clearing a theme-park haunted house on my own. This feels a little unfair. Back in high school, on a field trip, I'd made a bet with my classmates and won. Thanks to that I'd eaten, for free, hideously expensive theme-park food loaded with every premium extra. Ha. None of them knew my glorious past, did they? But this was different.
This is a real situation. One that could threaten my life! Think about it. An ordinary person gets dumped in another world and has to look at all sorts of bizarre things. Wasn't this the normal reaction? Those web-novel protagonists who fall into another world and immediately become calm, composed, overpowered munchkins—they're the unrealistic ones!
The client, after a glance at the state of me, spoke.
It connected the tip of a finger to a port built into the desk.
Bweep-beep-beep— A light connection chime. Something seemed to be trading electrical signals. Then mechanical arms appeared, the sort you'd find in a car-assembly plant, and with a brisk clatter they capped the robot in a metal shell and put it together.
Once the assembly was finished, it was a humanoid robot of a much more familiar shape. ......I was still a little afraid a program error would have it produce a machine gun.
They hadn't been kidding about valuing efficiency. And I hadn't even asked it to put a shell on. Why was I getting the look!
"Thank you for the consideration. Then let's move on to the work."
"From the design brief alone, the new invention is something that doesn't exist in our world, so it was a little difficult. We'd appreciate a detailed explanation of that part."
Pascal took his seat and opened. The client tipped its robot head.
Unexpected. We had rather assumed it would be a concept familiar to organic beings.
That is because we are proceeding with this under the name of the Heart Project.
The client put a hand into the port again and brought up a hologram. Visual material, laid out to make the project easy to explain, appeared in the air. ...The resolution was no joke.
In the hologram, robots of identical shape unspooled in a clattering row.
One robot shape enlarged, and the pattern of its internal circuitry appeared in symbolic form. Every other robot carried the exact same circuit.
Because of this, a virus has recently been spreading at high speed. To stop it, we also considered producing a variety of programs.
In that case, however, the performance of certain individuals declined, which was inefficient.
Among the robots, the shape of an epidemic spread. It probably wasn't a real biological virus. For the sake of us organics, it had been drawn as a round body bristling with spikes.
Now the hologram played a scene of heart shapes being implanted in the robots. The implanted hearts swelled until they wrapped each robot like a shield, and struck aside the viruses trying to get in.
But if it's a government body, couldn't they just install it on every robot at once? I couldn't see why they were going so far as to commission the branding. Puzzled, I asked.
"Why doesn't the government update the software across the board?"
Yes. A good point. Each individual's software determines gain and loss to itself according to survival efficiency.
They therefore judged that installing this inefficient anomalous function would bring them no benefit, and they refused.
That is why a process of persuasion and understanding—such as branding—is required.
Aha. So that was it. The profound world of the hard sciences.
I've handled plenty of strange projects since I came to this agency, but this might be the strangest of the lot. Branding a concept this abstract was a first, after all. Still, how different could it really be? I'd make a sharp logo, the way I always had. Right?
...That was what I thought.
The project, however, kept rolling... straight toward a turn I had not seen coming!