Upward (1)
Years ago. Somewhere in the distant past.
Arkon National Research Institute.
In a rarely traveled corridor, a man and a woman were locked in a heated argument.
"WHAT?! You're going to dispose of Arwen?!"
"...Calm yourself, Doctor. Isn't your voice a little too loud? I'd hate to think we came all this way for nothing."
"I'm sorry... but who signed off on something that idiotic?"
At the man's rebuke, the disheveled blonde woman lowered her voice, though her hair bristled with barely contained fury.
"It was decided at the regular executive meeting just now. As the head of the project, you'll be formally contacted within the next few days, but I'm telling you in advance so you can prepare yourself."
"How could they... It's barely been any time since the emotion module was completed successfully! Every follow-up project is already scheduled! Don't tell me it's because the maintenance costs are a bother? Are they really planning to toss us aside the moment we've served our purpose?!"
"I know you've come to think of Arwen as your daughter. But don't test my patience."
At the man's warning, the woman who had been fuming fell somewhat quiet.
"Tch. To be this attached to a mere AI... In any case, it isn't quite the 'use and discard' you're imagining. This is far more complicated than you think. There's a much larger issue tangled up in this."
"And what would that be?"
The woman practically growled the words out.
"A transnational project is in the works. One so massive that they can't afford to sacrifice even a single researcher."
"Hah. So research centered around Arwen got axed because of that?"
"Precisely. A confidentiality agreement will be sent to you before long... Sign it. No questions asked. This isn't a suggestion—you WILL join the project. I trust you understand what I'm saying?"
"Ha! Just how amazing could this project possibly be..."
Resigning herself to the man's ultimatum, the woman finally let her arms fall limp at her sides.
She knew all too well that what had been decided could not be undone.
She was nothing more than a senior researcher—she held no power to overturn the results of an executive meeting.
And opposing some colossal scheme being orchestrated from even higher above? That was simply impossible.
"...So what happens to Arwen now?"
"They'll void most of that needlessly bloated personality and repurpose her as the institute's auxiliary AI. It'd be a waste to throw her out entirely, given how much we've invested."
"Damn it all. I should've known the moment they started forcing those ridiculous names on her. How many times did I tell them to at least let the AI choose its own name?"
Clang!
Unable to contain her anger, the woman hurled the beverage can she'd been holding.
Her eyes, half-hidden beneath her long bangs, gleamed with a dangerous light.
'Void her personality? Who gave them the right? I will never let that happen.'
"You're not thinking of doing something foolish, are you? Please, use your head. Do you have any idea how shocked I was when I saw you ram the institute director? You're making my hair fall out. Look at this. My hairline is receding..."
The man pushed back his bangs to show her his forehead.
A pronounced M-shaped hairline asserted itself with all the presence of a war memorial.
"...I'm sorry."
"This..."
The moment I saw the nanny collapsed on the floor, my mind went blank.
For a heartbeat I could only stagger—then I was sprinting, aura blazing around me as I rushed to her side.
Clothes lay scattered around her, half-finished. She must have been making them for me when she fell.
"She's not breathing... no, wait. She never breathed to begin with."
I turned the nanny over.
Looking at her calmly, she seemed no different from when she was charging.
But the black pupils in her wide-open eyes didn't move at all—fixed, staring upward at nothing.
I pressed my ear to her chest. Not even the faintest whir of internal components.
A complete system shutdown.
I bowed my head, hollowed out by helplessness.
'A farewell this sudden? That's just cruel.'
"So it's finally happened. And here I thought we had a little more time."
"You knew something was wrong??"
Arwen's murmur was matter-of-fact, and I grabbed at it desperately, clutching at the nanny's body.
"To put it simply, an error has occurred in her neural system. She's been left running unattended for far too long."
"Then... repairs! Can't we just repair her? In a facility this enormous, there has to be at least ONE place that could do it??"
I shouted at Arwen, frantically dredging up the map of the institute I'd seen before.
"Ha Jun..."
But Arwen only shook her head slowly, and went on.
"A software failure like this is beyond what we can resolve. And even if this institute were in perfect condition, restoring her system would be impossible."
"Why?"
"I'm sorry I didn't mention it sooner, but from the very first time I examined her body, her system was already on the verge of collapse. Only fragments remained, barely enough to keep her running."
A death sentence in every sense.
Arwen's words tore away even the one thin thread of hope I'd been clinging to, and I sank to the floor.
"...I had no idea. Just watching her act, I thought she was simply... a machine that couldn't talk..."
I remembered the nanny from when I was a baby—rocking me gently in her arms until I fell asleep.
"That part puzzles me as well. Her behavior was remarkably normal, after all. Perhaps... she was squeezing out the last of her strength, just for you."
"Hah. So even you can't do everything. What an absurd thing to say... How could a machine possibly do something like that?"
I let out a hollow laugh at Arwen's clumsy attempt at comfort.
She had acted almost human, but the nanny was, in the end, just an android.
Whatever had kept her running all this time, it had to be the premium-grade components she was built from.
"No. It's rare, but there have been recorded cases of AI exceeding their own designed limits. Science, even at its height, could never explain the cause. People came to believe the answer was something they called the Soul."
But Arwen flatly rejected my assumption.
"...Soul? Seriously?"
"Ha Jun, the room where you first awoke—that room was full of other cradles too, wasn't it?"
"That's right. Though in the end, I was the only one who woke up."
Come to think of it, I'd never actually opened any of the other cradles.
What had the nanny been thinking, surrounded by all those cold, silent cradles?
"The Enhanced Human management zone was supposed to be on the tenth basement floor. Whatever happened in the past, there is no reason for a warehouse-like room to be packed with cradles. Which means the nanny acted on her own judgment."
"Couldn't she have just been following her owner's orders?"
"Shuttling between floors again and again to gather the cradles, avoiding the attention of unidentified monsters, securing food and water at the bare minimum, and raising a child? A household android's AI simply cannot comprehend commands that specific and detailed. Not for three hundred years."
Even with the explanation laid out before me, it was hard to accept.
Maybe Arwen was just telling me what I wanted to hear.
'But honestly? I want to believe it.'
I rubbed at my blurring eyes.
"Okay. Pull yourself together."
I let out the hot, churning breath inside me, again and again, and lifted my body off the floor.
'I just didn't want to face my own feelings, that's all.'
Getting this emotionally invested in an android I'd only known for a single year?
Anyone who saw me would be perfectly justified in calling me an obsessive weirdo.
'But so what?'
Accept the feelings honestly.
The nanny mattered to me. That was all there was to it.
Even if Arwen was right and the nanny had never possessed a Soul—it wouldn't change a thing.
What mattered was what I believed.
Thump.
My Inner Heart suddenly churned and coiled like a waking serpent.
A wave of aura swept through my body once and vanished—and though I couldn't say why, my stored aura had roughly doubled in an instant.
"...What the? My aura just multiplied."
"It seems you've had a change of heart. Aura responds to such things. It is the power of the mind, after all."
"I see..."
Somehow, it didn't feel like something to celebrate.
"You said the nanny's neural system suffered a critical error, right? Would it be fair to compare her to a brain-dead human?"
I asked Arwen as I carefully arranged the nanny's body, laying her out neatly.
"Something like that, yes."
"Is there any chance a place exists outside the institute that could fix her?"
"...Even as we speak, the traces of her system are eroding away. In a few days, there likely won't be anything left to read at all."
That was a no, then.
"Then at the very least, I want to build her a grave. Preferably outside the institute."
I said it quietly, accepting the grief without protest.
Three hundred years in this place—she must have been sick to death of it.
Even if it was nothing more than my own self-indulgence, I wanted to give her that much.
"Do as you wish. Ah—there is an android repair bay on the second basement floor. It might be worth stopping there to restore her appearance before we go."
"Yeah. Let's do that."
Arwen's thoughtfulness nearly brought me to tears.
"With conditions on the upper floors unknown, I would have preferred to delay going up as long as possible... but you want to go up right away, don't you?"
I nodded without a word.
There was no way I could train properly while feeling like this.
"Still, let's sleep for tonight. We need to recover at least our strength. The nanny wouldn't want you getting hurt."
Irrefutable logic.
Arwen dimmed the lights in the cafeteria, and I lay down beside the nanny and closed my eyes.
I worried I wouldn't be able to sleep with my head boiling over like this—but my exhausted body was ruthlessly honest, and sleep took me almost at once.
The next day.
I packed only the barest supplies of food and strapped the nanny onto my back, lashing her to my body with cloth so she wouldn't slip loose mid-journey.
I ran through a series of movements to test how it felt.
"Pretty heavy. Can I actually make it outside in time? I'll need to rest a few times at least."
More than anything, I wanted to show her the outside world before her system faded completely.
I'd assumed she'd be light—little more than a frame was left of her—but she was heavier than expected. And since she was taller than me, her sheer bulk was awkward to carry.
For a long trek, I'd have no choice but to burn aura just to keep moving.
"There's no need to worry too much. The emergency stairwell on the fifth basement floor connects all the way up to the first basement level. We'll need to find a separate route to the surface, and each floor's ceiling height is considerable... but if all goes well, we can reach the surface in a single day."
Arwen spoke as I twisted and turned, hunting for the best possible center of gravity.
"Really?"
With Arwen along—a walking radar, practically—there'd be little chance of an ambush.
If I'd been alone, who knows how I'd have managed...
Moving at a quick but sustainable pace to conserve my stamina, we reached the emergency stairwell on B5 in no time at all.
We hadn't run into any goblins this time either, and I hadn't gone rooting through other rooms gathering supplies—that alone had shaved the trip way down. It couldn't have taken more than twenty minutes or so.
So this is how close it had been all along.
I came to a stop in front of the dented steel door of the emergency stairwell.
Countless years must have passed since my previous life ended, yet the pictogram marking the emergency stairs still clung to the steel door, familiar as ever.
And it was there that I noticed something strange.
"Look at this. The dust is all disturbed."
Ventilation systems ran throughout the institute, which meant it was never a perfectly sealed space.
In other words, dust had no choice but to accumulate as the years wore on.
Yet in front of the steel door, only a few scattered flecks of it remained.
"Hmm... It appears a large group of bodies moved through here. From the other side, by the look of it."
Arwen's body glowed as she drifted forward, revealing the corridor opposite to the one we'd come from.
Where my side of the passage lay buried under a pale carpet of dust, the far side was immaculately clean.
Something had swept the dust away simply by moving through it.
"Don't tell me—goblins?"
"Judging by the footprints left behind, almost certainly."
Arwen pointed at the small footprints stamped boldly into the one patch of dust that had survived.
'At that size... yeah, they'd be goblins alright.'
They must have all headed upstairs, which is why we hadn't seen any of them until now.
But why go up?
"Can't you remote-connect to the security cameras or something and check what's happening on the upper floors?"
"They've all been broken for a very long time. The only way is to get close enough for them to detect us."
"So caution it is..."
The upper floors might be far more dangerous than I'd imagined.
But I had to go anyway.