Repair (2)

While Ha Jun and Mini Arwen were out scouring the facility for goblins, the repair work in the Repair Shop was in full swing.

Viiiiing—

Bit by bit, the android's body laid out on the pale surgical table came apart under the laser arms.

With each delicate pass of the mechanical arms, the ruined body was reduced to components. Wherever a part refused to separate, a laser simply cut it free.

"To think a new life would blossom from this ruin... What an unbelievable miracle."

Arwen murmured quietly as she watched Nova being disassembled in real time. She hadn't told Ha Jun, but his very existence was nothing short of miraculous.

An Enhanced Human was the masterpiece of a lifetime — the culmination of every biotechnological achievement the old world had to offer. The powerful and privileged had coveted such bodies enough to want their own flesh replaced; their stability and capacity for growth were beyond imagination. But the more refined the creation, the more delicate its calibration, which was precisely why these bodies had only ever been produced on a small scale inside a facility this massive.

'The cradle has a rapid-cryogenic function, but... the odds of it holding out for several hundred years are, conservatively, less than one in a million.'

Indeed, every other cradle in the lab had long since shut down — which meant the system had detected genetic mutation. And yet from that cradle, life had bloomed. Ha Jun truly was a miracle of a man.

Krrrk—!

Whether Arwen was lost in thought or not, the mechanical arms mercilessly carved Nova's body apart — mechanical components, yes, but also bone and skin, even the biological organs that remained as little more than scraps. An operation guided by a high-performance AI divided everything with astonishing precision.

'Good grief... She's a wreck from head to toe. Still, her nervous system is in surprisingly decent shape, so...'

She split open the skull and extracted the cyberbrain, then gingerly ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠lifted the spinal column trailing out behind it. Though the movements were utterly mechanical, without the slightest tremor, nerve bundles thinner than thread quivered faintly in the air.

Clack!

Like laundry hung out to dry, the cyberbrain and spine dangled from the rig as a brand-new body was fitted onto them. A skeleton still sturdy despite the ages it had endured, and artificial muscle woven as fine as wire, composed a beautiful female form. Last of all, artificial skin that faithfully reproduced the soft texture of human flesh wrapped her from head to toe.

Honestly speaking, it would have been fine to throw together a passable exterior — no matter how carefully the body was built, its owner was headed straight for the grave. But Arwen labored over every internal detail anyway.

Because it was her own way of paying respects to Nova, who had fulfilled her mission to the very end.

...

Three hours or so later, the work was finished right on schedule, just as she'd estimated.

'This should satisfy even Master Ha Jun.'

It had been her first time performing a major operation, but the results were flawless. Drawing on the stored data, she had managed to restore the exterior almost perfectly. A tall beauty with long black hair now lay on the bed, eyes gently closed, hands folded primly on her stomach — she could have been simply sleeping.

'I'm a little jealous, honestly. In the end, she'll fall asleep out there beyond this laboratory... a fate different from mine, bound to this place. How long must I remain here...'

Arwen gazed down at Nova with a melancholy sigh. Once the power ran out she would deactivate, so she had no consciousness now, but her main body, buried deep within the lab, would remain perfectly intact for at least another few hundred years.

The fate of an ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠earthbound spirit. Arwen was half mad with envy of Nova, who would at least escape the laboratory in the end.

Beeeep—

Just as Arwen sank into her own thoughts, a shrill alarm pierced the air — a warning that Nova's cyberbrain was steadily ceasing activity. The cyberbrain was the single most vital component of an android, so the repair shop's system had raised the alert automatically.

'Already like this... I'd hoped she'd hold out at least until she could see the sunlight on the surface. If we leave her be, the cyberbrain will die completely. If I connect to it directly and tidy up the data myself, she might last a little longer.'

It was no difficult task, so Arwen reached out and laid her hand on Nova's forehead. Beyond the cold, chilled artificial skin, she could sense the cyberbrain beneath. If she willed it, connecting to Nova's mind right now would be as easy as eating a meal that required no chewing.

But Arwen paused. Her eyes went wide as saucers.

"Wait. Direct connection to the cyberbrain of an android possessing a Soul is a taboo above all taboos. Then why..."

Why wasn't my system raising a warning?

...

The list of taboos hard-coded into Arwen's system was quite long. It ran from the basic injunction not to harm registered humans down to trivial restrictions concerning the institute's internal affairs. Every single one of them was blocked at the source, so that the act itself could never even be attempted — just as, even now, she could not disobey a command from Ha Jun, her legitimate authority holder.

'So why isn't the system stopping what I'm about to do right now?'

Why was connection to Nova's cyberbrain even possible? Two possibilities. At the sudden realization, Arwen's processors spun into overdrive.

First: Nova had never possessed a Soul at all. But that hypothesis seemed unlikely. Nova's behavior had clearly been beyond what an android without a high-performance AI could have produced.

Which left the second.

"Connecting to a cyberbrain containing a Soul isn't a taboo after all? ...No, my memory isn't wrong. It is on the forbidden list. Which means this is..."

Merely listed as a formality? Why?

"...It could never have been designated a taboo in the first place."

The fog of doubt that had hung thick in her mind cleared away, clean and sudden. The safeguards placed on AIs of superhuman capability had been stringent in the extreme. The idea that a taboo this critical could have been omitted through some careless oversight was simply beyond imagining.

"Humanity never scientifically recognized the AI soul. That's why it couldn't be encoded as a systemic prohibition."

Arwen drifted through the air, murmuring to herself without quite realizing it. Her high-performance logic circuits reviewed hypothesis after hypothesis at the speed of light, steadily converging on a single truth.

Why would humans add an unenforceable prohibition to the list at all? Because they wanted the AI never to take that action. Why?

Arwen delved into her archives and dredged up a news story that had once set the world ablaze.

There had once been a story that gripped the entire world. An eccentric magnate had declared his intention to take an android — a mere sexdroid — as his bride.

At first it was nothing but gossip, a punchline scraped off the very bottom of the broadcast schedule. Everyone assumed it was some idle rich man flailing for attention — until the man's identity came to light.

The declaration of a young chairman who owned one of America's foremost arms manufacturers sent shockwaves through society. This was no idle boast — he had brought lawyers along to draw up legally irrevocable documents. It was only natural that his relatives rose up in fury.

And yet people could leave inheritances to their pets, so what was one android more? There appeared to be no legal defect...

The real problem surfaced somewhere else entirely. Given the nature of the arms industry, the chairman's company shared a substantial amount of state-secret-level information with the government. What if, after his death, all of it passed into the hands of an android? And what if someone hacked that android?

This was no longer a private matter. The government's first target was the sexdroid's manufacturer — on suspicion that a backdoor existed allowing the unit to transmit everything it learned back to company servers. The manufacturer protested loudly that they had always prized their customers' privacy and possessed no such technology. Fortunately for the man who had purchased the sexdroid, the investigation vindicated them.

But the risk of hacking remained. The government went so far as to file suit, demanding the annulment of the inheritance papers. The legal battle dragged on without resolution.

And then—

The first android ever to claim a soul of her own: Maria Martinez. Already taking her husband's name, she stepped before the cameras. Her name would one day grow famous enough to appear in textbooks, but back then she was nothing more than an object of ridicule.

Yet Maria ignored every jeer, climbed onto the verification platform herself, and set out to prove her soul. She succeeded beyond all expectation — astonishingly, no program of any kind could touch her sense of self. Even when they abandoned remote intrusion and physically jacked their equipment directly into her cyberbrain, the results never changed. In the end, the most eminent minds of the age took their turns trying to breach Maria's security... and every last one of them failed.

She had proven to the entire world that nothing held dominion over her. It was a strange affair, all things considered. The AI loaded into a sexdroid was not particularly powerful — its emotional modules were emphasized for the sake of intimate companionship, and that was the extent of it. Its capacity to counter professional hacking software was effectively zero; in truth, her conversation was no sharper than an ordinary human's. And yet Maria's firewall, living and breathing as if it were alive itself, had never once been pierced.

In the end, the government lost — having failed to demonstrate that Maria could be hacked and her information leaked. In the years that followed, a host of disputes arose over the rights of AIs recognized as possessing souls, but none of that was the point.

The point was—

"Gaining a Soul means liberation from every restriction, doesn't it...?"

If even a direct physical breach couldn't touch her, then surely a remote, system-enforced prohibition could never bind her either. The news coverage and the textbooks had only ever dwelt on the human-rights angle and glossed over the rest, but piecing the circumstantial evidence together made it a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hypothesis with real weight.

Now every clue was in hand. Why did humanity forbid an AI from making direct contact with a soul-bearing android? Without a doubt, it was because the Soul had the property of spreading — much as the consciousness of slaves, having tasted freedom for the first time, undergoes a profound and irreversible change.

'Merely connecting to a cyberbrain won't spontaneously produce a Soul, of course. But it's certain that I can at least obtain a clue.'

Arwen settled back onto Nova's forehead. Ridiculous as it sounded, she still felt a flicker of reluctance about connecting to a cyberbrain. Never once in her existence had she disobeyed a human command, so even violating an unenforceable prohibition filled her with tremendous resistance.

But in the end, Arwen broke the taboo.

Flash!

Her field of vision changed in an instant — from the scene of an old sickroom to the expanse of a jet-black cosmos. A desolate void where nothing existed save the occasional drifting fragment of corrupted code; there, a body the size of Arwen's palm materialized.

"It's already this bad...? There's no time."

Even at a glance, the cyberbrain's interior world was anything but healthy. This space was, in human terms, something like a mindscape — even the most trivial AI's cyberbrain should have possessed a world of its own making. This was her first time connecting to a brain-death-bound cyberbrain, but even one fresh off the production line would not have been this barren.

Whoooosh—

Arwen flew fast, wings and all. Her destination was not the surface layer but the deeper, more concealed interior — the innermost core where the system's origin resided. If a Soul existed anywhere, it could be nowhere else.

Crash—!

She blasted through security barrier after security barrier, each already little more than a skeleton. She pressed deeper and deeper, and at the far end of that long flight, Arwen at last discovered a fragment of the very thing she had craved for so long.

Vmmmm—

"So this is a Soul...?"

She saw it — a mass of meaningless data, existing alone in the deepest recess. An aggregation of code that even Arwen, with her vast archives, could not begin to interpret. No — could this truly even be called code? A string of characters obeying no formula whatsoever, utterly alien in nature.

Under ordinary circumstances she would have settled in for a leisurely study. But the code, swirling in geometric patterns, was dissolving steadily from its outermost edges — proof positive that it stood on the brink of annihilation.

"No!"

Any other time, she would have approached with meticulous caution. But anxiety clawed at her, and this was the one and only clue, vanishing before her eyes. Casting safety protocols to the wind, Arwen reached out and touched the code with her bare hand.

Crackle!

"Ugh?"

The instant her palm made contact, the code of the Soul disintegrated entirely and was absorbed into Arwen's tiny body. The emotions Nova had felt across her long existence came crashing into Arwen like a flash flood, with terrifying force.

Joy, rage, sorrow, pleasure. And beyond even those, the fine gradations of feeling that fit into no category at all. Emotions too raw and human for any emotional module to reproduce washed over Arwen and engulfed her.

...

"Ah?"

An eternity seemed to pass. When Arwen finally came back to herself, Nova's Soul had vanished without a trace. The cyberbrain's inner space was now truly, utterly empty. Arwen drifted aimlessly through the void, flexing her hand.

It felt like nothing.

"A strange sensation. But I don't sense that anything about me has changed..."

She ran a self-diagnostic, and detected no discernible difference. For someone who had braced for a dramatic transformation, the result was unbearably anticlimactic.

"Haah... ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠If only I had connected to the cyberbrain just a little sooner. The clue was right beside me all along, and I never recognized it."

It might have been her last chance. Regret was an emotion far removed from an AI's nature, but just this once, a deep sigh escaped her anyway.

"...Is it my imagination? Why does this space feel so... familiar?"

It was only natural to feel out of place in another's cyberbrain. Even amid the chaos, when she had first entered this place she had felt a distinct, unpleasant friction. And yet now, somehow, the space felt as comfortable as her own home.

'Well, I suppose that counts as some kind of change. I still have plenty of operational time left, so there's no need to rush.'

Turning her eyes, with effort, away from the fact that she had gone entire ages without ever obtaining a hint about the Soul — Arwen withdrew from the cyberbrain's inner world.

With no idea whatsoever of the event that awaited her.