The Fate of Shin-Osaka – Chapter 3

I start every morning the same way. Since I don’t sleep, it’s easy to get up and move in the same fashion each day, no matter the circumstances. I grab an umbrella or a jacket if it’s raining or cold. If I spend the night out, I return to the apartment to wash my face and change my clothes. There is very little variation in my routine. And why should there be? I’m not happy to be here. I’m getting through the days bit by bit, routine by routine. It’s either this or shut down.

Shutting down sounds incredible right about now.

The door clicks closed quietly behind me at six-thirty. I’m usually gone before Rin gets up, and it’s better that way. I hate seeing the sadness in his eyes, but I don’t want to give up this small connection to my past. He just wants Yumi back. He wishes I wasn’t an android. He’s not the only one.

Kazuo is waiting for me outside with two cups of takeaway coffee. His clothing is casual today, slacks and a button-down shirt, and his hair is wild and free. He’s become a slender man here on Hikari, tall and thin as a bamboo thatch. His face is hidden behind a warm, puffy gust of muggy steam that smells of coffee, ozone, and old books. Thank the gods I still have a sense of smell. It’s the only thing tying me to reality most days.

“Here,” he says, handing me one. “It’s water.”

He knows how much I miss coffee, but it’s just another thing I don’t consume anymore because why bother?

“Thanks, I guess.”

The air outside has that morning smell, the scent of last night’s rain mixed with garlic and onions from the pre-work breakfast rush. We head away from the building, and Kazuo looks up at our apartments.

“Did you spend the night at home? With Rin?” His voice is hopeful.

But I’m having none of that.

“Yes, I was in the apartment. I sat on the couch. I was not with Rin.” I sip the water just to blend in. “Rin doesn’t trust me anymore. He loves — loved — Yumi when she was flesh and blood. That time is gone.”

He sighs and runs his free hand through his long hair. He hasn’t cut it in months. Fine lines slash the corners of his mouth, and dark circles sit like angry-half moons under his eyes. I hate to think about what this has done to him.

It shouldn’t be happening at all.

“And the longer this goes on, the less likely he’ll ever want to be with flesh and blood Yumi. Every time he looks at me in this body, he slips farther and farther away.”

“This is my fault,” Kazuo says with a sigh.

“Yes. Yes, it is,” I say, my voice flat. “I still don’t understand why you did it.” I look up and wave to the woman opening the bakery. The aroma of freshly baked bread lures several people straight to her door. Her ginger cat circles her feet as she programs the wallscreen with her specials for the day. “Morning!” I call out.

“Morning, Miss Saki!” Her bright smile brings out a grin from me. She nods to Kazuo, and he returns the nod.

I know everyone around here — all the shop owners, the employees, and most of the residents, too. I may have trouble accessing my old memories, but the new ones are a brand-new a database. They’re fresh, sharp, and unmistakably accurate like my brain was before we left our home on Orihimé.

“We did it because we need you now,” Kazuo says. “Not Saki. Yumi. Saki gave up her body for you because she knew if she stayed in it, she could never be what we needed. She would have left.”

“You don’t know that,” I insist.

“He’s right. I would have blown out of there the first chance I got,” Saki says.

“Wait. Saki agrees with you.” It’s my turn to sigh. “But I don’t. You don’t need me. Aimi and Ryoko are running the underground news station, feeding the resistance. Shiroi Nami is building its corporation. You, Shintaro, and Rin are figuring things out without me. I am here for no purpose except to make you feel better.”

After a few moments of silence, Kazuo clears his throat. “The Kazenoho Corporation is dead in the water, though.”

“And it will continue to be until I can do something about it, which I cannot do in this gods-forsaken body.” We pass the local handmade fan shop, and I smile and wave to the old man who runs it. “Looking good this morning!”

“It’s always good to wake up in the morning, Miss Saki.”

“Indeed it is,” I reply.

Kazuo grimaces. “Spoken like someone who hasn’t slept in three months.”

“Another thing that’s your fault.” I can’t hide the bitterness in my tone, even with my emotions suffocated under the governor. “And I still shut down,” I point out. “It’s required. I just don’t ‘sleep.’ Anyway…” I wave my thoughts away.

Just before we reach the outdoor market, he stops me with a hand on my shoulder. “Look, I wouldn’t have done it at all, but I thought you could help with the resistance, talk to the other androids. And I also figured you might be able to access parts of Saki’s memory that she couldn’t, since she was struck down in the fight, and her memory corrupted.”

I cross my arms and press my lips closed. This is not a good enough explanation.

“You still need to figure out Gen’s secret,” he reminds me.

“Maybe it’s not important, huh? Maybe I was just trying to laugh at Gen or…” I shrug.

“Exactly. You don’t know. And we need to know.”

“But my own memories are fucked, remember? They didn’t all get archived, and now everything is sitting in my head like a bunch of boxes in a warehouse. I may never find it, and eventually, I’ll either be deactivated, dead, or alive in another body.”

This was a terrible way to end up, and I don’t see how we can fix it now.

I stare off at the people in the streets. A man in a cap stands behind a small crowd, staring at a price list for some fruit. He looks like a lower-caste commoner, and I’m sure he’s wondering where the best deals are. A woman in a yellow and green kimono with stylized pine trees printed on it buys groceries. Two children run past her and disappear through an alley, their school uniforms a blur of white and blue. A hand-drawn sign on the alley wall reads, “Take a break inside and recharge.”

I can’t pick the androids out of the crowd, and I suppose it shouldn’t be that easy. Rin has special ways of testing androids to see if they are real people or not, a complex test developed by Kiiroi Yama and used whenever they took someone into custody. The androids wouldn’t fit in if it were as simple as a heat signature, a vocal tic, or a hairstyle. Fitting in was the goal.

I don’t feel like I fit in.

“I admit my plan was flawed,” Kazuo says, jolting me out of my thoughts. “I panicked, and I made a few terrible decisions. But we still need you.”

“I think it’s cost me the love of my life, Kazuo. If I had just died and he knew I would come back in my updated body, he would have held on. But seeing me in this” — I wave to Saki’s body — “means he’s disconnected me from the woman he loved. I would rather be dead. I want to be dead.”

This is such bullshit. Channeling what little anger I have, I chuck the coffee cup at a nearby trashcan and miss. It explodes water onto the sidewalk, and a man dodges to the side to get away from the spray.

“Sorry!” I call out with a smile. “I have terrible aim!”

He shakes his head and keeps going.

“We need you,” Kazuo stresses. “Take the anger about Rin and use it to figure out what we’ll do with Kazenoho Corp.”

I blow a breath through my nose and kick a pebble down the sidewalk.

“I have no idea what to do with it. Not yet. I don’t even know why I’m here.”

Kazuo’s lips fall into a gentle smile. “If you had died, you wouldn’t have spent time here in Matsubara Ward, which you love.” Kazuo always tries to find the bright side of life.

“I do like it here a lot. Love is not something I can feel anymore.”

Kazuo frowns as we enter the swelling crowd in the market. The market vendors call out from colorful stalls filled with fresh food and dry goods. Pickles, seafood, snacks, candies, oden, fried vegetables — the smells are so familiar. Back home on Orihimé, we have several markets throughout Yamato, the city I grew up in, and I would visit them at least once per day. They were the best place to grab a bite to eat, meet up with someone for coffee or a treat, or just wander when you didn’t want to be elsewhere. Kazuo and I used to go to them together all the time. Here we are, doing the same thing on a planet far, far away.

We’re silent as we amble along the walkway between stalls. Kazuo grabs salmon rice balls for breakfast, and we pull off to a bench so he can sit and eat. I smile and wave to people I know while trying to look casual.

Kazuo finishes his meal and dusts off his hands. “Did Rin speak to you last night?”

I wait while a family passes us. “About the surgery? Yeah. I’m going to do the research and find the right person for the job.”

“Good.” He reaches into his bag and hands over his tablet. “I have something I want you to see. Here’s the latest intelligence we’ve gathered on Aoi Uma. A lot has happened in the last two weeks.”

I take the tablet with skepticism. Aoi Uma has done nothing surprising in months. They’ve been building their Fukusha Model Tens off the main update network to divorce them from the Three Laws we gave to the other androids. Those androids have been advancing through Shin-Osaka and taking over, neighborhood by neighborhood. Aoi Uma has stretched themselves to the limit with little regard to how they’ll hold their territory once they’ve secured it.

But the data Kazuo shows me makes me blink in surprise.

Wow. Narumi Ogawa, head of Aoi Uma, was attacked on the street two nights ago. According to the first-person accounts, a man jumped out of the crowd while she was touring a company in Kadoma Ward and stabbed her eight times. Several witnesses said she was dead on the scene. Still, the next day, an anonymous informant spied her at home, seemingly okay.

Huh.

Well, that explains a lot. I wonder how long it’ll take the populace to catch on that she’s not human anymore.

I scroll a little more through the report until my eye catches on the last entry.

The android factory in Amagasaki, the one we infiltrated to get the Three Laws to the androids, has been closed on and off several times in the last two weeks.

“What the…?” I scroll through the report until I get to the conclusion at the end.

“At this time, we suspect this plant has been having supply issues and closes to save money when they run into shortages. Fabrication of Model Tens has slowed to a mere forty to fifty units per day. Previous numbers showed Model Tens being produced at ten times that amount. Aoi Uma has let approximately two hundred employees go without renewing their contracts. No further data is available.”

I turn off the tablet and hand it back. “Thoughts?”

Kazuo presses his lips together. “I only have guesses. Maybe the androids aren’t working out like they thought. Maybe their own suppliers and employees are having second thoughts.” He shrugs. “Androids use a lot of raw materials, metals that need to be mined and such. Those companies may not agree with Aoi Uma.”

“What do you think they’ll do? Are we talking about a new focus? Will they abandon the android business for something else?”

Kazuo raises his eyes to the sky. “If I were them, I’d buy out the suppliers and run it all myself, but I don’t know.” He sighs. “I used to be a lot better at this. One step ahead of the enemy. But since your death, I feel… ungrounded.”

“Well, at least you’re not ‘in the ground’ because I need you to help me make sense of all of this.” I poke him in the side. “There’s so much to figure out, but one step at a time. Forget this for now. We’ll come back to it later when we have more data.” Change the subject, Yumi. “I need you to get me into Kadoma Ward General Hospital so I can retrieve my body. Why did you leave me there?”

“Rin and I had both left to get something to eat when Aoi Uma attacked the hospital. We tried to get back in and couldn’t. We had to hand over your care to the cryo-freeze company, Inochi Corporation. Trust me. I beat myself up over it for a long time. It’s not what we planned.”

“Is any of this what we planned?” I ask, huffing a laugh.

“No.”

An idea begins to form as I put A with B with C and make connections between all the disparate elements of this situation. I don’t need to be the one to retrieve my body, but I want to. I want to be useful, and I’m tired of being a waitress for no good reason. It’s either this or I shut myself down. Those are my only two options.

“Okay then. I’ll go in and retrieve my body and get out. Me. Alone.”

“Wait a second…”

I hold up my hand. “After I see the surgeon, I’ll be an entirely new android. No one will know it’s me. But everyone who is anyone important knows who you are. Even the best disguise won’t be enough. Same for Rin. I’m the one who wants my body. I’ll do it.”

He sighs, but he knows there’s nothing that will stop me now. I have something to do finally. Finally.

And thank the gods, too, because I do not want to do this for much longer.

We’re about to leave when a new message flashes across my vision. This is the nice thing about being an android. I don’t need a tablet anymore. Isao and Wataru gave me access to everything a tablet can and more.

Speaking of Isao… This message is from him, and it’s marked top priority.

“Just a moment,” I say to Kazuo as he turns away. He pauses.

I battle with my inner journalist over whether to read this right away or save it for later. They may have taken my body, but they did not take my will, ambition, or personality.

I should read it.

I should leave it alone and let everyone else deal with this.

My desire for more information beats my desire to live and not kick the hornets’ nest.

“Your body is ready, and we’re returning to Hikari. We’ve seen the latest maps and believe Aoi Uma will hold most of the city soon enough. So, now is the time to act if we’re going to do it. You’ve had three months to work on the takeover plan. Send us your thoughts and ideas on how to move forward, and we’ll come up with a final plan together. You must exit the city and meet us in Awashikawa for the consciousness transfer. Our people have set up a new lab there. See you soon, cousin.”

I have no takeover plan. Aoi Uma is merciless and determined to own the entire planet. We are so fucked.

I blow out a long breath, an artifact from when I was a living, breathing human being. It doesn’t bring me peace anymore like it once did.

This is it. The pivot point we’ve been waiting for. We have to move forward now to the end of this battle, or we’ll wither away and die here.