1
<Today’s temperature stands at −7°C. Attire index A, warm clothing, is
recommended>
Despite it being eight in the morning, the stars continued to faintly twinkle in
the sky. With the psychological-horror movie she’d watched during her flight
still burned into her eyelids, Echika stood at the roundabout by Pulkovo Airport,
located in northwestern Russia.
Her jet-black hair, typical of her Japanese descent, was styled in a bob cut that
reached down to her jawline. Her thin frame was covered by a sweater, short
pants, tights, and boots—all of them black. People had ribbed her countless
times about being a raven in the body of a human.
Cars flowed into the roundabout, their headlights activated. Buses with
Cyrillic letters written on them pulled over to spew out their passengers before
sucking in more people. As Echika’s eyes met with a few of the riders’, their
personal data—like their names and professions—danced through her field of
vision in a pop-up display.
Ever since the popularization of Your Forma, this kind of personal information
had become visible just by looking someone in the face. Not for the average
citizen, mind you, but for people whose professions granted them the
necessary permits to access it. Names, dates of birth, addresses, lines of work…
These were all visible to Echika without even a command.
At any rate…
Despite it being fifteen minutes past the agreed time, Benno hadn’t shown
up.
Fine, Echika thought, licking her dry lips as she decided to call him. Audio call
to Benno Kleiman.
Converting her thoughts to a textual command, she issued that order to the
Your Forma inside her head. The boring ringback tone buzzed through the
earphone she’d left on her ear.
She knew Benno hated phone calls, so she didn’t expect him to pick up. And
despite that, she’d made the call anyway. Sometimes, he’d answer if he was in a
decent mood. Besides, she had half a mind to complain to him about his
perpetual tardiness.
But today wasn’t a good day, it seemed. The call timed out and automatically
closed. A moment later, she received a text from him. She opened up the
message window floating at the corner of her field of vision.
“I’m still at the hospital. When Chief Totoki said yesterday I’d be arriving on
the scene, that was a lie.”
She lied? Echika knit her brow.
“The chief ordered me to keep quiet about it, but our partnership ends
today.”
Figures.
She’d seen this coming. Her partnerships got canceled pretty often, so she
wasn’t disappointed or dejected by the news. The problem was that Chief
Totoki had kept it a secret from her until today. That gave Echika a vague, ill
premonition.
“Someone from the local branch should be in the airport to pick you up.
Stay at the roundabout.”
“Understood. Did you hear anything about my new aide, by the way?”
Echika replied with a question, but Benno didn’t answer it. That pissed her off
a little, but she was the one who’d gotten him hospitalized, and he hadn’t liked
her to begin with. Him turning a cold shoulder to her didn’t come as a surprise.
A new partner, huh?
She wasn’t enthusiastic at the prospect, to say the least. After all, no matter
who showed up, they wouldn’t last long. Most electronic investigators worked
with the same aide for a year or so, but in Echika’s case, her partnerships lasted
only a month at best. Her data-processing abilities were so outstandingly high
that no one could match her, so her aides kept failing and getting hurt.
Feeling a wave of melancholy creep in on her, Echika took out her electronic
cigarette and sucked on it. As she was about to blow out a wisp of water vapor
that contained neither nicotine nor tar, an alert popped up from her Your
Forma.
<Smoking is prohibited on airport grounds>
Restraining the urge to click her tongue, she turned off her cigarette and
instead resorted to fiddling with the nitro-case necklace hanging from her neck
in an attempt to distract herself.
The person picking her up arrived only thirty minutes later. As Echika stood
there, almost freezing over, an SUV pulled up in front of her. It had a squarish
body with a stylish maroon coating, and its roundish headlights seemed like an
expression of how this car was meant for driving off the road.
Her Your Forma swiftly analyzed the car’s make. A Lada Niva. An ancient,
respectable model that hadn’t seen a full makeover in some forty-odd years. An
artistic city like this had a unique taste in automobiles, indeed.
“Good morning. Are you Electronic Investigator Hieda?”
The driver’s-seat window rolled down, revealing the face of a young
Caucasian man. But despite looking him straight in the face, no personal
information popped up in her field of vision. That alone instantly made Echika
that much more depressed.
The person at the wheel was an Amicus. Though they were once called
androids or humanoid machines, they were now considered an indispensable
part of human life.
“Did I keep you waiting long?” he asked, holding up an ID badge identifying
him as an Amicus working with the local police. “I was told to meet you at nine
AM…”
“We were supposed to get here at eight.” Benno had relayed that to her, so
this was another one of his petty attempts at harassment. Typical. “Never mind,
let me get in.”
No sooner did the Amicus unlock the door than Echika slid into the passenger
seat. Finally, she could warm herself up a little…or so she thought, but her
expectations were dashed when she found the interior of the car was terribly
cold.
“Oh, excuse me. The cold helps my processing speed,” the Amicus said,
flipping the switch for the heating with a friendly gesture.
As far as Echika knew, it couldn’t tell the difference between hot and cold.
Being a machine fashioned in human form, it was compelled, by its system, to
act “human.”
“But if I was to catch a cold because of this, it would be a breach of your Laws
of Respect.”
“Right you are. Of course, I take care to watch over my behavior accordingly.”
To respect humans, obey the orders of humans, and never attack a human
being—all Amicus were programmed in accordance with these Laws of Respect.
Honestly speaking, Echika didn’t like these machines much. Or rather, she flatout
hated them.
The semiautomatic vehicle slowly started moving and drove out of the
roundabout. The streets of Saint Petersburg sailed past in all the glory of their
anachronistic architecture. It was an elegant, beautiful sight, but it was blotted
out as advertisement holograms unfurled over the walls.
One of the Your Forma’s features was an augmented-reality advertisement
system. By reading the user’s tastes, it displayed business advertisements
tailored to their preferences. These days, buildings around the globe were
covered in commercials, and no matter where one went, one couldn’t
appreciate the view. You could opt to turn them off, but it came with a steep
fee.
After all, the developer of the Your Forma, Rig City, was mostly funded by ad
revenue. What’s more, the Your Forma installation procedures were performed
free of charge for all users, which was also thanks to this revenue source.
“According to today’s schedule, you should be heading for the Union Care
Center next. You’re to Brain Dive and identify the source of the virus today,
yes?”
“Correct.”
“After Washington, DC, and Paris, there’s a third incident here in Saint Petersburg.”
“Forget the schedule—what about my new aide?”
“He’s ready and waiting for you. Would you like to hear more about him?”
“No, I’ll find out when I meet him.”
Cutting off the conversation there, Echika used her Your Forma to browse the
news. Lines of headlines tailored to her interests danced before her eyes.
<AI author to be final nominee for literary prize>
<Massive cold wave hits Japan’s Kanto region>
<Notre-Dame Cathedral restricts end-of-year countdown event>
<Switzerland announced as the leading country in number of assisted
suicides>
<Bookstore networks to increase year-end sales of paper volumes>…
The identity of her new aide didn’t interest her per se. She’d just do the work
laid out before her regardless. Echika had stopped thinking about her partners a
long time ago; that way, she could shield her heart from all kinds of guilt.
<The age of the pandemic is behind us. Won’t you grasp the thread of your
new life?>
That was the slogan for the first advertisements.
The invasive augmented-reality device, Your Forma, was an information
terminal fashioned after a sewing thread that sat within one’s head. After being
shaped into a three-micrometer smart thread, the device was inserted directly
into the brain using laser surgery.
With the Your Forma, one could do almost anything, from monitoring one’s
health to online shopping and updating social networks, via thought alone.
It all started thirty-one years ago, the winter of 1992, when a virus that came
to be known as The Spore caused a worldwide pandemic. The development of
vaccines and antibodies couldn’t keep up with the virus’s rapid mutations,
which swiftly paralyzed society. The death toll climbed to thirty million, with the
most frequent cause of death being viral encephalitis. As such, preventing brain
inflammation became a matter of urgent concern.
Under a World Health Organization initiative, different corporations and
groups cooperated to create a prototype of a brain-machine interface, which
they eventually rolled out for general use.
Over the next several years, they developed the invasive medical-thread
device Neural Safety. With its help, treating the encephalitis symptoms became
easier, and the mortality rate was greatly curbed. Future iterations could
outright prevent the disease.
And the population, exhausted from years of fighting the virus, had no reason
not to be drawn to this new thread.
And now, long after the pandemic’s conclusion in the year of 2023, Neural
Safety had since been reborn under a new name, evolving into the Your Forma,
the cutting-edge, multipurpose, multifunction information terminal.
One of its most noteworthy features was Mnemosynes—records of real
events, plus the emotions and impressions of the user at the time. They were
formed through converting the memories in the hippocampus into binary data
and producing a visualization of the heart.
Mnemosynes went on to revolutionize the face of criminal investigation.
Interpol’s Electrocrime Investigations Bureau became the sole organization with
the authority to investigate Mnemosynes, which they exercised to solve major
offenses. There were, of course, rare instances of criminals tweaking or erasing
Mnemosynes to escape judgment. Still, since it was impossible to falsify
Mnemosynes with current technology, they nevertheless contributed greatly to
the solving of criminal cases.
The people who plunged into Mnemosynes were electronic investigators—
also known as Divers—like Echika.
Divers connected to a victim’s or perpetrator’s Your Forma to quite literally
plunge into their minds in search of key clues for solving crimes. Mnemosynes
were stored in a stand-alone environment that was disconnected from the
network, which meant you had to interface physically with them through a
wire. On top of that, Mnemosynes were housed in a multilayered structure
resembling a mille-feuille. This ensured people with average processing speed
couldn’t so much as view the surface level of this data.
As such, the job had very specific compatibility requirements. These basically
boiled down to a genetic resistance to stress and an affinity with Your Forma.
When brains grew accustomed to using Your Forma from the early stages of
development, some would, in rare instances, adjust themselves to the device to
an extreme degree, spurring a formation of myelin. In simple terms, the brain
grows too used to the Your Forma and exponentially increases its informationprocessing
speed as a result.
Those kinds of slightly distorted people were selected to become electronic
investigators. And Echika stood head and shoulders above her peers, to the
point where even now, no aide had ever been able to match her processing
speed.
In other words, people calling her a genius wasn’t a compliment but sarcasm
of the highest degree.
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