86 - Volume 10 - Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

A KIND WORLD

“And now, an update regarding the war.

“A group of the unmanned Imperial weapons known as the Legion have invaded the Seventeenth Sector today. The force was intercepted and eliminated by the Republic military’s own unmanned drones, the Canines. Fifty percent of the Canine units were lost in the fighting, forcing the unit to fall back and be replaced by the reserve unit. As such, there was no loss of human life today, as well.”

The main street of the Republic of San Magnolia’s capital, Liberté et Égalité, was so peaceful and beautiful, one would be hard-pressed to believe the country had been at war for the past nine years.

Indeed, the synthetic food was a bit blander than natural food. And the scheduled blackouts necessitated by the chronic energy shortage did mean that the streetlamps standing on the sidewalk never fulfilled their role. And yes, the silhouettes of the hurriedly built, unsightly skyscrapers meant to accommodate refugees from other countries did blot out the sky.

But the surrounding citizens did cooperate to keep the flower beds and roadside trees green and watered, and there was always laughter coming from somewhere. The street corners were vibrant, with citizens of all colors and shades walking about.

A little girl, her eyes sparkling like the lifeblood of the sea, walked hand in hand with her parents, her laughter filling the street. They were all dressed up. Maybe they were going to some celebration? Or maybe they were just touring the administrative Sector?

Seeing this heartwarming family off, Lena smiled and sipped on the caffe latte in her paper cup. She’d stopped in one of the capital’s squares on her way back from school. Above a stopped fountain, a holo-screen was open and still showed the news, where a young, female Topaz newscaster continued commentating the ongoing war with a pleasant voice.

“The Republic’s combat system, which leaves the fighting to the drones with only a small number of personnel to command them from the front lines, continues to defend our country. In addition, contact is ongoing with the United Kingdom of Roa Gracia, the Alliance of Wald, the Grand Duchy of Qitira, the Holy Theocracy of Noiryanaruse, as well as the Rin-Liu Trade Federation, the Regicide Fleet Countries, and the Federal Republic of Giad. They have all either held on to their defensive lines or gained ground. Intelligence from the Federacy reports that the countries to the east of the desert have also been holding their lines.”

A mere two months after the war began, the Republic lost most of its land, and the Legion had been surrounding the Republic in the nine years since. But recently, their overall numbers had been on the decline. Perhaps the inescapable life span built into them as a safety measure was beginning to affect them. The Legion’s intense electronic interference was also growing thinner, allowing radar systems to detect the enemy all the way into the depths of their territories.

The Republic had just barely been able to keep communication lines up with the other countries beyond the siege line. This confirmed that they’d all survived, albeit isolated, and kept up their defensive fronts. Little by little, they were regaining their lost land.

Just as Lena’s homeland, the Republic of San Magnolia, had been doing.

The caster punctuated her words with a fair smile and continued speaking with a hint of pride.

“The possibility of us wiping out the Legion before they cease functionality in two years’ time seems doable. This is all thanks to our Canines, which have created a true battlefield of zero casualties. Despite us being in a war to defend our homeland, none of our citizens need to weep at the loss of a loved one. It is a joyous state of affairs, indeed.”

“…However,” one Alabaster man, sitting in front of her with a commentator’s nameplate before him, said, “I think we mustn’t forget that the Canines were originally an artificial intelligence made not for combat, but to befriend us humans. They were born to love us, and they have a heart, even if it is different from ours. We are letting these beings fight our wars for us.”

The caster cocked her head. Not out of doubt or displeasure, but so as to spur him to continue.

“The Canines are based on a downgraded version of an AI prototype, F008. Unlike the prototype, they’re not programmed to have anything that corresponds with sentience or emotion…”

“Correct, but does that mean we should say we don’t care? Just because they’re machines? Just because they’re not sentient? Just because they’re not human? If we keep thinking that those are reasons to let them fight for us, it could be the start of a slippery slope. One day, we might decide that we’re allowed to let those speaking another tongue or those of another culture fight our wars for us, too. We could make someone else shed blood and tears in our place… Yes, Ms. Soma, you said earlier that no one had to cry, but at least one child wept for the Canines.”

The caster nodded profoundly.

“The child of F008’s developer. The one who asked that they not take his friend to the battlefield.”

“That’s right. It’s exactly because we’re in a war right now that we mustn’t forget that child’s heart and kindness. That is the very spirit of the five-hued flag that we Republic citizens must stand for—”

“Oh, sorry, sorry! I kept you waiting, Lena.”

A voice suddenly cut into the program’s conversation, and its owner hurried over to Lena.

“Geez, Rita. How do I put it…? You’re always a little late, aren’t you?”

Lena directed a sulky look at Rita—her classmate, Henrietta Penrose—who kept bobbing her head in apology. She wore the same Prussian blue blazer as Lena, since they were in the same school, and had a strange stuffed toy dangling from her bag. She carried in her other hand a paper bag with the logo of a stationary shop from a nearby department store.

Lena could tell the bag was meant to be a present. And given the dark-brown wrapping, which was more relaxing and mature than it was gaudy, it was clear that it wasn’t a gift meant for a young woman like Lena or Rita.

“Oh, this? It’s a birthday present for someone you don’t know, so I figured it wouldn’t be right to drag you along for that. And when I got there, it took me longer than I thought to decide.”

“That childhood friend of yours? From another school?”

“The very same… I can’t believe Shin. He said he wants to go to that faraway school because it offers subjects that ours doesn’t, but that’s a big fat lie. I know for a fact that he didn’t pick this school just because his brother went here. He can be so childish sometimes.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Lena nodded indifferently—she had never met this childhood friend, after all—and took another sip of her coffee before leaning forward.

“How about you stop bragging about him all the time and introduce me to him already?”

“Never,” Rita said, turning her face away in an overdramatic jest. “You’re too pretty, Lena. You’ll snatch him away.”

“I’m not gonna put the moves on my best friend’s boyfriend.”

“Wh-what?! H-he…he’s not my boyfriend!”

Rita shouted unintentionally, her face going red as an apple. She blushed up to her ears, behind which was her beautiful, natural silver hair, the same as Lena’s. As Lena grinned at her, Rita tore her argent eyes from hers and, with a very thin voice, added:

“…Yet.”

“See?”

As he was preparing to go outside, Shin heard a snippet from the news program playing in the living room downstairs and grimaced.

“…but at least one child wept for the Canines.”

“The child of F008’s developer. The one who asked that they not take his friend to the battlefield.”

“That’s right. It’s exactly because we’re in a war right now that we mustn’t forget that child’s heart and kindness.”

“…Why won’t they forget about that already?” he grumbled, even though those words would reach neither the newscaster and commentator on the other side of the holo-screen nor his parents in the living room.

Putting aside the complexities of discriminating against machines just because they weren’t humans, this was a tale from his childhood. And it became an anecdote often mentioned in the debate on the pros and cons of using AIs for war. And since they were currently in a war against the autonomous drones called the Legion, this topic was discussed quite often by the people of the Republic.

Thanks to that, Shin constantly had to hear other people, some of them complete strangers, quote the words he’d said years ago as a small child in the context of inspirational, praiseworthy fanfare. He was quite fed up with it, to the point of nearly growing to hate news shows and debate broadcasts.

Even now, Shin didn’t think it was okay to let the Canines fight their battles just because they were machines, or that the Republic had to do it just because they were in the middle of a war. But he was way past throwing tantrums and crying to his father about it, and he wished the world would put that episode of his past to rest already.

And looking back at it now, he realized his father wouldn’t normally agree to the development of the Canines. And had Shin been in his shoes, he didn’t think he could agree to let millions die in favor of the Canines, either.

“…”

He nearly sighed, when he heard his brother’s laughing voice from the adjacent room.

“What are you sighing over, Shin?”

“Shut up.”

“It’s bad manners to go on a date with that sour look on your face. And let me tell you, if you make little Rita cry, I’ll be mad at you before Josef gets to you.”

“I told you, it’s not a date. Besides, why would you be mad over that?”

Rita’s father, Josef, was one thing, but why did Rei think he had a right to get mad at Shin over the next-door neighbor? That’s shameless.

“Well, Rita is my little brother’s childhood friend, which makes her something of a little sister to me…” His brother seemed to smirk. “And who knows, maybe she really will become a sister to me. Right, Shin?”

Shin clicked his tongue audibly. He wasn’t aware of this, but this was a gesture he only ever made in front of his brother.

“Ugh, just shut up. You’re annoying. Don’t Resonate with me today.”

“What? That’s mean, Shin—,” he seemed to say before Shin cut him off.

Again, his brother was in the adjacent room, meaning he wasn’t in the same room as Shin. The door to Shin’s room was open, but the door to his brother’s wasn’t, and there weren’t any windows in the wall between their rooms. They conversed using the ability that ran through their mother’s bloodline for generations—the power to share and transmit thoughts and senses among their blood relatives.

Josef von Penrose, who was their neighbor and their father’s colleague from the university, had spent a decade’s worth of research on mechanically re-creating this ability. But his experiments were mostly an excuse for Shin, Rei, and other students from the university to make some pocket money, and his research didn’t bear any fruit.

Their father was the only member of the household who lacked this ability and felt rather left out by this, so he seemed to back Josef’s aspirations to reproduce their ability.

Hearing his brother break into conspicuous crocodile tears at having been coldly cut off (in physical sound, through the walls. The Nouzen estate’s walls were built quite thick, so unless one shouted, they wouldn’t be heard in the adjacent room), Shin rose to his feet in annoyance. The more he engaged with him, the more his brother would tease him. And recently, Shin’s way of handling his worrywart of a brother was to simply leave him alone.

Oh, but…

“—Fido, watch the fort. And take care of Rei, will you? Since he can’t learn to act mature even at his age.”

The mechanical pet dog siting in the corner of his room like a well-disciplined hound replied with a vigorous shaking of its tail.

Shin left the house, with his parents and brother—who’d left his room rather nonchalantly—seeing him off from the living room. As he approached the house next door, a scooter with the logo of a home-delivery service stopped in front of his gate. A boy got off it.

He was probably the deliveryman in charge of this area, because Shin saw him often around these parts. He was tall and had short-cut steel-colored hair, and eyes of the same color. He seemed to be about Shin’s age, and Shin had seen him once in a high school uniform, so this was probably his part-time job.

“Yo. I got a delivery for you. Could you accept it?”

“Yeah…”

He was on his way out, but he wasn’t in a hurry. He accepted the envelope and left it with Fido, which had come to see him out (which then took it in its mouth and then tottered back to the house, using its front legs to press on the doorbell so they’d let it back inside), and then he signed on the receipt.

“Thanks for the delivery.”

“Cheers.”

Fido walked back over and sat beside the gate as the delivery boy returned to his scooter and raised his hand to wave good-bye before driving off. Watching him go, Shin opened the gate and left.

A decade ago, Liberté et Égalité was mostly occupied by Celena citizens. But nine years ago, it began assertively accepting refugees, as was its duty as the capital. Thanks to that, it was as overflowing with citizens of every hue as its distant neighbor, the Giadian Federacy, which had been a multiethnic country for many generations.

In front of a statue of Saint Magnolia was a Jade boy with doll-like features, playing the cello. A girl with long silver hair walked by, sharing some gelato with someone who seemed to be her boyfriend. Judging by her cerulean eyes, she had mixed Alba and Celesta heritage.

A group of schoolgirls passed Shin by, shrilly chattering like a flock of birds. One girl, with the chestnut-colored hair of an Agate and a Topaz’s golden eyes, laughed in a higher, clearer voice than the rest. Next to them was another group, this time of boisterous high school boys, with a Sapphira boy in its center.

Oranges grew on the roadside trees, making them cheap natural produce. One Rubis boy walked by, carrying a bag of oranges, and then turned around in a panic as a few of them fell out. A bespectacled Alba boy and a girl with two different colored eyes—one indigo and the other white as snow—watched him as they passed by. The girl was apparently going window-shopping with her younger sister.

A middle-aged Alabaster man and a Heliodor woman sat at a restaurant’s terrace with a young, blond-haired woman who looked to be their daughter. A girl with ink-colored hair tied in a ponytail—likely an Orienta, a rare sight in the Republic—was luring in kittens with pieces of sausage so she could snuggle them.

A young Jet woman walked by, seemingly several years his elder, her shoes clicking against the pavement when suddenly her high heels got caught on something. She nearly tripped, but Shin reflexively reached out to catch her. She smiled and gave him a quick “thank you.” It made his heart skip a beat. Sensing his discomposure, the woman cracked another smile—this one a bit more impish.

“Look at you all dressed up, li’l man. Out on a date?”

“No, I’m not.”

But the woman didn’t seem to listen. Taking out a single flower from the bouquet she was carrying, she offered it to him in an exaggerated gesture. It was the product of years of selective breeding, despite many doubts to whether it was possible—a modern rose with pale-blue petals.

“Take this as thanks. Good luck with your date.”

“I’m telling you, it’s not a date.”

But the woman wasn’t listening. She shoved the rose into his hand and sauntered off like a spring breeze, leaving a perplexed Shin in her wake.

As Shin expected, when he showed up to their meeting spot, Rita greeted him with a strange expression.

“What’s this? Who put this idea into your head?” She looked down at the blue rose in Shin’s hand, which he held on to for lack of a better thing to do with it.

“I just, um, I got it as a gift… You want it?” Shin said, offering it to her.

Rita looked at him with a slightly fed up expression.

“You know, Shin… You’re not supposed to give a girl something you got from another woman.”

“…”

Shin wondered how she knew about that detail. But Rita thought she could smell the scent of a woman’s perfume on him—and it wasn’t the kind of perfume his mother wore. And it clearly wasn’t the smell of the blue rose, which was a strain that gave off a very faint aroma. No, it was the clear scent of daffodils.

Well…

She knew Shin well enough to know that for all his curt facades, he was quite softhearted. He’d probably picked up something they dropped, and they’d given him this flower as a reward. And so she eventually accepted the rose he held up somewhat helplessly in front of her.

“Still, I’ll take it… It is pretty, after all.”

Shin himself likely cared little for flowers, but if he figured Rita might want it and brought it all the way here for her, that did make her a little bit happy.

Handing him a birthday present was only half the reason she had Shin hang out with her that day. The other half was because there was this expensive café she wanted to visit, but it was too expensive on its own. It did have a discount for couples, though.

And besides, she didn’t feel comfortable handing Shin the birthday present at home. After all, her father was becoming fussy about his teenage daughter, and Rei was, despite being their elder, enjoying teasing them a little too much.

“Mm, it’s good.”

“The cream and the fruit inside it taste natural… But apparently, the synthesized foodstuffs they make in the factories are getting good enough that they almost taste like real luxury items.”

Rita was happily eating a cake with (synthesized) mango sauce—mangoes only grew in the continent’s south, making them unobtainable due to the war—and synthesized cream. Shin was eating the same thing opposite her when he gave this curt impression, which made her drop her shoulders.

“Shin, don’t say stuff like that when I’m eating something tasty.”

“Why not? I’m complimenting them,” Shin said dubiously.

Rita looked away from him exasperated, and her eyes met with the middle-aged man at the adjacent table. He was sipping elegantly on a cup of coffee. His face had a scar on it, and he looked to be some kind of high-ranking military officer on his break. He smiled at her softly.

Collapsible tables were set up over the flagstones of the café’s terrace. Dotting the ivory streets were parasols that were currently folded up, looking like flower buds growing against the blue sky. The citizens moved like butterflies resting in the shadow of these flowers.

The middle-aged Celena soldier sipped his coffee alone. A Celena and Heliodor boy and an Alabaster girl sat at a table, their notebooks open. An Aventura and Sapphira couple sat at another. A group of Meridiana boys and girls, seemingly siblings, all gathered in one place. An Adularia waitress and a Pyrope waiter walked among the tables.

“…Say, Shin.”

Turning her gaze back to him, Annette asked:

“Say…would this sort of world have been better?”

Suddenly, everyone around them had disappeared. The countless, unoccupied tables threw pale shadows on what was not cobblestone but a plane, sitting beneath a sky covered in milk-colored mist. The shadows were almost unnaturally distinct, each of them cast in different directions according to the light.

Before she even realized it, Annette found herself clad in a white coat and a Prussian blue uniform. The contrast between them made her wistful for some reason.

“Well…this world would have been nice, I think.”

Shin replied, clad in a desert camouflage field uniform, which seemed to alternate like light shining in the water, flashing in random between that uniform, a steel-colored Federacy uniform, and a flight suit. She could see a few faint scars—and one large mark on his neck that looked like a decapitation scar. She didn’t know where he got that one.

“It would have been good if no one took from us. If we didn’t lose anything. If we never had to get hurt. If this was a world where everyone was a bit kinder to one another, I wouldn’t have had to become a Reaper.”

He never would have had to learn how to pilot a Feldreß. Or learn how to shoot a pistol or an assault rifle. He wouldn’t have needed to teach himself how to cut off his emotions or silence his heart. He could have kept his talent for combat, which he’d never wished for, asleep for the rest of his life.

And most importantly, none of the comrades who’d fought with him would have had to die in the Eighty-Sixth Sector without a future to live for or a grave to rest in. Their sole memory wouldn’t have been those aluminum grave markers and Shin’s all too modest promise to carry their memories with him until he met his end.

However… Even still…

“There would’ve been people I would have never gotten to meet in this world. Sights and words I’d never experience. So I can’t say this world is better…”

Smiling, as if concluding that this did seem like what Shin would say, Annette felt a tinge of loneliness fill her heart. There were no figures or voices around them. Even the shadows of the tables were beginning to fade, and she couldn’t see the expression of the boy sitting opposite her.

But she could tell, somehow, that he wore a faint smile. The weak smile of someone repressing pain and stifling tears.

“I can’t say that I’d have been better off if I wasn’t in that world.”

Annette smiled softly.

“…Right.”

“You’re right.”

That whisper was breathed into a room in the Rüstkammer base’s first barracks. Blinking a few times, Annette sat up in her bed. Her bed was a bit more luxurious than the one allotted to the Processors on the lower floors. It felt spacious even for Annette, who grew up as a noble daughter. That bed was occupying the large room of a field officer.

Needless to say, Shin wasn’t there. Taking advantage of the fact that she was alone, Annette smirked, her hair still unkempt.

Would this sort of world have been better? She couldn’t believe herself.

“When will I learn when to give up?”

It was a strange dream, Shin pondered as he looked up at the now-familiar ceiling of his room in Rüstkammer base. Rooms given to company officers—in other words, people like Shin—in this base were plain and had minimal furnishings. But this was a new base, and so everything was built firmly, the very image of sturdy quality.

Compared with the Eighty-Sixth Sector’s barracks—which was weather-beaten and rickety enough to care little for drafts and roof leaks and hardly sheltered them from the elements—this place looked almost luxurious.

So luxurious, in fact, that when he was first stationed here, Shin couldn’t quite get used to the place and felt uncomfortable. Looking back on it now, his heart still couldn’t leave the battlefield.

It still couldn’t leave the Eighty-Sixth Sector.

And yet he was getting used to looking at this ceiling. Getting used to this room. By now, he didn’t feel reluctant to wish for happiness, for the future he used to dread.

Yes, at some point, the battlefield of the Eighty-Sixth Sector had suddenly started feeling awfully distant to him. So to dream of an illusion of peaceful days in the Republic, of memories that had long since faded…

In that world, none of his comrades would have had to die. Neither would his parents and brother. And that thought alone made his heart throb with pain.

“I don’t want to say that about this world… Not now.”

No longer could he say that the people in this world, and all his myriad encounters, would have been better off relegated to oblivion. He was now able to believe that he couldn’t carelessly turn his back on the world…no matter how cruel and unforgiving it might be.