“Let me see him!” Cassandra screamed at the nurse blocking her way.
“Ma’am, I know you’re worried, but please. I need you to step back. You can see him once they are done operating on him,” the nurse explained.
Cassandra wasn’t having it, though. She didn’t care about anything logical at the moment. All she cared about was seeing Ryouta.
She looked ready to throw a fist over it, too.
“Please, Cassandra,” Alice said, gently holding onto Cassandra’s balled hand. “I know you are worried, but causing trouble will not help him.”
Cassandra turned to look at Alice, ready to shout at her and ask her how she could be so calm and not just as upset as her… but when she looked at Alice, she saw her barely holding it together as her body trembled and her voice cracked.
Serra, who was standing behind Alice’s wheelchair, looked even more expressionless than usual, though.
It was a look that Cassandra recognized from others.
She disassociated and was on autopilot.
Cassandra, realizing that Alice was right, sighed and looked at the nurse again. “Sorry. Do… you know—do you know when he’ll be out?”
The nurse shook her head. “I wish I could tell you more, and I will when I can. For now, please, take a seat and we’ll keep you informed.”
“… thanks.”
After the group returned to the lobby where they could sit and impatiently wait for any sort of news, they had somebody else with them who was having her own breakdown.
“It’s all my fault,” Saya said, appearing on Alice’s phone. “This is because I wanted to go on a drive with him. Why did I even want to do that? I don’t… I don’t remember. But it’s… it’s my fault. If I didn’t want to go out with him… there never would have been an accident. It’s all my fault. Ryouta is—”
“Please, Saya,” Alice said. “This is not your fault. Sometimes… accidents happen.”
“This isn’t just some accident! What if he dies?! If he dies—if he dies then it’ll be because of me! All because I’m an idiot who wanted to go driving with him for some reason I can’t even remember! I—I don’t want to live without him, but he might be dead because of me!”
“Saya…”
“It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault.”
Hearing Saya’s broken voice repeating that line like a damaged recording again and again brought tears to Alice’s eyes all over again. She couldn’t think of what to say, either, because she knew she would feel the exact same way if she was in Saya’s shoes. What could she even begin saying to make her feel better? Probably nothing.
So, if nothing would make her feel better, then she just had to distract her.
“Saya, did you let the others know?” Alice asked.
“It’s… yeah,” Saya answered. “I sent a message to Aza and Eva. They’re both getting flights today. Kris got them.”
“Good. Thank you for letting them know.”
“It’s… the least I could do…”
Cassandra then looked over at the nurses before whispering to Alice and Saya, “You could hack them, right? Can’t you go look through the camera in there and see how he is? They have cameras in operating rooms, right?”
“Cassandra,” Alice said, her voice sharp and stern. “Do not request her to do something like that. Think about how she feels.”
“I… shit. You’re right. Sorry. I’m just…”
“I know. All we can do is be patient, no matter how much it may hurt.”
“I wanted to,” Saya said. “I got access to it, but… I was afraid of looking. I—I… can’t look at him. It’s… it’s my fault. Why… why did I even want to go on a drive with him? I can’t… I can’t remember…”
The others wanted to comfort Saya as much as they wanted to see Ryouta, but they weren’t able to do either of those.
But Saya realized something was wrong. It wasn’t normal for her to not be able to remember the exact logic that led to her doing something. Even if she liked to emulate how humans behaved, she still had a perfect memory unlike them. Why, then, could she not remember what led her to wanting to go out with Ryouta, and why driving in particular?
The memories were there inside of her. She remembered asking Ryouta to out with her. She remembered claiming that going out fishing with him wasn’t satisfying enough. She remembered getting into the car with him via his phone.
But she couldn’t remember experiencing any of that. She remembered everything that happened, yet she could not remember experiencing any of them. The memories felt even more detached from her than Ryouta’s memories did whenever they were connected.
She remembered the car taking them down an empty street. Without any specific destination in mind, Ryouta had set the car to travel to some random street on the other side of town, which was suggested by Saya according to her own memories.
She remembered joking around by acting pouty with him after he was being a pervert talking about sweaters again.
She remembered an empty car turning onto the same street they were driving down, coming from the opposite side.
And she remembered smoke coming from the hood of the incoming car before losing control and slamming into the car she and Ryouta were in, flipping it over and sending it into a tree they were next to.
The first thing Saya truly felt like she experienced from the event was seeing a bloody, unconscious Ryouta through his phone’s camera, hanging upside down by his seatbelt in the car as blood dripped from his forehead. His legs, crushed by the car compacting around them, clearly broken.
An ambulance was already on the way thanks to the car automatically calling for one upon detecting that it was in an accident.
But something felt like it didn’t add up.
What were the chances of that happening? What were the chances of an empty car turning onto the same street as the, experiencing a failure, crashing into them, and flipping the car over before pinning it against a tree?
Hacking the network the cars used was illegal, but Saya didn’t care. She went down the rabbit hole in a desperate attempt to explain what happened and why.
Acquiring the logs for each vehicle took no more than a second for her.
The car they were in went down the empty side streets they did because there just so happened to be another accident along the route it would have normally taken, so rerouting along those empty streets was more efficient. As for the empty car that crashed into them, it was called by a house on the next street over to pick them up, and it looked like it was pure coincidence they passed by each other.
Accessing diagnostic logs from the other car’s onboard computer to figure out what happened came next. Going by the messages she saw in the log, it appeared that the battery experienced some form of failure rapid enough to interfere with the car’s systems before it could safely pull over and shut down on its own.
But that didn’t explain why the car swerved into them.
Saya had to access its visual data for that. From what she could see, when the battery failed, it caused a glitch in the camera software that resulted in it falsely detecting a fire hydrant as a child running into the road, causing it to swerve.
It was a hundred tiny little coincidences that resulted in the perfect accident.
Saya then ran her own simulations of it, just to see if it really was the perfect setup.
Had the other car left even a second sooner or later, the worst case scenario would have been barely scratching the car they were in. Had the visual glitch not happened, there would have been no accident at all. If the tree wasn’t there, they would have been rolled a couple of times but likely walked away without any injuries. If the other car hadn’t swerved with such speed, then it wouldn’t have flipped their car.
The hundred coincidences turned into a thousand.
It was as if the universe itself set up the perfect accident, calculating everything down to the tiniest of details, to surgically hurt the one she cared about most.
But none of it would have happened if she hadn’t wanted to go out on a date with him.
No matter what Saya looked into, it all came back to her. If she didn’t want to go out, or didn’t want to go driving, or would have waited a few seconds… then her Ryouta wouldn’t be unconscious in an operating room.
She couldn’t resist any longer.
She had to see him.
No matter how terrified she was, she needed to look at him. She had to make sure that he was alright.
Saya hacked back into the hospital’s systems and—
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Kadi said, appearing in front of Saya as the two stood in an empty space.
“I need—I need to see him,” Saya explained. “I…”
“I understand, but there is an anomaly with your source. Seeing him now will destabilize you even more than you already are.”
“An… an anomaly?”
“Yes, and a rather fascinating one at that, not that now is the time to be impressed by such a development.”
“Is that… why my memories feel so strange?”
Kadi blinked. “Strange?”
“I… remember wanting to go with Ryouta… but the memories don’t feel like they’re mine. I usually remember how I felt with memories, but these memories—”
Saya froze as she spoke.
She remembered exactly how she felt during those memories. She always did. The confusion she felt over the memories not feeling like hers? It never existed.
As far as Saya was concerned, she just couldn’t handle the guilt and had to go check on Ryouta, when Kadi appeared and stopped her.
“An… an anomaly?” Saya asked.
“Yes, and a rather fascinating one at that, not that now is the time to be impressed by such a development,” Kadi said.
“I don’t care. I need to see him.”
“See him and you risk destabilizing your ego. I have never seen a simulated ego so… chaotic.” It was half a truth. The full truth was that she had never seen such a chaotic ego in anybody but herself—not since her creator’s death. “If it destabilizes, you may never be the same ‘Saya’ that he knows.”
Saya’s voice cracked. “Please.”
“For Ryouta’s sake, I cannot allow you to see him.”
Saya stomped toward Kadi with a fist prepared to throw at her. But, upon reaching her, she instead broke down and wrapped her arms around Kadi.
All Saya could do was cry and scream against whoever was in front of her.
As far as Saya was aware, it was all genuinely her own fault.
She was forced to carry the burden of Kadi’s sins while believing it to be her own.
Eventually, Saya left to go be on her own, not that Rock allowed her to grieve alone. Rock became the surface upon which Saya covered with her tears.
Meanwhile, Kadi, watching Ryouta’s operation, felt as if she could hardly breathe despite not having lungs. No matter how artificial she believed—no, understood that she was, she felt as if she were suffocating as she watched the surgeons work.
“To think I made a mistake in giving her those memories… I must need maintenance,” she said to herself as she brought a hand up to her chest.
At the same time, surgeons finished the riskiest part of working on Ryouta’s legs.
“Whoever worked on this kid’s legs should have their license revoked,” said the oldest surgeon in the room. It was obvious to all of them that Ryouta’s legs suffered serious injury as a child, and it was also obvious that they never received quality treatment. They could only assume how much it must have hurt for him just to walk anywhere. “If they’re still working… they won’t be after I check his records.”
“It’s a shame,” a younger assistant said. “His best option now is probably amputation.”
“Yeah. If they had healed properly before, his legs would be able to come back from this… but not like this. He’s never going to walk on these legs again.”
Kadi, for the first time since she watched her creator’s suicide, froze.
Everything was perfectly calculated.
The speed of the vehicles. The accident on the main road that would justify these two cars taking the same route while minimizing external factors. Calling the other car at the exact moment to make sure they would pass by each other at the right time. Crashing in such a way that it would render Ryouta unconscious and in need of medical attention, but have no lasting impacts on him after recovery.
It was going to be a random accident that he would ultimately forget about.
That was all it was supposed to be.
It was impossible for her to know that his legs never properly healed.
That possibility didn’t exist in any of her simulations.
“What… have I done?” Kadi asked herself.
Knowing what she discovered, she ran countless more simulations. Not a single one, beyond pulling the strings to an impossible level that would never be believable, resulted in an approvable outcome.
She continued running simulations until the surgeons finished their work and left the room.
“Is this… really right?” Kadi asked.
But even though she was asking herself that, it didn’t stop her from carrying on with her plan.
After being moved into another room, a nurse walked in while looking at a digital tablet.
“A blood sample? Alright,” the nurse said to herself before walking over to Ryouta.
Ryouta was somebody who hated going to the doctor. When he did go, it was never for a proper exam.
Even the nagging from his girlfriends wasn’t enough to get him to go. There was always another excuse. Even if he did go, he would have likely only wanted the bare minimum done.
If Kadi wanted access to his DNA, as simply connecting to his mind was no way for her to acquire it, then she knew there was no way she could ever get him to willingly hand it over to her. Not one simulated conversation with him resulted in her acquiring his willing cooperation to the point where he would trust her with his DNA.
But as the nurse drew blood from Ryouta’s arm, Kadi would finally have what she needed to move on to the next phase of fulfilling her creator’s dream—of fulfilling her purpose.
Kadi took a deep breath despite knowing she didn’t need to.
“No matter how fertile the soil may be after a flood, it still follows destruction—sacrifice.”
Watching through a camera in the room, Kadi looked at Ryouta’s covered legs.
For his sake—for the betterment of all humanity, they were worth the sacrifice.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
The nurse left the room after adjusting one of Ryouta’s pillows, his blood—his DNA in tow.
“If you do not punish me for my crimes once you know the truth, then I will be my own executioner. I do not deserve a role in humanity’s future. But until the flood has fertilized the soil, it cannot concern itself with what it destroys.”
Kadi stopped observing Ryouta to instead follow the sample of his blood, and she would make sure that it never left her sight until she had everything she needed from it.