And this place,
That which they call "Earth"…
Was of a form most rare and mysterious…
Especially those surface projections,
"Human" by label,
Which engaged ceaselessly in the most remarkable behaviors.
- Excerpt from The Diaries of Greenpeace Crolis
Part I
Zheng: Our favorite pervert. That's what the sheet of paper taped to the door of the Okayama laboratory where he worked read, in flowery, feminine script done in pink marker, surrounded by a number of elaborately drawn roses. He forced his way through crowd lingering outside his lab, chortling at the sight, before ripping the paper off.
"Ah hah! Very funny! Don't you people have some work to do?" he asked suspiciously, before crumpling it into a ball and throwing it at someone else's face. He then unlocked the swinging glass doors with his cyberbrain ghost key. The peanut gallery had a laugh at his exasperation before the doors shut airtight.
"Good morning, Zheng."
Waiting by the airlock, Dr. Zheng's junior partner, Dr. Vasilyev, was already dressed in his cleanroom suit, a sterile suit with long white gloves and a breathing apparatus.
"Good morning, Mikhail Sergeyovich," he replied dutifully, while he pulled of his white coat and tie and hastily changed himself. "Is Yoko already in?"
"Definitely so. I'm starting to think she didn't even leave for the night."
Zheng affixed his breathing apparatus around his neck, letting the plastic mask hang open. "Did you hear about that flight, Misha?"
"The one that went down east of Aomori, the Boeing? God, how tragic. Have they confirmed any other survivors?"
"No, just those two children," Zheng offered somberly. "The Russian government announced they'd do a general sweep alongside the Japanese MSDF. Don't you have a nephew in the Russian Pacific Fleet?" he asked, turning his back so that the other man could flip on his air re-breather kit.
Vasilyev nodded. "The Red Banner Pacific Fleet, my sister's boy. He's a submariner, but I doubt his ship would get called out as part of the search," he explained, while patting the other's shoulder after checking the small display on his backpack. "Have they determined a cause yet?"
"Oh, I suspect they won't for some time. They're still looking for any other survivors, even if that's a long shot. But the word on the 'Net is that it was a mechanical failure with one of the turbines."
"Very strange," the other replied as the two men checked their kits one last time before entering the airlock. A short sterilizing and anti-static bath spray bath later, and they crossed into the laboratory proper, where a younger woman in the same gear was waiting a table.
"Good morning, Dr. Matsumoto," Zheng said through his air mask, getting her attention.
She looked up briefly from the computer she was working at. "'Morning Zheng, Vasilyev."
"'Morning Matsumoto," Vasilyev said before sitting behind another small desk. "Everything in working order?"
She looked up and pointed at the device next to her. "The nanotech film layer is still weird. I don't like the variances we're seeing."
Vasilyev passed Matsumoto and peered at it inquisitively. "We may need to replace it."
"It works fine, it's the software that's the problem. Ever since that most recent update, the fiber optic film samples I've been putting out seem worse than before, but it's not the materials either."
"Call Ota, he knows the supplier personally. Can we undo the update?"
"No, I get a system error when I try. I do cyberbodies, not computers." She put on a pair of high-powered magnifiers, wearing them like bulky goggles. "There's a difference, you know."
"Of course," Zheng muttered with a sigh. Matsumoto was much younger than either of them, a graduate student with just one year left for her PhD Biochemistry for Cybernetics at Tokodai. She had roughly the same level of cyberization as both of her colleagues, but her youth made her hands steadier and more reliable, or so they believed.
A chime on the wall rang and Vasilyev grabbed the nearby handset. "Lab Three here, go ahead." He paused. "I'll be right out," he said before rushing out of the lab.
"What was that about?'
"Maybe the contract?" Zheng said.
"I really hope so," she replied, shutting off the machine as the doors closed behind Vasilyev. "Did you hear about the Boeing that went down?"
"Tragic, yes. They're still saying mechanical failure. Mikhail says his sister's boy is in the Russian Pacific Fleet, but he probably won't be part of the added search. I can't believe the Russians are sending the fleet out, in the middle of the Union Convention."
"Well, it's their fleet, it's not as though any of the other republics have ships in the Pacific Ocean they need to coordinate."
"Point taken. I must confess, you didn't strike me as the kind of person to follow that sort of political affairs business."
She titled her head. "My younger sister's a real news junkie."
"Of course."
Vasilyev came scrambling back, still wearing his protective suit, looking particularly excited. Matsumoto raised an eyebrow and was about to speak when he preempted her. "Yes, I went through the static bath again. That was the Locus-Solus—the Consortium approved our statement."
There was a moment of dead silence in the lab, ended by Zheng. "You're fooling me," he said slowly as Matsumoto shot up to her feet and hugged the older man before giving a loud hoot in triumph.
"We're approved! We've been approved!" she screamed excitedly before turning back to Vasilyev. "How many do they want?"
"One completed prototype, with the option for a second model following trial."
"High-end package?"
"The highest. We'll need to pull out all the stops on the prototype bioroid, their words."
"I can't believe it!" she shouted in Zheng's face. He didn't respond, still stunned into silence. "I. CAN'T. BELIEVE. IT!"
"Well, let go of poor Zheng, he looks like he's seen a ghost," Vasilyev said grinning before grabbing the other doctor and shaking him by the shoulders.
"All right, all right, let go of me!"
"When do we start?" Matsumoto asked, her eyes still wide with excitement.
"Immediately, the funding's already gone through. Hell, we can replace the film layer! I mean, if have to," he quickly added, his hands raised in the air.
"We can start working on 'Uni' tomorrow," she whispered.
"Yes, but we're really going to need to do something about that name," Vasilyev interjected. "It's quite awful, Yoko," he said between laughs as Matsumoto pushed her palm into his face in response.
'Uni' was the name that Matsumoto Yoko insisted giving to Lab Three's first synthetic being, arrived at the same day Lab 3 decided that their first synthetic would be a modeled after a human female rather than male. Neither Zheng or Vasilyev were fond of the name, but conceded that it was better than the default option, Prototype Bio-Gynoid No. 1. Accordingly, the day after the call from Locus-Solus, she took a thick black marker and on the far wall of the laboratory, wrote two large letters in Japanese hiragana.
ユニ
"It was your dog, no? In grade school?" Vasilyev asked her.
"My cat," she corrected him. "A big, female tabby cat."
"I'm starting to see Misha's point," Zheng offered. Matsumoto ignored both of them. "I can see the headlines now: world's most advanced android model named after creator's cat."
There was no deterring her. On the other hand, the physical creation of Uni was a much more democratic process: after the Consortium promised to supply the processor 'brain', the three contributed individual components throughout the design reflecting their specialties: Zheng devised the respiratory system and most of the other internal organs, Vasilyev the skeleton and locomotive systems, and Matsumoto the optical and other sensory systems. The three of them had already agreed upon a component list weeks ago, and the Consortium's promise of near-unlimited funding led all three to go to the top choices from around the world.
What they had not decided upon, however, was its—or her—physical appearance. Uni had to be abnormally tall compared to an actual adult female, almost two meters tall, for reasons related to performance and internal layout. A pre-adult, even adolescent body was not technologically viable. Her internal balancing gyroscopes were intended to function for an automaton twice her size and substantially more massive. But after that, it was up to Lab 3's discretion: Locus-Solus expected a synthetic woman, and that was it. Aspects of its appearance—modeled ethnicity, facial structure, specific age—were left up to the creators.
"Very well then, so we just play God, yes?" Zheng posed on the first day.
While they waited for the components they ordered to be shipped express to their lab, the three put their minds together. There was surprisingly little disagreement.
On the matter of ethnicity and race, they decided on the deliberately uncommon: a combination of features that one would associate with a person of heterogeneous origins. Vasilyev, whose on background was Scandinavian and Slavic but whose wife was Indo-Vietnamese, was always intended to be the team's artistic modeler: Uni's complexion and certain facial features came from his eldest daughter, who was about the right age. Others came from younger, female members of both Zheng and Matsumoto's families. Vasilyev seamlessly combined them, and the resultant computer-generated facial model was both aesthetically pleasing and difficult to place, with a mixture of features from different nationalities. All three agreed this could be a benefit with the international consortium that was commissioning the project, and at least they didn't need to risk the possibility that the completed synthetic would resemble someone already alive.
Uni's body was quickly decided upon as well: Matsumoto had a stack of photo magazines of popular gravure models sitting on her desk for this exact reason. As with her height, by necessity Uni would have a lean, fairly muscular build to hold the necessary muscles, tendons and ligaments in her form. All three had a similar vision of physical beauty though: they voted on a particular model from the magazines, an unusually tall, very well-endowed beauty with curvy hips and long legs, both aesthetically appealing and straightforward for them to engineer. Matsumoto was their specialist in this area, having made a hobby of 3D model building and painting since her undergraduate years.
Zheng finished the details, the sort of things that would turn make the synthetic Uni human, though not too human, at least on the surface. The overall facial model, in particular, was a challenge.
"It's the little things, little imperfections that you need," he explained, the way a painter hosting a television show might explain to his audience. "A very small imperfection in the nose or chin."
"I hope so. She's going to look like this for the rest of her life," Vasilyev noted. By then, they'd already taken to calling the bio-gynoid "her" in conversation.
Uni got a slightly upturned nose that gave her a cute, even precocious face on what was otherwise a grown woman. After they'd taken their hundreds of three-dimensional wireframe models and actually set about in the manufacturing process that would take thousands of separate components and gradually combine them.
The first phase was organ assembly. It took a few weeks before the bio-organs and skeleton, arranged on the assembly table, clearly resembled homo sapiens sapiens—an anatomically modern human. "I knew this part would creep me out," Yoko announced, staring at the female skeleton reflected on the polished chrome surface, synthetic organs neatly packed into and around the skeletal frame. They hadn't been colored red yet, but stood out clearly from the sleeker, purely cybernetic components wrapped around the spinal column and skeleton.
"Me too," Zheng muttered uncomfortably.
"Well, you can't rush it," Vasilyev told them, circling the table with a number of different instruments, including a micrometer caliper. Every so often, using tweezers, he'd painstaking remove a tiny tubule between two organs, inspect them under a mobile microscope affixed to the ceiling, and reinsert them. The tiniest tubules were manipulated by Yoko, under Vasilyev's direction.
"If something goes wrong, it's not as though you couldn't fix it. That's what surgeons are for."
"True, but Locus-Solus is paying a lot for Uni here," he declared. "It's not enough for her to be functionally immortal, I want a bio-gynoid as tough as a military-grade model if I can help it."
"Can we hurry up with this? As strange as it sounds, I'd much rather stare at a skinless woman than a woman-shaped skeleton with organ sacs sitting in it," Zheng confessed.
With everything firmly held in place, and the synthetic skeleton almost completely complete on its own, Uni was deemed "structurally sound" and suspended vertically the same way the latest full-body cyborgs were during construction. From there the next phase began—all three used tools to unravel several spools of synthetic muscular fiber, imitating the pattern of the over 630 skeletal muscles in a human body. As the muscle fibers were fairly uniform and practically placed, that was a short procedure completed in little more than an afternoon, after which she had an undeniably human female shape. To complete the phase, over the next few days the three systematically checked the appearance and function of the so-called "finishing organs"—synthetic eyes, the tongue, genitals and other organs that were all layered in special bio-organic sensory film and could only be installed at this time. Over a cup of expensive celebratory Darjeeling tea from northern India, they attached the large pair of implants that would serve as Uni's breasts, which necessitated being installed under her skin but over her synthetic pectorals. It was a humorous coincidence that the tea came in later than expected, leaving them only this task to toast it to.
"To our gorgeous synthetic bijin," Matsumoto said through her mask, holding the sealed container of tea. In full clean room garb, one could only drink it by attaching the bottle to one's breathing system and sucking it through a line. "May these gelatin polymer implants spare you from all the inconveniences that come with an actual large bosom, or so I've been told."
"Hear, hear," they muffled in reply, and stuck their team bottles to frames of their suits.
The celebratory toast marked the beginning of the third and final phase. Painstakingly, rectangular sheets of synthetic hypodermis, the "inner skin" that also functioned as cartilage that would automatically bind to the synthetic musculature, were saturated in a viscous micromachine solution and laid out, one-by-one, onto the body frame like a papier-mâché art project. At the same time, the synthetic 'blood' that also flowed through full-body cyborgs was sent coursing through her veins, gradually turning her grey-white body into a very distinctive mixture of red and pink.
"I wonder how many people realize building a gynoid is like building a house," Matsumoto said, unconsciously wiping her brow.
"Fortune favors us: no leaks," Vasilyev pointed out, half-jokingly, as they laid the hypodermis sheets out, cutting off the excess, turning Uni back into a patchwork of grey-and-white once more. Unsurprisingly, installing the innermost layer of synthetic skin was a slow, painstaking process, cutting off the excess neatly and ensuring it had taken on some flexible hardness after binding to the skin. Nor were they finished: the entire body frame had to be soaked in sensory element-forming solution for several minutes, painstakingly dried and cleaned, and then soaked into another micromachine solution.
"Watch for any unevenness. You know Locus-Solus is going to go over every square centimeter of her with a microscope," Zheng instructed.
"I always hate this part of the job," Matsumoto mumbled, holding a portable air drier with a large filter attached to it over Uni's developing face.
The process, still uncommon at the time, matched the high-end procedures that full-body cyborgs would use in the coming decades: with the application of a small electrical charge, micromachines would bore small passages for optical fiber, the groundwork for a synthetic neural network. This was Matsumoto's specialty as well, as Vasilyev and Zheng got to sit it out.
"You know the next person who calls me a pervert, I'm going to hit," he told Vasilyev, as the two sat against the wall while Uni cooked in a chemical reactor. "I mean it this time."
Vasilyev nodded. In the weeks since they'd begun their project, they'd seen less and less of their cohorts in the other labs. Nonetheless, Zheng was cynical.
"See you boys in thirty-two hours," an exhausted Yoko said, dragging herself and her belongings towards the airlock door.
In that 32 hours, Uni received her synthetic epidermis and her body was completely "cooked", leaving Zheng to finish the facial details—hair implants, the self-repairing filaments for her eyebrows and eyelashes, lips, nose, teeth, etc. Yoko got to sit back with Vasilyev and watch.
"I'm telling you, in a few years, all the finishing touches will be done automatically, and we won't even need craftsmen anymore."
"You sound like you're looking forward to it," Matsumoto observed.
"It can't come soon enough for me."
"I don't know, Zheng. There's something to be said about a skilled craftsman plying his trade," Vasilyev offered, looking at the work. For the first time, Uni's actual face was visible—her slightly turned-up nose, her weakly-shut eyes, her full lips.
"Leave it to a dialectical materialist to say that," Zheng countered, which got a laugh from Vasilyev.
As in android manufacturing, the scalp hair came last, where it took the place of a wig. Yoko, with her characteristic forthrightness and medical bluntness, called a rep from Locus-Solus about the possibility of replicating human hair growth, and the costs that would be involved. The current androids and gynoids on the market were essentially hairless and wore wigs, with the exception of the highest-end models which benefitted from hair implantation technology.
"I'm sure you know better than us how expensive hair implantation is, so even the best androids only have it on their scalps," she explained on phone. "For bio-androids, this gets a little complicated, so I'll try and put it in laymen's terms. None of the internal bio-organs function using hair or cilia, not the lungs, not in the nasal passages, and so forth—that would be extremely costly and inefficient. Filaments are already used for things like eyebrows and eyelashes anyway. So the purpose of hair is purely cosmetic for a bio-android. Obviously, a completely hairless adult human male would be considered somewhat unusual, which was a major advantage for both gynoids and bio-gynoids. And obviously, we won't just be giving her a wig."
Vasilyev and Zheng sat in their anti-static suits, watching Yoko continue to elaborate, in great depth, about the advantages and disadvantages of hair on a synthetic body before finishing twenty minutes later.
"And?"
"Only on her head," she concluded. "They did approve the 'hair budget' though, so we're over that."
Vasilyev held out a pen. "Correct me I'm wrong, but don't many women go to fairly extensive lengths to keep hair only on their heads?"
"So the case could be made we're doing her a favor," Zheng added.
"And you're married?" Yoko asked him directly.
The next day they found Uni hanging suspended from the ceiling, nude, with her head stuck in an airtight apparatus. With a loud, wet squick it popped off, revealing her completed scalp: a long, unkempt main of strawberry blonde hair that reached down past her waist with bangs that framed her face on either side. Yoko ran a comb through the hair to straighten it out slightly while Vasilyev pulled up her lips and gave her gums a cursory glance.
"She looks good."
"For what we spent on her, she better," Yoko replied as Zheng stood up and adjusted his glasses over his breather mask.
"We'll run a full examination with the CAT scanner later, but we won't actually know for certain until she's engaged."
"And only Locus-Solus can do that," Vasilyev mumbled. Zheng patted him on the shoulder supportively as he peered into Uni's left ear, otherwise hidden under her mop of hair.
"As the oldest member of Lab Three, I can say with some confidence that she'll operate perfectly once engaged. We've done an excellent job," Zheng announced.
Matsumoto turned to him after shaking her head. "So we really don't know until they decide to turn her on."
"We never can." Vasilyev cleared his throat, then spoke on a loftier tone. "As the only person here with any children, I do think it's a lot like having a daughter: you really don't know what kind of person she's going to be until she starts walking and talking.
There was a pause, before both Zheng and Matsumoto burst out laughing hysterically at his comment. Vasilyev looked at the two of them through his goggles before giving an indignant shake of his own head.
"Oh, to hell with you people."