The Undiscovered Country
First and most importantly, this fic is an entry for Kish's Kittie's AU Contest, which can be found on her Free Imagination forum. Basically, it's a contest for alternate-universe RxI fics, although non-romantic stories centered on those two are okay too, as far as I know. Even if you're planning on writing a vampire romance (which, in my experience at least, ALWAYS suck), you should go check it out.
Secondly, this is dedicated to my boyfriend, known around the internets as Wowbagger. Without him, I wouldn't have even considered his genre, let alone had enough of an understanding to write in it. Thank you for teaching me that Star Trek actually isn't stupid, except for the episode with the space hippies. And also the one with the spores.
Thirdly, a big giant thanks to Katana of the Jade Wings, who beta-read this for me!
And finally, I am leaving the time period of this fic deliberately ambiguous, just because. Also, all named characters ARE canon. Some are from the anime, some are from the manga, some minor ones bear little resemblance to their canon selves, and ALL ages should be considered to have nothing to do with canon ages.
Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, but the setting and plot are, thanks, and the epigraph is in the public domain.
But the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
no traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to those we know not of
-- Hamlet Act III, Scene 1
"We'll be going planetside in about 30 minutes, Doctor. Fair warning."
Dr. Ryou Shirogane, age 48, resisted the temptation to smash the intercom with the book he was reading. Breaking parts of the ship wouldn't do anything to quell the annoyingly chipper, strangely British voice of the Kobayashi Maru's computer system, and, really, the urge to violently harm inanimate objects stemmed more from nervousness than anything else. Planetside in half an hour. Ryou had spent his whole life gaining a reputation for being composed, clinical. But right now he was ready to smash a starship to pieces because he was nervous about going to a planet he hadn't seen in more than 30 years. Pathetic, he mentally chided himself.
And yet, here he was, within minutes of Susseran, almost completely by chance. The Earth High Council had sent him along on the assumption that he was the closest thing they had to an expert on the planet. And, true, he'd spent more than a year here, back in the day, but he had never been a xenobiologist or anything of the sort, so his interest in the planet's ecosystem had been basically confined to determining that it could, in fact, support life. On the other hand, how many middle-aged roboticists could say that they'd named a planet?
When he'd been here before, long ago (to think just how long ago made him feel ancient, like he'd created Susseran instead of just been the first to semi-explore it), the planet hadn't been inhabited by anything more dangerous than strange chitin-covered hyena-things, easily dealt with by anyone with a plasma rifle. Certainly nothing sentient. He'd found no intelligent life, and had told the High Council so.
Therefore, it had come as quite a surprise to everyone when a routine scan of the planetary system had found sentient life. Natural sentient life, the scan-jockey had said, anticipating Ryou's protest. Not particularly advanced, but there was a culture there, and, thanks to Ryou's visit thirty years ago, they apparently spoke Japanese.
"C'mon, Doctor! Planetside party leaving in 10 minutes. Get your tush up to the dock," the computer voice chirred, breaking him violently out of his reverie. Out of habit, he gave the intercom his signature glare, the one that could set even the most competent of lab assistants quaking at the knees, then headed to the docking station.
o()o
By observing the difference between the way the diplomatic corps looked after landing on Susseran to the way his fellow scientists did, Ryou got an accurate, if cynical, measure of how much more the High Council valued this as a political mission than as an exploratory one.
The diplomats were talking and laughing amongst themselves. Personally, Ryou wouldn't give any of them the time of day. People like that, who cared about talking more than thinking, were utterly beneath his contempt, although he knew that one of his comrades, a Dr. Akasaka, had taken a shine to the translator (an American woman named, as Ryou vaguely recalled, Mary) during the voyage.
Speaking of Dr. Akasaka, the older man was looking positively green around the gills. The scientific crew had clearly gotten the less-experienced landing pilot. Ryou was feeling a little nauseous as well, but he wouldn't give anyone the satisfaction of making any outward sign of it. Heck, even Pai, the lone alien scientist to come on the mission, looked the worse for wear, although it was always hard to tell with aliens.
Looking away from his stricken fellows, Ryou saw that the diplomatic party had been met by the Susserian Duke herself. Nothing about the leader's long robe and face-concealing pointed hood suggested femininity, but the briefing Ryou and the others had sat through on the ship had identified Duke (apparently both a name and a title) as a woman.
That intelligence was proven correct as Duke addressed the gathered Terrans and Susserians. "Welcome to our world, Earthers," she said in a odd, lilting voice, much slower than the rapid-fire Japanese Ryou was used to hearing back on Earth. "I am sure we have much to learn from each other, and I hope this first true Earther meeting will be the first of many!" She clapped her robed hands together once, and her entourage did the same. The human party followed suit.
Then Duke turned her featureless, hooded face toward the scientists, who had been lurking awkwardly off to the side. Culturally significant or not, that hood is creepy, Ryou thought, although he betrayed no sign of his inner discomfort.
"You are Shirogane-san, are you not?" Duke asked in her heavily-accented voice. Ryou cocked an eyebrow in surprise.
"I am Dr. Ryou Shirogane, Duke-sama," he replied, coolly polite, and clapped his hands together in front of him. She did the same.
"I thought so. You are very much as the cat-woman described you. It is good to have you here, Shirogane-san." She clapped at him again, then went back to speak to the diplomats. Ryou stood rooted to the spot, visibly shaken.
Dr. Akasaka, who kept his long gray hair in a thin ponytail, touched his shoulder, hesitantly, as if he were afraid Ryou would spin around and bite his hand off. "Are you all right, Dr. Shirogane?" he asked quietly.
Ryou did whirl around then, and Dr. Akasaka, to his credit, only flinched slightly when faced with Ryou's steely glare.
"Nothing you need to concern yourself with, Doctor," he replied curtly. Akasaka, realizing when he wasn't wanted, moved discreetly away.
When a young Susserian, looking almost perfectly human save for his odd mode of dress and curious loping stride, came to direct the scientists to their quarters, Ryou pulled him aside and asked quietly, "Do you know of a woman named Ichigo? She has pink hair and strange ears?" The youth nodded eagerly.
" 'Course" he said with the same odd accent as Duke. "I can even show you where she lives, if you want. Right after I take you Earthers to your quarters, yes?" Ryou nodded and the boy bounded happily ahead.
o()o
Ichigo's house looked no different than any of the other houses in the settlement, basically piles of stone covered in living, growing grass that made them look like small hills. Still, Ryou felt, or imagined he felt, a certain electricity about the place, a spark in the air that could blossom into a tiny thunderstorm at the wrong word, the wrong gesture.
Standing outside, Ryou vigorously rang the bell, like a cat's bell, that hung from the entryway. After a moment he could hear a shuffling inside the dwelling and another moment later the blueish wood door opened, and Ryou was suddenly face-to-face with his past.
o()o
15-year-old Ryou peeled the mask away from his face to inspect his work without having to filter light through the mask's orange goggles. The micro-welding was just about done. Every seam was sealed, every fiddly bit of circuitry in place, everything uploaded into the memory banks, and the outer membrane reapplied. All he needed to do was turn it on.
He grinned up at his assistant, a pale, blonde-haired grad student who was lucky enough to be getting university credit for working with a child prodigy. Grins like that were rare for him, even as a teen. He had always been the serious, studious one, but now everything he'd theorized about artificial intelligence was about to be made a reality.
"Ready, Ms. Shirayuki?" He called. She wrinkled her nose, rabbit-like, and nodded.
"You bet, Doctor! Man, if this works..." she trailed off as Ryou approached a central console and pressed the big red button in the center.
Immediately, the metal figure he had been working on,a tall, thin girl with a feline tail and matching ears poking out of her pink hair, began to move. Its pink eyes lit up and it looked around the room, then down at its hands, apparently amazed by what it saw.
"How are you feeling, Ichigo?" Ryou asked the automaton mildly. Ichigo looked at him in confusion for a moment before replying.
"I feel great, Dr. Shirogane," she said, her voice passably human if unpleasantly monotone.
"Good, that's good," Ryou replied, with another one of his rare smiles. "Would you mind if I ran some tests on you?"
"No problem. Go ahead." Ryou nodded and went to the main computer bank where Berri Shirayuki was staring open-mouthed at the robotic girl in the middle of the lab.
"Holy shit! It worked!" The blonde-haired girl exclaimed excitedly, although her mood rapidly deflated when she saw Ryou's glare.
"I would appreciate it if you wouldn't use language like that around my Mew. She's still very impressionable." Berri blushed embarrassedly and nodded.
"Can't you just, like, reboot her if she learns the wrong stuff?" she asked after a moment, like a man prodding a rotten tooth to see when the pain will come. Ryou sighed.
"If you had read my primer, Ms. Shirayuki you would no that there is no 'rebooting' with such advanced an AI. The only way to shut her down is with a code only I know, spoken in my voice, and even that's simply a failsafe in case she somehow gets out of my control. And her personality wouldn't be recoverable, anyway. She'd just be a dumb robot."
Berri nodded again, vaguely, too busy watching Ichigo try out her new limbs to get lectured.
o()o
Ichigo looked exactly the way he remembered her, smooth-skinned and wide-eyed. More wide-eyed than usual, even, and Ryou felt a surge of pride at the look of shock that overtook her face. The reaction was perfectly humanlike. Ichigo was still a flawless approximation of human consciousness, more than thirty years after she'd been programmed. Any creator would take pride in such exceptional work.
"R-ryou-san?" she asked hesitantly, her voice bearing a trace of the lilting Susserian accent. "You came back..."
"Of course I came back," he said, keeping his voice neutral. "I said that I would, didn't I?"
"Yes but... what happened to you? You look so different!"
He considered this, and supposed she would find his appearance a shock. He wasn't unkempt or ill; in fact, he was probably in better shape now than he had been when he was sixteen. He had lived since then. And he still had a full head of hair, although the blond was slowly giving way to gray, giving him the look of someone in a crown of finely-woven gold and silver fibers when he stepped into sunlight. His face was lightly lined now, but that was as much from frowning as from age. None of this should have surprised the robot girl.
"I aged, Ichigo. Surely you're familiar with the phenomenon."
"Yes but..." Ichigo repeated herself, "I've seen the people here sicken and get old and even die. I just... I guess I didn't think it would happen to you."
o()o
The woman in his doorway was about thirty, with short, businesslike brown hair that would have been proof of her occupation even if she hadn't been wearing a Human Fleet uniform. She saluted."Dr. Shirogane, I am commander Honjo with the Human Fleet. I assume you've been told about the new android law?" she asked in a businesslike voice, holding out a hand for Ryou to shake. When he didn't, she put it down, not visibly unbalanced by the teen's unfriendliness.
"I have, Commander, and I think it's ridiculous. My creations pose no threat to anyone! It's idiotic that all my good work should be ruined because some researchers thousands of miles away were fools." He spat the last word, but Honjo seemed unphased.
"Nevertheless, the law has been passed. After what happened in India, did you expect anything less? The creation and maintenance of artificial intelligence is illegal now, Doctor. However, in light of the fact that you have been a great help in the past, the High Council is prepared to offer you an option other than simply destroying your-- what do you call them?"
"Mews," he replied curtly, and offered no further information.
"Right, Mews. If you so choose, we will allow you to leave your "Mews" on an uninhabited, though livable, planet, no more than a quarter light-year from here. We would even allow you to stay with them for a period, to continue your studies. All that we ask is your signed promise that you will make no more artificial intelligences once your tenure is up. What do you say?"
"I say that you haven't left me much of a choice. Yeah, all right. I just don't want them to be destroyed." Honjo nodded curtly at his response.
"Good. You leave in two days. Now if you'll let me in, I'll show you the necessary paperwork."
o()o
"So, um, have you been well?" the robot-girl asked after an awkward pause.
"Well enough. There isn't a lot for a roboticist like myself to do on Earth now, when only minor AIs are allowed, and even then only with government supervision," Ryou replied, thinking again of the Kobayashi Maru's irritating computer, a minor intelligence if he ever saw one. "Yourself?"
"I really do love it here," she said wistfully, and he was pleased to note that her ability to mimic human vocal tone had only grown in the intervening years. "I missed you so bad the first few years, but then I found that there were people here, and--" she sighed happily. "Yeah. I'm doing well."
He nodded, trying hard to keep his clinical mindset. "And the others? I haven't been to see them yet."
"Pretty good, mostly. Just about everyone adapted to life here quickly, and we've settled down." Ryou cocked a brow.
"Mostly? Just about everyone?"
"Well..." Ichigo began hesitantly, not willing to look her creator in the eye. "Zakuro... she didn't like living among people. She'd lost the knack during those years after you abandoned us, I guess. So she just fled into the forest one day. I haven't seen her in, oh, more than twenty years."
Ryou was taken aback. Zakuro, the last Mew he'd created before the Android Law had shut him down, had always been the most stable, the most practical of his creations. But there was nothing he could do.
Ichigo caught his odd expression and added, "I'm sorry. If I had known you would be back, I would have made more of an effort to keep her with us. Sorry."
"No, it's all right. I'm just surprised. So, has anything else exciting happened while I was away?"
"I got married!" she squealed, suddenly excited again. That was not what Ryou was expecting to hear, and his normally stoic face betrayed incredible shock. "I know, right? Unbelievable!" she continued happily. "His name's Masaya. He doesn't have any weird powers like some of the people here, but he's a good guy. He's out in the field right now, but if you come back later, I'll introduce you."
"I'll see if I can find the time," he responded mechanically. "It would be interesting to meet him."
o()o
He had said goodbye to most of the Mews already. He would miss having them around, and his lab would be much quieter without Minto and Purin's screaming matches. He only needed to say goodbye to Ichigo, the first Mew he'd created and the last one he wanted to leave, and then he'd step into the waiting planet-lander, be flown up to a spaceship, and then away, too far away for any hope of return.
"Don't go, Ryou!" the pink haired robot said desperately, her eyes shining in a way that would have meant tears were streaming down her cheeks, were she capable of crying. "Why can't you stay with us?"
"I've explained this, Ichigo," he reminded her patiently. "My life is on Earth. I wish you and the others could share it with me, but you can't. I'll miss you, but I have to go back. I'll come see you again someday." She just stared stubbornly at him, as if her glare could force him to stay.
He moved over to her and put a hand on her cheek. Her resolve softened immediately. He kissed her once, a strong deep kiss that was a reminder of the year they'd spent together on this new world. Then he walked toward the idling planet-lander, without even a glance backward.
"I'll wait for you forever," Ichigo whispered at his retreating back, just before the lander swallowed him up.
o()o
Ichigo's last words, half-heard but remembered with blistering clarity after all these years, haunted Ryou as he went about his scientific duties. I'll wait for you forever. Well. He knew how that turned out.
On some level, he knew he was being ridiculous. He had left her here thirty years ago. Of course she found someone else in that time.
But she had said she'd wait forever, and, if Ryou was being honest with himself, seeing her again was the real reason he had agreed to come on this voyage at all. That nagged at him as he interviewed Susserians about their technology and helped Dr. Akasaka collect floral samples.
What bothered him at night, lying awake in the hill-house where he stayed with the other scientists, was something he'd never admit aloud. When he'd created Ichigo all those years ago, he'd programmed her, so secretly that not even Berri noticed, to love him and him alone. It was a stupid, adolescent thing to do, but deep down, he was annoyed even now that that worship was the one part of Ichigo's programming that seemed to have failed.
o()o
It was the night before the Earth party left. Ryou had run exhaustive tests on three of his Mews already, determining that Minto, Retasu, and Purin were sane and healthy and would probably survive for hundreds of years. It was a good feeling, knowing that his work was built to last.
He hadn't tested Ichigo at all. In fact, he'd been avoiding her, although once someone pointed her husband out to him, he took every opportunity to glare at the poor Susserian.
Tonight, though, he had arranged to meet her in the makeshift laboratory set off from the main settlement. He paced nervously while he waited for her to show up, continually at war with himself. On the one hand, he was middle-aged, much too old to be mired in something as juvenile as an unrequited crush. But then Ichigo's whispered I'll wait for you forever would sneak uninvited into his mind, and he conjured up an unasked-for mental picture of her shining, liquid eyes, and be once again hopelessly mired in need for her.
She arrived after dark, moving soundlessly through the thin-leafed underbrush with feline grace.
"I'm here," she said needlessly as she stepped into the lab's pool of silvery lithium-light. "What tests do you need to do?"
"Do you really think I called you here for that?" he asked incredulously. He thought he programmed her to be smarter than that.
"No," she replied, eyes downcast. "I don't." He went to her, intending to make her look at him, but ended up kissing her. She immediately opened her mouth and returned the kiss, which was hungrier and needier than he remembered from when he was young.
When they parted, Ryou asked tentatively, "What about Masaya?" Ichigo shook her head.
"He'll understand. He knows that I love you in a way I can't even describe, and he's such a nice guy. Besides, marriage here isn't quite like it is on earth. Susserians are more forgiving."
He kissed her again, and went to take off her clothes. As always, he marveled that flesh he knew to be artificial could be so real, so lifelike under him. His need for her was matched, as it always was, with pride that he had created something so perfect, a robot that was in every way real, and perfectly subservient to him. The feeling of power strengthened and intertwined with the pleasure of being with her, and it was the best feeling Ryou could imagine.
Later, lying next to her on the ground, Ryou turned toward Ichigo and pressed soft kisses along her hairline. "Come back with me," he murmured into her soft pink hair.
"No," she replied simply. Ryou raised himself up on his arms and stared at her.
"Don't worry. I'll get rid of your ears and tail and no one will be able to tell you're not human. You won't have to hide or anything like that."
"That's not the problem. I just... No. I can't go with you."
"It's not your husband, is it?" Ichigo shook her head.
"I told you. He's a great guy, but there's no passion there." Ryou stood up, frustrated, and tugged on his pants.
"What, then?" he fairly growled.
"I don't know how to say it nicely," she said, looking down at her hands. "You're... you're just so old! I remember you being so young and you're not anymore!"
"Of course not. You're older too, Ichigo."
"Only on the inside. This body you built me, it doesn't age. I'm the same," she said her eyes shimmering with her version of tears. "An—and I couldn't handle watching you get older, watching you die!" she sobbed bitterly. "It's better if I just stay here and remember you like you were."
"What about Masaya?" Ryou demanded, angry. "He's not going to be young forever, you know."
She nodded again. "I don't love him the way I love you. Isn't that stupid? I can stand watching him slowly die because I don't love him."
"Ichigo..." Ryou said quietly, visibly fighting to keep himself calm.
"Yeah?"
"Strawberry bell bell. Reborn, strawberry check," the scientist intoned, as if he were invoking a spell. The confusion in Ichigo's eyes at the strange words faded as he finished. In fact, the light in her eyes vanished entirely and she fell to the ground, limp and lifeless.
Ryou smiled grimly as he hefted the body over his shoulder, an action that made his back scream in protest. She didn't feel so lifelike now that she was dead, and he wondered vaguely how he could have ever thought this lump of steel and circuitry was a person.
He left her deep in the woods, where he knew the natives rarely went. They wouldn't find her for weeks.
o()o
The next morning, he boarded the lander with the other scientists, not sparing a single glance back toward the grave of the girl he had created.
o()o