The next day, Kaneki ditched Tsukiyama and went on a walk around the city. It was busy, people bumping into him at every turn. But that was perfect. He needed the feeling that you can only find in a crowd just like that. The feeling of being alone in your head, cut off and distant from everyone despite the people knocking into you and shouting in your ear. When noon approached, Kaneki found a nice windowsill to sit on. He had wandered into the tourist trap that was the flea market. Vendors lined the street, selling various knick-knacks and foods, everything from pineapples to gloves to hunks of graphite shaped like sea shells and switchblades. The market was fn to watch. All sorts of people came by. He watched a woman and her daughter go up to one of the fruit stands to get a basket of apples. The old vendor peered suspiciously at the young child, like he was afraid she would take something. He glanced off to his left at something. Kaneki followed his gaze and saw a multitude of police drones. He sighed and looked around, searching for the suits that would indicate one of the technicians for them was around. He found a few, two men sitting under a sakura tree and a woman talking to one of the vendors. His lip curled in automatic disgust at them and he turned away. One of the police droids rolled away from the pack, heading towards a stall in the corner. Kaneki glanced at it, noticing the vendor was gone and there seemed to be a boy trying to take advantage of that. He was looking around himself nervously, probably checking for droids. Kaneki waited for the boy to see the one headed towards him and stop, but that didn't happen. To his surprise, the bot stopped a little ways away from the boy, waiting. The boy grabbed one of the items, shoved it in his pocket and began to walk away casually. Now the bot took off, lights flashing. Kaneki stared at it. It felt as if his whole world had shifted. He had gone more than a decade and a half believing the society he lived in was fair and just, and the robots an ingenious invention to keep society in order. Now, in just two days, he had seen with his own eyes (or rather his own eye plus one of Rize's). The robot did nothing to stop the boy from committing the crime, despite its protocols clearly being enough to alert it that a crime was about to take place. It would be exceedingly simple to add on an extra bit of software so the robot could go up to the boy and tell him not to do something. It was just more convenient for them to not have it do anything, huh? Less protocols to manage, less potential bugs to be fixed. No wonder most people avoided the bots and the technicians. Kaneki sighed again. Who designed this system? What was their goal? Did they realize how corrupted their ideals had become, how warped and twisted they were? It seemed like someone would realize what had happened, figure out that something had gone wrong. But nobody had seemed to. Kaneki wondered why the government did nothing about this. Wasn't there some law that would be at least somewhat applicable to this type of thing? Probably not directly relating to robots, but still. Kaneki thought about it. Maybe one day he could go to the capitol and complain or something.
Shinohara sat in the office of one of the technicians for the bots. It was endlessly fascinating to him how the men and women could so easily input new codes, strange combinations of letters and number broken by slashes and underscore, framed by the little symbols that Shinohara was sure had a proper name but were always going to be the little less than and more than signs. He liked to know what they did, how they worked, etc. but often he would just get kicked out by an annoyed techie for asking questions and talking while they tried to work. So he had limited his time spent doing this to once a month and rotated through the employees, everyone taking a turn answering his questions for a day.
"So why do the robots only punish crimes?"
He asked. The last man he had observed had been very proud of how well the arrest part of the droids' protocols worked, but had still complained about them not being able to prevent crimes. The man he was with now shrugged.
"Because they're droids. They don't have the capacity to understand intention."
Shinohara frowned at the man's back.
"Couldn't you give them enough programs to be able to respond to social cues in the environment to simulate understanding?"
The man grumbled and bit his lip, half turning to distractedly look at him.
"That's going into the realm of AI, Artificial Intelligence. Without a working, live human brain as the base program, that kind of technology is not possible right now. And using a human brain would require the brain be separated from the body but still kept alive and transferred into a container, which essentially constitutes human experimentation. Which, as you know, is illegal."
Shinohara sighed.
"Fine then. I'll leave now, and stop bugging you."
As he turned to exit the room, the technician called out to him.
"Shinohara-san? If you want, check the labs downstairs. I believe they have a new type of droid you might like."
Shinohara nodded and made a quiet noise of assent before going into the hallway. He made his way down to the labs, finding his mood brightening and curiosity peaking with every step closer to his target. When he entered the lab, it was the usual chaos. Spare metal parts lay around, the five or six scientists- more like black market engineers or doctors- bustled around the room, shouting over the sounds of welding and sawing to each other. On the counter in the middle of the chaos, a for was beginning to take shape, sort of. Jointed legs, two angled towards the head and two angled towards the rear. A round object that was connected to a camera sat on the table, unconnected to the rest of the bot. The round object looked to be a smooth, spherical lense, a cone inside of the glass allowing for a program to stitch the images into one smooth continuous scene. The metal shell that would eventually house the eye sat on the table next to it, small indents for the eyes. There were eight pits in total, four big enough to fit eyes the size of Shinohara's fist and positioned around the head. The other four were the size of the eye on the table, tangerine sized, and positioned above the four main eyes to act as back up. If all of the eyes had the 270 degree vision they were designed to have, it would be exceedingly difficult to sneak up on it. The programming for the sensory portion would have to be complex, however, since Shinohara imagined the fields of vision for the eyes would likely overlap.
"How soon is this going to be ready for the feild?"
Shinohara stopped the closest scientist to ask. The disheveled looking woman shrugged.
"A day, a few hours? I don't know, shouldn't be long though."
Shinohara nodded.
"What's the purpose?"
She smiled.
"To help you guys, of course! They're supposed to assist with fighting those rebels. Basically, facial recognition software would be applied to their data banks and then they would be set loose in the city. Once they find a match, they would destroy it. It should make your job much easier!"
Shinohara stiffened as she hurried off again, his mind automatically finding problems. What if the bots couldn't distinguish the actual rebels from look alikes in the city? Facial recognition software had made dramatic improvements since its' invention, but their data banks had only a few pictures of the rebels, hardly enough to make a full, complete facial construction for the bots. There was a high chance of mistakes being made and civilians being injured. Shinohara mentally shrugged it off, choosing to believe that the CCG knew what it was doing and had the only the best in mind for each individual citizen.
After Shinohara left the office of the technition, the man sent an email to his superiors. He didn't know why, just that when he had been promoted to work on the robots directly, he had been instructed to inform them if anyone ever started to question the whats and whys of the robots. Of course, he knew full well that it would be a simple matter to add crime preventative measures to the code, but this was one of the taboos of his job. It woudn't work perfectly, in fact there would be many issues with the software because of the aforementioned limitations on robot comprehension, but it would at least e something. He had stopped questioning it a while ago. It didn't really affect him, after all. He never would commit a crime anyway, and this job paid a little too well for him to care about strangers.
A notification popped up on the side of a computer screen. The owner of the computer, a man by the name of Marude opened it. He frowned. So Shinohara was poking his nose into things he shouldn't, huh? He'd have to make sure the man didn't go looking any further. It was important to keep society functioning exactly as it did now. If people were prevented from committing crimes, then the evil people who harboured the potential in their hearts to do bad would never be weeded out of the population. As long as the bots continued to function the way they did now, society would eventually straighten itself out and evolve into a peaceful, carefree population that depended entirely on the CCG for protection and governing. The unnecessary members of society would be killed. Anyone with defects, such as depression, addiction, physical deformities, learning disabilities or those who were lazy and didn't work to earn their keep were... disposed of, so to speak. No laws would be broken, everyone would have money and standing in society. It would be a utopia. A sustainable economy centred around his business, ensuring its continued survival. The perfect plan.
Notes:
Well, shit's going down, guys. A lot of shit.
-Uta
