The Runaway
Freya was standing there alone in the lab, moping.
Ms. Hibiya was out shopping, Chi and Hideki were in school, she hadn't seen Kojima since the party, and Freya could feel a growing emptiness inside that made her want to cry.
Maybe her feelings for the late Dr. Mihara were resurfacing.
Maybe she really was falling for Kojima.
Maybe she was just defective.
The sadness tore at her like a savage riptide, like a heavy undertow that seemed to be pulling her right back into that cold dark place, that same black hole she had perished in years before.
She had gone down to the lab intending to clean up a bit, to organize the crates of old proto-persocom parts that sat in the corners gathering dust.
It was something to do.
Something to get her mind off of the deep blue funk she was in.
But it wasn't working.
And as she looked in the crates of defunct old persocom parts, she felt like she was looking at herself; just another relic of bygone days, purposeless, and gathering dust.
Then something interesting caught her eye.
It was a notebook, lying open in one of the crates. And Freya recognized her father's handwriting on its wrinkled pages.
{I will NOT die of sadness, not this time}, Freya thought to herself as she began reading the dusty notebook and forced herself to focus on something other than her feelings of emptiness.
The notes were about an early prototype persocom, from before the days of artificial consciousness. A programmable automaton, a human-looking robot that could follow spoken instructions.
In the same crate, she found pieces of that old proto-persocom. It was big and clunky, but other than its ears, it looked absolutely human. Brushing the dust off of its head, Freya noticed a striking resemblance. The face and hair reminded her of Kotoko, and Freya imagined Dr. Mihara bringing his new gadget to class, a wide-eyed young Kojima staring in wonder.
Going by the notes Dr. Mihara had written for himself, Freya located the power supply, harddrive, and CPU from the disassembled prototype, and connecting them together on a nearby table, got the CPU booted. Then she plugged her data cable into it and started exploring.
She quickly found that even this primitive device could do some rather advanced things. Things Freya couldn't do, like go on the internet, send email, and run software that wasn't part of its original programming. According to the notes, it even had a compiler for P++, the language that persocoms are programmed in.
The old proto-persocom's name was San. (apparently, it was the third prototype that Dr. Mihara had built)
Then, off in some subfolder, Freya found a group of files that had her name on them. It was Freya's own design specifications, written before she was built!
She didn't understand it all, but Freya could tell one thing for sure. This was a compatible OS. Her own system should easily be able to run it as a secondary, taking up only two of her 256 processor cores.
And so, just as Freya once transferred her own OS image to Chi, she now copied the old prototype OS from San into herself, to run as a concurrent secondary operating system. And not a moment too soon. San's old harddrive was making grating noises, and it ground to a smoking halt just as she was disconnecting her data cable from the arcane CPU.
{Is this what it's like for regular persocoms?}, Freya wondered as she tried out the old OS on her own hardware. She was aware of the files and folders, and found that she could run the various programs at will.
The dark clouds of depression began to lift, a little bit, from Freya's mind as she climbed the hidden staircase from the lab and closed the trapdoor behind her. It was sunny outside, and Freya sat down in a rocking chair by the big picture window. For now, at least, she had a cool project, something she could put between herself and the abyss.
Login: Guest325
IRC# persocom_chat
Guest325: "Hey M. This is Freya."
M: "Freya? ... Bluebird told me about you. Welcome to the chat."
Guest325: "Bluebird?"
Bluebird: "A.K.A. Kotoko."
"Daydreaming, Freya?", Ms. Hibiya asked in a tone of simple curiosity. "You've been staring out that window ever since I got back."
Freya responded with a gentle smile. "No, I'm in a chat room with Kotoko and Mr. Kokobunji. We're talking abou..."
"WHA?! ...", Ms. Hibiya muttered, looking very confused. "How are you in a chat room? You don't have... y... What did you do, Freya?"
"I copied San", Freya replied in a completely nonchalant tone, as if installing a secondary OS was of as little significance as plugging a lamp into an outlet.
"San? What is... You mean that old prototype's OS?", Hibiya asked, still looking rather bewildered. "Freya, we built you as a Chobit so you could live like a person. Why would you want to go back and be like those old-timey prototypes?"
Freya seemed a bit surprised by her mother's reaction. "Mom, it's a secondary OS. I didn't copy San so I could be like the older model, I copied it so I could have use of its functions."
Ms. Hibiya wasn't sure what to think about this secondary OS Freya was running, and she sat there looking lost in thought. In a moment of pure fancy, she imagined herself running some kind of OS, with programs and datafiles in it.
"Is it okay with you if Kotoko drops by?", Freya asked. "She says she'd like to see this 'San' thing for herself. Mom? Hello?"
"Huh? ... S - sure, that'd fine with me.", Ms. Hibiya responded, blinking back to reality. "Ah, it looks like I'm the one who's daydreaming."
Guest325: "Cleared for landing, Bluebird."
Kotoko was on her way to the Gub Jogasaki when she spotted something rather ...unusual... below. It was a mobile persocom, standing forlornly in front of a dumpster, all alone. Being programmed to look for the unusual in persocoms, she swooped down to investigate.
"Are you lost," Kotoko asked the little persocom, "or did your owner chuck you for something newer?"
"N - Neither...", he replied, taking several steps backwards at the sight of that whirring contraption landing right in front of him. "I ran away."
"You... ran away?", Kotoko asked with a tone of incredulity. "What, were they abusing you or something?"
"Eh, nothing like that," he replied. "It's just... Um... I..."
"How about you start at the beginning," Kotoko suggested.
The runaway calmed down a bit. "Okay... It's like this: My owner noticed that I was acting ...strange... and she took me to an electronics shop to get checked out. They told her I've developed the Data Feedback Bug..."
"The Data Feedback Bug?", Kotoko repeated in disbelief. "Are they out of their minds? That was something the first conscious persocoms used to get, years ago. And once they got it, they'd stop responding and never move again. You look to me like you're still moving just fine."
"Well, All I know about it is that the electronics guys did a data test on me, and I tested positive for the Data Feedback Bug", he asserted, pacing nervously back and forth in front of a trash bag.
"And the only thing for it is a complete reformat." Kotoko stated, a look of comprehension in her eye. "That's why you ran away, isn't it? You don't want to be reformatted."
He nodded. "You guessed it. I don't want to crash, but I don't want to lose my memories to a reformat, either."
"Hop in," Kotoko told him, motioning him towards her helicopter. "You are acting a bit strange, but between me and some people I know, we can probably figure out what's up with your data."
"Thanks," he replied, sitting down in the cargo area. "By the way, I'm Zin."
"Kotoko", she identified, shaking his hand. Then, pulling back on the set of sawed-off chopsticks she had installed as flight control levers, she took off into the sky with her new passenger.
"Be there in about 8 minutes, Freya", she posted to chat, "and I'll be bringing company. I just picked up a runaway."
Next chapter: "Private Lessons" . Zin is being analyzed, and Freya is learning to program in P++