Disclaimer: CLAMP owns Chobits, and does not return my phone calls.
A/N: Moving right along...
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Chobits: Care & Maintenance of a Heart & Soul
Ch. 11: The Gathering Storm.
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Hideki stared in shock at the hand on his arm, and its owner, Dita.
For the third time in as many days, Dita was waiting for him in the lobby of his prep school. Each time, Dita hauled the confused ronin to a tea shop, or quiet pub to review his class work, further tutor him in his lessons, and, invariably, discuss his relationship with Chii. With each interaction, Dita was forced to revise her assumptions and extrapolations about the young man. Each time, new and persistent signals were aroused by the quiet revelations he delivered about his feelings for Chii, and his desire to help her and all persocoms achieve their full potential as feeling and aware beings. Dita found the sensations to be irresistible, and without consciously realizing it, was basking in the notion that love might actually be possible for her.
She's really taking this tutoring agreement seriously, Hideki thought, as she yet again guided him out onto the streets of Tokyo. After a brief walk and they were seated in an isolated booth in an out-of-the-way tea shop, she held out her hand, and in a mock serious tone, demanded, "Let's see it."
From his knapsack, Hideki withdrew the results of a midterm calculus exam, and handed them over with a flourish. "I think you'll be pleased," he said.
"Ninety-three! Good work, Hideki!" she reached out and gave his arm a congratulatory squeeze, setting off alarm bells in Hideki's head. "I knew you could do it," she said. Following Hideki's astonished gaze to her hand, she blushed, releasing her grip. The rush of signals that accompanied the physical contact was…intoxicating.
"I can hardly wait to show Chii," Hideki gushed. "She'll probably be happier about it than I am." It was too late to pretend he didn't notice the affectionate gesture, but he decided that protesting or otherwise calling attention to it was a minefield he had no desire to navigate. "I really appreciate all your help," he continued, "and I still don't understand how you got me the days off work at My Pleasure. Anyway, I couldn't have done it without your help. So how's Zima? Are you guys finding any more persocoms that need our help?"
He's actually kind of amusing when he gets flustered and rambles on like that, thought Dita. She chuckled softly, and the reassuring sound confused Hideki greatly. "First, my help came as part of an agreement, and while we haven't yet brought any couples to you for your advice or support, the data I've assimilated from you concerning your relationship with Chii has been invaluable. Your manager at My Pleasure was most cooperative when we told him we'd reimburse the expense of a temporary replacement, provided he kept your job open for you. I'm sure it helped when I suggested that you were temporarily assisting a government agency with field testing of a mysterious new type of persocom. Zima's just fine, and our focus right now is on isolating and eliminating the failure mode that immobilizes the newly awakened. We're very close, now, thanks to the help of you and your friends."
"Well, I didn't really do that much. It was mostly my friends," he said, nervously rubbing the back of his neck.
"Zima and I couldn't have gained the support and advice of your friends without your endorsement, and for that, we thank you," she paused a moment, hesitant to continue. "There's another thing I've been meaning to say to you, Hideki."
"…" Hideki froze, mentally poising himself to flee.
"I'm sorry," Dita said softly. "About everything. I'm sorry about calling you Meatbag, about assuming the worst about you without the data to support my conclusions. I'm sorry I threatened you and your Chobit. After getting to know you a little, I've had to revise at least a gigabyte of relational data. I…just needed to say that."
Hideki tried furiously to adjust his thoughts from their previous survival mode. Has she been hacked? he asked himself. Unsure of the safest answer, he returned to his nervous neck-rubbing. "Errr…it's okay?" he ventured. "You couldn't have known any better. I mean, your programming as a firewall and protector would have made you a little paranoid and hostile to anyone you don't know, right?"
Dita placed a few bank notes on the table and started to get up out of the booth. "That's certainly part of it. There are other factors that I won't go into just yet; just know that I'm glad I had the opportunity to amend the Hideki Motosuwa records in my database."
His mind whirling, Hideki followed her absently to the street outside. "I have to go meet Zima now, and I'm sure you want to get home to your cute little girlfriend, so I'll bid you farewell." Dita's tone was slightly teasing.
Finally remembering his manners, Hideki bowed and said a polite "Good night." The instant he straightened however, Dita darted in, embracing him tightly, and said, "Good night, Hideki-kun," in low voice. As abruptly as she hugged him, she released him, and strode off down the sidewalk, leaving the gob smacked young man in front of the tea shop. She smiled enigmatically to herself as she let the tingle of sensations from the embrace drain away. These are emotions, she thought to herself in wonder. I'm really experiencing true emotions. Soon, I'll be ready. Just a little more experimentation and analysis, and I'll be ready to tell Zima just how I feel about him. Just a little more time with Hideki…
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"So what are our alternatives?" Minoru asked. Chitose had opted for a meeting at the Kokubunji estate, where their privacy could be better assured. It was agreed upon from the outset that Chii and Hideki were not to be informed of at least one of the options for re-initiating Chii's broadcast to the persocom population at large. Hideki, Chitose quipped, would likely run out and set fire to Dita immediately, just as a precaution, in case she got any ideas.
"Resetting Chii is simply not an option," Chitose asserted. "I couldn't bring myself to do that over again, under any circumstances. I simply can't do that to Hideki, either."
"We'd better have some other options to explore when we brief Zima and Dita," said Minoru. "They certainly won't overlook that possibility, and I don't think Dita will have the same reservations that we will."
Chitose thought for a moment, and continued, "Resetting Chii wouldn't work, anyway." As the others looked at her questioningly, she continued, "We could reset Chii, and set her and Hideki up in exactly the same circumstances, but the one thing we can't do is reset him. The simple fact is that as they have grown together through their relationship, Hideki has changed, matured. He is not the same clumsy, somewhat perverted boy that activated Chii. As he is now, he may not be a newly-initiated Chii's Only One. Hideki then and Chii then were a perfect congruence of circumstances, resulting ultimately in the Awakening. It is no longer possible for those same circumstances to exist."
"So, the reset option is off the table," Yuzuki joined the discussion. "And we have sufficient rationale not to pursue it further. What's the likelihood of accessing her system directly and forcing execution of the broadcast event in some sort of debug mode?"
"That depends on the level of diagnostics available at the terminal interface," Minoru replied. Turning to Chitose, he asked, "Does she have a user-accessible diagnostic or test mode; one capable of selecting a specific event module and forcing execution?"
Chitose shook her head. "Only very basic system status and integrity," she said. "The sheer volume of compiled code required us to keep frills like that to a bare minimum. Most of the modular testing and debug in the development stage was done offline, on a similar, but not identical processing platform in the lab. Her primary user interface was to be her five senses, and her voice. Ichiro and I specifically designed her not to be used in the fashion you're suggesting."
Minoru was unable to keep the disappointment from his face. "So, what if we simply asked her to run the event routine again?" he asked. "Would she, herself, be able to execute the task?"
Chitose nodded solemnly. "Yes, that would be the best and most reliable way to do it, but…"
"She's not functioning at a level that would allow her to understand and perform such a request," Yuzuki broke in. "She's still so childlike and naïve. In her current state, there's no way we could make her understand what we wanted her to do."
"With Hideki's companionship, her growth has accelerated," said Chitose, "but she still has yet to fully realize herself and her capabilities. Hideki can help hurry the process further, but he has to do some growing up of his own. Given time, I have no doubt of the outcome; but how much time do we have?"
"So in reality, it all depends on Hideki," suggested Minoru.
Chitose nodded. "It always did."
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Later that evening, Chitose repeated the nearly-forgotten weekly ritual of intercepting Hideki and Chii, and waving them into her unit. With a briefly questioning look, Hideki scooped up Chii's hand in his, followed Chitose to the kotatsu. In addition to the ever-present tea tray, there was a small metallic case prominently in the middle of the low table.
After they were all seated with tea in hand, Chitose took a hesitant breath, and then spoke. "I'm glad to finally have a chance to talk to the two of you. Things have obviously been very busy for all of us since Zima and Dita enlisted our help."
"That's no joke!" blurted Hideki. "Between Dita's tutoring and questions about our relationship, and trying to spend more time with Chii, we've barely seen each other over the past few weeks. How's the work on the Awakening coming? Dita seemed to think we were close."
Chitose displayed a hopeful smile. "We've identified why the Awakened are becoming immobilized or shut down, and we know roughly how we can fix it. We just need a bit more work on the implementation. It's looking very positive, at the moment. Speaking of spending more time with Chii, how are things between the two of you?"
Hideki's blush was brief and subtle. "Uh…We're making progress, for sure. Chii's becoming very affectionate, and seems to be expressing herself much more…directly. She's speaking much more naturally, and even taught herself fluent English." He made a show of draping an arm around Chii, drawing her in close. "I'm also getting more comfortable with my own displays of affection, a little at a time."
"I like it when Hideki touches me. I can feel things when he does. Nice things." Chii chose that moment to join the discussion, and it was Chitose's turn to enhance the color of her cheeks with a tinge of red.
"Remember what I said about small steps," Chitose admonished the couple. "There's a specific reason I wanted to talk to you tonight. You do remember that you've activated emotions in other persocoms, don't you? Good. One couple in particular is apparently deliriously happy with their new relationship, and wanted to thank you. I'm not sure the gift they're offering is what I'd want for the two of you, but I promised I'd let you both consider it." She slid the mysterious metal case across the table to Chii. "These are from Minoru and Yuzuki."
Chii carefully opened the case. Seeing the human like ears, complete with auditory hardware and tactile sensory interface, her hands drifted up to the side of her own head, gingerly touching the connector housings that marked her unmistakably as a persocom.
"This is for both of you to decide," Chitose's tone was serious. "This makes Chii more likely to pass for human. It also very suddenly and sharply removes a psychological barrier that you're both very accustomed to. You need to consider this very carefully."
Chii, only barely heeding Chitose's words, had turned her attention to Hideki's ears, brushing her fingertips along the outside, almost reverently. Hideki's reaction was immediate. Flinching at the ticklish sensation, and suppressing a giggle, he rolled his neck, shivering slightly. Chii, seeing the reaction, looked at Chitose questioningly.
"Hideki must be ticklish on his ears," Chitose explained. Noting Chii's unsure tilt of her head, she went on, "It's a very difficult sensation to describe; it's something you'd have to feel for yourself."
Chii's response was immediate. "Then Chii wants the ears. I want to feel 'ticklish'. Hideki, can I have them, please?"
Chitose sighed in resignation as Hideki, unable to refuse his precious Chii anything, said, "Of course, if that's what you want."
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The room now more resembled a bio-mechanical abattoir, than the office/lab/bedroom in a lavish mansion that it was. The floor, walls, and ceiling were decorated generously with the viscous, straw-colored fluid that served persocoms as a coolant and lubricant. Drops of the oily substance pattered from the ceiling into the pools on the floor, while rivulets formed from the spattered patterns that found a home on the walls. The source of the fluid was the half-dozen or so brutally disassembled persocoms that had once maintained the home.
The electronic gate had been easily defeated, and entry to the mansion was a simple matter of brute force applied to the unfortunate front door. Once he had seized his quarry, Ragnar simply informed the household staff of persocoms that their attempted departure would result in the disassembly of their master, rather than themselves. Whether their devotion was the result of clever programming, or some delusional sense of attachment to their owner didn't really matter to him; it yielded the results he required. After securing the helpless master of the house, Ragnar set himself to work. A brief examination of the persocom's activity logs showed that they had, indeed, been in direct connection with the so-called Chobit, making his course of action clear. He tore each and every one of them apart. Slowly and methodically.
Being programmed as an organized and systematic sort of persocom, Ragnar sorted the parts as he removed them. Distantly humming "Ride of the Valkyries", he twisted and pulled the limbs off each persocom, stacking them neatly into gruesome piles of mechanical arms and legs. Oblivious to the muffled screaming and tears of their owner, he returned to each torso, tearing out battery packs and hard drive units. Two more neat piles of components were formed. Finally, each head was wrenched off in turn, the last being absently retained in his grasp as he lectured his luckless host.
"For someone so legendary for their elusiveness, you were remarkably easy to locate," said the blue-eyed giant of a man, almost conversationally. "One could almost say that you wanted to be found." He regarded the severed head of the custom persocom in his hands blandly as he spoke, not even making eye contact with the bound and gagged occupant of the opulent office chair in front of him. Negligently dropping the grisly object, he finally glanced at his prisoner disdainfully. "There is a word in English that describes it perfectly, you know; 'hubris'. An arrogance of pride. Maybe tonight's experiences will be a lesson in humility for you." The smile he offered was a simple display of teeth, completely vacant of any humor or warmth.
"Let us get down to business, shall we?" the monstrous ersatz gaijin said. "Just so we decisively establish our respective roles in this brief relationship, I am going to break one of your fingers. After which, I will remove your gag, and ask you a question. Please keep in mind, when forming your answer, exactly how many fingers you humans possess."
Fresh tears of anguish flowed as Ragnar advanced on his prey, grasping the left wrist in a vice like grip. A moment, and a sickening cracking sound later, the muffled screams and sobs of terror became muted howls of pain. He waited patiently for the noise to subside to a defeated whimper, and with a sharp motion, removed the duct tape gag from his prisoner's mouth.
"M?" he asked.
"Minoru Kokubunji," sobbed Yoshiyuki Kojima, a.k.a. the "Dragonfly", without a second's hesitation.
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Continued...