Chapter 14: Raining Blood
While Chi and Hideki were discussing their finances, Kojima had been in his study, putting his doctorate in a frame to hang on the wall. He wanted it mounted in time to impress his favorite little guests.
And right when he expected it, the chat post from Kotoko came in. "Be there in a few", she posted. "Ok", he responded, "I have the study window open."
Zin and Kotoko locked the door on their rooftop shack, and powered up the helicopter.
"Imagine the look on Kojima's face", Kotoko commented, beaming a broad smile at Zin as he loaded a tiny padded metal box into the cargo area.
"You think he'll let us use his lab for free?", Zin asked, hopefully.
Kotoko, still smiling, gave Zin a big hug. "I KNOW he will", she assured him. "He'll be too fascinated not to."
"My little lightning bolt Zin", she cooed to Zin as he climbed into the cargo area himself and sat down just behind the pilot's seat.
A quick kiss before they buckled in, and then Kotoko pulled up on the collective pitch lever and off they went, straight up into the sky.
It was springtime, and from their vantage in the sky they could see the cherry blossoms blooming, out beyond the city. Nature was turning green again, and even at this height, one could get the faint smell of flowers wafting in on the warm spring breeze.
About halfway to Kojima's, they heard a buzzing sound. It was a small insect, flying in through the open window.
An instant later came the impact.
A blur of black and yellow feathers.
A loud thump.
A nauseating lurch as the chopper reeled from the sudden blow.
A flycatcher, apparently chasing the insect, had come charging in after it like a rampaging bull. The impact had knocked a hole in the rear bulkhead, exposing the folds of the helicopter's emergency parachute.
It was all Kotoko could do to keep the craft under control with that bird thrashing around inside it, and Zin, sitting behind the seat, wasn't in a position to do much. He was pinned between the back of the seat and a big fat bird butt.
Looking for an escape, the insect burrowed into the parachute, and the flycatcher tore in after it, its talons clawing the floor, the ceiling, and Zin, for traction.
Then all hell broke loose.
The flycatcher let out an ear-splitting squeal, and a shower of blood and shredded nylon rained down on them from the ceiling. Their uninvited guest had gotten its foot caught in the main drive gear, that all-important transmission that sends the motor's power up to the whirling blades above. With a grating noise that was worse than fingernails on a chalkboard, the motor revved uselessly against the now-toothless nylon gear, and the chopper blades coasted lazily to a halt.
They were in free-fall.
Kotoko scanned the ground below. Between the roads, the sidewalks, and the buildings, there was nowhere soft to land. And they were hundreds of feet in the air.
She pulled the ripcord on the emergency parachute, while Zin tried to free the stuck bird so it could deploy. It was no use. The flycatcher and parachute were hopelessly entangled.
Zin continued his efforts anyway, while Kotoko pushed the collective pitch lever down into negative lift, hoping the chopper's free fall would get the main rotor blades spinning again.
A thousand calculations played out in Kotoko's head as she tried to gauge the approach of the hard concrete below, so she could pull up on the controls at just the right time to get perhaps a few seconds of lift right as they neared the ground.
"Mayday! Mayday! Bluebird going down!", she posted to every chat channel and forum her friends might possibly see. "Coordinates: 29872 by 0760236!"
She had found that optimal spot on the lift control at about 12 percent negative, where the wind from their descent got her the maximum RPM on the unpowered rotor blades.
As the second story windows blurred by, Kotoko pulled up on the collective lift control, and she could hear the freewheeling main rotor slowing again to a stop as it provided that one last puff of lift to soften their descent.
It wasn't enough.
Its rotor unpowered, its parachute crippled, the tiny craft slammed into the sidewalk with a sickening "CRACK!", and shattered into pieces.
Kotoko was thrown from the wreck, and landed several meters away. "ZIN!", she screamed, trying to run back to Zin who was lying motionless in the pile of debris. But Kotoko couldn't even stand up. Her legs were a crumpled mass of metal and polymer.
Leaking oil and battery acid, Kotoko started dragging herself towards Zin, calling out to him, screaming his name, hoping he'd reply, hoping he'd at least start moving again.
Before she got to him, she blacked out.
Freya was the first on the scene, with Chi right behind her. They had gone rooftop-hopping, as only a few persocoms could.
Kotoko and Zin were lying amidst the scattered wreckage, covered in blood. Nearby lay the flycatcher, bled to death, its lifeless body still tangled up in the ruined parachute.
"We found them! Returning to the Gub!", Freya posted on chats and forums, as they bounded their way back to the apartment building.
Ms. Hibiya met them at the door, and ushered them into her lab. Kojima, who had seen Kotoko's mayday and Freya's update online, arrived right behind them.
Kojima put the unconscious Kotoko on a table, and with a pocket knife, quickly opened her up. Her leg servos were smashed, and their severed pushrods had punctured her battery pack. Ms. Hibiya set up a power supply on the table beside Kotoko, and Kojima, removing her ruined batteries, hooked it up. Kotoko's CPU had been without power, but if the capacitor on her non-volatile memory was still holding a charge, her CMOS configuration data should still be intact.
Kotoko made a weak-sounding beep, and her head jerked to one side. Then her eyes opened wide, and she let out a blood-curdling shriek. "ZIIIIIIIIIN!"
"We're working on him," Ms. Hibiya explained, and Kotoko managed to turn her scarred, mangled head far enough around to see him, lying there with his components all strung out across the table, connected to various sorts of diagnostic equipment.
As Kotoko watched in abject horror, Ms. Hibiya and Kojima, along with Minoru and Yuzuki who had arrived a minute earlier, tried one recovery method after another to try to get the data from Zin's damaged hardware. Nothing was working. And they soon found out why.
"I'm afraid Zin is unrecoverable, Kotoko", Ms. Hibiya told her. His solid-state harddrive is physically broken. There's no way to read the data. " She paused, shaking her head, then looked at the floor. "He's gone."
"Ziiiinnnn...", Kotoko repeated, sobbing inconsolably as she tried in vain to get up, her one functioning arm flailing around uselessly.
Kojima reached out for her, but couldn't figure a way to pick her up with all those wires connected to her, and so they just stared at each other with tears in their eyes.
"Sora...", she mumbled, her speech beginning to slur. "Where's... Did anyone... Back in the..."
Then Kotoko passed out again.
MJZ 1234567890- Hardware configuration test in progr74538 #8499B 532blackness swims silently along in that cold dark subterranean thruway where no one can ever93a o3Ffla F6E9 01B8invalid interrupt vector9209 A10A8'm all alone in here... But where is here, and who am3333333333333 333333333333333 33333333333333 33333333333333 33333333333333333OH NO PLEASE NO DON'T LET ME STAY THIS WA32767 498hardware conflict on DMA channel 5, switching to channel 2hjlaiub vFF54ulling at me; and my heart now goes the way of the47OSYWI 98763982Non-maskable interrupt enabled.
Checksum: {FF64 8018 217B 9019} Confirmed.
MOV AH, 7
MOV DL, 1
INT 21
INT 20
"BEEP!"
When she regained consciousness, Kotoko felt ... really ... strange ...
As she looked at the scene beside her, it seemed that her depth perception was out of adjustment. Or something. The whole scale of the room seemed somehow ...wrong...
{Oh no, I have processor damage}, she thought.
Kotoko strained to sit up, then slumped over as her inertia carried her forwards. Putting her hands down to steady herself, she realized that her arms and legs were all intact and functioning again. But everything felt heavy, and cumbersome.
Holding on to the wall for balance, compensating as best she could for this bizarrely amplified sense of mass, Kotoko struggled to her feet, only to find herself eye-to-eye with Ms. Hibiya.
"What the hell?", she muttered, in a voice she didn't even recognize as her own.
"Your body was damaged beyond repair", Ms. Hibiya explained. "But your CPU, your memory, and your solid-state harddrive are all just fine, and we've bolted them in as the processor module in the body of one of Dr. Mihara's old prototype persocoms."
Kotoko, scarcely believing what she'd just been told, still disoriented with this absurd change in scale, stumbled her way to the nearest mirror and stared in absolute shock at the clunky, big-eared antique of a persocom looking back at her. "FUCK!", she gasped, touching her fingers to her face in disbelief.
Pale and panicky, she turned around to face the surreal scene of her friends standing around her.
They all looked so small.
They were her size.
Then her mind returned to the one she'd lost. She picked up the crumbled remains of Zin in her shaky hands, then carefully set them back down and started crying again. Kojima pulled her close, and she cried on him awhile.
"I... have a vacancy, if you need a place to stay, Kotoko", Ms. Hibiya offered. "That shack will be a bit small for you now."
"That's very generous, Ms. Hibiya", Kojima cut in. "But I'm hoping she'll accept a room in my home."
"You want to take me back, just like that?", Kotoko asked, "after the way I ran out on you..." Tears in her eyes, she looked over again at Zin, lying there dead on the table.
Kojima, under the false impression that Kotoko was regretting not just Zin's death but her recent adventures with him as well, offered what he thought were some consoling words.
"Well, its not like you went out and had a baby with him or anything..."
Kotoko suddenly pulled herself from Kojima's grasp, her eyes wide, a distressed look on her face. "SORA!", she yelped, as she started looking around the room, frantically searching for...
"Did anyone see a mini-CPU module?!", she asked loudly, panic on her face. "At the crash site, about this big, thick yellow foam padding on the corners!" She made hand gestures to indicate the module's size and shape.
Everyone was looking at each other, shaking their heads. "All we came back with were you and Zin", Chi told her. Kotoko let out a plaintive squeak, and ran screaming out of the room, bouncing clumsily off the door frame as she went.
The others ran after her, to find her stumbling her way outside. "I have to get back to the crash site!", she yelled, as she took off down the street.
Chi and Freya kept up with her, while Yuzuki hung back with the slower-footed humans. And soon, Kotoko was back at the crash site on her hands and knees, sifting through the wreckage as though her very life depended on it.
There it was, inside the parachute, a small metal box with foam padding on the corners. It looked like a short fat USB stick. Kotoko picked it up, and inspected it for damage. Then she started grabbing at her own ears. "How do you open the data port on this antiquated thing?!", she shouted to no one in particular.
Chi reached for Kotoko's ear. "I saw Mom pull here", she explained as she pulled a small latch, and with a metallic "clink", Kotoko's left ear hinged open.
Fumbling for the data port, Kotoko plugged the little CPU module in. What followed was a series of diagnostic beeps, as blobs of light traveled across Kotoko's eyes.
"She's been like that for three minutes", Chi explained to the humans who had just arrived to find Kotoko standing there staring blankly into space, a small padded device visible inside her left ear.
Finally, Kotoko's blank expression turned into one of relief. "Sora's okay!", she exclaimed, breathing a huge sigh, hugging everyone around her.
"You mind telling us what 'Sora' is?", Kojima asked.
"Not 'WHAT'," Kotoko corrected him, "'WHO'. Sora's my daughter!"
"Your... daughter?", everyone asked at once, staring in surprise.
"And she's in that little tiny box?", Chi added.
Kotoko nodded in confirmation. "Zin and I had started building a persocom up there on the roof. All we have so far is the CPU module, and we had been programming her with operating system code from the both of us."
She noticed that her large data port cover had enough room under it to close with Sora still inside, and proceeded to close it. "Ah... I can just leave her connected until her OS is complete."
And they all headed back to Ms. Hibiya's lab. Soon, Kotoko would be back at Kojima's, designing a body to bolt Sora's CPU module into.
But first, Kotoko would need time to grieve, and a chance to properly say goodbye to the little mobile persocom who had been the love of her life.
Next chapter:
A funeral for Zin.
Now that Kotoko is back, Kojima has little time left for Freya.
Oh, and in case anyone hasn't noticed: Kotoko is pregnant!