Track 26: Biohazard

Line after line of green-on-black text scrolled by on the screen, too fast for anyone to read. Kotoko lay on the desk in front of it, motionless. A cable snaked out of one of the bells on her head and into Sumomo, who was in turn connected to the monitor. Kojima sat in front of her, perched on the very edge of his seat, staring at the text. A half-drunk can of redbull was set next to the two persocoms, its remaining contents completely ignored for the moment. Hideki refused to stop hovering over them, his head mere inches above Kojima's.

The group was crowded into one of Club Mercer's private rooms, and with the addition of Kojima, there was barely enough room to walk around. Minoru and Yuzuki were relegated to standing in the far corners. Chi was gripping Hideki's arm, her concern obvious. Whether she was worried about him, Kotoko, or both, the firm pressure of her grip was comforting.

Without taking his eyes off of the screen, Kojima took a sip from his redbull. The young man had been Irate at first when they called him, though he had agreed to help when he found out why they had. When he arrived, he had sprung into action without even asking any questions, rented one of the rooms and used Sumomo to run a hardware scan. Having him here was another comfort. He had built Kotoko with his own hands, so he should be able to repair her as well.

Finally, the endless column of text stopped scrolling, leaving a final diagnostic report and a blinking cursor on the bottom of the screen.

Hideki was the first to speak. "What happened to her?"

Kojima adjusted his glasses. "Thermal overload. Her system automatically shut down to prevent damage, though it looks like her RAM was already affected."

"What caused it?" Minoru asked.

Kojima chugged the rest his can of redbull, crushing it flat between his hands and casually tossing it in the trashcan beneath the counter. "Two of her hard drives failed, and reconstruction lead to too much CPU overhead."

Hideki felt vertigo when he heard that. Hard drive failure. Just like Hiro's wife. Slowly losing her memories, one by one, until nothing was left. He found it hard to swallow. "Does that mean that she's—"

Kojima waved him down. "Don't get your panties in a twist, I said two of her drives failed. She boots from a RAID-6 array, it can handle that much. Her data's recoverable, or rather reconstructable thanks to parity."

"Not that I'm not grateful for it, but isn't that a little excessive?" Minoru asked. "Why would you put that in a home system?"

Kojima smiled. "Because I can!"

"but it was a hard drive problem?" Hideki asked. "It seemed to come on so suddenly."

"Tell me, has Kotoko been slower to respond lately?" Kojima asked. "Having a hard time remembering things?"

Hideki scratched his cheek in thought. "Come to think of it, yeah. Then again, she's been working on this investigation with us a lot, and there were other things she was working on.

Kojima shook his head desparigingly. "Persocoms don't get just temporarily stressed like that, Motosuwa. If they start running slower, you need to find out what's causing the problem and fix it. At best it's a memory leak and you should consider rebooting them. At worst, it's a serious hardware fault that you need to address right away."

Hideki felt a twinge of guilt. At least part of this was his fault. If only Hideki had known more about persocoms, if he understood more about how they operated, perhaps this would not have happened. Persocoms were so similar to humans in so many ways that Hideki too often forgot that they were so fundamentally different. They had different needs, and had to deal with different sorts of problems.

"So some of her data was lost?" he asked.

Kojima shrugged. "Sort of. About a quarter of her data was 'lost' some time ago, whenever her first drive failed. All this time she's been reconstructing the missing portion from parity files on the other disks. That's probably what caused the second failure, actually. All of the extra data seek commands stressed her other drives and her CPU. He smirked. "Don't worry, your blackmail on me is safe."

"Thanks to this raid-six sort of thing," Hideki concluded.

"That's right," Kojima replied. He sighed. "Three years without backing her up, or even running a hardware scan, really it's surprising she ran as long as she did. You could at least make some effort to keep your persocoms maintained."

Hideki felt a twinge of anger. The criticism was all too true, but it was more than that. "Yeah, if I had known the warning signs, I might have been able to do something before this happened. But in a way it's your fault too."

Kojima looked completely confused. "Me, what did I do?"

"Kotoko misses you," Hideki explained. "She's been looking up processors and motherboard and all sort of things because she knew she'd lost your interest, that she was going to become obsolete unless she had upgrades I couldn't afford and you probably wouldn't pay for! I'll bet she wanted to crash!" Hideki was trying his best not to shout.

the persocom builder waved him down. "Calm down, will you? Persocoms don't fail like that."

"Freya did. He replied.

Kojima sat in stunned silence, clearly not knowing what to say.

"None of us were paying enough attention to her," Minoru interjected. "I should have realized that she was having serious problems, but I was too focused on the investigation."

"Don't be too harsh with yourself, Lord Minoru," Yuzuki consoled, "I too failed to recognize her situation, despite being aware of the warning signs."

Kojima unplugged Kotoko from Sumomo. "We should repair her as soon as possible anyway. RAID-6 tolerates two drive failures, but if one more goes then the whole thing's shot. It might also be a good idea to back up all of her data, just in case something goes wrong. We'll probably want to swap out her processors too, and the RAM sticks definitely need replacing.

"If we find replacements for everything which failed, she'll be back to normal, right?" Hideki replied. "We can just buy replacement parts?"

He grimaced. "Slight problem with that. They're rare discontinued parts and, ah, I honestly don't know if they were entirely legal."

Minoru glared at him. "Go on."

"I purchased them from Undertaker way back. I couldn't do this much miniaturization on her without a little bit of help, so I had him track down a few things. I just have no idea where he sourced them from is all."

Hideki turned to Minoru. "I don't like the idea of using Undertaker's services more than we need to."

"I don't like it either," the younger man replied. "I hate the idea of Undertaker profiting from our misfortune." He sighed. "But we're a little pressed for time right now. Kotoko was helping us with our investigations, and she had just discovered something. We still need to track down a few things to finish our other project anyway. If he can find the parts—legally find them, then Undertaker seems our best bet right now."

"I'll talk to him," Kojima offered. "I know exactly what we'll need anyway."

"I'll go too," Hideki added

"Me too!" Chi cut in.

"That might not be such a good idea," Kojima replied, "Undertaker's bound to take interest, and unless you want to put bars on your window and an extra deadbolt on your door, you really should stay here with Kokubunji."

"But I want to go with Hideki!" she declared.

"What's wrong with her going with us?" Hideki asked.

"Do you really think it's a good idea to let him know you have such a rare and valuable persocom in perfect working order?" Kojima laughed. "If you thought I was a kidnapping asshole, what do you think Undertaker would do?"

Hideki looked over to Chi. She looked so sad, as if the idea of being away from him caused her physical pain. He felt guilty, it felt like he was betraying his promise to Chi, but he thought Kojima had a point. Taking her with them to the parts dealer was just asking for trouble. He had a promised to go forward together, no matter where it took them, but that did not mean he was going to put Chi at unnecessary risk.

Yuzuki put her hand on Chi's shoulder. "It'll be alright, Chi. As soon as they find the right parts for Kotoko, they'll be right back. It shouldn't take them more than two hours."

"Even less if he has them on hand," Kojima offered. "You never know with that guy."

Suddenly, without caring that the others were watching, he embraced Chi. She was warm against him, her head resting comfortably against his chest.

She gripped his arm. "Hideki…"

"it's ok," he said. "I want to go together too, but we have to do what the others think is best. We're all worried about Kotoko right now, and it means we have to talk to someone that would try to kidnap you. I'll be right back, and we can spend the rest of the evening together."

She looked into his eyes, an earnest, honest sense of worry etched into her face. "Promise?"

"I promise," he replied.

Chi gripped his arm. "Be careful."

Hideki nodded. "I will."

"We'll head back to our house and start backing up Kotoko's data," Minoru announced. "Meanwhile, you two track down Undertaker and get what we need.

Yuzuki cradled the miniature persocom in her arms, gently supporting the miniature persocom's head with her hand. "It'll all be alright," she cooed, more to the crashed persocom than to anyone else. "Everything will be fixed soon."

Half an hour later, Hideki and Minoru found themselves passing through a gap in a chain-link fence, the parts dealer leading the way. It had not taken long for them to explain what they needed, and from there they had traveled another thirty minutes by train to a large junkyard.

Beyond the fence, Hideki was shocked and sickened by what he saw. Hundreds of persocoms lay half-buried. The artificial skin of some had peeled or shredded away, laying bare their slowly rusting frames. Some were standing up, frozen in place, like discarded mannequins. Others had been completely disarticulated, wires and fragments of metal frame sticking out of the packed earth beneath their feet. A scattering of wires and sharp steel fragments littered the ground, making it difficult to walk. It was horrible, yet strangely fascinating, something which looked so human, just thrown away like any other broken appliance.

What intrigued him most, however, was his companion's reactions. Kojima seemed completely calm and detached, though he was far, far quieter than normal. His usual wry smile was gone, replaced with a blank look. Undertaker was whistling cheerfully to himself, practically skipping along.

"Welcome to the scrapyard kiddies!" the parts dealer declared.

"This is where we found RAM sticks for when I was building Mariko, isn't it?" Kojima commented.

Undertaker nodded. "Good memory. This is one of my better salvage grounds. Well one of the better legal ones. Should be able to find everything on that little list of yours."

Hideki stepped on something soft, then jumped back when he realized it was the severed hand of a Persocom. Before he could stop himself, he cried out with surprise.

"Calm down," Undertaker said, "I can't have you freaking out on me while I'm trying to work here."

He gulped, trying to regain some semblance of calm. "It feels like we're climbing a mound of dead bodies."

The parts dealer shot a look to Kojima. "Your friend gets squeamish about machines."

Kojima shrugged, giving a forced show of unconcern which did not entirely fool Hideki. "Hey, nobody's perfect."

"I'm sorry!" Hideki snapped. "They just look so much like people."

Undertaker simply chuckled and began to climb the mound of derelict persocoms.

Kojima sidled closer to Hideki, speaking in a low voice so only Hideki could hear. "If it makes you feel any better, these ones were never activated, they don't have any data but their OSes and factory pre-installs. It's an E-waste dump for surplus stock."

Hideki muttered back. "It's still really creepy."

"Yeah, it really is," he admitted. "But we need what Undertaker can find here."

"Damned waste," the parts dealer commented, "They made them just to junk them because they ran out of warehouse space. There's millions of yen's worth of tech here alone, and it's all just rusting away. If I was in charge, they would have been disassembled for replacement parts the instant their model went off sale."

Hideki tried to focus his mind anywhere else but on his surroundings. "Let's get what we came for, and get out of here as soon as we can."

Kojima and Hideki followed Undertaker up the mound. With an uncharacteristic patience, Kojima explained exactly what he needed to look for. Keeping his footing was difficult, and sorting through the pile made the broken persocoms shift dangerously. He breathed a sigh of relief every time the shifting stopped.

Suddenly, a limbless torso slid from the pile, tumbling toward them with a loud clatter. Hideki and Kojima scampered out of the way, but Undertaker was just a second too late. One of the frame's edges struck the parts dealer's leg, its jagged edge cutting through his pants and into the flesh beneath. It continued bouncing for a dozen feet before coming to rest with a final crash.

The parts dealer looked down casually to where the frame had sliced through. His only reaction was "Ah hell!"

Hideki's eyes went wide as he saw the wound. Beneath the torn cloth and skin of the man's leg was a mess of plastic, wires, and chrome-plated steel. He had seen the same thing before, when Dr. Suzuhara had repaired Flower.

"Y-you're a persocom" he stammered.

Undertaker pulled out a length of string and began lashing the artificial skin back in place. "Cyborg actually. Three of my major organs are artificial, including my heart and liver. So are my legs and one of my eyes."

Hideki was still trying to process the new information. "Why? How?"

"Brain-machine interfaces have existed since before persocoms," he explained, "It was the basis for Angelic Layer, as a matter of fact. As to why, well, haven't you ever wanted to have thermal vision? Run a mile in 2 minutes? Drink as much as you want without any consequence?"

Hideki thought about it for a moment, but could not get over his sense of disgust at the idea. He was certain now of one thing: Undertaker was insane, and dangerously so. The man had taken something which was supposed to help people, prosthetic limbs and organs, and twisted them to his own uses. His own body meant nothing to him, just another piece of machinery to upgrade.

They returned to their work, sifting through the pile. Over the course of the next fifteen minutes, they acquired a small bag full of chips, including RAM sticks, two credit card-sized boards, and a pair of laptop hard drives. Hideki was surprised how small these last two were; each was barely larger than a postage stamp, and a few millimeters thick. It was hard to believe that all of Kotoko's data, everything that made her who she was, was stored on four—now two—disks just like them.

As Undertaker crested the top of the pile, he looked out across the scrapyard. As something caught his attention, he commented, "Forgot they were doing a videodrome stream today."

It took Hideki a moment to realize what he was talking about. Hardware destruction. He was still several feet below Undertaker, but he peeked over the summit, and immediately regretted his decision. A group of six or seven people, all carrying baseball bats, stood in a ring around a persocom. set up on a tripod a short distance away was a video camera.

Kojima had not even looked over the edge, but noticed Hideki's expression. "Some people have a sick idea of entertainment."

"They're a bunch of assholes that blame Persocoms for why they can't find a job." Undertaker shrugged. "Really, the reason they're out of work is that they do nothing but get high and watch Eraserhead."

Hideki turned away. He did not want to see any more. He wanted to be done and to leave the junkyard. Minoru had been right: there were things going on in the Underworld that he did not want to know about. He had reached his limit as to how far he was willing to go. He wished he had not come. Trying to keep his voice from quavering, he asked, "How much more is on the list?"