This chapter is really long, even if you disregard my long babbling at the end. The chapter itself is about 1.5 times the length of a normal chapter.
Tsukiya takes the remote and walks towards the surveillance room. "Well then," she says when she turns to him who looks as if he doesn't know what to do, and then to the two original bodies which have been sleeping for a good amount of time, "there's not much time left, it's not too late if you want to beg for mercy." She stands at the door and lets out a smile of satisfaction. It seems that she had anticipated his choice very early in the game, so she doesn't stay for too long. She takes a look at the time left on the screen of the remote and then walks behind those two glass doors.
As time flies away every second, multiple scenes which occurred over the days repeatedly play in his brain like a movie. When they first found out about this body being a combination of two people, it was so hard for them to believe it, yet now when realizing that he himself isn't human, he accepts the fact so easily.
When they stare at those two wires through his eyes so anxiously, on the other hand she awaits for how things come out to be in an extraordinary calm manner, as if those doors separate them into two completely different worlds.
Life or death all depends on that one moment. Maybe there's still some chance that it'll work out if the risk is taken, at least that's what they think. So, he reaches for that black wire with the hand that's not occupied, and no longer thinks of the existence of the white wire. With those scissors in hand, he's in charge of the ever repeating fate.
In the cold air, the crisp sound of glass resonates. Sparks of fire splatter in all sorts of directions. Oh so dazzling, so beautiful, so catching to the eyes like jewelry. Layers of smoke linger around.
It's impossible for projects which disobey her to end up with a pleasant fate, especially this kind that doesn't even know to kneel and bow down to beg for mercy.
He just lies there without moving, and to coat the surface of his body which is already covered by many wounds is a layer of dust. The face must already be an unappealing blur of bloody flesh by this point. Only that chip in the brain which is connected to the main system in the clinic and that artificial heart are worth the trouble to retrieve.
Smoke gradually dissipates, yet the beeping sound is like a magical curse which cannot vanish from the ears.
Tsukiya has her eyes opened up wide. "Impossible..." she cannot help but speak her mind as she's deeply shocked.
He didn't touch any of the wires. Behind the broken glass lies two uninjured people. And the timer on the bomb hasn't stopped yet.
Tsukiya turns to look at Kaito Kuroba, and then at her AI project. She starts kicking him uncontrollably without conserving any power, and all he does is moan a few times as he rolls on the ground. This time there's nothing else besides anger and hate, just plain violence. She has forgotten all intentions. The more she attempts to release her anger, the more anger simply accumulates within. She cannot be stopped.
They should have been sent on the path to the afterworld, leaving just a corpse of bloody flesh blur, and not have any chance to live anymore. Yet, even when it's time for death, they still had him use his magic skills on the tools to buy some time. What's the point of doing that anyway? What is it that he still persists? What's the reason that makes all of this worth the effort?
So annoying! Why would there be people so stupid to the point that they'd rather not die quick and easy with the snap of two fingers. Is this it, how they'd rather have things be?
Over and over again, he gets hit and collapses on the ground again. Even if he cannot get up, he still doesn't give up to fate. It should be time for this sort of sad life to end already.
With this kind of thought in mind, she steps on his right hand with one foot and lifts the other one up high. Then down it goes so turbulent as it brings a cold wind, sharp as a guillotine.
With a grieving utter, the skeleton below her feet creaks and grates. The warm skin and flesh being covered under blue fabric rips and separates to become of atypical shape. Blood cannot stop flowing as it stains the clothing red. That arm, unfortunately, is probably useless by now.
He has no way of struggling free, yet those eyes of hers still seem to signal extreme dissatisfaction. She's dissatisfied of that physical body almost being disabled, yet it still has a breath left. So inside, her anger still cannot be calmed. She still won't let it go.
Color gradually disappears before his eyes, yet those eyes are still as clear as before. That of which shows from the look in his eyes isn't the pain and desperation like imagined. He's always like this, always having the light and glory conceal the ugly and impure. Even now, he still manages to maintain a fake image of the virtuous, unwilling to unmask.
Even when that human skin which joins with the bones and muscles has already rotted, even when trapped within a non-human being, he still hasn't changed.
Snowflakes continuously appear on the screen, black and white start to take over his vision, and even his hearing starts to blur up. Some sound pops up from time to time. There appears to be directions given and commands. Although he's not too sure of how many people came, he's very sure that the two leaders are dressed in black. Must be the first party—
Under the purplish-gray sky, there's a black desolated grassland. On that grassland, there's just a kid who's continuously pushing wild grasses aside until he finds a road that's truly flat. On the edges and corners of this road, one can see some bumps and hollows, quite some imperfections. Seeing this, he just laughs a little and continues to walks, until the sky turns to marine blue and that sun in the sky turns to a dazzling gem emitting an aquamarine glimmer. Then he came to an intersection. Two roads of black and white are placed before the kid along with a sign that has two blood red words pointing two directions which read good and evil.
He doesn't bother to consider the words written in blood. As if feeling that walking on a flat road serves no interest to him, he decides to choose neither and thus just walks straight forward. Smoke covers his eyes, and cold air approaches from all directions. Silver white moonlight opens up layers of haze, and the chains on his feet gradually split into pieces. Like snow encountering spring, everything in the environment turns into clear water. He floats in the ocean, only to see something being separated from his body, a black silhouette, by some mysterious power. He himself happens to be white from head to toe in contrast.
Fiery red light as brilliant as a bright pearl miraculously lives and attracts the white-clothed pandora-gem seeker. When that person disappears, he also somehow uncontrollably gets attracted by some sort of mysterious power and wants to get closer to it so that he can touch that light. Before his fingertips could reach, the next moment that bright pearl cracks open. The smell of rusted iron accompanies fresh blood as it flows out and gets washed away by sea water. In that little bit of red left over he sees infinite strands of strings of destiny which link to everyone, including himself and that devil behind the psychological consultant mask—
The first thing that Shinichi Kudo notices upon waking up is the crisp "tick-tock" sound which travels into his ears. He immediately opens his eyes up wide and looks around. Not until he sees that clock on the wall does he let out a sigh of relief. Sizable sweat drops still cling on his face. He looks at himself in the mirror, and everything's the same as usual. There's also no existence of another person's voice in his mind to disrupt his train of thought. In the large Kudo Residence, all that's left is the sound of his footsteps as he walks around, the snoring sound of Agasa-hakase which happens to get more and more similar to thunder, and the beautiful tweeting sound of birds outside.
The long night has ended. The light of the early morning is still as bright as ever; it travels through glass and through the window of one's heart, finally coming to warm the heart.
After checking the date and time, he changes into clean dry clothes and steps into the sunlight, only to see a black car driving towards him from faraway and that an old friend has come.
"Kudo-san, how's your recovery?"
"Fairly well," says Kudo as a smile appears on his face, "Futoumiya-san, what brings you here today?" He takes a spin on the topic and goes for business right away.
"Well then, pardon me for taking some of your time," says Futoumiya as he pats Kudo's shoulder and then walks into the grounds of the Kudo Residence, "has to do with your request." He only hints at it with a few words.
A cold wind comes into the Kudo Residence, which reminds Kudo of the days at Suzukawa's lab and for the most part at Tsukiya's Psychological Consultation Clinic.
Hakase who has already awaken helps brew a pot of tea and then silently sits to the side.
There's no longer any bruises on that handsome face from days ago. This time with their meeting, Futoumiya no longer has that smile on his face. Even though the person in front of him still has a poker face on, but at least he doesn't put on an act. To Kudo, this actually makes him feel that getting along is much easier.
"Actually," he says, appearing really sincere, "we've always been looking for a justifiable chance to deal with Tsukiya." He lifts his head up to seek for eye contact, while Kudo just stirs his tea very calmly. The spoon in his hand collides with the side of the cup from time to time and makes a crisp noise.
"Gotcha," says Kudo who maintains a smile, although from what Futoumiya says he figures that he was definitely tricked by him, "in order to fool the enemy, one must first fool their companion." The tone of this sentence is rather light, as if he's telling a joke. "I sure get it."
After all, there's no such thing as coincidence in this world; all there is happens to be the detailed planning of human and that of which results from what humans think about deep inside.
Futoumiya has already seen Kaito Kuroba before this. He's very clear of the fact that they're not trapped inside one body now, yet somehow he feels as if quite some time passed by that they now possess certain traits of one another.
"The mute Mai happens to be one out of the earliest batch of artificial intelligence humans that Tsukiya created. Thus, its intelligence level does not match that of later ones. In fact, it's closer to a robot."
"It's that girl," Hakase suddenly interrupts, "a few days ago she came here, and it seemed as if she wanted to kill people."
"If I recall correctly," before Kudo could respond, Futoumiya answers, "that day, Kudo-okusan came home just in time and helped to defeat Mai."
"Right, and we didn't tell her the specifics because we didn't want her to worry. She's out shopping for groceries now with Ai-chan."
And then it suddenly quiets down.
"Speaking of which, it scared the hell out of me," Hakase says and then takes a sip of tea, "that the child could actually speak."
"Right, the saying that she's a mute is just to cover up the fatal flaw to Mai being an AI human."
"I sweat cold sweat just thinking back to that situation. At first, it was just that I couldn't hear any emotion in her voice, but then when she woke up after getting knocked out, that voice..." Towards the end, he feels that his throat is a little sore, so he gulps down a little bit of water, "it was like it came from a machine, an actual machine."
After hearing Hakase's statement, Shinichi Kudo just silently shuts his eyes. The scene with him and Kaito Kuroba facing against Saiesu Tsukiya still remains clear and distinct in his mind. Although she's different from Mai, but when her true look got exposed, he felt as if he was facing a real devil and not human. Those wounds which supposedly belonged to an artificial body have deeply cut into his soul, never to heal.
When he opens up his eyes, Futoumiya starts to tell the story of AI-san—
It slowly opens its eyes, only to see that there's no one else in the room besides it. The cool lighting shines upon its face which sort of has a hue of human skin. Now, its mind is clearer than ever without all sorts of thoughts being mixed together. The injuries which it once had also miraculously disappeared, as if that battle never happened. The only excess thing now, are chains that somehow reassures it.
Not long afterwards, Futoumiya who saw that it woke up from the camera walks, pulls a chair over, and seats himself down in front of it.
"You're...Futoumiya-san." The tone of that voice is very ice cold, perhaps one may even call it monotone. Behind the human voice disguise, one could kind of get at its mechanical nature.
"Would you mind if I address you as AI-san?"
"Why no, no I would not mind at all." It manages to put a smile on.
First of all, it searched for human manners in its mind, retrieved memory related to normal day communication from some corner of its database, and then sent out a command to control facial muscles from its brain. Within this period of time, many complicated codes instantly went past the screen of the remote in Futoumiya's hand. As for on the surface, the reaction time that it used, was 0.3 sec., with is the average human reaction time.
"Well then, AI-san, I would like to invite you to join our organization." With that, he waits a while for it to respond. "Sorry, was I too straightforward?" he adds on a few seconds later.
It's able to analyze and reach the conclusion that although Futoumiya is just representing Tahou by throwing this invitation out to it, he's not being perfunctory. In fact, he's very sincere. After all, its ability in all aspects is a copy of Shinichi Kudo and Kaito Kuroba. On top of that, it has an individual smart learning system on its own.
By using the system's own function to check the time, it's very clear of the fact that a full twenty-four hours has passed since it fell unconscious. Within this twenty-four hours, those injuries could not have recovered to this degree, which means that Tahou has done stuff to it and fixed everything for it including its internal system. Of course, they must have examined its internal system as well, not to mention using some other smart system to connect with its consciousness and let it be able to regain consciousness and awaken. Everything that it thinks of and analyzes now must be all recorded by them.
Except, none of this matters to it.
Futoumiya still puts on a poker face as he observes AI-san with great interest along with the misery and frustration that it uncontrollably shows.
"As an artificial intelligence human, I'm growing every single day by many times the speed of regular human," it says and then bites its lower lip a little. "Someday in the future, I may become too powerful and threaten mankind," it says as it stares directly at Futoumiya's eyes, "won't I?"
He carefully takes a look at it. It seems like it's at the point of breakdown where a little tremble is actually added to that plain tone, and it appears that there's a slight bit of terror in its eyes.
"Maybe, but this doesn't mean that you definitely will."
It knows that Futoumiya's slight hesitation before answering isn't just because he had to formulate his thoughts into words, so it feels even more empty on the inside and it hates itself even more.
Yet this situation is a little beyond his expectations. It seems that it may have self-initiated a type of human emotions and feelings learning program.
"I'm..." it seems a little moved emotionally, "the work of a villain."
Futoumiya doesn't say anything. He just listens to what AI-san has to say and silently observes it who is closer to human much more than ever before.
"No matter how hard I learn from human, of how to be a lifeform made from flesh, in the end the purpose of my creation is to help the villain win control over mankind..."
Maybe he should say something now, but he knows that whatever he says cannot beat the harsh reality coming out of its mouth.
It must really be afraid that it'll get out of control. It doesn't know what path to take and what to do. So then does an organization which doesn't take clear stance, does an organization that lends a hand out to stop things only in the situation that large-scale evil is done, does an organization that one can never actually get away from even when one quits actually suit it?
"Tahou isn't an organization that takes clear positions between good and evil."
Maybe it's because he's starting to feel empathetic towards it. A sentence that seems like just a statement of fact, happens to also come from his heart. After pausing for a few seconds, he continues: "But we can assign you to a research group that can help benefit mankind according to your needs, and we will always monitor your thinking system to ensure that no problems arise."
"Please let me die, I should not and I no longer have any reason to live on this world," AI says with no more trembling in its voice, as if it already made its mind up. "Let me die, this is the only thing that I can do for mankind." Sincerity shows in those eyes.
"Understood." He doesn't try to persuade it at all, he just gets up and leaves.
Because following its wish, is the most basic respect that they can pay to it—
"What about the other AI?" Kudo's voice returns to the calm tone that it usually is.
"Tsukiya's testimony wasn't free." With Futoumiya saying this, the entire atmosphere falls into a deathening silence. "For her to be willing to tell us the complete info of other AI lifeforms, including the research and experimentation process, there was one single condition that had to be met. That is, she wanted to die, and she wanted them, her projects, to die with her as well."
Kudo doesn't say anything, until Futoumiya gets ready to leave.
"Futoumiya-san, please say hello to Mutou-san for me. Last time when we met at the psychological consultation clinic, we were too caught up with more important business that there wasn't any time for us to talk a little like in the olden days."
When Hakase first hears this name, he doesn't remember who it is, until Futoumiya turns around and smiles that creepy mysterious smile of his just like when they first met eleven years ago. "Thanks for Kudo-san's message at the time, I'll remember to tell him."
"Why no, really, it was Mutou-san who stopped me from going to the lab at UTokyo and disguise as Mai. All I did was just tell him that you didn't come."
Kudo still remembers, when he found out that Futoumiya already found the lab at the time, the first thing that popped up wasn't surprise but rather a complicated feeling.
Futoumiya doesn't bother to provide an explanation, instead he just smiles and nods his head before driving away.
Many days have passed since then. The organization that had always gone against Kaitou Kid got destroyed, and Miai who happens to actually be a high-ranking member of the organization got arrested as well.
This day, Shinichi Kudo fell asleep in front of a stack of info like always, and then wakes up again some time later. Kaito Kuroba works his favorite jewelry appraisal job like always as well as he immerses himself in the dazzling beauty of jewelry.
The city night is still noisy. Many colorful lights overlap on the street. Kaito Kuroba just finished attending a jewelry exhibition. Because he drank a little wine, he decides to walk home while also clearing up his mind a little by breathing in some fresh air. It may be because he's having illusions due to being under the influence of alcohol, but he seems to see a familiar figure walking towards him. The sound of car horns is hurting his ears. Hazy moonlight elongs their shadows.
At that one moment, two pairs of eyes meet up and they brush pass each other. Everything just seems like extremely long dreams which overlap at some point and then go their separate ways.
Super long babbling from me:
(: 3) All parts of the epilogue will be uploaded as I finish translating them, currently still have 3 parts to translate. It's mostly first-person from our mad scientist's perspective in terms of the first 4 parts and it kinda just goes through her life, how she got to the point she did and everything. The 5th part is actually completely written in third-person and is mainly about others. I don't ask anyone to like our antagonist here, I know I definitely don't all that much considering what she did to people, but I would like to think that readers may change opinion of her a little bit and feel that you know and understand her better.
Anyhow first of all, I want to thank everyone who was able to make it to here, because I honestly did mostly direct translation and some sentences and details don't come out as good as they would've been if this novel was written in English from scratch. Although it may not have been evident, generally speaking my English writing proficiency is better than Chinese, but as many things are contradictory, my passion for writing doesn't really lie with English.
There are many sentence structures and literary usages that are very different between the two languages, so with certain things I decided to abandon direct translation and go with whatever holds about the same meaning. And, uh, well as you see, this is the result. Better versions, hopefully, will come out in the future when I make more significant edits to the whole story.
Despite the fact that mystery's pretty frustrating to write, it does happen to be one of my favorite genres. One of my biggest joys which many of you may find really annoying, happens to be incorporating factors that will drive my readers nuts and make them find the plot or some aspect unpredictable, especially with mystery.
And I'm pretty sure that unless someone who already read this spoiled it to you or something like that, you were only likely to guess things like them two being in one body, Futoumiya setting things up on purpose, Tsukiya being the biggest villain at the end, maybe even our "main character" being non-human, etc.; not the fact that our "main character" is actually an AI lifeform and not a physical combination of two people until you got to read it, cause if you did then we'd have to discuss why you've been reading my mind.
Enough of blah blah blah that many of you probably don't care enough to read. I would guess that the majority of you still don't quite understand many of the settings, well then, feel free to ask if you've got anymore unanswered questions. I'm just gonna go ahead and talk about the "fusion" of Shinichi and Kaito, how it actually works and stuff.
First of all, they were never actually physically fused together like I said in the paragraph before the last paragraph, and that so-called human-fusing machine isn't an actually fusing-machine. It's just used to store their original bodies and get their brains connected with the main system at the clinic and supposedly the lab at UTokyo for monitoring purpose. That thing's essentially the same structure with The Dream Exploring Machine despite appearances being different.
As for the whole time Shinichi and Kaito were unconscious, their brain waves were sent to the chip in the clone's brain through the main system, and they temporarily "occupied" this body.
This clone, happens to be AI-san.
Basically, the body itself is an actual human body made from flesh, except it wasn't born naturally but rather cloned into the image of Shinichi/Kaito. If you're wondering by any chance, no, AI lifeforms are not exact clones of any existing person but pretty much all of them are products of genetic engineering, meaning their body parts are most likely clones of others—or not, that's for me to think through in more detail in the future although my scientific knowledge most likely won't accumulate much more than now.
Anyhow, back to the main point, scientists will be scientists, humans will be humans, Suzukawa and Tsukiya obviously wouldn't let their experimental products that they worked so hard on be able to roam wild and free all they want. So the difference between the AI lifeforms and normal people in this novel, happens to be that there's a chip in their brain, and the only organ they have that's really more of a machine is the heart.
Under these conditions, in order for the AIs to functions, they must have a main system that they're connected to. They who do not possess human hearts, when not influenced by the brain waves of others as in actual humans, supposedly cannot feel real human emotions and feelings.
AI-san is a later project, and yeah most likely the last I would say. In the beginning he often passes out, that's because Suzukawa and Tsukiya never used real living people to experiment the thing with "connecting" two brains.
At first his body wasn't all that used to it, not to mention Shinichi and Kaito and especially Shinichi at the point were in rather feeble physical conditions with the bodies.
We really should give our mad scientists some acknowledgement though, at first Haibara didn't get that AI-san wasn't human.
It's mainly because they made his DNA sequencing very similar to Shinichi and Kaito, as in what it might've been if they were actually fused together. The thing with a face, pretty easy to get one that looks the same, but man with DNA, phew.
So then why would Haibara have a way to figure out that he's not human? That's because there's a specific gene that doesn't exist in nature, and neither is it one as the result of mutation, at least not one that she could find a record for.
That is to say, all of the above comes from my wild imagination, so don't be so nit-picky with details. This brain contains absolutely zero advanced knowledge of genomics and AI and other scientific stuff. The more important thing that Haibara realized is the fact that as a "fusion", he still had two separate brain waves controlling one brain and one body.
I mean so yeah, it's pretty easy to believe that this guy didn't develop a second personality or something since his rationale still exists and he's able to analyze normally. Not to mention them two being able to communicate directly and analyzing with their own point of views simultaneously. So with this abnormal situation, Haibara had to think outside the box, although this was done mostly for my own convenience.
Here's a basic summary in case I confused someone even more: Shinichi and Kaito's brain waves got connected to AI-san's brain, thus they were able to occupy and control his body while their own bodies were asleep for this whole time.
Let's see, what else is there that I can babble about…
Oh yeah, I somehow decided to use mostly last names to refer to Shinichi and Kaito in this novel, probably kinda as a thing to show that they're no longer children but true active members of society, adults who have to wear a mask, conceal stuff, and learn to think in certain ways and take certain paths even if they get lost sometimes like they did when they were young. Another thing is that, it shows a sense of unfamiliarity and more serious formality between the two and during the whole scenario.
Finally, something that's related to this novel but really really miscellaneous: this novel is the direct product of jealousy between good ol' friends.
What? I know, crazy right?
Basically, my good ol' friend YY requested me to write something for her as a birthday gift in 2016. So I did, and it ended up being a really short original piece that's seven thousand some characters total in length. I sent it to her, and she posted it to qzone, a social media site. My other friend LL saw it, got jealous, and said that she wanted a birthday gift as well that was no shorter in length and the quality cannot be any more worse than YY's.
Ok dude, technically speaking I stopped writing people birthday gifts years ago and only broke my own saying because me and YY are super best buds. Like, how could I turn her down?
Oh what the heck, you know what, I'll do it. You now owe me a birthday gift too.
So then I waited until like about a year later to actually think about what to write for her. She likes Kaishin so I was thinking of writing a few thousands, very short piece. Then I realized, I didn't know what to write. Some of you might want to slap me for saying this but I wasn't good with normal lovey-dovey stories, or more that I didn't wanted to write those. I don't have a particular interest in Kaishin, so I had no good idea in mind. I wanted something unique, something only I could come up with.
So yeah, probably have to incorporate something with them being on opposite sides. Like, have it be a few years from now and throw in some good cases.
Wait, but I don't wanna write the same old mystery-solving processes and make it a long novel.
Then voila, I thought "unique, unique, what is there", then "combination of Shinichi and Kaito in one" came to me.
Then throughout the process of just planning basic plot and detail since there was still school, some time later I thought that I could incorporate some more twists.
I got to just abandoning the original thought of writing Kaishin 'cause for me it's just better off to focus on plot rather than experiment how to incorporate it when I didn't really know how to. LL was fine with that so yeah.
Eventually I got to start writing the actual story with the start of last summer. And guess what, I finished before school started. Then I got the idea of an epilogue during the school year, and eventually got to finish the last part with the beginning of this summer.
: ) Yeah about my birthday gift, my friend LL had a really rough time with school cuz that's how China rolls. I mean she has more time than she ever did than the past few years now during this summer, but it seems like it might take at least a year or two for my birthday gift story to get completed. Friends aren't friends for no reason. That is, procrastination definitely flows in our blood.
Well, that's about it. I might get to translating and uploading my other piece which is a Shinran piece that's already finished some time in the future, but I want to get to really focus on the long piece that I still haven't finished and probably won't be for the time being.
I'll be starting a new short piece and then uploading the Chinese version during July, not here obviously. I may or may not get to translating and uploading the English version to FanFiction during next summer, but definitely some time in the future. It'll probably be mostly an autobiography piece of Fusae, with some hints of her love with Hakase, but I'll pretty much be keeping their relationship the same with the original so not something you should be looking forward to all that much if you like a sweet romance piece.
Last sentence finally, I know, hope you enjoyed the main story and look forward to the epilogue!