WINDSTORMchapter2
Bulma was slowly recovering .
The accident had shaken her more than she expected . Having seen everything in life as she had, she thought there was nothing left that could shock her. Well, she knew another thing now...never say never.
And never refuse help when you are injured, especially when it comes from a supernaturally strong son.Trunks' skills were more than heaven sent in those days. He could help her in almost every work that was physically demanding.
And for everything that required intellectual skills there was another assistant, newly come and welcome by Bulma with the deepest gratefulness: Amrita.
Bulma thought she should thank Kami directly (if there still had been one) when the young woman appeared one day at Capsule Corporation, asking to become her apprentice.
"Well" the older woman answered to the younger one "let me see what you can do. I can pass down to you a lot of things, my gal, but not everyone would be able to understand just a part of them. Let's do like this: I can keep you here as my apprentice for a month. You will try to do what I ask you and I will try to make you understand. But if I judge you not suitable for this work when that time is up you will have to give up . Do you think you can do it?"
The girl reflected for a while before answering.
"Yes, Bulma-sama."
Trunks smirked, unseen. Amrita was pretty enough not to look too intelligent at first sight. But after all,in her youth, so was his mother.
"I wonder how long she is going to last" he thoght to himself. Bulma would sure make her work very hard.
Trunks was a clever boy - very clever, indeed. Probably much more than average, as Bulma well knew : how could it be otherwise? He was her son!
But to inherit all of Bulma's knowledge that was not enough.
Bulma wasn't just clever: she was a genius.
And one with many faces, too: to learn all that she could teach, another genius
was needed.
And Amrita was that genius.
She had the most amazing intelligence that Bulma had ever seen, apart from herself, obviously!
Teach her anything, she would promptly learn, ask her anything, and she would gather informations from any available source, often via mysterious channels which she guarded jealously like secrets.
It was a pleasure to see her go around the lab, busy as usual, fetching this or that thing for Bulma, or work on the computer,whose secrets she seemed to understand like an open book. Tecnology was something like a game that she loved to play. But most of all she loved bionics and cybernetics,and had spent weeks
studying the project for Jinzouningen Juunanagou which Trunks had brought back from the past. "It's so fascinating" she used to say. "But unluckily I'm not very skilled at it."
Bulma would listen, and every now and then she would draw long sighs. "Unluckily" was not the adverb she would use in this case, not after all the panic the Jinzouningen had caused. But maybe Amrita was not so wrong; artificial humans could possibly come into usefulness some day. Especially now that reconstruction was setting off well, but there never were arms enough...it would be easy to build an android and give it the right programming so that it would help in the most fatiguing works. A pacific creature, made to serve human beings instead than to kill them. A completely artificial being with no will of its own, prompt and skilled when required but otherwise completely harmless. A very appealing fantasy...
"What's that?" asked a rather curious Trunks.
Amrita was working at Capsule Corporation, like she did every day.
But today she was not in the lab,which had become her reign soon after her arrival, but in a room at the second floor, sitting by the balcony door with a large sheet of paper unfolded in her lap.
"What are you doing here today? I thought you never came out of the lab. You've been here for almost six weeks now, and I never saw you anywhere else, whatever long was the period you spent in here."
"Well" started answering Amrita. "Seems that your mother is gaining a little trust in me now, and so she gave me the permission to use this room upstairs instead of always staying in the lab.The lab is in the subterranean floor,you know, and it is so gloomy. It made me sad to spend too much time there. I can't waste these gorgeous sunny days."
Oh, that was a wonderful reason. Trunks gave her right; it was the middle of May now, their first spring without the Jinzouningen, and never had the days seemed so beautiful .
It was like a rebirth, both of living beings and things.
New buildings were substituting ruins little by little, while the scattered debris were being taken away to be turned into new building materials.
On the once arid, devastated, blood-soaked land grass and vegetables had started growing again, the explosion craters in the ground slowly levelling like wounds closing on a tortured body.
Even people seemed to renew : those who used to stay hidden for fear of being killed now came out in the free air, eyes half-closing in the sun like some strange kind of creature that has been living too long in the underground.
The sunlight flooded the balcony and the large room, giving everything a warm orange golden tone like the walls were on fire. But if one went out, the sky was infinite, its colour so blue that one could barely stand to watch it.
Against that background even Amrita's hair was somehow diminished in its beauty.
It was light blue, just a little more tendent to lavender than the sky, 'straight as spaghetti' -as Bulma used to call it- and so flowing that she always had to keep it bound in complicate hairdos, that gave her a certain air of nobility.
As a matter of fact Amrita was not noble at all, being as she was the product of a broken home,like she had once admitted with Bulma. Broken not because of anything like divorce, but, as so often happened, because of one of her parents -her father in this case- being killed by the jinzouningen. But both Bulma and Trunks knew she didn't like talking about it, and carefully avoided the subject whenever the occasion presented.
Amrita seemed to be in a good mood that day. She turned towards Trunks showing him the papers she held. They were covered in numbers and drawings, diagrams and schemes, looking to him like the writing of a dead language that he,the frustrated archaeologist, could not decode.
"Are you talking about this? Oh, it's nothing special. It's just the project for a neural net" she explained,like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"A neural...?" he replied, puzzled. "Wait! I know what it is. It is a net made of circuits arranged so to imitate the way human brain neurons works, isn't it? And can you really turn it into a real thing? I read they're incredibly complicated to construct, not to talk about the physical space they occupy...and that just to simulate the brain of a simple living being..."
"I don't know" Amrita said thoughtfully. "I wouldn't dare to say that I want to emulate a human brain. Plus, we still don't have enough knowledges about the way a system like that can work. We still don't know wheter it works at all, actually. No- I'll settle for the brain of some small domestic mammal, like a dog or a cat." She paused, then drew in a long breath. "But for the moment, that's just a dream. Even if I could really build such a thing, I couldn't give it an appropriate body now. I've been studying the projects for Jinzouningen Juunanagou lately, but those ones are for a human body, and moreover they require an organic basis to support their main structures. If only your mother would help me...but for some unknown reason, she refuses. Just to build an artificial cat..."
"Don't blame her. You talk like you've been living on another planet for the last twenty years. Everyone has gone through so much because of artificial beings that I think they don't want to see another for the rest of their lives, even if it is a cat."
"I understand. But it's like refusing electric energy from a thermonuclear installment just because there has been the atomic bomb.What I mean is, there are some risks, but you still want electricity, don't you?"
"And what would be the advantages that justify your research? Electricity is an extremely useful thing, but it doesn't seem like for your robot cat it will be the same."
"There are a lot of things that you can do...but listen, let's change subject matter now. Don't you still know anything about that girl that almost killed your mother? Haven't you found her?"
"No.That troubles me a lot. I've been searching everywhere around the zone where the accident happened, but there was absolutely no trace of her. Obviously if she can go as fast as my mother reported she could as well have taken the world tour in the meanwhile.And I cannot scan the whole Earth for her."
"You're worried about your mother, aren't you?"
"Actually not that much. We have to remember that in the end that sort of out-of-place Powerpuff Girl dragged her out of the car and saved her life by taking her to the hospital. You should have seen the car chassis after she did that. The car was all shrivelled up like a dead snail and the doors wouldn't open, so it needed to be flame-cut to take even a pin out of it. She ripped it up in two with her bare hands I say. I swear I saw hand marks on the plate - they had remained impressed on it like it was butter."
"So if she wanted to kill my mother, she would have done it by now, I suppose.
No, that's not the main problem, the point is that we cannot let a creature so strong simply roam wherever she pleases and do whatever she wants. She could be dangerous, and how can we know she's not until we track her down? And where does she come from? Why didn't we ever hear about her? Why didn't she ever fight against Juunanagou and his sister?"
"She could have done it, just that we don't know. If we don't know anything about her so far, how can we know if she didn't do that too?"
"That's not a bad argument. But you see, I suppose something like that should have made the scene wherever it happened to occurr. Things like that don't go unnoticed."
Amrita stayed silent, made a move like she wanted to answer, then apparently gave up.She crossed her arms and bended her head, so that her chin rested on her collarbones now. She seemed immersed in deep thoughts.
"Listen" she said , starting all of a sudden. "Now I'll go down in the lab. Tell your mother I'm there if she comes looking for me."
And, saying so, she got up from her chair and hurried downstairs straight away.
Trunks watched her go.
He liked her, much the way he could like an older sister, because she was twenty-eight years old - which is, when Trunks was born she was already seven.
She was lucky, the boy thought,she knew what it meant to live in a world devoid of the jinzouningen, at least for the first years of her life. Him, he didn't have any memory at all of what the world was like before they came, but he figured out it had to be much better than it was now, for at least it wasn't full of gloomy ruins everywhere.
He knew something from his trips in the past, but that would never be the same.
Amrita, she had really lived there.
She was somehow crazy and wise at the same time. And she wore strange flowing clothes that made her look even more like a princess.
He figured out that she would be the right heir for his mother's knowledges.
That was a pity , because he often spent his days fantasising about bringing home a wife that would be his beloved mate and his mother's worhty daughter-in law at the same time.
That's what it was, a fantasy, he perfectly knew. Not only had human beings become a rather rare race on earth, but also he knew his character wouldn't allow him to mate easily.
He was tough, stubborn, a lover of solitude who didn't always enjoy human company, even that of his mother, and he thought he was bitter, for having lived in a world falling apart, for having lost his teacher and his best friend, for having seen people die every day.
Plus he didn't think that he could be a good father.His convinction was that there are things that you have to learn directly from seeing them happen.
Bulma was slowly recovering .
The accident had shaken her more than she expected . Having seen everything in life as she had, she thought there was nothing left that could shock her. Well, she knew another thing now...never say never.
And never refuse help when you are injured, especially when it comes from a supernaturally strong son.Trunks' skills were more than heaven sent in those days. He could help her in almost every work that was physically demanding.
And for everything that required intellectual skills there was another assistant, newly come and welcome by Bulma with the deepest gratefulness: Amrita.
Bulma thought she should thank Kami directly (if there still had been one) when the young woman appeared one day at Capsule Corporation, asking to become her apprentice.
"Well" the older woman answered to the younger one "let me see what you can do. I can pass down to you a lot of things, my gal, but not everyone would be able to understand just a part of them. Let's do like this: I can keep you here as my apprentice for a month. You will try to do what I ask you and I will try to make you understand. But if I judge you not suitable for this work when that time is up you will have to give up . Do you think you can do it?"
The girl reflected for a while before answering.
"Yes, Bulma-sama."
Trunks smirked, unseen. Amrita was pretty enough not to look too intelligent at first sight. But after all,in her youth, so was his mother.
"I wonder how long she is going to last" he thoght to himself. Bulma would sure make her work very hard.
Trunks was a clever boy - very clever, indeed. Probably much more than average, as Bulma well knew : how could it be otherwise? He was her son!
But to inherit all of Bulma's knowledge that was not enough.
Bulma wasn't just clever: she was a genius.
And one with many faces, too: to learn all that she could teach, another genius
was needed.
And Amrita was that genius.
She had the most amazing intelligence that Bulma had ever seen, apart from herself, obviously!
Teach her anything, she would promptly learn, ask her anything, and she would gather informations from any available source, often via mysterious channels which she guarded jealously like secrets.
It was a pleasure to see her go around the lab, busy as usual, fetching this or that thing for Bulma, or work on the computer,whose secrets she seemed to understand like an open book. Tecnology was something like a game that she loved to play. But most of all she loved bionics and cybernetics,and had spent weeks
studying the project for Jinzouningen Juunanagou which Trunks had brought back from the past. "It's so fascinating" she used to say. "But unluckily I'm not very skilled at it."
Bulma would listen, and every now and then she would draw long sighs. "Unluckily" was not the adverb she would use in this case, not after all the panic the Jinzouningen had caused. But maybe Amrita was not so wrong; artificial humans could possibly come into usefulness some day. Especially now that reconstruction was setting off well, but there never were arms enough...it would be easy to build an android and give it the right programming so that it would help in the most fatiguing works. A pacific creature, made to serve human beings instead than to kill them. A completely artificial being with no will of its own, prompt and skilled when required but otherwise completely harmless. A very appealing fantasy...
"What's that?" asked a rather curious Trunks.
Amrita was working at Capsule Corporation, like she did every day.
But today she was not in the lab,which had become her reign soon after her arrival, but in a room at the second floor, sitting by the balcony door with a large sheet of paper unfolded in her lap.
"What are you doing here today? I thought you never came out of the lab. You've been here for almost six weeks now, and I never saw you anywhere else, whatever long was the period you spent in here."
"Well" started answering Amrita. "Seems that your mother is gaining a little trust in me now, and so she gave me the permission to use this room upstairs instead of always staying in the lab.The lab is in the subterranean floor,you know, and it is so gloomy. It made me sad to spend too much time there. I can't waste these gorgeous sunny days."
Oh, that was a wonderful reason. Trunks gave her right; it was the middle of May now, their first spring without the Jinzouningen, and never had the days seemed so beautiful .
It was like a rebirth, both of living beings and things.
New buildings were substituting ruins little by little, while the scattered debris were being taken away to be turned into new building materials.
On the once arid, devastated, blood-soaked land grass and vegetables had started growing again, the explosion craters in the ground slowly levelling like wounds closing on a tortured body.
Even people seemed to renew : those who used to stay hidden for fear of being killed now came out in the free air, eyes half-closing in the sun like some strange kind of creature that has been living too long in the underground.
The sunlight flooded the balcony and the large room, giving everything a warm orange golden tone like the walls were on fire. But if one went out, the sky was infinite, its colour so blue that one could barely stand to watch it.
Against that background even Amrita's hair was somehow diminished in its beauty.
It was light blue, just a little more tendent to lavender than the sky, 'straight as spaghetti' -as Bulma used to call it- and so flowing that she always had to keep it bound in complicate hairdos, that gave her a certain air of nobility.
As a matter of fact Amrita was not noble at all, being as she was the product of a broken home,like she had once admitted with Bulma. Broken not because of anything like divorce, but, as so often happened, because of one of her parents -her father in this case- being killed by the jinzouningen. But both Bulma and Trunks knew she didn't like talking about it, and carefully avoided the subject whenever the occasion presented.
Amrita seemed to be in a good mood that day. She turned towards Trunks showing him the papers she held. They were covered in numbers and drawings, diagrams and schemes, looking to him like the writing of a dead language that he,the frustrated archaeologist, could not decode.
"Are you talking about this? Oh, it's nothing special. It's just the project for a neural net" she explained,like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"A neural...?" he replied, puzzled. "Wait! I know what it is. It is a net made of circuits arranged so to imitate the way human brain neurons works, isn't it? And can you really turn it into a real thing? I read they're incredibly complicated to construct, not to talk about the physical space they occupy...and that just to simulate the brain of a simple living being..."
"I don't know" Amrita said thoughtfully. "I wouldn't dare to say that I want to emulate a human brain. Plus, we still don't have enough knowledges about the way a system like that can work. We still don't know wheter it works at all, actually. No- I'll settle for the brain of some small domestic mammal, like a dog or a cat." She paused, then drew in a long breath. "But for the moment, that's just a dream. Even if I could really build such a thing, I couldn't give it an appropriate body now. I've been studying the projects for Jinzouningen Juunanagou lately, but those ones are for a human body, and moreover they require an organic basis to support their main structures. If only your mother would help me...but for some unknown reason, she refuses. Just to build an artificial cat..."
"Don't blame her. You talk like you've been living on another planet for the last twenty years. Everyone has gone through so much because of artificial beings that I think they don't want to see another for the rest of their lives, even if it is a cat."
"I understand. But it's like refusing electric energy from a thermonuclear installment just because there has been the atomic bomb.What I mean is, there are some risks, but you still want electricity, don't you?"
"And what would be the advantages that justify your research? Electricity is an extremely useful thing, but it doesn't seem like for your robot cat it will be the same."
"There are a lot of things that you can do...but listen, let's change subject matter now. Don't you still know anything about that girl that almost killed your mother? Haven't you found her?"
"No.That troubles me a lot. I've been searching everywhere around the zone where the accident happened, but there was absolutely no trace of her. Obviously if she can go as fast as my mother reported she could as well have taken the world tour in the meanwhile.And I cannot scan the whole Earth for her."
"You're worried about your mother, aren't you?"
"Actually not that much. We have to remember that in the end that sort of out-of-place Powerpuff Girl dragged her out of the car and saved her life by taking her to the hospital. You should have seen the car chassis after she did that. The car was all shrivelled up like a dead snail and the doors wouldn't open, so it needed to be flame-cut to take even a pin out of it. She ripped it up in two with her bare hands I say. I swear I saw hand marks on the plate - they had remained impressed on it like it was butter."
"So if she wanted to kill my mother, she would have done it by now, I suppose.
No, that's not the main problem, the point is that we cannot let a creature so strong simply roam wherever she pleases and do whatever she wants. She could be dangerous, and how can we know she's not until we track her down? And where does she come from? Why didn't we ever hear about her? Why didn't she ever fight against Juunanagou and his sister?"
"She could have done it, just that we don't know. If we don't know anything about her so far, how can we know if she didn't do that too?"
"That's not a bad argument. But you see, I suppose something like that should have made the scene wherever it happened to occurr. Things like that don't go unnoticed."
Amrita stayed silent, made a move like she wanted to answer, then apparently gave up.She crossed her arms and bended her head, so that her chin rested on her collarbones now. She seemed immersed in deep thoughts.
"Listen" she said , starting all of a sudden. "Now I'll go down in the lab. Tell your mother I'm there if she comes looking for me."
And, saying so, she got up from her chair and hurried downstairs straight away.
Trunks watched her go.
He liked her, much the way he could like an older sister, because she was twenty-eight years old - which is, when Trunks was born she was already seven.
She was lucky, the boy thought,she knew what it meant to live in a world devoid of the jinzouningen, at least for the first years of her life. Him, he didn't have any memory at all of what the world was like before they came, but he figured out it had to be much better than it was now, for at least it wasn't full of gloomy ruins everywhere.
He knew something from his trips in the past, but that would never be the same.
Amrita, she had really lived there.
She was somehow crazy and wise at the same time. And she wore strange flowing clothes that made her look even more like a princess.
He figured out that she would be the right heir for his mother's knowledges.
That was a pity , because he often spent his days fantasising about bringing home a wife that would be his beloved mate and his mother's worhty daughter-in law at the same time.
That's what it was, a fantasy, he perfectly knew. Not only had human beings become a rather rare race on earth, but also he knew his character wouldn't allow him to mate easily.
He was tough, stubborn, a lover of solitude who didn't always enjoy human company, even that of his mother, and he thought he was bitter, for having lived in a world falling apart, for having lost his teacher and his best friend, for having seen people die every day.
Plus he didn't think that he could be a good father.His convinction was that there are things that you have to learn directly from seeing them happen.