Chapter 6:

Dita Meets Her Maker

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Dita lay motionless on the cold metal table. Her arms and legs were shackled to the slab with electronic cuffs. Her usual black vinyl clothing had been removed for maintenance, leaving Dita with only a white set of undergarments for modesty's sake - not hers, but that of the people in white coats who were currently running the lab. They moved from console to console, checking readouts that had been plugged into her through her I/O hubs. Occasionally, Dita caught snippets of whispered conversation - "inexplicable", "unfortunately", and "deletion" were some of the most common words they were using.

Had anyone bothered to ask her, Dita would have categorically denied it, but all the same, she felt a heart-stopping dread building inside her. The reason that she had come back to the lab was because she wanted to be rid of the strange new emotions she had been given, and to help her creators to develop a cure for all the millions of other persocoms affected by what was now being called the Chobits Incident - particularly Zima. Now, though, it was becoming clearer and clearer that her masters had no idea how to delete the senstions. At least, not without destroying Dita herself in the process.

Still, Dita remained in her place. She was a combat persocom, and she would do what she was told to do.

Even if it destroyed her.

Even if it made her feel afraid.

Wouldn't she?

The hermetically-sealed lab doors slid open with a hiss, and Doctor Kato, the man most directly responsible for creating Dita and Zima, walked in. He surveilled the room for a moment, taking in the table, the wires leading into and out of Dita's head, the monitor screens and consoles distributed around the room. Then he walked over to the control pad mounted next to Dita's operating table and tapped in a command. Dita felt the table rise and rotate until she was upright, facing Kato, trying hard not to show the fear that she knew must be in her eyes.

If Kato noticed, he didn't show it. Turning to one of the lab workers, he motioned toward the door. The man nodded, and everyone left the laboratory save for Kato and Dita, who really didn't have a choice in the matter.

The moment the doors clicked shut, Kato heaved a sigh, and his whole demeanor shifted. The calm, cool, professional man who had walked in only seconds earlier evaporated, replaced by a man who seemed about ten years his senior. This Shigeru Kato seemed exhausted and careworn. As she watched, Doctor Kato walked over to one of the substations, typing more commands. A moment later, she heard a small "beep", and saw that all of the security cameras in the room had just deactivated.

Kato sighed again, this time in relief. "Good. At least Murakami still trusts me enough not to revoke my security clearance."

Dita's brow furrowed. "Doctor Kato? Why did you turn off the security system?" A million possibilities raced through her head. Clearly, Kato was about to do something that he didn't want the Director to see. Was he using some kind of illegal black-market program to help cure her? She knew that humans were strangely sensitive to female nudity; was Kato going to have to open up her chest cavity? Then another thought came to her - one far less pleasant. "Doctor Kato...?" she called again, too scared to bother hiding the anxiety in her voice.

Kato looked at her, then smiled. Even though he looked indescribably weary, there was something in his eyes besides his sadness that, somehow, helped Dita to feel less scared. "It's all right," he said. "I've set the security system to show the same footage in a loop, so we can talk without being overheard. Nobody will know about this conversation except you and me, Dita."

"Conversation?" Dita said.

Kato's smile broadened. "Yes, Dita, I just want to talk. I promise I won't do anything bad. All right?" He put a hand on her shoulder, and Dita felt that strange, warm, fuzzy feeling again, not as intensely as when Zima had touched her, but she recognized it anyway. A few hours ago, she might have tried to resist, or told him to take his hand away so that she wouldn't have to deal with such a strong emotional response. Of course, a few hours ago, she hadn't been nearly so terrified, and this new feeling seemed to be displacing her fear, so Dita relaxed, letting her head droop to one side. Though her fuel cell still had about fifty years' worth of power left, Dita felt exhausted. Without even thinking about it, she let her cheek rest on Kato's hand, drawing comfort from the presence of someone - anyone - who seemed to give a damn about her feelings.

"My God," Kato said softly. "You really are frightened, aren't you?"

Dita hesitated for a moment, then answered him honestly. "Yes," she said, "I'm feeling really scared right now. The other doctors kept talking about my emotions, but I don't think they can get rid of them without killi-- without deactivating me."

Kato's smile faltered. "I ... Dita, I think you should know about a talk I had with the Director this morning."

"Yes?" Dita said, feeling some of her fear return.

"After I ran that system scan on you last night, I discovered that there was no trace of the original program that ... well, installed your new emotions. It looks like it somehow altered the physical structure of your neural net, then erased itself from your hard drive. Basically, your neural pathways are altered, and I have no idea how to change them back, or if it's even possible to do so."

"Then I'm ... stuck like this?"

Kato nodded. "I'm afraid so.

Dita felt as though she was drowning in pure, distilled terror. "B-but ... but I'm a combat persocom! I can't feel emotions! If I did, I wouldn't be able to carry out assignments reliably! I would be ... I would be ..." Dita could barely bring herself to say the words. If she did, she would have to admit that her worst fear had become a reality -- that she no longer had a purpose for existing.

"I would be useless!"

Kato sighed. "You know," he said, "that's exactly what the Director said. He's asked me to--" Kato gulped. "He's asked me to deactivate you tonight. Then we're going to run a nanoscale analysis of your entire neural net using an SMT scanner. He thinks that it might offer us some clue as to how you were altered, so that we might be able to help the other persocoms affected by the Chobits Incident." Dita saw Kato's facial muscles tighten slightly. "Unfortunately, in the process, we would be completely destroying your neural net. We would never be able to reactivate you again."

Dita felt her coolant pump racing in her chest. "But ... the other persocoms ... will it help them? If you destroy me, will it mean that you can help them get rid of their emotions? So that they won't have to feel ... scared, like I do?"

Kato's sighed again, then took off his glasses, looking straight into Dita's eyes. "Honestly? I'd give it about one chance in a billion. The odds of even locating which pathways were affected are astronomical, as are our chances of reversing the process."

Dita felt numb inside. "Then ... then, you're going to destroy me for no reason? Because I'm useless now?"

Kato's face was impassive, and he didn't answer her question. Instead, he asked, "What do you think about that, Dita? About what the Director asked me to do?"

Dita hesitated, trying to separate her thoughts from her emotions. "I think that it seems pointless. It seems wasteful to destroy a multi-million-yen persocom like myself when there's no guarantee that it will serve a purpose. Even though I might have more feelings than I should, I can still do some things. I can walk, and I can talk, and I can think. And ... and I can feel now, too." She looked at Kato, pleading with her eyes. "Isn't there some way that these emotions can be useful? Isn't there a need for them somewhere?"

"I once knew a man who thought so," Kato said quietly, looking away. When he turned back to her, he said, "Dita, did I ever tell you that I used to work for Professer Ichiro Mihara, the man who designed the Chobits series?"

"Of course," Dita responded matter-of-factly. "It's how you were able to design Zima and me to be immune to--" She caught the contradiction, corrected herself. "It's how you were able to, theoretically, make Zima and me immune to the Chobits program. You knew more about his work than anyone else, so Director Murakami hired you to create us."

Kato smiled. "Yes. Of course, I was never very good at understanding the programming he wrote for Freya and Elda; I just helped design a processor that could run it. In fact, my specialty was in mechanical engineering, not software design." He sigh wistfully. "I suppose, if I were to to try and take credit for any piece of the Chobits project, the only thing I could really claim responsibility for would be Freya's physical body. When Ichiro and his wife decided to have a second daughter, it was Chitose who handled most of the design work for Elda, so I was more-or-less out of the loop."

Dita watched Doctor Kato's face. He looked sad. "Doctor Kato, is something wrong?"

Kato looked up at her with surprise. "Something wrong? Well ... I guess I just have a few regrets about how things turned out. I've always wondered if there was something I could have done ... something I might have said to Freya to help her."

"Why? What happened?" Dita asked. "I thought that she fell in love with her surrogate father, then tried to delete her own data when she realized that she couldn't have him. It was her own fault for getting so hung up on a human."

"No," Kato said, "There was a bit more to it than that. You see, Ichiro gave his daughters the ability to feel human emotions, just as you can now - even love. He also embedded a very special program inside them. He felt that, if his daughters ever did find someone special - someone they could spend the rest of their lives with, who could make them happy - then that would mean that emotions and free will were useful traits for persocoms to have. It would mean that persocoms wouldn't just be useful to their owners, but that they could be happy themselves, together with someone special to them."

"The one just for me," Dita said, recalling the words that Freya had used when she had briefly taken over Chii's body the other night.

"Exactly. Unfortunately, since the Miharas and their girls lived in a very remote research facility out in the country, there were very few people for Freya and Elda to interact with, much less fall in love with and start lives of their own. Over time, Freya fell in love with the only man who actually paid any attention to her as a person, not just a research project. Then, as you know, she realized that the two of them could never be together - Ichiro was already married, and Freya was his daughter. So, to keep from interfering with her father's marriage, she never told him how she felt." Kato paused. "It was only after she had passed away, when we looked at all the data from her hard drive, that we realized why Freya's heart had been so badly hurt that she couldn't stand to live. She thought that she couldn't tell anyone about her feelings, but she couldn't keep them bottled up inside forever, so she chose to fade away."

"But I still don't understand. What could you have done to prevent it, Doctor Kato?"

Kato was silent for quite a while. Finally, he spoke. "I keep thinking," he said, "that, if I had told Freya how I felt about her, that things would have turned out differently."

"How you felt about her...?" Dita asked, perplexed.

Kato smiled sadly. "Yes. You see, I fell in love with Freya."

Dita's eyes widened. "You ... you loved her?"

"Very much. When I was helping to create her shell, she seemed like just another prototype persocom to me, but when I came in to do some maintenance on her about a week after Ichiro and Chitose had turned her on, I was amazed at just how ... well ...how real she was. She didn't act like a persocom; she didn't spend her time doing chores or asking for tasks to accomplish. She just enjoyed exploring the world around her. Every tree, every bird, every blade of grass was special to her." Kato chuckled. "Once, she actually grabbed me by the hand and pulled me backward, because I was going to step on a few ants that I hadn't noticed, just marching along."

He looked up at Dita. "You should have met her when she was younger. She was so happy then, so much like a child. For the first couple of weeks, I used every excuse I could find to get out of the lab and spend time with the Miharas, and especially with Freya. She called me her 'Uncle Shigeru'. Whenever we were together, I felt happier than I ever have in my life, before or since. She loved it when we would just sit and talk; she'd tell me about things she'd seen, or things her parents had told her, and I'd just go on for hours about how and why things were as they were. She'd just soak it up like a little sponge!" To Dita's surprise, Kato seemed almost ready to burst into laughter.

"Then, one morning, I realized just how deep my feelings were for Freya and ... well, it scared the hell out of me. I had never actually dated before; I was fresh out of college, and even during my academic career, I had been so focused on getting my degree in engineering that I just hadn't had time for romantic relationships. When I realized that I was in love for the first time, and that the one ... hell, the person ... I was in love with was a persocom, I panicked. I stopped spending time with Freya like I had, only coming in to perform routine maintenance for her once in a while. One time, she asked me why I never came by, and I told her ..." Tears welled up in Kato's eyes as he spoke. "I told her that nothing good could come from relationships between humans and persocoms. I told her that nobody would understand the way I felt about her, and that the problem would only be worse if she started feeling the same way."

Dita remembered saying exactly the same thing to Hideki Motosuwa, the boy who had fallen in love with Chii. Had Doctor Kato programmed her with those beliefs? It seemed the most logical explanation.

"So," Kato continued, "because I was too much of a coward to follow through on my feelings for Freya, the only man she had left to fall in love with was her own father, and you know how that turned out."

Dita thought about what Doctor Kato had just told her. Although the man seemed intent on feeling badly about it, Dita could understand his reaction. When she had felt the first stirrings of that warm, fuzzy feeling for Zima, she had run away, hoping to get her feelings removed rather than facing them. Now, however, she was starting to realize that denying a person's emotions could be more harmful than suppressing them, no matter how strong those feelings might be.

Meanwhile, Kato kept talking. "After Freya died, and the Miharas took Elda into the city to try and salvage what was left of their family, I let Director Murakami talk me into helping his R&D department design combat persocoms for the military. I was so full of guilt for what had happened to Freya that I never wanted to work with emotional persocoms again. I thought that, if I could lose myself in my work, making persocoms that were specifically designed not to have emotions, then I could avoid having to watch anything like the Chobits debacle again. And, I guess, I wanted to avoid another situation where I might get too attached to my work." Kato laughed bitterly. "Did I mention that I was a coward?"

"I'm ... I'm, sorry, Doctor Kato," Dita said, "I had no idea about any of this. I'm sorry about what happened between you and Freya."

Kato waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. "Don't be. It happened a long time ago, and although I feel badly about it, it can't be helped now. The most I can do is make sure that the same thing never happens again."

"So, does that mean that you're going to deactivate me?" Dita asked. "So that I don't fall in love and get hurt?"

"Before I answer that," Kato said, "I want you to tell me something. When you're with Zima, what do you feel?"

Dita answered immediately. "I feel strange inside. It's like I'm warm, but I'm not overheating. It's kind of like how a stuffed animal feels when you touch it. I feel ... good. Even when I think about him, I can still feel it, but it's not as strong as when we're together, and I start feeling bad when I realize that we're not together anymore."

"And what do you want to do when you feel like that toward him?"

"I want to ..." A million images flooded Dita's mind. "I want to hold him, and I want him to want to hold me, too. I want to ... to put my lips to his. I want to see him smile, and I know that just being near him will make me happy, too." Dita looked apologetically at her creator. "I'm sorry. I know I'm probably not making much sense."

Kato just kept his gaze fixed on her. "And Zima? Do you think he feels the same way toward you?"

Dita thought of how Jima had held her close on the night they had gone after Chii, how he had tried to help her come to terms with her feelings. "I think so. At the very least, I know he cares about me."

"Well, then," Kato said, "it sounds like you're in love, Dita. And if you're right, you may actually have found the one just for you already."

"I'm ... in love?" Dita asked, but already she knew the answer. It fit exactly with what she felt; she liked Kato, and she was glad that he was helping her to sort out her thoughts and feelings, but her feelings for Zima were far stronger and more intense. He really was the only one for her - not just because she had been created to work with and protect him, but because they cared about each other.

Dita felt tears welling up in her eyes. "I wish I could be together with him one last time. I wish that I could tell him how I really feel. I wish I could tell him how sorry I am for running away." She looked at Kato. "I don't want to die."

"Then you have a choice to make, Dita. Are you willing to leave the Syndicate, to turn your back on everything that's given you purpose in your life? Are you ready to take responsibility for your own actions and make your own decisions?"

Dita took a moment to think over all the implications of that questions. When her eyes rose to meet Kato's again, they were filled with a new resolve. "Yes," she said. "I'm willing to do all of those things. As far as the Syndicate's concerned, the only function I have left is to die. But, now that I know that there's more I can do than just follow orders - that there's more to life - I want to experience these feelings inside me, and to learn to follow them. I want to be with Zima, and I want us to have a life together."

Kato's poker face disappeared, and Dita saw what had been underneath it: a warm, genuine smile. "I was hoping you'd say that," he told her. Then he began typing on the main console, and Dita's shackles opened. She stood on the cold tile floor of the laboratory, staring at Kato. "But ... didn't you tell the Director that you were going to deactivate me tonight?"

Kato flashed her a mischievious grin. "Yes, that's what I'm supposed to do," he said. "But then again, I can make independent decisions, too."

Dita's eyes lit up. "You mean, you're going to let me go?"

"Not just yet, I'm afraid. Even you could never escape on your own, combat persocom or not; the security drones would eventually catch you, and then we would both be in deep trouble. Our best chance is to wait until tonight, when I'm scheduled to deactivate you and perform the scanning prcedure. Director Murakami will have every security drone in this building right here in the laboratory. If we can destroy them all before you make a break for it, you should have a clear escape route."

"But even I can't destroy that many drones by myself!" Dita protested. "And, no offense, Doctor Kato, but you're only a human, and a civilian at that."

"You're right. You and I alone don't have a chance. We're going to need some ... outside assistance."

"You mean Zima?"

"Who else?" Kato typed some more, then motioned for Dita to come over to the console. "I've set this up to connect to the Net," he said. "Do you think you can contact Zima?"

"No. I've been trying ever since I came back in, but I think Zima may have firewalled his wireless transciever. I can't get through to him."

Kato nodded, as though he had been expecting this. "I think I might be able to do something about that. Now, Dita, I want you to listen to me very carefully..."

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