Hana paced back and forth in the tiny closet that had been prepared for her in something of a makeshift military sleeping area, as if she would have been capable of sleeping in some old, tattered bag. Even so, her mind had been racing, begging for another party to bounce her ideas off of, but Dae-Hyun had yet to reply to her message. Her pacing on the verge of wearing a hole in the cement foundation beneath her, Hana bit at her lip in irritation, gasping in relief as her phone began to buzz in her hand.
"What the hell took you?!" she immediately demanded, "We're under curfew!"
Dae-Hyun shot back, "I had to charge my phone; just chill. What the heck has you so riled up?!"
Stepping toward the door, Hana gently cracked it open before peeking outside, "I'm thinking of something stupid."
"Oh, by the gods, of course you are," came her agent's exasperated voice, "You didn't get a chance to leave, did you? You know, it's one thing to wake up in the dead of night to steal dim sum, but you're in a military base!"
"So?"
Exasperated, Dae-Hyun groaned into the phone, "Oh my god, you're gonna die tonight."
With a scoff, Hana stepped into the hallway, creeping out through the darkness, "I'm not gonna die. I'm just sating some curiosity."
"You haven't a single clue how many people's last words those belong to…" Dae-Hyun complained with a defeated, "So what curiosity are you sharing exactly?"
Hana admitted slowly, "Well… I don't know. I was doing those inane coding activities, but I decided to write in a word processor just to see what would happen."
"Like a chatbot," Dae-Hyun noted.
"Yeah. But nothing happened," Hana explained, "Until I looked back at the lines of code coming from the AI construct- I saw the letters for "hello" within all the chaos."
A long stream of silence met her over the phone before Dae-Hyun finally spoke up.
"Are you crazy?" came an even-keeled, cool voice.
Hana began, "I-"
"Are you crazy?!" repeated Dae-Hyun with much more appropriate alarm, "That code might as well be random! Of course you're going to get some random words in there! If you put chimpanzees on typewriters, you're gonna come across something legible at some point!"
Sighing, Hana dropped her arm to her side while continuing to navigate the darkened warehouse, only returning the device to her ear once she'd taken a few deep breaths.
"-before you blow up the cosmos with your incessance!"
She retorted, "Bro, I'm just typing words onto a screen; it's no big deal."
"And what if it writes back, huh?"
Hana silently admitted to herself that she hadn't exactly thought that far ahead. Still, the thought intrigued her, like a tantalizing goal hidden behind some measure of security.
"I just want to see what it is I'm working with, is all," Hana explained simply, "Isn't that part of my readiness?"
Dae-Hyun grumbled, sighing all the same, "Not if you're doing this under the cover of darkness."
"It's gonna be fine. It's just a basic AI architecture; what's it gonna do? It's like a chatbot; maybe I can figure out why it does what it does."
"Don't you think they've tried that by now?" Dae-Hyun sighed with exasperation.
Hana replied, "I honestly don't think so. You've heard Kats; he wants to say he's doing all this to help the world, but he's only thinking about himself and his own retribution."
"Yeah, you mentioned that after speaking with him."
"I don't think he's even thinking of this in terms of the AI constructs having the free mind he's always talking about. They're there to serve a function, that's it-"
She shrugged, "Kind of like his attitude toward me."
A pause greeted her for a brief few moments before Dae-Hyun answered, "Okay, so- What, you want to get to know the AI like it's a person?"
"No, but-" Hana paused, realizing how silly she was sounding, "If I can understand why these things are so determined to injure their pilots, that's certainly something I'd like to know."
Dae-Hyun audibly sighed in thought on the other end of the call, finally concluding, "Okay, fine, what the hell. It's your funeral, anyway."
Grinning, Hana rolled her eyes, "At least your outlook on this entire thing hasn't changed."
"Shit, Hana; you were seven years old stealing candy from the store and I was still covering for you. You think I'm able to stop now?"
Hana laughed quietly, a deeply reverent nostalgia selling up within her.
"So, what, you have a plan? I assume you can't just walk on in and do this."
Nodding to herself, Hana explained, "Actually, they just put me on a laptop that accesses the construct. I really only needed another voice to keep me from freaking out in the dark."
Sighing with a longing intent, Dae-Hyun complained, "Ugh, and here I was getting excited to play hacker or something."
"You always did want to do that," Hana laughed quietly to herself, "If this becomes a career for me, I'm sure you'll get a chance."
"If you're serious, I'll need to start learning how to actually do that. I can run circles around cars or computer hardware, it's the stuff inside I'm lost on."
Hana stepped through an adjacent corridor before stepping into the same room she and Mina Tan had been working in.
"Oh, check it out; they're designing an entire user interface based on my skill set. It's like a fully catered operating system," she explained absently while stepping around the room for a light switch, "Here, let me put you on video."
Newly illuminated, Hana raised her phone to navigate the darkened room, examining Mina Tan's desk for the laptop she had been using.
"You know the lack of security is very unnerving to me," came a droll observation from her phone.
Hana replied, still buried in her task, "Well, this place is like a lockbox. Good luck even getting inside in the first place. Everything seems passcode protected, biometric, and keycarded anyway."
"Not to mention the deathly robots inside."
"I think it's just- Ah!"
Hana exclaimed as she pulled the laptop out from beneath a stack of papers, "Now we're in business."
Taking a seat, she readied the device for operation, sitting her phone up against a couple of textbooks so that Dae-Hyun had view of the screen himself. She sat astir as the laptop whirred to life, rubbing her chin with apprehension now that she was finally in the thick of this self-assured assignment.
"Won't they be able to tell you're up to something? Like on a server somewhere?"
Hana shrugged, "What? I'm just practicing late into the night. Those coding objectives aren't gonna meet themselves."
"Oh, like your cute charm is gonna get you out of this."
Smirking, Hana admitted, "Probably not, but I don't care. This is far more interesting, anyway."
"Chaotic good incarnate," groaned her friend via her phone.
The laptop splash screen appeared, leaving Hana with a password entry prompt that instantly forced her brown forward, "What?!"
"Big surprise, huh?" came a sarcastic quip from Dae-Hyun.
"There wasn't one when Mina let me on earlier!"
She dropped her face into her open palms, leaving Dae-Hyun to mutter with the most unhelpful energy, "Well, you've got nine numbers and zero. Better get started; sunrise is in quite a few hours."
"Shut up!" Hana begged angrily, "Let me think. Numbers, numbers… Birth dates?"
Dae-Hyun shifted in his seat, flattering his fingertips along his keyboard, "Katsy is a public figure to some extent, so-"
"It wouldn't be his."
"I thought you said he was self-centered?"
Hana twisted her lips, "He is, toward his innermost circle. His daughter, or his wife; it might be one of theirs."
"Okaaay, so… Wasn't his wife in the public consciousness in some circles, too?"
"And also deceased when he came here."
Dae-Hyun nodded to himself, crossing his arms, "So Hana Sugita. She never gave us a birthday though, right?"
"I don't think so, no."
She crossed her arms, leaning back into the chair as she considered her next course of action. Settled in as she was to this activity, she examined the remainder of Mina Tan's desk as if the answer would simply by lying there somewhere in plain view.
"Hang on," came the voice of Dae-Hyun, obscured by his clacking keyboard once again, "I found a marriage license. Assuming Hana was born afterward, that's at least a starting point. Eliminate the date of their emigration, that further removes options."
Hana grimaced, "So what, we're just gonna go through each date, one by one?"
"What do you want? the stork to grant me access to Japanese birth records?"
"And you want to be my hacker in the chair," whined Hana, smoothing her face with a hand, "What if we only have three chances?"
Shrugging on her phone, Dae-Hyun concluded, "Well, we ought to keep thinking then."
Hana eyed the laptop screen with a scrutinizing glance, as though trying to melt a hole through it with just a stare.
"Alright, there's a school record," Dae-Hyun spoke happily, "Second year primary school- Maybe she was born in '53?"
With a quickness, Hana leaned forward to type in the date, 2053, only to pause once again, "I need two more digits."
"Maybe the month, then? What was she, a Pisces?"
She rolled her eyes, "Oh, shut up."
"Well, years are one thing, and dates are another," came a diminutive reply from Dae-Hyun, ending with a deep groan, "Let me see…"
He went on clacking, leaving Hana sitting in an antsy posture while she awaited a solution. Perpetually unable to remain still while others worked, she returned forward, examining the array of digits beckoning her to action. She typed the appropriate numbers -2053, assuming the year came first- before fiddling her fingers atop the keyboard as though lying in wait.
" Let's see…" muttered Dae-Hyun while scouring what he could visit the internet, "Surely she's posted an astrology chart or something on social media…"
Absent-mindedness clouded Hana's wavering attention span, left as she was to her own, fidgety devices. Her fingers tapped rhythmically along the desk face, impatience welling up inside her.
"Anything yet?"
Dae-Hyun retorted, "Bro, chill; this is like a needle in a haystack."
Groaning to herself, Hana reached out toward the keyboard, tapping at the keypad in random swaths of movement, sending the password to its six digits before the line paused at its limit, though her flattering didn't stop.
"Nope… Nope…" recited her friend again and again, each tab in the browser another wild goose chase leading nowhere.
Hana blankly fired more keystrokes, glancing off into the darkness of the office, forming shapes of nothingness. Her thoughts went off into other directions, thinking of why she was doing any of this, of her brother, of-
"What?!"
Hana jumped back to attention, seeing the laptop having accepted her sequence of inputs, much to her surprise.
"Well, let's take it back to nineties," exclaimed Dae-Hyun before turning his full attention to his phone, "Alright, so what all is that?"
Not afforded the time to think about what had just happened, Hana went along to explain, "Well, this window is the AI construct."
She pointed out a window with endless text scrawling up the screen, its meaning labyrinthine with its foreign characters, symbols, and digits all creating a language wholly indecipherable to human eyes.
"Prodigious…" whispered Dae-Hyun while examining the meaningless scrawl, "So what, you're just going to type into a text file and see if it answers?"
Hana nodded, "That was the plan."
She opened up a txt file before typing.
"Hello"
Nothing happened within the wall of text that might have replicated what she had seen earlier. Still, Hana traced trenches into the screen where her eyes bore into its pixels while she scrutinized every line that she could. Between each and every symbol she recognized as foreign, between the pounds and dashes and exclamation points. Her eyes ran up, down, right, left, trying to find anything that resembled a reply, but to no avail.
"Anything?" Dae-Hyun asked aloud.
Sighing heavily, Hana leaned back into her chair, "Nothing."
Disappointed, Dae-Hyun did much the same, dropping his arm into his lap to send his camera screen aiming skyward, "Oh well. Hey, it was fun while it lasted, being the man in the chair."
"Yeah," Hana replied woefully, though slowly working into a disheartened laugh, "It was a stupid idea, I guess. It must really have been random chance."
Quick to reassure, Dae-Hyun went on, "Hey, it was a good idea. I'd bring it up with Katsu next time you see him; if it helps you all understand these things, I don't see why it's not worth a shot."
"Budget cuts," Hana groaned, "Time limits, bureaucracy-"
"Yeah, yeah; I'm just trying to be supportive, you know."
Hana smiled weakly, her voice a soft chuckle, "Yeah. I know."
She watched the laptop screen for a brief few awkward moments of silence before pulling her phone back up to her face.
"Alright, you can head on out. I'll set everything back up and get some sleep."
Dae-Hyun failed to respond for a moment, battling the need to seek out his own bed against his service to his friend, though ultimately spoke, "Are you sure?"
"Yeah, I'll be back home in the morning if this curfew expires. I'll let you know," Hana assured with simplicity lining her voice.
The two said their goodbyes before hanging up, leaving Hana alone to sit her phone down atop the desk in front of her. She forced her brow forward, eying the screen with a challenging stare.
"Alright," she spoke with tenacity, "Speak up. Are you just shy or what?"
Nothing.
Hana tapped her finger against the desk top.
"You know who I am, right? I'm going to be your pilot, and I'd rather not get killed, so if we could build a rapport or something." She shrugged. "Obviously something doesn't sit right with you and that arrangement; I mean, you're not just a program."
Still nothing.
She sighed, "Look, I've heard all that stuff about Omnics having thoughts and consciousnesses and stuff. If you're an AI meant to rival them, I'm assuming you'd have to be at least similar."
Hana peered through the laptop's screen, "I know there's someone in there."
The text program remained ever present in its complex arithmetic, leaving Hana to sigh, leaning back into her chair. A defeated groan escaped her lips as she bemoaned her thoughts on this matter having, essentially, gone to waste. With languid motion, she began to rise, only to be stayed by a separate window popping open desire her hands having been occupied.
"I am someone"
Hana's eyes went wide while trepidation guided her back into the office chair.
"I mean, they've been having those global conventions on artificial personhood," Hana shrugged, "Aren't you aware- I guess, of your own existence?"
She stayed still, awaiting a reply as though it were Morse code from another planetary system.
"I am a machine
meant to combat the Omnics"
Hana's brown furrowed.
"And do you know how you're to do that?"
This response came later.
"Hana Song is meant to guide me
by means of controlling me"
Hana's eyes shook as she watched the now-familiar scrawl.
"I do not like that"
