Part 19
A/N: Too much WAFF?
"Good morning, Hana."
Sono poked her head into the guest-room door, finding Hana still busy getting dressed. A large selection of clothes — skirts, pants, shorts, shirts, blouses, dresses, and so on — were laid out on the bed. The purple-haired teenager seemed to be struggling to decide what she wanted to pick. At some point she took a pair of knee-length black shorts and a thigh-length red skirt.
"Morning, Sono," she greeted.
"Say, how about we watch a movie before you go?" Sono asked.
Hana paused while putting on her shorts, looking at Sono with surprise. She visibly thought about it for a moment. Then she seemed to realize that she was standing there in her underwear, her shorts halfway up her legs and looking equal parts cute and ridiculous, so she shook her head and finished putting them on before sitting down on the bed next to the rest of her clothes.
"I don't know if I can. I have rehearsal today," Hana said, while going over her new shirts. She had, admittedly, given her a lot of different shirts. Not quite everything she couldn't wear anymore, but… a lot.
"Isn't your rehearsal in the afternoon? And it's a really short shuttle ride from here to the opera house."
"I was going to practice on my own first— " she suddenly found Sono's finger over her mouth. The heiress had walked across the room while Hana was choosing a shirt.
"Hana, you're the best singer I've ever heard," Sono said while smiling brightly. "I know you want to do a good job and make everyone happy, but you don't need to practice that much."
"But Mr. Lark said that even the best singers in the galaxy practice all the time. That I need to practice at least that hard if I want to be big in this business!"
"He was exaggerating to put some pressure on you so you don't get lazy. You're more than talented and dedicated enough. Even those people take a few days to relax sometimes."
Hana looked unconvinced and very worried… but relaxed once given a quick hug from Sono. She agreed to stay a little while longer. Sono felt relief for a moment.
After breakfast, as Hana walked with her to the home theater, she kept wondering if this was really necessary. Did she really need to know everything about Hana? The girl was such a nice, earnest and well-meaning person. She'd never heard her wish any ill will on anyone. There wasn't any reason to suspect that Hana intended to do anything but be a performer and make people happy.
'But that's not why. It's not about what Hana wants or what her intentions are… It's about what she needs. What will keep her safe.'
She wanted to be Hana's friend. She believed she was Hana's friend. That meant she needed to look out for her. If there was anything… She needed to be sure. Just make sure Hana's condition wasn't dangerous to her, and then… Then they could just forget about it and move on. No reason to force the girl to be open about the way she was if there was no pressing danger from it.
Hidden in Sono's palm was a Tool in its compact storage mode, small enough to hide completely in a hand. Hana's back was turned. She was right there. She'd never notice. Sono could just take one strand of hair, unfold the Tool and snip it off. She'd already gone this far—turning what was planned as just a fun night out with her friend into a chance to collect samples from her. What sense did it make to back out now? It was for Hana's own good, wasn't it?
Sono held her hand back and kept walking.
If she did this… it felt like she was saying she didn't trust her. She was going behind Hana's back, literally, when she should have been forthright and simply asked. If she found something, wouldn't they need to talk about it anyway? And how was she going to explain how she'd found out?
Well, she'd found something. She didn't know what, but something. Hana was chattering on about what they'd done last night, while Sono could only halfheartedly respond. Her worries had only grown overnight, her mind running from one wild scenario to another. Hana was a robot—no, she was a space pirate plant—no, she was a clone, of some historical genius, and she'd sicken and die in a few short years without her medication, from the space pirates or crazed aliens or government program she'd run away from. Never losing any skin or hair or even single cells had to mean something. She didn't know what, but it could easily be something bad.
So she should ask. But… what if she did, and there was nothing wrong—other than having just reminded Hana of whatever she'd been running from? What terrible things might space pirates have done to her? Thinking back, Hana had been terrified of singing for some time, hadn't she? They could have… oh dear.
Before she could talk herself out of it again, she reached out and snipped off a single strand of hair.
Hana suddenly stopped.
Sono nearly ran into the back of her, but halted herself quickly while slipping the hair into her pocket. The singer wasn't moving, just standing still with her back to Sono. She wasn't talking anymore. Hana had stopped talking the moment Sono cut the hair.
"Hana, is everything okay?" Sono asked, suddenly feeling a tightness in her throat. No, it wasn't possible.
Slowly, Hana reached up with her right hand and patted the back of her head. She did this a few times, her hand starting to tremble. Sono's heart rate began to rise. There was no way Hana could have noticed!
"Sono… w-wh… why?" Hana asked, her voice breaking.
She'd made a mistake. A terrible, awful mistake.
"Why d-did… why did y-you do that?"
Every instinct in her body screamed at her to deny, to deflect, to claim it was an accident, to flee, to do anything but stand there and confront what she'd just done. She didn't want to see the expression on Hana's face. She tried to fight them. Sono didn't want to run away. She knew she'd been caught. She knew there was no point to running now.
"I-I-I don't understand. Why?"
She wasn't quite strong enough to stop herself from taking one step backwards.
That was enough to make Hana panic.
"No! Stop!" Hana screamed, turning around and tackling Sono to the floor.
When she regained her senses, she found a trembling Hana clinging tightly as if her life depended on it.
"Please, don't. You can't." Hana said, drawing ragged breaths between syllables as she fought back tears. "You can't take that. Please."
"Hana, I…" Sono tried to speak, holding her hands up as if she wanted to embrace and comfort her friend. She held back only because she wasn't sure if she should, when she was the one who'd caused this in the first place.
"You can't take pieces of me. You can't. Please, give it back."
She wanted to say she was just trying to help, but the words felt like ash in her mouth. Hana wouldn't understand. How could anyone understand, if their best friend did something like this to them?
She reached into her pocket to get the hair back out… and realized she'd messed up.
"Uh… Hana?"
"Give it back," she repeated over and over, her face shoved into Sono's chest.
"I'm very sorry and I'm trying to do that, but… uh… I think it slipped through the fabric of my skirt."
Hana stopped trembling and slowly raised her head up to look at Sono's face. Her eyes were dry, but clearly prepared to burst into tears at any moment. Sono was surprised. She would have expected Hana to be bawling her eyes out already.
"That's… really bad." Hana cast her gaze down slightly to avoid eye contact. "Really, really bad."
"I... don't understand. I just lost strand of hair. I can't take it anymore."
"Losing it is very bad. We can't move until I find it." Her eyes flitted over the floor. "I can't see it," she said, her voice full of barely controlled panic.
Sono was getting confused. Was Hana really that paranoid about someone sequencing her DNA?
"Why can't I move?"
"Because it might still be stuck to you, and you can't take it too far from me."
Now Sono was extremely perplexed.
"Why?"
"Because it… Because…" Hana started, shoving her face back into Sono's chest before mumbling again.
"Hana? I can't hear you. Please, tell me what's wrong with the hair." Sono urged, finally getting the courage to wrap Hana up in her arms. "I'm sorry I took it. I won't do it again. I promise. Just tell me what's wrong."
The younger girl shivered in Sono's embrace for a few moments before finally pulling her face up to speak.
"Because… it would explode," she said in a tiny whisper, just loud enough to hear clearly.
Sono stared, wide-eyed, at Hana for some time. That was the most absurd thing Sono had ever heard. It sounded completely ridiculous, and some part of her mind insisted that it had to be a lie or some bizarre thing cooked up by Hana's overactive imagination in a moment of panic. The hair would explode? That was even weirder than all the crazy things she'd thought up in her fitful sleep. Sono at least had evidence that those wild ideas were possible, because the technology existed. Most people would still think she was crazy for thinking them.
"It will explode," Sono stated, not in a questioning tone.
"... Yes."
"How badly?" she asked, in disbelief that this was the next question she felt the need to ask.
Hana thought about it, face going green as her eyes flitted from Sono's chest to her face.
"If you were holding it in your hand, it would give you third-degree burns over your whole arm with less-severe ones across the front of your body and... you might lose your hand."
That was pretty bad. Sono thought about the problem for a moment.
"Right… If you're not fibbing or just imagining this somehow, then we can at least find out if it's still on me. I'll tell you what we'll do. We're going to get up, together, and walk away from this spot. If it's on the floor, the fire suppression system will take care of it."
Mother would be unhappy and ask how the carpet got set on fire, though. Hana gripped Sono tighter, apparently very reluctant to follow this course of action.
"Hana, I swear it will be fine. We have very good safety systems in this house."
"I can probably find it once we get up…"
Oh. That made things simpler. After a few more moments of gentle prodding, Hana finally allowed Sono to get up. Shivering like a leaf, Hana clung to the older girl with a vice-like grip. Sono then stood completely still while Hana looked around on the floor until she found the hair and picked it up.
Sono couldn't help but wonder if Hana had been telling the truth or just lied to protect herself, but she wanted to give her friend the benefit of doubt.
"…Hana?"
"I'm sorry," Hana whispered.
"So am I," she replied, hugging Hana tighter. "Really, really sorry."
They stood like that in silence for a few seconds longer.
"How about we go sit down?" Sono suggested, letting out a sigh as she came down from the adrenaline and stress of last few minutes. Hana nodded and they went back to Sono's room.
Hana sat on the sofa in Sono's personal recreation room, staring into a cup of tea. Sono was sitting in a chair in front of the holo projector, also holding cup. Neither of them had touched theirs since… Hana had begun to tell the truth. What she claimed was the truth.
"Robot" was one of the crazy ideas that Sono had come up with, which she'd thought ridiculous almost immediately. The realization of a fully sapient humanoid AI was still at least a decade off by the best estimate of most top minds in the field, in both the Federation and the Empire. Mother was one of the optimists who felt that a post-species AGI that could pass off as humanoid, or any other human-sized species, was on the cusp of realization. As one of the best AI developers in the galaxy, that opinion wasn't to be taken lightly. Yet Lyro Kirikeel was also confident that no one had created such an AGI yet, because she was certain it would be her that made it happen, and it would still be several years away in the best of cases.
Sapient AGI existed already, and they were used for some very impressive jobs, especially in military roles. They even had rights in the Federation, protecting them from abuse. But they were huge things, usually no smaller than a car. The best "AI" currently in-use were organic supercomputers like Aurora Units and the infamous Chozo unit Mother Brain that had been discovered and stolen by the Zebesians over a decade ago. Experts still debated hotly over whether they could rightly be defined as AI in the traditional sense.
Hana claimed to be a humanoid AGI; a fully-fledged sapient artificial intelligence in a human form of human size, but not organic. Yet she was very insistent that she was not simply a robot. She was equally insistent that she was human, but not human in the sense that this galaxy knew them, and that this wasn't a contradiction.
Not only that…
"You're two different species of AI fused into a hybrid?"
Hana nodded.
"How does that work?"
"Because apparently my mother is a four-hundred year-old genius."
The explanation got more fantastic from there. Hana told her about waking up all by herself on an uninhabited planet in the rimward regions of the Expanse, her mind filled with a mishmash of simulated memories of an imaginary human life and non-simulated knowledge of a not quite human world. She survived there for three years before finding out the planet was inhabited by Metroids, discovering a Chozo ruin with a ship, and subsequently escaping.
An eight-year-old girl, left to grow up alone on a planet infested with Metroids? Even if Hana was supposedly a superhuman AGI with powerful defenses, that had to have been terrifying. Nothing less than heavy anti-armor weapons worked on those things and no shields were known to stop them.
And then there was that 'little' detail. Hana was three years old, literally speaking. "And a half," she insisted, but then she also insisted that the count should start at eight, and not zero. She did this while still appearing sixteen, but looking as put-out as any child who'd been told that "eleven-and-a-half" did not equal "twelve".
Cid was literally using child labor. After worrying that he'd hired a maybe-fifteen-year-old, that was…
And she could never tell him. Not ever.
And her origin…
Hana herself admitted to being uncertain about a lot of the details, as she had never truly lived there, having at best a few vague impressions of her mother stroking her hair as she was being… constructed, Sono supposed, and wasn't that a thing to think about her best friend.
She tried to be as brief as possible. She came from a planet named "Ar Ciel". 700 years ago there was a war between the regions of Sol Ciel and Sol Cluster, using new technology that made the war so bad it threatened to destroy the planet. Hana emphasized that the statement "destroy the planet" was absolutely literal. There would not have been a planet there by the time they were done, had they not stopped. And this, she claimed, from a civilization that didn't have FTL.
'Sol Ciel? Sol Cluster? That sounds familiar... isn't Sol the name of the original Terran homeworld? Or am I remembering wrong... I'll look it up later.'
The nations of Sol Ciel had been constructing a giant energy transmission tower called "Ar Tonelico" and decided to use it for the war. Due to large jamming devices protecting their enemies in Sol Cluster from above-ground attack, they fired the strike through the planet itself. Originally intended to simply be a show of force without anything beyond a moderate earthquake, the shockwave was somehow amplified while passing through the planet and caused a giant plume of plasma and molten rock to erupt from the ground. This completely destroyed four countries.
It put an end to the war, but at a terrible cost. The planet's core was severely damaged in the process, ruining the environment and making life difficult everywhere. Sol Ciel and Sol Cluster agreed to work together to fix the damage caused, and they had every expectation of succeeding... had survivors of the Seven Bloodstains Incident from the nation of Syestine not decided to launch a retaliatory terrorist attack on Ar Tonelico. The damage caused a huge energy buildup in the tower that couldn't escape until it was finally launched downward.
The planet was genuinely screwed up that time. Everything became barren volcanic wasteland, poisonous clouds spewed out of the ground and covered the whole world... The only places people continued to survive were on Ar Tonelico and the two towers built in Metafalss and Sol Cluster as part of the Planet Regeneration Project. They couldn't escape into space either, because a thick layer of plasma formed at the top of the atmosphere that fried any ships attempting to fly up too far.
Long story short, the planet was fixed now. Hana said she was certain of that, but didn't know the details of how it was done.
'How does a sublight civilization go from making their whole planet a volcanic hellscape, to restoring it to life-sustaining conditions in the span of only 700 years?'
As for her 'mother'? Someone named Mir, a "Reyvateil" who Hana said was supposed to look nearly identical to her aside from having thinner, straighter hair, darker eyes and sharper facial features. The story was too complicated for Hana to tell in one sitting, but Mir was created 400 years ago in Sol Ciel and subjected to very cruel treatment to turn her into the perfect tool and weapon. They wanted an emotionless drone without its own will or desires, and hoped to make all Reyvateils like this. Predictably, this made her go as close to insane as it was mentally possible for her species to get. When it seemed like humanity was about to enslave the Reyvateils once and for all, Mir decided to kill all humans and create a paradise for Reyvateils only.
'It's just like all the stories...'
Hana looked uncomfortable as she said this, and Sono had to wonder how she felt about it. This was her mother she was talking about, and… Sono thought she'd had relationship problems?
Mir had very nearly succeeded. In the course of her rebellion she was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, including other Reyvateils who'd refused to join her or were simply caught in the crossfire. Despite that, when she was defeated, Shurelia—the administrator, and possibly the only person Mir looked up to—had refused to kill her, instead imprisoning her mind in virtual reality for the next few centuries. Even then Mir hadn't given up, and eventually she'd almost escaped to resume her war. It took a very long time and a lot of pain, but she was finally convinced by the effort of many good people, humans and Reyvateils, to give up on her hatred and try to make up for everything she'd done.
'They just… forgave her? Someone who killed millions of people? And Hana told it like the killer was forgiving them. What kind of culture does Hana come from where people are capable seeing things that way?'
Hana explained that Mir had been even younger than her when they started experimenting on her. Mir had been the mental equivalent of 6 years old, and they'd kept it up until she was 30 before she snapped; even then, it was the threat of harming others that made her go off the deep end. The number of people who had been present for Mir's rebellion and were still alive could be counted on one hand anyway, so the vast majority of living people hadn't held any personal grudge against her... or, really, even knew she ever existed. It helped that Shurelia, possibly most-trusted person in the known world, didn't feel any real animosity for Mir in the first place.
Then there was the thing that brought all this out in the open.
"Why would the hair explode?" Her face was a picture, she was sure. She'd given up on disbelief, and was simply taking it all in as Hana spoke. She'd reconsider it later. It was, if nothing else, an amazing story.
"Because the matter I'm made of isn't stable. It can't exist too far from me, or… poof," Hana said, making a 'poof' motion with her hands.
"The… matter?" she asked, apprehensive.
Hana sighed and put the tea on the coffee table, fed up with staring at it.
"I'm not made of atoms. There isn't a single atom or atomic particle… or particle period in my body. I don't run on this universe's physics. I'm not from this universe."
'Then how could she possibly be human?'
"In the universe I'm from, all matter is composed of waves. Before you say 'so is matter here', that's not the same. Matter in my universe is always wave-like, regardless of whether it's interacting or not. Atoms and particles don't exist. There are many different types of waves, but there's only 2 you need to understand right now. Detail Waves are all the physical matter and energy. Light, heat, solids, liquids, gases, plasmas, and so-on. Hymmno Waves are… well, they're the stuff souls are made of. They exist in different wave layers from Detail Waves and only interact with them in what's called a Wave Crossover, but pretty much every lifeform uses them to run their minds. All of the information that makes up my mind and thoughts, my emotions and desires, is composed of Hymmno Waves. Then both these classes are further divided into Static and Dynamic, but then I'm just going into more detail than you really need to know right now."
She didn't get half of that.
Sono briefly had a moment of paranoia over the thought that mother might be listening to this conversation, but… Mother really wouldn't have listening devices in her room, would she? Sono had certainly worried about that when she was younger, but never found any evidence of it. Mother was overprotective sure, but not a crazed stalker. Sono had grown out of such wild fantasies years ago.
"My body produces a small field of my universe's physics to protect itself here. It's not… really dangerous to native life. Random atoms here and there turn into Detail Waves briefly and produce small bursts of radiation when they decay, but I've never noticed anything more serious. Your physics is just a lot more stable than mine. I was terrified that I might be a risk of cancer to people around me after I learned what cancer was, so I did lots of research and found out that almost everyone in star-faring civilizations is pretty robust against radiation damage. I was never a serious radiation hazard."
If this was true, and Sono wasn't quite ready to accept that it was, it was huge. Like, "greatest event in galactic history" huge. First-contact with another universe. She had to remain skeptical, though.
"Hana, you have to understand that this is a very big claim you're making. These are all very big claims, but that is the biggest."
Hana nodded in understanding.
"I know this is like I'm saying I don't trust you, but I just want you to demonstrate for me, okay? At least about you being… synthetic."
Hana sat silently for a while, wringing the hem of her skirt in her hands. Then she started glowing. Sono leaned back in her chair as the girl in front of her lit up in a brilliant display of green patterns and glowing eyes. Then she formed a hemi-spherical barrier of translucent green hexagons around herself. Sono touched it, and it felt solid. Definitely not like repulsor fields or particle shielding, which just pushed away or burned anything that touched them. Not a hologram either, as Sono would have to be wearing a haptic interface to feel that, and would still be able to push through.
That was definitely proof enough of being a synthetic. Alternate physics… not so much. Yet, Sono could tell that Hana was clearly very distressed about all this. She would drop that line of questioning for the moment. If Hana really was from another universe with different physics, it should have been easily verifiable with some testing. She wasn't sure if she wanted to put her through that, though.
"Why did you do it?" Hana suddenly asked.
"Huh?"
"Why did you take my hair?" Hana looked pleadingly at her. "How long did you suspect me of something? Did I… did I do something wrong?"
No, she never did anything wrong. If Hana was really telling the truth about her mental age… she didn't want to disbelieve that; it made sense of far too many quirks. Hana had to believe this was her fault— that she'd done something to deserve this treatment. Children usually did, she'd found, even if that didn't make any logical sense to believe. She couldn't let her go on believing that.
"You didn't do anything, Hana. This is my fault, not yours… and partly Oren's, but I could have just ignored him. He convinced me something was wrong with you. I was… I was afraid."
"Of me?" Hana asked, choking up as she did. Sono quickly jumped up and put down her tea, crossing the room to put her hands on Hana's shoulders. She looked the AGI girl —her precious friend— in the eyes with the most serious expression she could.
"No. For you. We thought you might be a… genetically modified clone, or the victim of cruel body modification experiments. People in that position are often physically or mentally unstable. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it's not out of the realm of possibility around here. It's not just media sensationalism or urban myth."
Sono's expression became pained and she gripped her shoulders tighter.
"I thought you were going to get sick. That you needed treatment or medication of some kind. I was afraid that… that you might die. It's not a good excuse, I know. I should have just asked you, but I thought we could avoid reminding you of whatever you'd run away from if we didn't find anything wrong."
Hana turned her face down, hiding her eyes behind her hair. Sono watched with trepidation as the young girl trembled, then began to hiccup with sobs.
"H-Hana? Are you… upset? I'm sorry."
Then the girl suddenly jumped forward and wrapped her arms around Sono.
"I'm n-not sad! I-I'm just… so h-happy! I f-finally don't h-have to be afraid of som*hic*one knowing! Thank you!"
Sono held the happily crying child tight, relieved that this all worked out somehow. After taking a few minutes to calm down, Hana and her shared a laugh over the whole thing. Then they finally drank their tea, still hot in their self-warming cups.
Then suddenly, Sono felt a question bubbling up when she thought about this whole fiasco again.
"Hana… if the hair had still been stuck to me, how were you going to get it off?"
"Uh… Oh… Well..." Hana blushed as she started and stopped. Sono raised an inquisitive eyebrow.
"I… didn't… mention I can shapeshift, did I?" Hana blushed even harder.
"Shapeshift?" Her thoughts went to any number of movies she'd watched, especially the ones with Jovian actors. That meant… she glanced at Hana's teenage form again. Sure, what kid wouldn't want to grow up early, and—the hair.
"I couldn't tell where it was, but I'd be able to feel it if I touched it. I'm not entirely limited to human shapes. So…"
She didn't seem to want to complete the sentence. Sono thought about it.
A beat.
'Yeah. That would have been awkward. Moving on.'
"Okay. It's not the craziest thing I've heard all day. I'm glad you didn't have to do that, though." Sono tried not to think too hard about what it would have looked like. Hana, for her part, kept blushing. Distractions, distractions…
"When will I get to see you at your real age?" She wondered, looking speculatively at Hana.
Hana's eyes widened, and her face twisted into the most comically outraged expression Sono had ever seen on the girl. She couldn't help it, she burst out laughing. After the past half-hour's revelations, this was what upset her?
"It's not funny. I don't want to be a chibi!"
She sounded downright whiny. The only thing missing from the picture was her cutely stamping her feet. Sono was starting to have trouble breathing… die, she'd die if she couldn't stop laughing soon.
"It can't possibly be this funny!"
Hana's affronted voice sent her into a new bout of hysterics. She couldn't even see the girl for tears, and she was using her to stay upright.
"No, no. Just—" She choked out. "I don't even know what's a chibi."
And somehow that was incredibly funny. She collapsed further, almost dragging Hana down on top of her. Days of stress from worrying about her were just melting away. There were problems in plenty for later, starting with the fact that twelve-year-olds should not be working at all, let alone working to stay alive--and, oh boy, they needed to sit down with Oren soon--but her life had gotten oh so much brighter in just half an hour. Things were going to be all right.
"A chibi is…" Hana giggled a little, then cut herself off, but kept silently shaking. In laughter, this time, not tears. Sono could tell. "From those memories, or simulations, or… stop that!"
She decided to find out if tween-aged alien AIs were ticklish.
Turned out that they were.
