BATTER 36

Children naturally want to be firemen or even extinct dinosaurs. Baron let out a grin that looked more like a deep grimace as he faced the wind. Eyes as vividly blue as wet feathers captured this crumpled, characteristic smile. Bijou sat beside Baron and asked.

“What kind of truck did you want to be?”

“The fastest, sturdiest, fucking strongest truck. I thought it’d be cool if it had guns attached, too.”

“Even though normal trucks don’t have guns.”

“The world’s a rough place, man. It was even worse back then. Anyway, my mom said I couldn’t be a truck, so I was pretty upset at the time.”

Baron’s dream was a crazed career goal that even a crazed AI had rejected. As he chuckled at the memory, Bijou spoke up with a remarkably serious face.

“If you transplanted an AI that had learned your personality into a truck, wouldn’t you be able to achieve that dream?”

“Haha, you say things that are scary enough to be sexy sometimes.”

“Is it scary? Sometimes I think about turning humans into machines.”

The sound of the wind racing past his ears felt exceptionally loud. Behind the hair fluttering and obscuring his vision, what kind of expression had Bijou been making…?

“Because then, I could easily erase pain and erase loneliness. Just like deleting a memory file.”

Baron stared at the white face where light and shadow flickered alternately. If a human heart could be fixed by tapping on a keyboard, just like opening the back of a machine’s head to fix code, then pain and loneliness would no longer be able to exist.

In truth, the human heart—the human soul—has a tendency to be excessively idealized and overrated. Are humans not also organic machines fashioned by the hands of an omnipotent Creator? Protein dolls moving according to programming recorded in their genes.

Where is human sorrow? Where is human solitude? In the amygdala, in the hippocampus? Inside the furrows of the wrinkled gray matter? Even if that were the case, they cannot be separated at will. If separation were the standard, an actual soul might belong to machines rather than humans. Baron let out a laugh quieter than the sound of the wind. Even behind his fluttering brown hair, the curve of his crinkling eyes was clearly visible.

“If you erase those, you’re not the same human anymore.”

“Do you believe there is meaning in suffering?”

“Well, it seemed like it wasn’t a bad means of education.”

There was no need to dig into cringe-worthy territory like the “meaning of suffering.” Because there was no discipline quite as long-lasting as a punishment. Baron gave a playful shrug.

“The problem is you’re thinking too much. Do you really need to use such complicated methods? Humans already have a traditional, classic coping mechanism.”

“Are you saying there is a good way to forget agony?”

“Yeah. It can be broken down into three big steps. First, find a decent partner. Second, seduce them. Third, fuck ’em. See? Simple, right?”

A vulgar answer was accompanied by an even more vulgar hand gesture. Despite it being “advice,” Bijou nodded with a serious face. At the same time, he smiled softly and turned his body to sit with his back to the light. His blonde hair, having soaked up the sunlight, glowed like the radiant brilliance of a distant, mysterious star.

“There was once a time when humans thought machines would want to become human, too.”

Baron thought about what this sentence implied. The guy continued speaking in a low voice.

“I wonder if I am thinking the same way they did?”

Beneath his long, extended eyelashes, something like the pure, white light emitted by sterling silver had gathered. Recalling that the light source was behind the guy’s head, it actually wasn’t even light at all. Like that cliché, old proverb about eyes being the window to the soul, perhaps a glimpse of his “soul” had momentarily revealed itself? Baron whispered like an exhalation. A faint smile, as thin as a reed by a river, was hooked on his lips.

“You’re quite human yourself.”

“Is that a compliment? I didn’t quite understand the meaning.”

Eyes were merely a type of lens or reflector for gathering visual information, so there was no way a non-material entity like a soul or spirit could be projected. The “soul” shimmering in someone’s gaze is nothing more than a minor misunderstanding. The muscles surrounding the eyeball, the moisture on the surface, and the projection of the viewer’s own mental state create the illusion of a soul. It’s the same as how, when you press a camera shutter, it’s the photographer’s consciousness that remains, not the essence of the subject.

What was reflected on his silver plate?

After thinking for a moment, Baron said.

“It means you look sad.”

After that, only the white noise of the wind passing by or the wheels rattling remained. Along the bumpy road, a neck like a lily stem swayed. Amidst the vibration he was growing accustomed to, Bijou met Baron’s eyes. The eyes that had been merely staring for a while curved into a gentle arc.

“Thank you.”

“Really? I said it to piss you off.”

Baron cackled intentionally vulgarly. Similar to the reaction he always showed, Bijou didn’t give any answer and merely smiled softly. While Mori pushed forward against the wind, the sun crawled slowly toward its highest point in the sky. It was around the time shadows began to pool at their feet that the tattered but diligent Mori came to a stop.

As if familiar with the place, Bijou didn’t even check his surroundings and immediately climbed down from the cargo bed. Baron followed suit and jumped off Mori’s back. Cracked and protruding ground greeted them. Mori, having guided them to a factory complex that had become a ruin long ago, departed without so much as a goodbye.

Earthquakes aren’t common in the Northeastern states, but once before Baron was born, a historical earthquake of massive magnitude had occurred. It was an overwhelming earthquake that had twisted the very surface of the earth. Since it was already a point in time where humanity could abandon their home, some areas were restored, but others were simply abandoned as ruins. This factory district where they now stood was part of those abandoned regions.

Baron looked up at the white, rectangular buildings that still gave off a desolate chill long after the disaster, and the chimneys that soared as if to scratch the clouds. The color at least was similar, but they didn’t look like a place where a hospital or a doctor would be. Since any useful scrap metal or machine parts would have been stripped clean long ago, it wasn’t likely the interior would be any different. Glancing at the deserted factories, Baron asked.

“You brought us to the right place, right?”

“Of course.”

Bijou walked with a calm demeanor, as if telling him to follow. He brushed through tall, yellow weeds and moved aside a dusty steel plate that had been leaning against the wall. A door appeared, just as featureless and grimy as the exterior wall. The door, which didn’t even have a proper lock, opened easily with just a slight pull.

“This is like the start of a horror movie.”

Baron muttered the pointless joke as he peered past the door. A stuffy, cool darkness stretched infinitely downward. Within the range where the light reached, the silhouette of a faint staircase was visible. It was an atmosphere that would be somewhat understandable even if there were a basement sealing away a cursed Ouija board or a Necronomicon bound in human skin.

But in this day and age of the 23rd century, there were plenty of things more terrifying than necromancy using corpses or ill-tempered white ghosts. Bijou, who had found the handrail by feeling the wall, took Baron’s hand and placed it on top of it.

“It’s a little dark, so please hold the handrail tight and follow me slowly.”

“A little,” he says—an indescribably positive choice of words. As if it were a path he frequented, Bijou stepped down the stairs without hesitation. As they headed lower, the smell of cold, stale dust sharply pricked his nasal cavity. The narrow downhill path toward an endless basement evoked the contradictory words of a birth canal and the underworld.