Traffic was heavy; the old program we wrote ages ago to render it was originally a joke, now it was a rule. No one could break the rules once they were decided, not even now. The car was rolling along slowly through the crowded streets; hundreds of people crowded the sidewalks outside, all wandering aimlessly here and there. I couldn’t tell who was a user and who was a program, that was the point. I did catch a glimpse of a few familiar faces, probably software I built ages ago, long forgotten to me, but still operating.
The driver turned around and told me we would be there soon. I knew traffic would clear up, the formula was pretty simple, and random variables were almost predictable at this point. Very few of the programs were actually un-predictable. As long as you read the code you could figure them out. I proofread most of the code that went into the first couple of years of the Domain. Everything was logical. I just sat back and stared out the window as the world outside passed by.
The Domain always had a way of relaxing me. Something about it was so familiar, so much like home. I can’t even remember if I had ever been to the real Tokyo now that I think about it. A long time ago I was supposed to go there, the plans just eventually fell through. I was always under the impression that it would always be there, that I could just go next year. That was a mistake.
The real Tokyo fell to the same war that tore the world apart. Japanese alliances were fiercely for their corporations the defense force itself was completely corporate, there was no conflict in Japan. The problem wasn’t with itself though; it was with the outside world. In the period of anarchy that followed the collapse of world government no one in the world was safe. The other corporations took their private armies to the streets and fought each other continuously.
In this time Japan itself was assailed by its own overseas holdings. American based branch offices sent American corporate troops to kill their own. In the end there was still some attachment to ones country, ones place of birth. In this period of upheaval Japan faced its own technology in a great battle that lasted months. In the end, Japan is said to have sunken into the sea, and along with it all of their knowledge and power. Now that I look around at the streets of Tokyo from the year 2000 I realize the kind of things people are capable of. All of these people may have once existed.
Our code was not completely random, we had database after database of old information, many of it things that could be used for identification. And so it would be that we resurrected the city, we drew from those old files the faces of the dead, and with that created them anew. We had raised a city of the damned. Doomed forever to walk the streets of their city, without ever knowing there was an outside world; Thousands upon thousands of AI, all oblivious.
It made me think back to Konpyuuta Chan. She was my masterpiece, my everything. Years of labor went into her programming. I started her with nothing, a clean slate. No templates, no borrowed code, she was written on a platform all of her own. I trusted no one with her information, I wanted her to be ultimately unique, and into her I poured everything I had. All of my knowledge, my skill, my ability, everything was in her. While Tokyo may be full of thousands of other programs, I wanted her to be nothing like them, a kind of individuality that no other software could ever claim for itself.
The car finally pulled up in front of the Palace, the heart of the city. Within its walls I would find myself face to face with Tokyo itself. Emperor.
Emperor was the program we wrote about a year before we even thought about opening the Domain to outsiders. While its membership was still strict and limited, we could not watch everyone all the time. So from that necessity Emperor was born. He served his purpose well, he watched everything at all times. Into him we placed all of our concern and love. He would never turn on us, his loyalties were to Tokyo alone, and so he made the perfect ruler. No matter what anyone said or did, the domain would not move until it had Emperor’s approval. If he had called up me then something monumental must have been going on.
When we had gotten out of the car the men escorted me further into the Palace. Its walls shone in a kind of splendor that could only be achieved through days of detailed texture mapping. I sighed. I could never appreciate this place the way others did, every other lamppost was just another line of code to me. Knowing how everything worked and why left me missing something in this place now. Just understanding how the sun rose and set left me looking at the reds and blues in the sky and saying to myself “now it will shift exactly three levels darker in the high sky, and the color will shift lower to the horizon…” School always did that for me too, it ruined the world for me; especially science classes.
The room to which I was escorted was huge, with a long oval table set in the middle. Sitting at it were nine of the ten original team. I saw my seat still empty, to the right of the throne upon which Emperor sat. I walked in slowly, glancing about the room quickly. All of us were assembled it seemed. Something very important must have been happening.
“Ah! Kusanagi, please do sit down.” Emperor beckoned me to my seat at his side. I slowly walked over and sat down. “It is good of you to come on such short notice.”
“No it is fine, it is my pleasure.” I nodded my head toward him slowly.
The others were all sitting in their usual places, wearing their usual clothes. No one had changed much since we founded the Domain, which was a rule, once you decided who you were, you could never change. Many of their faces looked grim and troubled; nothing new at all. The weight of the domain began weighing heavily on all of us once we started to understand what it really meant. Emperor began to speak.
“Since Tokyo was founded it has stood for something important to all of us, I am here because of that importance. We face grave times it seems; our worst fears may have finally come true. The corporations, from which we have hidden for all these years, have begun to search for us. They have found us out, we do not know how, but we do know they are looking for us. The only good news is, they know only one thing, ‘Tokyo Domain’. Our sources have verified this, if they know anything else, they are keeping it very secretive.
And so, they have begun to search. They are buying out every hacker and runner contract on the net. They will have everyone who can use a console trying to root us out by the end of the week. That is why you were called here, we must act now before the corporations can do anything.”
The room suddenly became very quiet. I think we all knew this would happen sooner or later, and there was very little else w could do about it. The procedures were already in place. Countermeasures would have to be taken, immediately. Emperor continued…
“There is one who commands great respect form the people who has made a call to arms. He is calling for every program and user to come to his aid to fight the corporations at every turn. He is causing a great trouble for me as I am bound to do anything about it. He is in no violation of any rule, and so he is free to do as he pleases. I know we can all agree on that. The problem lies in a potential violation.
He has rescued countless volumes of information from the records we have stored here, and in them he claims to have found our salvation. He claims to have discovered ‘Mecha’.”
I couldn’t help but snap to attention at that comment. Mecha? How was it possible, there were billions of files in the libraries, it would be impossible to sort out the information on such a thing, let alone know how to apply it practically to the real world. It couldn’t be possible… Mecha in Tokyo maybe, but not in real life.
Emperor waved his hand, and servants placed in front of each of us a file. I looked through it for a moment, and there it was; the plans for the first Tokyo Defense Force Mecha.
“The problem now lays my friends, in what we do about our situation, and this.” Emperor stretched out his hand and pointed at a little plastic model in the middle of the table, a model of a little Mecha, on the base was lettered “SOUL-CC”
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