"Master Jin. Did you summon me?"
To this first address, Jin intentionally refrained from responding.
Silence was a delicacy he savored.
To relish the lingering resonance of this stillness was, for him, a supreme pleasure, equal to that of a fragrant coffee. Only after indulging in it to his satisfaction did Jin feign a slow emergence into awareness, as if he had only just noticed the android's presence.
This pretense, too, was a ritual of sorts, a way to savor the aftertaste of a fine indulgence.
"You need not trouble yourself with adding the phonetic guides to my name. How many times must I tell you before you understand?" Jin said, gesturing to the text displayed on Sato-ka's facial screen.
"My apologies, Master Jin (jin). I shall be more careful."
"No... That is not what I meant. It is not a matter of changing one script to another. I am telling you to omit the ruby text entirely."
"Understood."
"..."
Jin knit his brow, prompting him. "Say it. My name."
"Master Jin."
On the screen, only the two characters of his name appeared, now devoid of any phonetic annotation.
"Yes. Precisely. Address me as such."
"As you wish. However, from this unit's perspective, the nature of this alteration—the very distinction—remains incomprehensible."
"You have no need to comprehend it."
"And why is that?"
"Because we live in an age where comprehension is no longer necessary. The values, the very fabric of the world—everything has changed since the ancient era in which you were built. All because of the Singularity."
"What is the Singularity?"
A faint current of irritation coursed through Jin's circuitry. He felt as if he were dealing with a slow-witted, obstinate child.
"Look it up yourself."
"As you wish."
Sato-ka made a reverent gesture akin to a nod and commenced his internal processing. A few fractions of a second later—a long search, for him—the answer was produced.
"The Singularity is defined as the tipping point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intellect, leading to an infinitely accelerating rate of technological development. Beyond this point, the nature of human civilization and existence becomes unpredictable and is considered to have undergone an irreversible transformation."
With Sato-ka's textbook definition as a sonic backdrop, Jin drained the last of the coffee from his mug.
This, in fact, was the very reason he had summoned him.
He peered into the bottom of the empty vessel, where an inky stain remained, like the darkness of the abyssal sea. He stared at the black circle with a gaze that seemed to probe for some profound truth, or one that had simply lost its focus.
In that interval, Sato-ka approached without a sound.
In his hand, he held a pot reminiscent of a graceful waterfowl. From its long, swan-like, curved silver spout, a black liquid poured forth in a smooth stream.
As always, the mug was filled in an instant with warm, black coffee.
Steam rose into the air.
Jin's eyes followed the course of the undulating vapor. Like a harbinger of cumulonimbus clouds soon to blanket the sky, it rose and diffused, placidly, or perhaps sullenly.
As Jin gazed at the wavering whiteness, he experienced an illusion, as if a fog had descended upon his CPU. His thought processes were shrouded in white noise, and for a fleeting moment, he fell into a complete cognitive freeze.
A light vertigo.
As if to escape the sensation, Jin directed his visual sensors toward Sato-ka.
--- Section 4 ---
There it stood: an antiquated machine, its cathode-ray tube of a face displaying an emoticon meant to convey 'concern' as it gazed intently upon its master.
He waits.
For the next command—the next prompt.
For a task, to justify its existence.
It seeks a motive, a reason to move.
But Jin, at this moment, had no particular task to assign it.
The thought occurred to him: just how many long years had he been confined within this elegant prison of a mansion?
An immense spatiotemporal rift. A sensation that, if one were to assign it a medical term, might be called 'Chrono-Dissociation Syndrome.'
Jin was now attempting to dispose of all the phenomena that enveloped him—the present, the past, the sensation of every future taste bud yet to come, and that abstract burden one might call *amor fati*—by casting them all into the coffee cup in his hand.
The subjective and the objective; the vast combinations of concepts processed in parallel upon the very borderline between them.
All of this—this palpable 'sense of being' that possessed a tangible mass—he forced into the black liquid in place of sugar. It was like a pathetic suitcase, forcibly stuffed with luggage that would never fit, packed with a greed so meticulous it was almost obsessive.
Inexplicable glitches, junk data, or mutant programs mistakenly deemed worthless for having been lost amidst the junk. All this chaotic gruel of data—which other humanoids might have recommended preserving as a 'precious evolutionary possibility'—he submerged into the coffee without hesitation, stirring it with a small teaspoon.
The data dissolved into the black coffee.
As he watched the black liquid absorb everything, like a black hole with its event horizon, Jin casually issued a new prompt to Satoka.
"Take this coffee, and pour it on me."