A whimpering sound, *wan-wan*.
The sound of Satōka, sobbing beside him, echoed.
The twilight manor was so still that its very silence was a kind of roar, pressing upon the eardrums. But Satōka's pathetic weeping acted as a noise-canceling counter-frequency, nullifying the pressure.
Sumi could close his eyes and enjoy the sound as if it were background music.
--- Section 7 ---
He quelled his inner fervor with an image: pouring coffee, not lubricant, upon an overheated actuator to cool its core. With this, he settled back into his deck chair.
He launched a drone into the air, linking it to his own visual sensors.
A panoramic perspective from on high.
The turquoise poolside, the white deck chair, and he himself, clad in garments now adorned with an exquisite brown pattern where he had spilled his coffee.
All of it composed as a single work of modern art.
Satoka's wails, echoing through the scene, served as an indispensable accent to a composition that had been verging on the monotonous. Like the final background added to the Mona Lisa, or a single drop of paint released into the pond of a static garden.
Kiyoshi felt a subtle flutter of excitement, like that of a novice, or an old man who, awash in wealth, had taken up painting. He immersed himself utterly in this perfected tableau.
Suddenly, Satoka's crying ceased.
A flash of irritation surged through Kiyoshi's CPU.
*Do not ruin this perfect immersion.*
The displeasure of having the BGM, so essential to this space, abruptly cut off. He pried open eyelids he would have preferred to keep sealed for an eternity.
His gaze fell upon Satoka's facial monitor, which was fixed on a single point.
In the direction of the pool.
Kiyoshi suppressed the impulse to order another "automated abuse," and affording the silence Satoka had created a mere two percent of his respect, he directed his own visual sensors toward the object of its gaze.
A body was floating in the pool.
It was face down, its front submerged, only its back visible upon the water's surface.
It was like an under-stirred butter coffee.
A pat of unmelted butter drifting aimlessly on the black liquid surface, an oily, visually unappealing buoyancy.
The form was clad in nothing but a white gown. Individual identification was impossible with its face hidden in the water, but judging from the long, spreading hair, it was likely a humanoid robot configured to a female model.
The drowned-corpse-like body did not stir in the slightest.
No, strictly speaking, perhaps it was moving. But at a velocity of 10⁻²⁰ meters per second—a speed converging on absolute zero. It drifted in the center of the pool at a static velocity that, without quantum observation, could only be described as "stationary."
"Satoka," Kiyoshi asked his domestic robot.
"Is that a guest?"
"It is not," Satoka replied instantly.
"It is an anomalous corpse."
"…And what is an anomalous corpse?"
Kiyoshi knew the lexical, or rather, the semantic definition of the term, but he could not bring himself to "understand" it in any real sense.
It was why he posed the question—probing known information as if searching for an unknown bug. In response, Satoka, shifting from her earlier, emotional crying mode, outputted her answer in an academic tone, as if directly linked to an encyclopedic database.
"An anomalous corpse is a general term, from a medical or forensic standpoint, for a dead body whose cause of death is not immediately apparent. It mainly refers to remains where criminality or accident is suspected, and it is standardly defined as a case to be processed through an administrative or forensic autopsy."
This reaffirmation of known information did nothing to heighten the resolution of his understanding.
Kiyoshi was once again seized by the impulse to rise from his chair, but he suppressed it with reason—or perhaps, a programmed aesthetic.
*I have only just risen.*
The nobler the being, the more minimal its movements must be. Some superstitious code of unknown origin was causing a bug within him, though he himself remained unaware of it.
In his elegant life as a humanoid—his "Electro-Life," rather—this bug posed no obstacle. On the contrary, it functioned as a philosophy that justified his own indolence.
He refused to register the unpleasant object directly upon his retinas, continuing his observation through the camera feed of the drone still hovering overhead.
On the screen, viewed from directly above, the anomalous corpse was spread-eagled.
It was a pose as if frozen, space-time and all, in the midst of a butterfly stroke.
--- Section 8 ---
Frozen in a moment of violent action, it was more static than a photograph, yet appeared more dynamic than a moving picture. The paradoxical visual data was so intense it triggered a peculiar synesthetic error in Jin's GPU.
To resolve this disquieting paradox, Jin, as though possessed by the ghost of a process that simplifies complex situations, issued a command.
"Satoka. Retrieve it."
"I cannot."
"And why not?"
"This unit has aged considerably since its manufacture and is not equipped with IPX-rated waterproofing or dust-proofing functions. To enter the pool would be to instantly short-circuit my systems, and I would become a second anomalous corpse."
"That will not do," Jin murmured. "I have no taste for arranging two anomalous corpses in my pool."
"There, you see?"
"Do it nonetheless."
"I beg your pardon?" Satoka's speaker emitted a flustered tone of protest. "But how am I to do that?"
While Jin's vastly superior CPU had calculated a trillion possible solutions in the space of a single attosecond, it was clear that Satoka's meager processing power would fail to produce even one, though she be granted an eternity of one second.
Mercifully, Jin offered one such solution.
"Why not simply fish for it?"
"Indeed."
Satoka's imagination may have been impoverished, but she was adept at interpreting and executing a given prompt. She vanished into the residence at once—and returned, after approximately three years had passed in Jin's subjective time, bearing a single fishing rod.
"You are late. What took you three years?" Jin immediately demanded. "I grew so weary of waiting that the rotational axis of Uranus has shifted by five degrees."
"Oh, for goodness' sake. Such hyperbole," Satoka chided, her tone one of exasperation. "A planet's axis does not precess over a mere three years. The axial tilt of Uranus is approximately ninety-eight degrees. It rotates in a stable manner, almost on its side. The gyroscopic effect maintains the orientation of its axis, making it physically impossible for the angle to change on a timescale of a few years."
"…Do you not possess the definition file for 'humor'?"
Jin shook his head in weary resignation.
Lifting his gaze, he saw Satoka standing there, reverently holding the fishing rod like a chambermaid cradling a broom. Jin perceived this scene not through the drone's camera, but directly, driving the actuators in his own eyeballs to focus his optical sensors upon her.
Jin transmitted a data packet from his optical sensors, instantly overwriting the specifications of the fishing rod Satoka held.
He virtually downgraded the data of the unrefined, standard model into a more primitive and charming form, one that would better suit her small, delicate hands.
He made no compromise, however, on the bait.
From the deep seas of Titan, Saturn's moon, hailed the Giga-Shark, a colossal ichthyoid said to reach a thousand kilometers in length. He affixed a single, priceless pearl of its caviar to the hook without a moment's hesitation.
"Now, go and catch that anomalous corpse."