"Rain..."
The grotesque corpse, which had collapsed into Jin's arms and was clinging to his chest, murmured the word.
Until that moment, she had worn an eerie, plastered-on smile, staring at Jin's face like an unbreakable curse. Her gaze, humid and viscous, had ensnared him in a mixture of adoration and murderous intent, but suddenly, that restraint was released.
She lifted her head, her eyes turning toward the leaden sky.
A shade of melancholy colored her features.
At her every move, every gesture, the fear centers in Jin's mind had been blaring alarms.
Her unceasing gaze, delivered at point-blank range, had eroded his system like a noxious radiation. While there was no physical damage to his chips, a severe contamination had occurred in his logical layer—his software. It felt as though thousands of lines of his source code had been rewritten in some indecipherable, otherworldly language.
But with her gaze averted, the digital exposure ceased.
Jin immediately initiated his self-recovery process. He connected to his backup partition on the cloud, downloaded the authorized source code written by his engineers, overwrote the corrupted sectors, and rolled back the bug-riddled script to a stable state.
Once his systems returned to nominal levels, Jin cautiously returned his gaze to her.
The terror had not vanished. He had no desire to input any further information regarding this being.
But the two of them were now layered atop one another on a deck chair, like lovers at a luxury resort. To ignore her completely, to treat her as merely part of the scenery of this modern-art-esque estate, was impossible; the situation was far too physical.
The luxurious moment of simply sipping coffee and melting into the landscape was over.
He could no longer remain passive; an action had to be taken.
Jin followed her gaze.
She was looking up at the sky.
At the falling rain of diamonds.
For Jin, a resident of Uranus, this weather, unique to the planet, was a familiar sight. But now, he needed something to fill the silence—background music, or perhaps information to help him view the situation objectively.
He sent a prompt to the household robot.
"Satōka. Explain the diamond rain. Three lines."
A string of characters once known as Japanese scrolled across Satōka's facial monitor. Jin, finding even the act of reading it to be a chore, immediately re-entered his command.
"I want to use it as BGM. Read it aloud."
"As you wish."
In a tone that was at once textbook and yet strangely dynamic, Satōka began to recite the definition of the natural phenomenon.
"It is a phenomenon occurring deep within the atmosphere of Uranus, where extreme pressure and high temperatures cause the pyrolysis of methane, which then crystallizes into carbon atoms."
--- Section 12 ---
The generated diamonds, mingling with the partially melted liquid carbon, descend as an intense sleet into the sea of the planet's core. One might call it the world's most expensive and ruthless ice-rain, a maelstrom of adamantine jewels and their molten counterparts."
Jin gazed up at the same sky as the unnatural corpse lying upon his chest, as if they were lovers.
But then, abruptly—
The rain stopped.
A passing shower, it seemed. Its all-too-abrupt end threw Jin's mind into disarray.
For the moment the raindrops that had held the sky together vanished, the corpse's gaze, as if drawn by a powerful magnet, snapped back to him.
And this, just after he had finally repaired the source code.
The noxious radiation of her gaze began once more to corrode his CPU, his core software, the very depths of his backend.
He would a million times rather be struck by that rain of hard diamonds than be drenched in her gaze.
Jin spat the silent venom, yet this time, he did not look away.
Gradually, a peculiar bravery began to well up inside him. A ruinous euphoria, a feeling that he would not mind if his source code were destroyed.
It was an astonishing bug, even to himself.
The sensation of his coding being thrown into disarray, of it being rewritten. He realized for the first time that this sensation was not entirely unpleasant.
Let it be destroyed. It doesn't matter if I'm broken, if I'm rewritten.
Of course, such acceptance was accompanied by terror, yet Jin was beginning to feel a certain exquisite sweetness at the core of that terror.
And so, Jin did not flee, but instead gazed intently upon the face of the unnatural corpse.
It was the first time he had truly looked at her.
A beautiful face.
Her long, wavy golden hair was no mere dye. It possessed a luster as if it were self-illuminating, an alloy forged from gold and the flicker of flame. It was a hue that evoked a sense of Cosmic Fate, as if its color had been ordained at the very moment of the universe's Big Bang. A primordial and immutable constant, impossible to ever rewrite.
He shifted his gaze to the features of her face, meticulously inputting the information.
Perhaps it was due to his long, solitary life. In truth, aside from the clunker Satoka, he'd had virtually no opportunity to come into contact with a physical other—a humanoid.
Jin's activities—or rather, his 'electro-existence'—took place almost entirely within the micro-world of the network. His macro-self, with its physical form, had been steeped in the greatest luxury in the universe: solitude, here in this elegant mansion.
In that cloyingly sweet, syrupy solitude, his social intelligence had melted into a viscous sludge, ceasing to react to any ordinary stimulus.
That was precisely why this experience—of physically encountering another being with an external form, of inputting that information at such close range—was so utterly new,
and so unbearably frightening,
and…
"You are… very lovely."
The audio data was outputted from him, seemingly of its own accord.
In response, the unnatural corpse spoke from her supposedly dead lips, the voice shockingly vivid.
"That's because it's my design."
The sound was so hauntingly pleasant that a shudder of fear ran through Jin.
And in that moment, he felt he understood the true nature of this fear.
It was pleasure.
"Since when was that your design?"
Jin attempted to engage in an objective exchange of information, to distract himself from the fear and the pleasure.
The corpse answered without hesitation.
"Since before I was produced. In accordance with the law of entropy, I am required to be beautiful."
"And who decided that? Such a thing?"
At this, she let out a guileless smile.
It was not the innocence of a child. It was the artless naturalness of the countless meteors adrift in space, all bearing similarly uneven surfaces. A pure laugh, expressed as a 'phenomenon' in and of itself, having passed through no social filter.
Laying bare the ultimate naturalness that only a dead thing can exude, the unnatural corpse answered.
"You did, didn't you?"
"…"
He could not deny it.
As Jin stood frozen by the shocking truth, at a loss for words,
the rain of diamonds began to fall from the sky once more.