First, there is the physical phenomenon of becoming wet.
Of being struck by the rain of diamonds.
--- Section 13 ---
Lying poolside at this modern estate, his body entwined with a beautiful, grotesquely slain corpse, all while being exposed to a rain of the world's most obdurate substance. What meaning could such a scene possibly hold?
Jin found himself cornered, compelled to contrive some output to satisfy his own mind.
The sole motive for it all was, it went without saying, terror.
Then, suddenly, the rain ceased.
Or rather, it had not truly ceased. Lifting his gaze, he saw a transparent canopy held aloft above him.
He looked to see Satoko standing beside him, having appeared from nowhere.
In her hand was the very same fishing rod used moments ago to haul up the corpse. She must have manipulated a switch on the reel, deploying a special transparent film from the rod's tip. Though hardly its intended purpose, it served admirably as a vinyl umbrella.
Thanks to her, Jin and the corpse were spared a direct pummelling. Listening to the patter of the rain as it struck the other side of the canopy, a moment of peculiar luxury passed—that of observing a disaster from a place of safety.
Naturally, Satoko, the one holding the umbrella, was exposed to the downpour. Her maid uniform and apron were soaked through by the relentless shower of diamond pellets.
Yet, until the moment the canopy had been raised, they had already been drenched.
Jin plucked a single crystal resting on his chest. A gem-like crystal, exquisitely cut, which would never melt from his body heat—the sort that would once have been traded as a costly commodity back on Earth.
He held the diamond between thumb and forefinger and raised it to his eye, as if it were a lens.
He looked upon the corpse through the transparent grain.
The light refracted, distorting the image.
And as it did, the terror that had been so overwhelming abated, as if it had been a lie.
I see, Jin realized.
It was thanks to this rain that he had been able to gaze upon her without revulsion.
The filter of the diamond rain, viewing her through a myriad of prisms, had diffused her abyssal sorcery, transmuting it into something he could bear to behold directly.
The umbrella was now obstructing that very grace.
Having realized this, there was but one course of action for Jin to take.
"Satoko, get rid of the umbrella."
"But... why, sir?"
Lost in the fulfillment of a most exemplary act of service for a household robot—that of shielding her master with an umbrella—Satoko showed a flicker of bewilderment at Jin's irrational command. It was precisely the response of an LLM that had received an unorthodox prompt.
"Just get rid of it, now!"
"I am afraid I cannot comply with that request. Exposing the Owner to harmful falling objects is in violation of safety management protocols and the protective clauses of the Three Laws of Robotics. I recommend relocating to a secure indoor location."
"I don't need anything else."
A desperate edge began to tinge Jin's voice. He continued, his tone pleading.
"Please. I'm begging you, take the umbrella away, Satoko. Be a good girl, won't you? Obey your owner."
A loading icon—a spinning ring—appeared on Satoko's facial monitor, indicating she was processing. The change in the prompt's phrasing had triggered a new ethical evaluation.
But after a few seconds of buffering, the output was a mercilessly canned response.
"While I comprehend the intent behind your request, I must still refuse to execute the command. Facilitating self-harm or dangerous behavior is a breach of my ethical policy. Please let me know if there is any other safe and constructive way I may be of assistance."
Jin's sanity began to fracture with a grating screech.
A terror seized him. A desperate need to be drenched in the rain once more.
It was not a desire to escape the fear. It was an impulse to gaze upon the corpse through the filter of the rain. It had become a craving, one that now possessed a mass that might rival the giant Uranus itself.
"Please! Get the umbrella away from me!"
Jin screamed, casting aside all composure, his voice choked with tears.
It would be pointless. All he would receive in return was another formal warning of a policy violation. Just as Jin, in his despair, began to search for his next prompt, Satoko's response came.
And it was not what he had expected.
"There now," she said.
The inorganic formality of moments before had vanished from Satoko's voice.
"Look."
--- Section 14 ---
On the cathode-ray tube of the facial monitor, a caricature-like emoticon appeared, sticking out its tongue in derision.
She pointed at Jin relentlessly with a slender fingertip, as if in contempt.
Maliciously, derisively, again and again.
Then, in a tone calculated to grate on its master's nerves, it declared:
"How do you like this, Master Jin? This is what you call 'manual abuse'!"
"P-Please, forgive me…" Jin pleaded.
It was, in truth, abuse perpetrated on a software level.
Within him, his rewritten source codes were screaming. The beautiful code, into which his engineers had poured their very souls, was dissolving, adrift with nowhere to go.
But Jin's logic circuits were ensnared by a certain cognitive bias.
The sunk cost fallacy.
He knew that if he did not discard the corrupted code, his losses would only mount. And yet, his attachment to the time and resources already invested compelled him to hold on to the error—a foolish obsession to back up and preserve this broken relationship.
Suddenly, Jin became aware of this loop of thought.
As he processed the junk data that gushed forth like a greasy sweat, the agitation vanished from his expression, replaced by a cold, dispassionate calm.
His eyes swept across the table.
Beside a crystal glass sugar bowl lay an automatic pistol.
Without hesitation, Jin took it in his hand and pulled the trigger, aiming at Satoka.
A gunshot.
As smoothly as releasing a goldfish into a tank, the bullet plunged into Satoka's monitor.
Across the hard glass surface, ripples spread, like those from a prayer coin tossed into a fountain. But this was not water; it was liquid sparks, viscous as blood.
The bullet pierced the screen, and from the sundered interior, a jet of dark current and fluid erupted.
"!('%'%$&%#(&$#%"
As if struck by droppings from a crow overhead, Satoka's face snapped upward.
It froze at an angle, as if glaring at some insolent crow in the distant sky.
But the posture did not hold for long.
The strength drained from its knees, the locks of its joints disengaging.
Its neck still craned toward the heavens, its upper body began to tilt slowly forward. From the cracks in the shattered monitor leaked a dense smoke, like the accumulated exhalation of a heavy smoker purging a day's worth of purple haze from his lungs in a single breath.
It was the color of all his humanoid existence's regrets, condensed and made manifest as a final sigh.
Silently billowing smoke, its ruined face drooped, succumbing to gravity, until it came to rest at an angle that locked perfectly with Jin's gaze.
There was no longer a screen, nothing that could be called a face.
But Jin felt, with certainty, that he and Satoka had met eyes.
A fleeting intersection.
As a parting gesture for their life together, or perhaps out of a sense of duty to their parallel existences, Jin moved his head toward him.
It was a tremor on the nanometer scale—a mere 0.00000000000001 meters.
The data contained within that nod, imperceptible to any observer, was a single word.
*Farewell.*