Chapter Text
Mondo Oowada didn't particularly like his job. Or his apartment. Or his town. He hadn't exactly planned his current situation. Still, he couldn't complain— not out loud. Obnoxious coworkers or not, he wasn't trying to get fired. A guy's gotta eat.
When the clock finally struck eight, he heard the shuffling of plastic wheels and cardboard boxes that indicated that everyone was wrapping up for the night. They still had a half hour or so left until they actually closed. That didn't stop people from setting down their greasy tools to get everything packed away and ready for the next day. Mondo was careful not to hit his head as he crawled out from underneath the pickup truck he was working on.
"Any luck?" One of Mondo's more overbearing coworkers asked. Mondo shrugged.
"Nah. Thing's hopeless." But the boss will make me delay that announcement so we can milk as much from the customer as possible, he didn't add. Mondo's coworker knew the deal. He grimaced sympathetically, flashing his weird shark teeth for just a second. Mondo still didn't know if those were real or not.
He was hoping, as he did on most nights, to get the hell out of the garage and back home without running into the boss man. He had no such luck. As soon as he caught sight of Mondo, he grunted at him. Mondo understood that as a summons and sighed as he trudged up to him.
"Check the yards," he barked.
Mondo couldn't help but groan.
Their business was in one of those parts of town that people only ever ended up in by accident (you know the ones). And there was a big lot outside and a decently-sized yard with plenty of trees that surrounded a somewhat dilapidated smaller structure currently being used as a tool shed. The metal hulls of a few stripped cars sat lifelessly out on the mostly-brown grass, waiting to be salvaged for scrap metal. Beyond the garage's property, several empty lots and buildings with padlocks out front, and more trees, overgrown and with rotting limbs, stretching behind, stretching all the way to the highway.
As far as Mondo was concerned, It looked like a real dump. And so the locals took that as permission to dump their junk there.
Some of it, they kept. Mondo knew how to tell what could be repurposed and what was better off in the dumpster. He also had to keep an eye out for vehicles that were unceremoniously left behind the abandoned businesses. Especially if they didn't have license plates. If he found one of those he was expected to let his boss know, and he'd probably go on to contact the cops.
Mondo huffed as he grabbed the roll of trash bags that they kept near the back door. He had half a mind to grumble something at his boss. The guy acted like he was some corporate fat cat despite running a crummy little business in the worst part of town. He liked telling Mondo and the other mechanics how to do their jobs even though it'd probably been twenty years since he'd seen the underside of a car. And worst of all, he intentionally hired former delinquents and ex-cons and then constantly reminded them of what a huge favor he was doing them. Always going on and on about how grateful they should be that he was giving punks like them a chance. Mondo didn't have a lot of patience for it. He'd mouthed off a few too many times. So here he was, stuck doing the extra busy work that could keep him after his shift was supposed to end while his coworkers finished sweeping the place and stood around chatting in his absence.
For whatever reason, it was an especially messy day. Someone had thrown a metric fuckton of cardboard boxes out of their window as they drove past, as far as Mondo could tell. Most of them were wet, too. Cardboard peeling apart at its seams. Lots of wads of crumpled newspaper. Mondo kept searching the wreckage (gloves on, of course) expecting to find something valuable hidden in the trash, but, no. Nothing. All junk.
Until he got to the last lot.
This clump of trees was the closest one to the highway, making it the spot where the heaviest objects tended to end up. And there was a big box there, tattered but mostly intact, wrapped all the way 'round with an uncomfortable amount of duct tape. If you'd put a gun to Mondo's head at that moment and forced him to predict his own future he would have guessed that it was a broken refrigerator. And he would have been very, very wrong.
Mondo kicked the box over so that it laid totally flat. It was heavy, but not the right sort of heavy to be a fridge, and he heard something in the box rattle about. A loud but muffled thwump rather than the familiar clangs and bumps of metal and plastic. Mondo raised an eyebrow. Whatever. He fetched his boxcutter from his toolbelt and made quick work of the duct tape.
He screamed.
Not a girlish scream— of course not. He was a tough guy, of course. But the spilled contents of the box DID scare the everloving shit out of him and he cursed at the top of his lungs. He found himself yelling for help before he had time to really process what he was looking at. He heard leaves crunching rapidly behind him.
"What happened?!" Kazuichi yelled. And then he was screaming too. His voice was shrill and annoying and Mondo suddenly regained his composure just to get him to shut up. Too late, though. The boss was on his way.
"Oh, god damn it," he swore. "What did you do, Oowada?"
"How would I have pulled this off so fast?!"
The big box appeared to contain... well.
A dude.
A dead guy.
What definitely looked like a human body had collapsed limply from the cardboard prison. The poor guy looked like he was just sleeping. And his arms and legs had been bound with a computer cable and an extension cord. That would suggest a murder, right? Someone was trying to dispose of the body. But how did he die? Mondo couldn't see any injuries. He barely registered his boss pulling out his cellphone and whining about what a hassle this was going to be, barely noticed Kazuichi pushing past him to kneel down.
"The fuck are you doing?" Mondo sneered. Kazuichi was a coward most days. He'd just stopped screeching. And now he wanted to get up close and personal with the corpse? "Just five seconds ago you were—"
"Shush!" Kazuichi silenced Mondo with a hiss. Mondo had half a mind to take his beanie or something just to knock him down a peg. "Boss— put your phone away. We're fine! We're cool."
"Huh?"
"It's not a person." Kazuichi rolled the not-corpse over and gestured at it. Mondo didn't know what he was supposed to be looking at. He shuddered.
"What, is it one of those weird-ass dolls?"
"Wh— NO, Oowada! Geez!" Kazuichi grabbed hold of the still form he was kneeling beside by the head. He lifted it up, slightly. And when he did, Mondo spotted a metallic glint at the sides of the face.
He covered his own face in his embarrassment. How had he missed the telltale ear-things?
"Oh," boss-man breathed. He squinted down at the find, apparently unsure of how he should feel. "It's just a persocom."
Mondo didn't know if the word "just" was the right one to use there. In this part of town? Hardly anybody could afford one of the damn things. They were human-shaped super computers, for Christ's sake. Mondo had never so much as touched something that expensive. Not where he'd grown up. He was kind of afraid to touch it, actually— he couldn't help but feel like it would break under his dirty, sinful orphan touch.
"D'you... d'you think maybe it still works?" Kazuichi asked, staring at it. He probably couldn't help his hopeful tone. Their boss crossed his arms, intrigued.
"...Can't hurt to check, right? You know how to work these things?"
"I wish," Kazuichi snorted. "I can only do vehicles. I couldn't get my hands on a lot of computers. Even the regular ones. And I wouldn't know the first thing about software."
"Oowada." Mondo stiffened. "Check'n see if Fujisaki is still in, will you?"
Mondo swallowed his complaints once more as his boss and his coworker worked together to pick the floppy-limbed machine up. They were having a rough time of it and called for more backup. Mondo had heard in passing somewhere that a persocom gets heavier when it's shut off. Some kind of theft prevention measure. Harder to steal something that weighs three hundred pounds.
There was a tech shop a block or two away from the garage. A guy named Fujisaki ran the place with his son. The sign out front was dark, indicating that they were no longer open for business, but Mondo knocked anyway. Fujisaki opened the door soon enough. He recognized Mondo. He claimed to never forget a face, but just HAD to throw in a joke about Mondo's hair being hard to miss.
"A whole persocom?" Fujisaki gasped once Mondo had explained their predicament. "Who would just throw something like that away?"
"Well, I figure it's broken, but boss said it can't hurt to check it out. God knows we can't afford one of those things otherwise." As certain as Mondo was that it would be a fruitless effort, he understood the urge. A free persocom? Who could pass that up? (Come to think of it, maybe he shouldn't have yelled and gotten their attention. Maybe he should have smuggled the thing out to keep for himself. He could have at least sold it for spare parts, right? Like a car?)
"Ha! Yeah. Me neither," Fujisaki admitted. "As much as I would love to get my hands on one of my own— even a laptop model— I'm stuck operating on the occasional loaner."
Fujisaki nodded, apparently at himself. He disappeared into the building for a short while. Mondo heard him shout something. He assumed Fujisaki was telling his son that he'd return shortly. When he reappeared with a laptop under one arm, he shut and locked the door behind him, and Mondo led the way back to the garage. They walked briskly through the cold, watching the little clouds formed by their puffs of breath, Fujisaki with his thin hands shoved into his trouser pockets for warmth. Mondo wasn't bothered by the cold anymore. Living on the streets often had that effect on people. And it wasn't like his cheap apartment ever really got warm. He spent many a winter morning huddled as close to his kotatsu as he could get.
By the time Mondo led his follower into the garage, Kazuichi and boss-man had managed to wrangle the now unrestrained persocom into a lawn chair provided by another coworker. A young woman that Mondo also didn't get along with. He already knew the look on her face and he wasn't looking forward to whatever was about to come out of her mouth.
"Do you think it can—"
"You can't screw the robot," Kazuichi interrupted. And that, admittedly, got a laugh out of Mondo. Fujisaki pretended not to hear it. "Whether it's working or not."
Fujisaki circled the unit. It looked strangely like a scene in a yakuza movie in which the snitch has been beaten in the course of a grueling interrogation, because the persecom sat slumped in the chair with its— his?— head hanging low, closed eyes obscured by the shadow cast by the flickering white fluorescent light. Any moment now, Mondo was waiting for him to sit up and say something like "I'll NEVER talk!".
The weird thing about persocoms was how much they did look like people. The only visible difference, without looking really closely, was the ears. This particular unit had somewhat standard ones. Kind of small, maybe, and a little bit higher up than they'd normally be. Not that Mondo saw enough of the things in his daily life to be sure. The ones on TV had lower-set ears. Lots of wealthy studios used them in shows these days because they didn't have to worry about pesky things like unions and benefits that way.
The persocom's cat-like ears were platinum-colored, mostly, with some gold accents. There was neatly-cut black hair and a pronounced brow. His clothes were perfectly ironed and perfectly white— persocom owners tended to dress their units in futuristic outfits or in clothes that would look like costumes on people. It was strange, really, that he looked so shiny and brand-new considering the state they'd found him in.
"...He looks dead," Kazuichi said, breaking the uncomfortable silence.
"I thought he was. Thought somebody'd dumped a corpse," Mondo explained for Miu's benefit. "Guess it can't really die, though. It's just sleeping, right? Sorta?"
"I'd say they can die." Fujisaki shrugged. "In the same way that other electronics die. Eventually they just can't run anymore. You could call that death. Unlike us, though, you can just copy the memory over to a new unit."
"So if I was a persocom, I could get hit by a truck and they could just put all my brain juices into a new body?" Kazuichi asked. Fujisaki pointed at him.
"You've got it! That's the idea, anyway. Sometimes, with the older models, it doesn't work. And the files can get corrupted if it's a bad enough virus."
"Imagine if somebody could hack your brain," Kazuichi said, sounding horrified. Miu, still standing beside him, scoffed and crossed her arms.
"It's not like it's actually alive, dumbass!"
Fujisaki ignored the bickering as he studied the cords boss-man handed him. The ones that had been used to tie it up.
"These look like they should work," he confirmed. "One of these is his charging cable and the other is for hooking him up to a computer."
"Needin' a computer to run your computer," Mondo scoffed, rolling his eyes.
"Now, now— you really only NEED a display of some kind. A monitor. Most places will provide you with one when you buy your unit. You'll need at least a laptop if you wanna install more complicated software, though. Even a cheap one will do." Fujisaki glanced at Mondo. "Was there a monitor in the box, or just this guy?"
"It was just him."
"Well, that's fine. My laptop will do for now. I thought that he might not have been intact, otherwise the owner would've just sold the set to a parts store. They're harder to sell if you're missing something."
Mondo and his coworkers and his boss watched with open fascination as Fujisaki set up his little workstation. He borrowed a stool and hooked the multi-pronged cable to his laptop on one end and to the persocom on the other. His left ear opened up to reveal little slots and plugs inside. His right ear then housed the longer cable. Boss-man plugged it into a wall outlet.
"His battery's almost drained, but he should turn on soon enough," Fujisaki concluded. He had some window open on his computer with a bunch of folders. "...Huh. Looks like an old custom. A hybrid."
"A hybrid?" Miu had apparently never heard of such a thing.
"Persocoms fall into three overall categories— companion models, business models, and customs. This one was probably built by a person, not a company, and made to have some of the functions of both a business model and a companion model."
"Wouldn't that make it more valuable? Why throw it out?"
"Maybe the owner didn't really know what he was doing. Could've been a first try. They're obviously hard to build... so hard that most people would rather dish out the money than try to do it themselves even if it's cheaper." Fujisaki squinted at his screen. "Seems to have a pretty standard custom operating system, but the memory's been wiped and there's no owner data or extra software past the function and personality settings. When he turns on he'll probably think it's the first time."
"Huh. ...Weird." Mondo frowned. He was kind of nervous, for whatever reason. He didn't know what he was supposed to say to it when it woke. "Does it have a name?"
"Doesn't seem so. A lot of customs pick their own names."
"Then what are we supposed to call it?"
"...Unit 2X11037, I guess."
"That's a fuckin' mouthful!"
"Why don't you pick something to call it, then? Should be easy enough to teach it. It shouldn't need a last name."
A silence. Mondo threw his arms out.
"...Well? Somebody pick a name!"
"Kazuichi Junior!"
"NO!" Mondo glared at him. "If we're namin' it after anybody, it should be me, right? I found the thing!"
"We're not naming it after either of you because it's stayin' with the business," Boss-man interrupted. "It was on MY property, after all."
Dammit, Mondo thought. I really should have stolen it.
Miu had pulled her cell phone out. She stepped forward, getting everyone's attention.
"Good names for a persocom," she said out loud as she typed. She was leaving it up to fate— to Google. Everyone waited for a result. "...There was one named Tomoya that killed somebody."
"Why would we wanna name it after a murder robot?!"
"I just thought it was fuckin' interesting, sharkboy! Lighten up!"
"Why is that on the popular name list?" Mondo asked. He sounded tired, because he was already exhausted for some reason. Miu shook her head.
"It's just a list of famous ones. And infamous ones."
"Okay, well, how about a smart one?" Boss-man suggested. "We could have it handle the books."
"Oh, okay, I gotcha! Not a bad idea!" With more specific instructions, Miu made quick work of narrowing down the list.
In the end, they didn't settle on just one name. They combined a few to give the unit a unique name of its own. They'd call him Kiyotaka. Taka for short, after the first persocom to work in politics as a record-keeper. And they did this just in time. After about twenty minutes of charging, the figure in the lawn chair shifted. Everyone jumped in surprise. The head lifted. The eyes snapped open. Mondo flinched again.
Bright red. Really freaky stuff.
It seemed to take the machine a few seconds to adjust. There was some kind of quiet whirring sound, the occasional click, as the internal mechanisms and gears started moving.
"Told you it was an old custom," Fujisaki boasted in a whisper. "The newer prefabs have silent startups."
As bright as those eyes were, they only seemed to get brighter, and bigger, as the seconds passed. Eventually they were so alert and so intense that Mondo wondered if that was why he'd been thrown away. It'd be hard to focus with something like that staring at you, he thought. His eyes looked like they were swirling.
One hand moved. It darted, with little warning, elbow sharp and back straight. A salute.
"Greetings!"
Another silence.
"...Is it supposed to be like a soldier?" Kazuichi guessed. Mondo shook his head and sighed.
"I dunno. Loud, though."
The persocom— Kiyotaka— didn't say anything more until he was spoken to. He just kind of sat there, quietly and patiently waiting for something. Instructions, maybe.
"Hey there," Fujisaki said. "Do you know where you are right now?"
Kiyotaka looked around the room. He seemed to be aware of the cables in his ears, because he did so carefully.
"I haven't the slightest idea! But I'm sure that will become clear in time, yes?" He sat up straight and touched a hand to his own chest. "It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance! I live to serve, and shall do as I am commanded to make your lives more efficient! Who amongst you am I meant to call master?"
The second he used that damn word Mondo swung his head towards a squealing Miu. She was making exactly the kind of face he was expecting her to. She hopped up and down and pointed at herself.
"Me! Me, me, me!"
"She's lying," Mondo shouted above her as he gave her a warning glare. Kiyotaka looked confused and took a few seconds to process that. If he didn't know who he was supposed to answer to, who was he supposed to believe? Mondo wasn't sure how to explain the concept of lying to a persocom.
"I'M in charge here," Boss-man yelled over them both, "but you don't have to call me that. Just boss is fine."
"Understood! And what am I to be called?"
"Your name's Kiyotaka. Taka for short."
Kiyotaka seemed to pout.
"For short?"
"A nickname," Mondo answered. "Kiyotaka is kinda long."
The persocom studied him for a moment. Then he grinned.
"A nickname...? A nickname!"
Mondo didn't know why that was so exciting. He was going to guess that he'd never had one before, but he wasn't supposed to remember "before", was he? Was Fujisaki wrong about his memory? Mondo wasn't planning to challenge someone that was an expert compared to him, but he was curious. More so than he'd already been.
Fujisaki briefly interrogated Kiyotaka. As he'd suspected, Kiyotaka claimed not to remember having any previous "masters" or having lived anywhere, but he also admitted to feeling some confusion when he'd awoken, as if he was supposed to remember the room he was in and couldn't place it. Fujisaki assured him that this was common with memory wipes. Kiyotaka had some of his own questions, too. He wanted to know why he'd been disposed of. Fujisaki didn't have an answer for him.
"It doesn't matter anyway, right?" Fujisaki said, trying to reassure the strangely sad-looking robot. "You have a new place. New masters."
"Right... Right." Kiyotaka nodded. "I take it that I am expected to assist you all in your place of business? What sorts of tasks am I meant to see to?"
Mondo's boss had to think that one over for a second.
"That depends. What're you good at?"
Kiyotaka, too, needed a moment to answer the question. Sometimes he would pause and blink, and Mondo felt like he could almost see something spinning behind his eyeballs. It was sort of like when a person looked up when trying to remember something. He also heard that distant whirring sound.
"I specialize in business and management and was custom-designed for maximum efficiency!"
"Huh." Mondo saw the boss-man smile for the first time in quite a while. "Just what we were hopin' for. These three are mechanics. I'm in charge of 'em. We could use help with the bookkeeping. You'd have to keep track of the clients and finances. Do you think you could manage?"
"With ease, of course!" He saluted his new boss again before turning to the man closest to him. "So, Mr. Fujisaki— when can I begin to work?"
"That, uh... that depends. Do you mind tuning out for a few minutes while we discuss things amongst ourselves?"
"No trouble at all! I shall give you your privacy for precisely the next five minutes. We will regroup soon!"
Just like that, Kiyotaka's eyes dulled, and then closed, and then he slumped slightly in the chair again. It was kind of creepy. Mondo didn't know they could do that.
"A little jarring, isn't it? ...He should beep when he's about to wake up again. It's called a privacy timer." Fujisaki turned in his chair to face the others once he was certain that Kiyotaka couldn't hear him anymore. "So, as you can see, his major functions seem to be in working order, and I can email you a basic instruction manual. We'd have to put him to the test to see the extent of his physical attributes, but he says he's specialized for business and for now, we'll have to take his word for it. Most persocoms can't really lie."
"So we're good to go? We can put him to work?" Boss-man guessed a little too confidently. Fujisaki sort of shook his head. "What, y'still want more time?"
"See, the thing about these machines... it's hard to tell if they're really WORKING or not until you've had them around a little while. The basic functions can work even if the software is a mess." Fujisaki nervously adjusted his glasses. "They're kind of like human kids! If you mess something up early in their development, the whole AI gets all screwy!"
Fujisaki laughed, albeit nervously, but Mondo gawked in abject horror. That sentence kind of struck a nerve.
"Sayin' somethin' that dark so fuckin' casually—"
"I suppose I can run a full diagnostic on him," Fujisaki pondered, ignoring Mondo and speaking directly over him to his boss. "I-I'd need you to understand in advance that I can't do that for free, though. It can take a lot of computing power, especially with the less efficient older models or custom machines. Depending on how complex he is I might have to delay other work."
Mondo's boss groaned, but didn't argue. He rubbed his temples.
"Nah, I get it. We don't just go around givin' away materials. How much are we talking here?"
Fujisaki waved him off with too casual a hand. His smile was a nervous one.
"Oh, we don't have to talk about that here. It's tacky to discuss finances in front of the kids, right?" Who the fuck are the kids? "Just shoot me a text and I'm sure we can work something out. I can take him back to the shop with me just to get him out of your hair."
"Guess that's just what we have to do."
Kiyotaka did beep, eventually, and then he woke up. He did it quicker this time. Fujisaki gently explained to him that, for now, he would be staying with him at his computer shop until they determined the state of his system. Kiyotaka nodded gratefully and didn't seem to have any trouble following his temporary master from the premises. Fujisaki promised before leaving that he should have results in the next few days.
And that, for a while, was that.
Several days passed before Mondo saw the persocom again. Two days after he had first appeared Mondo eavesdropped on a conversation between Fujisaki and his boss. Not that he would get in trouble for it— he was in the room and they could obviously see him— but both men clearly thought that Mondo was busy and wouldn't really notice their discussion. (He also had earbuds in as he ate his lunch, but hey, they were the ones that assumed he listened to his music or whatever loud enough to not even notice them talking.)
Fujisaki had finished his routine exam on Kiyotaka, and he hadn't found anything particularly dangerous. He'd probably be able to navigate standard tasks just fine, he was good at organizing and math and that sort of thing, and he definitely wouldn't turn against his masters, or kill a customer, or anything crazy like that. Fujisaki even claimed that Kiyotaka's hardware was quite powerful with a great deal of memory and processing power, even if it was a bit slow and inefficient.
And yet, Fujisaki seemed hesitant to deploy Kiyotaka.
"There's something about his settings," Fujisaki half-whispered. Almost like whatever this "glitch" or "malfunction" was scared him. "They may as well not be there. A persocom is supposed to have adjustable levels of various things— aspects of their personality, their skills, interest in certain subjects, things like volume— and he does, theoretically. But they don't really work. Every time I turn something down he somehow just turns it back up on his own. It's like his internal systems don't know when enough is enough. He could end up being quite overbearing, at the very least."
"Could be. Maybe he'll just work too hard. I don't have any problems with that, 'specially since I don't have to pay him!"
The boss laughed uproariously at that. Mondo rolled his eyes. He was pretty sure that his boss did technically have to pay the persocom something, even if he wasn't required to pay a human's wage.
Kiyotaka was deployed despite Fujisaki's warnings. Fujisaki brought him to the shop after another couple of days. Kiyotaka was carrying a duffel bag full of lender clothes. Not exactly the right size, but they would have to do for now. He couldn't just wear the same outfit every single day. Not in a dirty garage like this one. It'd get covered in grease stains. Fujisaki had also given them a cheap old monitor, and he'd printed out the instruction manual because Mondo's boss was too dumb to open a PDF.
He was eager. That was the only way to describe it, really. He was so excited to get to work that Mondo wondered if he'd been developed by some dystopian mega-corporation to replace a human workforce or something. The boss explained that his job was to man the front desk for now. They'd have him answer phones and schedule appointments. Kiyotaka boasted that he had spent the entire previous night researching the various car-related terms he would need to know and developing his customer service script. He just kept on talking, and the boss ignored half of what he said.
Fujisaki bid them farewell. Kiyotaka took his spot at the front desk, ready for his job training to begin. And from that moment on, things were never quite the same.