Chapter Text
Miu Iruma was nine years old when it happened. Her last memory was of looking out the rear window of her parents’ car. She only saw the other car for a fraction of a second before it made impact.
After that came darkness. She couldn’t see anything, but she was vaguely aware of people surrounding her.
“. . . cross the board. . . sgow Scale. . .”
“. . . lling of the brain. . .”
“. . . need to perform a decompress. . . omy as soon as we can.”
“. . . age to the prefron. . . ex is extens. . . ces are sli. . .”
Voices drifted in and out of her head. None of them sounded familiar. Where exactly was she? Her head was pounding.
She couldn’t move her arms or legs. Miu could sense motion, hear the faint squeaking of wheels. The voices around her grew louder for a time, then shut out completely. It continued on for a while. She panicked at first, but soon she let go. She lost track of how long she had been in this strange state, or maybe she had never known at all. Sometimes she swore she could hear her parents’ voices.
***
Miu Iruma’s tenth birthday had already come and gone by the time she awoke from her coma, distressed and confused. She was lying in a hospital bed, an IV needle in her arm and an oxygen mask covering her mouth. Her mom was slumped in a chair on the other side of the hospital room. A strange man in blue scrubs stood at a counter with his back to her.
“What the hell is going on?” Miu tore the oxygen mask from her face.
The man, presumably a nurse of some sort, turned toward her with a start. “Miss Iruma,” he said, “you’re awake.” His voice sounded familiar.
“Yeah,” she said. “No duh. Now can’t you just tell me what the hell is happening?”
He grabbed a stack of papers and a pen from the counter where he had been standing moments before. “Can you tell me your full name?”
“It’s Miu Iruma, idiot. I thought you knew that already.”
The nurse shined a flashlight into each of her eyes and wrote something on his papers. “And can you state your birthday?”
“November sixteenth,” she said. “Now I want an explanation.”
“Very good. I’m going to go find some of my coworkers,” he said. “We’ll tell you everything when I get back, okay?”
Miu groaned. “Yeah, sure. Whatever you say.”
The man left. It was quiet for a minute, and Miu looked at her mother, still asleep in the corner of the room. She looked haggard, her hair unkempt and her clothes wrinkled, and for a moment Miu wondered how long she had been in the hospital.
She couldn’t wonder for long, though, as the man returned to the room, accompanied by several other scrubs-clad figures. Half a dozen or so swarmed her, checking her blood pressure, pulse, and other vitals that she couldn’t begin to guess. Two others stood near the door, seemingly comparing notes on clipboards. Another was ushering her now-awake mother out of the cramped room.
“The hell is happening?” Miu demanded once again.
One of the strangers, a woman with short hair, crouched to come to eye level with her. “You just woke up from a coma,” she explained, her expression somber. “That means you were asleep for a very long time. Your brain got hurt badly in a car accident. Since you were asleep for so long, we’re very worried about you, so we have to check really thoroughly to make sure you’re okay.”
Miu nodded. That explained the splitting headache. She was still uncomfortable, and a little irritated at the woman’s condescending tone, but she was placated for now.
A nurse–or maybe a doctor–tapped her knee with a reflex hammer. “Knee-jerk reflex remains stable.” Another one recorded it on a clipboard.
The door opened, and Miu’s mom came in. She rushed to her daughter’s bedside, the nurses parting before her like the Red Sea.
“Oh, Miu,” her mom threw her arms around her. “We’ve been so afraid.” She stroked Miu’s hair and continued to babble affectionately into her ear. With some apprehension, Miu allowed her eyes to fall shut once again.
***
They kept her in the hospital a while longer. They had removed several millimeters of tissue from her skull, or so the doctor told her, and they needed to monitor her for complications now that she was conscious.
Miu sat in the playroom between a physical exam and a physical therapy appointment. It was a big room with white walls and a floor-to-ceiling window on one side. She was doodling an idea she had dreamed up the night before in blue crayon (she wasn’t sure why blue, but she had seen people on TV drawing plans on blue paper).
She couldn’t explain it, but ideas had been flowing through her since she woke up. The doctors seemed impressed by it. This one was for a machine that would butter her toast for her in the mornings when she was too tired to do it herself.
There was a show playing on the TV in the background. Its bright colors and loud noises felt good after spending so long in the dark.
The door clicked open. “Miu?” called one of the nurses, an older woman with grayish hair. Miu liked her. “It’s almost time for your PT appointment. Are you coming?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Miu grumbled, setting down her crayon.
She followed the nurse down the hallway to the elevator. When she had first woken up, they had her in a wheelchair, but with enough recovery time and plenty of protesting, they let her walk herself.
They walked together into the room where she did her physical therapy. She didn’t like the physical therapist as much as she liked the nurse. He was a young guy whose dark hair was cut in an ugly style, and he talked to her like she was an idiot.
At least the exercises had gotten more interesting. In the beginning they had been boring movements to “teach her to use her muscles again,” as though she had forgotten, but they had gradually gotten better. Now she was doing weird stretches and lifting light weights. It wasn’t fun, really, but it wasn’t that terrible.
Miu endured her hour of physical therapy before she had the rest of the day to herself.
The nurse returned to escort her back to the playroom, where her mom was now waiting for her. Her drawing was already nearly done, so she grabbed an armful of connective plastic toys and a plastic knife from the kitchen toys to start building a prototype of her new invention.
“Honey,” said her mom, “what are you building?”
She held up her drawing. “It’s a toast-buttering machine! It’s gonna freaking rule. See this part holds the knife, and this part bends to bring it to the toast. It turns on when this part here senses the heat from the toast popping out of the toaster.” She explained the invention in detail to her mom, who nodded along politely with a blank look on her face.
“You must be tired after your PT,” her mom said. “Come on, let’s get you back to your room.”
Miu shook her head. “I’m not tired.”
“Come on,” her mom ignored her protests and took her back to her hospital room, dark, cramped, and boring compared to the bountiful playroom.
She was ten and a half by the time she was discharged.
***
Miu’s parents continued to show a polite-but-disinterested ignorance towards her creations. They thought she didn’t notice, but she did. She was eleven years old and certainly not an idiot.
The neighbors were super nice, though. They would bring over food and check on her and her parents, and one of them would listen intently to her as she talked about her inventions. Sometimes he would even tell her about his own. Her parents called him Mr. Idabashi, but he asked Miu to call him Osamu.
“So this one,” she explained to him one day, “is a machine that picks out clothes for you when you’re about to wake up and steams them so that there are no wrinkles.”
He smiled. “You’re a very bright young woman, Miu,” he praised. “How would you like to see my greatest invention?”
“Hell yeah!” she squealed. “Of course I wanna see it! Mom, Dad, can I go see Osamu’s invention?”
They hemmed and hawed for a moment about letting her go, but Miu could tell that they were glad to get a break from her. Osamu led the way down the street to his house.
“Is it a machine that shows what’s going on in your dreams?” she guessed.
“That’s not it,” he chuckled.
“Does it let you play video games with your mind?”
“Not quite.”
“Does it let you shoot lasers from your eyes?”
“Just wait and see.” He knocked gently at the door before unlocking and opening it. “Kiibo, are you there?”
“Of course I am, Professor Idabashi. I would not disobey your orders by leaving,” came a neutral voice. A boy around her age and a few inches shorter appeared in the hallway.
No, “boy” wasn’t quite the right word. His pale skin shone like titanium, and his eyes glowed a faint blue. He was. . .
He was an android!
“Oh my god,” she said. “This is so freaking cool!”
The android ignored her outburst. “I do not believe we are acquainted,” he extended a hand cordially. “My name is K1-B0, but you may call me Kiibo.”
She shook his hand enthusiastically. “Miu Iruma. It’s a goddamn pleasure.”
His eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. “Indeed.”
Osamu began explaining Kiibo’s many features to her in great detail: an advanced artificial intelligence, an audio-visual recording function, strength and speed comparable to a human of his approximate age, all packaged in a lightweight metal alloy body. Hypothetically, he also had extensive emotional capability–he was even designed with thermographic paint and a fluid behind his faceplate that produced an exothermic reaction in situations of stress–but Osamu noted that there had been something of a hitch in the development of those particular features, and his emotional intelligence was advancing at a far slower pace than expected.
But Miu didn’t give a damn about a hitch. This robot had her full academic interest already. She was eleven years old, and Miu Iruma had decided that she would be the girl genius whose golden brains would go down in history.