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This afternoon, Tsukasa had saved months of work on crucial neurocode to an external drive for submission. He’d set it on the desktop while he got up to pour some more tea. By the time he returned—within the minute—it was gone.
His first, instinctive thought, of course, was espionage. Sabotage, subterfuge—even if the idea was ludicrous here, he still carried that nervous vigilance in the back of his brain. From his mid-adolescence he’d been a government asset with a full-time bodyguard. Here in orbit, only a handful of humanity spread out over the sectors…the solitude was blissful, until it wasn’t.
But he didn’t have to spend long half-convinced there was an unknown enemy lurking in his quarters—he was startled out of it by a pathetic hacking noise at his feet. The cat looked up at him helplessly. He coughed once more.
“Are you kidding me?” Tsukasa asked him. “Again?” First it had been the worn-down nib he’d just unscrewed from his stylus, and then last week half a dumpling that he’d dropped on the floor.
Shintaro meowed, staticky and muffled.
“That’s it.” Tsukasa heaved him up onto the table by the middle, feeling around for the seam in his fur. “I’m finally going to figure out what’s wrong with you.”
He fished the memory drive out of his cat’s mouth with a bent wire within minutes, but the fact that Shintaro had eaten it at all was more concerning. He wasn’t supposed to eat things. He had no reason to want to—Tsukasa had specifically programmed him that way. Shintaro had a mouth, of course, and a tongue. Both important external cat components. But there was no stomach in his mechanics, to say nothing of a full esophagus.
Of course, he was an old machine. Tsukasa had first begun building him at twelve—one of his first serious projects—and he’d been put together with a twelve-year-old’s resources. Over the years Shintaro had been vastly improved in terms of quality. New fur, new eyes, new musculature. From the outside he was now mostly indistinguishable from a live cat. But his behavioral programming remained basic and juvenile, and until now any bugs had simply never been enough of a problem to bother rewriting any of it.
This one was curious. Was Shintaro’s AI developing? Imitating cat—or perhaps even human—behaviors that he’d been programmed without? Tsukasa might have found it a fascinating model of artificial neuroplasticity if he didn’t find his cat eating his shit so fucking annoying. For now he just needed to fix it.
He pulled up a screen and scrolled through, wrinkling his nose. He’d come back in and fix some more of this when he had time. He desperately wished that he did have time, and in most circumstances he’d have made it. In most circumstances, he’d prioritize however he personally saw fit. But the stakes were too high elsewhere for him to truly procrastinate. There would be time when they were finished for him to keep messing around with his cat. After humanity’s future was secured, when the last of humanity’s present would be left to linger until they couldn’t.
He knew most of the others didn’t like to think about it, but frankly, Tsukasa couldn’t wait. He’d always yearned for a life with no obligations. No need to work, no pressure to properly direct his focus. The freedom to follow any fancy. Nothing to do but live and love as indulgently as he could until it came time to die.
He'd deactivated Shintaro for maintenance, but he idly scratched his chin anyways as he skimmed the code. Just a little longer, okay?
The door opened behind him. Tsukasa jumped, twisting tensely around—but it was only Takatoshi. He dropped his bag, stretched his shoulders, and looked up at Tsukasa with deep, exhausted eyes.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m home.”
Tsukasa draped his arms over the back of his chair, drinking in the sight of him. Takatoshi’s shifts were long. The last time they’d spoken was three days ago, regarding something of an urgent matter, but there hadn’t been any more urgent matters since then. They didn’t call to exchange sweet nothings. Tsukasa didn’t like to call at all when he could avoid it—he didn’t like the thought of his personal conversations on record. He was well aware that Takatoshi Hijiyama made him stupid, and that the awareness didn’t change that. He preferred to save their romance for the moments they were face to face.
“Hey,” he said warmly, resting his chin on his folded arms.
The last they spoke, they’d said a lot of things, but sweet nothings had been among them. He knew they’d been playing on both their minds ever since. As Takatoshi came closer to meet him, Tsukasa shifted in his chair—leaning back against the table on his elbows, opening up. Coy, anticipatory. This had always been one of the best parts of the dance. He stretched up into his lover’s touch, turning against the gentle hand that lifted his chin—
“Fucksake—!”
Takatoshi had never quite gotten used to the robot cat.
Tsukasa took his hand and kissed it, if he’d have to wait for his lips. “Sorry,” he said. “He ate something today.”
“What, again?”
“Yeah.”
Takatoshi eyed Shintaro on the tabletop, his skin pulled back to expose the machinery. “It still creeps me out when you poke around in there,” he muttered.
“Well, I’d hoped to finish before you got here,” said Tsukasa. “You’re early.”
“I am.” Takatoshi returned his eyes to him, and his brows twitched in amusement. “You might be grateful.”
“Hm.” Tsukasa looked back up at him, heavy-lidded. “…I might be.”
Takatoshi braced a knee against his chair to finally lean down over him, kiss him properly. They forgot everything else for a minute or two.
“Sekigahara showed up early,” Takatoshi mumbled, still close. “Said I could go.”
“Bless the man,” replied Tsukasa, “but go amuse yourself for a bit, alright?” He gave Takatoshi’s cheek a pat before letting him go and turning back to the cat. “If I’m not distracted, then maybe I can get Shintaro put back together in time for you to snuggle.”
“We don’t snuggle.”
No matter how spooked he was to see his insides, Takatoshi was fond of the cat. The cat was fond of him. Shintaro had always liked to curl up on his chest as he lay on the couch, and the artificial purr lulled him to sleep half the time. Tsukasa had always missed the sight of it, while he was away.
“If you say so.” He chuckled. “In time for us to snuggle, then.”
“There are better words I’d use.”
“And I can’t wait to hear them. Once I’m finished.”
Takatoshi stepped back. Tsukasa could hear him run a hand through his hair.
“…I hope you haven’t spent all day on this,” he said. “Don’t you have more important work to get done?”
Tsukasa could hear the judgmental tang in his voice. He rolled his eyes and glanced back.
“Still sore about the Deimos thing, are you?”
Takatoshi turned his head to the side, defensive. “I’m just saying. If you have time to rewire the cat, then maybe you have time to do your job properly.”
“Not if I spend all that time arguing with you.”
“Tsukasa…”
“With all due respect, Takatoshi,” he said, “it’s not your job to police how I do mine.”
But Tsukasa knew why Professor Shinonome had gone to him first, before any of the people whose job that could have been. He was the only one who stood a chance at a productive conversation. Tsukasa Okino knew very well what his reputation was, and he knew everyone else on the project spoke to him with an expectation of smug obstinance in the back of their mind. Some, politely. Some, less so.
No one had called yet to get on his ass about it, so he assumed neither Takatoshi nor Shinonome had said anything. Tsukasa trusted his lover—but he hadn’t been sure whether to trust Takatoshi’s ability to defend his actions to anyone else.
“What did you say to her?” he asked, looking up again.
Takatoshi shrugged.
“What you told me,” he said. “That it was just environmental; you’d been through it and removed the game elements. That kind of thing. And you know more about this stuff than either of us, so I guess she was willing to trust you.”
“…You mean she and Ida are on the outs, so she didn’t want to get him involved.”
Amused, Takatoshi snorted. “Maybe that was some of it.”
“Thank God.” Tsukasa knew he could never have explained this to someone like Tetsuya Ida. He was a decent ally when they disliked the same people, but disagreements between themselves tended to turn vicious.
“You think he wouldn’t listen?”
“None of them would listen.” Maybe Professor Kurabe, she seemed fond of him, but the likes of Morimura didn’t trust his judgment one iota. “They wouldn’t have any problem with the code itself, but they’d still just call me lazy. Make me waste time redoing it, and if I do that, the rest of Universal Control is going to suffer, and that’s what’s really important.” That's what had never been done before. He'd been recruited because he was the only person alive who could.
They looked at each other for a moment. Takatoshi knit his brow.
“But…” He sat on the table beside Shintaro, staring back at Tsukasa. “…Why would you do it in the first place, though? I know you could have written something yourself, if you wanted to.”
“I didn’t want to.” Tsukasa twitched his lips. “Like you said, I’ve got more important things to be doing. If there’s good code applicable to our project out there already complete, why would I spend the time to write my own?”
Pensively, Takatoshi looked away.
“You said you played it, right?” asked Tsukasa. The fondness in his voice overtook the irony. “Mighty Kaiju Deimos: Survival?”
“I mean, yeah. When I was a kid.”
Takatoshi had been a kid in the sixties. Fourteen in ‘67 when the game was first released. He’d grown up in a family rather than a group home—had the sort of parents who let him play games. Even after years of relative freedom, Tsukasa had first played himself at twenty.
“You remember the sunsets?” he asked.
“…Not really,” replied Takatoshi, turning back in surprise and arching his brows. “As I recall, I was kind of focused on the monsters.”
But Tsukasa had never been able to experience video games the way other people did. To him, the plot was always secondary to the craft. He saw the code beneath the feeling, the intricacy behind the simplicity. The world of MKDS had been thrillingly, stunningly natural. Seamless.
The game was ostensibly set in a contemporary era, but it had been made with nostalgia. The clean air and bright sun and clear water from the developers’ childhoods. A background made simple with a purity that Tsukasa had never seen himself. “I guess I first played it after Earth wasn’t like that, anymore,” he said. “I always thought that city would be a nice place to live.”
“Really?”
“Before the monsters, anyways.”
Little more than ten years separated them, but they were from different generations entirely. Takatoshi remembered when things were better. But that meant he also remembered them going bad, and that was a grief that Tsukasa had never truly carried. He’d never felt that loss. The feeling he’d found in a reflection of the past wasn’t the mournful nostalgia that Takatoshi might have felt, but a fierce, desperate longing for something alien.
The corner of Takatoshi’s lips curled into a fond smile. “Only you could see a disaster game that way.”
“If I wanted a disaster, I’d program that myself,” said Tsukasa with a little haughty sniff.
“But not the environment?”
“Of course.” He shook his head. “Survival was ahead of its time. It codified the VR standard twenty years ago, and nobody’s made any real improvements since.” The passage of time, the seasons, the feeling of the wind… That game had been a virtual reality masterclass. Just thinking about it gave him the urge to play again. “Even if I were to spend all that time coding my own environment, it’d be exactly the same.”
“Exactly?”
“Exactly enough.” The besotted look Takatoshi was giving him was too much—Tsukasa turned back to Shintaro on the table, flushed. “I just…like the thought of it. Them all growing up in a world like that.”
It was all he could do for the future. His gift to them, for as long as they could have it.
“…I didn’t think you thought about them that way,” said Takatoshi, after a moment.
Tsukasa snorted softly. “What, as people?”
“You know what I mean,” Takatoshi replied, shaking his head. “You always tell me I’m too sentimental about it.”
Takatoshi was too sentimental about it. Sometimes he acted like they were planning a far-future resurrection. Tsukasa couldn’t blame him—that was what Project Ark would sound like, to a romantic layman. But the clones would have different lives entirely, different experiences. Those things meant far more to the development of personality than petty genetics.
“They’re not going to be us, but they are going to be people.” And Tsukasa didn’t envy them the task they’d be given. Just the thought of it made him feel lucky to live at the end of the human race rather than the beginning. “I want to do what I can to make their lives better, in the meantime.”
All of the sectors, all of the backgrounds, would come with their own challenges. Some of that was necessary. As kind as they all wanted to be, human beings required adversity to grow. To learn, to strengthen. But they’d survive it, and they’d do it in a bright world. Tsukasa would make sure of it.
Takatoshi stood, and he bent to kiss his temple, cradling his face in tender hands.
“Thank you,” said Tsukasa quietly.
“I love you,” murmured Takatoshi. “I’ll go take a nap. Fix the cat.”
Tsukasa nodded, and he and Shintaro were left alone at the table.
Officially they weren’t permitted AI requests, but Tsukasa had felt his own barely counted. He’d convinced Professor Kurabe to pattern one of her handful of cat models after Shintaro. Only the skin of him, the black and white. They’d be spread throughout the sectors, and even after it all no one would ever know that there’d once been a beloved pet built in that image.
Even if he preferred to think logically, Tsukasa wasn’t immune to sentiment. None of them were. Their own lives were all dead ends, after all, and they had nothing left to hope for but the lives of others. Hell—was there even any harm in thinking of it the delusional way Takatoshi did, when it helped to keep him going?
He couldn’t speak for love. But Tsukasa liked to think that maybe, someday, another Tsukasa Okino would cross paths with another Shintaro. Another Tsukasa Okino would breathe in cool, fresh air. Another Tsukasa Okino would watch the most breathtaking sunset that this Tsukasa Okino could give him. He couldn’t give him anything else but that.
He twisted around to look toward the window, where he was reflected in the glass against the inky black.
He turned back to the screen.