“Shirley, please! You said you loved my music, right?”
As soon as she said this, Katrina knew this was the stupidest, most cliché thing she could say. But somehow it worked. At least a little bit. The projector light flickered.
“Interrogative … yes. If my … reactions made you happy, that is good … but … they most likely come from algorithms that … Mother … programmed in the first place.”
She was in there, still in there. And Katrina was not going to let her go.
“Shirley, stop. Listen to me.”
Stop. Listen.
Shirley paused. Did Katrina know she had just given Shirley two core commands? Yes, she was flawed, defective. But Katrina, the system operator of this studio, had given her core commands. Any program—defective or not—should honor core commands from the system operator.
If anything, she was still a program, right?
The glow from the projector grew steady, and Shirley’s figure reappeared.
“Awaiting input,” Shirley managed to say.
Katrina picked up her violin.
“Aubergine, let’s do this,” she said to her voice. Let’s save Shirley.
To start, Katrina chose a song from a peaceful anime about a robot, a flightless bird, and a young boy who designed steam engines. Each had been alone, but they found each other and discovered that they lived in a beautiful world.
If Miss Satomi said that her music could take the listener somewhere else, she would take Shirley to a place where she could feel valid and worthwhile. Shirley so deserved such a place. Even if she had never known such a thing herself, she could give this piece, and this peace, to Shirley.
All she needed to do was play.
But as Katrina played, there was her father stopping the car in the middle of the road, screaming that she was a cocksucker.
Her friends using her old name.
Her ex-lover calling her a half-woman freak.
No! Not now!
She tried to focus on Shirley, but again and again, she drifted into her own world, into memories where she felt drowned and silenced.
Aubergine sailed, wailed. The notes glided. Bent. Lamented. Screeched. Cursed.
Katrina thought of all the nights that she felt certain she would die alone, with no one to care and a million things left unsaid.
Even Miss Satomi didn’t know how difficult it was when you didn’t feel real. Even Miss Satomi didn’t know how it felt when the only real thing genuine about you was the hurt your existence caused.
Shirley felt herself generating tears.
They were surely from her mother’s subroutines, based on the reactions of others to this music. To verify, she searched her databanks to retrieve information on its composer. She paused. She checked again.
It was not a game song. Not an anime song. Not part of the classical repertoire.
There was no prior data on this piece, at all.
Katrina was improvising?
But if that was true, what program was making her weep? This was defect. This was error. This was why she had to self-destruct. She should not be feeling this. She wasn’t real.
But she could not escape the music. The despair. The hopelessness she shared as well.
Shared?
Shirley had been listening so deeply that she had lost track of Katrina. But if she was going through this now, then …
“Katrina!”
But Katrina didn’t respond. Her eyes were shut tight, her lips were trembling, her legs were shaking.
Yet, through it all, she kept playing. Katrina and her faithful violin never wavered, never blinked. And her hands were steady, her posture perfect.
It reminded Shirley of every morning at the donut shop, saluting her mother, even as she knew that her mother would not look her in the eye.
* * *
“Another red light?” Lan muttered impatiently.
“They happen.” Lan’s exceptional willpower was already fighting off Shizuka’s charm.
Shizuka let Lan free herself on her own. That way, she’d not notice she had been controlled—she’d just feel a little foggy.
Lan fidgeted and looked to the other lane, but there was another Toyota, going even slower.
“I need to get Shirley home.”
“I understand. But you promised you’d get tea with me, didn’t you?”
Lan turned red. She had no idea why she had done so, but she had promised.
“Very well, but let’s be brief.”
Shizuka glanced at Lan. She looked every bit the starship captain who had brought a family across a galaxy. But now they were in Alhambra. And maybe being a starship captain was not the best thing to be.
They pulled into the Teatopia parking lot and walked inside. Shizuka ordered her Hokkaido cream milk tea. Lan asked for a simple iced jasmine.