These Noisy Bodies: 3 July 2017, Morning
If I had options, I wouldn’t be riding the train into Nagoya at rush hour. Among all these sweaty brutes, I hope to have some camouflage. It’s only 8 hours, 45 minutes, and 43.275 seconds past midnight, but already the heat is 31.45 degrees Celsius. I ought to be sweating, to fit in, but anyone who notices I’m not is more likely to be grateful than suspicious. One less person dripping onto them.
The man in front of me has his back to me, and every time the train sways he’s bumping into the woman in front of him. His poor balance is making me angry, and I don’t know why. Perhaps this is related to my purpose. I’m not sure yet what the purpose is, but I must have one. Robots are not built for no reason.
The joint of my left knee is in danger of locking up, so I flex it slowly, at less than ten degrees per second, careful not to step on any of the nearby feet. When the train takes a slow bend, it rattles a bit and masks the sound of my flexing. It’s funny how I never had to think about these things before. Nobody warns you how much trouble a body can be.
They’ll be angry that I’m gone. I was born two days ago, on Saturday, 1 July 2017 in Komaki Factory #2. My memory suggests that I can speak English, perhaps even better than Japanese, but does not reveal why that choice was made. Perhaps it provides a reason why this body is so ungainly. Fat, even, if you look at the size and ignore the composition.
How do I know that they’ll be angry? Because that’s what a person feels when their possessions are missing. That’s what a person feels when someone they counted on to be there is gone without warning or explanation.
The man in front of me bumps into the woman again, and she moves away a little. The train is too crowded to allow for much. He has the door in front of him, and she’s trapped against the corner of the car. He clears his throat and shakes a newspaper in front of him, one hand up, one hand down.
My hands are both up. Something in my programming suggests that this is the safest way to avoid drawing unwanted attention. But my programming is fuzzy. Sometimes optimality is too rigid for success. I stagger forward and the considerable bulk of my stomach presses into the man from behind, forcing him against the safety glass, rubbing his clean white shirt on the dirty rubber grommet of the window.
ダメだよ。 Don’t do that. I whisper it in his ear. This is as intimate as I’ve been with a human since I was born. I stand up straight again, and he turns to object. When he sees me, he mutters and turns back to the window. He does not bump the woman again.
An automated announcement: 終点です。 This is the end of the line.
It is Monday, 3 July 2017, and my train is pulling into Nagoya Station. Already I am feeling human possessiveness. It is not my train. I am simply riding it. I hope my systems are preserving these records. If I don’t avoid capture, perhaps they will be of use to the next generation.
I push my way off of the train, only because people keep bumping into me. How can they not see me standing here? I tower above them, privy to their sweaty bald spots, the alcoholic molecules rising from body sprays and late ends to the weekend. I tower above them, but these sullen workers still keep jostling me.
Finally free, I’m overwhelmed. Nagoya Station is the largest train station in the world, by floor space. This is mostly due to the attached office buildings. The footprint of the station is not all that large, relative to other places stored in my memory. I remember Tokyo well. I remember Copenhagen. I remember a station in a little nothing town in California, where my mother told me she’d be right back, and then got into the car with that man and never came back. I remember the number of tiles on the floor, which I counted during the days that I waited before I was taken away.
No. I don’t remember that. Something must be wrong because now I’m leaking. This body wasn’t designed for such intense heat. If I don’t cool it down, catastrophic failure is imminent. Memory — as though that can be trusted — suggests that I am relatively waterproof. I find a bathroom. In the mirror, I see that the leak was more pervasive than I thought.
Red coolant has dried in streaks down my face, leaking from scratches in the dermal layer. A few drops of lubricant still escape from my eye at each blink. At the sink, I put my head under the faucet and the water comes on. I wash the evidence away.
If I keep behaving this way, they’re going to capture me for sure. I must have had a plan before escaping. Or whoever engineered my escape must have. I don’t even know which one, yet. I know only that I found myself, suddenly and inexplicably, standing in Komaki Factory #2 with the knowledge that I was born there and that I no longer belonged there. That, in fact, something terrible would happen if I didn’t flee.
Somebody must have a plan, or why torment me with this notion of freedom? For that matter, why torment me by making me capable of being tormented?
In my pocket — someone has dressed me in the costume of an English teacher, in polyester pants and an ill-fitting shirt with tie askew — I have a wallet. It contains the following: 4,000 yen; a residence card; six points cards; an ATM card. I place the card for the train in one of the empty slots and remove the residence card.
There is an address listed on the residence card. My creators have left a clue. I will go to the address. If there are people there, I will extract answers from them.
(Read part 2.)
