CLEMENCY

Ding!

     The echoing sound resounded as the doors of an oversaturated convenience store slid open. A young woman with her hair tied back into a French braid that looked as if its tips were dipped in sky blue paint, an oversized white sweater with a pastel purple windbreaker jacket draped over it, a sticker loaded backpack, and shoes with platforms thicker than a block of Swiss cheese came fumbling out. One of her hands looped through a plastic bag while the other struggled to open a pack of roll cakes.

Bzz, Bzz

“Ack!”

     Startled by the unexpected sensation, her heart skipped a beat as she yelled aloud. Everyone around flinched from her abrupt outburst while she shuffled her eyes back and forth before hastily proceeding forward. Swiftly gripping the pastry with her mouth, she fished around in her hard-to-reach pants pocket before yanking out her phone.

“M-Mirai?” she mumbled through her cake filled lips, with her eyebrows sloping from one to the other. “Why would she be calling?”

     Finally bringing herself to a halt she perched up against a siderail, bit off a piece of cake, and then slapped the most arrogant smug onto her face.

“Heya!”

“Laia, it’s me Mirai”

Her posture slumped as she thought to herself how obvious that fact was.

“Mirai! I haven’t spoken to you in like… whatever the equivalent of forever is.”

“That’s not true.”

     Irritated by Mirai’s unnerving need to always state the obvious, she found herself thinking back to why she’d grown distasteful of Mirai’s company.

“Listen, I need to ask you something.”

“Well, I highly doubt you called me to say hi.”

“I need to know how to hack a home AI Hub.”

     Now finding herself indulged by what Mirai had to say, she fixed her posture and held a firmer grip onto her phone. “You can’t,” she then solemnly, but curiously replied.

“What do you mean? I’m sure there’s a way to hack through the login.”

“No, I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m saying YOU can’t do it.”

“Are you being straight with me?”

     With the conversation leaning towards an ominous direction, Laia began to grow eerily conscious of her surroundings.

“Listen, I’ll admit you’re good at things, Mirai, but this ain’t one of ‘em that you can learn overnight.”

     As a moment of silence followed, Laia carefully awaited Mirai’s response; still completely dumbfounded with the situation before her.

“Well, I need somebody who can.”

     Standing tall with her chest puffed up and chin high, she resembled a set of armor on display at a history museum… A perfect depiction of presentation, but vacant of a presence on the inside.

     “The only person that can do that—is me, she paraded, “if it wasn’t for that a-hole of a director I would’ve been qualified to join the–"

Before Laia could rant any further, Mirai interjected, “Listen, I don’t need your monologue of self-servitude right now!”

     “Okay, fine!” Laia chanted before nabbing another bit of her roll cake. “If I can get connected to the interface then I can probably still use my old service code to bypass the login. Apparently, they don’t give general enlistments much priority when removing security access. I know because I actually used it the other day to get through the train gate for free. Hahahaha! I was down to my last 500 credits and couldn’t imagine using it on pub–"

“Hey!”

“Alright, alright, calm down. I have my laptop with me so send me the address and I’ll catch a cab there.”

“Fair enough.”

“Oh, and by the way you wouldn’t have money to pay the ca–"

Once again caught off guard by the unexpected buzz of her phone, she peered down at it to find a message sent from Mirai. “Oh, she freakin’ hung up on me!”

     Throwing her hand in a fit, it was already too late before she’d noticed her strawberry roll cake slipping from her fingers and thrusting through the air. Rotating as it edged closer and closer to the solid, cold, filthy pavement beneath it.

SMUSH!

“Damn it!!”

     Tires rutted against the paved road as the vehicle came to a pause. “Twice in one day. That might be a cab driver all-time record,” the man chanted as he sat in the driver’s seat peeking out towards the house from the window. “What?” Laia barked staring forward, dumbfounded as the cab driver looked at her with a stark face. “Never mind, that’ll be 21 hundred credits.”

As she gazed at the price tag, she leaned in closely to the driver and pleaded, “Can it be charged to the person in that house?” with her finger pointed straight out the window beside her.

Now trading dumbfounded stares, the driver gaspingly uttered, “…What?”

     As she opened the front door, Mirai stood staring at an expression as mystified as a racoon in the dead of daylight. “I always assumed it’d be more sciene-fictiony around here,” Laia chanted. “I’m more so surprised that face of yours is capable of speech,” Mirai tediously countered.

     But without missing a breath, Laia’s mouth kept on its treadmill. “I mean you always hear about how exclusive this neighborhood is with its illuminati-esque nature and all the rumors and speculation and whatnot. People who live here aren’t really real, and how it’s from a different dimension, and time doesn’t pass, and it’s all a simulation… You just learn to expect more! And can you believe the cab I took here had an actual living person driving it?!”

     “Laia, shut up,” Mirai jabbed as she locked the front door shut, “can you get into that thing?”

     Standing in front of the AI interface, Mirai had a burning glare to her eyes; one that Laia had come to despise. Laia then let off a single sigh; her expression descending into defeat.

“You know something Mirai, even you can try and show a little humility sometimes…”

     Neither of them dragging their words on any longer, Laia pushed past Mirai and stood face to face with the assignment at hand. She observed it briefly before navigating around its lock screen widgets. Finding intrigue in its surprisingly colorful appearance in contrast to what she viewed as a dreary home interior.

“So… who’s house is this?”

“It’s mine.”

     Looking back over her shoulder at Mirai she challenged, “And you were telling me about self-servitude.”

“Can you get inside it?”

“Mmm, depends on what I get in return.”

“You came all the way over here to bargain?”

     Slipping her backpack off her shoulders and placing it at her feet, she looked towards Mirai with a change of character and a pointedness to her delivery. “Mirai, I don’t know what the hell is going on right now. We’re standing in someone’s house hacking into their AI Hub… In Inagi of all places.” With her voice decreasing to a whisper, “Who even knows what happens to people that get arrested here?”

“You won’t get arrested, because it’s mine.”

     Forcing her finger in Mirai’s face with over-expressive eyebrows across her forehead, Laia’s nagging became relentless. “YOU called me here because YOU can’t access the damn thing. Like hell it’s yours!”

“Fine, give me the computer and I’ll do it. You can leave.”

     Possessively gripping her bag in both hands and holding it close to her chest, she retorted. “No!”

“Don’t make me take it from you.”

“You still need my service code!”

“And you’ll tell me what it is.”

     Now lost picturing herself being painfully tortured by Mirai, she snapped back to reality and acquiesced.”

“If I hack this system… You get me reinstated.”

     A bit thrown off by her request, Mirai took a moment to follow. “That’s what you want? To go back?”

     “Yea, and not just regular enlistment, I wanna be one of those in the really dim room with ten screens plastered on the wall and can appear as a hologram in the corner of a field agent’s visor or something!”

     As another one of her typical tirades came to an end, she took a second to catch her breath. Mirai looked upon her with the thought of disbelief blended in a dose of, I should have expected nothing more, roaming around in her head.

“None of that exists.”

“Well, I’ll request for them to make one when I get there!”

…

“Fine, if that’s what you want.”

     Like the flick of a lightbulb, Laia’s usual obnoxious personality came gushing back to the surface as she faced her task with a renewed sense of conviction.

     “Okay!” she cheered before cracking her knuckles and needlessly stretching. “Let’s pop this baby open shall we!”

     Clawing away at her keyboard she tried seemingly endlessly to find a breakthrough.

     “Can you get it?” Mirai eagerly asked. “This system is complex,” Laia reluctantly admitted. Diving further into her computer, she let the sequence of code guide her fingertips. Her eyes jutting back and forth as she consumed mountains of information, deciphered it, and boiled it down into a moment defining string of text.

“I’m in!!”

     The two of them immediately looked at the Hub interface which had the words scrawled across it,

Yukue, ACCESS GRANTED

“Your name ain’t Yukue… right?”

Before Mirai could fix her mouth to speak, a voice chimed in uninvitingly.

“Your assessment is correct, intruder!”

     They immediately began looking over their shoulders on edge. Searching for the source of the voice to no success. The room dimmed to an ominous red hue.

And then the ringing started.

Eeeeeeeeeeek!

     They clutched their heads in agony as Mirai cried out for Laia to “Shut it off!!” But with Laia too disoriented to react, Mirai made a last-ditch effort as she felt her consciousness slipping.

“Protocol CLEMENCY! Citizen ID 40146! Citizen ID 40146!” Then suddenly, the ringing ceased.

“CLEMENCY request, accept. Face recognition required. Please face the Hub interface.”

     Mirai carefully looked up at the monitor above. Biometric Confirmation Required was written across the screen. Standing in front of it, the monitor shifted to a check mark, and moments later the room lighting returned to normal.

     “Citizen number 2815, Mirai Tsumibiki. You have been granted Co-Use by the homeowner, Yukue Tsumibiki. Would you like to grant CLEMENCY to the intruder?”

     “Yukue Tsumibiki?” Laia, slowly coming back to her senses, muttered from below. “She’s not an intruder. I let her in.” Mirai explained without a response from the AI. “Yes, I grant her clemency.”

     “Understood. Intruder, please face the AI Interface and state your Citizen ID.”

     Stupefied and looking as if suffering from the effects of hypoxia, Laia disregarded the AI’s request in favor of her own personal complaints. “I think my brain is being juiced…” she cried as she stumbled to her feet.

“Intruder, please face the AI Interface and sta–”

“Alright!” Laia then howled.

     As the two of them briefly glanced at one another, A white light condensing in front of the interface grabbed their attention as it slowly began materializing into form. As the glow of the light dissipated, a round floating orblike shape appeared, coating itself in a sky-blue hue, and drawing a smiley face onto its surface.

     “Welcome to the AI Hub. It is a pleasure to see you, Mirai.”

     Staring at the unbelievable sight before them, they both struggled to find words to speak.

     Laia yanked Mirai by the arm and pulled her to the side, facing away from the mysterious presence in the room. “Inagi was built by aliens!” she theorized with her eyes nearly falling out of her head. Mirai peeked back over at the strange orblike creature; her eyes squinting as a thought popped into her head. Motioning to step away from Laia, she was cut short as Laia once again latched onto her sleeve. “And what the freak is clemency?!”

     Passing Laia nothing more than a dead stare, Mirai approached the floating orb which met her with the equivalent of a warm smile.

“Yukue granted me Co-Use? When did she activate you?”

“2 days, 12 hours, 32 minutes, and 8 seconds ago.”

     As the orb spoke, it elegantly floated around Mirai with a water like buoyancy to its motion. Its animated visage was uncanny and its voice, although stiff and direct, very soft-toned.

“Does your system record its interactions?”

“Yes.”

“Show it to me!”

     Mirai and a confused Laia stood silently as they glued their eyes to a video playback from nearly three days ago. A frightened Yukue appeared on camera. Fear lacing her eyes. She took a single breath before speaking.

“Mirai, we live by the Unholy Trinity, but in this world there are no False Prophets. You have until six days from now, or you may never see me again.”

Mirai hesitantly took a half step towards the video projection before holding herself steady in place. Looking through the eyes of her sister frozen on screen.

A blank stare, an empty voice, and a heavy heart.