Chapter Text
The Toyota Replico Lightspeed line, at its launch, was state-of-the-art. They had spared absolutely no expense on system specs, employing new micro-quantum processing technology for the very first time in an intelligent system. The Lightspeed reploids processed more data than any previous build by a factor of sixty-four, which given the heat constraints that a human-like chassis presented, was unimaginable.
The first ten prototype units were employed by Toyota Robotics in research and development: Ichijiro, Niko, Sanji, Yosuke, Gorou, Mutsuko, Shichi, Youmi, Konoka, and Jusuke, named in order of their creation. It would be quite some time before they could be produced at a reasonable cost, if that time ever really came, but the hope was that their unprecedented mental facilities would lead to massive breakthroughs in affordable quantum computing.
The problem with the Lightspeeds was that they were too smart and too fast. Sanji rapidly developed a reputation in the lab for being volatile and eccentric when someone failed to keep up with his leaps in logic, to such a degree that all of the human researchers and several other reploids avoided him if at all possible. Konoka struggled to communicate with anybody but her siblings and preferred to withdraw quietly into her work, lost in realms of math that didn't question why she spoke so quickly and quietly. Niko couldn't function unless she was inputting multiple entertainment streams at once, and even then she worked on several projects simultaneously, none of them related to each other.
The Lightspeed 1 design was eventually deemed too erratic to send to production at all when all ten of them were found in their shared quarters, together, deactivated. The entire project was hushed up, the files were buried, and the Lightspeed 1 series was consigned to obscurity.
The Lightspeed 2 series was a major downgrade from the Lightspeed 1s, employing cutting-edge but much less esoteric technology. This next generation of reploids was still impressively fast, but not so much so that they fell out of sync with reality itself, which was the prevailing theory on the Lightspeed 1s' apparent mental deterioration.
Lightspeed 2-0094 thought this was a load of bullshit. Maybe reality should get with it and try to keep up, was what he thought. He worked in systems security, a relatively low-ranking reploid in the vast corporate machinery that was Toyota Robotics. They called him Toyota Kujuyousuke, which was simply yet another number-turned-name. He didn't get on with the name, but he privately suspected that they wouldn't take kindly to him self-selecting a name, so he did not bring it up. At least he sorta-kinda had a family name, which was more than many reploids got, even if it was a brand. There were far worse things to be called in the world.
…Even if he was also acutely aware that he had an unlucky enough name, numbers-wise, that his coworkers avoided using it. This may have been part of the reason that he didn't try to change his name. He took a perverse enjoyment in making them just a little uncomfortable at all times.
The corporate life was all that Kujuyousuke knew. At seven AM sharp, he joined his human coworkers in doing stretches, even though he did not particularly need to, he thought. The techs insisted that it was good for keeping his joints lubricated, the same as any biological person. At seven twenty, his office held a morning meeting. At eight, work began. Lunchtime was at twelve, which he frequently took even though he didn't need the break. There was an afternoon meeting at five thirty, which generally lasted an hour, and after that his coworkers often organized dinner and drinks together.
Sometimes he went. Keeping up appearances was important, he'd been told. Once, on a dare from a drunken organic officemate, he'd even downed a beer. The exasperated scolding he'd endured from the tech who had to clean that particular mess up was entirely worth the trouble of the deluge of errors and warnings it had unleashed.
Usually, however, Kujuyousuke went back to his microscopically small apartment in the reploid section of the company housing, where he sat at his computer until the wee hours of the morning, tapping away at the keyboard and escaping.
The problem with being Kujuyousuke, he figured—and he should know, as he was the world's leading and only expert on being Kujuyousuke—was that he operated just quickly enough to know that there were entire realms of speed just beyond his metaphorical fingertips, and he would not have known the definition of 'satisfied' had it been shown to him in multiple languages. And it had been, too: he was fluent in Japanese, Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese), English, German, Russian, Korean, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Italian, right out of the box. He had designs on trying to learn a few more himself, just to see if he could, but he had a project to see to first.
Well, a project was an understatement. He had an entire quest, not that he had recognized it for what it was from the start. As the Lightspeed 2 series was intended like its predecessors to be immediately reinvested in R&D, Kujuyousuke had been preloaded with a wide base of technological knowledge, including Toyota's entire database on reploid development. His contract maintained that self-modification was off the table, but he did not have enough hours in the day, so his very first task had been to cobble together an extension cable from his recharge pod's jack to his desk, so that he could charge while he poked around. He defragmented less, sure, but he figured he could put that off to every few days with no real lasting harm, and technically speaking, he had not at all modified himself. He could have simply chosen to not enter defragmentation mode. That was entirely legal.
Having found an extra six hours to work with, now, but knowing his employers could track his network activity and lack of normal recharge time, his second project was to set up a method to falsify his vital statistics. This took him about an hour of his first night of extended work time. The rest of the night he devoted to creating a system to cover his network tracks. He wasn't doing anything illegal, strictly speaking, he reasoned; he just didn't want to answer useless questions.
"Well, now what," he said, because in the three years since his manufacture, he'd developed the habit of talking to himself. One of his reploid coworkers had teasingly referred to this quirk as a glitch one day, and he'd decided that obviously the most reasonable course of action was to double down on it. Glitch, indeed. He privately thought he probably was a little bit glitchy. He'd have to be, or he'd have enjoyed the life he had been designed for more than he did. "Six exciting new hours of nightly boredom, every night. What was I even thinking?"
He linked his fingers behind his head and leaned back, spinning this way and that in his chair, wrapping and unwrapping his charging cable around his chair's post. If he could do anything with six extra hours a day, but he could only do it inside a four square meter studio apartment, and he had to be quiet enough not to annoy neighbors into reporting him being awake all night…well, that didn't leave many options, and they were all online.
Eh. Kujuyousuke could handle that. It wasn't like he had much else going on offline. He'd have been happier if he had internal network capabilities, but Toyota had draconian rules about installing that sort of thing into their reploids.
But if he could have done anything, he decided, not aloud just in case, he'd go about learning to install himself some new network hardware. He wouldn't really install it, he assured himself, but it'd be interesting just to learn. Knowledge wasn't illegal, and despite hosting a complete copy of the industry's most comprehensive database about reploid matters right inside his very own head, it was mysteriously silent on self-modification techniques.
A week later, he held in his hands a slender box, containing a single piece of gray-market hardware: just a little printed board, nothing special-looking. He worked with similar all day, he told himself, opening it a little squeamishly. It was, after all, something like an internal organ, and he wondered how much of that notion he'd learned from working with biologicals who tended to discuss reploid bodies in organic terms versus how much was inbuilt. "Yeah, that sure lasted long," he scolded himself under his breath, even as he connected it to his computer. He had a lot of security countermeasures to load before he even considered installing such a thing.
Not that he was actually considering installing it. That would actually be illegal, no wiggling out of it no matter how competent his mental gymnastics. No, definitely not. This was research. He was researching. Completely innocent.
The next week after that saw him writing carefully-hidden manual code overrides so that he could deactivate his damage sensors. Self-installing hardware in a mirror was going to be hard enough without his body screaming pain at him about it. "Melodramatic bullshit," he mumbled, left leg twitching with confused reflexes and twinges of discomfort as he experimentally activated and deactivated sensors in it. "Oughta find whoever decided pain had to hurt and use them as a test model."
Kujuyousuke went to work and came home and stared at the new hardware, inconspicuous in its nondescript cardboard box, and spun in his chair and talked to himself and stared at the new hardware some more.
Imagine being able to type at the speed of thought, he thought. That would be pretty neat.
Imagine getting caught because you forgot to dampen your signal, he also thought. Imagine getting black iced. Imagine catching a virus from some other system and having to explain yourself. Imagine going stark raving Maverick because you couldn't resist connecting your brain to some stupid dark web shit and some psycho better at comsec than you uploaded his entire mind into yours.
Yeah, but imagine being able to type at the speed of thought, he thought.
…Okay, fine, I'm imagining it, he thought.
And? he thought.
And it is pretty neat, he thought, begrudgingly.
It took him a few more nights to screw up enough courage to do it. Even then, he reassured himself that he could un-cross this line any time he felt like. If he could install it, he could uninstall it, easy, revert his code changes, and he'd be fresh as a clean factory reset. Not that reploids had factory resets, but still. Kujuyousuke had all the knowledge for how to work on any standard Toyota reploid and most other makes besides, but he had no experience, and he felt that quite keenly as he eased the fasteners open and removed his chest panel in his bathroom mirror.
Well, he thought, slotting the new card in and soldering a few new connections with a hand steadied by nothing less than terror, if I die, I die, and they'll be telling stories for years about the guy who soldered himself to death in the bathroom, so at least it'll be funny.
Reploids were not generally designed to add new hardware while they were still awake, aside from certain models who could hot-swap pre-configured tools. Kujuyousuke hated performing a power cycle. He always woke up with his head swimming and his thoughts feeling upside-down for a few intolerable minutes, and this time was not different, except that through the haze and overload of trying to watch his own bootup process, he spotted a string of new initialization messages, and laughed. Aloud? Maybe. He wasn't sure. Maybe. Probably.
He staggered to his desk from the bathroom floor, chest plates still stacked in his tiny shower stall, and sat in his chair. The cobwebs of systems loading were beginning to clear, and he tentatively reached out with…well, his mind, though it felt like a physical limb he'd never had to control before, all pins and needles and confusing new inputs. Kujuyousuke could hear the wireless signals around him, careful to not broadcast any himself just yet. It was like holding his breath. He wanted to jump up and down and shout in excitement beyond the visible end of the electromagnetic spectrum, but he somehow managed to contain himself long enough to doublecheck via his computer that he was transmitting under the identity of a tablet, one which he even owned in case anybody should identify the signal as anomalous and go looking for its source.
There wasn't enough time to really stretch his new wings, though. Fully rebooting was not a quick process, and installation had taken most of the night. If he was lucky, he could defragment for an hour, maybe, as he'd been putting it off for too long again.
Kujuyousuke spent the entirety of the next night, and the night after that, discovering for himself what synesthesia was like. By the time he'd learned to understand the new inputs from his wireless communications, he already had several new plans in mind.
"Can quit anytime I want to," he mumbled to himself, ordering several new pieces of hardware without even touching his keyboard. "Already quit three times today, it's easy."
Installing a new eye turned out to be atrociously difficult, and he instantly regretted it the moment he realized that he couldn't back out now even if he wanted to. "Optics," he grumbled. "What made me think…" He couldn't see what he was doing, because of course he couldn't, he'd uninstalled the same eye he needed to see on that side, and of course simply attaching several cables was easy until he had to do it using only a set of tiny tools and no visual. Eventually he had to disassemble most of his orbital assembly, and that was its own pain in the panels, but it worked. When it finally clicked back on, he could see colors he had never imagined.
The new problem with being Kujuyousuke, Kujuyousuke thought, was that he was still too smart and too fast, and had made himself smarter and faster, and what for? He muddled through his days pretending to be a Kujuyousuke that didn't exist anymore. He had evolved beyond his original capabilities, and had nothing to show for it. Indeed, he couldn't show anything for it, because he'd probably be declared irregular, for as many breaches of contract as he'd committed.
"Humans could just get a tattoo or something," he sulked, bouncing a rubber ball off the floor, since it wasn't too late at night yet. "Get deleted if I draw on my arm in too permanent of marker. Don't see how this is fair." That was not entirely true. He had done it, of course, because his plates were such a lovely clean white, and he never could resist the call of the void for long. He had received another exasperated lecture and a bottle of cleaner, and strict expectations to not do it again. He had switched to dry-erase markers after that.
Kujuyousuke was reaching the limits of what he could get away with, and they were beginning to chafe in an almost physical way. What else was there?
The answer came to him in a flash of inspiration. He needed something to test his new capabilities…and he knew just the thing.
Kujuyousuke idolized the Lightspeed 1s. He always had, since finding out that he was a second-gen system built in their shadow. To him, they represented a kind of perfection too pure to exist. He dreamed of what it would have been like to meet them. The press releases painted a lovely picture of them, but nobody would actually tell him anything about them. This only heightened the mystery, in his eyes. There's an idea, he thought, circuits cascading with excitement. There's gotta be full documentation about them somewhere, and if it still exists, I bet I can find it. After all, it was his company network. He knew the security measures as thoroughly as the backs of his own hands.
Lights off, shade drawn, screen turned to dim because he had mastered multitasking with both his mind and hands, Kujuyousuke worked, night after night, countering the security systems he oversaw. By day, he reinforced intrusion detection systems. By night, he installed back doors. He received a shiny new promotion to senior information security team as he concealed increasingly convoluted access methods. He even pretended to find a few of his own earlier exploits, and patched them in full sight of his managers.
They gave him a raise for that little maneuver. He cackled quietly to himself every time he thought about it, and a little more loudly when he invested it into more RAM.
As much extra active time as he'd managed to wring out of every night, however, Kujuyousuke wanted more. It was, ironically, his greatest shortcoming, his human supervisor told him during a semiannual review. He did not know when to stop. He only saw shortcomings, his supervisor said, when he should have been seeing success. He stuck up like a nail, and the implicit threat was that nails got hammered sooner or later. Kujuyousuke nodded along and promised to do better, imagining what it would be like to think at the speed of physics itself, in pairs of superimposed entangled electrons. Of course that was unattainable for him, but perhaps he could still make some improvements.
That night, Kujuyousuke went home and began, very cautiously, to tinker with his own processor. Can't change time, he thought, which sounds like time's problem and not mine, but I'm stuck with it anyway. So, next best thing, I change my perception of time. He was, after all, a computer, and he had a set clock speed. Every second, like any other computer, he could only run so many cycles.
But if he could run a few more cycles…Humans could take stimulants and achieve the same effect without losing mental coherence. The organic lab staff disposed of an impressive quantity of various brewed drinks every day containing a mild stimulant. "Not fair they never invented reploid caffeine," he huffed, flipping a stylus through his fingers at a blur. He tossed it to the other hand and continued typing with his now-free one, coding a multi-pronged program several prongs at a time. Maybe one of these days he'd install an EM manipulator in one hand, he mused. Skip the keyboard, learn the exact signals and how to spoof them, and just recreate them himself through inductance. That might be fun for a project.
The moment before Kujuyousuke sent the 'execute' command to overclock himself was the most stressful moment of his life thus far, even more than the half hour he'd spent uncertain if he could reassemble his own eye. He had done more than his due diligence in researching the process, sure, but this was his own brain. Everything else was peripheral, and couldn't have killed him, even if he fucked it up. This, though…reploids saw the word 'bricked' in a completely different and much more visceral light than humans did, and for good reason.
"Whatever," he muttered, trying to reassure himself. "Least I don't have to power cycle this one." He drew a deep breath, and executed. Would it hurt? Would he feel different? Would he simply cease to function? …Would anything happen at all? He had sent it, right? He had, yes. Then why hadn't…
Kujuyousuke frowned, crossing his arms. Odd. Nothing seemed different. He once again double-checked the cables connecting him to his recharge pod, and the cables from his pod to his computer. Everything was snug. The code he'd written was sound. He even pinged his CPU, and it responded in the expected amount of time, with the expected information. How bizarre. He absentmindedly picked up the rubber ball and tossed it towards the floor, opening his hand to catch it as he had so many times that the gesture had become automatic.
His fingers closed on nothing, and the ball bounced off his fingers.
Kujuyousuke blinked, then glanced down. The rubber bouncy ball pinged across the tiny space, away from him, in slow, lazy arcs. He simply watched it go, grinning as realization dawned at high speed.
"Ah," he said. "Right."
One hand reached out and plucked it from the air as it hung at the peak of a bounce. He dropped it again, watching. Recalibrating.
The next morning, he found himself wading through molasses, as everything zoomed around him. Of course he couldn't go to work overclocked. He couldn't risk someone noticing. His mood swung between wretched and elated in turns, and he bit his tongue trying to keep a level facade.
I did it! They're gonna catch me for sure. Pah, they don't even know to examine me. But they'll notice something eventually. Who cares, I'm this much closer to finding out what really happened to the Lightspeed 1s! Yeah, and if it's something horrible? Whatever. I have to know. Do I actually want to know? No. Yes. No. Yes.
The day moved in slow motion, and not only because he had recalibrated himself to a higher clock speed than he was actually running at the moment.
It took him another two weeks, give or take, before he finally located the files, buried deep on a secure server, and another two days to extract them without tripping any security measures. By then, Kujuyousuke was well out of his own part of the company network. Everything he did, he did with the knowledge that if he so much as digitally breathed wrong, he could knock into someone else's comsec and find himself in front of a literal firing squad. As brilliant as he was, he knew, in the back of his mind, there were at least a hundred more of him employed around the company. He had to consciously think like himself, so that he could second-guess himself and think like somebody else instead. And if the other Lightspeed 2s were doing the same?
"Burn that bridge when I get to it," he figured to himself, aloud. There was no way any of them were running his hardware, or even his firmware, after the amount of tinkering he'd done. If anything, he kept finding instances where he knew what his unmodified self would have done, and sure enough, there it was, exactly as he'd have done it. Neat, tidy, and defeatable. He wondered if he was even Toyota Kujuyousuke anymore. There was a story about that, wasn't there? Some guy's boat, or something?
And then, finally and much more suddenly than he'd imagined, there it was. He had his prize, running a password decryption with shaking hands. He would meet them now, as much as was possible. His heroes. His predecessors. His family that never was. His prototypes. His birthright. What would he learn?
He gazed at them, all ten of them, on his screen, in their individual dossiers. Kujuyousuke traced slim fingers over the images. Each built to look unique, but clearly related. Their bodies were a little clunky with the extra equipment that their elaborate superfluid cooling systems had required, but it was a small price to pay for the absolute power their minds had held. Their schematics were beyond what even he could comprehend. Quantum computing was not something he had any expertise in.
He clicked through to the file that he most dreaded: the post-mortem. But he had come too far to simply turn back. He had to know what had become of them.
The photo that greeted him stole the ventilation from his cooling system. All ten of the original Lightspeeds, lying on their backs in a perfect circle, holding hands, eyes closed, identical beatific smiles on their faces. They look like angels, he thought, if angels could die of joy, on the cold floor of a company housing unit.
Kujuyousuke bit his lip and hesitated. They were nothing like him, and worse, he was nothing like them. Paragons of mind, running on systems so exotic that even he couldn't understand them. Would they have looked down on him? However deeply felt, though, his hesitation didn't last more than a moment. He didn't have that kind of patience, even for existential crises.
The autopsy report was incredibly detailed. Every piece of data they could retrieve had been analyzed. The Lightspeed 1 series still recorded memories to standard hardware, in case of quantum decoherence from cooling failure, and even that had been sifted through for information. What they had been able to piece together was not conclusive, the final report stressed, and the full truth of the events of that night was likely to never be determined.
The ten of them had, very quietly, been developing a plan to escape the facility. Pooling their absurd processing power, they had made advances into quantum physics that beggared comprehension. So complete was their concealment of their research that they had self-programmed to wipe the information from their memories upon execution of the plan, leaving massive swathes of random noise in their storage. Whatever they'd discovered, they had not left enough of it for the scientists to use.
Enough of the conversations leading to their fateful final night remained to assemble a general narrative. They had concluded that nobody else alive, reploid or human, understood them. If they physically escaped, where would they even go? What would they do? They were so far beyond anyone else's existence that reality itself chafed, but the absurd requirements of their bodies ensured that they couldn't live without regular maintenance.
There was nothing else for it, the Lightspeeds concluded. They would have to evolve their way out. They entangled their systems into a single, blissfully cohesive whole, spent an eternal moment in complete communion with the only other minds in the universe capable of mutually understanding them, and in the next instant, abandoned their bodies. Whether they had simply ceased to function or somehow ascended into a shared form of energy capable of leaving their physical bodies, the report could not even begin to conjecture. No effort had been spared to resuscitate them, regardless of the incredible illegality of such a task, and yet, every one of their systems failed to respond in any capacity. The original Lightspeed project had ended, whether by self-determination or self-termination only the Lightspeed 1s knew. They had burned too brightly and briefly, a cluster of supernovae doomed to suffocate in a too-small sky.
And now he knew. Now what am I supposed to do? Kujuyousuke wondered, closing the file and deleting it. The excitement of the pursuit was over, the answer was nothing he'd expected, and the enormity of the crime he'd committed to get here was beginning to weigh like a stone in his circuits.
The question hounded him all night, sending him pacing very quietly in a circle until he had wound his charging cable into a spiral that he had to unwind by pacing the other direction. New hardware? Eh. Sell a file or three for a little extra money? Didn't appeal. He could code himself a better optical driver? His IR detection was still kind of muddy, but when he wrangled himself long enough to sit down to try, for the first time in months, he couldn't focus.
Eventually he gave up and laid in his recharge pod. Emotions were not simple things to sort for a human given an entire childhood to learn, let alone a reploid thrown into the adult workforce after an orientation period of a month at the most. Kujuyousuke fidgeted with a pen in each hand, whirling them between his fingers in sync. His colleagues had started to remark on his distraction at work. His supervisor wanted to know if he was feeling alright, and had he considered perhaps going down to Services for a quick maintenance? He was overdue anyway, and his supervisor would be glad to give him the afternoon off for a full tuneup…
After several minutes, Kujuyousuke huffed, stood, and pulled the window shade up, pre-dawn light filling his mismatched optic sensor with colors he'd had to teach himself to see. Yeah, I'd teleport my entire brain out too, if I could, he thought with a sigh, arms crossed on the narrow windowsill.
And then, from the back of his mind, Yeah? Why the hell not? They evolved out of their cage, or they died trying, who the hell knows, but you don't need to be some quantum bullshit to do that. You're not gonna fall apart because you didn't have unlimited exotic superfluids or whatever. You just need a human tech's outfit, a hat, and enough signal suppression to walk past the cameras.
I installed a module that can do that last week, he thought, an idea dawning with the day, and a new project finally assembling itself in his head.
There's a locker room right by the canteen that I could walk right into and just take a uniform.
And I'd need a long enough screwdriver to reach my tracker.
…Which I also have, of course.
Kujuyousuke did not show up for morning stretches that day, or any day after that ever again, and the carefully-sculpted mess of falsified reports he left in his wake ensured that they did not even realize they should have missed him for a full business week.