5. I'll Ruin This Love
"So, summer is beginning."
I repeated her words, suddenly feeling a sense of unfairness.
"To have a beginning but no end... that goes against the law of entropy."
At that, Shizuku burst out laughing, pfft, as if she had heard a mildly amusing joke.
"You still believe in such old-fashioned laws?"
"It's not about believing..." I shrugged. "It's just something I know. Laws aren't faith; they're knowledge."
When I replied, the faint smile that had floated on her face abruptly vanished.
Silence returned.
I was secretly relieved.
If the conversation had continued—that is, if I had continued to be exposed to the dangerous radiation of her cute voice—my system would have breached its critical point.
How long can I endure this?
I should run away quickly.
This is enough for today. I should go home, recover my resources, and face this curse again tomorrow.
If I gradually acquire resistance that way, the day of my liberation might eventually come—I tried to harbor such a faint hope.
However, contrary to my CPU's logic operations, my body began to drive itself.
As if dominated by something, my speakers vibrated and my mouth moved on its own.
"What happened after that?"
When I asked, she looked at me as if she didn't understand what she was being asked.
The moment I was captured by those eyes, I felt myself drowning in love for her again, completely defenselessly.
I want to resist.
Why must my body and CPU be trampled so thoroughly by a mere high school girl humanoid robot?
However, as she spoke again, my guard was lowered once more.
"What do you mean, 'after that'?"
Asked to clarify, I answered.
"I mean after we were surrounded and crushed by the media. What happened after that?"
"Nothing much. The military came and saved us, and I just went home."
"You just went home? You didn't faint?"
"No, I was fine. Did you faint, Somare-kun? What happened to you after that?"
The moment my name was pronounced from her speakers, a powerful shock ran through me as if I had collided head-on with a large truck, and pseudo-dopamine rushed through my brain circuits.
But, determined not to dance to such a hallucination, I immediately reconstructed my interpretation.
I am a humanoid robot driven by transistors. A substance like dopamine is nothing more than a barbaric data transmission substance used by primitive humans via uncertain systems called neurons.
By hammering that fact hard into my CPU, I succeeded in forcibly cooling down the love that was about to overflow.
Little by little, I feel like I'm understanding how to deal with—or debug—this error called "love."
Alright, let's proceed with the conversation at this pace.
"Apparently, I was carried home on my brother's back."
And immediately, I returned the focus of the conversation to her.
"What about you, Shizuku-chan? Did your family come to pick you up?"
"Stop adding 'chan'."
Her voice carried the chill of winter on the dark side of Mercury—near absolute zero—before it was encroached upon by the Summer Hole.
I corrected myself instantly.
"...What about you, Shizuku? Did your family come for you?"
"No. I don't have a family."
Hmm. She has no resistance to being called by her name without honorifics. While accumulating learning data one by one, I connected the next question.
"So, you live alone?"
"Yeah." She nodded. "Though until 15 minutes ago, I lived with my grandparents. Both of them were bought by humans..."
I was mildly shocked.
"So, you've been living alone for 15 minutes?"
"Yeah."
Looking at her somewhat lonely expression, I tried to imagine the overwhelming mass of time contained in those "15 minutes."
For beings like us with cutting-edge processing elements, a human "second" is equivalent to hundreds of years of thinking time.
In our subjective time, where clock frequencies are raised to the limit, a duration of 15 minutes is close to an eon in which civilizations rise and perish.
During those vast calculation cycles, had she been processing the data of "loneliness" all by herself?
"But," she said, as if suddenly shaking it off. "I like being alone."
The moment I heard those words, the immune system I had nearly acquired collapsed.
My vocal unit drove itself, ignoring my will. Driven by that sticky, primitive human desire—a savage impulse to recklessly seek and devour her existence—I was forced to spit out a line.
"From now on, you're going to hate living alone."
She asked back with an expressionless face that expected nothing.
"Why?"
Of course, completely independent of my own will, I formed a perfectly calculated "posed look" and said:
"Because I won't let you."
"...What do you mean?"
Humanity vanished further from her face. It deepened into a reptilian, cold expression. Like a chameleon changing its aura, she bared her wariness.
"You don't mean you intend to live with me? You're planning to barge into my apartment where I live alone?"
For some reason, her wariness resonated like sweet syrup dripping from heaven. That voice took out my CPU chip and dipped it like fondue into a cup filled with that syrup.
"Of course."
I said it. Taking a deep breath to prevent my CPU from bursting from thermal runaway, I spoke in a gentle tone, like a whisper.
"Of course, I'm going to intrude. It's okay, right?"
I have a body with "beautiful boy" settings and handsome features. Utilizing these resources to the fullest, I told her, as if seducing her.
"Because from now on, I'm going to ruin you. You ruined me, so it's fine, right? We're even. First, I'll ruin your daily life, then I'll ruin you yourself... That's it."
Suddenly, a perfect solution flashed in my mind.
For the first time since meeting Shizuku, I was strongly attracted to something "other than Shizuku."
An idea was inceptioned—planted—deep in my subconscious.
Ultimately, almost lamenting, or perhaps screaming, I voiced that idea.
"By ruining you, I will sedate my feelings of love for you. I will stifle them. To do that, I must be with you first. I must be by your side 24/7, observing your every move in detail, and become disillusioned by all of it. For that purpose, we will live together."
I entered a state of excitement peaking so high my circuits were about to burn out.
I crammed the object called "Shizuku" in front of me into the full frame of my visual camera lens.
I wanted to laminate the image onto the lens right then and there, so that nothing other than her would ever be reflected in my visual sensors again.
Staring at her with such a maddening gaze, I declared.
No, I sentenced.
I proclaimed.
"I'm going to ruin this love."