2. Lover's High
The little girl ran up to me.
Ignoring her mother's attempts to stop her, she came right up to my face, grabbed the hem of my uniform, and tugged forcefully. It was an unreserved gesture, as if she were pulling the cord to sound a steam locomotive's whistle.
"Hey, where's the girl? Why are you alone?"
I intentionally answered with a question.
"Why do you ask?"
Then the little girl said:
"Because you fell in love, right? Isn't it unbearable if you aren't looking at her? Doesn't it hurt so much you feel like you can't go on living? How can you just nonchalantly come to a convenience store all alone?"
That is quite a sharp question, I thought with admiration.
It was sharp enough to make one speculate that this little girl robot's OS was actually older than that of the mother figure accompanying her—that perhaps it was actually the child who had led the mother to the convenience store.
Of course, that was completely irrelevant information.
But I was desperately seeking to distract myself from something—so much so that I had to allocate CPU resources to processing such trivial details to fill my thoughts.
The little girl was right.
I was dying.
I was desperate to get her into my field of vision as soon as possible and input that data until I reached the capacity limit of my memory chips.
Instead of a reply, realizing that this little girl understood the essence of my pain and had taught me the method to alleviate it, I stroked her head with gratitude.
After stroking until her hair was thoroughly tousled, I withdrew my hand and dashed out the automatic doors of the convenience store.
I looked up at the sky.
The giant was no longer there.
The blinding sun-colored arrow that had pierced my chest was also gone, perhaps absorbed into every corner of the actuators that made up my body, concealing its form.
Mercury was peaceful, having regained its boring daily routine.
Except for the anomaly that was myself.
I ran.
Like a single bullet tearing through the transparently blue night sky of Mercury.
...No, let's stop with such weaponized metaphors. This was a bluer, hotter impulse.
In any case, I ran.
With all my might.
As I did, I felt the pain gradually subsiding.
This was not a runner's high. It was not an effect caused by the physical exertion of running, but an elation driven by the prompt of heading toward the one I yearned for.
If I were to name it, it would be akin to a "Lover's High."
Pushing my actuators to the brink of screaming from overload, at the end of my sprint, I finally found her.
It was her from behind.
She wasn't in uniform. Short sleeves, shorts, and white New Balance sneakers—a casual outfit.
Yet, I identified her instantly.
Does the algorithm known as love heighten sensor sensitivity to such an extreme?
Shizuku.
Because I had sprinted so violently, my vocal unit wasn't functioning. I sent a thought—telepathy—via radio waves.
It certainly seemed to reach her; her feet, which had been keeping the rhythm of her stroll, came to a halt.
Shizuku slowly turned around and directed her gaze toward me.
Our lines of sight crossed.
We recognized each other.
In that instant, the media that had been lying in wait surged forward like a tsunami.
They surrounded us in the blink of an eye, camera flashes firing with a frequency that made the stardust in the night sky pale in comparison.
The flood of light filling our field of vision continued like a never-ending fireworks display.
Overwhelmed by the brightness, Shizuku held up a hand to shield her face.
And then, right in the midst of the frenzy of paparazzi, reporters, and onlookers, she spoke in a voice so tranquil it seemed as if time had frozen in that spot alone.
"Did you call me?"
To that question—no, to that resonance whose tone was far too gentle to be called a question—I could not reply with my voice. A strong intuition took hold that I must not respond with linguistic data.
So I broke through the storm of flashes, steadily closed the distance between us, and took her hand.
I squeezed her hand tight.
And waited to see the result.
If she were to shake off my hand, I would be unable to bear the shame and would flee this place at full speed.
If I were not rejected, it would be a cliché development, but I would pull her by the hand and we would run out of this blizzard of scrutiny together.
But somewhere in my heart, I had also been hoping for a novel reaction that was neither of those, one that would betray my prediction circuits.
However, her reaction was ordinary.
She merely wore a bashful expression, applied just the slightest bit of pressure to the hand I held, and squeezed back.
What was transmitted through the sensation of her palm was a truth too calm and too cruel.
She was simply overwhelmed by this abnormal situation.
A pitiful doll manipulated by the flashes of countless cameras.
That was what she was right now.
She is unable to escape the chains—or perhaps the unavoidable program that should be called a curse—known as "Boy Meets Girl" that binds teenage humanoid robots hand and foot. That adorable bashfulness is nothing more than a bug-like conditioned reflex.
So, I defied my instincts.
I dared to define the program called "Love," which the Sun-generated boy giant had installed in me like a divine mandate, as a "curse," and resolved to resist it.
Facing Shizuku, who was hopelessly dear to me, I declared:
"From now on, I'm going to hate you with everything I've got."
Upon hearing this, the soft, pastel-pink tinged smile that Shizuku had been wearing gradually crumbled away.
Yet, perhaps conscious of the eyes around us, she did not try to shake off my hand.
I felt relief at that cowardice, but at the same time, I felt a fierce anger.
I flung her hand away.
Instantly, the intensity of the camera flashes swelled ten-thousand-fold.
We were assaulted by a crackling avalanche of light, and in the blink of an eye, we were submerged—no, drowned in light—within that brilliance.
I could no longer move a single actuator.
A physical mass known as "public interest" weighed down upon us, and all five senses whited out.
Shizuku and I were completely buried at the bottom of the light.
Being crushed to death like this wouldn't be so bad.
It might even be a novel solution to escape this curse called love.
Just as my thoughts were about to cease, an antenna that was still functioning—a microscopic reception sensor—picked up a minute fragment of data, less than a few bytes in size.
Although it was linguistic data, it arrived not as sound, but as a "color" that lightly brushed against my CPU.
That data bore the color of Shizuku.
When decompressed and translated into language, the meaning was this:
I hate you too, Somare.