Chapter 25. The Space Being Looks Into The Stars
Noise began to permeate through my synesthete body. My heightened senses began to pick up on information much farther than the average person’s hearing range.
This is…
The first thing that became ingrained into my eyes when I was born was a white ceiling, along with a single line engraved on it.
[WHITEHEAD ALWAYS FOUND ANSWERS]
I could easily understand what it meant, thanks to the linguistic knowledge I had inherited from my parents. Using the knowledge in my head, I hypothesized the reason for my creation. I was probably a prototype of a new human that was to replace the current humanity. A designed race of humans.
For now…
The cables on my body, as well as the metal restraints on my limbs, were quite annoying. Wasn’t this too cruel a treatment for a baby who couldn’t even walk? I modified my nerves to tune out the unnecessary noise around me, and stimulated my cells to grow faster. I should be able to walk in three hours. By then, I should be able to tear myself out of my restraints as well.
I detected a vibration below me and looked down. I could see a mirror underneath me. A person could look in from the outside, but I couldn’t look outside. I was able to detect electromagnetic signals on the other side though.
“So that’s our test subject?”
A man in a white lab coat was looking down at me coldly. I couldn’t exactly hear what he was talking about, but I could guess from the shapes of his lips.
“I heard you tried putting in asian DNA in the pool this time?”
“…You’re going a little too far with the joke.”
The woman, like the man, had white hair.
“You’ve mixed A13 and E38’s DNA to create this subject this time. It’s pretty much guaranteed to be a failure like this.”
“The expected stats for this one’s quite high, though.”
“I had heard that this combination of DNA might have negative effects on the test subject’s personality. Perhaps this would create negative effects for the humanity of the future…”
The two quickly disappeared out of my sight as they talked amongst themselves. A while later, a different woman holding an e-cigarette appeared. She, too, was wearing a white lab coat, but unlike the two from before, didn’t seem to belong to this place at all. She was wearing high heels and a purple skirt. Her white shirt seemed to be about to explode thanks to those breasts of hers.
“So you’re growing already. You should understand what I’m saying then, right? If you try anything weird, I’ll fry your brain. You’ve been warned.”
The woman looked at me coldly as she said this. When she manipulated the hologram in the air using her fingers, the cables on my arms were taken off. The restraints on my limbs were taken off as well. When I sat up, the woman handed me a tiny ball.
“Wear this.”
It was a white sphere. It was quite a strange object with a button in the middle.
So I just need to press this?
When I pressed the button, the object exploded into a bunch of white strings that enveloped my body. The strings contracted on my body into the shape of a space suit in an instant. When I raised my feet into the air, the strings wrapped around them to form shoes.
“Fits perfectly. Physical age seems to be about five years old. The fact that you’re able to tamper with your body right after birth itself is quite satisfactory.”
The woman walked down a hallway while saying this. I considered what I was to do for a second, then decided to simply follow. The threat from her at the beginning wasn’t a lie after all.
“Ah, I forgot to tell you. I’m your biological mother. But don’t even think about calling me that.”
I couldn’t see her face as she was saying this.
“What shall I call you, then?”
“Multibrain. That’s what the others call me.”
Multibrain…
A door in front of us opened to reveal another path. It seemed to be blocked off by a wall, though.
“And I am?”
“Test subject.”
I stopped in my tracks. Multibrain noticed this and turned around.
“Individual names are meaningless.”
The wall opened up. When I walked in, my feet began to be lifted up into the air.
Gravity control…
Multibrain leapt up to the top of the vertical path in one step. I followed her actions upwards. After a bit more walking, we arrived in a room containing a device that resembled an MRI. Multibrain sat me inside.
“Stop it with the accelerated growth. There might be calculation errors otherwise.”
I was thinking of doing that anyway. My body was running low on energy. A green light scanned my skinny body with a humming noise. I decided to ask Multibrain a question.
“Why does this body not have a heart?”
“Heart?”
Multibrain clicked her tongue at that.
“‘This body’ and not even ‘I’? A child like you shouldn’t be saying stuff like that. Think of the other person while talking. Ask the question again. Put a smile on your face this time.”
“You told me not to do anything like that.”
“Don’t go assuming things on your own. I only have one kind of feeling for you anyway.”
“What’s that?”
“Expectations.”
“……”
“If I were to answer your question, it’s because you have a unique venous system that can pulsate by itself. Almost like a branchiostoma belcheri. …Come down, now. I need to take your blood.”
After finishing the blood test, Multibrain used the ergometer to measure my strength, and took an intelligence test and an emotion test.
“Everything’s within the expectations… There’s a bit of a problem with your personality, but that can be fixed. Intelligence is…”
She threw away the hologram in front of her.
“Machine’s no good for measuring it. Haven’t seen one that couldn’t be measured in a long while.”
When she modified the panel in front of her a few times, a table appeared in front of me.
“You should have the rules for go stored in your head already. Begin.”
The timer started the moment she finished speaking. Black goes first. I glanced at Multibrain once, and made my move.
The result of the one hour thirty minute battle was my loss, by one point. Multibrain complimented me for my efforts.
“You did well for your first time. This is pretty good, especially against a quantum computer.”
“One more…”
“No. You just thought that it was ‘obvious’ for you to lose, didn’t you?”
Her words were cold. It almost seemed like her glare was about to pierce into me.
“Never, never think that you’d get a second chance. You lose once, you can never win. Can you live again after you die? No. You can’t.”
“……”
The table disappeared. The Multibrain approached me, examined my face for a second, then clicked her tongue.
“I thought you’d feel ‘disappointment’ if I inserted the word ‘expectations’ into you. It seems you can’t feel anything, though. That makes you a failure as a living organism.”
As she said, I didn’t feel anything from this loss.
“You might go extinct from the fight for survival at this rate…”
I must’ve imagined a little tone of worry in her voice. In any case, this was the end to Multibrain’s tests. After this, multiple lab assistants appeared to perform more tests on me. Most of them were simulations. For a solid year, these people made me get experience through VR simulations. They were doing it to fill in my weak points, I assume. The assistants put me through war, surgery, company, weapon, and exercise simulations to get experience.
It was almost as if they were trying to create the perfect human. But in the end, what was ultimately created was a defective product that only killed for profit.
I stopped thinking about the past, and answered the saint with a smile.
“I hope I could turn out to be a good person in the future. But isn’t it too late? For the both of us, at least.”
Those who have stepped into a pool of blood will leave a trail of blood even when they decide to walk on a white path. It didn’t really change anything if you tried to back out of your path after you went so far on it. Before the saint could say anything else, I tried to change the topic.
“Ah, speaking of. I created a plan to take down the Warrior in the case that the first and the second strike force fails in taking him down. Want to hear?”
“For now…”
The saint didn’t seem very happy when she heard that I had a plan. As I thought, she doesn’t want to see him die. I explained my plan in simpler terms so that the saint could understand it.
“Hmm…”
After thinking a little bit to herself, the saint shook her head.
“Too big of a risk. What will you do if it fails?”
“I’ll act like a dog and be your slave forever.”
The saint began to think again thanks to my revolutionary incentive.
“Do you… Do you really think your plan would work?”
“If the Warrior does indeed turn out to be a hero, then yes. It’s not like I can guarantee a plan would work. After all, I can’t see into the future. Most things aren’t certain until you try it out. What, is there a reason why you’re hesitating?”
“Well… I don’t know. I still don’t know if I’m doing something right…”
This was something I was curious about as well. If I were to describe the saint in one sentence, it was that she was ‘too kind of a person’. She was someone who was willing to take on any danger to save everyone. Someone like this was trying to kill the heroes who saved this world. In this way, she was going completely against her ideology of life.
This all originates from the fact that ‘it’s impossible to save everyone’. If the hero starts a war, many people will die, regardless of the outcome. Would it be fine for the saint if citizens begin to die in this war under the name of ‘justice’? Of course not. In that case, it would be better to help the side that would result in the least deaths. The reason why the saint was making such a big decision was because she failed to persuade the hero. I decided to tell her my solution to her situation.
“Don’t worry about it too much. Humans are beings that pursue profit from the beginning, anyways. The correct answer is always one that gives you the most profit in the end.”
This is probably why my personality was listed as pure egoism.
“Now, let me ask you something. Do you like a world filled with evil people, or one filled with saintly ones?”
“Of course, it would be…”
“The latter. Now, what answer would you get if you asked this question to an evil person? Would he choose a world where he might get backstabbed at any moment?”
I was confident.
“No, the reason why the world is so full of evil is precisely because it’s more profitable to steal a piece of bread in front of you rather than to wait for happiness that might or might not come. The reason why people commit crimes is because it brings profit.”
“Are you telling me that everyone sins? For profit?”
“Precisely. Humans all act for their profit. Good and evil are just modifiers people stick to certain actions afterwards. If you always think of helping the most amount of people at once, there’s no way you’d become unstable like this.”
Why do people have to be good? It was so much easier to profit if they chose to do evil things. Back in my childhood, those who worked for Whitehead all answered this question with these answers.
“Who knows? Maybe because you’d go to hell?”
“Because of the law. You’d be jailed if you committed crimes.”
“Because the majority of the people in the world are good.”
If there was no hell, if there was no law, and if the good were the minority, would it be right to commit evil? I brought the question to Multibrain in the end. The woman, who was vaping with her e-cigarette, looked down at me coldly.
“That’s a question with no answer. Find an answer on your own. Pick out the answer you like after you find several on your quest.”
I did what she told me. I analyzed data of acts that people praised and acts that people frowned upon. Using this, I concluded that the acts that sought short-term profits to be evil, and acts that sought long-term benefits to be good. Because I was the most precious thing in the world for me, I had thought that being evil or good was just a choice. Of course, I regret thinking that way later on in life.
The saint listened to my story quietly for a bit, then retreated to her room after saying that she needed to think for a bit. The stable was quiet again now. I lay down on the haystack, and looked up into the stars.
Perhaps a human like me shouldn’t have existed in this world.