Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume15 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 4===

She was in a daze.

The Information Alliance Idol Elite known as Oh Ho Ho was not inside a cockpit surrounded by strange machinery. She was in Midtown, Manhattan, New York. Specifically, she was in the center of Times Square which was one of the biggest tourist locations.

Time had stopped.

That was likely one of Manhattan’s abilities. All the people in the square were closed in 3m clear cubes with their looks of shock frozen on their faces. That they still held their smartphones with the lenses pointed outward may have been their Information Alliance-ness showing through.

The scenery had greatly changed. Giant clear ivy was tangled tightly around the outside of the towering skyscrapers to thoroughly reinforce them so they would not collapse from the movements of the world’s largest Object. They were harder than steel beams, more flexible than muscles, and designed to allow any external force to escape safely.

Was this heaven or hell?

Either way, the ringlet curls girl spoke weakly in that strange and unfamiliar world.

“Now I’ve done it…”

The extremely bitter and heavy feeling she felt may have been similar to the “sage time” whispered of on the internet.

No one responded to her, of course. Oh Ho Ho thought about the situation while touching the cold surface of a giant die containing a mother protecting a stroller.

[[Image:HO_v15_363.png|thumb]]

She hated it.

She hated the world beyond all measure.

…But what exactly was she supposed to do now? It was clear as day that nothing she did now would bring Quenser back. For the Oh Ho Ho who performed as the G-cup top idol using the Information Alliance’s 3D modeling, perfectly recreating an individual using AI, robots, clones, virtual reality, or other methods seemed plausible enough, but none of those would ''really'' be him. She recalled the 4m G-cup idol she had been operating earlier. It simply was not the same. She wanted to see Quenser again. That was a grand and emotional task, but asking the adults for the highest quality body pillow made from all sorts of cutting-edge technology was not what she wanted.

In fact…

(Th-the adults must be working hard to figure out why I went nuts… O-ohhh, it’s so embarrassing!! Are they giving out all my information!? Are they posting blown-up pictures of me on the briefing room screen!?)

In addition to her personal feelings as a teenage girl, this was also dangerous for her side job as an idol.

Her entire face grew bright red, but she could not turn back time. She hoped the Information Alliance would do its things and seal away all that information as national secrets.

“…Sigh.”

Staying here would accomplish nothing. But going elsewhere would not change anything either.

Her small stomach growled inside the silence of a city devoid of human voices. She wondered if feeling hungry like normal was a good sign. She was surprisingly resilient to stress, so she looked around and found she would have a hard time even finding a burger with everyone enclosed in resin. It looked like she would have to wander around in search of a bread vending machine or something. And it would have to be one that accepted the e-money from a smartphone or card. As a top-level Pilot Elite and a top idol, Oh Ho Ho was not the type to walk around with change. Even tips were paid electronically these days.

But then one piece of clear ivy smoothly bent over to her. It was thicker than her arm and the tip opened in front of her face like a beautiful flower made of crystal. Something like sticky nectar dripped out. The Manhattan 000 was supposedly being controlled by Oh Ho Ho via countless keyboards, but when she got distracted, Capulet would move in to fill the gap.

AI was meant to support human work. When she came to a stop, Capulet moved its resources back in.

Oh Ho Ho gave the dripping clear liquid a very troubled look.

“…Are you telling me to eat that?”

Her voiced question received no response.

She had no idea how much it was all linked, but as her doubts grew, the presence of the AI network also grew. It was like a GPS navigation app that mistakenly thought the user was lost and provided predictive route popups and control tip popups when they had only stopped in front of a vending machine to take a break.

Oh Ho Ho hesitantly scooped some up on her special suit’s fingertip, moved her mouth in hesitation, and finally squeezed her eyes shut and stuck her finger in her mouth. It was unexpectedly sweet and thick. It reminded her of a diet drink that was meant to fill the stomach. She used one hand to brush her hair off of her cheek like she was using a park water fountain and she stuck her tongue out toward the clear flower for more of the mystery health food.

“Nn…gulp. Gulp, gulp.”

It did not seem harmful.

As a Pilot Elite, she was used to the stimulation of many different chemicals on her tongue, so she had decent instincts for such things. If it was dangerous, she would have known as soon as it touched the tip of her tongue.

“Pwah. Hmm, I would get tired of this pretty quickly…”

Her comment was answered by more and more ivy approaching in much the same way. The diet drink may have had coffee and yogurt flavors, but she slapped them aside. She did not like how they kept pushing up toward her nose and blocking her vision, like people handing out tissues on the roadside or full screen smartphone ads.

It was time to drive them away.

She generally used a console, but she did have an emergency method. She used a one-handed wireless keyboard that resembled a numeric keypad to send the world’s ten toughest unsolved problems toward Capulet and redirect its resources there.

(Phew…)

Once the biological desire for food was met (albeit in an unconventional manner), her thoughts could face the realistic problem. In that utterly silent city, Oh Ho Ho returned to a work van parked on the curb in Times Square. The windowless back space contained a single seat surrounded by keyboards and it was normally used as a mobile console room for remotely controlling the powered suit, but that had changed.

It was now an indirect cockpit for fully controlling the Manhattan 000, the world’s largest Object. Melly Martini Extradry and the thousands of other Martinis around the world did not matter. Just by moving her fingers and hitting those countless keys, she could redirect Capulet’s attention elsewhere and control the Manhattan 000 herself. That small space had to be far more valuable than a lunar villa.

But Oh Ho Ho ignored the traffic laws and hopped into the driver’s seat which had no connection to the Object. Clear ivy was anchoring the van to the ground, so she used the one-handed wireless keyboard to send the bare minimum of commands needed to have that ivy retract, freeing the van. After lowering the seat as far as it would go so her feet reached the pedals, she grabbed the steering wheel. It was an electric van with an automatic transmission, so it did not feel like operating a real vehicle. It felt more like a go-kart at a run-down amusement park.

She could have changed the traffic lights as she pleased, but with no one else around, there was no need to obey the lights in the first place. This was another of the Manhattan 000’s abilities. She skillfully avoided the abandoned vehicles and the people encased in cubes as she made her way toward Columbia University.

She had no idea how much hardware had been linked together to create Capulet or how much processing power it had, but after contacting it, she had realized it was more like a cat than a dog. Telling it to not scratch the walls would only create a confrontation that wore them both down, so it was more efficient to approve of the action while guiding it in a better direction, such as attaching packing tape to the wall or buying a scratching board. That was a lot like Juliet which she was quite familiar with. But even with that mutual contact with the AI network that occasionally attempted to interfere, she could not escape the stifling sense of loneliness.

(Rationally thinking, I can’t force the 10 million people in Manhattan to go along with my selfishness.)

The work van was nothing compared to a 20,000 meter monster. She easily operated the steering wheel to drive the van through silent Manhattan while she lost herself in thought. As she drove down Broadway to approach her goal, she saw the remains of large vehicles and unmanned Bullmites. It was the aftermath of the previous fighting.

Some of them were still functioning, so two or three Bullmites ran alongside the work van.

After arriving at Columbia University accompanied by her unmanned bodyguards, Oh Ho Ho ignored the no parking sign and stopped the van right in front of the university. She got out and approached the second gym and the toppled trees around it. The serverless but coordinated Bullmites followed her.

Finding the person she wanted was not easy.

She had done this herself and should have known the exact location, but it all seemed different when seeing it for herself.

The area was full of clear cubes. It was like cutting open the belly of a giant fish full of eggs. An explosion of her personal emotions had caused all of this. She had trapped them and sealed them away. The number of cubes packing the gym made her feel nauseous, but she eventually found the one she was looking for.

“…Father…”

He was a sickly-looking middle-aged man with a beard.

Even with all this going on…no, because all of this was going on, he had been using his smartphone’s voice recorder to leave a record of what was happening when his time was frozen. He had carelessly not set the screen to shut off after a few minutes. The background photo of the whole family smiling together was visible through the translucent window.

It was not the top-level Pilot Elite or international top idol he had been trying to protect. He had been focused on a completely different side of her.

Quenser Barbotage was no more.

But that did not mean she could throw everything else into the flames.

She placed her palm on the cold cube, squeezed her eyes shut, and thought. She had already made an unforgivable mistake, but what should she do even so?

If she wanted to have her revenge, she could do it.

She could kill the person who actually did it. She could request a list of everyone pulling the strings and profiting from it behind the scenes and reduce every last one of them to ashes. She could even send the responsibility for the wars and military actions back to the world’s safe countries which enjoyed peace and tranquility.

But. However.

Was that really what she ''should'' do?

“…I need to surrender…”

Finally, Oh Ho Ho forced the words from her small mouth.

“That would be the fastest way to resolve all of the issues surrounding Manhattan. I did all this without thinking, but it is true I separated the possibly-dangerous Martinis from Manhattan. If I return this to the Information Alliance, it should resolve the original problem.”

That decision may have been correct.

It may have been the best available choice in the world created by her decisively incorrect choice.

But there was no guarantee everyone else would also make the right decision.

An alarm rang at the same frequency as a baby’s crying to most effectively draw people’s attention to their eardrums. All of the phones held by the people inside the cubes lit up at once, sending the emergency information into Oh Ho Ho’s field of vision.

It was not that something had been found.

Quite the opposite. More and more screens were going dark. The unmanned drones automatically monitoring the ocean around the Manhattan 000 were being shot down by someone. A great threat was approaching. And the fact that she could not see what it was only made it feel more threatening.

“What is this…?”