“Ayla.”
“Has it been a while since we last met, Karina? You could come by more often, you know.”
“It’s not that you want to see me. You just want customers to show up.”
The moment we sat down, Senior Ayla quickly approached and handed over a teapot.
Without thinking, I tried to take the teapot she offered, but Senior Ayla lightly pushed my hand away.
“You’re not here to work.”
“Ah, r-right. Thank you.”
I’m still not very used to being a customer.
Clink.
The teapot was set down on the table. When I reached out to pour the tea, this time Karina smacked my hand away.
“You. Do you even know how to pour tea?”
“I-I learned. I’m part of this c-club too, you know.”
“Oh, right. Then you do it.”
The way she was treating me like a subordinate was subtly irritating.
“I’ll pay for the tea and snacks too, so order whatever you want.”
Of course I should do it. Naturally.
I poured black tea into a teacup and handed it over. Karina elegantly lifted the saucer in one hand and held the cup’s handle with the other.
Though no matter how elegant she was, there was only so much she could do while wearing a tracksuit.
After I filled my own cup as well, Karina crossed her legs and promptly leaned back against the chair.
“You and Levan have quite a bit of influence these days.”
Ah, this was about what I’d seen earlier on the academy community.
“A lot of cadets are reevaluating the practical performance of smoke grenades and reactive armor.”
To be precise, there was much more reaction to reactive armor than to smoke grenades. He was the top student, after all.
Reactive armor itself was a technology that had naturally fallen out of use as tandem warhead technology advanced, and armor technology developed to an extreme in order to stop those tandem warheads.
In the end, the world was left with shells that even reactive armor couldn’t stop, and excellent armor that didn’t need reactive armor in the first place.
Using that as a countermeasure against melee equipment, with ammunition sensitive enough to explode even from stimulation by close-combat gear, was certainly worth everyone’s attention.
“Well, everyone’s freaking out over the reactive armor, and they’re all discussing the smoke grenades.”
Rather than their uses, they were discussing how to counter them.
“Soon enough, most Titans will be fitted with thermal sensors. Oh, and for the record, I used smoke grenades well too. Once I tried them, they were pretty useful.”
She asked about them and then immediately put them to use?
No, maybe Karina’s White Bunny had already had a thermal sensor to begin with. The Luna Count family stood at the cutting edge even within the technologically advanced Empire, after all.
Karina took a sip of tea.
“Before your questions, I’ll tell you one thing first. The Luna family is very sensitive about leaks concerning our artificial intelligence technology, so there are many things that aren’t even disclosed to internal personnel. There won’t be much I can answer.”
“Th-then why did you come?”
“Nobles are extremely mindful of other families’ domains, and commoners are usually too afraid to ask questions like that. It was the first time in my life I’d been asked something like that, so I found it interesting.”
So it was the “you’re the first man who’s ever been this rude to me” pattern.
Even as she spoke, Karina didn’t seem particularly uncomfortable. It didn’t seem like she was hinting that I had been rude, either.
In the first place, she didn’t demand aristocratic manners from a lowborn. Because I was lowborn, she simply assumed I would naturally be ignorant.
For me, that was actually an advantage. Maybe choosing to be lowborn hadn’t been such a bad idea after all. There was also the fun of trampling people who looked down on me with skill.
At this point, since I couldn’t avoid it, I was ready to enjoy it.
“I’ll answer what I can, and I’ll say I don’t know for what I don’t know. For the rest, I’ll keep my mouth shut. How’s that?”
There was no reason to refuse.
“A-and everything said here is a s-secret?”
“Yes. Can you promise?”
When I nodded, Karina quietly nodded as well.
“Wh-why is it that only the Luna family can create a-artificial intelligence?”
“I don’t know.”
The answer came the instant I asked the question.
It was a little bewildering, but not that surprising. It wasn’t as if Karina Luna was the heir who would inherit the family, and she might not have received that kind of education.
But I had plenty of questions prepared.
“Wh-why is there red liquid inside the c-core?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are s-special materials used in the a-artificial intelligence circuits?”
“I don’t know.”
“Th-then why did you even come?”
“Didn’t I tell you? I was planning to come see Ayla for the first time in a while anyway.”
Karina took a sip of black tea and nodded as if she liked it.
Is there no pile bunker for use on humans?
She didn’t seem to be lying. In the first place, as a noble, she had no reason to go out of her way to lie to me and tarnish her own name.
Then she really didn’t know.
Either the Luna Count family had been educating her that way from the start, or Karina was such a wild young lady that she didn’t even properly listen to her family’s education.
My rational mind clearly wanted to say it was the former, but why did I want to believe it was the latter? Was it because Karina was such a total mess?
“It’s definitely rude to call someone here and then make that face.”
Ah, my expression.
After wiping my face once with my hand and raising my head, Karina stared intently at me.
“And it doesn’t seem like that was what you called me here to ask about in the first place.”
So she already knew.
I lightly glanced around. There was no one who loved maids so much that they would come to this café at nine in the morning, where maids were always on standby.
There was no one who would bother eavesdropping on our conversation either.
I held out one hand to Karina. When Karina reached out to take it with a puzzled expression, I quickly pulled my hand back and raised my smartwatch.
The smartwatch’s speaker vibrated.
“Huh? Why me all of a sudden? You two were talking, so I was deliberately staying quiet.”
Karina’s eyes widened.
I had thought about it since last time. Ailee was somehow different from other artificial intelligences. At first, I hadn’t noticed, and after I did, I’d assumed it was because of the sync Aaron had mentioned.
Like how she would speak from the smartwatch as if she’d been summoned first even though I hadn’t called her, or how she used my academy ID to write posts on the academy community.
Honestly, it made no sense from a common-sense perspective, but I’d simply thought that perhaps an artificial intelligence with an exceptional sync could do that kind of thing.
I had thought that way until Professor Zeke, who likewise had a high sync, was surprised by Ailee’s behavior.
If, as Professor Zeke said, Ailee was stolen property from the Luna family, then the people who knew Ailee best would certainly be members of the Luna family.
“How did it come out when you didn’t call the artificial intelligence? Did you modify it with gesture recognition?”
“The smartwatch hasn’t been m-modified at all. And the artificial intelligence hasn’t been modified either…”
“You can’t modify an artificial intelligence. That’s common sense.”
You can’t modify an artificial intelligence.
Which meant interference was possible in some way. Levan had, in fact, said he used a stimulant on his artificial intelligence to forcibly raise its reaction speed.
Thinking about it now, it might have been a kind of CPU overclocking. In any case, I had no intention of using it on Ailee.
Karina stared at my smartwatch for a long while, then leaned back in her chair again and took a sip of tea.
“Your Titan, could it be an experimental model that went missing from our family? There are more than a few places after our family’s experimental units, so I honestly can’t tell.”
“Th-that might be possible.”
“If I tell my family about this, your Ailee might be confiscated. Why are you asking me so boldly?”
“Because Senior Karina s-said so.”
I raised my index finger and brought it to my lips.
“E-everything said here is a s-secret.”
“That’s right! I heard it clearly too. Promises have to be kept!”
I wasn’t the only one who nodded. Karina had definitely nodded too.
“You think I’ll keep that?”
“You’re worse than a c-commoner in skill, and you won’t even keep a promise—”
“Shut up. Stop right there.”
The best way to persuade a person is to get under their skin.
I know well because it’s happened to me plenty.
Karina let out a deep sigh, then picked up a cookie from the table with her mouth. It took her quite a long time to chew a single cookie.
After I waited for a while, Karina finally swallowed the cookie.
“I don’t know about this either.”
No, fuck.
No, wait. I had thought that might be the case. From Karina’s startled reaction in the first place, it hadn’t been an “Why is this here?” reaction, but more of a “What is this?” reaction.
Still, it was pretty irritating that every question I asked was answered with “I don’t know.”
“Well, I told you. I said I’d answer that I don’t know for what I don’t know.”
She wasn’t wrong, but still.
“However, I do have a guess.”
“Y-you do?”
When my body leaned forward, Karina tilted her chair back to avoid me. She even stretched out her hand and waved it as if telling me to go back.
Once I backed away, Karina set her chair upright again and opened her mouth.
“Recently, in creating artificial intelligences, development has been underway regarding the personality of artificial intelligences. I’d guess this is probably one of the stages in that development.”
A development stage?
“If you take a human’s level as the maximum and raise the autonomy of the personality to the maximum, I think this might be the form it takes.”
After thinking for a moment, Karina nodded.
“Well, it’s probably one of the earliest artificial intelligence models from the experimental stage. Recently, research has been moving in the direction of suppressing the personality of artificial intelligence as much as possible.”
“Suppressing the personality?”
“Yeah. The conclusion was that the most efficient method is to suppress the personality as much as possible, then overclock the artificial intelligence itself and run it in a state similar to high sync, even if that reduces its lifespan.”
Isn’t that what Levan was using?
Then was the reason Levan’s sync was unusually low also because of this?
More importantly, she’d said she didn’t know anything earlier, but she knew quite a lot about this sort of thing.
“You look like you’re thinking, ‘She knows a lot about this, though.’ I just don’t know the practical and detailed research. I at least know what kind of research my family is doing.”
Does it show on my face that much?
“Yeah, it shows on your face that much. Don’t look so surprised and drink your tea. How about wearing a mask?”
“A m-mask is a bit…”
“Why?”
I’ve gotten somewhat used to the scent of tea. Since I work at the café, I can now tell which teas have good or bad aromas, and what properly brewed tea is like.
Senior Ayla’s tea is definitely a little different. Is there such a thing as talent for this?
Anyway, a mask is out of the question.
“Usually, in this kind of genre, p-people who wear masks either fall into delusion, look mature on the outside but actually never m-matured, or end up constantly doing eccentric things.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s j-just something like that.”
A masked man is absolutely out of the question.
And I have no intention of painting Ailee red or giving her horns, either.