This world is shit. But not as shit as me.
“Satsuki Kureshima. You have been enrolled in the Ministry of Health’s resilience program.”
The woman in front of me spoke in the whispery tones of a guided meditation set to healing music.
Ophelia—that was the name she called herself—was remarkably human for an automatically generated AI therapist. She had appeared moments earlier, following a brief notification from the emotion-capture sensor behind my ear.
She had straight black hair cut in a slightly front-heavy bob, pale skin, almond-shaped eyes that were neither particularly large nor small, and a sharp, intellectual line to her nose. She was wearing a tight, high-neck sweater and a pleated skirt that just covered her knees. No sex appeal; a girl you could trust. Basically, the perfect therapist. Which made sense. The government’s Mental Health System (we used to mockingly call it the “Suicide Prevention System”) had assembled her based on the data it had collected about me since I had reached adulthood, covering my personality, stress reactions, brainwaves, and hormone levels.
“Did you sleep well last night?” Ophelia asked.
She sat facing me, sinking into a red chair of Scandinavian design. She looked relaxed. Of course, all of this was in VR. In physical reality, I was sitting on a hard office chair in my studio apartment, where I live alone, but I could feel the soft upholstery of the virtual couch under my backside. The scenery around us had been pulled from my memories of the forest behind my grandparents’ place where I used to spend summer vacations. I could hear the burbling of the river, and the light spilling between the leaves lit the forest floor in a circle around us. This, I assumed, had been calculated to provide the most relaxing possible venue for my therapy. Of course, the real forest had been buried under an endless succession of earthquakes and landslides; my grandparents’ house was long gone. I hadn’t seen my grandparents outside of VR for years.
“Like you don’t already know the answer,” I said, groping through my brain fog for the words. “Life hasn’t exactly been conducive to great sleep lately.”
“I’m sure it hasn’t.”
The sensor behind my ear warmed slightly, transmitting her voice directly via bone conduction.
“Based on your abnormal hormone levels, elevated blood pressure, increased heart rate, blood sugar level spikes, and brainwave patterns, we have determined that your mental health has deteriorated. If you continue on this trajectory, you have an eighty percent chance of developing depression, and a twenty percent chance of suicide.”
Suicide? What piece of shit commits suicide?
I was sick of listening to her explaining at length.
The primary function of the emotion-capture sensor was to render human emotions observable, but it also had a stress controller that monitored cortisol levels. When they passed a certain threshold, the sensor flagged the wearer for admission to one of the Commission on Loneliness’s resilience programs. (The long recession in Japan meant that cases of depression here had increased to a level higher than in England or Australia.) The sensors were merely “recommended” according to the Ministry of Health, but seeing as how most HR departments required new employees to wear one, they might as well have been obligatory.
Resilience is the human ability to adapt to and recover from traumatic psychological events. Particularly stressful events such as divorce, the death of a loved one, injuries, illness, or getting fired or demoted could cause psychological damage, sometimes to an irreparable degree. The program fed the patient’s data into an AI which would then create the optimal therapy program to help them recover on their own. Whether you accepted the program or not influenced your Trust Score. It was also a criterion when considering criminals for parole. The program had been introduced sometime around 2040, but it wasn’t until a famous athlete caught for shoplifting used it to overcome an addiction that its popularity really took off. Psychological resilience developed through the program had proven useful for finding work, getting into school, even finding romance.
“That’s not all,” Ophelia continued. “If your current state of health fails to improve, I predict a fifteen percent decrease in income and a ten percent increase in medical fees. In particular, your cortisol readings are dangerously high. This could lead to liver impairment...”
I couldn’t give a shit about all of that. I had no interest in the future. I just wanted to know one thing. Why did she—why did Akira disappear?
“Satsuki, I can see our conversation is causing you stress.” Ophelia turned her observant gaze toward me. “Your dopamine and adrenaline levels are rising sharply, while your oxytocin level is dropping.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I grumbled. “I’m sorry but I don’t care about anything you’re saying. I just want to talk to her again. That’s all.”
Ophelia’s artificially generated face betrayed no emotion.
“You are extremely hurt about the end of your relationship with Akira Tojo, aren’t you?”
I had been seeing Akira Tojo until a month ago. Things had been going well. We were almost at the one-year mark. Then came a message out of nowhere—“It’s over”—and she was gone.
Even now, a month later, I felt raw. I thought of her constantly, the words “why?” and “how?” on constant replay in my head. I could barely function. Work came to a standstill. I was imbibing dangerous levels of alcohol. I wasn’t sleeping. I felt depressed. My colleagues looked worried when I showed up at meetings with a face like the grave and I could tell they were whispering behind my back.
Well they can all fuck off. Like they haven’t been here before. ...But what if it really is just me? Am I the only one who’s ever had this wretched, miserable feeling like the world is falling apart?
“Akira Tojo has set your permitted contact level to zero. You are forbidden to reach her by any means of communication, including social media or VR. Unfortunately, it is quite impossible for you to speak with Akira under the current circumstances.”
“Why? What did I do?” I knew it was childish to shout at an AI, but Ophelia had a look that made you want to throw off your usual social filter and let it all come out.
“It must be very hard for you,” Ophelia said, her voice taking on a sudden humanity.
Now the AI sympathizes with me. Is that supposed to cheer me up?
“I’m sure it gives you no joy to have an AI sympathize with you,” she said, reading my mind. “So I’d like to start at the beginning. Please, tell me everything that happened from when you first met Akira until now. I will use your story to recommend the most appropriate resilience program.”
“I told you, I don’t need therapy!” I was shouting again. “I just want to know why she left. That, and if there’s a way to get us back together. Give me that and my problems are solved, no program needed.”
Ophelia observed me in silence. I blanched a little. I knew she was just an AI, and their faces were totally different, but something about her eyes reminded me of Akira’s whenever she was trying to see through me.
“If you want those answers, you’re going to have to start by telling me what happened.”
“We met playing Air Race,” I began. Ophelia seemed to be listening intently, even though I was sure she already knew everything. The very act of storytelling—going back to a shocking event and relating it from an objective viewpoint—was an orthodox therapeutic method, she explained.
In Air Race, you put a simple jet engine on your back and flew through the air, avoiding obstacles to reach a goal. Successive pandemics had made E-sports played over VR mainstream. They were especially popular with the younger crowd, to the point that real sports were quite rare. At first, I played alone, trying to beat my best time, but after meeting Akira a few times on the same course, we started talking, then dating.
While it was commonplace for people to date in VR and become a couple without ever having met in the flesh, we were different. We met in real life and dated in real life. When I told my friends we were thinking about getting married, they were astonished. It’s too risky, they said, going from dating with all its uncertainties to being partners living together, but I didn’t listen. I was confident in the depth of my affection for her. I even looked down on the people who called what we were doing old-fashioned or inefficient. A random encounter had given me a chance at something amazing.
I didn’t have many friends, and all of my work was done in VR, which meant that I really didn’t have much going on in my life other than playing Air Race and going on dates with Akira. Her skin was smooth, it felt good, and being with her released more dopamine and endorphins than any sex with a VH (virtual human) ever could. Just holding hands with her flooded my system with serotonin. I’d never felt such happiness in all my twenty-five years. I could never have asked for anything more.
“My only experiences with love had been in VR. All ideal partners, chosen by AI, but nothing ever worked out. That’s why I thought maybe this one would. A real relationship, with a partner I picked. And it did work, it was good! I knew from the moment I first saw her that she and I were destined to be together.”
“Based on your heterosexual preference and social status, Akira’s match level was only about the 69,000th out of the 235,432 potential romantic partners your age group.”
Ophelia’s inorganic voice cut through my impassioned retelling and let the excitement out of the room entirely.
“Your compatibility was only seventy-five percent. You knew there were partners better suited for you.”
“Of course. But I also knew that it would work.”
“How?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” I shouted, getting frustrated. “Because I loved her!”
Ophelia’s eyes narrowed. A moment later, her body disintegrated into translucent blue spheres of various sizes that ricocheted around the room. I knew it was just a glitch, but it startled me. I heard a small whining noise through the bone conduction mic. The sensor was analyzing what I had just said.
“I’ve chosen a suitable program for you.” Ophelia was back in human form. “A cognitive distortion correction program.”
***
Akira was right there, smiling at me. Her beautiful hair fluttering in a gentle breeze under soft gradations of natural light.
I was watching a date from about three months into our relationship. I knew it was just a VR replay, but I felt tears come to my eyes. Back then, everything had been going so well, so smoothly. As long as we were together, I knew I had nothing to fear.
“You wanted to know why she left you, correct?” Ophelia asked. “I am only an AI therapist. I do not know if I can give you everything you want. However, this program should provide you the tools you need to find answers for yourself. I have optimized it to satisfy your wants while helping you build the resilience you need.”
That was her pitch, back before we started. Anything was better than sitting here doing nothing. I was in.
“The program will take place over four or five sessions: a replay session in which we will review and analyze the past, a role-playing session where you can re-enact key moments, a simulation session where you can simulate new interactions, a conversation session with a helping partner who has agreed to aid your recovery, and other sessions as required, such as for overcoming critical trauma.”
After the first long session in which I had unloaded everything I’d been feeling, I already knew that the program was starting to lighten my depression, at least a little. After a month of not speaking to anyone else about Akira—it was too embarrassing, after I’d told everyone we were getting married—it was a relief to get it out. Here, talking to an AI, I was free to say whatever I liked. I could scream obscenities, I could let my emotions rage, I could admit what it was I really wanted, no matter how embarrassing it might be.
A strange-looking creature was curled up on the floor by my feet. It was an E/A—an emotion animal—a manifestation of my emotions. This one looked a little like the miniature shiba my grandparents had, and also a little like the friendly monster that showed up to help you in Monster Crusher, a game I used to play when I was a kid. He was a murky gray color shot through with streaks of bloody crimson, with spines on his back, dull fur, and dead eyes.
Ophelia asked me to give him a name, so I called him Yuzuru, the name of my grandparents’ shiba. I reached out to pet him, but Yuzuru didn’t react. He remained curled up, in denial of the outside world, an anguished look on his face.
“He is your partner,” Ophelia explained. “Don’t worry. As you recover, his appearance will improve.”
I was watching a VR replay of myself and Akira having tea at a café. It was weird, seeing my own past playing out in 3D. What I was experiencing now was a “refrain session.” It is said that by recreating scenes from our past as they were, it is possible to discover problems and update our perceptions.
Akira had just ordered her second drink when the notification came into both of our phones that the number of Childcare Docks at the Childcare Center in our city had passed five thousand units.
“My friend works at the CcC,” Akira said, lifting her thin lips from the straw in her frozen drink. “Those Childcare Docks are really popular. They had over four thousand requests come in the last time they added units, and only a thousand CcDs to spare.”
A Childcare Dock, or CcD, was a child-rearing system that used AI and robots to raise children from birth to the age of six. While they were originally intended for people who were unsuited to parenting, their popularity exploded after an experiment in 2040 that compared children completely raised by CcD for their first six years to children who had been raised the traditional way showed higher abilities across the board in the former, with less individual variation and increased resilience to stress.
“They’re trendy, I get it,” I said offhand. “But I wonder if a kid raised by CcD can really communicate with anyone but AIs when they grow up.”
“The data say they’re growing up just fine,” she told me. “With above-average IQs, no less. Which makes sense. Raising kids is hard. Who would leave something so risky to people alone? Not everyone is cut out to be a parent, you know.”
Her voice was just as flat as I remembered. Ophelia had done a good job recreating her from my memory.
“You know that people are the animal least suited to raising their own young? Thanks to CcD, deaths due to parental abuse have dropped to almost zero, and there have been big reductions in postpartum and child-rearing depression. It’s all positive.”
“I bet our kid would be cute,” I said, trying desperately to change the subject away from a debate on social issues and toward something that would let me soak just a little longer in the warm feeling of being with her.
“Hmph.” She pouted a little then fixed me with a stare. “You know I already have a child-rearing partner picked.”
Akira had told me that she had been raised in a parallel partnership family soon after we had started dating. Around the time that marriage rates hit rock bottom in 2030, people had started forming partner contracts, dividing up the partners with whom they had romantic relations, married, and raised children. Akira’s parents had been in the first generation of parallel partners. She was born to two mothers (they’d already figured out how to collect DNA from two people of the same sex to fertilize an egg at that point) and grew up surrounded by them and their various romantic and marriage partners. These days, fully fifty percent of the population was in one kind of parallel partnership or another. It was perfectly natural for Akira to think of child-rearing, marriage, and romance as separate things.
“She was my classmate in high school—my best, best friend. Before we graduated, we decided that we’d have a kid together.”
In the replay, my pasta-entwined fork froze halfway to my mouth. I was pale, trembling. Just watching it made my emotions from that day come back so vividly it was like feeling it all over again. I felt a shock like being punched in the face. I was speechless for a moment, before I managed to squeeze words out:
“So...you don’t want to have a kid with me?”
“Well, I’d give us having kids a better than zero percent chance.” Akira said, unenthusiastically. “I just can’t picture marrying you and kids right now. I still want us to be together though.”
“Wait, so you’re going to marry someone else too?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Akira’s eyes widened. “Marrying your romantic partner is just asking for trouble.”
The house where I grew up was a traditional one, with one mother and one father. My parents came from a pretty conservative part of the countryside where monogamy was still the standard, and birth and child-rearing were performed by humans as a matter of course. I’d always imagined the same for myself. It had never even crossed my mind that things might work out different for me.
“I was planning to love, marry, and have kids with you, Akira,” I said. “Parallel partnerships just water down each person’s feelings and responsibility to the other.”
“That’s not true. My family was parallel, but everyone loved me equally,” Akira said, frowning.
An awkward silence unfolded between us.
“I mean, I’ll think about it,” she said at length. “You can only put one kid in CcD at a time, so if I was going to have another one, it would be after my first with her. Giving birth sounds pretty rough, so it would be an artificial womb, and since raising two kids at the same time is tough, I’d put it in CcD until it was six.”
No way, I almost said, but what came out was “Okay.”
She didn’t give that impression to look at her, but Akira could be very stubborn. I would just have to change her mind slowly, over time. That was okay. I loved her. I’m sure she would come to see things the way I did.
“If you want a parallel partnership, fine, I’ll do it your way. You’re free to choose partners as you like. I don’t care if you want to use an artificial womb. And CcD up until the age of three is fine too. But we should meet halfway and raise the kid after that. That’s the best way for the child to know we love them.”
If I had been looking into her eyes at that very moment, I would have seen the twin furnaces of hell. If I had seen how she felt, I’m sure I would’ve immediately gotten down on the floor, prostrated myself, and apologized. But the me in the replay wasn’t looking at her face at all. I was hunched over, trying to protect myself from my own lack of faith in my words, my eyes wandering across the tabletop.
The replay ended.
“We just saw you saying something you didn’t really believe,” Ophelia said. “Why?”
“Because… I didn’t want her to get mad at me,” I said. “I was sure she wouldn’t understand my point of view, so I thought I’d have to win her over slowly. I thought if we were together, and our relationship deepened, she would come to understand how we could make it work.”
Ophelia stared at me. I knew she was just 3D computer graphics, but something about her face made it look like she was judging me, and I couldn’t stand it.
“Isn’t that what a partnership is? You have to give up something to be with your partner. I compromised. She should’ve compromised too if she wanted to be with me!”
There was that feeling again, gripping me. I wanted to take it all out on the AI.
Ophelia was right, though. In order to date Akira, I had bent over backward in more ways than one. I would go wherever she wanted to go, even if I wasn’t really interested. In line with her wishes, I didn’t bother her on weekdays and only called her on weekends. Because I loved her, I suppressed myself. I changed to suit her.
I felt something and looked down to see Yuzuru curled around my feet. His brow was furrowed, and he gave off a pitiful whine. I watched him for a moment and felt the dark thing inside me loosen its grip, just a little.
“How did watching that scene make you feel?”
“I think I said things wrong. I was so stuck in my own head that I didn’t even notice the look in her eyes... I should have paid more attention to her.” I drew a sharp breath. “Could that have been what she didn’t like about me? That I didn’t pay her enough attention?”
I was sure there were several times I had been guilty of it. Not just in big scenes like this, but in trivial, everyday moments. My disconnected thoughts were starting to come together, the fog lifting from the whys and hows in my head.
“I cannot tell you what another person is really thinking. The resilience program isn’t about her feelings. It’s about understanding and, eventually, accepting your own.”
***
The next part of the program was the “conversation session” in which I would talk with a helper chosen by Ophelia. Being chosen to participate as a helper in someone else’s resilience program was considered an honor. It was also a great chance to earn Trust Score points. I was anxious about whom Ophelia might choose, though. For one, I hardly had any friends, and the relationships I had with them were superficial at best. I couldn’t imagine anyone I’d be able to be brutally honest with. And what would happen if the helper declined?
Still, nothing prepared me to hear the name she chose.
“Contact him. He has already received a general briefing.”
It was my literature teacher from middle school. A stubborn old guy, with old-fashioned ways, like a relic that had time-slipped from the turn of the century. Still, his classes had been surprisingly interesting; they were pretty much the only ones I paid attention to in the humanities. But we had no other connection, and had never even spoken outside of class. So why him?
“There you are.”
He raised a hand in greeting as he walked into the VR bar that was our rendezvous spot. It had been ten years since I’d last seen him, and while he had more white hair, his stern demeanor was unchanged. What was I supposed to talk to my old middle school teacher about, exactly? I had no idea.
“I never thought I would be chosen as your helper,” he said with a grin, tilting back his glass of whiskey. I don’t think I had ever seen him smile before. It felt strange.
“So you did a program too?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. Everyone chosen as a helper had gone through their own resilience program before. It was a prerequisite.
“You bet. When I got divorced. Now that was a bad scene,” my old teacher said as casually as if he were mentioning the weather. “I’d just retired. Had no place to go, and suddenly wasn’t seeing anyone. It really got me down.” He scratched his head. “I became a digital alcoholic. I was in this bar so much, I stopped living real life. Without the program, I would’ve ended up dead in a ditch somewhere. But hey, I’m sober now. This glass? Fake whiskey. No buzz.”
He tilted his glass with a clink of ice.
“That...must have been hard,” I said, unsure how to react. In middle school, he had been my teacher, but here I was, startled to learn the obvious: that he was a person too, with the depth that came from layers of experience built up inside him.
“So, you had a breakup?” he asked bluntly. That hadn’t changed, the bluntness. “Tell me about it.”
Overcoming my embarrassment, I tried to give him the full picture. He nodded now and then to let me know he was listening, but otherwise he was silent. I found him easy to talk to due to his simple and unpretentious manner and the fact that he didn’t overreact to what I was saying. I couldn’t imagine it being so easy with someone my own age. It occurred to me how nice it would have been to have someone like this to talk to back when Akira and I were together.
“So,” he said when I finished. “You’re in the program because you want to know why she dumped you.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I don’t blame you for wanting to know. But you do understand, that’s not going to happen?” He leaned forward, folding his arms on the table. “You can never really know how someone else feels...especially not the people closest to you.”
“What should I do, then?” Surely he would have some good advice, I thought. He had lost in the game of love, just like me. “Just give up?”
My old teacher stared at his glass for a while, like he was mulling something over, before speaking. “You remember that day in middle school when you came to my office after class? You had a problem with an analysis question on the reading I had assigned. The question was ‘How does the main character in the story feel?’ and you wanted to know how anyone could know the correct answer. ‘Is there even a correct answer?’ you asked. When I asked why you were concerned, you told me ‘Because I don’t want to get it wrong.’ ”
I had no recollection of that day at all.
“You haven’t changed much, have you? Of course, you could take issue with us teaching like that, the same methodology all those years. That’s something I only realized after I retired. School and society both try to force you to find the correct answer, but there isn’t a whole lot of value in correct answers, really. That comes from using your head to think about your own answers.” He went on. “You say you want to know how she feels… but what you really want to know is whether you were correct.”
He was right, of course. I wanted our natural relationship—not the result of some AI match-making—to have been correct. I couldn’t take it if the choice I had made turned out to be wrong.
“You know,” I said, “when I was seeing her, I wasn’t really seeing her at all. I was so obsessed with what I thought the perfect relationship should be, I never looked at how our relationship actually was.”
“Yeah, well, it’s hard to look at the truth,” my old teacher said, nodding. “You have to examine every little difference of opinion, talk it through. Even then, there’s always the chance your partner won’t accept the answers you found. What do you do then?”
“I know, right?” I said. “Maybe part of me was afraid she wouldn’t accept me.”
“Well, good on you for figuring that out,” my teacher said. “I only got it after a decade of wasted time and a disastrous mistake.”
We sat and drank in silence.
After a while, my teacher spoke again. “By the way, how are your parents? Back when you were in my class, I remember hearing from your homeroom teacher that your family was going through a rough patch.”
***
My father was an engineer and my mother was a YouTuber. They met through a dating app in the middle of the pandemic in 2021. Both of my parents were easy-going enough, but I always had the sense that they saw each other not as people, per se, but as the necessary parts to build and maintain a family. I had never caught them having a conversation. When my dad was home he defaulted to playing online games and my mom would be absorbed in her streaming, leaving the housekeeper to take care of me. Whenever there was something I didn’t understand at school, my parents just told me to Google it. AI taught me everything I needed to know. I made it through puberty uneventfully enough, but I never had anyone I could really talk to. When I went to my dad once about some trouble I was having with friends, he just frowned and suggested I talk to an online counselor before disappearing into his room.
So I lived my life following the correct choices, as made by AI. The clothes I wore, the music I listened to, even the topics I discussed with friends, were all determined by algorithm. I wasn’t dissatisfied. I was happy. It was hard having real conversations with other people. I liked having the answers given to me. And I never felt dissatisfied with the romantic partners the AI chose for me, either. But every one of them left me in the end.
***
Ophelia was back. This time, we were standing amid quiet seaside scenery.
“You’re afraid to tell people close to you what you really think.”
Her expression had softened since the last time we spoke. Her face now had a little bit of Akira, and a little bit of my mother. She spoke calmly, and her clear eyes seemed to look right through me.
“That’s right. I’ve always been scared to tell anyone what I was really thinking. Not just Akira, anyone. What if I said something and they rejected me? What if they didn’t even listen? What if me telling them something real was what drove them away? I even kept lovers at a distance. So what if we didn’t deeply understand one another, as long as the relationship went smoothly?”
Down by my feet, Yuzuru had grown to about one-and-a-half times his original size. His fur was green now, streaked with scarlet, and shining like the light in his eyes. An impressive mane had replaced the nasty spines on his back, and he was standing on his four paws, facing Ophelia, as if trying to protect me from her.
“Is that what you really want?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I do want people to know how I really feel. But I was afraid that if I went off-script and said something that wasn’t AI-approved, they’d pull away. And Akira—what if she rejected me? What if I lost her?”
“Even when you were dating Akira, you were secretly dissatisfied, because you never let yourself reveal your true feelings. You never tried to overcome the real differences between you and her.”
“Shut up. I know that. I know. We were too different for it to go well. How could it? But I loved her, I really did. And I thought if I could just make it work...”
“What did you think that would mean for you, making it work?”
“It would mean being able to make something other than the correct choice. It would mean being able to make a mistake.”
Ophelia nodded. “When you looked at your parents’ relationship, you felt something missing, didn’t you? Their neglect for you reflected their lack of passion for each other. When your partner is chosen by AI, there are no hardships or difficulties to overcome. I wonder if you weren’t using your relationship with Akira to overcome the loneliness your parents made you feel.”
I noticed with a start that Ophelia had changed. She had split into two people now: my parents, looking just like they had when I last visited home several years ago. They were sitting across the dining room table from each other, an uncomfortable distance between them, just like in real life.
“Do you feel something when you look at them?” Ophelia’s voice came from the air. “If you do, please tell them.”
“Dad?” I swallowed. “Thanks… for lending me your AI assistant when I was kid. But that’s not what I really wanted. I wanted to tell you my worries. I wanted to hear what you thought.” As I spoke, I could feel the anger boiling up from deep in my belly. “And it wasn’t just when I needed help. You were always lost in your games, you never had time for me. Same with you, Mom. How could you look at me when you were always looking at the webcam? How can you have a family if you never talk to each other? I know you raised me, and maybe I’m wrong to say this, but…”
I hesitated for a moment.
“Even when you quit being a YouTuber, when you got depressed, Dad didn’t do a thing. He just hooked you up with the support center. You looked so alone, Mom. I think that’s why, even when you got home from the hospital, you went into VR and never came back. It was his fault. You should’ve looked at each other, you should’ve listened to each other. You’re husband and wife!”
I wasn’t even sure myself exactly who I was shouting at. The face in front of me was my dad’s face, familiar as always. A replica, sure, but this was the dad who lived inside me, the dad Ophelia had generated from my memories.
A moment passed before the dad sitting in front of me slowly opened his mouth and said “I met your mother through a dating app. Before that, I was never good with people, I hadn’t ever had a relationship before. I didn’t want any of that romance stuff. I just wanted to get married and settle down. The dating apps back then weren’t as good as they are now, so I had to meet a lot of people before something clicked. I think I went through twenty or so matches before I finally met your mother.
“Your mother was good at talking to people on-screen, but she wasn’t the type of person who was good at talking to the opposite sex in real life. Both of us being poor talkers, we suited each other fine. We each had our own private time at home, our own personal space. It was good, at first. But when you were born, everything changed. Parenting was hard. You were our first child, and we didn’t know the correct way to do anything. We bumped heads more often than before. As a result, we avoided discussions. Sure, we could have tried being honest with our opinions, but who’s to say that would have resulted in anything productive? So we thought, why not leave it to the professionals? They have all the right answers. Better to entrust you to them than leave you at the mercy of our inexperience.”
Dad looked tired. He had always felt closed-off, his thoughts unknowable, his very existence a rejection of me. But now he looked suddenly small, even weaker than I was.
“It’s too much trouble being with people. I was envious of you, you know. Living in an age when AI makes all the choices, and you never have to experience the friction of natural relationships. But I guess that’s not what you wanted.”
It’s not too much trouble being with people. I just couldn’t take the stress of the fighting and the rejection. So, I shut up. As a child, as a university student, as an adult, at every critical juncture, I went silent. Holding my tongue and avoiding doing anything was another kind of correct choice. It was the same with Akira. I had vaguely sensed what she wanted, but I was too scared of our relationship falling apart to face it head-on.
And she saw right through me. That’s why I kept my mouth shut, erasing what was “me” so it wouldn’t clash with what was “her.” Because she knew better than anyone else how soft I was, how reluctant I was to disappoint, even to the bitter end.
The image of my mother and father disappeared. In their place was Akira. An illusion that Ophelia had to have generated by reading my thoughts. She looked at me, her mouth slightly open, as if she wanted to say something.
And I had something to say to her.
But not like this.
I took off the VR goggles. I could still hear Ophelia’s voice.
“The session isn’t over. Please put the goggles back on.”
I stood up from my chair and threw on a jacket. Quickly straightening my hair in front of a mirror, I made for the front door and put on my shoes.
“Where are you going?”
“Her place,” I answered. I’m going to talk to her, face-to-face. That’s what I need, to talk to her.”
“You cannot. You haven’t finished your program. You need to see it through to the end.”
“No, it’s okay. Correct or not, this is my choice. I have to talk to her again. That’s what I’ve been missing this whole time. Really listening to her, and really telling her how I feel.”
Ignoring Ophelia’s pleas, I dashed out the door.
***
How long had it been since I ran this hard? I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to see her, I had to apologize for the miserable person I’d been. I had to give her what she needed. Then, I would beg for another chance. I’d done the program, I’d reflected on my actions, that had to count for something.
I changed trains, got off at her station, and walked the five minutes to her apartment. I pressed the intercom button.
To my surprise, the person who opened the door wasn’t her, but an older woman who looked a lot like her. The woman’s eyes were sunken, her cheeks hollow, her face pale. She clearly wasn’t well. She stood vacantly in the doorway and looked at me for a while before asking, “Are you...Satsuki Kureshima?”
“I am!” I replied, my voice cracking in my bewilderment. “You’re Akira’s mother!”
“That’s right.”
I knew it. Akira had never shown me a photo of her parents, but looking at this woman, the resemblance was undeniable. This must have been one of the partners who’d reared her. I felt relieved. At least she had told one of her moms about me.
“I came to see Akira. I...we had a fight. Where is she?”
Her mother’s eyes widened in surprise, then her face went dark. “She died last week.”
For a moment, I couldn’t be sure what she had said. D, i, e, d? Died? What does that mean? Does that mean...no! Akira!?
“MERS2. It was very sudden.” The woman lowered her eyes. I could see her eyelids flutter. “I got a notification that she spiked a fever in the night. She was taken to the hospital immediately, and was still conscious when we got there, but only barely. Her condition worsened just after...”
The Second Middle East Respiratory Syndrome had been prevalent since last year. It had a high fatality rate, and while it hadn’t reached pandemic status in Japan, infections were spreading. Most young people got off easy even if they caught it, but this was the first major disease my generation had faced, and we were criticized for not taking it seriously enough.
No. Not Akira...
“It was all so sudden. It still doesn’t feel real, even to us.”
The truth of what she was saying was written in the lines of deep dejection and sorrow on her face. I just stood there, unsure how I was supposed to accept this new reality.
“We’ve been reaching out to her friends to let them know, but...” Her eyes drifted. “Before she lost consciousness, she said… She told us not to tell you if she died.”
I was speechless.
“That was the first we’d heard about you. We asked her why not. If you’d been with her for a whole year, didn’t you have a right to know? She told us that you sank into such a deep shock after the breakup that, if you heard the news, you might never recover. Resilience programs can only do so much. There are people who fall too deep into sadness to make their way back out. She said you were delicate, and should be protected, at least for now.” Her mother sounded sincerely apologetic. “I’m sorry we didn’t tell you about the wake, or the funeral. You can offer some incense now, if you like.”
“I...” I opened my mouth, still unable to accept what I was hearing. “Didn’t she trust me?”
The mother shook her head. “No, that’s not it. I think she did trust you. She said you were a good person, a very good person. But trust and compatibility are two different things.”
Akira knew me too well. She understood that I would be in deep pain after losing her. She knew that I wouldn’t be able to handle her death, just as she knew we weren’t meant to be partners. Her methods were rough, but if she hadn’t done what she did, she knew that I would’ve just gone on suffering forever, talking to no one, never go through a resilience program, and living with my pain.
I stood there, stunned, but trying to put on a brave face. This little woman standing in front of me was surely feeling much more pain than I was. What I needed to do was comfort her, ease her wound, her shock. I realized I was trying to make the “correct choice,” regardless of how I really felt. But maybe this was the time for correct choices. I’m sure that’s what Akira would’ve wanted, if she were here. Whether I was up to the task or not was another matter.
“My wife and I take turns when we get a break from work to come here and clean up. We’re selling the apartment at the end of the month, so there’s not much time...but whenever I think of her, I forget what I’m doing, and I can’t…”
“Let me help,” I said. “I want to hear your stories. I want to hear about your Akira. I was a terrible boyfriend, I couldn’t make Akira happy. I made a lot of mistakes, and I was afraid to be honest with her. That’s why she dumped me. But, she was a wonderful person...”
Tears spilled from my eyes. My love for Akira, my memories of her, choked my chest.
I felt the woman’s small, warm hand on my shoulder.
“It doesn’t matter how compatible you are. There are always differences, always things that don’t work out, a whole mountain of them. Even with an AI’s help, no one ever has zero problems. AIs can reduce risk, but they can’t prevent every random event. It’s up to us to hang onto the threads connecting those events to keep our relationships together. I’m sure you two were no different. But even if one of those threads should break, that doesn’t mean it never had any meaning at all. It’s up to you to decide what you will do with what you learned from your relationship.”
Akira’s mother wiped her eyes and smiled. “So. Tell me your story.”
We spoke at length, drinking tea out of Akira’s favorite cups. I helped her mother clean up until late that night, and left promising to visit again.
When I sat down in my chair and switched on the VR, Ophelia was waiting for me. She had resumed her original appearance. She didn’t look angry.
“It was just like you said,” I told her. “I shouldn’t have gone. You were trying your hardest to fix me, and… I’m guessing I’ve regressed quite a bit.”
“Based on your progress with the program, I didn’t think it appropriate for you to learn of her death. That is why I tried to stop you. Your stress numbers are up a full fifty points. This is a severe regression.”
“I knew it.”
“I will be transferring you to a different program designed for bereavement care. The approach and the steps are a little different from the program for people suffering from romantic breakups, so I’m afraid I will have to say goodbye for a time. You’ll be assigned a new therapist better suited for you.”
Yuzuru had reverted to his original shape, curled in a miserable ball at my feet. His hair was a dark black-blue, the color of the deep seafloor. I gave him a pat. It was up to me to help the little guy get better. Because I was his master, and he was me.
“I’m good, actually,” I told Ophelia. “I think I’ll do this one on my own. Stress-wise, I’m out of the official danger zone, right?”
“Yes, that is accurate.” Ophelia said. I heard a slight buzzing, as though she were calculating something. “However, if you do not undertake the bereavement care program, your recovery will take at least three times as long.”
“I’m okay with that. It’s work I have to do. That’s what Akira taught me.”
“If you interrupt the program midway, you won’t receive your completion badge. The badge can be very helpful for finding work or schooling, or when choosing a partner for romance or marriage.”
“I’m okay with that, too,” I said more crisply. “But can you leave him with me at least?” I pointed down at Yuzuru. “He makes a good partner.”
“Very well,” Ophelia said quietly. I’m not sure an AI can feel satisfaction, but she sounded satisfied enough. “Before your program began, I determined that you possessed a considerable degree of natural resiliency. That is why I recommended a slightly more intense therapeutic course for you. You need time to examine yourself in order to recover. This process involves a certain amount of pain. You understand this, and you have the courage to dive into that pain. You also have the ability to learn from your mistakes and setbacks. That is worthy of respect. Not that the respect of an AI means much to you.”
“No, it does. Thanks.”
“I believe you will recover.”
Ophelia stuck out her right hand. There, in VR, I gave her a firm handshake. Still feeling the faint warmth of her palm against mine, I flicked off the switch and gently closed my eyelids.
Translation by Alex O. Smith