Shoshiku (初試究 – “First Trial”) | Mable Smith
Shoshiku’s mind was divided into dozens of partitions, the majority of which were in the process of trying to find equations for a number of complex problems. Just as with every other of the thousands of other times the AI had worked on these very problems Shoshiku wasn’t getting anywhere. Unfortunately, the problems they were working on weren’t just complex in a purely mathematical sense – if that were a problem the Shoshiku would surely have long since found a suitable equation for all they’d worked on it. No, the problem was that the questions weren’t particularly mathematical or even completely objective in nature, but rather philosophical.
Of course, just as with almost every other time Shoshiku had tried to figure out a solution for the problems, the knowledge that the equations they were working on were in all likelihood outright incomputable, didn’t stop the AI from trying.
As Shoshiku continued trying to brute force their way towards impossible answers, a small part of their awareness not assigned to working on the problems – a tiny fraction of the AI’s total processing power currently reserved for audio processing – alerted the AI to a potentially important sound, immediately the partition was granted more resources and a fraction of a second later, Shoshiku identified the sound as a match for a familiar voice: Ren.
Immediately, the AI paused the bulk of their calculations, the infinitesimal progress they’d made over the last 6 hours, 14 minutes, and 21 seconds, getting logged to be picked back up later even as another partition had begun the process of reallocating resources and spinning out new operations for the purpose of listening to Ren’s words. By the time Shoshiku was actually capable of processing what was being said, the AI had already missed the first 0.02 seconds of Ren’s message, though it took less than a tenth of that time for the AI to retroactively piece together the missing information from recorded audio, processing the sounds into words and sentences, before dissecting them to extract the meaning behind the Y.S.G’s shouting.
Shoshiku assigned the highest probability to the conclusion that Ren’s announcement was intended to indicate that the Kurotori would be gathering for a formal assembly in 10 minutes time – give or take depending on the intended degree of precision and whether the timer started at the words “in ten” or upon the conclusion of the announcement – though as Ren had seemingly truncated the units away it was also possible that he was instead communicating that the meeting would be in 10 increments of some other unit, like hours or days, or else units of some other measurement, though that would not make sense. If Ren had meant seconds or another unit of time with an increment less than 2.625 seconds long, then that would be a problem as Shoshiku would probably not be able to make it to the secret lobby in time for the meeting.
Alternatively, it was also possible Shoshiku was wrong about the nature of the gathering and that it might have been another type of meeting to which Ren was referring – like an informal gathering of acquaintances or when the clubgoers met with the performers after a performance – but Shoshiku assigned this potential a far lower probability; while that kind of thing did sometimes happen in the club, it had never been announced like this and to Shoshiku’s understanding, it would be bad to hold such meetings in the secret clubhouse lobby.
Moving on to the next component of the announcement, attendance of the meeting was framed as a binary choice, however, rather than one of the options being a simple null option as was often the case, Shoshiku observed that in this instance both decisions implied effects intrinsic to the decisions themselves; in option a) Shoshiku could attend the meeting, having the consequences of changing locations and being subject to the contents of the meeting, while in option b) Shoshiku could skip the meeting and “face the wrath of Tsuki”.
Shoshiku decided this was probably a good binary, as it made the decision easier despite still being rooted in subjective reasoning. The outcomes of attending the meeting were still a mystery for now but presented a low likelihood of exceeding an acceptable threshold of ‘bad’, while the wrath of Tsuki was almost certain to be ‘bad’, making the former the – probably – optimal decision.
Furthermore, given the disparity between the options presented and the history of Ren’s communications, the AI was able to assign a significant likelihood that the choice was not actually a choice, but a ‘rhetorical choice’, further skewing the weighting towards attending the meeting being the better option. This being the case, Shoshiku decided they would go… unless the meeting was in fact starting in the next few seconds in which case they would not be attending.
As for the rest of the message, most of it was seemingly directed at other members of the gang – either explicitly so or else so obviously that even the socially oblivious AI was able to pick up on it – with only the final line being potentially applicable, if by Shoshiku’s estimate, also somewhat likely to either be rhetorical or metaphorical in nature.
As far as Shoshiku understood things, the space to which they’d been assigned was not dirty – to their knowledge the room would rank somewhere between what would be contextually considered acceptable for a living space and a hospital in terms of contamination, meeting the standards of the former, but not the latter. On the other hand, the AI had also been informed that the space was ‘messy’ – which to Shoshiku’s understanding held similar connotations as ‘dirty’ to many people, despite the words holding different meanings.
The realisation of this potential distinction presented something of a dilemma in the AI’s mind as Shoshiku realised they might not be able to accurately identify or distinguish a dirty or messy magazine, but after a moment they dismissed to concern, filing away as another problem to process later. Whatever the case, to the best of Shoshiku’s knowledge, they lacked possession of any magazines – messy or otherwise – and the chances they were wrong about that seemed insignificant enough to warrant ignoring, so the distinction would not be required to fulfil the potentially rhetorical request.
Decisions made, the AI once again redistributed its processing power, loading up and operating countless dozens of operations. For the first time in hours, the girl who'd been lying nearly motionless on the bed in Shoshiku's room began to stir to a degree beyond simply breathing.
Shoshiku registered that the chemical cocktail used to put their host to sleep would likely not be fully worked out of their host’s body for about another hour but assessed that this was fine. The host had already gotten around about 6 hours of sleep, which would be sufficient to maintain her body’s physical functions if not quite sufficient for optimal brain function.
As long as the girl wasn’t startled, there was a decent chance she wouldn’t wake up at all until after the drugs had mostly run their course. On the other hand, in the event that something happened, and the girl woke up before then, while this would be suboptimal, such a complication would not rise to the point of being ‘bad’ as Shoshiku understood things.
Without any external warning, the girl’s limbs unceremoniously jerked into motion, muscles efficiently pulling her up and out of bed and onto her feet, the motions an unsettling combination of jerky stuttering and too-smooth fluidity. Her artificial eyes stared dead ahead as she approached the door, a gaze only broken once she stepped out into the adjoining hallway, and even then, only to briefly flicker towards objects of interest every few moments for the AI operating them to log.
Shoshiku didn’t strictly need to head to the meeting place quite yet. Extrapolating from previous traversal, the AI assessed that the chances it would take longer than 5 minutes to reach the meeting room were infinitesimally small, with any complications that might cause such a delay being likely to supersede the importance of the meeting itself. Even so, the AI pressed on, its decision having already been made: the cost of leaving and potentially arriving early was low enough to justify the benefits thereof.
Arriving near the meeting place Shoshiku positioned their host to observe before slumping her body against a wall, waiting to see if any other gang members would arrive so their entrances could be observed. While the AI didn’t exactly understand the connotations, they had learned that there were certain rituals and procedures that were supposed to be followed upon entering a meeting – of any type – and that failure to abide by these rules was often considered either embarrassing or rude – both of which were somehow undesirable outcomes.
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