1Poison Heart
They were tools, she thought, and not for the first time; tools to be used like any other, no different from the keys imbued with animal data that allowed for her transformation, the accoutrements of her armour. And yet, despite this, despite the understanding that such machines were simply tools of humankind, Yaiba Yua had the distinct feeling that she was being used.
She had to remind herself again that the machine was an it, that it was not a person despite its likeness; she had to remind herself that it was her role as a public servant to police such ideas of personhood as stated by the law regardless of the pressure felt from corporate institutions with a vested interest in ensuring that the minutiae of her role was amended in their favour.
Whilst she did not possess the fervour of distaste that drove her subordinate, Fuwa, she was likewise reluctant to give ground to Hiden Intelligence and its youthful president. For a start, there was the incident in what was now termed Daybreak Town, and, even had she not needed anymore evidence required for her to err on the side of caution, there was the dangerous precedent laid down by American laws that ensured that large corporations might be granted personhood, that conglomerates might rightfully be portrayed as individuals and sue 'other' individuals who might cause their profits to be diminished by raising awareness to poor practices. And what of the complicity of such companies in the unrest in Hong Kong, the use of the technology used in facial recognition towers being a means of identifying protestors?
Before joining A.I.M.S., Yaiba had majored in international law at Meiji University, graduating at the top of her class; she understood keenly the danger of affording non-human animals equal status. After all, hadn't that always been the issue with whaling off the coast of Japan, and wasn't such a practice not only a cultural tradition but also a sovereign right? She glowered darkly. Yaiba Yua had little time for animal rights activists or vegans just as she had little time for those who cried over the rights of HumaGears in human society—those who, like Hiden's president, had a vested interest in ensuring the law favoured non-humans.
She considered herself a conservative, her father a judge of no small renown, her upbringing somewhat sheltered. There had been some disagreement between her and the old man upon her graduation and enrolment in the police force, however, at the end of the day, she liked to think that he would have been proud of her had he still been with them.
And yet despite all this, there was the discomfort, the uncertainty, the feeling that she was being manipulated, the other woman standing with her hands folded in her lap—not a woman, she reminded herself, a machine.
She had heard that all those of her model were named after Honshu peninsulas, Chita, Miura, Atsumi, and so forth, and yet Izu seemed oddly cold even for a HumaGear. Quite how the machine had deduced the matter of her sexual inclinations was a matter of concern for Yaiba. Not only had she spent both a significant amount of time and money to ensure that such information was not made public, but she had gone to great lengths to ensure that the call girls whose silence she brought were human, not HumaGears. That, perhaps, was the issue; whilst people could, unlike machines, be paid to keep secrets, they were also capable of lapses in judgement and betrayals of confidence. Regardless of how it happened, it had nonetheless happened, and Yaiba Yua had found herself easily ensnared by the machinations of the Hiden machine, the president's aide, Izu.
If she had had a higher opinion of Hiden Aruto, she might had considered this a ploy by him to buy her loyalty, yet it had been clear from the firmness of Izu's touch, the pressure of her fingers, the way her eyes moved across her body that this was a course of action decided on by the machine alone.
Her fingers, her eyes, Yaiba thought again, displeased with the realisation that she had inadvertently began to consider the machine a woman rather than an object, a tool. Perhaps her feminist history teacher at university would have blanched at that comparison, at the idea of HumaGears as objects, their presence occupying a space often assigned to women in previous decades, being the subject of sexual relations, the object onto which sexual desire was projected, yet Yaiba was not so fainthearted; a machine was a machine, whether it was a toaster or a HumaGear was really beside the point—and yet again, she recalled the pressure of Izu's cold shape, the efficiency of her undressing, the feel of her touch between the legs. It angered her. She felt cheated, she felt as if she had been tricked into something she had not necessarily wanted to admit to desiring, and that, in itself, caused her to feel a certain amount of shame, made her feel less of a woman. Perhaps, had she chosen a different career path she would not feel so uncomfortable with that which had transpired; perhaps, had she not already carried with her the weight of the culture of the police force, an institution that frowned on expressions of femininity, she might have been able to reconcile herself to her desire for the young president's mechanoid aide—and yet she was what both her upbringing and her circumstance had made her, and there was no real time for considering otherwise. What was prescient now was finding a way to extricate herself from such a situation.
The doors of the lift opened and she marched forth as if with purpose, striding down the richly decorated corridor, her hair swept over her shoulders, the sound of her heels silenced by the soft carpet that ran down the length of the hall, the portraits of saints framed in gold regarding her from either wall. With displeasure, she approached the last door and slid the progrise key into the hotel door's lock, pushing it open and gingerly crossing the threshold.
Standing by the bed, hands folded in her lap, the HumaGear, Izu, stood naked and expressionless, waiting patiently for their transaction to begin.
