Saber Marionette Fan Fiction ❯ Severing the Tangled Wires ❯ Chapter 1 ( Prologue )
[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]
By: Lady Aoi 
Hanagata reminisces while watching Otaru play with Lime.
Anime/Manga: Saber Marionette Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Angst / Drama | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 09.14.2002 | Pages: 1 | Words: 2.4K | Visits: 381 | Status: Completed
Hanagata reminisces while watching Otaru play with Lime.
Anime/Manga: Saber Marionette Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Angst / Drama | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 09.14.2002 | Pages: 1 | Words: 2.4K | Visits: 381 | Status: Completed
Severing the Tangled Wires
A Saber Marionette Fan Fic
by
Lady Aoi
Summary: Hanagata explains the reason behind his amazing vitality, knowing full well that nobody will hear. (It's basically a monologue)
Rating: PG-13 for dark themes, child abuse, shounen-ai.
Spoiler Warnings: Pretty far into the J series.
Disclaimer: Hanagata isn't mine. And not in that sense, either.
Lady Aoi's Notes: This fic is a bit of a tangent off a longer series I'm writing. theCarlinist gave me the idea during an AIM session a few months ago. Basically, he misunderstood something about the longer series and that misunderstanding generated a new plot bunny.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Do you remember the first day we met, Otaru-kun? Heh. Probably not. Unlike some....well, people, for lack of a better word, your memory is finite. Unlike some people, your memories are not stored as a series of indelible ones and zeros deep inside a tangle of wires and circuits. What is it like to forget, Otaru-kun? For your memories to have soft, round edges like old photographs. Is there a romance to forgetting? I cannot say. This is something I am not allowed to do.
Be thankful for your ability to forget, my love. Be thankful, too, for the things you never knew in the first place, and the things people kept from you in order to keep you a happy and safe child. I may have been a child, technically speaking, but I have never been safe, or happy. Except when you were near. And even then, according to the words of some, happiness for a... person like me is impossible. At the very least, it is nothing more than an intriguing debate held over after dinner drinks, a game for philosophers and students.
Be thankful, Otaru-kun, that I play such games with you. And that I debate the paradox of my emotions with no one but myself. Be thankful, if for nothing else, that I have spared your feelings. That I have lied to you.
That I am only thinking this somewhere deep inside my...mind as I watch you play with your beloved marionettes. If you only knew how thin the line between your dolls and your best friend truly was...
****
Do you remember the day we first met, Otaru-kun? I do not think so. I am told people can always remember the moment of bald terror which introduced them to an enemy, the droll house party where they met an annoying acquaintance, or the blood-pounding sweetness of a lover's first kiss... but a best friend? No. Best friends, it seems, are like one's body. You cannot remember when your soul was first melded to it. To you, it was simply always there, a fact and necessity of life.
As flattering as the notion is, however, I was not always there for you. We met for the first time when you were just six years old. You were a sad-eyed orphan gazing wistfully up at Lorelei's portrait in the Japoness History Museum. Even now, if I close my eyes, I can see the intensity that knotted your little brow as you tried in vain to fathom the logic behind this strange being, this memento mori of a human female. And I, standing five feet, two inches to your left and clutching my father's massive hand, also remember finding the intensity of your gaze just as fascinating and beautiful as you likely found Lorelei's smile.
For it was nothing like the cold, curious gazes of the white robed men who worked in the laboratory under this same museum. I should know. I saw them every morning for five years. And they always looked at me in the same way; with that strange combination of fascination, revulsion and pity typically reserved for visits to an operating room or a freak show. And believe me, my room beneath this museum was a little of both. The way you looked at that painting, though, bore no trace of this terrible gaze. It almost looked, from my vantage, as if you were praying to an angel. And in that moment I knew that someday I wanted you to look at me with the same devotion.
But I am getting ahead of myself. That is what you would say, at least, were I telling you my story and not sitting on this blanket guarding Cherry's picnic basket. Hm... I wonder if she would notice a few missing pickles? Given my bad luck, she probably would. So, instead of pausing to eat, I will go on with my story.
If you want to know what I was doing in an underground laboratory (and one, from the description you have given me, you probably walked through on that fatal day you discovered Lime), you would simply have to ask. The answer is deceptively simple.
Once upon a time, as the old Earth stories begin, there was a powerful, wealthy man named Hanagata Kamatarou who was nothing less than a giant, mentally and physically. And this giant had a young son, a beautiful little blonde prince who would someday inherit the giant's kingdom, despite his relatively smaller and frailer body. But unbeknownst to the giant, the child's weak form was not a mere quirk of genetic engineering. One day, the little prince got very sick for a very long time. The doctors could not diagnose his illness with any certainty, and his daily declining health lead them to believe the boy would not live to see the year's end. But as in many fairy tales, a wonderful miracle happened. Towards the third week of his illness, the boy began to show signs of improvement. And by the fourth, he was making a full recovery straight out of a romance novel. But it was then the angel of light that had bestowed this miracle revealed its true nature. That same week, the boy sickened and eventually relapsed into a coma. He never regained consciousness, not even when the giant kneeled beside him clinging to his small hand as if his size itself could keep death at bay. But, to the giant's horror and sadness, all his might and wealth proved insufficient protection against his son's mortality. The boy died three days later and with him the giant's hopes for his mighty empire.
Faced with his line's end and blinded by silly ancient-Earth notions of blood, inheritance and family that seem to have buried themselves into the minds of this planet's men, the giant began to lose all hope. And so he despaired until the birth of Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa's eleventh pure clone. Because, on that day, the heavens opened a second time and another miracle presented itself.
The Shogun, unlike many other Terra Two leaders, regarded his pure clone as an dignified person, not a puppet to be controlled by the hands of previous generations and their mistakes. Instead, he wanted his pure clone to make its own mistakes and become an individual. And yet, he could not forget this pure clone's importance to his own line. Thus, turning it out into the world alone and unprotected was nothing short of dynastic suicide. And what boy could grown into a normal, happy man watched constantly by the imperial sabers? No, this idea was just as impractical.
It came down to this. The shogun needed a guard for his son who would serve with unquestioning (indeed unquestionable) loyalty and obedience. And one who would not make any mistakes when it came to raising this precious boy. Now, as we all know, humans are greedy, dangerous and, more importantly, fallible creatures. Thus, no man alive could be trusted to protect the boy, one way or the other. As for a common marionette protecting him, such a thing would have looked entirely out of place. For though a marionette would never disobey its creator, it would be too visible to guarantee the prince's anonymity. Further, its lack of an otome kairo and, well, general complex thought processes made it an impractical parent, to say the least.
The solution to the problem, then, was deceptively simple: combine the best of both worlds. Create a loyal marionette who would not stand out in a crowd and would be sufficiently intelligent to keep the little clone from most, if not all, conceivable harm. I say deceptively simple because creating such a marionette would by no means be an uncomplicated project. Or an inexpensive one.
And so, knowing Hanagata Kamatarou's great wealth and power, the Shogun visited the giant. And knowing full-well the effects the giant's loss would have on the future of the Hanagata Trust, the Shogun offered the giant the following deal. If Hanagata Kamatarou would fund the creation of this special marionette, he would be allowed to keep the marionette when the clone had matured enough to protect itself. The giant could then program the machine however he wished and thus indefinitely insure his corporation's future. For what better CEO can a corporation have than a machine programmed to act and think like a human, but able to escape death by virtue of that same programming?
In other words, it was the Devil's bargain.
And the giant could not refuse such an offer.
Do you understand me, Otaru-kun? I am, technically speaking, no different from the marionettes you play with every day. If you were to cut me open right now, you would see this clearly. I have the same titanium skeleton, and electricity pulses through my wiry veins. But if you were to crack my chest open, you would see the fullness of the terrible truth. The reason most men can accept your marionettes as human women whereas I am little more than...
Otaru-kun, there is no otome kairo where my heart should be. Instead, there is an artificial intelligence circuit, about the size of your fist and the color of the sea. It is shaped like a wedge and is stamped with Kamatarou's logo: a symbol that should be my last name. Except, technically I have no name. My serial number is SMJ 0000X, and Hanagata Mitsurugi died of a fatal illness almost twelve years ago. I was merely fashioned in his image -- or at least the image of what he may have grown into -- to appease a father's overbearing grief and his overweening vanity.
But again, I am getting ahead of myself.
Kamatarou used his money to renovate some decrepit storage space beneath the history museum. Three months later, a trio of Japoness' best and brightest technicians began building Terra Two's first male marionette. Kamatarou insisted on taking part, of course. And since he was the project's only source of funding, no one dared question any of his actions. So, when he presented the team with a strange series of design specs which called for the marionette to be pale, delicate and blonde, the technicians worked 'round the clock to make this so. Within weeks, the machine perfectly resembled Kamatarou's dead son in every conceivable way. The program to animate this simulacrum, however... ah. Yes. That was another story, entirely.
My AI circuit was their biggest challenge. In order to successfully blend into Japoness society, my behavior and inflections had to successfully mimic those of humans. No one knew exactly how to create an otome kairo, and would never have wasted such technology on a male marionette in the first place. The circuit they put into me, then, was nothing more than a more complicated model of the ones found in Baiko and Tamasaburo. More complicated in that simply contained programs that allowed me to have more facial expressions, a larger vocabulary, and more knowledge about proper child-rearing than the imperial guard. But I was not supposed to have any feelings. AI chips, remember, can only deceive. They cannot replicate the very core of humanity like those damned otome kairo.
At least, that was the theory.
My genesis was not an easy feat. The AI circuit, being so large and containing so much data, was difficult to maintain, even harder to predict. I remember the looks of defeat, frustration and.... hehe...sheer terror on the faces of my creators at my various antics. One day, a faulty string of data made me repeat every fourth word spoken to me five times in a row. On another, I couldn't speak at all, after an unforeseen power outage wiped the data from my verbal processors and the backup's from the laboratory's mainframe. These things and many more were constantly shutting down or falling apart altogether. Having watched a human child mature, I suppose I can now say I was like a sickly baby. The only difference being that an infant is typically comforted by its caregivers when it cries and screams in its distemper. Whenever my 'caregivers' unscrewed my arm, or tore my chest apart to repair some faulty hydraulics, however, they took my own crying and screaming as proof that (thank god!) at least my emotional programs were working... and so realistically, too! One might even believe I was a real little boy, if I could only feel real pain. And it didn't hurt one day when one of my frustrated scientists drove a lit cigarette into my left eye because "the damn thing refused to work", now did it?
I may have been a machine, Otaru-kun, but I was never stupid. Even before I was given a sense of self-awareness, I knew (instinctively, perhaps?) that I was different, and subordinate to, these strange men in their white coats. And that if I ever tried to act like their equal, a damaged eye that took a week to repair would be the least of my concerns.
After six years of programming, development and remodeling, I was finally ready. I was dressed in some of Hanagata Mitsurugi's clothes (a large lavender bow, a pair of pale tights and a white shirt with ruffles down the front) and lead for the first time into the sunlight. I remember holding Kamatarou's hand uncertainly as he gave me my first orders. In the outside world, I was to call him "Daddy", a word which would tell everyone that I was a real little boy, not the marionette I again became in the laboratory's artificial light. I would now live in Kamatarou's huge house like a real little boy. And then, I would be sent to a school with many little boys. Here, I would eat, sleep and live with a boy whose name has haunted me from its first mention.
Mamiya Otaru.
A Saber Marionette Fan Fic
by
Lady Aoi
Summary: Hanagata explains the reason behind his amazing vitality, knowing full well that nobody will hear. (It's basically a monologue)
Rating: PG-13 for dark themes, child abuse, shounen-ai.
Spoiler Warnings: Pretty far into the J series.
Disclaimer: Hanagata isn't mine. And not in that sense, either.
Lady Aoi's Notes: This fic is a bit of a tangent off a longer series I'm writing. theCarlinist gave me the idea during an AIM session a few months ago. Basically, he misunderstood something about the longer series and that misunderstanding generated a new plot bunny.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Do you remember the first day we met, Otaru-kun? Heh. Probably not. Unlike some....well, people, for lack of a better word, your memory is finite. Unlike some people, your memories are not stored as a series of indelible ones and zeros deep inside a tangle of wires and circuits. What is it like to forget, Otaru-kun? For your memories to have soft, round edges like old photographs. Is there a romance to forgetting? I cannot say. This is something I am not allowed to do.
Be thankful for your ability to forget, my love. Be thankful, too, for the things you never knew in the first place, and the things people kept from you in order to keep you a happy and safe child. I may have been a child, technically speaking, but I have never been safe, or happy. Except when you were near. And even then, according to the words of some, happiness for a... person like me is impossible. At the very least, it is nothing more than an intriguing debate held over after dinner drinks, a game for philosophers and students.
Be thankful, Otaru-kun, that I play such games with you. And that I debate the paradox of my emotions with no one but myself. Be thankful, if for nothing else, that I have spared your feelings. That I have lied to you.
That I am only thinking this somewhere deep inside my...mind as I watch you play with your beloved marionettes. If you only knew how thin the line between your dolls and your best friend truly was...
****
Do you remember the day we first met, Otaru-kun? I do not think so. I am told people can always remember the moment of bald terror which introduced them to an enemy, the droll house party where they met an annoying acquaintance, or the blood-pounding sweetness of a lover's first kiss... but a best friend? No. Best friends, it seems, are like one's body. You cannot remember when your soul was first melded to it. To you, it was simply always there, a fact and necessity of life.
As flattering as the notion is, however, I was not always there for you. We met for the first time when you were just six years old. You were a sad-eyed orphan gazing wistfully up at Lorelei's portrait in the Japoness History Museum. Even now, if I close my eyes, I can see the intensity that knotted your little brow as you tried in vain to fathom the logic behind this strange being, this memento mori of a human female. And I, standing five feet, two inches to your left and clutching my father's massive hand, also remember finding the intensity of your gaze just as fascinating and beautiful as you likely found Lorelei's smile.
For it was nothing like the cold, curious gazes of the white robed men who worked in the laboratory under this same museum. I should know. I saw them every morning for five years. And they always looked at me in the same way; with that strange combination of fascination, revulsion and pity typically reserved for visits to an operating room or a freak show. And believe me, my room beneath this museum was a little of both. The way you looked at that painting, though, bore no trace of this terrible gaze. It almost looked, from my vantage, as if you were praying to an angel. And in that moment I knew that someday I wanted you to look at me with the same devotion.
But I am getting ahead of myself. That is what you would say, at least, were I telling you my story and not sitting on this blanket guarding Cherry's picnic basket. Hm... I wonder if she would notice a few missing pickles? Given my bad luck, she probably would. So, instead of pausing to eat, I will go on with my story.
If you want to know what I was doing in an underground laboratory (and one, from the description you have given me, you probably walked through on that fatal day you discovered Lime), you would simply have to ask. The answer is deceptively simple.
Once upon a time, as the old Earth stories begin, there was a powerful, wealthy man named Hanagata Kamatarou who was nothing less than a giant, mentally and physically. And this giant had a young son, a beautiful little blonde prince who would someday inherit the giant's kingdom, despite his relatively smaller and frailer body. But unbeknownst to the giant, the child's weak form was not a mere quirk of genetic engineering. One day, the little prince got very sick for a very long time. The doctors could not diagnose his illness with any certainty, and his daily declining health lead them to believe the boy would not live to see the year's end. But as in many fairy tales, a wonderful miracle happened. Towards the third week of his illness, the boy began to show signs of improvement. And by the fourth, he was making a full recovery straight out of a romance novel. But it was then the angel of light that had bestowed this miracle revealed its true nature. That same week, the boy sickened and eventually relapsed into a coma. He never regained consciousness, not even when the giant kneeled beside him clinging to his small hand as if his size itself could keep death at bay. But, to the giant's horror and sadness, all his might and wealth proved insufficient protection against his son's mortality. The boy died three days later and with him the giant's hopes for his mighty empire.
Faced with his line's end and blinded by silly ancient-Earth notions of blood, inheritance and family that seem to have buried themselves into the minds of this planet's men, the giant began to lose all hope. And so he despaired until the birth of Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa's eleventh pure clone. Because, on that day, the heavens opened a second time and another miracle presented itself.
The Shogun, unlike many other Terra Two leaders, regarded his pure clone as an dignified person, not a puppet to be controlled by the hands of previous generations and their mistakes. Instead, he wanted his pure clone to make its own mistakes and become an individual. And yet, he could not forget this pure clone's importance to his own line. Thus, turning it out into the world alone and unprotected was nothing short of dynastic suicide. And what boy could grown into a normal, happy man watched constantly by the imperial sabers? No, this idea was just as impractical.
It came down to this. The shogun needed a guard for his son who would serve with unquestioning (indeed unquestionable) loyalty and obedience. And one who would not make any mistakes when it came to raising this precious boy. Now, as we all know, humans are greedy, dangerous and, more importantly, fallible creatures. Thus, no man alive could be trusted to protect the boy, one way or the other. As for a common marionette protecting him, such a thing would have looked entirely out of place. For though a marionette would never disobey its creator, it would be too visible to guarantee the prince's anonymity. Further, its lack of an otome kairo and, well, general complex thought processes made it an impractical parent, to say the least.
The solution to the problem, then, was deceptively simple: combine the best of both worlds. Create a loyal marionette who would not stand out in a crowd and would be sufficiently intelligent to keep the little clone from most, if not all, conceivable harm. I say deceptively simple because creating such a marionette would by no means be an uncomplicated project. Or an inexpensive one.
And so, knowing Hanagata Kamatarou's great wealth and power, the Shogun visited the giant. And knowing full-well the effects the giant's loss would have on the future of the Hanagata Trust, the Shogun offered the giant the following deal. If Hanagata Kamatarou would fund the creation of this special marionette, he would be allowed to keep the marionette when the clone had matured enough to protect itself. The giant could then program the machine however he wished and thus indefinitely insure his corporation's future. For what better CEO can a corporation have than a machine programmed to act and think like a human, but able to escape death by virtue of that same programming?
In other words, it was the Devil's bargain.
And the giant could not refuse such an offer.
Do you understand me, Otaru-kun? I am, technically speaking, no different from the marionettes you play with every day. If you were to cut me open right now, you would see this clearly. I have the same titanium skeleton, and electricity pulses through my wiry veins. But if you were to crack my chest open, you would see the fullness of the terrible truth. The reason most men can accept your marionettes as human women whereas I am little more than...
Otaru-kun, there is no otome kairo where my heart should be. Instead, there is an artificial intelligence circuit, about the size of your fist and the color of the sea. It is shaped like a wedge and is stamped with Kamatarou's logo: a symbol that should be my last name. Except, technically I have no name. My serial number is SMJ 0000X, and Hanagata Mitsurugi died of a fatal illness almost twelve years ago. I was merely fashioned in his image -- or at least the image of what he may have grown into -- to appease a father's overbearing grief and his overweening vanity.
But again, I am getting ahead of myself.
Kamatarou used his money to renovate some decrepit storage space beneath the history museum. Three months later, a trio of Japoness' best and brightest technicians began building Terra Two's first male marionette. Kamatarou insisted on taking part, of course. And since he was the project's only source of funding, no one dared question any of his actions. So, when he presented the team with a strange series of design specs which called for the marionette to be pale, delicate and blonde, the technicians worked 'round the clock to make this so. Within weeks, the machine perfectly resembled Kamatarou's dead son in every conceivable way. The program to animate this simulacrum, however... ah. Yes. That was another story, entirely.
My AI circuit was their biggest challenge. In order to successfully blend into Japoness society, my behavior and inflections had to successfully mimic those of humans. No one knew exactly how to create an otome kairo, and would never have wasted such technology on a male marionette in the first place. The circuit they put into me, then, was nothing more than a more complicated model of the ones found in Baiko and Tamasaburo. More complicated in that simply contained programs that allowed me to have more facial expressions, a larger vocabulary, and more knowledge about proper child-rearing than the imperial guard. But I was not supposed to have any feelings. AI chips, remember, can only deceive. They cannot replicate the very core of humanity like those damned otome kairo.
At least, that was the theory.
My genesis was not an easy feat. The AI circuit, being so large and containing so much data, was difficult to maintain, even harder to predict. I remember the looks of defeat, frustration and.... hehe...sheer terror on the faces of my creators at my various antics. One day, a faulty string of data made me repeat every fourth word spoken to me five times in a row. On another, I couldn't speak at all, after an unforeseen power outage wiped the data from my verbal processors and the backup's from the laboratory's mainframe. These things and many more were constantly shutting down or falling apart altogether. Having watched a human child mature, I suppose I can now say I was like a sickly baby. The only difference being that an infant is typically comforted by its caregivers when it cries and screams in its distemper. Whenever my 'caregivers' unscrewed my arm, or tore my chest apart to repair some faulty hydraulics, however, they took my own crying and screaming as proof that (thank god!) at least my emotional programs were working... and so realistically, too! One might even believe I was a real little boy, if I could only feel real pain. And it didn't hurt one day when one of my frustrated scientists drove a lit cigarette into my left eye because "the damn thing refused to work", now did it?
I may have been a machine, Otaru-kun, but I was never stupid. Even before I was given a sense of self-awareness, I knew (instinctively, perhaps?) that I was different, and subordinate to, these strange men in their white coats. And that if I ever tried to act like their equal, a damaged eye that took a week to repair would be the least of my concerns.
After six years of programming, development and remodeling, I was finally ready. I was dressed in some of Hanagata Mitsurugi's clothes (a large lavender bow, a pair of pale tights and a white shirt with ruffles down the front) and lead for the first time into the sunlight. I remember holding Kamatarou's hand uncertainly as he gave me my first orders. In the outside world, I was to call him "Daddy", a word which would tell everyone that I was a real little boy, not the marionette I again became in the laboratory's artificial light. I would now live in Kamatarou's huge house like a real little boy. And then, I would be sent to a school with many little boys. Here, I would eat, sleep and live with a boy whose name has haunted me from its first mention.
Mamiya Otaru.