3. Love is Scary
When I woke up, I saw a familiar ceiling.
As if using that pure white ceiling as a screen, a sequence of memory data—feeling like events from just moments ago or perhaps from the distant ancient past—played back like a panorama.
Before I could drown in that torrent of memories, I reflexively closed my eyelids.
"...That was close."
While processing a hologram called "cold sweat" running down my back, I grasped the current situation.
It seems I won't be able to open my eyes for a while.
The visual sensors and memory storage were linked too closely. The moment I opened my eyes, the memory of that "Boy Meets Girl" scene—which distorted even spacetime—would flashback, and my system would surely crash.
First, to lead a normal daily life, I decided to reboot my day with my eyes closed for the first time since my manufacture.
Keeping my eyelids shut, like a deep-sea creature that needs no visible light, I fired up my other sensor arrays to full capacity.
Here on Mercury, said to be rich in color and painted in psychedelic hues, sensors other than vision are considered low priority. However, my learning functions, having spent my not-so-long operational time on this planet, are not just for show.
Within three seconds, spatial mapping was complete, and I adapted to the "eyes-closed state."
I sat up in bed.
Sensing the direction of the door, I turned the knob and stepped into the hallway. Then, straight to the stairs.
Halfway down the stairs, there was an obstacle difficult to perceive without visible light. It was a spherical autonomous cleaning drone my mother had bought online yesterday and left there because the setup was too troublesome.
My foot slipped on its smooth surface, bringing me to the brink of falling. However, through instantaneous probability calculations and micro-adjustments of my attitude control thrusters—a kind of quantum mechanical brute force—I avoided the future where I fell. I succeeded in descending the stairs, wobbling but secure.
When I entered the living room, my younger brother's voice flew at me.
"Bro, why are your eyes closed?"
My brother is a junior high school boy type humanoid robot.
Technically, we are set as brothers, but that relationship is merely that of mass-production models born from the same corporate production line. While my model specs are the newer high school type, his manufacturing date—his line rollout—came later.
In our society, in accordance with the law of increasing entropy, the individual with the longer operational time (meaning they have existed longer and accumulated more disorder) is defined as the "older brother."
"Shut up."
I spat out the words.
Too bothered to explain things to him, I groped for the refrigerator and opened the door. I took out a bottle of Sulfate Tea and downed it in one go.
The moment the ice-cold liquid passed through my throat, it was converted into heat energy exceeding 300 degrees inside my body, washing every transistor making up my actuators with a crackling, explosive sensation. The intense stimulation nearly forced me to wake up fully, but I managed to endure it and kept my eyes closed.
"When I came to, I was in bed," I asked my brother. "What exactly happened? I have no memory log."
"How much do you remember?"
Asked a question in return, I grimaced as if extracting corrupted data and retrieved my most recent memory.
"...Shizuku told me she hates me."
My brother laughed and said in a teasing tone, "Then didn't you faint from the shock of that?"
"What happened after I shut down?"
"What happened? Well..."
My brother transmitted the image data from that time.
"The police came right away. They tried to disperse the onlookers, but there were too many of them. Eventually, it turned into a riot, or a festival—anyway, it became a huge uproar. In the end, the military had to be deployed to bring it under control."
"...The military?" I tilted my head. "Did Mercury even have a military?"
"No. Not Mercury's, but the Venusian Army. The commotion was so huge that the noise apparently reached Venus. The silence-loving Venusian humanoids were furious and dispatched a suppression unit."
"And then?"
Filtering out unnecessary information, I urged him on.
"What happened after that?"
In other words, what I wanted to ask was:
"What happened to Shizuku?"
"Well," my brother continued. "After the Venusian Army kicked the media out, the two of you were lying there like corpses from a failed romantic elopement, right? So then, emergency engineers were dispatched from Mars."
His explanation went on.
"You guys had your bodies crushed into pieces like stardust by the physical weight of 'public interest.' The capable engineers from Mars picked up the fragments one by one, handling them like archaeologists excavating ruins, and carefully restored and repaired you right on the spot. You were both returned to your respective families, restored as if nothing had happened. I carried you home on my back, you know. Treat me to some ice cream later."
"...So, Shizuku is at her own home right now."
"Well, that's what it means."
At that moment, I snapped and opened my eyes wide.
Just as the human eye constricts the iris to adapt when moving from darkness to a bright place, my CPU was finally in a state where it could accept and process that traumatic memory data.
No, it wasn't just that. By speaking the name "Shizuku"—part of the incantation of the curse cast upon me—it was as if I had re-cast the curse on myself, and my thirst for her overflowed.
I had to think of her right now.
No, I wanted to see her as soon as possible.
I slammed the empty diamond glass onto the table. With enough force to crack the tabletop.
I ran out of the house just like that.
Behind my back, as I receded at a speed approaching that of light, my brother's solitary mutter followed like an echo, eventually vanishing like a bubble.
"Love really is scary, after all..."