Love and Justice

Chapter 1

"You're assigning me to work with the robots?" Hana Ichimira asked in shock as she followed the commissioner of the Metropolitan Tokyo Police Department, a tall, lean man in his mid-forties named Juuzo Saejima, down the hall of the police station. "But Commissioner-"

Saejima cut Hana off with a wave of his hand. "You heard right, Ichimira," he informed her in a very business-like tone. "They need humans on their team, someone to do the job when their size makes it next to impossible for them to go in and make arrests."

"I thought there was a boy who worked with them," Hana weakly protested. "A teenager, what's-his-name..."

"Yuuta Tomonaga," the commissioner replied, leading Hana down a short flight of stairs. "He never had any official training to speak of, just whatever he picked up in the field with the force. When he graduated from secondary a few months ago, we sent him to the Academy for some more formal--" he chuckled wryly-- "not to mention official training."

"Commissioner, the Academy brings up another valid point," Hana tried again. "With all due respect, I just graduated from the Academy myself, surely there's someone better qualified than I for this assignment."

"Actually, that's part of why I'm assigning you to the Brave Police force in the first place," Saejima explained, holding up a file folder with Hana's name printed on it. "I spoke with all of your academy instructors, every one of them said you were highly respectful of your superiors and nearly bent over backwards to tolerate even the most bothersome of your fellow cadets," he lowered the folder, "Quite the glowing report, honestly, and it only further convinces me that even our most senior officers couldn't take some of the 'bots with whom you'll be working."

"I beg your pardon, Commissioner?" Hana queried.

"Yuuta-kun has only been at the Academy for a few months," Saejima began, "and in that time span I've already had about twenty failed attempts at finding someone else to work with them until his graduation."

"Is it really that bad?" Hana asked, trying to picture the situation prior to her arrival and debriefing that morning.

"Just to give you an idea," Saejima began wryly, "the last officer I had working with them was carried by the shirt collar, kicking and screaming, into my officer in the mouth of a robot in the form of a dog. He was then promptly dropped to the floor and I was equally promptly informed that the force simply couldn't work with him due to his inability to follow orders.

"None of the twenty previous attempts handled taking orders from a robot very well, kept trying to turn the tables, tell them all what to do. The force leader, Dekkardo, was patient enough about it, but the rest of them knew that he was in charge and didn't take orders from anyone else lying down. I'm hoping they'll react better to someone newer to the force, not to mention closer to Yuuta-kun's age."

"Oh..." Hana replied slowly, then tried again: "But if they're robots, can't you just reprogram them to take orders from someone else?

Saejima fixed Hana with a hard stare. "Ichimira, you'll soon find that none of these robots can be so easily reprogrammed like a computer."

Hana tried not to squirm under the commissioner's gaze as she asked, "How is that even possible?"

"There was some kind of interference when Dekkardo's AI system was first brought online, making him fully sentient, as are all of the robots with whom you'll be working," Saejima explained. "The department has been working with some of Tokyo's leading scientists and engineers in an attempt to recreate whatever made them sentient, we've had enough success to not call the project a total and complete failure, yet we've never managed to find the definitive cause. The experiment can be run with one hundred identical robots the exact same way a dozen times, and yet only one robot would walk away sentient. Most of the scientists have all but given up and just accepted that we're witnesses to a miracle, one that's becoming more and more rare by the year."

Without thinking, Hana let out a low whistle. "Guess that shows you how much I really know, I'd always assumed they just had highly advanced AI systems."

"That's all they were originally meant to be, and--" Saejima chuckled darkly, "what we intend to let the public think."

Hana reacted a little more violently than she would have liked. "Begging the commissioner's pardon," she began, "but doesn't the public have the right to know that their... defenders are just as sentient as you and I?"

"And risk the scandal on the department's hands?" Saejima asked incredulously. "Of course not! If the public knew the truth about the Brave Police force, there'd be a backlash from here to kingdom come, people would question their creation, good intentions or not. I can name at least five people, all of whom very high ranking, who would scream for their destruction if they found out about them being sentient. That's the reason you had to sign the nondisclosure form before being considered for this position."

"Can't your protect them?" Hana questioned, hiding her revulsion that anyone would so easily take a sentient life... even if it was a robotic one.