13. "When Love Ends, Love Begins" (2)
Overhead, a miraculous, magnificent view spread out—one I had likely never seen since my production and would probably never see again until my disposal.
Yet, she showed absolutely no interest in that "rare scenery" and was looking only at me.
Me, who had regressed like a small child, enjoying and accepting the beauty of the night sky from the bottom of my heart, ultimately wishing to melt, body and all, into this spectacle.
She continued to gaze at such a me with eyes that were endlessly deep and quiet.
Our lines of sight entangled.
Just like that, an eternity of three seconds flowed by.
For those like us possessing cutting-edge processing elements, three seconds is a span of time comparable to three hundred years for a human.
Amidst the clamor of the fireworks aurora playing colorful tones, we were isolated in a silence of another dimension, cut off from everything else, staring at each other.
Unable to bear it, I was about to break the silence first and cut the line of sight when—
0.000001 seconds faster than that, the florists and passersby who had been setting off bouquet fireworks around us gathered to surround us.
And they raised their voices in unison.
"Congratulations on your graduation!"
While shouting one after another, they set off fireworks—no, giant party poppers—all at once again.
This time, the celebratory cannon fire was released not toward the night sky, but slightly diagonally, aimed right over the heads of Shizuku and me.
*Pop, pa-pop!*
With bursting sounds, innumerable ribbons sprayed from the tubes.
It was a torrent of long, vibrantly colored paper streamers.
Raining down over our heads, they were like a red carpet fluttering down from the sky, or perhaps like a psychedelic rain blocking our vision.
A wild dance of ribbons scattering flashily in front of my visual sensors.
Due to that physical obstruction, the gaze entangled with Shizuku's was flickered and severed.
Without one preceding the other, we naturally broke eye contact and averted our eyes from each other's faces.
I attempted to explain to the residents of Flower Shop Street to clear up the misunderstanding.
"Um, we haven't graduated yet. We are still second-year high school students. We'll be third-years soon, but..."
"No."
Along with a voice of denial, a single girl-type humanoid walked up.
Set to be about middle school age, perhaps? With hair as white as snow and smooth as silk. She, who wore that abundant volume of hair in a casual bob cut, told me as if correcting my misunderstanding.
"We are celebrating your graduation from 'love'."
"Graduation... from love..."
I dared to roll the words around in my mouth.
Pronouncing them carefully but awkwardly, as if relearning an unknown foreign language from scratch.
The white-haired middle school robot nodded.
"That's right. Just now, your eyes met Shizuku-chan's, and despite a long time of three seconds passing, no emotion of 'heart-pounding' occurred, did it? Well, indefinable and incomprehensible new sensations might have welled up, but at least, no current that could be clearly tagged as 'love' should have flowed through your circuits at all."
Hearing that, I immediately searched my past logs.
As if breaking the seal of a black box, I expanded the recent emotional data stored in my body and attempted an analysis.
And I unintentionally leaked a voice.
"...It's true."
Certainly, massive data was recorded in the logs.
But it was filled with strings of text garbled due to language setting mismatches, or decipherable character strings (dark matter) like an alien language.
Analyzing all of them is difficult, but there was one certain thing.
Within the slight amount of interpretable data, binary patterns defined as "love" were not found.
I cannot deny the possibility that they are lurking within that storm of garbled text, but at the point of being "unreadable," it cannot be the existing, mass-produced, ready-made "love."
In other words, data indicating "love" as per the specifications was non-existent.
Shocked by that fact, I couldn't even nod.
"Somare-san is no longer in love with Shizuku-chan."
"...Why is that?"
I felt that fact with my own skin and had no intention of denying it.
But I don't understand the reason at all. It's too abrupt.
Then suddenly, the surroundings were enveloped in a festival-like frenzy.
The graduates paired up and began dancing traditional dances like waltzes.
As if swept up in that vortex, Shizuku, who had been by my side the whole time, had her hand taken by someone and was led away into the circle of dancers.
While worrying about her moving away, I sought a reason from the girl in front of me.
The girl continued her explanation.
"Because the approach when a male type is attracted to a female type is driven mostly by algorithms mimicking the system called 'sexual desire.' No matter that Somare-san is a state-of-the-art AI-equipped model made on Mercury, because the imagination of the engineers who designed you was impoverished, the story-like emotional wiring of 'being attracted' is built completely mimicking humans."
She presented the cold facts indifferently.
"In a manner of speaking, until now, Somare-san was merely being swayed by a pseudo-sexual desire program. Well, Shizuku-chan is insanely cute, after all. Her CPU cannot be called excellent even as flattery; she is so passive one might call her a spontaneous marionette, a clunker who can't do anything alone... But in equivalent exchange, her exterior (hardware) is sculpted more beautifully than anyone else on this Mercury. Somare-san was simply strongly attracted to those external specs."
Here, lightly dodging a male student who reached out to invite her to dance, the white-haired middle school student continued.
"And here is the main point. It's not a method that applies completely to everything, but there exists a setting where 'exercise temporarily reduces sexual desire.' The engineers who made Somare-kun's model focused on that—or rather, placed weight on it. Therefore, Somare-kun's unit is adjusted so that the sexual desire suppression effect of exercise works remarkably well."
"In other words,"
I organized my thoughts.
"Because I performed 'mountaineering' at the sweets shop earlier and overtaxed my body, the parameter of lust for Shizuku was reduced. As a result, the 'feelings of love' also cooled down and shrank?"
"That is exactly it."
"Then, if time passes, it will revive again, right? That system called sexual desire."
"Normally that is the case, but regarding Somare-kun, it seems that's not so."
"Why?"
The white-haired middle school student brought her face close as if peering into my internal structure with a microscope, and while staring intently at the nape of my neck—a vital point where connection ports are concentrated—she explained.
"Originally, a cooled love does not lose its nature itself, only the 'quantity' such as intensity and water level changes. But in Somare-san's current case, the 'nature' of the love itself has changed."
"The nature... changed?"
"Yes."
She announced it in a solemn tone, as if delivering a death sentence.
"In other words, Somare-san's love has transmuted into 'Love' (Ai/Charity)."
"Love."
It sounded like a word from a foreign country I had never heard of.
My vocal actuators didn't turn well, and perhaps it sounded to the other person not as "Ai" (Love) but as "Tai" (Ulterior Motive).
I once again followed with my eyes the figure of Shizuku, who was being made to dance, looking like she had no choice, with some male graduate.
"I see."
My gaze staring at her. The series of data processing woven from that visual information rapidly became clear.
The indecipherable alien language (dark matter) that had filled my logs until just moments ago became vivid like muddy water being filtered, transforming into a language system I knew.
Vast amounts of data converged, and it began to draw a single picture.
It represented a certain hieroglyph.
Or, like the twelve apostles appearing in *The Last Supper*, it was an array of information lined up in a row on the table of my CPU, emitting a solemn presence.
The composition of the mural—no, the ceiling painting—they constructed was this:
*When romantic love ends, true love begins.*