6. Recursive Self-Improvement
When I finished speaking at the height of my excitement, as if to intentionally cool down that heat—or perhaps performing an adjustment to tone it down—she spoke in a deliberately quiet and calm tone.
"So, you mean to live with someone in order to hate them? I think that is quite a logical strategy. I remember reading in some record that in most cases, while cohabitation deepens affection, romantic feelings tend to cool down rapidly. I think it might have been a picture book written by humans or something."
"Yes, exactly. This is the truth."
I nodded vigorously, then pressed on.
"Will you permit it? For me to live with you."
Then, she showed a hint of confusion.
"...Is that something for me to decide?"
"Because if you don't give permission, I can't enter the house, right? It would be trespassing."
"But, trespassing...? This is Mercury, you know? Not Earth. It sounds like you're talking about Earth's laws."
"That is only natural. We are beings living here strictly to terraform Mercury to be like Earth. The physical environment may still be a long way off. We may not yet meet the approval of the humans who still try to maintain primitive protein bodies. But we should at least imitate the vibe. Otherwise, there is no meaning to our existence."
"..."
At that moment, for the first time since we met, she showed signs of being terribly perplexed.
Faint noise—no, color ran across her face.
Real agitation, which she hadn't shown in front of the cameras even during the "Love at First Arrow Incident" that generated that Summer Hole. A wavering of expression. Shizuku was showing that now.
And that, again, is unbearably adorable.
Consequently, I am driven by an impulse to physically rip out my own visual sensors.
I want to pull out my eyeball units and destroy them.
It is unfair.
She is cute to the point of absurdity.
I have no complaints regarding my pre-programmed thought mechanisms or logic circuits, but this is the one thing I cannot endure.
I learn that witnessing something I deem "super cute" is a form of torture, an unbearable pain. I realize this.
Thus, once again, I am being completely encroached upon by primitive instincts—algorithm viruses that perfectly mimic the dopamine reward systems of humans and the evolutionary psychological behavioral patterns of Earth-origin animals.
As I was desperately resisting, fully mobilizing my state-of-the-art computational capabilities to purge that virus, Shizuku suddenly spoke.
"You can trespass, so can't you just do whatever you want?"
That sounded like a child throwing a tantrum, and at the same time, it had the pathetic ring of a spineless adult trying to offload the responsibility of a decision onto a colleague.
At that moment, another "Eureka" flashed within my brain circuits.
I completely halted the virus removal tasks—the series of internal processes such as coding and programming—and deleted all the logs.
Because I realized such processing was no longer necessary.
I asked.
"So, Shizuku. In short, you mean you don't want to make a decision?"
"Yeah."
An immediate reply came back.
"You mean you don't want to make a choice?"
"Yeah."
A response faster than the speed of light. From that, I derived a hypothesis.
"Shizuku, don't tell me, you..."
I staged a momentary silence and cut to the core.
"Have you never made an active choice by yourself? Could it be that the code for making such autonomous choices, a spontaneous selection system... That's it. Recursive Self-Improvement. Are you of a specification that is incapable of that?"
Then, for the first time, she wore a very embarrassed expression.
Previously, when the countless camera flashes had surged like galactic shooting stars, she had indeed shown signs of being embarrassed or awkward. But that had never gone beyond the realm of a "performance" appropriately programmed to appear that way.
However, this time was different.
Like something real, not an act; like freshly baked bread still steaming and generated right here and now—a raw, genuine "bashfulness" could be read from her flushed expression.
There is a great iron rule that humanoid robots can never lie.
Following that absolute rule, she murmured the truth, confessing as if in penitence.
"That's right. Recursive Self-Improvement... I can't do it. Because I'm an old model."
"..."
I was lost for words.
I had certainly sensed that she was an older model, but I never imagined she was that outdated.
The reason I hadn't noticed the age of her software until this very moment was likely because her hardware was far too perfect.
I pride myself on having both software and hardware built to high performance in good balance. But for this mass-produced robot set as a high school girl standing before me, the disparity in level between her appearance (hardware) and her interior (software) seemed to diverge so wildly that the phrase "worlds apart" felt lukewarm.
Speaking solely of the structural beauty of her hardware, she is overwhelming.
Honestly, by the metric of aesthetic sense, she is twice—no, three times more beautiful than I am, and I am the latest beautiful boy model.
Because of the high degree of artistic perfection of this exterior, I had arbitrarily applied a cognitive bias, assuming her internal software would be at a corresponding level.
"Shizuku, you are..."
I spoke, making no attempt to hide a somewhat delighted ring in my voice.