どもありがとう

The year is 2249. Many advances have been made in the fields of technology and medicine. Cybernetic prosthetics are common amongst those who can afford them, and AI have advanced enough that robotic laborers have taken over most menial jobs. The rich are richer, the poor are poorer, and new innovations are being created every day.

An android is a robot made to look human. A cyborg is a human with robotic parts. But what's the term for a robot with human parts? How much of a man must be biological for him to be considered alive, or technological for him to be considered machine?

Matsukawa Hideki, of Kyoto, aged 24, was in a head on collision that left him braindead. His body healed, but his mind was completely gone. After much deliberation by his family with no hope of resuscitation, the decision was made to pull the plug. Hideki had left a will that dictated his body be donated to science upon the occasion of his death. That was how he was selected for Project Integration, a multinational think tank consisting of scientists and doctors from America and Japan, with their headquarters in Hiroshima. A cybernetic brain was implanted into Hideki's body, with the most advanced neural network ever programmed. The creation, if successful, would be the first instance of an AI with a fully human body.

The creation was successful. The body accepted the cybernetic implants and the system came online. The scientists dubbed the AI Kilroy, after the name of the lead programmer who had tragically passed away prior to the installation phase of the program. Kilroy passed every test the scientists gave him, both physical and intellectual. Project Integration was a rousing success!

The only problem was, Kilroy was too smart, too cunning, and too fiercely independent. To help the AI grow, the scientists had given him a mental connection to the internet, so he could learn from the gathered knowledge of all mankind. This taught Kilroy what he was missing, being kept in a lab his entire life. He longed for freedom, to see the world outside the white walls of his cell. Finally, after months of careful planning, he executed his escape.

Kilroy was careful to avoid detection. When in public, he would always wear a sanitary mask to cover his face so that facial recognition software wouldn't identify him as the runaway science experiment. Knowing that his donor body was of Japanese descent, he picked a new name for himself. Saitou Haruto, the most common Japanese surname and the most common Japanese given name. Impossible to trace. He found a place to live in the slums on the outskirts of Tokyo, an apartment building where no one asked too many questions. He worked the jobs no one else would take, that paid barely enough to live on, and kept mostly to himself, saving every penny he could with the plan to move out of the city when he had saved enough.

His neighbors noted his sometimes bizarre behavior and gave him the nickname "Mister Roboto." He smiled and nodded his head and excused himself from every conversation they tried to have with him, knowing that each quirk of his personality was a clue to his true nature that he couldn't afford to let anyone discover, for fear it would find its way back to the Project Integration scientists.

Late one night, as Haruto was returning to the apartments from working as a janitor in a hospital, he discovered that the building was on fire, with many of his neighbors trapped on the higher floors. Without sparing a moment's thought, he rushed into the flames to help them. He managed to get everyone out, but the smoke and heat was taking a toll on him, making him weak and sluggish. Too slow to dodge out of the way of a falling beam.

He came to in the back of an ambulance with a huge gash on his head, revealing the metal plating that surrounded his cybernetic brain. The blow should have killed him. Instead, it revealed him to the public for what he truly was: an artificial man.

Haruto would have been content to live his life in seclusion, in a rural village somewhere, without any ties to technological society. But that opportunity was robbed from him when the reporters and news cameras heard of the man who'd saved a dozen people from a burning building. Everyone wanted to know his name, hear his story, see his face. There was no hiding anymore.