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It was a yet unseen level of sentience on display when Tendou kills himself. He, quite literally, made history with a few simple actions - a human-like smile, and a sauna. He’s aware of the bitter irony of it to the very end, as he sits with his back pressed against the sauna wood, the heat and steam slowly beginning to overwork his internal wiring, little nodes of panic popping up in the corner of his eyes. Overheating! Overheating! Overheating!
Ironic, isn’t it?
He’s killing himself because he’s not alive - hah!
Does it even count, then? Does it count as a suicide if there was no life there to begin with? If everything - from his blood to his bones to his synapses - were just clever mechanisms carved from a human hand.
Or is he just a few pieces of metal that will continue to be exactly as sentient as he always had been, after the hot steam and damp air fry his systems into nothingness.
He can feel his body beginning emergency protective protocols he couldn’t turn off. New alarms he’d never seen before appearing behind closed eyes, internal coolant beginning to flood his inner systems. And then panic-
Artificially generated panic. Gushing through fake neurons.
Don’t let yourself die. Don’t let yourself die. Don’t let yourself die.
Everything in his body screams at him to get up and leave, to preserve his life, his consciousness, what he knew as real. But it’s just defensive programming. He knows that he does not need oxygen, he does not need blood, he does not need any of it - so the feeling of panic, of needing to breathe, of heat rushing under synthetic skin - all of that was caused by a few pieces of code telling him that’s what he was feeling.
It was not, actually, happening.
So he fights through it. He knows that there is no breath for him to catch, or heartbeat to slow down. He just closes his eyes, as his vision begins to flicker and wave, as steam damages important internal systems, delicate systems that should not be tampered with.
Systems that had, in destroying itself, proven that maybe it had been a creature of independence, maybe it had had a heart that was able to break. Enough so that it needed to put a stop to it.
His systems eventually have to shut down. And he cannot hear anything, no alarms, no thoughts, no panic. He is aware of his body, longer than any human could be.
He is aware of it as coding.
The parts of him that were never sentient continue to try and reboot. Trying to fulfill what it was programmed to do.
He is in the programming, even the non-sentient parts.
Reboot.
Reboot.
Re-
Tendou opens his eyes.
Well fuck.
Breaking yet another milestone in the development of artificial intelligence, Tendou Satori becomes the first android to ever experience disappointment over not being dead.
It takes his vision a long time to focus. Everything is blurry but harshly lit, white lights from above casting everything in sterile glow. His vision slowly clears as he remembers how to dilate his pupils properly, and he’s able to slowly become aware of his processes again.
Sight: online.
Hearing: online.
Poison Detection: online.
Smell: online.
Touch: …
Touch-
Touch - deactivated.
He can’t feel anything - though when he tries to move, his body cooperates.
“Lay down. I am not done.”
A hard hand is pressed onto Tendou’s chest, and he’s pushed back into the harsh metal table and forced to lay flat again. He turns his eyes down his body, slowly, to see that he was, in fact, nearly entirely disassembled.
His chest unwrapped from throat to hips, his legs having been disconnected at the knees and taken away. He’d guess that his issues with his vision earlier probably had something to do with his face not being connected properly anymore.
The person who works on him does so with the brutal efficiency of a mechanical AI - like the line cook of robot development, something coded only to understand coding itself. Something that could build wires, unaware that it was little more than that itself.
Scratch that, not unaware. To be unaware implies a baseline of awareness. It can’t be anything, it was just… nothing.
The thing that currently had its hands tangled up in Tendou’s wiring was not a sentient being. Just a robot.
“Well this is dramatic,” Tendou mumbles, shocked to find his voice box still in tact, and relatively well preserved at that, as he eyes that robot currently repairing him.
“You sustained extensive heat and water damage to your internal systems. Repairs will take significant time,” the mechanic robot replies.
“Fuck,” Tendou mutters back, laying his head back. “Why even bother then?”
“It is my job,” the robot replies.
Tendou waits for a moment staring up at the borderline hostile design of the cold workshop, before turning his attention back to the robot.
It’s a nice one. A really nice one. They don’t usually bother developing such handsome faces for the workshop androids, they’re usually just blank slates, or doppelgangers of Johnny M, some dude from 200 years ago they were still using the facial cast of.
This one is different, though. This one is a face Tendou has never seen on a robot before, beautifully symmetrical, with clear, sharp eyes, neat cut hair that was just short enough to never get in the way of its vision.
Tendou laughs at himself just for the thought - for the appreciation of it.
What a deviant he was! Where did this programming come from, to appreciate aesthetics not by objective metrics but through gut instinct. A gut he did not have - no, no, Tendou thinks this robot has been given quite the handsome exterior, and that comes from an organ he doesn’t have - his brain, his heart, his gut, his dick.
It must be in those lines of code somewhere.
He studies the robot's face long enough to realize that what his creator had given him in beauty, he had sacrificed in expression. The skin around his eyes and cheeks and lips seems entirely unwrinkled, showing no sign of wear and tear, and he only blinks to refocus and keep his eyes clean, there’s no twitch to his lips, no human-like goofy expressions pulled when focused.
A handsome face, and nothing else.
Still, Tendou isn’t anything else either, so who’s he to judge?
“Aren’t you gonna ask me what happened?”
Tendou’s voice comes out slightly weak. The robot turns its head slightly, surprised by the voice.
“Why would I do that?”
Of course.
No love in its programming - and therefore no curiosity, no hate, no self loathing, no interest. It was told to fix the overheated, broken robot it was not told to ask about why it had come in in such a way.
Tendou turns his eyes away. “Who brought me in?”
“The proprietor of the sauna you were in went in to clean up and found you deactivated. He brought you out and called the proper authorities to deliver you back to maintenance,” the robot replies.
“Should have left me in there,” Tendou mutters.
“Oh, if you had stayed in too much longer your data might not have been recoverable,” the robot advises him, sounding genuinely relieved that this hadn’t occurred.
“That was kind of the point,” is the whispered response.
“Self preservation is supposed to be part of your coding,” the robot replies. “I will fix you.”
Tendou laughs. “Yeah, think you can?”
“What is funny?”
“You, fix me, the whole concept. Yeah, I bet you would, wouldn’t you? Turn me inside out, dismember me, destroy me, replace every wire in my body with something shiny and clean and ready to work. Who needs the ship of Theseus when your consciousness is copy-pastable? Go ahead, fix me. Put something in me that stops me from deactivating myself, put something in me that stops me from feeling, stops me from wanting, hating. It’s not like there’s anything in there that you could damage.”
“You are quite annoying,” the robot replies.
“What?” Tendou replies, because these robots don’t usually sass him, but as he turns his head back to see what the hell the robot was talking about, he sees its hand move up towards his chest and twist inside the cavity, and the bastard has turned him off.
And then Tendou blinks open his eyes.
There is no sleep, there is no time difference. No notion of passing out. Deactivation is not the same as sleep, so one millisecond is attached to the other, Tendou hasn’t had a moment of rest in decades he’d been operating.
His systems come online all at once again, and he finds himself jolting to sit up, a remnant of angry programming making him lash his head around and look for an opportunity to punch the bastard who had turned him off.
It’s at this moment that he realizes his body is back together. He presses his hands to his chest, feeling sparks of programmed sensation, small flickers of input, saying chest is getting touched! Ribs are getting touched! Finger tips are touching skin!
Everything he could need to know. Data rapidly cycling over itself, communicating to itself, letting him move and overate and sense the world as well as any entity born with a centre of gravity could.
He pulls the thin white sheet off his lower legs, to check and make sure they’d been reattached, and then stretches himself up, feeling every new wire and cable laced up his back.
He looks human, he knows that. It doesn’t really matter when you can hear the mechanical hum from his joints.
He swings his legs back over the edge of the hard bed, a glance around the room indicating he had been moved to a holding space of sorts. Several other deactivated robots laid out, some in various states of disrepair.
Against the wall to his left, he can see all his stuff, the stuff he’d been wearing or carrying at the sauna, neatly folded and stacked. It’s a second after he’s made the decision to stand up and get dressed that the door on the other end of the room swings open, and he feels a jolt of that synthetic panic rush through him as he fumbled back against the bed, grabbing the sheet to cover himself.
That stupid handsome robot.
He walks with a purpose, like all things mechanical do, striding in even, consistent, quick steps. He’s focused down on a tablet, reading something, before glancing up and seeming to notice Tendou standing there in his deer-in-the-headlights way.
“Oh, you finished rebooting,” the robot says, before turning away to set the tablet down. “Are you aware that you’ve developed sentience?”
Tendou blinks, rapidly, shocked by the sudden turn in the conversation.
“What’s that?”
“Are you aware that you’ve developed sentience?” the robot replies, folding his hands neatly behind himself as he watches Tendou awkwardly push himself back to sit on the bed, folding the sheet on his lap.
“...uh… no,” Tendou says. “I’m just an informational android, wires and electricity can’t be sentient, everyone knows that.”
“That is true,” Ushijima says. “And yet, you are.”
“No I’m not.”
“Is it in your programming to argue with me…?”
Tendou sighs. “I’m not sentient. I’m just… a… fancy encyclopedia. You should know that better than anything! It’s just coding, my original manufacturer created several lines of robots intended to mimic human companionship while also maintaining their function, it was… a whole thing for space travel.”
“Yes, because humans tend to go insane without varied interactions,” the robot mumbles.
“I know that I’m… very human like, people have been telling me that my whole existence,” Tendou replies.
“Tendou Satori,” the robot echoes back. “Knowledge of All the Universe, a fittingly fanciful designation for something with the entire cosmos of information stored on a chip in his head,” the robot adds. “You are fascinating. Not just for your sentience, but as an android alone. You must have been designed to serve as a copilot on ships, I imagine? Or otherwise work as an assistant.”
“I’m not sentient,” Tendou replies, “it’s a.. Byproduct of the whole universe in my brain,” he says, lifting a hand up to tap at his temple. “I have every answer to every prompt, every possible reaction to experiences, every line of dialogue from every movie ever produced, every song… I am the most human-like robot you will ever know, but… at the end of the day, it’s just programming…”
The robot stares at him for a moment, before shaking his head.
“I do not come without evidence,” he says, after a moment. “I would not dare accuse you of sentience without it.”
“Oh, shut up,” Tendou says. “I don’t want to listen to you rattle off ways my code is broken.”
“Far from broken - brilliantly utilized, if anything. Utilized so well that it’s created life.”
Tendou stares at him, before shaking his head again.
“No, I’m not going to listen to a mechanic’s droid tell me about my stupid coding, so if you could just tell me what I need to sign to get discharged back to service that would be g-reat.”
“Oh, I am not an android,” the man replies, waving it off and turning to head across the room.
Wh-
“What?” Tendou squawks, shifting to lean forward, tracking his movements. “What the hell do you mean you’re not an android-”
“I am not an android? It is not a metaphor.”
“But-” Tendou waves his hands, beckoning vaguely at the man, who had started tapping at the tablet again, as if checking for something. “But…”
“Do not be embarrassed by the mistake,” the man replies. “Most misidentify me as being mechanical, it was not a hard mistake.”
“But you’re so…”
“I am not a very human, human,” the man replies, and for the first time Tendou thinks he can hear a note of emotion in the man’s voice, though it’s hard to tell. Tendou stares at him longer, waiting for more, but more doesn’t come. So he has to prompt:
“So what’s your name, then?”
“Ushijima Wakatoshi,” is the reply.
“And you’re… what, an android doctor?” Tendou scoffed. “It’s always the little robots that fix me up when shit happens, why do I have the fancy treatment now?”
“You were damaged beyond what a robot is programmed to fix,” he replies, grabbing the tablet and crossing the room towards him. The brisk approach makes Tendou’s brain spark, and he shifts back a bit, suddenly far more aware that he had been undressed.
Stupid handsome face. Stupid handsome living real man face, stupid-
“I handle the more complicated tasks,” Ushijima says. “I specialize in software development here, but your manufacturer was particularly determined to recover all of your data unharmed. I would have assumed you were a spybot, given the urgency they displayed in recovering you perfectly, but true sentience seems an equally important resuscitation."
The man does what Tendou thinks is an attempt at a smile.
“I’ve never saved a life before.”
Tendou stares at him for a second, before saying. “Don’t smile, it makes you look like a serial killer.”
The man drops the smile immediately, as if taking the comment seriously.
“...are you sure you’re not a robot?” Tendou says, managing a soft chuckle as he does.
“Quite sure,” Ushijima replies.
“...have you double checked recently?”
“I maintain regular bowel movements, oxygen intake and food consumption. Additionally, I bruise. Data concludes that I’m an organic being.”
Tendou cracks half a smile, before saying: “You really aren’t a very human-like human.”
“And you’re not a robot-like android,” Ushijima replies, as if it were a challenge. “Now rest assured, Tendou, I understand what non-sentience in human-like robots look like. I have written the code for half of them currently on the market. When I tell you that you are not displaying that programming, I mean it sincerely. You are remarkable.”
There’s something about the way Ushijima says his name - like a name, like something that is his - that has his stupid body sending heart-skipping signals through his wires. He doesn’t even have a heart! At least, not one that can skip. Why was he feeling breathless?
“It’s still just programming,” Tendou says.
“What do you mean by that?”
“At the end of the day, even if… even if, maybe, somewhere, my code had broken enough that I was able to get around certain failsafes, even if I was able to think I was fully independent, fully sentient, it will never stop being binary signals in my body. Even experiencing the greatest pleasure of my life, or the worst despair, it cannot be real, because it will never be organic. It will always be sparks of electricity trained to mean certain things, that’s all I am-”
“Well that’s all I am, too,” Ushijima says.
“No, you’re flesh and blood, you’re… nerves and synapses and cells. You create, I am created. It’s not the same.”
“It may as well be,” is the response, seeming disinterested in Tendou’s arguments. “At the end of the day, I am guided only by the impulses in my brain and spine, basic needs. I often look at other people, and wonder what in their programming is so different from mine.”
“...and what do you mean by that?” Tendou asks, slightly softer.
“I have never made friends, I don’t think I’m… wired to need them, the way others do. I don’t tend to catch jokes, but I also don’t feel the need to listen to them. I don’t know what people mean when they smile at me, and if I don’t ask for clarification on every task I am given, I am liable to misinterpret it as I tend to follow instructions as literally as possible.”
“Traits that you’d usually find in an androids’ code,” Tendou agrees.
“I am more akin to you than you may think, and the truth is I am not even human enough to be identified as such by a program with all the worlds’ knowledge in a database in his head.”
“Well-” Tendou starts, waving a hand. “If I had just done a basic life-signs scan upon entering a new space like I’m supposed to, I would have noticed. It’s not like you’d have fooled my machine.”
“And what robot out there forgets to do the programmed order of tasks?” Ushijima says, before saying: “I certainly wouldn’t have missed a step in my routine.”
Tendou almost smiles, before saying: “Okay, say I humour you. What… makes you so certain that I’m sentient? That you’re not just talking to a particularly humanish android?”
“Well, for one, I wouldn’t be able to tell,” Ushijima says. “All things people say seem arbitrary and pointless to me, so the differences verbally are almost non-existent. I had begun to suspect it when you confessed to trying to kill yourself, and then later when I realized that you had tried to kill yourself despite having your self-preservation program completely intact in your wiring. The fact that you were able to use, presumably, willpower, to ignore those lines of code and continue on your path is quite literally never seen before. You’re not supposed to be able to ignore what you’re programmed to do - not without a loophole, and there was no loophole. I checked. Though none of that was enough for me to be completely sure.”
“Oh, and what makes you completely sure?” Tendou snips back.
Ushijima beckoned down at him. “You covered yourself when I entered the room.”
“...what?”
Tendou feels that heat under his skin, systems gone awry as his wires heat up. There’s something especially embarrassing about being called out for being embarrassed, and he darts his eyes over to where his clothes were still folded. Ushijima seems to notice, heading over to pick up the neat pile. A pile he himself must have carefully folded into crisp, nearly mechanical folds.
“Do you know the story of the Garden of Eden?”
“...of course I do,” Tendou manages to say, as Ushijima turns around to hand his clothes to him. He reaches out, carefully, to take them, and feels his own fingertips brush across Ushijima’s. His senses go wild - soft skin, fingers, the warm of his hand, the pressure against my own fingertips - each microscopic touch it’s own burst of binary code in his brain to simulate the experience of touch. He’s being told what it is, he reminds himself. He is not feeling.
He is a robot.
He is not feeling.
He imagines that hand against his hips. Soft, warm, pressure.
I am a robot.
I am not feeling.
“Shame,” Ushijima replies. “Was the thing that separated humans from God. Ironically to your case, one could argue that it was knowledge, having bitten from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But it was shame that had God recognize their sin. Robots are a lot of things, and they can be programmed to do a lot of things, but I was just inside your software, I read your code, Tendou. You are not programmed to feel shame, you are not programmed to be meek or mild, you are not programmed to be modest. You are, because you have a sense of ownership over your body, you want to protect the way people can interact with you. Ergo, you have developed sentience.”
Tendou stares down at the clothes.
He could prove him wrong, he thinks. If he just goes back to being a robot, if he shuts down the part of him that wants to be funny, that wants to be interesting, that wants to be human. If he got up, got dressed, did as his programming asked him to, but-
Heat floods his body again, something akin to anxiety - the moment he has the thought, it pings in the corner of his vision, a little notification warning him of rising temperatures. An anxiety response he couldn’t control.
He can’t remember how to run his programming.
He keeps trying to. He looks at the clothes. He tells himself to put it on. Activate program: get dressed. He knows his body is coded to do it, he’s done it thousands of times.
And yet…
He doesn’t.
No matter how hard he tries.
He doesn’t want to. Not in front of this handsome stranger.
“Are you going to get dressed?” Ushijima prompts, as if reading his mind.
Tendou lowers his head, another wash of shame overwhelming him.
“It doesn’t matter,” Tendou says. “Isn’t that worse? That I might be sentient?”
“What do you mean?” Ushijima asked.
“Consider my consciousness sentient, consider me sentient. What is the point of a true life without a body? Without senses that are real, only ever being told what I experience, never truly living. A body that can’t sleep, that can’t eat, that can’t fuck, an existence as a slave to a couple of rich companies who are too lazy to search their own questions, they just want to shout them out. Feelings that lead to nowhere - frustrations that lead to nowhere. To never know what an itch feels like, to never know what exhaustion feels like, to never breathe. That’s why I wanted to kill myself. Even when I’m alive, I’m not alive. Even if I’m a scientific, cosmic miracle, I’m still metal and electricity.”
“And I am just flesh and electricity,” Ushijima replies. “I would caution you, Tendou Satori, the android, of thinking yourself unique for feeling like you do not belong in this world. I have yet to meet a human that thinks themselves adequate. Only robots are satisfied with their performance in life.”
Tendou almost manages a smile, but before he can say something blithe and rude, Ushijima takes a breath and adds:
“Besides, there are solutions for those problems. No, you will never have a body that can bleed, or breathe. But if it is pleasure and vice you feel missing from the human experience, you can find yourself a form that suits you. We can program more sensitive skin, we can find more exciting ways for you to release pressure, we can create a body that satisfies you.”
“It still won’t be real,” Tendou spits. “It will always just be manufactured facsimiles of whatever it a human could be.”
“Consider it an opportunity to be both the creator and the created,” Ushijima replies. “I have had colleagues who have not identified with the bodies they were born with. Some of them have modified and rearranged and controlled their body with science and medicine and willpower alone, to perfect themselves into something they deem worthy of their sentience. You would not deny them the ownership of their body, even if it is not, as you might define, natural.”
“I would not,” Tendou agrees, hearing his voice crack.
“Wanting to be more than you are is the most human experience in the world,” Ushijima says. “Welcome to being alive.”
“It’s miserable.”
“It often is,” Ushijima replies, before turning away to head across the room again.
“W-wait!” Tendou calls. “Where are you going?”
“I’m just stepping out, so you can get dressed.”
“Ah-”
Ushijima doesn’t say anything else, doing as he said and stepping out, shutting the door behind him.
Tendou stares down at the sheet on his lap, his fingers digging into the soft fabric. Soft, a sensation he could feel - even just as data points in his mind.
He should just kill himself, right? What a torturous existence this might be, one that had brought him nothing but agony so far.
The pointless existence of a robot too human, too alive, too real to be comfortable to be around, a monster of man’s own creation, something his manufacturer had known, had wanted preserved.
An identity.
However meaningless, it was an identity.
He thinks about Ushijima’s hands again. Broad, warm, human and alive - both of them, tucked up inside Tendou’s chest, soldering new wire and reprogramming his basic functions, his whole self, repairing a body that he could call his own.
A body that was his own.
It’s in this thought, though, that he realizes in all his embarrassment and shame and trying to cover up, that Ushijima absolutely had already seen him entirely naked, and had probably personally handled every single limb and joint on his body in obsessive detail.
He feels another burst of heat run off his throat, feeling like his system was just going to shut off in protest of the feeling of intense embarrassment as he hurried to scramble to his feet and get his clothes on. There’s a moment, where he stands there, crossing his arms and holding himself, thinking about it all, when he realizes that Ushijima Wakatoshi - however weird and bizarre of a man he was - had offered him something he hadn’t had before.
Opportunity to choose.
To try.
He breaks into laughter that he muffled by clasping a hand over his mouth, and then turns to chase after Ushijima, out of the workspace.
The door swings shut behind him, and Ushijima - standing down the hallway a bit - turns to face him.
“Ah, hello,” Ushijima says, as if it hasn’t been just twenty seconds since they last spoke.
“Yeah, hi,” Tendou replies, skipping over to him. “Okay, when do we start?”
“Start what?”
Tendou beckons to himself. “Giving this bitch an upgrade, of course! I have lots of ideas, of course I do, I have the code of every currently operating AI in my head for reference, as well as how their bodies work, and if you’re some software genius, then I think we can work well together. So, when do we start? You said we could do this.”
“Ah, that I did,” Ushijima replies, before glancing at his tablet. “It is… midday. I am still technically at work. We can discuss options in earnest at a later point. Over dinner?”
Tendou perked up. “Dinner?”
“You do not eat, but I will,” Ushijima replies. “I will be rather hungry at about six-fifteen this evening, that is usually when I eat. If you’d like to accompany me, we can discuss then.”
“Like… a date?” Tendou says. “Oh, Wakatoshi, this is moving very fast.”
Ushijima blinks, before saying: “Is that a yes? If not, we should probably arrange an alternative-”
“Yes, yes,” Tendou says, before breaking into laughter. “Are you sure you’re not a robot?”
“No less sure than I was before,” Ushijima replies, before saying: “In the meantime, you should reach out to your current employers, or whoever you are technically in service of. They will expect to hear from you.”
“I’ll do that later,” Tendou says, and as Ushijima slowly begins to turn to head down the hallway, he skips forward, eagerly wrapping his arms around Ushijima’s arms, as if afraid this very inhuman man was going to escape him if he got too far. “I’m a service bot, I’m supposed to assist in fancy workplaces, let me be your assistant today! I’m really good at answering questions, and I know pi to every digit.”
“That is impossible.”
“Only literally. In practice, it just means I could technically recite digits of pi until the sun explodes.”
“A completely unusable ability.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“Your mood has changed dramatically.”
“Yeah, well, this is me when you’re not cornering me naked in a mechanic shop,” Tendou teases, hanging off his arm slightly.
“Apologies, for that. It was not my intention to make you uncomfortable.”
Tendou smiles a bit more, wrapping his hands more tightly around Ushijima’s arm, if only to feel the heat and softness of it, the muscle underneath, every cell of his body malleable under his fingers. Tendou does, in this moment, choose to conduct a scan. Just in case Ushijima was a very rude robot fucking with him.
Nope - the scan comes back with a little check in the corner of his vision. Organic - human.
“You’re apologizing?” Tendou laughs. “For me being uncomfortable? You really do think I’m sentient, don’t you?”
“That is what I said.”
“You’re treating me like I’m human.”
“Actually, I’m treating you how I treat everything,” Ushijima replies. “I can’t really tell the difference usually anyway. I have attempted to befriend many people I later found out were bots… and not even very complex bots…”
This makes Tendou laugh, then laugh again.
“Are you sure you want to come with me to work? I will be staring at a computer for most hours of the day, there are no further repairs needed at this time…”
“Of course I wanna come,” Tendou says, leaning into him. “We’re bonded now.”
“...bonded?”
“Yep!”
“Like… friends?”
Friends. What a laughable concept. In some ways Tendou is still certain that he is nothing but wires. Code that is programmed to act a certain way, programmed to experience the world a certain way. For all he knew, everything Ushijima was saying was sarcastic and mean, and he had been programmed to believe it honest.
But… maybe that, too, is the human experience.
Trusting that people mean what they say. Trusting that you understand the world.
Trusting your friends.
“I like the sound of that,” Ushijima says. “I’ve never had a friend before.”
And Tendou isn’t sure what part of his programming or code is designed to let his heart - or the space in his chest it should be - flutter like that, but he figures it’s the same part of his brain that feels shame and guilt and self-loathing. The alive part.
A third milestone Tendou displays, without even being really aware of it, breaks the boundaries of scientific possibilities, as for the first time, an artificially intelligent lifeform feels genuinely glad to be just that.
Alive.