The room was the color of bone. Emi sat on the artificial tatami, its texture a sterile approximation of the actual factor, and spoke in direction of the microphone that hung from the ceiling like a silver spider. A persistent cough — a well-recognized betrayer she did not suppress — rattled her physique.
“Komorebi,” she whispered, the phrase a delicate puff of air. “Daylight filtering by means of the leaves of timber.”
The microphone glowed a placid blue. A synthesized voice, impartial and calm, replied from a hidden speaker. “Acknowledged. Noun. A phenomenon of sunshine and nature. Please present a sentence for context.”
Emi closed her eyes. She wasn’t within the bone-white room any extra. She was seven, hiding from the summer season warmth underneath the sprawling arms of a camphor tree in her grandmother’s backyard. The sunshine dappled her pores and skin with shifting heat, painted shimmering cash on the mossy floor.
And he or she was 27, Yuka’s head on her lap underneath that exact same tree. Yuka, who had traced the brand new, softer line of her jaw and whispered, “You all the time glow a bit of brighter within the solar, my love.” The sunshine smelled of tilled earth and her grandmother’s pickled plums, but additionally of Yuka’s citrus shampoo, a scent that was its personal form of dwelling. A faint tremor ran by means of her hand as she recalled the reminiscence, a fleeting reminder of the physique’s limitations.
“AI can’t study that,” she had instructed the Conservator as soon as. “The scent. The sensation.”
The Conservator, a younger man with form however distant eyes, had patted her hand. “It’s the phrases we have to save, Emi-san. The grammar. The construction.” He referred to as her Emi-san. He didn’t know the quiet triumph of that, of seeing her title on official paperwork after so lengthy. One other phrase the machines would by no means archive the sensation of: a reputation that lastly fitted.
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Emi opened her eyes. The blue mild pulsed, ready. She took a shallow breath, feeling the acquainted pressure in her lungs, a pained counterpoint to the colourful reminiscences.
“Obaachan no niwa de, komorebi wo abita,” she stated. In my grandmother’s backyard, I bathed within the tree-filtered daylight.
“Acknowledged. Sentence construction logged.”
She spent her days like this, decanting her soul, phrase by phrase, into the machine’s infinite reminiscence. She gave it the sharp, percussive phrases for anger and the liquid sounds of sorrow. She taught it the 17 syllables of a haiku a couple of lonely crow, and the recipe for her mom’s onigiri, ensuring to specify the precise stress of her mom’s arms, the exact quantity of salt. She gave it the phrase aishiteru, not as a definition, however as a reminiscence: the burden of Yuka’s hand in hers, a shared heat towards the encroaching chilly that had already begun to creep into the world.