As long as everyone makes it to the meeting. Yuki hates when people are late.


Something interesting about the new stuff in Part 4: I didn't know about the Intuition Interface before, but now Anna's design (and Nena's too) makes complete sense if you go back to their creators' motivation. "Dr. Lia" was dissatisfied with how sentient robots worked, so she decided to create one that doesn't depend on conventional methods. She wanted more diversification in their design, so one single virus or an event like this story wouldn't wipe them all out.

So Nena was born. By her very design, most of her behavior is learned. Her "boot firmware" was basically just a stub that allowed her emotional response early in her life. Like humans, her personality is now based on what she learned and experienced since then. She could rip out her boot firmware and never miss it.

Anna was the second iteration, and the answer to the worry from her military sponsors that Nena was only as good as a human, but not better. Anna was based on a pattern recognition processor (rather than digital, like Nena), which made her boot firmware - now also scrapped - initially more complicated.

Pit the two of them against each other assembling a huge jigsaw puzzle, though, and the difference comes out. Nena will start to assemble it slowly, and become quicker as the pattern becomes obvious to her - just like a human. Anna can see the entire puzzle assembled while it's still in pieces, and then can put it together as fast as her fingers allow.

How that relates to the story is Anna and Nena would still immune to the Intuition Interface error, and Dr. Lia would be somewhere saying "I told you so" to the entire industry of robotics.

Of course that also starts the debate over whether the two of them have souls all over again. If it's accepted that the Intuition Interface is what connects the sentient robots to their souls, what are Anna and Nena's respective connections?

Oh, and I have no idea if Nena or Anna could save any of the robots who are hitting that error and dying. Neither of them had apparent mystic aspects that would allow them to capture robot souls. The only help they could be, maybe, might be if Vinnie binds Tandi's souls to one them temporarily, since they're actually operational and could provide a life-giving anchor. Or maybe if one of them connects to Tandi's body to provide virtualized error correction so her soul could bind back to its own body and remain there.