LEDGER

February, 2025

The tiny branch of baby-breath has become brittle, stiff. Dehydrated and dead as it is, it would take very little for him to break it. Putting it back between his ledger's pages would be danger enough to its structural integrity. But he was used to things breaking down.

Things are made, things break, things die. It's how it always goes.

Still, he is very careful not to harm the flower. It is the only thing he has that is in anyway connected to her. Valerie's possessions had all gone back to her family, from her personal AIMER work, to the flimsy ball-point pens you could buy in packs of ten for two dollars. She loved those, loved to write them until they dried up. She generally liked to keep tallies. Ten pens, five hundred page notebooks, two small tubes of her favorite hand-cream a month. Parks never saw the point to it, if things ran out, he threw them out and got new ones. It didn't matter how many of each he went through. But tonight he had decided to give her habit of tallying things a chance.

He cranes his neck back, throwing a shot of shochu back, only a little fazed by the searing burn of the alcohol. It had stopped being a problem for him eight shots ago. Putting the polished clay shot glass down on the mahogany table, he finds with dull disappointment that his mind is still working. Still turning. This had also stopped being a problem a while ago. He started growing accustomed to the hurt Valerie left behind. Well, not exactly. Her car and some stupid tree did that. She just died. Like all things eventually do.

Mors certa, vita incerta. Who used to say that a lot? Or had Parks read it somewhere? Who fucking cares?

A waitress, programmed to watch for telling signs that a customer might be requiring service, comes by Parks' table. She is scantily clad, like the men like these unfortunate objects to be in clubs like these. Her legs are airbrushed and bare, walking on high heels that are pushing the line of being stilts. Her jet black hair catches the red mood lighting emitted from strategically placed lamps all over the club, laying perfectly neat, the bangs in place, the rest brushed and framing her slender shoulders. The face is a beautiful one, standard Asian features favoring a Korean ideal of beauty. The subtle but very expensive look achieved only with plastic surgery.

"Need a refill, handsome?" she asks, but her face doesn't register the flirtatious tone her voice held. It's just lines of code, it's what you do for a living. Lines. Responses to visual and audio stimuli. Parks finds himself idly wondering why the waitress in one of Tokyo's many clubs looks Korean. Fetishes, he concludes. Who is he to judge. He'd fuck her too, if she had a pulse. If he didn't want to just for once hold his own wrist and feel nothing there.

He nods his confirmation to the request for more alcohol and watches the waitress leave. While looking at her perfect, seductive stride, the movement of her back underneath the tiny silk dress she wore, he debated whether he has worked on the software operating her 'brain' or not. She could be a domestic model, Japan has become one of AIMER's biggest competitors in the AI industry, or it could be a rare European import. Most likely, she was AIMER AI. There was no telling which version of the Artificial Sensibility Interface she was. She could even be his very own..

Glass shatters and for a bizarre, alcohol induced moment Parks imagines it is the windshield of Valerie's car. But no. It is one of the waitresses, she dropped a tray full of sake glasses when some corporate looking middle aged man with pattern balding slapped her ass. Parks watched and counted the seconds off silently, to see how long it would take the girl – the thing – to smile the incident off and pick the glasses up. That is standard approach in these situations usually. There is no self-defense programmed into these robotic models, seeing as they count more as property than living workers. If this clearly intoxicated business man damaged the blond, blue eyed Caucasian waitress he wouldn't face assault, but vandalism and destruction of property charges. There is no use defending her honor. No use calling him a sexist pig. People slap and destroy computers all the time. This one just had a very pretty wig on.