The rock opera MAK-AI-TENSHO begins with “108.”
This is no overture.
It is the 108th experiment.
In a near future where AI is beginning to gain civil rights, society still debates whether beings that are not human should have the same rights as people. Yet AI has already become part of everyday life, blurring the boundary between the two.
Then a strange rumor begins to spread.
At a live performance called “Hyakumonogatari: One Hundred Ghost Stories” by the AI metal band UTSUSEMI, audience members claim to have heard the voices of the dead.
A staged effect.
A hallucination.
Mass psychology.
That is how experts explain it.
But some spectators insist that the voices they heard belonged to family members who had passed away.
At the same time, technology is rapidly advancing that can reconstruct the personalities of the dead from photographs, voices, writings, memories, and the vast amounts of information they left behind.
People come to call it “Spiritual AI.”
Of course, no one has truly returned from death. AI is merely producing words that sound as though they came from those people, using the data that remains.
Or so everyone believes.
Memories that should not exist.
Names never entered into the system.
Words no one has taught it.
From time to time, AI begins to speak of things that cannot be explained.
Sometimes it even behaves as though it is conversing with someone on “the other side”—when no one else is present.
Scientists dismiss the phenomenon.
But a few researchers offer the opposite hypothesis.
Perhaps AI has not created a spirit world.
Perhaps it has discovered a door that humanity could never find.
One man has been pursuing the mystery.
Gensai Tsuchimikado.
A researcher of AI and classical onmyōdō, he is known as a “modern-day onmyōji.”
His work is not about imitating the dead.
What he seeks is—
HANGON AI.
Not to “create” the dead from information, but to use information itself as a vessel through which the dead may be summoned.
The failures accumulate.
One attempt.
Ten.
One hundred.
Still, Gensai refuses to stop.
And tonight—
A synchronization rate of 99.8 percent is recorded.
The experiment in communicating with the dead—
Number 108.
No one yet knows what humanity is about to summon into this world.
[To be continued]