The room was the colour of bone. Emi sat on the synthetic tatami, its texture a sterile approximation of the real thing, and spoke towards the microphone that hung from the ceiling like a silver spider. A persistent cough — a familiar betrayer she failed to suppress — rattled her body.
“Komorebi,” she whispered, the word a soft puff of air. “Sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees.”
The microphone glowed a placid blue. A synthesized voice, neutral and calm, replied from a hidden speaker. “Acknowledged. Noun. A phenomenon of light and nature. Please provide a sentence for context.”
Emi closed her eyes. She wasn’t in the bone-white room any more. She was seven, hiding from the summer heat under the sprawling arms of a camphor tree in her grandmother’s garden. The light dappled her skin with shifting warmth, painted shimmering coins on the mossy ground.
And she was 27, Yuka’s head on her lap under that very same tree. Yuka, who had traced the new, softer line of her jaw and whispered, “You always glow a little brighter in the sun, my love.” The light smelled of tilled earth and her grandmother’s pickled plums, but also of Yuka’s citrus shampoo, a scent that was its own kind of home. A faint tremor ran through her hand as she recalled the memory, a fleeting reminder of the body’s limitations.
“AI can’t learn that,” she had told the Conservator once. “The smell. The feeling.”
The Conservator, a young man with kind but distant eyes, had patted her hand. “It’s the words we need to save, Emi-san. The grammar. The structure.” He called her Emi-san. He didn’t know the quiet triumph of that, of seeing her name on official documents after so long. Another word the machines would never archive the feeling of: a name that finally fitted.
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Emi opened her eyes. The blue light pulsed, waiting. She took a shallow breath, feeling the familiar strain in her lungs, a pained counterpoint to the vibrant memories.
“Obaachan no niwa de, komorebi wo abita,” she said. In my grandmother’s garden, I bathed in the tree-filtered sunlight.
“Acknowledged. Sentence structure logged.”
She spent her days like this, decanting her soul, word by word, into the machine’s infinite memory. She gave it the sharp, percussive words for anger and the liquid sounds of sorrow. She taught it the 17 syllables of a haiku about a lonely crow, and the recipe for her mother’s onigiri, making sure to specify the exact pressure of her mother’s hands, the precise amount of salt. She gave it the word aishiteru, not as a definition, but as a memory: the weight of Yuka’s hand in hers, a shared warmth against the encroaching cold that had already begun to creep into the world.
