The Thousand Year Beach by TOBI Hirotaka

Author:TOBI Hirotaka [Hirotaka, TOBI]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781974704620
Publisher: Haikasoru
Published: 2018-06-19T05:00:00+00:00

A little before the fighting at the entrance began …

In the manager’s office of the Mineral Springs Hotel, Denis rubbed his light bulb of a head. Despite his tense anticipation of the coming battle, his office was quiet and still. He was alone in the room. Even the ceiling lights were not turned on. There was only the pool of light cast by the lamp on his broad desk.

In that light he had piled dozens of large, leather-bound ledgers. In the surrounding darkness stood even more piles of ledgers.

Denis’s face, always so affable, was cold and subdued. He took great pains to maintain the image of the affable, easygoing Denis for the sake of the others, but when he was alone he let the mask drop. Doing so did not bring him relief. In fact, the opposite was true. Particularly when he was gazing at these ledgers.

Their covers bore only numbers, embossed in small gold letters. A classic, beautiful typeface, the same as the lettering on signs and room number plates throughout the hotel. Each of the hundred or more ledgers had its own sequential number. Denis had one of them open now. The faint cream-colored page was covered in tiny, neatly arranged writing in blue-black ink.

These were Denis’s daily records.

The one he had open now was from when “this summer” had first opened for business.

In the pantomime world of the Costa del Número, the AIs were both characters and stagehands. They performed many tasks behind the scenes, like a small theater troupe whose players also handled finances and advertising. Denis Prejean played several roles related to his employment. He was the evaluation function used to optimize the hotel’s service index and the HR system that kept his employees working smoothly. He also kept these ledgers. The ledgers were a database scrupulously recording each guest’s behavior in their room, and Denis was the only program capable of accessing that database. And, of course, Denis was the sum of all these programs clad in the skin of an AI.

It was Denis’s job to record who the guests brought into this members-only service domain, whether those companions were other guests or AIs, what tastes the guests had, and how they enjoyed spending their time. He was also expected to ensure that the hotel’s service reflected these things on subsequent visits, and protect the guests’ privacy by strictly controlling access to the ledgers.

Even putting it mildly, his days were hellish. Denis’s affable, decent personality was entirely unsuited for these tasks.

Denis well knew the depths of dissipation and cruelty to which guests sank at the Mineral Springs Hotel. He knew how monstrously they treated the AIs they brought in with them from town, and of course about their abominable behavior in the town itself.

Of course, all of this was legal, and no one could criticize it. If what the guests did was sordid, then the very creation of the Realm of Summer had been an atrocity, and the accumulation of all that was recorded here.

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