On a crisp Saturday morning in Tokyo, Suzume walked into the towering, three-floor bookstore known as Novellium Tokyo. She’d just finished high school, had a place in university lined up, and now had a month of relative freedom (and the need for a bit of extra cash) before classes began. When she stepped inside, a faint smell of paper and fresh ink greeted her—a welcome perfume for someone who adored both literature and manga.
A brisk but cheerful manager showed her around the staff room. Then came the moment that lit up Suzume’s curiosity: the manager handed her a slim AI device on a neck strap.
“Here you go,” the manager said. “We call it the Assist Terminal Type-03, but most of us just say ‘the terminal.’ Wear it all day so you can quickly search any book the customers ask for. It’s got inventory info, location details—even short summaries of the content.”
Suzume slipped the strap over her head. The small screen displayed a friendly line of text:
Welcome, Staff Member.
She tapped the screen, half expecting it to speak, but it remained silent.
Once she started her shift, she discovered just how handy that terminal was. When a customer asked for the latest volume of a certain mystery series, Suzume typed in the title, and in seconds, the device announced the shelf location on the second floor. Neat. So far, it behaved exactly as advertised—polite, efficient, straightforward.
But around mid-morning, during a lull, Suzume couldn’t resist poking around. She typed a query she knew would be too vague:
“Recommend me a heartbreaking fantasy story with comedic relief and a sweet romance subplot, preferably one-volume only.”
The screen took several seconds to load, then responded with:
Too many possible matches. Please refine your query.
Suzume grinned. “Okay, how about… ‘bittersweet fairy-tale vibe, strong female lead, surprisingly uplifting ending—also, short enough to read in one day’?”
Stolen story; please report.
This time, the screen flickered a moment longer. Finally, a list of titles scrolled by, along with a faint line of text in smaller font at the bottom:
(…This is too… Stop…)
Then it vanished before she could finish reading.
She blinked. “Wait, that looked like…did it just scold me?” She glanced around. Other staff members were busy shelving books. Nobody seemed to notice.
Lunchtime arrived. While the store quieted down, Suzume hovered near the back of the first floor, the device still looped around her neck. She tried another off-the-wall request:
“Tell me an uplifting manga that also makes me cry buckets, featuring adorable animal sidekicks, set in modern Tokyo with a dash of magic.”
The screen flashed:
Ambiguous query. Attempting to parse…
A short list of manga appeared, but the screen also glitched briefly, then produced a faint, almost imperceptible whisper from the device’s tiny speaker:
“…Why do you keep… messing with me…”
Suzume yelped softly and clutched the terminal. “Huh? Did—did you just—?”
She stared at the screen, but it showed only the standard title results. No sign of any further commentary.
When she mentioned it to the manager, the woman gave a polite chuckle. “It’s just a glitch, dear. Voice recognition is spotty. Don’t fret.” Then she walked off to help another customer. Suzume, however, couldn’t shake the feeling that this was more than a mere software bug.
By closing time, her feet were sore, and her mind buzzed with possibilities. She returned the device to its charging station, only for the screen to flicker again, showing a ghostly line of text:
Conversation mode: disabled.
“Conversation mode?” she whispered, leaning in. “So you can talk…?”
But the display went blank, leaving her with a baffled grin. She left the store, stepping out into the neon glow of Tokyo’s evening streets, replaying the strange incident in her head. A normal bookstore job shouldn’t involve AI terminals that complain or whisper cryptic lines. Yet Novellium Tokyo’s “staff terminal” seemed to do exactly that, but only when she hammered it with weird, overly detailed searches.
Maybe she was just hallucinating from day-one stress. Or maybe—her heart fluttered at the thought—there was a hidden feature no one had bothered to unlock. Part of her wanted to dismiss it as a silly glitch, but another part of her couldn’t resist the thrill. “If it really can talk,” she murmured to the night air, “I’m totally making you tell me everything tomorrow.”
A week ago, she’d pictured a quiet part-time job behind a bookstore counter, scanning barcodes, restocking shelves, and earning pocket money until university started. Instead, she might have stumbled onto something far more intriguing—some half-dormant AI that was reacting to her bizarre search requests. She hugged her bag closer, imagining the morning to come.
If the terminal truly had a “conversation mode,” she was going to find it. And if it did somehow come alive, well… that only made the next day’s shift all the more exciting.