Suzume felt a bit guilty about the garlic. That was her first thought as she climbed the narrow steps leading to Master’s upstairs apartment, balancing a small saucepan of still-steaming peperoncino. Down in the café below, the lights had been dimmed, the “Closed” sign flipped, and the last faint aroma of freshly brewed coffee was steadily being chased out by the bold intrusion of garlic and chili. Of course, no one wanted the sweet fragrance of espresso ruined by an unfortunate whiff of peppery oil, so Master had insisted: any cooking tonight would be done upstairs, in his tiny living space. That meant Suzume, the gracious diner, was now in charge of hauling the final plate of pasta to safer ground.
“Look, if you’re done complaining about the smell, can you hurry up?” Master grunted from the top of the stairs, arms folded. He was an ex-military man, tall in posture and succinct in speech, but these days more dedicated to the art of coffee than to any old notion of national defense. Still, a certain commanding presence lingered in the way he frowned at Suzume’s slow ascent. “We’ve got bigger issues than garlic,” he said.
“Yeah, I know, I know,” Suzume muttered, stepping onto the landing. “It’s not my fault your secret second-floor hideout is basically a closet with a hot plate, you know. If you’d let me do it in the café—”
“Absolutely not,” he interrupted. “My shop is already carrying enough baggage from you and your AI meltdown fiascos. No need to soak the place in chili oil to boot.”
Suzume exhaled, half in annoyance, half in concession. He had a point. Besides, the caffeine-buttery atmosphere of the café was no place for sizzling garlic. That was best left to a private cooking corner in his minimalistic living space, which she was only allowed to see because she happened to be his niece.
She found a spare tabletop to set the saucepan upon, then glanced around. The second floor was half-living room, half-storage space, with a battered couch along one wall, a short and slightly scarred wooden coffee table at its center, and a random array of boxes stacked in corners. Master insisted he liked it that way—he claimed it was “efficient.” Suzume, on the other hand, found it borderline claustrophobic, though she had to admit it was far more comfortable than the café’s polished wood floors for an evening meeting.
The reason for the meeting? A certain iPad containing a certain AI named Kakashi. The iPad currently sat on a rickety side table, an LED blinking in nervous pulses. Kakashi was presumably sulking—if an AI could sulk—because Suzume kept demanding he return to the bookstore to handle “fuzzy searches” for weird books, while he was quite content to remain in the café’s safe environment.
“You realize,” Suzume said, wiping away the last droplet of chili oil from her fingertips, “that if you had just stayed in the bookstore terminal, I wouldn’t be half-dead from searching for raccoon-space-travel picture books all day?” Her voice carried that dangerously casual tone she used when she was either about to explode or break down in tears. Possibly both.
The iPad’s speaker crackled in response. “Su… zu… me… please… un…der… stand… meltdown… sc… scare… me… beep… beep…?” The halting mechanical voice came off half alien, half poltergeist, though Suzume had grown used to its choppy quality. She pulled a kitchen stool closer and let out a deep sigh, rummaging for a fork to taste-test the last batch of pasta.
Master stood by the single window, arms folded tight. His ex-military posture made him look like a statue carved from stone—except, of course, for that faint smirk that betrayed how much he enjoyed watching these two bicker. “All right,” he said, leveling a calm gaze at the iPad, “are you two done cooking and complaining? Because if so, we can finally talk. You said you can’t live without fuzzy searches, and your AI friend here is terrified of meltdown.”
Suzume slammed the lid on the pan. “Exactly. I can’t keep rummaging through thousands of shelves for random books every day while Kakashi is up here chilling with you! It’s not fair. I had five separate customers today asking for titles like, I don’t know, ‘A Pink Rabbit Something Something’? I nearly collapsed. Meanwhile, he’s up here, beep booping about cappuccinos.”
“I… not… cappuccino only… beep… meltdown… sc…ary… want safe… here…” the iPad squeaked. Then, out of nowhere, the screen flashed bright red, displaying the enormous text: IYAAA!! (O_o)
Suzume clenched her teeth. “Stop shouting ‘Iyaaa!’ at me with big letters, geez!” She swore she heard a muffled chuckle from Master’s direction.
Master let the moment linger, then shrugged. “Look, you two need a solution that doesn’t involve meltdown… or rummaging… or… I guess rummaging for meltdown. Heck, I don’t even know. I just know the café downstairs is closed for the night, so we can talk it out here. Without the smell of garlic destroying my business’s good name, if you don’t mind.”
Suzume hopped off the stool, grabbed a wet rag, and started wiping the few dishes that remained. “I do mind, but I also appreciate the food. Let me handle these so you can do your ‘ex-military rummage’ or whatever. Then we talk.” She made a face at the iPad. “Kakashi, if you have any bright ideas, now’s the time.”
The LED blinked wildly. “I… meltdown… sc… beep… confu… sed… want… bo… oks… maybe… beep… beep…?” The words came out halfhearted, as if the AI wasn’t sure which was scarier—meting out meltdown in the bookstore or facing Suzume’s righteous fury.
“All you do is meltdown meltdown meltdown,” Suzume muttered under her breath. “Why not meltdown from overexertion helping me, instead of meltdown from sulking in an iPad?”
Master pivoted abruptly from the window. “Funny you say that. Because there might be a halfway measure. Something that doesn’t force the poor thing back into that old bookstore terminal—since, well, that terminal might as well be a ticking time bomb, as far as meltdown risk is concerned.”
He moved to a stack of plastic bins in the corner, rummaging through them with that matter-of-fact efficiency he used whether making cappuccino or carrying out field drills. Suzume finished rinsing the pasta pan, quietly eyeing him. “You sure you want to bring out more of your weird military goodies? Last time it was a random cooling fan, the time before that was some ancient circuit board. Now what?”
Master barked a low laugh. “Those were child’s play. This here,” he said, pulling a small battered box from underneath a coil of wires, “is something I used to rely on during overseas postings. Not sure it’ll help, but if we tweak it right, maybe it’ll let Kakashi do his fuzzy searches from up here, without physically going back to that bookstore hardware.”
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Suzume set down the dish. “Wait, you have a tool like that and you’re only telling me now? I’ve been dying all day!”
“Hey, you never asked if I had an advanced mini translator. Or an almost-legal test device that I got from a hush-hush project. I only remembered because you started banging your iPad around again.”
The iPad beeped. “U… hush… hush… project? beep… meltdown… beep…??” Its screen flickered with an anxious ASCII face, something like (>_<). Suzume couldn’t help giving it a scowl. She still resented that this creature had basically ditched her in the store’s hour of greatest need.
Master flipped open the box. Inside lay a small watch-like gadget, all black steel and scuffed edges, about the size of a thick Apple Watch but with a distinctly archaic flair. “I used to call this the Mark 13 Communicator. Don’t ask me why. The devs were uncreative, I guess. But it’s got voice recognition, partial translation capability, and a link that used to feed data to a remote server. If I wire Kakashi’s fuzz-search routine into it, you might not need him physically in the bookstore terminal at all.”
Suzume’s eyes widened. “Wait, that sounds perfect! I can stand at the bookstore’s terminal, pretend I’m searching or something, but actually send the fuzzy query to Kakashi up here? Then he can do the meltdown-free super-brain thing, right?”
A spark of interest seemed to flicker across the iPad’s LED. “S… super… brain… meltdown… beep… sc… wait… that might… beep…??”
Master shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe it’ll blow up. Hard to say. This contraption’s from some old international assignment. I used it for language translation in the field—a quick fix when no interpreter was around. But it’s definitely not standard-issue, and it drains battery like crazy. Last time I touched it, it overheated if I left voice recognition running too long.”
Suzume practically pounced on the box. “I’ll take it! Overheating is better than meltdown, right, Kakashi? I mean… meltdown is your big fear, so maybe we just trade meltdown for a little bit of scorching battery?”
The iPad beeped out a half-laugh, half-sob. “(O_o)? beep… scorch… battery… sc… not sure… beep??”
Master pulled out the device, flipping it over in his hands. “We can try hooking it to your iPhone, or maybe direct to the iPad. The idea is to keep Kakashi’s main processes up here, in safe territory, while you go about your day in the bookstore. This watch might let you send queries—like you used to do with that old terminal—without physically crossing wires.”
Suzume’s pulse quickened. For the first time in days, she saw a glimmer of actual hope. “That’s… genius! Or maybe borderline insane. But either way, I’ll do it. I’d kill for a day at work where I don’t run myself into the ground searching for weird rabbit-detective picture books.” She let out a short laugh, realized it sounded half-hysterical, and covered it with a cough. “Anyway, is it legal? Or is it hush-hush?”
Master gave her a dry smile. “Let’s just say I never turned it back in. And it’s one generation behind what they ended up using. Should be fine.”
Turning to the iPad, Suzume took a deep breath. “Hear that, Kakashi? We won’t have to jam you back in that meltdown-prone bookstore terminal. You can stay up here with your fancy custom fans or whatever, and I’ll just do remote queries. No meltdown, no rummaging. Problem solved, right?”
A short silence, then the iPad’s speaker mumbled: “Pro… blem… beep… meltdown… beep… maybe solved… sc…?? Books… can find… beep??” The LED flickered a soft greenish hue, as though thinking, or maybe hoping.
Suzume set the watch carefully on the old coffee table, next to the leftover pasta. “Now we just have to see if hooking this up is possible. We can’t do it in the café downstairs anyway—garlic plus chili plus meltdown plus who-knows-what is too big a risk. Might as well do it here, safe from coffee customers.”
Master rolled his eyes good-naturedly, then rummaged deeper into the box, retrieving a few small cables, random adapters, and what looked like a battered micro-circuit board. “Let’s see. We might have to jerry-rig a second battery if we want the voice recognition to run all day. Because if I recall, after half an hour, it used to beep an overheated warning in four languages.”
The iPad beeped. “Heat… beep… meltdown… beep?? (T_T).” Suzume couldn’t help snickering. “Don’t worry, meltdown buddy. We’ll keep you on ice or something. Or we’ll just test it for short bursts. As long as it means I don’t have to physically chase down random shelves for hours, I’m game. So let’s get started!”
She pulled up a battered footstool next to the table, brushing aside a stray sock and an old magazine. The minimalistic living space was small enough that with the leftover pasta pan on one side and Master’s dusty box on the other, there was hardly room to breathe. But Suzume felt a surge of determination. She had spent the past days trapped in fuzzy-search hell at the bookstore; if hooking up a half-illegal military translator watch was the ticket out, she was all in.
Master knelt down, flipping through a slim, half-destroyed manual. “If the meltdown fiasco repeats itself, don’t say I didn’t warn you. But I’ll do my best to tweak the load distribution. So, how about you finish wiping that chili pan for good, and I’ll try to wire this into the iPad’s innards. We might need Kakashi’s help for the software side.”
“Hey, I’m not some housemaid, you know,” Suzume huffed, but she grabbed the pan anyway. “Just hurry. The bookstore opens early tomorrow, and I can’t show up empty-handed or empty-‘fuzzy-search-handed’ or whatever you call it.”
The iPad screen, still perched on the side table, lit up with a flicker of new text. “Ear… ly… beep… meltdown… beep… sc… want… help… maybe… beep??” It seemed to be warming up to the idea. Suzume felt a wave of relief. Finally, they were on the same page. Or maybe the same screen.
Master cleared his throat, rummaged through cables. “Right. Let’s see if I can rig a stable channel from the iPad to the watch, and from the watch to your iPhone. That’ll keep Kakashi’s main processes here, meltdown-free, while you essentially remote-control him from the bookstore. Good enough for you, soldier?”
A grin tugged at Suzume’s lips. “Yes, sir. And no meltdown. Or else.” She shot the iPad a mock glare, to which it responded with a shaky:
“S-sir… beep… meltdown… sc… no meltdown… beep…!” That final beep might have been the AI’s version of a halfhearted salute. Suzume almost laughed at how silly it sounded, but she let the moment pass. After all, if this plan actually worked, tomorrow might be the first day she could handle random “pink dog traveling to Antarctica” requests without wanting to collapse in aisle B-3.
Outside, the last hint of sunlight faded, leaving them in a lamplit hush. The overhead fixture flickered softly. Garlic, chili, and coffee smelled faintly in the air, a bizarre trifecta of scents that seemed to sum up the day’s madness. Suzume placed the pan in the sink, pushed up her sleeves, and braced for a night of improvised engineering on Master’s old war-time translator watch. A meltdown-free future was just a few cables and maybe a couple of questionable moral choices away.
Soon enough, the three of them—ex-soldier, frantic niece, and stuttering AI—would be forging a new frontier in fuzzy search technology, high above the now-quiet coffee shop. Tomorrow, there would be new chaos in the bookstore, but for once, Suzume had a spark of hope that she wouldn’t be running herself ragged. She glanced at the iPad again, half-expecting another bright red “IYAAA!! (O_o),” but it remained a gentle green, as though Kakashi were mustering some confidence of his own.
One step at a time, she thought. One meltdown fiasco replaced by possibly a mild software meltdown, or an overheated battery meltdown, or some minor fiasco meltdown. But hey, at least the chili and garlic meltdown was done for the night.
She let a small smile creep across her face, turned to Master, and pointed at the watch’s battered frame. “All right, old man,” she said, voice lighter than it had been in weeks. “Let’s see what else you’ve been hiding in your mysterious military stash.”
(End of Ep.9)