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Q.E.D. iff, vol. 11, by Katou Motohiro. Grade: B
Two new stories this time. Warning - stupid joke names approaching.
Shinrai dekinai katarite (Untrustworthy Narrator)
A few years ago, back when Touma was still at MIT in Boston, there was an American named Radish Bowl, who worked at the university as an assistant gardner (his boss was Soy Black). Radish was a nice guy, but he'd fallen in with a mafia thug - Onion Ring - who was a member of a gang run by Garlic Oil. One day, Radish got fired for stealing money from Soy (presumably to give to Onion), and had ended up sleeping in a box in an alley. Touma had rescued him from the streets, realizing the guy is a talented gardener. Touma was going to visit his family for a Florida trip for a couple weeks, and he wanted Radish to apartment sit. The boy pulled some money out of an old cocoa tin in the fridge to cover expenses while he was away. Two weeks later, Touma returned to his apartment to find Radish, and the rest of the money from the tin, gone. (Radish's younger sister, Eshallot, had dropped by to thank Touma for giving her older brother a second chance, and she blames all of Radish's problems on Onion's bad influence). A few weeks later, a lawyer, Carrot Stick, contacted Touma for help on a case.
Onion had been in a turf war with a rival drug dealer, Corn Syrup. The war escalated when Corn supposedly stole Onion's supplies from the garage where Onion's gang hang out. The police believe that Onion had visited Corn's house and shot him in the head. A neighbor witnessed a hooded figure running away after a gunshot, but couldn't make a positive ID on Onion. Onion's friends all claimed their boss had been with them watching a live basketball game on TV. Generally that wouldn't be enough to protect him, but there's an unimpeachable character witness vouching for Onion - Radish. Radish is the kind of guy that no one could believe would lie for any reason, so it's looking like Onion is going to skate free this time. Carrot is hoping that Touma can find some other way of busting Radish's testamony. Touma spends a bit of time at this, then the next thing we know, the prosecutor is charging Radish with the theft of money from Soy and Touma. He gets sentenced to 3 years in prison.
The three years go by, and Radish is finally released. His sister is waiting nearby to greet him, but Garlic reaches the prison gates first and gives Radish a ride to the airport. Garlic knows that Touma was the one that had fingered Radish, and he wants his "friend" to help him get revenge on the boy. Garlic's plan is that they'll fly to Tokyo and stage a diversion to let Radish get close enough to the boy to photograph his notes. Garlic's learned that Touma is working on some kind of high-tech project, and he wants to sell copies of the notes to the highest bidder, which will make him money while also embarassing their common enemy.
In Tokyo, Kana meets up with her friend and says that he's looking healthier now. Touma replies that he'd just finished his big project and now needs to copy his notes out of his notebook. Radish intercepts them on the street and reintroduces himself. The three of them go to a restaurant, where Radish eventually gets around to asking if the boy was the one responsible for getting him jailed. After a few heartbeats, Touma says "yes." Radish bursts into tears and leaves, and Kana berates Touma for the way he's treating this "nice guy." The boy simply answers back with, "There was no other choice." Three days later, at a cafe in Roppongi, Kana is preparing to eat a famous mango shaved ice dessert when Garlic and some thugs drive up in a van and smash into another car. The thugs pour out on the street, and run towards the two. Kana drags Touma from the cafe and goes back to beat up all the thugs by herself (and to eat the mango ice, but it melts before she has the chance). They encounter Radish, who tells Touma to follow him. Radish and Touma go to the roof of a nearby building to look down and watch the action. While the boy is distracted, Radish opens his bag and guiltily photographs all the diagrams and formulas. Just before finishing, Radish notices an envelope in with Touma's books.
Questions: Does Garlic win this round? Why did Touma finger Radish rather than break the alibi protecting Onion for Corn's murder? Did Onion kill Corn? What happened to the drugs from Onion's garage? What was the trick Onion used in setting Radish up to alibi for him? Will all of this drive a wedge deeper between Radish and Touma?
Science: Nothing.
--- Spoilers ---
The sene jumps to the airport, where Garlic and Radish are attempting to check in for their flight back the U.S. The ticketing agent flags them and the two men have to visit one of the security rooms. Garlic is willing to let the security agents go through his luggage, but he balks at turning over his phone, screams about his privacy being invaded, and demands a lawyer. Part of the problem is that Radish is a convicted felon who has travelled outside the U.S. on a doctored passport. Garlic vouches for him as a trusted friend, then Touma enters the room. The boy asks for "that" back, and Radish shyly returns the envelope he'd taken from the bag. Garlic claims to not know anything about this theft, and gets even more vocal when Touma tilts the envelope forward to pour out a tracking chip (which is how he and the police knew that the two fugitives had gone to the airport). Garlic now emphatically denies knowing Radish at all, saying they'd arrived together by coincidence. The police show a warrant to search the phone, and Garlic claims the photos there are just from a school kid's homework. Touma replies by saying that those notes are actually for a cyber attack weapon, possession of which is prohibited by law. Garlic stops dead, amazed that math can be used as a weapon. He's led away by the police, who leave Radish behind.
Radish attempts to apologize, but Touma interrupts to tell him that he suffers from kleptomania and needs professional help. Fortunately, there are two people there to help him. Eshallot and Soy enter the room, and Radish agrees to let himself be put into counseling. Touma and Kana leave, and Touma comments that the guy's constantly having to explain why stuff kept disappearing around him is probably what got him so good at looking honest. But, stealing Onion's drugs was a bit too excessive. If Onion ever found out, he'd definitely kill the ex-gardener, which is why Touma worked to get him put in prison for 3 years, to let things blow over for the guy's own protection.
All that remains is to explain Onion's alibi trick. When the gang was watching the basketball game, Onion had his digital recording deck set to playthrough on record. He then had his men place multiple pizza delivery orders, and had Radish answer the door. Each time he left the room, Onion put the deck on pause for a couple minutes. After he had about 15 minutes of delayed game built up, Onion left the room, ran over to Corn's place, shot Corn in the head, then got back in time to watch the recorded halftime show together with Radish. Since the murder occurred during the real game halftime, having Radish say he was in the house then provided an almost airtight alibi.
In the end, Kana demands payment for helping on this case - she wants him to buy her another mango shaved ice dessert.
Oboreru Tori (The Drowning Bird)
It's the future (again). In the year 202X, Japan's need for judges has outstripped the supply, and the country starts experimenting with AI justices. By 204X, all judges are AI, which is seen by the people to be the perfect solution, since no one can argue that a judge is biased one way or the other during sentencing. However, there's a special case before the courts now. Kyuusaku Mizuno stands accused of killing his wife and her lover. The prosecution, a human woman named Hiroko Hiyama, reads the charges against him, saying he'd come home unexpectedly one day, was recorded on the apartment complex's security system as entering the building at a specific time, got to his apartment, saw his wife and some guy from a host club in bed having sex, hit the guy in the back of the head with a flower vase, stabbed him in the heart with a folding pocket knife, and then slit his wife's throat. Pretty quickly, he was caught by the police, and the knife was found to have his prints on it. The police have sworn statements from coworkers that Kyuusaku had talked about suspecting his wife of infidelity, and that if he ever caught her in the act, he'd probably kill her. The prosecution asks for 30 years in prison, if not the death penalty. The defense, an unnamed human man, points out that there are various flaws in the prosecution's story. None of the client's acquaintances ever saw him with a knife, or heard him talking about having one. Additionally, the prints on the knife are partially missing, and the suspect had no blood splatter on him when the police arrived. The prosecutor amends her account by suggesting that the accused killed his wife from behind, etc., etc. Regardless, one week later, the AI system finds Kyuusaku guilty and sentences him to 29 years, 8 months and 12 days in prison.
The scene changes and the defense attorney is in his office, grousing to new staff member Kana. They both agree that something is off about this case since the AI judges usually err on the side of the suspect when there are enough holes in the case. But, not this time. The guy suggests that Kana do some investigative footwork on her own, as practice. As a result, she visits Kyuusaku in prison. He insists he's innocent, and that he'd been framed. He's one of the engineers that performs software maintenance on the AI judge systems. Half a year earlier, he'd gotten a weird phonecall suggesting that there was a bug in the code, and he'd been putting in a lot of overtime since then to find out if the caller was wrong or not. His colleague, Tetsuo Yuzawa, had warned him that if he kept neglecting his wife like this, she'd start cheating on him, but he was obsessed with the code. On the day of the murder, he'd gotten a call from his wife to come home, and when he arrived, she was in bed with the host guy, but both of them were already dead. He heard the sirens outside and tried to run away, but the police caught him immediately, suggesting that someone else had called them in advance. He'd collected all of his notes in a packet he'd left in a coin locker in a train station. The locker key is taped to the back of a picture frame in his apartment, and he wants Kana to take the notes to "that guy" - a famous software guru that had graduated from MIT as a teenager.
Kana goes to the apartment and locates the key, but when she visits "that guy's" mansion (Touma Sou), she's told that he's on vacation. Frustrated, she tries interviewing Yuzawa and the prosecutor, but those are deadends. When she asks Yuzawa about Touma, he says that the kid is an absolute genius and is a cult superstar in the AI community. Eventually, she breaks down and goes to the train station to open the locker with the key, and is immediately attacked by thugs that demand the notes. She defends herself instinctively, then runs away to escape. The thugs give chase, and one has a gun that he tries to shoot her with. At that moment, a stranger (Touma) comes out of a basement door and tells her to follow him. They go down to the canals running under the streets of Tokyo and escape in Touma's customized cruiser (he's turned it into a kind of floating library houseboat). Kana asks what kind of work he does, and he answers that he's a freelance sofware engineer, without actually identifying himself. Kana complains about how she'd failed to speak to "that Touma guy", and shows him Kyuusaku's notes in the hopes that he'll be able to help her. After a few minutes, he looks up from the papers and says that he'll do what he can.
A couple days later, she returns to the boat, and Touma tells her that there is a bug, and it's part of the "drowning bird" problem. In this scenario, AI systems are heuristic, following specific chains of logic as dictated by their programming (the general consensus, including the comments from the prosecutor, is that switching to an AI-based legal system was a mistake. Why are the police and the lawyers still humans, but judges are computerized? It doesn't make sense.) Anyway, if you tell an AI system that there's an "Oboreru Tori", which effectively translates in this case to "a bird in water", the system is going to cross-correlate what it has on water, birds, drowning, etc., and come to the conclusion that the bird is a duck or a swan. But, humans know that birds in water can include any normal bird that fell out of the sky into a river. (The phrase seems to be part of an idiom that "birds that fly can still drown.") This all boils down to a blindspot in the AI judges. The two of them revisit the crime scene, and Touma comments on several oddities in the case, the most blatant one being that the host guy was lying on top of the woman, and while her throad had been cut from in front, there's no blood splatter on the guy. This implies that there was someone else in the apartment, who had killed the two separately, then placed the male victim on top of the woman, before hiding under the bed. The theory is that when Kyuusaku showed up, then panicked on hearing the police sirens, the real killer crawled out from under the bed and simply strolled out the door behind him.
As Kana and Touma leave the apartment building, they're accosted by the thugs again. Touma tells her to run away, but she ends up throwing all of them over the street railings into a nearby canal. The thugs then escape. The next day, Kana, Kyuusaku and the defense attorney are in court to present new evidence to the AI judge, but Touma is late and the prosecutor is crowing over her new victory. At the very last moment, Touma arrives.
Questions: What's the bug in the system? Can it be exploited to save Kyuusaku? Who is the real killer? What's their motive? What was the trick for getting Kyuusaku's fingerprints on the knife?
Science: Not much, really. Just a quick comment on a possible weakness in heuristic-based AI systems that aren't real learning systems.
--- Spoilers ---
After a lot of setup and exposition, Touma shows that there's a possibility that an unknown killer could have used a recording of Kyuusaku's voice, and his photo on a smartphone to get into the apartment building, sneak into the apartment, and kill the two victims. The killer could have taped the murder weapon (a folding knife) to the inside of the apartment door handle to get Kyuusaku's fingerprints on it, hid under the bed, and then left the apartment after Kyuusaku fled. They could have removed the knife from the door handle, taken off the tape and dropped the knife on the ground for the police to find (the partial fingerprints could be explained by the fact that they were blocked by the tape at the ends). The judge system agrees that these things are possible, but that doesn't change its verdict. Touma then asks it to bring up its recording of the crime scene - it does, and the image is of a room devoid of furniture. This is Touma's "drowning bird" case. The bug in the software is that the AI system can't relate two different sentences that on the surface, to a human, would be the same thing. That is, "the wife's bedroom" and "the room the victims were found in" have been specifically entered in the case as two completely different locations by the prosecution, and the "bed room murder scene" doesn't have a bed, so there's no place for any other murderer to hide under. As long as the AI system associates the crime scene with the wife's empty bedroom, it will still find Kyuusaku guilty of the crime.
The prosecutor knew about this bug, and had been exploiting it to improve her convictions record (and she's very angry at being exposed), but she's not the killer. In fact, the real killer had discovered the bug in the AI judge system some time ago, and had been selling his secret on the blackmarket. Kyuusaku's colleague, Yuzawa, was afraid that Kyuusaku was going to uncover the bug, too, and cost him a lucrative income stream. The proof that Yuzawa is the real bad guy is that the thugs that attacked Kana had demanded Kyuusaku's notes specifically, and the only people that knew about them were Kyuusaku, Kana, and the guy Kana talked to about them - Yusaku. Case closed.
In the end, Kana asks Touma how he knew about all this, and he says that he'd also thought something was off about the AI system, and he'd been following Kyuusaku's progress, and then following Kana when she went to visit the coin locker. That's why he was nearby when the thugs attacked her. In the end, he gives her his business card and tells her to call him any time she needs him in the future. Kana laughs him off, then pauses and asks herself why having his number makes her feel better for some reason.
Summary: I really wish Motohiro would get back to the really hardcore science stories. His regular murder mysteries always come off as fluff, and have several easy to poke plot holes. The gimmicky names in Untrustworthy Narrator are just stupid, and his views on robotics and AI are kind of limited. But still, the artwork is ok, and the stories are quick reads. Nothing really out of the ordinary, though. Recommended if you like the series.
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