Sunny
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Do androids dream of electric sheep?
A: Its rhetorical, and anyway, the answer remains opaque no matter which cut ofBlade Runneryou consult.
It turns out that what homebots dream of when reflecting on their sins … is game shows.
Thats whatthisneurotic homebot dreams up, at any rate.
[sic], replete with cheerfully animated titles and cartoonish sound cues.
A Wipe verdict will send her back to the sweet oblivion of Factory tweaks.
This one is such a wild formal outlier that it doesnt even have a title sequence.
The game show kicks off with a segment called Whos in the Box?
So I was just aprop!?
Joey demands, in colorfully animated subtitles.
It feels like it could be infected, Sunny says unhelpfully.
Occupying the third box is Mixxy, the object of Takumis crush and of Sunnys ire.
She had a blade to Suzies throat, Sunny protests.
What was I supposed to do, compliment her knife skills?
Noriko calls for a playback of the scene fromepisode sevenwhere Sunny slugs Mixxy in the gut.
Theres no knife; Sunnys attack is unprovoked.
The bot is confused and horrified.
Did I really hurt all those people?
Tough crowd, Yuki quips.
(What is this,Dark Matter?)
And so we reach the games second segment, Why Would Masa Make Such a Bad Bot?
A scientist and apoet, Noriko swoons over her son as the promo film plays.
In the video, Masa recounts how a homebot designated No.
6 slowly acquires Asahis trust over the course of a year, culminating in Asahis embrace of No.
6 as they watch a baseball game on TV together.
So take all of this with a grain of possibly irradiated salt.
The video then moves on to footage of two homebots performing dentistry on an ImaTech lab assistant named Kaz.
One of them, identified as No.
When the dentist-bot does not obey, No.
In the present, Sunny cries out for the footage to stop, and it does.
Shes surprised to learn that she can control the playback.
Were not supposed to do that, she says of her own attack on the dentist-bot.
Masa points out that this empathy from Asahi would have been unthinkable before his year of homebot-enabled therapy.
This concludes the second round of the game.
Yuki congratulates Sunny on her survival, but the bot is more anxious than ever.
I went to a robot fight called Junk League, she protests.
So clearly the bug got out!
But thenthe entirety of this episodeis set inside Sunnys machine consciousness anyway, so electric-sheep dream logic abounds.
I learned that one in prison!
17, the spurned homebot, begins beating No.
6, the bot who dumped it, with a chair.
6, shielding the bot with his body, which does nothing to stop No.
We had been led to believe this was Sunnys original sin.
It was a misdirect.
Sunny did not commit this violent act, but she witnessed it.
Shes remained traumatized by it.
After making a futile effort to revive Asahi with chest compressions, Masa orders No.
17 to sleep and then to wake again.
Masa then grabs the murder weapon the smoking chair and beats No.
As this flashback/playback/whatever-it-is ends, Noriko contests its authenticity.
Masa would never do that!
A title card tells us four hours have passed, and the perspective shifts again to that of No.
A drunken Masa has ordered the bot to awake so he can apologize.
He addresses it as Three Two.
Spoken aloud in Japanese in that sequence, those Japanese numbers sound like Sunny in English.
What kind of monster covers up a mans death and then saves a robot?
Sunny demands of Masa.
For Suzie, Masa answers.
(This doesnt tell us why Masa believed the yakuza was watching himbeforethis all went down.)
Suzies like I used to be, he says.
She wouldnt survive the loneliness his death would bring.
In this scenario, declares Masa, Sunny was the poison and the antidote.
Sunny isnt buying this explanation.
She demands that Masa be subjected to his own round of Whos in the Box?
The next guest is Hime, the embittered Oyabuns daughter/lover of Tetsu.
But instead of further implicating Masa, Hime demands that Sunny take responsibility for her growing propensity for violence.
Do you know how to boil a frog?
Hime asks, explaining that each of Sunnys small transgressions expanded her ability to contradict her programming incrementally.
Eventually, she was capable of ignoring it entirely.
But Hime denies having sabotaged Sunnys code.
She manipulated the botemotionally, not technologically.
You took advantage of how much I love her, Sunny whimpers.
Suddenly, the audience of Masas has vanished.
Sunny must decide her own fate.
This moment fromepisode twois the happiest of Sunnys short life.
At peace with her decision, Sunny rolls herself through the red double doors marked Wipe.
He contains multitudes, I guess.
