R.N.A.
Sister is glad R.N.A. is starting to understand (because she certainly doesn’t). How could someone who resembles her that much exist, let alone be on this train…? She should have stopped questioning the nature of its existence by now, which all manners of things that are clearly not of this world (frankly, it had even swayed her faith, and she had developed the thought that whoever or whatever was judging their actions board this train was certainly not God), but she can’t help but still be confused.
But ultimately, this isn’t for her to make sense of, is it? It’s for everyone else. Those who had known this ‘Atsuko Samukura,’ and now had to be faced with this woman who apparently looked like her.
R.N.A. “I understand… You are not her. You just… look alike. The train… perhaps it brought us… here… as a joke. To give us… hope.”
“………….”
Sister couldn’t exactly argue against that. It wasn’t like she hadn’t run into her own fair share of cars on this train where she wasn’t confronted with her own past. Forced to remember the people she had loved and lost.
“…….I hope this car, this train, can give you hope regardless. Not to steal it away from you at the last moment, but… for your own sakes. I can’t speak for whatever cruel fate brought you onto this train, that stole this ‘Atsuko’ from you and then brought you here, but… I’ve made my stay in this car to help people like you all, passing through here. To… confront your past selves, to take the first step forward… toward accepting whatever it is you feel you can’t accept.”
From the looks of it, she certainly has her work cut out for her with R.N.A. She doesn’t quite get why R.N.A. is a… ‘robot,’ but. There was still a child for them like everyone else, right? So why…?
R.N.A. Robots don’t need forgiveness. They need objective facts. If you fail to help someone, you have failed them. If you fail in your objective, you have failed it. It was easy for Sister to forgive herself. She is human. She has an infinite amount of possibilities stretching out before her. But this is all R.N.A. has. Success or failure. Two binary states. No cross over.
She wishes she could understand that, to understand why. But she can’t. Understanding other people… was never her strong suit. If it was, nothing that happened to her would have happened. She would have been a normal child, a normal person. But alas.
R.N.A. “It is not my fault… I know… whose fault… it is. Our group… Used to be two people larger. But… I still failed. I promised. I promised everyone to nuture them. To make them… abandon ideas of murder. So we could all… get off of this train. But I failed. Not just Atsuko… Fenna, Comedy and Jack too. Four people. Now three are gone.”
“…………………”
Sister can’t even begin to understand the context behind any of it. It used to be two people larger, yet having failed four people, and three people are gone… Confusing stuff.
“…You can’t hold that responsibility on yourself. Anyone carrying that weight on their shoulders… is bound to collapse. When someone is determined to… do something bad… nothing will stop them.” She knew that better than anyone. It took realizing just how rotten things were for her to understand. And Atsuko had said something similar to Fenna, hadn’t she?
R.N.A. “I am a robot. My purpose is to help… But I could not help them… So I failed.”
“I am alright… with not succeeding. I do not… want to not succeed… but I can accept it.”
“……I don’t know how fresh your wounds are. But… I can’t expect anyone to just… accept it, that easily. It takes time.” Once again, she knows from experience. It took years after her release, and however long she had been on this train, to mourn them. Even now, she mourns them.
R.N.A. “But still… I miss her. Even though… she was so mean to me. She was… troubled. Very troubled. But I still miss her. Maybe… I miss the person… I thought she might have become. If she had a chance.”
‘Mean to them’ is an understatement, R.N.A. Let her have it.
Given what others had said about the similarities between them… Perhaps it’s for the best Sister never knew her. And she loathes to say that ‘the person she might have become’ was her. Because even Sister hardly had a chance. She had torn a path of carnage in her path to becoming who she is right now. She’s become this… image of serenity not through the goodness of her heart, but by emulating everything she had given her. That is why she is Sister, and not… the person she used to be. The name she used to have.
R.N.A. “…Is it wrong… to miss someone… in that way?”
The past won’t change. That’s what she’s come to accept. The people she loved and lost will never come back, no matter how hard she prays, no matter how hard she hopes one of them might somehow walk through the door to the car one day, no matter how much she wishes she could have undone everything she did to everyone.
"……Of course not. ‘Regret’ is normal. Perhaps it would be more worrisome…. if we didn’t have any regrets at all. All of us think about ’what could have been, if just that one thing had been different, or that one thing hadn’t happened’… That is the essence of the Daycare Car. To face your past self… To accept that what has happened… had already happened.
“But… of course it’s not wrong to have that longing, to wish things could have been different. To overcome that… that’s what I want to help people with in this car, yes, but… It never truly disappears.”
She wants them back. If one of them was somehow still alive and waiting for her, she would leave this train in an instant.
But she knows they’re both gone, and not coming back. So with the goodness they showed her… Sister dedicates her life to repaying that. So that when the day comes that she reunites with them, they might still be able to forgive her for everything that happened.
“……Even robots are allowed to regret. Even robots are allowed to wish, to hope, to move forward. Everyone is.”
