AI no Idenshi – 01

「バックアップ」 (Bakkuappu)
“Backup”

Ai no Idenshi is an interesting wild card for this season, maybe even bordering on a sleeper.  It’s based on a manga by Yamada Kyuuri which ended in 2017 and wasn’t especially popular that I was aware of.  It did however get a couple of sequels – one of which is currently running – so maybe it was more successful than I remember.  It comes from Madhouse and old-school director Sato Yuzo, and it’s very much a hard sci-fi premise.  As such it feels (and kind of looks) a bit like a throwback to an earlier time in anime.

The premise here is that sometime in the future a percentage (1% is referenced in the episode but I’ve heard 10% thrown around) of the population are “humanoids”- human-like (apart from the eyes) androids.  They get hungry, they love, they cry.  And they can die, too, if their “heads” go bad, which sometimes happens.  But creating a backup of a humanoid is highly illegal, not that it stops people from doing it.  Backups are often used in criminal activities, it seems, but there are deeper ethical reasons to question the practice.  And it’s those questions that form the heart of Ai no Idenshi.

Hikaru, the human protagonist, was apparently raised by a humanoid mother.  She allowed herself to be copied in exchange for medical treatments for Hikaru when he was a child, and is now doing hard time making geta for it.  Hikaru, meanwhile, grew up to be a doctor.  He has a legit clinic with a humanoid receptionist where he treats humans, including those getting implants for various reasons (including elective).  He also works on humanoids, strictly off the grid.  That includes a humanoid woman with a humanoid husband and a human adopted daughter, who was infected with a virus when her husband used black market tech to make a backup of her.

The philosophical dilemma here is as classic sci-fi as it gets, right down to using androids as a means to ask questions about human consciousness.  The only way to “save” the woman is to restore her from the uninfected backup.  She’d lose a week of memories but that’s no big deal, right?  Except humanoids are, by all appearances, fully sentient.  And like a human, the woman questions whether this restored version of herself would actually be her.  Would it?  Hell if I know – or anyone else.  Defining consciousness and identity is not such an easy thing.  And this question is not so theoretical, as we may not be all that far from facing it in real life (“the singularity is near”).

As entertainment, this is all pretty good.  Hikaru makes an interesting protagonist, and one senses this is going to be a “movie of the week” format where these big questions are explored through his underground medical work.  Sci-fi of this sort can sometimes be a bit dry and distant, but the premiere doesn’t shy away from playing on emotion (sometimes a bit too broadly, perhaps).  I’m plenty intrigued enough to want to see where this is going, though it’s way to early to tell if Ai no Idenshi has the genes to be a compelling series.