Stardate 20040327.0437

This article contains heavy spoilers about the series Hand Maid May. It reveals major plot elements and gives away the ending. Do not read this if you have not seen the series but think you might want to do so.

Hand Maid May is one of the earliest anime series I watched, and it is still one of my favorites. The primary emphasis is on characters, and they're good ones. But the story itself is fragmented to the point of near incoherence. Greely and I are both fans, and have off and on discussed various aspects of what happened to try to come up with a backstory for the series which makes sense of everything that happened. Given that there's time travel involved, it's virtually impossible to come up with a flawless backstory when the original authors themselves didn't have one, and it is possible to shoot ours down if one is really inclined to do so.

But we think this does a pretty good job of explaining what's going on, all things considered. But first, some basic summary info about the series:

	Kazuya Saotome, engineering student and geek
	Kasumi Tani, gorgeous babe and jock
	Kotaro Nanbara, self professed to be Kazuya's best friend and worst enemy
	Ikariya, Kazuya's squidbot and prototype of all CBDs
	CBD May, 1/6th scale, programmed to serve as a maid
	CBD Kei, "sister geek" model, super-genius with no common sense
	CBD Rena, "little sister" model with obvious fetish appeal
	CBD Sara, customer service model
	CBD Mami, perfect housekeeper model
	Cyber-X (Takuya Saotome), future descendant of Kazuya (and Kasumi)
	Commando-Z (Totaro Nanbara), future descendant of Kotaro Nanbara

Rules of the game: The object of the game is to create a coherent backstory and explanation for the events shown in the 10 episodes of the primary series, based on the Japanese dialogue. The English dub, the 11th episode, and the web pages included on the CD in the boxed set are interesting but are not canon. (The 11th episode, in particular, is a confection which contains elements which make no sense at all.)

Episode summaries:

#1: Kazuya's 37th attempt to make Ikariya understand spoken Japanese fails dismally, and Kasumi consoles him, and rather seriously teases him. It becomes evident that Kasumi spends a lot of time in his apartment and that they are attracted to each other but haven't done anything about it. This episode also shows us the ladder stretching horizontally between her bedroom and his apartment.

Nanbara gives Kazuya a disk with a computer virus on it, and it "orders" CBD May from the Cyberdyne Corporation, which delivers her promptly. Kazuya is utterly astounded, not suspecting that anything like her even existed. As she demonstrates her capabilities to him, she runs out of power, and because her charger was broken Kazuya hacks her USB port and recharges her through it. To make her happy, Kazuya gives her a ribbon, which she loves. Kasumi first meets May and is also rather stunned.

#2: After Kazuya leaves to go to school, Nanbara barges into his apartment and finds May there. He thinks she's Kazuya's design and decides to steal her and claim her as his own invention. CBD Sara shows up and demands payment, assuming Nanbara to be Kazuya. Kasumi comes in and chases them both away. She had sewed some clothes for May, and gives them to May in a bag, telling May to give them to Kazuya without telling her what they are. Disregarding Kazuya's orders to not go outside alone, May leaves the apartment in order to deliver them to Kazuya as soon as possible, and is chased by Sara and Nanbara while Kazuya also tries to find her.

#3: CBD Rena is dispatched to repossess May, but is charmed and confused by Kazuya and May and especially by Ikariya, and instead runs away. She starts living with Kasumi and becomes a fixture in Kazuya's life.

#4: Hyperintelligent and stunningly gorgeous CBD Kei manipulates Kazuya to set up a situation where she can repossess May, but before doing so she becomes puzzled by the fact that May's behavior deviates from her standard programming. Kei asks for permission to investigate and Sara grants an extra 48 hours. In the course of her investigations, Kei herself begins to deviate from her programming. And she, too, runs away, and ends up moving into the apartment just below Kazuya's, and likewise becomes a fixture in Kazuya's life. Fed up with it all, Sara visits Kazuya and demands that he yield May up the following evening.

#5: Things are glum in Kazuya's apartment, until Kasumi talks sense to Kazuya and gives him tickets to the local amusement park. Kazuya and May spend their last afternoon together at the park, arriving home in time to meet Sara. In tears, May returns the ribbon to Kazuya. Sara takes May and leaves. Kazuya vows to develop his own version of the MAID system, so as to create May for himself. He is then visited by Cyber-X and they drink milk together. Cyber-X offers Kazuya a free cyberdoll of his choice to aid him in his research, and Kazuya asks for May back. After Cyber-X leaves, Kazuya sits waiting, holding the ribbon, and when the doorbell eventually rings he runs to the door, grabs the box and tears it open but only finds a cable inside. Stunned, disappointed, dejected, he drops the box and cable, and the ribbon falls as well. The person making the delivery picks up the ribbon and smiles at him and he realizes that it is May, now fullsized. He ties the ribbon onto a lock of her hair, and welcomes her back.

#6: The inevitable summer-festival episode which the rules say every romantic comedy must include. Kasumi, Kei, May, Rena, Kazuya and two local kids attend together. Everyone gets separated in the crowd, so there's a minor crisis as Kazuya hunts through the festival trying to find and bring everyone back together. In the course of it Kazuya encounters Sara, learns she is a cyberdoll, and yet is kind to her. She is affected strongly by that and gets a crush on him. Later, Kasumi sees Kazuya and May standing together under a tree during a rain squall, and becomes depressed. Nanbara meets full-sized May for the first time and becomes infatuated with her.

#7: CBD Mami appears out of nowhere and moves in, claiming that Kazuya's father had sent her. She starts manipulating everyone like a Jewish Mother. It's thoroughly annoying and terribly embarrassing. Among other things, Mami manipulates Kazuya into going to the store with May, and on the way home they have a picnic and slide on the grass. Kasumi becomes even more depressed.

#8: There's a typhoon coming, and everyone is trying to batten down the hatches. In particular, May has a plan to tie down the ladder so it doesn't blow away. In Kazuya's apartment, others start pressing Kazuya about the ladder and he's reticent; but when May asks him, he talks. Kasumi hits rock bottom, and runs away. At the urging of Kasumi's mother, Kazuya goes looking for her, and in turn Sara, May and Nanbara follow him without him realizing it. Kazuya finds Kasumi at a playground, and they talk. He is patient and kind, and she finally begins to realize that he has very strong feelings for her, too, which have not been changed by his relationship with May. We see a flashback showing their first meeting when he moved in, and view events from the period when they came to know one another and became close, and see how central the ladder was to it all. Sara and May eavesdrop, and May becomes determined to save the ladder at all costs for Kasumi. During the first part of the storm, Kazuya and Kasumi huddle in a corner half-way home, with Kazuya protecting Kasumi with his body, while May recruits Nanbara and the other CBDs to sit on the ladder in the rain and wind. Sara, Nanbara and Mami are blown away. As the eye of the storm passes, Kazuya and Kasumi also return, and Kasumi learns that May had overheard them in the park, and was protecting the ladder for her. After the storm, Kasumi and May have a long talk, and the darkness in Kasumi's heart is lifted.

#9: Commando-Z makes his appearance, confronting Nanbara and cheered by Sara. Mami is at her most manipulative, and waves two tickets for the amusement park in the air. She makes Kazuya the prize in a "dating-game" contest among Kasumi, Kei, May and Rena, but rigs the game so that May wins it -- and off they go, to reprise the previous time in episode #5, except that this time May is full sized. But there is a sad undertone to Mami's manipulation, and she mentions to May, "You haven't got much time left." While Kazuya and May are at the park, Sara collapses, then Rena and Kei also collapse. Finally Mami herself succumbs, and Kasumi tries to care for the four malfunctioning CBDs while Nanbara drives to the park to bring Kazuya and May back. Commando-Z reveals the truth about the time travel and about the virus that has been destroying the cyberdolls, and reveals that Kazuya himself was the creator of the MAID system and might well be the only person to truly understand it, and to have any chance of defeating the virus. Commando-Z also says that May is immune, though no one knows why, and incorrectly speculates that it is because the virus developed inside of her.

#10: Kazuya tries his best to understand what is going on but cannot figure out what to do. May suggests that since the virus doesn't affect her, that Kazuya try transferring it out of the other four cyberdolls and into her. When Commando-Z points out that there isn't enough storage room in her, she unlocks a secret storage area. Commando-Z says that Kazuya himself had originally included that area so that the cyberdolls could grow and change. In the end, seeing no other choice, they accept her plan. Kazuya needs more compute power to make it work and Nanbara steals a pile of computers from the college which he and Commando-Z set up in Kazuya's apartment and in Kasumi's room. Once ready, Kazuya initiates the transfer via the high-speed hand-link network amongst the five CBDs, controlling the process through May's USB interface. Once the virus is reassembled inside May, it reprises the virus from the first episode -- only this time it is stopped by the fortuitous appearance of Cyber-X. Rena, Kei, Sara and Mami wake up -- but May is found collapsed on the floor. Cyber-X reveals that the memory area which they'd used had been where May had stored all her memories of the time she'd been there, and those memories were all gone. May had sacrificed them in order to save the other CBDs. She wakes but is reset to factory defaults and remembers nothing. But the others talk to her, and tell her how they feel, and they all clasp hands -- and suddenly May gets tears in her eyes and calls Kazuya by name, and is back again. In a coda, there's a picnic.

So... how do we square all of this? What follows is mostly based on emails Greely and I exchanged, but I wrote it. I gave him a chance to read this before it was posted, and there parts of it he doesn't totally agree with.

Kazuya Saotome was a second year student in electrical engineering, and was fascinated by artificial intelligence. He was a major computer geek and had read a lot of the extant literature about the state of the art in AI. So why was it that he had never heard of Cyberdyne and never heard of Cyberdolls? Is it plausible that such a thing could exist without him having any inkling of them? It's like one of us being a major computer geek without ever having heard of Microsoft.

The reason he knew nothing about Cyberdyne or cyberdolls is that they didn't actually exist in his time. They came from the future.

About 200 years from now, Cyber-X (aka Takuya Saotome) is the chief engineer of Cyberdyne (in practice, if not in title) and business partner of Commando-Z (aka Totaro Nanbara), who is the head of Cyberdyne, but also an engineer of some considerable talent. They have a serious problem because cyberdolls are crashing and resetting themselves to factory defaults, and the customers are getting pissed off. Despite their best efforts they cannot figure out what is causing the crashes, and ultimately decide that only the original genius who created the core technology on which all cyberdolls are based can solve the problem. That genius was Kazuya Saotome, and the problem is that he had died more than a hundred years before. So they decide to travel in time to visit him. (Apparently inventing time travel was easier than debugging the system flaw.) This anime series covers the period of their visit to their past and shows us the result of their interference.

Cyber-X and Commando-Z made elaborate preparations before they left. In particular, they carefully prepared six cyberdolls (CBDs) to take with them.

The CBDs they brought were a 1/6th scale G-99 (which we come to know as "May"), a full-scale G-99 (which she is moved into later), a CF-3357 (Rena), an Af-444 (Kei), an Af-773 (Sara) and an Af-863 (Mami). "CF" seems to mean "child form factor" and "Af" seems to mean "Adult form factor". It's not clear what "G" means, but I suspect it means they're custom prototype units, because the two G-99's were customized to have USB interfaces even though USB was long obsolete.

All six were given custom programming. All knowledge of events and technologies beyond those of Kazuya's time were removed, and as a result, they operated comfortably in our era without anachronisms or mistakes. None of them were activated until after Cyber-X and Commando-Z had returned with them to the past, and none of them knew they were from the future. Presumably C-X/C-Z also brought other helpful things, like large amounts of gold bullion, and whatever equipment they needed to perform May's memory transfer.

The reason they brought two G-99's is because May had to be fullsized in the end so that she could interface with the other 4 CBDs during the virus cleaning sequence. My assumption is that a 1/6th scale unit doesn't have the hand-network capability built in. That seems to be confirmed by the observation that Kei had to use May's USB interface to access her memory in episode 4.

After C-X/C-Z arrived from the future, Cyber-X set up a server to simulate a Cyberdyne online ordering system and began activating all the cyberdolls except for the full-sized G-99. Once activated, Mami was partially briefed, and was the only cyberdoll who knew about the virus and knew the true purpose of the operation.

Meanwhile, Commando-Z sought out local hackers and offered them big money to make contact with Nanbara, so that Nanbara would "come up" with the idea of trying to give Kazuya a computer virus (by having that idea fed to him). C-X/C-Z needed the virus to be written in such a way that it would make Kazuya's computer contact the fake Cyberdyne web site and "place an order" with it. The hackers wrote the virus for Nanbara, and they also included the payload Commando-Z required, which would make it "place the order".

But the hackers hired by Commando-Z crossed him up, and incorporated some extra stuff in the virus. Hackers willing to write those kinds of things are not, after all, the most honorable of people.

It was that extra stuff they included, without knowledge of either Commando-Z or Nanbara, which was the ultimate source of the virus which had been destroying all the cyberdolls.

Greely somewhat disagrees with this:

I don't think Commando-Z was part of the original time jump. I just can't imagine him managing to keep a low profile in the present for so long. I think he stayed in the future and waited until it was time to get things rolling.

If that's correct, then Cyber-X would have been a one-man show until Commando-Z finally showed up. But there's no way to tell.

After the virus was given to Nanbara, who gave it to Kazuya, Cyber-X monitored his web server, and when he saw the virus "place the order", he sent a signal to Sara. She had been instructed to wait outside Kazuya's apartment, and upon receiving the signal Sara delivered the 1/6th scale G-99 we come to know and love as "May". And thus began the sequence of events which C-X/C-Z hoped would lead to a solution to the problem of the cyberdoll virus. And thus also began the sequence of events which created the cyberdoll virus in the first place and infected every cyberdoll with it.

And that's why time travel is so much fun for science fiction writers.

[Greely suggested an alternate scenario: Nanbara found the hackers on his own and got them to produce the virus he gave to Kazuya. When C-X/C-Z traveled back in time, they found those hackers and bribed them to include code in the virus which would make it contact the phony web server. In this reading, it was still Nanbara's virus which ultimately caused all the grief in the CBDs in the future.]

If May had been full sized when she showed up in the first episode, Kazuya would probably have freaked even worse than he did, and Kasumi certainly would have gone ballistic. There was no chance that a full-sized May would have been permitted to stay in Kazuya's apartment, and even if she did she would not have developed the kind of relationships she did with the two humans. However, because she was small when she first appeared, Kasumi didn't think of her as competition, and both humans came to accept her, and then to really like her a lot.

It was therefore a key part of C-X/C-Z's plan for her to be 1/6th scale initially but to be transferred into a normal sized body later, and the best way to make that happen was to repossess her using the excuse that Kazuya hadn't paid for her. In fact they didn't care at all about payment; C-X/C-Z actually went to a lot of effort in order to plant May in Kazuya's apartment. But with the fiction of repossession, May's memories were transferred into the full-sized G-99 which had not yet been activated, after which the 1/6th scale G99 was deactivated. (Greely hypothesizes that the transfer process is destructive, so that once she was in the full sized unit there was nothing left of her in the small one. Even though we don't include episode 11 as canon, it's noteworthy that after May accidentally transferred herself into the five mini-Mays, the full-sized May shut down.)

Once May had been transferred into the full-sized G-99, Cyber-X visited Kazuya and outright gave May back to him with no strings attached, contriving an explanation that Kazuya found acceptable, or at least an explanation that Kazuya really wanted to believe even though it was far-fetched. [Kazuya really isn't very worldly, and tends to accept what others say uncritically, which is also why he ran Nanbara's program and set off the virus.]

Cyber-X went to Kazuya's apartment because he needed to return May to Kazuya in the full-sized body, but he had to improvise the actual conversation so that Kazuya wouldn't smell a rat (or a gift-horse). Cyber-X pulled it off, but he almost blew it a couple of times. He almost gave the game away when Kazuya asked for his name, but caught himself before saying "Saotome Takuya", which would have raised far too many of the wrong kinds of questions. There were other ways in which that conversation didn't ring true, but Kazuya in general is a bit oblivious, and was so eager to get May back that he didn't notice.

One of the worst problems in Cyber-X's story was this:

Kazuya: "What happens to cyberdolls you repossess?"
Cyber-X: "They're taken to the maintenance factory for a service check and then stored until a new order is received."
Kazuya, emphatically: "What about their memories?!"
Cyber-X: "They're kept intact. We reset them when the new order comes in."

That doesn't make any sense. A repossessed unit would be reconditioned to factory defaults in every way and then be returned to normal stock, which would mean that the memories would be reset immediately. Cyber-X had no choice, however; he had to give that answer because he had to explain why May's memories would still be intact once she returned, which the plan required.

The worst problem in Cyber-X's performance showed up when Kazuya stopped at the end and said, "Look... I don't have the money to pay for this." Cyber-X thinks for a moment and then answers, "Then how about this? We'll say this is in return for the milk you gave me before."

Kazuya was too eager to believe to notice just how false that sounded. It's blatantly obvious that Cyber-X was doing everything he could to get May back into that apartment.

The entire plan required pulling a major con on Kazuya, and he never really realized just how much he was being manipulated. That said, it has to be pointed out that one consequence of that con was to make Kazuya's life richer and more rewarding in the long run in many ways. But to get to that point, Cyber-X and Commando-Z jerked Kazuya around mightily for a few weeks.

What Kazuya was trying to do in his Project Doraemon is "non-trivial" (as engineers put it), and so he had a lot of setbacks. In fact, though he apparently didn't realize it, no one had ever succeeded up to his time in what he was trying to do, so it's hardly surprising that it was slow going.

To begin with, "Project Doraemon" was something he did for school and as a hobby, and given the difficulty of the problem, Kazuya might have lost heart and given up. But after May came into his life, showed him that what he wanted to do was possible, and then was repossessed leaving a big lonely hole, he got serious about Project Doraemon because he decided he wanted to make his own cyberdoll. At that point, it was no longer a hobby; it had become a life quest for him. That was one of the objectives of the plan, and one of the reasons they gave May to him initially.

When Sara rang his doorbell to make the delivery, Kazuya was still stunned from the experience with the virus, and then he was even more stunned by May after he opened her box. So he never noticed the strange fact that Cyberdyne delivered May to him very late at night well outside normal business hours, and that Sara rang his doorbell exactly fifteen seconds after the virus had clicked "do" to complete the order on the phony Cyberdyne web site.

C-X/C-Z counted on that. They needed to get May into his hands while he was still stunned by the virus and off balance, because someone is more likely to accept a new weird thing when weird things are already happening. Had Kazuya been given a few hours to calm down before May was delivered, he would not have reacted the same to her and might have been less willing to let her stay. He might, for instance, have tried to locate the Cyberdyne corporation so he could return May to it, which would have been a disaster for C-X/C-Z.

But as it turned out, C-X-C/Z successfully placed May into Kazuya's home and Kasumi agreed to let her stay, and the plot was afoot.

Cyber-X kept May under surveillance, which we see several times early in the series. He wanted to make sure nothing untoward happened which might screw up the plan. So, for instance, when May left home to deliver Kasumi's bag to Kazuya, C-X kept track of where she was and put up signs to permit Kazuya to find her. And yet again, Kazuya was oblivious to the strangeness of it all, and followed the signs without really thinking much about why they might be there. He may be a genius but he's also more than a bit naive and gullible.

If Mami was mostly in on the truth, Sara was the most seriously duped. She thought she was a representative of a contemporary Cyberdyne Corporation, with her working in some sort of small branch office, but in fact she was all there was of it in any meaningful sense, which is why she made deliveries, did repossessions, and supervised other CBDs later. In fact, nearly everything about her situation as "representative" of Cyberdyne was bizarre, but she didn't know any better. (Likely she was programmed not to notice anything strange about it.)

So she thought that there was actually a commercial transaction involved in May's delivery, and genuinely thought she was supposed to repossess May because Kazuya hadn't paid the bill. And eventually she did so, just as she was supposed to.

There was more to the plan than just trying to solve the problem of the cyberdoll virus. Another part of the plan was to make sure that the Cyberdyne corporation actually came into existence, and to make sure that Cyber-X got born.

C-X/C-Z's plan began by planting May into Kazuya's life, but it also included planting Rena and Kei. Yet another thing Kazuya never really questioned was why Cyber-X promised to give him one Cyberdoll, but actually gave him three of them.

The fiction of repossession also permitted C-X/C-Z to introduce Rena and Kei into Kazuya's life before Sara finally repossessed May. Sara didn't realize that the repossession attempts by Rena and Kei were supposed to fail, or that C-X/C-Z actually wanted both Rena and Kei to run away and join Kazuya's household.

Why were there no attempts at all to try to "recapture" Rena and Kei, when Sara knew exactly where they were? Kazuya was oblivious to it all.

Why did Sara not try to capture Rena or Kei later in the series? Why did Sara even share meals with them in Kazuya's apartment without any comment at all about them having run away? It's because she was told not to try to get them back. Sara followed those orders and never questioned them; it was one of many odd orders she had been given that made no sense.

There were good reasons why Rena and Kei were also planted. The most important reason was to help light a fire under Kazuya and to steer in him the right direction when he finally does develop the MAID system.

It was mainly his experience with May that made him truly become committed to Project Doraemon, but part of what he ultimately imitated -- and, because of time travel, actually created since he was "imitating" the future results of his own work -- were the ways that the cyberdolls interacted with one another. He had to see that happening, which meant there needed to be other CBDs around. It was also critically important that May, Rena and Kei be different from one another, in configuration and capability and basic personality.

Certainly there was a rather dramatic contrast between Kei and Rena. The Af-444 model (Kei) is essentially a cyberdoll geek, albeit a stunningly gorgeous one, equipped with far more processing capacity than a normal cyberdoll. The CF-3357 model (Rena), on the other hand, is clearly designed to be sold as a fetish object to dirty old men, so the emphasis was on personality (as it were). The G-99 model (May), of course, was different again, especially the 1/6th scale unit. With constant exposure to them all, Kazuya would tend to think in terms of making the MAID system extremely versatile.

But that was not the only reason C-X/C-Z wanted them to be there. At the beginning of the series, Kazuya's ego was in pretty sad shape, and having Kei and May be nice to him and fuss over him was good for his spirit. More to the point, watching Kei and May fuss over Kazuya lit a fire under Kasumi and made her come to terms with her feelings about Kazuya and get serious about trying to make him get serious about her.

Kazuya moved into that apartment just before entering college, and as the series began he completed his second year, meaning they had known each other for about 21 months. She's a year younger than he is, and in the first year she was still in high school. In the second year she began attending (a different) college. Their relationship developed over that time, and they became close, and she spent a lot of time hanging out in his apartment.

She had recently been teasing him bigtime, with short skirts and cleavage and panty-flashing and "accidental" falls into him, and like a lot of girls that age, she got a charge out of his reaction to it. She deliberately wore provocative clothing. It's noteworthy that in the first episode, when she was in his apartment and heard the mysterious neighbor, Shikishima, she ran back to her room to change clothes before trying to catch Shikishima to collect his rent.

And Kazuya, in his lovably oblivious way, never wondered why it was that Kasumi wore those clothes for him but didn't want other men see her dressed that way.

Kasumi had become extremely fond of him and she cared a great deal about him. He is, after all, fundamentally a good man; he is honest and straightforward and kind and caring and intelligent, and he's even moderately good looking. He's not unflawed; she noted his impracticality, and recognized that he was going to need someone to look out for him. But that's what some geniuses are like, and his good points far outweighed his bad ones. Without really realizing it or acknowledging it to herself, she had long since fallen in love with him.

The closing song is hers, and it is sung by the voice actress that does her voice. The lyrics describe her confusion about her feelings:

When I'm with you, I blush till my ears turn red.
I wonder why that is...
When I'm alone with you, I can never seem to do anything right.
I become so tongue-tied I can't speak at all.
It's strange, don't you think? I think about it too much.
Is this love? I just can't accept that at all.
I can't be honest. I want so much to be.
Someday, perhaps, you'll tell me the true feelings that are in my heart.

She was just beginning to acknowledge it at the beginning of the series. As she wiped the ink off his face after failure #37, and teased him with her cleavage, she also said, Kazuya, Doraemon's all well and good, but isn't it time you made Shizuka-chan? I know! The most efficient plan is to make me Shizuka-chan. I didn't pick up that reference, but Greely explained it to me:

It's a cultural reference that apparently any Japanese would get. Kazuya calls his work with Ikariya "Project Doraemon" as a reference to the Doraemon cartoon, which features a robot cat from the future who was sent back to be a young boy's companion. The series is as well-known in their culture as Peanuts is in ours, and Shizuka-chan is the little girl that the hero is destined to marry."

It's like she's saying, 'Hey, Charlie Brown, isn't it time you stopped playing with Snoopy and started playing with the Little Red-Haired Girl. And I want to be your Little Red-Haired Girl.' If only he'd been paying attention...

But Kazuya was looking at her tits and the comment passed him right by, and she didn't end up being able to bring herself to repeat it. Even so, when she said that it was at least as much another way of teasing him as it was a "ha-ha-only-serious" suggestion.

Chigusa knew, though. Kasumi's mother Chigusa also fully approved of Kazuya. If she didn't she'd never have permitted that ladder to stay there between her daughter's bedroom and Kazuya's apartment.

In fact, it seems as if Kasumi and Kazuya were the last two to figure it out. Even Kazuya's younger sister knew. But Kasumi and Kazuya were still young, and there was no rush. However, since Kasumi was destined to be Cyber-X's great-to-the-nth grandmother, it was important to make sure she really did become that grandmother eventually.

If C-X/C-Z needed Kazuya to make Project Doraemon a life quest, then Cyber-X also needed Kasumi to make Kazuya a life quest, and at the beginning of the series she hadn't really done so yet. Having Kei and May there, and to a lesser extent also Rena, was at least as important as a way for C-X/C-Z to manipulate Kasumi as to manipulate Kazuya, and over the course of this series, she gets jerked around at least as much as he does.

I don't think May will be hurt when Kazuya and Kasumi get married. For one thing, she's just too damned sweet, and she loves Kasumi nearly as much as she loves Kazuya. She will adapt, and serve them both and love them both, and be happy because they make each other happy. Kasumi will have to get used to sharing Kazuya with May, at least a little bit, but it will be fine -- mostly because Kazuya's relationship with May will remain platonic. He has a strong sense of honor and propriety, and he's also inhibited, so Kasumi will be the first and only woman he'll ever kiss, let alone sleep with. And May will be able to help take care of Kasumi and Kazuya's babies, of which we know there will be at least one. May can't have babies herself – cyberdolls are not that good a simulation of humanity – so this is the only way she'll be able to care for Kazuya's children.

Eventually Kazuya will succeed and produce a cyberdoll, but only because he really became committed to doing so in episode 5. But initially he used Ikariya as a testbed for his designs; that future cyberdoll will be version 2.

Sometime after the series, Kazuya and Nanbara will found the Cyberdyne Corporation, using Nanbara's money and Kazuya's genius. Nanbara will run it, because he will insist on doing so, and because Kazuya is not suited to doing so and not interested anyway. Kazuya will continue to work on engineering, which is what he most wants to do. They'll be "partners" but Nanbara will likely cheat Kazuya somewhat and become much more rich and famous -- and Kazuya won't care, because those things are not important to him.

Nanbara is also changed by the events of this series, and I'm not sure he'll be as poisonous when the time comes as he seems to be at the beginning. C-X/C-Z also jerk him around a bit. So he won't totally shaft Kazuya.

In Nanbara's rap song which we hear in episode 1 and again in episode 10, he said, "Since I was born, my dream has been to head a huge company that runs the world! But the shallow dream of my rival Saotome has been..." and both times, Kazuya finished it by saying, "...to build Doraemon!" And thus will a partnership be formed, because in the Cyberdyne Corporation they'll both fulfill their dreams. But that will only happen if C-X/C-Z's plan comes off.

What Kazuya didn't know -- and the CBDs also didn't know, was that in a sense Ikariya was their grandfather. For personal reasons which were probably somewhat whimsical, Kazuya chose the form factor of a squid for his prototype development effort, but that's just packaging. (It's also the kind of thing that engineers do -- take my word for it.) But the core of the design was the electronics and the programming which implemented speech recognition and synthesis, vision, motion, and the foundations of cognition, and those parts of Ikariya ended up being the basis for the equivalent parts which eventually appear in all CBDs, even though their technology is drastically improved. That core was the "MAID System", which Kei was the first to describe to Kazuya in episode 4, which he vowed to "duplicate" in episode 5, and which Commando-Z ultimately revealed as being Kazuya's creation in episode 9.

Ikariya's source code was on Kazuya's PC when the virus ran, and the virus embedded itself in that source code. It became part of the MAID system, and was inherited by all cyberdolls.

Why did the virus not destroy Ikariya, and why was May immune? What did it do to all the other cyberdolls? That was pretty hard to rationalize. This is what we came up with.

It has to do with the "secret system", and the "free blank memory data space". The secret system was the ultimate achievement of Kazuya's genius. It was a mechanism which permitted cyberdolls to develop and change, to grow personalities. It was a potential that all cyberdolls had, but it responded to the cyberdoll's environment and not all cyberdolls used it very heavily.

In episode 10, Sara remembered Kazuya saying to her, "It doesn't matter if you're a human or a cyberdoll when you help people." And Cyber-X reacted, "How typical of Mr. Kazuya. He honestly views them not as servants but as equals to accept, with feelings in their hearts that should be respected. The black box of the MAID system, the free blank memory data space, was included so that they'd have room to develop those feelings."

Essentially, if a cyberdoll was treated as a person then she would become a person. Being treated that way unlocked and activated the secret system and permitted access to the free blank memory data space. But the virus had insinuated itself into the secret system and it also activated.

Ikariya was not affected by the virus because he didn't contain a full implementation of the secret system. It was in there, but the things it attacked were not.

In the CBDs, though, there was a race.The virus developed at a steady rate once activated, but the secret system development was a function of quantity and kind of external stimulus. If the secret system developed far enough, fast enough, it would reach a point where it too was no longer vulnerable, but no cyberdoll before May had won that race.

May was the only cyberdoll who won the race, and that was because she spent more time with Kazuya than any other cyberdoll during the critical period of vulnerability. Because he treated her as a person rather than as a servant, her personality and feelings developed very rapidly, and she won the race with the virus.

The other cyberdolls we see in the series, and the countless others we see in symbolic images from the future, were not given the proper stimulus in great enough quantity, and so they developed too slowly and the virus won, at which point it wiped out everything.

Commando-Z said that May was immune, but in fact she was not. By artificially moving the virus into her and displacing her memories in that area, in fact the virus did to her what it had done to countless other CBDs: wiped her out, forcing a reset and reinitialization.

But before that happened, it gave them another chance at the virus. Whoever it was that wrote it had included a mechanism permitting it to be deactivated, by typing the words to Nanbara's rap song as he spoke. Likely that was Nanbara's own idea, since it was a way of taunting Kazuya, and the first time Kazuya wasn't fast enough to keep up. The second time, Cyber-X appeared at the last moment and did keep up, and the virus deactivated itself and innoculated everything within reach.

In particular, it removed itself from Ikariya's source code, meaning that the other four CBDs were, as Greely put it, "retroactively never infected". So they woke up.

But May was down, and when she woke she didn't recognize Kazuya. Cyber-X essentially declared that she had died: all her memories had been destroyed.

He was wrong. The most important question remaining is to explain how May got her memories back in the tenth episode. Because in fact she did.

In the first episode, there's what seems like a throwaway comic moment, but it is much more important than it seems. May had been calling Kazuya "-sama", and it embarassed him and he asked her to stop. So she ran through a predefined list of alternatives, including "Kazuya-dono" and "Mister Kazuya", and he finally told her, "Just call me Kazuya-san, OK?" She readily agreed, and did call him that for the rest of the series.

That was not the default case, nor the second nor the third; it was among her choices but well down the list.

After the virus was deactivated, and May had collapsed on the ground, when she woke up she did not know Kazuya, and Cyber-X said that she had been reset to factory defaults. May then went through the license agreement with Kazuya, as she was programmed to do, while everyone else waited outside and mourned her death.

Once May finished reciting the license, Kazuya struggled for words, but got interrupted when the others all came in, and we watched each speak to her and lay their hand on hers, forming eventually quite a pile of hands.

During that, May's behavior started to change, and at the end she sheds tears (which G-99 units are not programmed to do) and she said, "Kazuya-san". The "-san" ending was not her default mode when addressing her owner. Even more important, he had not yet told her that his name was Kazuya, and no one else called him "Kazuya" in her hearing before she called him "Kazuya-san". So how did she know to call him that?

There's really only one way to interpret that. Despite what Cyber-X had said, May's memories were back. But if that the storage area which had held those memories had been wiped, how did she get them back?

Our best guess is that during the time when Kazuya was transferring the virus out of the other four CBDs into May, May was also transferring her memories into the other four CBDs to back them up.

Here are some emails we exchanged when we worked this out, starting with me:

Tonight I got nostalgic and watched it again. The end of episode 10, in particular; and I had another idea about it.

In order to defeat the virus, they decided to move it all into May. (That never totally made sense, but let it go.) She was the one to suggest that, and volunteered the use of her "hidden" memory area. Of course, that's where she had stored all her memories and all the extra programming she herself had spontaneously created that made her more than what she had been when she left the factory, and afterwards that was all wiped.

But...

They were dealing with four CBDs which were malfunctioning and unconscious, and one working unit. Kazuya interfaced to the working unit -- May -- through a low speed line and she established a high-speed interface with the other four. What Kazuya was doing was to remotely control Kei, Rena, Mami and Sara at the level of their OS (the MAID system) to transfer the harmful information out of them.

And when it started working, we saw a graphical representation of pieces of the virus coming into May's memory area, and we also saw pieces of her memory peeling off and flying away.

But they were in pieces, which seemed to be coherent and self-contained. They didn't dissolve in a shower of bits; they seemed to be packaged, and they seemed to be going somewhere.

May was not malfunctioning. What if she backed herself up into the other four CBDs? Even as she transmitted Kazuya's commands to the other four and accepted the viral data from them, what if she was also copying her own memories into them? Each would get part of her. (There was not enough excess storage capacity for each to get the full dataset.)

For her it would be a risk, of course. There was no guarantee that the data would be restored. And she had to manage it in a way that it didn't end up screwing up the others. That meant she had to package the data in such a way that they could not access it, because if they did access it then it would become part of their memories and they'd become schizoid. So she probably had to encrypt the data.

Perhaps there was no way to copy everything even into four destination CBDs; there may not have been room. (Not even when one of them was Kei, a top-drawer computational unit which would be presumed to have far more storage than the others.) But she could copy the most essential parts of what was in that space into the others: the extended code which began the process of her behavior modification, her basic feelings about everyone she knew, and her memories of the most important events which had happened to her.

After the virus had been defeated, May was reset to her factory state. But when all the others came into the room, and began that "laying on hands" sequence, the first few to do it were all CBDs. There may have been networking going on, especially considering what they were all thinking and talking about at the time. May herself, in factory-reset state, would not know that there was important data out there, but pre-death May may have set up the fragments of herself that she backed up so that they would be readily accessible and would bootstrap themselves back into her. I think that's what happened.

Evidence? (Or at least suggestive elements in that episode?)

Sitting on the stairs outside, Mami says: "May treasured the memories she acquired since meeting Kazuya. She wouldn't let them go... she wouldn't let them be erased... Those warm memories she had..."

May and Kazuya sitting inside after May goes through the license agreement spiel, and she refers to him as "Master". She doesn't use his name; it isn't "Kazuya-sama"; it's a generic term of some kind.

Then the others barge in, and start laying on hands, in this order: Reyna, Ikariya, Kei, Sara, Nanbara, Mami, Kasumi, and then Kazuya.

I don't think Ikariya's tentacle or Nanbara's hand would prevent the networking from happening. If three human hands had been in between two CBD hands, that would have been too much, but Kasumi and Kazuya are last, outside the others.

The first change in May's behavior begins after Kasumi speaks. All five CBDs are already networked, and Kasumi talks about memories and forming wonderful new ones.

And for the first time, May's behavior diverges from the programmed behavior of a unit of her type. May says, "Wonderful memories" and sounds a bit distracted; I think that the phrase "Wonderful memories" was one of the access keys pre-death May had set up, and that's the point where the first bootstrapping begins. The primary job of the bootstrap would have been to open up and format the spare memory area, and then to locate other backup sets to download and unpack into it.

Kazuya starts to speak. Then we get a long flashback of some of the most important moments that pre-death May would definitely have treasured most. At first they're short and in black-and-white but color gradually fades back in and they get more and more vivid. What we're seeing is datasets being downloaded and unpacked. Some of them contain memories, but others contain more code, particularly the code which had developed to give her emotions. The memories come into color as she begins to feel them rather than just access them.

And once the flashback is over, she gets tears in her eyes -- something which is impossible for a newly-initialized CBD of her model. (Which we know because Kei said so in episode 4.) May also begins to demonstrate clear emotions. Her behavior is now completely outside the norm for a unit of her type.

But the process continues. All the critical datasets may have been unpacked, but she has to organize it all, link the memories together again, reconnect the code fragments, integrate code and memory, and then start running the result. What we then see is a series of brief graphics flashes of her ribbon being tied, interspersed with Kazuya as he continues to speak to her. And by the end, she calls him "Kazuya-san" and, quite frankly, acts and sounds just like she did before she died. (There's no reason she would call him "-san" otherwise; it's something he requested of the previous May, but had not gotten to with the new one.) And we get one more ribbon sequence, only this one completes and pans back to a full image of May as she was, smiling, and spinning in a virtual space. That means she's back. The process is complete; she's been successfully restored from backup.

Backing herself up into the other four CBDs was the only chance she had; the data link to Kazuya's antique computers (technology 200 years earlier than the equipment inside the CBDs) was far too slow. Only the data link to the other CBDs had the bandwidth to handle it, and they were the only systems available to May which had even remotely enough capacity to hold what she needed to save.

I think she worked it all out before she spoke up and suggested that Kazuya move the virus into her. Why didn't she mention what she had planned? Because it would have forced her to reveal that the "hidden" area inside her wasn't actually empty, and there was too great a chance that Kazuya would refuse to do it. May loved the other CBDs and wanted to save them, and had pretty much concluded that this was the only way it could be done.

However, May didn't have any intention of unconditionally sacrificing herself; part of why she was upbeat and positive because she knew she had a chance of surviving, at least in the long term. Nonetheless, she had to die as an inherent part of the process of saving all the other CBDs. She had to experience the process of watching her memories be destroyed, and of losing her feelings for all the others. And she suffered because of it; we saw it happen. Once that was complete, she truly was "dead"; the computational unit reset to factory settings, and didn't even remember the pain of dying.

Her plan for survival was no sure thing, of course. There was no guarantee that she'd be restored. But she set things up so that there was a good chance of it happening, sooner or later. I'm not sure I think it would have actually required another five-way network, but it would have required her eventually to network with each of the other four CBDs, possibly more than once. Perhaps the bootstrap code she set up would be stored fully in each of the other four, but each of them would also carry unique backup sets not duplicated in any of the others.

However, as it turned out, restoration from backup happened far faster than anyone had any right to expect, because of the "laying on hands" sequence; all the data was available immediately, and she got given the right access keys to kick the process off. As a result, she was restored from backup in about two minutes. For something that complicated, that's blazingly fast.

And why didn't any of the other CBDs know what she'd done? Because the data was encrypted, to prevent it from screwing them up. Nonetheless, I think there may have been a subliminal impression in them regarding what she'd done, which is why Mami ends up saying what she did. But there were limits to how much of that kind of thing May could do. For one thing, there was a lot going on. For another, her computational unit was far from top-drawer; Cyber-X said so in episode 5. The ideal case would have been for her to figure out how to implant a specific memory about what she'd done in each of the other four so that they'd wake afterwards and know they held some of her and had to give it back. Had it been Kei rather than May, that's what would have been done. But May didn't have that ability, and if she screwed it up, she could end up badly harming or outright killing the others. She couldn't take that chance.

So about the only thing they might have been aware of was that there seemed to be blocks of data in them that they couldn't access, the origin of which was mysterious. (It was transferred into them while they were unconscious, of course.)

Greely responded:

> In order to defeat the virus, they decided to move it all into May.
> (That never totally made sense, but let it go.)

Among other things, if he'd actually removed it, they'd have gotten better. It makes more sense if she's just transferring a copy to a working system that he can reach.

> Even as she transmitted Kazuya's commands to the other four and
> accepted the viral data from them, what if she was also copying her
> own memories into them? Each would get part of her.

Which they should have had room for, since if their own memories were *full*, they'd lose the ability to grow further.

> That meant she had to package the data in such a way that they
> could not access it, because if they did access it then it would
> become part of their memories and they'd become schizoid. So she
> probably had to encrypt the data.

I think that gives her too much credit for planning. Putting the data somewhere in their systems is sufficient, if it's stored in currently unused space. The risk was that one of the other CBDs wouldn't link up with her before their OS chose to use those blocks to store new experiences.

The data could also have been packaged up the same way that they transfer information about their favorite tv show. That wouldn't have become a personal experience, and it matches up with the visuals as May recovers.

> May and Kazuya sitting inside after May goes through the license
> agreement spiel, and she refers to him as "Master". She doesn't
> use his name; it isn't "Kazuya-sama"; it's a generic term of some
> kind.

Steel Angel Kurumi uses the same word. I'm pretty sure it's goshujin-sama, which appears to lie somewhere between husband and master in meaning (which sounds about right for traditional Japanese sex roles).

And yes, calling him Kazuya-SAN has to be recovered memory. That suffix was way down the list in her original interview.

> And once the flashback is over, she gets tears in her eyes --
> something which is impossible for a newly-initialized CBD of her
> model.

Unheard of, in fact, which is what really solidifies Kei's interest in the subject. [which leads one to wonder why the bodies were built to be capable of crying in the first place, but that gets us back into all the problems with exactly how human their bodies are...]

Me, again:

It can't be stashed in unused space and not labeled, because there would be no way to access it. If May herself somehow retained info about where it had been stored in the others, then it would be OK to do that. But given that May herself was wiped in the crisis, and expected to be completely reset (or at least expected that there was a good chance of it happening), how would the newly-reset May access those memories in the others given that their data structures all showed them as being "unused"? May could only reach that data if the data stored in the others was recognized by the others as being accessible.

The entire point was that the data in the others had to be tagged as "used" but also tagged in a way which prevented the others from taking a look inside.

May's problem going in was to figure out how a cleanly reset May could access those memories without anyone else really doing so.

The big difficult is the first transfer: how to access the bootstrap and get it back into May. What's needed is an access key of some kind which May herself had a good chance of encountering, but which the others were unlikely to encounter. If they did, they'd be able to open those lockboxes themselves. But if May never ran into it, she would not be able to, and the data would be lost forever.

Which is why it actually makes sense that it was Kasumi's comments which kicked it all off. Kasumi had already talked to May (on the roof, after the typhoon) about how precious memories were, and if May got wiped there was a major chance she'd talk to May again about those things. But that was not the kind of thing Kasumi was as likely to discuss with any of the other CBDs in those terms. That's why it makes sense that May would make the access key be Kasumi talking about wonderful memories, say, with some sort of specificity like "talking directly to me and not overheard talking to someone else" so that the other CBDs overhearing it would not treat it the same.

All other things being equal, May would probably rather have used Kazuya as the access key, but the problem was that there wasn't anything like that she could be sure he'd say to her but not to any of the others.

It occurs to me that another way to keep those blocks away from the others is the timestamp. They'd be tagged as having been created while the other CBDs were out cold; that might conceivably cause them to treat such blocks as "not mine" -- while also making them wonder where they came from. It would be hard to escape the suspicion that May had put them there, which is what Mami begins to speculate about.

It's all rationalization, of course, but I think it makes about as much sense as the rest of the explanation we came up with. And it's the only thing which explains how she got emotional so fast, and how she once again started referring to him as "Kazuya-san", and how she seems just like she had been at the picnic just a couple of weeks later.

The memories we saw in flashback could not have come directly from any of the other CBDs, because the last ones were of her and Kazuya that very afternoon at the park, holding onto his arm, just seconds before Nanbara showed up. None of the other CBDs witnessed that. They could not; they were all already out cold when it happened. Those memories could only have been May's own, stashed in the others.

The reason I don't like your idea of it as "TV-show data" is because we have to explain why none of the other CBDs exclaimed, upon waking up and then learning that May's memories had been reset, "Hey, I've got some of her memories in me. How about you, other CBDs? Let's give them back to her."

That would have been cool, too, but it isn't how it happened. It's not enough just that those memories don't screw the others up; we have to explain why they didn't even recognize them for what they were.

And Greely:

Here's my problem: you've come up with a clever and technically sophisticated method of resurrecting a cyberdoll. Unfortunately, May herself is neither clever nor technically sophisticated. She's the sort of anime heroine described as "cute as a button, dumb as a post".

She's certainly aware of her origin as an artificial life form, and knows that she has programming, memory storage, and probably other things like the repair nanobots, but I see no reason to believe that she has any understanding of how those things work, certainly not at the level required to invent a distributed encrypted backup system with subliminal triggering.

Kei could have done it, if she'd been available and seen the need, but she was busy dying.

I think the only one who could have done it was Kazuya, and he did it after May was brought back. Consider that when Kazuya and Cyber-X destroyed the virus, it affected all of the cyberdolls, even the ones in the future. That only makes sense if, instead of being cured, they were retroactively never infected.

So, I think that Kazuya responded to the trauma of losing May by becoming determined to prevent such a loss in the future, not realizing that this new subsystem would be incorporated into May and allow her to save herself.

One more reason to avoid using time-travel as part of your plot. :-)

Whether it was May herself who came up with the backup mechanism or Kazuya who later did and incorporated it into the MAID system little matters; the point is that it worked, and May actually didn't die after all.

And so they all live happily ever after, with Nanbara running Cyberdyne, Kazuya designing cyberdolls, Kasumi taking care of him and having his babies, and May taking care of them both and helping raise the kids.

Ultimately, I think Greely actually summarized this whole business the best: I think that Steven and I have put far more thought into explaining the ending than the writers did creating it in the first place, and we’re still arguing over some of the fine points. That we’re willing to do so argues for the basic quality of the show; that we have to points to a problem in the writing.

Update 20040430: If Mami and May are both designed to be maids, then why is it that May seems to have so much difficulty with the basic skills involved, while Mami is hypercompetent in those areas? And why is there such a difference in their personalities? I think that the reason is that Mami was designed to be a housemaid, whereas May was designed to be a nursemaid. Both of those roles are domestic, and they're both referred to as "maids", but they're really quite different jobs and demand quite different skills. Mami unquestionably could change a diaper, but I wonder how good she'd be at comforting a crying child, or telling that child stories and making her laugh? That is the kind of thing I suspect May would excel at.

Beginning in episode 6, once she's full sized and can go out on her own, she almost immediately starts bonding with the neighborhood kids, and vice versa. And though episode 11 is not canon, once the five mini-Mays transfer their memories back into the full-sized body, May is shown caring for the baby, and soothing Rena's feelings. That's her true vocation, and it shows through clearly.