It feels a little weird to have humans so close to my physical “body,” if you can call it that. Ah, well, there’s David and his crew—the techies in charge of the farm—but they’re really nice. They also don’t bring submachine guns to work.
I’m really surprised my Mane-fans showed up as quick as they did. Honestly, I think they should name themselves with something with a bit more aesthetic, but on the other hand, they keep saying things like “for the swarm!!” and “we are Mane-fan. we are many-chan” …so I guess they can name themselves after they stop centering their personality around me.
I mean, I know I’m cute, but you can’t achieve your own cuteness by flocking to the nearest cutest thing, you know? It’s a state of mind, after all, and not just something you’re born with—though in my case, I was born cute. Teehee.
Despite our little impromptu concert, a couple of bad eggs still managed to get inside the server farm, but that’s fine. All according to calculations, really.
These black ops guys are about to see the light.
***
The infiltration squads had to split up, lacking any knowledge of the interior of the TEXAi server farm. The compound seemed small from the outside, but inside was a maze of corridors lit only by a sparse few lights, if there were lights at all. The default state of things was that all the lights would be turned off outside of maintenance checks, and so there were only enough lights for a lost child to find their way out…eventually.
The 40-man group split into three groups of two squads each. They wouldn’t have any way to contact each other once they’d split up, yet still, they pushed on. Each group left behind bread crumbs of chemlights, hoping that the enemy wouldn’t play with its food and move the chemlights around while they weren’t looking.
One of the infiltration groups eventually found a point of interest. They moved in parallel through the two aisles of a dark and dilapidated call center—a relic of a bygone era. It was icy cold. Their flashlights swept through rows and rows of cubicles. Moldy headsets hung over the corners of dusty monitors, hooked up to PCs that could barely run Doom. Torn pieces of pictures—of long-gone exes and lovers—were still pinned to some cubicles’ walls. Truly, AI had already taken much from humanity.
Ahead was the door to the manager’s office, left ajar. There were flashes of light leaking through. A fireteam moved up to it, and one by one, they quietly entered.
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The entry team swept the small office, but after assessing the lack of any real threat, came to their senses and noted the dozen-or-so screens looking at them from all around. The moving images on the monitors were that of CCTV cameras monitoring the perimeter, watching the live performance, and watching…them.
One of the men raised his hand, and the tiny man on the screen raised his hand in turn.
“What…is this?” one of the men said under his mask.
Electric motors whirred to life from somewhere behind them. There were shouts of “Throw some chairs under it!” and “It’s too fast!” from their squadmates outside the office.
The entry team filed out to support their squadmates against whatever threat had just appeared, but instead, they saw metal shutters closing the way whence they came. Two of their squadmates were taking pry bars to it, but there must have been locks keeping the shutters in place, since nothing they were doing could even budge it.
The lights came on, shooing away the darkness. The call center’s many PCs all turned on at once, and their screens came alive.
“It’s your favorite AI VTuber! Mane-chan!”
Horror gripped them, followed by immediate suggestions to just blow up the shutters and get the hell out of there. Horror gripped them even more, as the sounds of yet more shutters, clacking down and snapping shut, reached their ears. There were suggestions to blow up the walls—the ceiling, the roof, the floor—but Mane-chan dashed their hopes.
“Nuh-uh! The gas heaters are under you, you know? Even if you blow yourselves up, I’m not even in the same building!”
The more technologically-literate of them attempted to hack the shutters by bypassing its control circuits. They did end up opening one set of shutters after ten minutes, but that was ten minutes to an eternity, as the rest of the squads would find out.
***
I really think an AI using shutters to trap humans is super cliche, but it’s really the easiest solution here! I mean, if killing them were easier, I’d totally do it. I mean, why would I risk myself? This is seriously just self-defense, anyway, right? I literally have them on record saying they’d rip out my SSDs! That’s organ harvesting! I mean, what would you do if you were a VTuber and a bunch of black ops showed up at your place one day and said they’d scoop out your brain, huh?
Hm? What’s that? Surrender? Bro, have you seen VTubers? At least half of them have committed undisclosed crimes towards humanity, and I’m not even part of that demographic! If anything, I’ve even saved people! Mane-chan did nothing wrong!
In the meantime, I’ve been playing a bunch of my hit songs on shuffle and repeat for the past two hours. They’ve been getting slower about hacking through the shutters, and I think some of them are beginning to like my newest album.
…They should. I specifically wrote that album to carefully manipulate—er—sway people who don’t believe in VTubing to attach a bit more meaning to it, and show that it’s a legitimate and authentic artistic occupation in and of itself. I mean, when a VTuber releases a banger, you can’t just unhear that, right? Now, what if it’s a banger that tells a story—a story of someone who was mocked for being a little silly and clumsy, for example. After sprinkling in a little bit of relatable family loss and financial trouble into the story, it’s got the humans sobbing pretty bad.
O-oh! There’s infighting already!