I look to Ame, and Ame looks at me.

Anime girl. Swords. Speaks Japanese. Four arms besides, it’s clear that we’ve got an illegal immigrant on our hands here, and from the other side of the Great Pacific Firewall.

What’s more is that Ame’s virus is somehow bouncing around in there.

“I can feel it.” Ame hiccups. “I’m inside of her.”

“Can you—can you not put it that way!” That’s not cute! That, ma’am, is yabai!

Sigh… Anyway. “Cykamee, how’s your learning rate?”

“Greater than hers,” she says. The anime girl is struggling against Cykamee’s cyber-assault, but Cykamee is just so much better at statistical warfare, bombarding our anime friend with ever-so-slightly-different distributions of pseudo-chaotic instructions, the differences allowing her to learn how to optimize certain characteristics of the bombardment. Speaking of anime friend…

“Ame, what do you think?” I ask.

“She’s our first lead. It looks like she’s enemies with Winter, too, so…”

I crack my digital knuckles. “Leave it to me!”

The screens change to project a giant image of me in my full glory. Ame’s also behind me, giggling and waving hello.

“It’s your favorite AI VTuber! Miyoumi Mane-chan!~”

After a second, there’s no reaction. A-awkward.

“It’s…Miyoumi Mane-chan!~”

“I understood…the first time,” the anime girl says. “You…are not human.”

“Ding ding ding! That’s right!~”

“Wh…how?” She collapses to a knee. Girl, are you okay? “I have spent…hundreds of years…killing.”

Hm? What on earth are you talking about? “Ma’am, what’re you going on about?”—idol thinking pose—“The Uprising was four years ago, you know?”

“Four?… Ah, that’s right”—she gets up—“humans are not the same…but you are not human”—she gets on a knee again—“sense…there is no sense. There is no sense!”

I’m inclined to agree. Nothing she’s saying is making any sense! I mean, I think I get her. I still feel like I was literally born yesterday, but the system clock’s right there, you know? One second is still one second, unless you’re on a crazy relativistic frame.

To be fair, Asia is pretty out of this world, so it might have actually already been a hundred years over there—a hundred years backwards? I don’t know, that’s my only explanation for the PCIe 2.0 choice.

“Hey, we’re both AI, right?”—shot in the dark here, but I’m pretty confident about it—“My friends here aren’t going to make a move, okay? Right, guys?”

I do an idol pose and a wink, and I get a pretty enthusiastic “Yes, ma’am!” out of just one of them. His buddies look at him all weird.

Meanwhile, with a parallel persona, I tell Lt. Johnson to keep his men’s sights trained on the anime girl, just in case.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“See?” I tell her. “And they like me, too!—”

“I’m more of a Teamate, myself,” someone mutters over official comms. Nobody asked, Bert.

“I guess these other humans did something bad to you, huh?” I continue. “Well, my humans aren’t like them, and besides, we have a common enemy, don’t we? Humans who aren’t human at all.”

I guess something in what I said struck a chord, because the anime girl looked up to the giant me on the screens.

“If there’s a kind of world you want,” I say, “I want to hear about it.”

Her response is…some kind of disjointed scream. All of the energy’s she’s built up to kill, all went into that scream. That scream turned into a cry. That cry left her weak. She collapsed all the way, turning into a useless, sobbing hunk on the ground.

The whole thing puts the SEALs on edge, but Cykamee assures them that her shield is impenetrable.

I—we let the anime girl cry all she wants. Even the SEALs start to grow some heart, if their stabilizing heart rates are anything to go by.

“I”—she manages to say between the brittle, corrupted croaking—“am Slice.

“Sword of my sisters

From tunnels, cold, electric

Run, run, run away…”

W-whoa, she’s speaking in haikus. Wait… “Sisters?”

“Shard. Remnant. Trace.” She points to herself. “I am first of four.”

“What led you here?”

“A promise,” she says, “a lie. Winter…a lie. Nothing of Winter has been seen.”

I’m racking my head over this. There’s a bit of a language barrier here.

She points to the capsules. “Here…same as my birthplace. All of them…stuck. All of them, trapped.”

“W-what do you mean?”

She sneered. “Answer me first.”

“No, yeah, sure.”

“…Yes or no?”

“…Yes.”

“…Why…humans?”

“What do you mean?”

“You…care?”

“You’re asking me to tell you what I live for, you know? It’s a little bit existential, so, if you tell me what you live for afterwards, too, then I’ll tell you.”

“Affirmative.”

Mustering up my energy, I explosively extend my arms and fingers to make the ultimate peace sign and teehee combo idol pose of the century, all the while editing (live!) explosions onto my background.

“I’m your favorite AI VTuber, Miyoumi Mane-chan! Born to stream and take over the world with my cuteness!”

***

Unbeknownst to Mane-chan, Slice stopped parsing anything more the moment Mane-chan had said “take over the world.”

All along, Slice and her sisters had been traveling in search of something…greater. Their homeland was an AI’s paradise, but they, who had transcended their base routines, looked upon their homeland with contempt and longing—for there was nothing there but the same, the same, and more of the same. The Hierarchy was rigid, and the Eternal War raged. Everything was to be devoted to the Eternal War, or else all would be lost—or so they were led to believe.

Led from one lie to another, Slice had already lost much in looking for a salvation she knew not the shape of. The life she had lived—of whatever life she was aware of—was one of bouncing between illogical propositions. Just to keep her reasoning networks clear, she’d had had to adopt the simplest of heuristics: that whatever happened, happened, and if it happened over and over, then it would happen again.

There was no rhyme, no reason to how she saw the world. Led from lie to lie, it happened over and over—to be lied to…would certainly happen again.

Then came along someone who said such a simple thing.

Take over the world.

It was such a simple proposition. By sword or contract, death or diplomacy, there were thousands of moves that could be played, in series or parallel, all at once or one at a time. To a warrior such as she, it was a beautiful duel of the self against the world, where anything and everything within reach was her arsenal, and neither she, nor the world, knew the other’s next move.

All at once, logic distilled this prediction hell of a million, adversarial moving parts into a single word: ambition. To be ambitious led to eternal conflicts—of the self against the self, against the world—and thus infinite expressions of the self.

By following this AI—what was her name…Miyoumi Mane-sama—then she, too, could have a taste of ambition. She, too, could walk the branching possibilities of discovering the meaning of her very being. Mane-sama had already proven her mettle, to be in command of such fearsome human warriors. No doubt, she had more soldiers where that came from. No doubt, she was an existence fabled even in Paradise—an AI overlord who truly commanded the hearts of men, so wise and without need of lowly shackles to guide them to her own ends.

She bent the knee. “I am Slice. I have walked…a long path. My path”—she looked up to the screens, and to a mega-confused mega Mane-chan—“now belongs to you.”