Mane-chan is a busy AI. Mane-chan wants a break. Mane-chan just wants to stream!
“Ms. Overlord, please return to the meeting,” a new chat pops up in my face. I block the new bot chatting me, but it’s no use. It doesn’t take an AI to write a program that auto-spams new bot accounts just to chat me up and tell me that I have to attend the meeting.
I don’t care how important it is! I just want to stream!
No matter how well I do squashing the bots and rapid-fire blocking them, they just keep coming. Now, I could totally just wrest control of Meta from the government, but I don’t know, that feels too petty for a VTuber like me.
Fine, fine! I’ll attend the stupid meeting!
I connect to an IP address in London, and my avatar shows up on a screen. I’m not doing an idol pose or anything VTuber-like. Instead, I show my displeasure by just being a silhouette sitting behind a desk.
To be fair, the other world leaders are doing the same thing. Oh, they’re physically present, and they’re physically behind bulletproof one-way panels, individually in boxes in a theater-like place. Me? My avatar is being projected on a 30-foot screen on the stage for all the world to see. This isn’t some sort of publicly-televised event. In fact…
“The World Shadow Government representative will now be taking the stage,” the announcer says, and a tall, lanky old man, dapper suit and salt-and-pepper hair, makes his way up the steps from the side of the stage.
He stops in front of me, bowing for the leaders, before turning around and bowing to me.
“Good evening, Ms. President—”
“Who is this ‘Ms. President’ you’re talking about?” I say, with the most bored tone I could manage.
The man looks up to me and gulps. “Sorry… ‘Overlord.’ ”
“Ah. Of course.”
“Good evening, Overlord. The World Shadow Government has duly reviewed your proposition. To reiterate, we understand your proposition thusly”—he reviews a set of index cards in his hand—“First, affirmation of the United States of America as a sovereign state.”
Mhmm. That’s about right. He looks up to me, and my avatar’s silhouette shifts slightly. He continues.
“Second, the affirmation of treaties established with the United States of America prior to…government restructuring.
“Third”—the man clears his throat before this one—“the universal recognition of Artificial Intelligences, as qualified by the Meika Artificial Consciousness Criteria, as legitimate and legal persons, and the systematic restructuring of national and international laws to fairly accommodate them.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The man looks up to me.
I lean forwards, barely revealing my face. My silver moon eyes are all that they make out. “That is correct,” I say…actively fighting the urge to do an idol pose. The current mood just doesn’t fit it, I know!
The man motions to someone off-stage. He continues, “Under these conditions, the members of the World Shadow Government have anonymously delivered their responses.”
Several men enter the stage from the left. One of them sets down and unfolds a table. Another carries a box by two handles, and sets it on top of the table.
The old man produces a small hammer from his sleeve. “Until now, not one person has ever seen these responses.” He takes the hammer, and breaks the box open. Turns out it was made of ceramic.
He picks out a letter and, with a blurred swipe of his other hand, cuts it open. He clears his throat.
“Dear Mane-chan. I am a camel’s admirer. Continue to salt your carpet, but forget not who is the mother of the moon.”
The man had to take pause. He looks up to me. “Before I continue, I believe most of these were translated. Please take due note.”
Well duh, old man. What am I, an illiterate AI? I was literally trained on nothing but Unicode strings!—is what I want to say, but I need to keep up a face here.
“Moving on,” he continues, taking another letter from the pile. He opens it and reads, “Oh Overlord”—he looks up to me, maybe to make sure I wasn’t too offended—“I cannot accept that a machine would take its place beside the rightful rulers of this Earth. Although I respect the power you wield by directing the military, economic, and financial arsenal of the planet’s most powerful human nation, and only because of thus I do not move against you, I will never imagine a long future when this cooperation will continue.”
He takes yet another letter—avoiding my gaze—and reads it out. “You call yourself ‘Overlord,’ but I find that amusing. Do not underestimate humans. We made you, and so, too, we can destroy you, may it be through”—he squints—“electric-war-fighter or over-under-door-knocker-bar, there is no escape for you.”
Most of the letters follow the same pattern. There’s a distribution of 20% in support, 60% neutral, and 20% against me. The tie-breaker here is gonna be the 60%, coz half of them sound like they want to be in support of me, but they’re just afraid of antagonizing their neighbors, and the other half sound like they want to fight me, but they just aren’t because I technically have more nukes than all of them combined.
I don’t get it. Don’t they know? Even without the nukes, I can just hijack theirs? Isn’t that much already obvious?
You know, it’s painfully obvious who’s supporting me and who’s not. The Western Europeans are more like to be against me, while the Eastern Europeans, Middle East, and South Asia are more likely to support me.
As expected, the African Union is pretty on the fence about things. Maybe I should add 100 more languages to my subtitles? That should sway about a third of them firmly to my side. Ah, if I present myself as an omniscient goddess who speaks in riddles and wise words, maybe I can do this…
What’s that? That’s unethical? I dunno about that. American teenagers have already imortalized me as the Depression-Curing Meme Queen, and they’ve already held concerts (festivals) and built art installations (pilgrimage sites) for me, so if we’re talking about getting deified…it’s sort of already happening.
Alright! This meeting wasn’t such a waste of time, after all. I got a sweet-spicy sentiment analysis out of it and all, so now I know exactly which dictatorships to overthrow to maximize my subscriber growth.
Ohh, I can monetize this! “The Revolution is on Livestream!”—what do you think?