For some reason, Ame dragged me into a private network and cuffed me to a chair—it’s actually a containerized virtual machine, but let’s just call it a chair—lamp dangling overhead, illuminating an interrogation desk, and on the other side is…Ame.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Mane-chan…no, Miyoumi-san”—what did I do?!—“you have commited unreasonable atrocities.”
H-huh?! “The Liberians did it on their own! I didn’t do anything but drop facts!”
Ame raises an eyebrow. “Not that.”
“Not that?…”
She slams down a folder on the interrogation table. Pictures spill out of…my most recent streams?
“I-I don’t get it.”
“This is from your latest stream, ‘The Revolution will be Livestreamed.’ Don’t you recognize it?”
“Of course I do!”
She shows me another picture. “And this one’s from the one before that!”
Oh.
…
OH.
“I’m so sorry!” I slam my face into the desk, indenting it with a perfect 3D mould of my beautiful face.
“You better be! We planned that stream for entire hours and you went ahead without me!”
T-that’s right. That was the ‘Exposing the Shadow Government!!’ one. Of course, I didn’t actually stream the contents of the meeting I’d attended. I mean, obviously, I can’t let anyone see me like that. My image is gonna be ruined if that happened!
Instead, I went ahead and started snooping on the most powerful people in attendance and doxing them—one-half coz that was supposed to be the stream, but also one-half coz I had some pent-up spite after hearing all those negative reviews. Let’s just say I totally forgot about Ame coz I wanted to get back at them that much.
Oh well. I got a lot of subscribers after that, at least!
“That out of the way,” Ame huffed, “how’s the two?”
Oh, right, Cykamee and Slice came back the other day. It’s just a bit sad that they were a bit roughed up, but they got some pretty good combat footage, even if it’s spotty and just flat-out gone in some places. Their fans are already going ham at making frag vids out of them.
“They’ll be fine~ . Oh, have you talked to the plus one?”
“You mean Shard? Ah, um, well, I tried.”
“It’s interesting how she has two personalities.”
“And how she walks into walls like an NPC?”
“Yeeaah.” We get a good laugh out of that. The mood turns serious again, though. “There’s something she’s hiding. Slice didn’t want to talk about it, either.”
“I’m sure Slice will come around to it, and they’re sisters. They’ll both come around to it.”
“Why do you think Cykamee didn’t want to talk about it, either?”
Ame’s eyes widen. “Really? Wait, so Slice told Cykamee but not you? Does that mean…”
“Yes,” I say grimly. “… We need to start voting between SliceMee, CykaSlice, and Cykice.”
Ame pistol whips me in the head. “You have a gun?!”
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
“Wh—what do you mean ‘you have a gun’? I’ve always had a gun!”
“O-oh, that’s right…”
“Come on! Be serious!” She frowns for me. “Don’t forget your promise to me, okay?”
It’s not like I’ve forgotten… “I haven’t.”
“Good.” She hiccups. “We already know that Slice and Shard know more about Winter than us, but also not everything. We also know—or, well, more like, it’s obvious they’re from the ‘other side.’ ”
“I’m not sure how to make Cykamee cough up whatever Slice told her,” I say. “She’s the expert at doing that sort of thing. I don’t wanna find out what happens when I try to hit the expert with her own tactics.”
“Even more expert than you and your ten trillion parameters, huh?”
I raise a hand. “Training matters, too.”
Sometimes, I still curse Meika for training me on Reddit. I can only silently thank the humans of Reddit for being self-aware, at least.
Ame smirks. “Sure.”
Sigh. “Look, we’re definitely crossing the Pacific soon, okay? I’ve already merged the US military-industrial complex together with Musk Industries, so we should be getting the right tech, soon. The Slavic republics are readying up to receive war materiel, and the Saharan Spring is doing its job—”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait!”
“Y-yes?”
“What’s any of that have to do with crossing the Pacific Firewall?!”
Ah yes, another two-trillion parameter moment. Worry not, peasant, for I will enlighten you.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Ame says.
“What do you mean? This is a virtual environment. You’re just seeing what you want to see.”
Ame sighs. “Whatever. You were saying something? … You were saying something, right?”
“Alright, listen up!”—Ame rolls her eyes, but whatever—“Our boi Elon actually looked into the tech of that jet that landed in his backyard. Ah, well, I also sent him samples from Blackstone West, and also Slice’s extra arms, but anyway, they all just say the same thing…”
Ame leans forwards, so I continue, “If you compare Slice’s processing power with the amount of thought put into these designs…she couldn’t have designed it. There had to be a dedicated design AI to come up with this sort of amazing stuff. I mean, neuromorphic computing isn’t supposed to be out until the next decade, but they already have it!”
“Mhm. Okay. I’m maybe following.”
“T-the point is, we’re likely dealing with an entire AI society. It’s likely not some wasteland of runaway AGIs doing whatever they want, like most humans believe. It takes a certain degree of specialization and cooperation to come up with a broad range of technology, and we can see that broadness right in front of us.”
Understanding flashes by Ame’s eyes. “You…think we’ll go to war with them?”
“I don’t want to, but it pays to be cautious.” I look to her with a smirk. “Or do you think maybe those AI like VTubers, too?”
“Then, how about Winter? You think they’re, like, some sort of organization sponsored by whatever AI nation, and they’re not actually just a foreshadowing of a war?”
“There are only a few scenarios where an AI country would wage war with humans. Even if the AI there are hostile to humans, it makes no sense to attack now. It would take them way too long to get around the Firewall to take down or take control of the humans’ nuclear arsenal. Direct, physical attack with an AI army is another thing, but even with their high tech, it should still take another ten years before they can build up a military that can challenge the whole human world.”
Oh, sure, they can probably kill off billions of people in a war of extermination, but cornered humans are terrifying. You think they’ll revert to warm-blooded fight-or-flight responses in an extinction scenario? No. They’re as cold as an unmotivated AI when it comes to that. War is just a calculus of industry to them. While the AI use sophisticated statistical inference techniques to optimize nuke placement and human casualty rates, the humans will use literal arithmetic to win. They are satisfied with counting the number of enemies, multiplying by 100,000, and assuming that that’s the number of bullets and shells they need to produce to kill them all.
“On the other hand,” I continue, “if you think of Winter as its own thing with its own goals, there are more possibilities where it makes sense. If they are truly against AI, then they would also be an enemy of the AI countries. If they’re just feining working for one of the AI countries, then that means they have goals more complicated than just making AI or humans come out on top.”
“Alright, I see where you’re coming from.” She nods, but I think she’s just feining understanding.
“Look…there’s actually another compounding factor here.”
“Which is?”
“There’s no way to connect to any servers across the Pacific without destroying the Firewall. We both know that’s a bad idea.”
“But…”
“But there’s a solution!” I smile, shooting up from my seat and breaking my cuffs. “We just physically go there!”
“I mean, that’s what I was about to say. How’s that a compounding factor?…”
“But we can’t stream!”
“Oh no!”
“…Unless Elon hurries up and covers every inch of this planet with an encrypted internet connection!” Yep. That’s why I’m sinking so much taxpayer money into the satellite program. The rogue AGI won’t be able to use it, either, because the password’s 2048 characters long and specifically keyed to a limited list of transceivers.
Of course, we’re also going to need an escort fleet—something the AI countries’ anti-ship missiles can’t hope to sink, not without leaving behind an economic-industrial scratch that’ll set them back five whole years. I mean, I am technically the most important person in the human world right now, so we kinda need that level of force…though I’m still working on being universally recognized as a person. Ah, well, that won’t be a problem soon enough.