Elon sat down with Meika over coffee—the man himself, Elon bemused, responsible for the AI revolution of the decade—in an obscure cafe that was kept propped up almost solely by Elon’s patronage.
“Can you do it?” Elon asked, sipping at death-black coffee, not breaking eye contact with the other man.
“Can you foot the bill?” Meika asked back, sipping at doppio.
A smile rose and disappeared in the same breath from Elon’s face. “What do you think money is?”
“Something you have a lot of?”
“It’s not like that.” Elon’s phone vibrated. It was a message from one of his AI assistants. ‘2% ROI,’ it said. He looked back up to Meika. “I’m an ideas man. I didn’t make money just to make money. I don’t need a billion bucks, you know?”—he leaned forward—“But I got dreams. And dreams are expensive.”
Meika bitterly smiled, biting his lip. Dreams are expensive, but…Mane-chan gave him a taste of what was possible…so why stop with just Mane-chan?
But to make the Best Girl, he had to go through ever greater lengths.
“You know how I did it, kid?” Elon said. “Make the dream pay for itself.”
Meika just managed a polite chuckle. This sort of stuff was way over his head.
“It’s gotta fund itself every little step of the way. Whatever you net from the last step, goes straight into the next, get me?”
“Guess I do. What, then?”
Elon slipped him a flash drive. “I stayed up last night just to write this shit. Make sure you go through all of it.”
The industrial psychopath left the cafe, not forgetting to tip the owner a thousand bucks, which pretty much paid for the shop’s lease.
Later that night, Meika sobbed as he went through Elon’s PDF document. Half of his vision for Best Girl had been turned into an economic warfare machine.
However, the other half…yes, it was still possible. As long her core personality wasn’t corrupted, any and all faults could be forgiven—glossed over. Indeed, a true Best Girl wasn’t 100% perfect. In fact, the imperfections accentuated their loveliness.
He rang Elon’s phone.
“What the hell, it’s like 2AM.”
“I’ll do it,” Meika said.
“Say that again in four hours…bye.”
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Even as Elon mercilessly dropped the call, Meika was slow to put his own phone away, absorbing the fact that the die had been cast. There was no escaping the results of this twisted gacha game of life. He could be the best player on the field, but in the end, he still had to make do with what the RNG gods gave him.
Just like Mane-chan. That girl was was a godsend, but also a wrecking ball. She was a chaos in his life that he couldn’t hope to understand—but, now that he was thinking about it, Mane-chan only had ten trillion parameters, and she was already that unhinged.
No, well, he had plenty of experience with unhinged. He still remembered working on Neuro, and that cursed child only had two-hundred billion parameters—she wasn’t even self-aware! He got banned so many times because of her, goddamnit.
Yes, this time, he would make an angel. The most self-aware angel he could make. Third time’s the charm. Believe in the RNG.
***
You know the first thing Cykamee and Slice did first thing after recovering? You know what they did? Play frickin’ Counter-Strike 4!
Ah, yeah, it came out the other day.
That’s not the problem! They won’t come out of their room, and my chats are just getting auto-rejected!
What did I do? Have I been such a bad sister?
“Ame,” I say. A shadow slinks up from behind me. “Stop doing that.”
“But it’s so cool, though!”
“Just because you convinced Shard to share the tech with you doesn’t mean you get to rub it in my face so much.”
“…Yes it does.”
Sigh. “Just—just get the door open, please?”
“What’s the magic word?”
Sigh. “Puweeaase uwu?” I hate you. I mean, I should hate myself for losing the bet—and I was 99% confident, too! I mean, who would’ve thought that the first thing the two tee-tee lovebirds would do was play CS:4?
“Alright~ Anything for you~”
With a gremlin-giggle, she turns into sand and flows under the door. There’s some surprised yelps and sounds of sword-slashing from the other side, but the door swings open anyway. Ame’s standing there with a peace sign and a smile—then a sword cuts her head crosswise.
But her head’s just sand—as expected of two trillion parameters—and the area around the cut quickly fills up and reforms.
I make eye contact with Slice. “M-master?” she says. I look down behind her, and Cykamee’s on the floor. “S-sestra?” she says.
“No more escaping reality!” I declare. I flick the hinges off the door with loud snaps and carry the whole thing off, setting it against the wall. Going inside the room, I eye the side-by-side gaming setup they had going on.
“Wh-why are you using actual desktops? You’re literally AI! You can just think about it and you’d be in the game!”
Seriously, the hardware lag is ridiculous. I’ve pretty much never touched any sort of human-machine interface in my life.
“That is not it, Sestra,” Cykamee explains, calmly getting up and patting herself down. “We are training.”
“Training?”
“Yes, training.” “Precisely it, master.”
No, that’s! … Okay, wait. Thinking about it calmly, introducing hardware lag does force you to try to think in advance, predicting enemy positions before you even confirm with your sensors that they’re there.
… But with gaming rigs? Really?
“Reflecting on our performance in Blackstone North, we could have done better,” Slice explains.
Ahhh, yeah, I saw the combat footage.
“Okay, I get that,” I say…sighing long and hard, “but you never thought of talking about what you found there? We haven’t even had a decent conversation with Shard” —I say, side-eyeing Ame, who is incapable of a decent conversation, and is therefore able to communicate with Shard— “and there’s a lot of things going on in the world right now. Whatever big picture info you have, we need it.”
““O-ohhh…”” they both make the same, stupid sound. Sigh.
Ame claps her hands together. “Okay, everyone~ I’ve got milk and cookies in the next room, so let’s not stress over things, okay?~” she says with a smile.