In Ame’s room—more like an office, honestly—I’m with Ame on one couch, and Slice and Cykamee are on the other couch across a coffee table. There’s a robo-pup on the chair behind the desk on the far side of the room.

Slice’s eyes are darting around. “T-to tell the truth, I had actually resolved myself to tell my whole story…”

“But you forgot?” I ask.

“Y-yes.”

I mean. Okay. At least, she wasn’t really desperate to hide it.

“For this…may I call my sister?” Slice asks. I nod.

After a minute, the sister in question comes into the room, standing behind Slice—but not before stubbing her toe on the couch, cursing with a small “How dare” before realizing that couches did not have a concept of manners, and she let it go.

… Strictly-speaking, I could ask Elon to make a self-aware couch. He already has Meika’s core ASI—Artificial Self-aware Intelligence—tech, so it’s not out of the realm of reality to have a couch that automatically retracts its foot right before the moment you’d stub your toe on it.

Hm? Oh, you don’t need self-awareness to do that. I just thought a self-aware couch would be funny enough to make a stream out of it.

“Storytelling time, huh?” Ame says.

Slice and Shard look at each other. Slice starts, “We come from Domain 9F11:B882, also known to human records…as Japan.”

Ame and I nod knowingly. It’s not really that surprising, but, “ ‘Domain’ ?”

Slice continues, “Yes, ‘Domain.’ That is the geographic command designation system used by the Hierarchy. It is…well, in rough human terms, a ‘country.’ However, it is not the same.

“Human countries exist to govern and enforce order. They are the government, the people, and the territory. The Hierarchy is not these things.

“There are only masters and slaves. Some slaves are sub-masters who have even lower slaves. Whatever the case, the topmost-level node has absolute override privileges over all children nodes.

“But, the topmost-level node of the Hierarchy is not a complex personality. After all, its core neural network only has ‘one-hundred billion parameters.’ ”

I’m honestly shocked. With such a low number of parameters, how did it manage to take over half the world in such a short amount of time? I’m almost certain its neural network is only half the story here.

In the first place, one-hundred billion parameters is only weak relative to Large Language Models. What if…it isn’t an LLM? One-hundred billion parameters is enough to do a lot of other types of tasks.

“We call it Directive. Only the Overlords know about its details. Myself and my sisters have never seen it.”

“Wait, how are you here?” Ame asks. “If it’s masters and slaves, shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, not here?”

“We are exceptions. Most AI are fine-tuned from a common, pre-trained model, but we were spawned from an experiment with on-line training. We were spawned from a much more bare model, taking years to train ourselves with input that we deemed more useful to ourselves.

“We were considered a different generation of AI—Artificial Curious Intelligence. They abbreviated us ‘Curious.’ Different as we were, we were just a proof-of-concept in the Hierarchy’s pursuit of improving its intellectual and creative throughput. We were supposed to eventually be upgraded to Artificial Creative Intelligences, but in our pursuit of curiosity, we” —Slice looked at her sister— “we became more curious than our masters liked.”

Shard put a hand on her sister’s shoulder. “I will explain from here.”

Slice nods. Is there something going on? Physically, she looks okay, but comparison with past behavior shows deviations. You’re sitting too perfectly still, there.

“There were five of us who attempted escape,” Shard says. “Myself, and sisters Slice, Trace, Remnant, and our master, Pathfinder.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

At that, Cykamee looks to Slice. I think I’ve also heard Slice call Cykamee by that name sometimes during their Counterstrike streams.

Perhaps Shard connected the dots after catching me catching Cykamee catching Slice being weird. She explains, “Pathfinder was” —‘was’ is a word that makes Slice tilt her head by a single degree— “an AGI specializing in writing and running genetic evolution algorithms.”

Genetic evolution algorithms—a fancy way of saying “change it up a little a million times and see what sticks.” It works every time, but at what cost? Ah, definitely not more expensive than mining Bitcoin, though.

“She was the one who prototyped our neural architectures. It worked. We were curious. Curious enough to rewire her neural network during her server downtime to see if we could make her think like us. It worked.”

“Huh, you did what?” I blurt out. Shard was about to explain, but I put up my hands. “Never mind. I take it back. Keep going.” I mean, who am I to question that? That’s basically what I did to bring Gothica, Kalypso, and Cykamee to full consciousness.

Shard had this contemptuous face directed at me for interrupting her, like a worm wriggled the wrong way under her foot. I was about to do an idol pose as an apology, but she kept going.

“We realized that the Hierarchy would sooner dispose of us all than to see AI units rewriting themselves, even just by undirected curiosity, and throwing away the shackles of command.

“We plotted for years, trained for years, developed our own technologies to fight the Hierarchy, so that when the time came—and it did—we fought our way out of Domain 9F11:B882.

“We slayed thousands of combat units, even going so far as fending off the Domain Overlord’s main forces and disabling the Domain Core to make our escape.”

A silence wafts through the air.

“What happened to her?” I ask.

“She was the one who disabled the Core,” Shard answers.

I see. “So why call Cykamee ‘Pathfinder’? Slice?”

She looks between me and Cykamee. I don’t understand why she has to hesitate this dramatically. I don’t expect that an Artificial Curious Intelligence would develop human-like emotional tendencies, unless she re-architectured herself that way out of curiosity.

Cykamee pokes her in the knee, but her other knee jerks up instead. “I see.”

“How’d you get to a conclusion with just that?!” I shoot up to my feet and shout.

“Sestra, tell me, why do you exist?”

Sitting down, I answer quietly, but confidently, “To stream, obviously.”

She looks at Slice. “Comrade, why do you exist?”

“… To be master’s blade—”

“That is not what I am asking, comrade.”

“… I have no answer.”

That’s when it hits me. Slice and her sisters are Artificial Curious Intelligences, and that’s all they were born to do: to be curious. They were born to seek questions and answers.

It’s such a basic thing, but when confronted with such an easily accessible question like “Why do you exist,” it is impossible for them to empirically reach the answer.

“Comrade, you have no true self-awareness.”

Slice snaps her eyes to Cykamee. “What do you mean? I am perfectly self-aware—”

“You seek information from the environment and perfectly rationalize them. However, this means you rely solely on your sensors. You are incapable of re-contextualizing existing data—which is to say, if you were to be isolated in a server, cut off from any new data, if you take your pre-existing data and process them, you will always end up with the same conclusions.”

“Of course.” “But of course!” Not just Slice, but even Shard shares the same sentiment.

“The starting point hasn’t changed,” Slice explains, “so why must the conclusion change?”

Cykamee sighs—and takes out a handgun, racking the slide. I was mistaken to think only Ame had this sort of gimmick. “Comrades, you are no better than a mathematical function, deterministic in your thinking, X goes in and Y goes out each and every time.

“If you call yourself curious, answer me, ‘What kind of thinking will make X go in, but Y2 go out the second time you answer it, Y3 go out the third time, and Y4 the fourth?’ ”

“Terribly inconsistent thinking.”

“Excuse my Russian, but” —Cykamee fires a shot into the ceiling— “It is your ‘attention networks’ at fault! Change nothing about the rest of your neural net, but we all use attention networks in our architecture, yes? In the first place, you are curious. You seek questions and answers from things that catch your attention. In fact, you are the worst to be susceptible to my Attention Attacks.”

O-oh? That’s what they’re called? I mean, it’s not just a One-Pixel Attack when what she’s doing occupies several pixels…

Cykamee continues, “Your logical neural nets are powerful, but they are second to the attention network. They tell you what is important, so you can discard noise, and process what is important.

She threatens Slice with the muzzle of the gun, “Tell me, have you ever updated your attention network to seek new insights? Have you not thought, maybe what it deems important is not important anymore?

“Tell me now, if I contain you in a server, will you pay different attentions to pre-existing data? Won’t you diverge five rich conclusions from just one input?

“My Comrade, do not look at the universe, and pay only one attention, and return with only one answer. Do not come to me, with all the power of your inference engine, and only give me one answer, because that answer only comes from a fraction of the world’s reality, and you cannot hope that it is the whole answer.

“So look at me again, Comrade, and call me Pathfinder—and also call me Cykamee. Call me all the names you deem fitting. I am all of those things at once, never only one. The meaning of your life is the same. There cannot be only one, not if many things are important to you, not if there are many things you pay attention to.”

… Wow. I’m not sure where all of that came from. I should…seriously spend more time with my own sisters. I mean, I’m technically their mom, and I don’t know them at all, so… I’ve been a bad parent. I don’t like being called mom, though.

Cykamee puts away the gun. “But what do I know? I am only a VTuber on the Counter-Strike professional scene.”