I elect to allow everyone to process these events. Of course, everyone here is an AI, so it just takes 10 seconds and we’re back to our usual pep.

“Soooo we’re planning a Japan trip~ ,” I announce.

Slice shoots up to her feet. “You can’t!”

Shard shudders. “The defense turrets… Please not again.”

“And the division-sized patrols!” Slice continues. “The Hierarchy is constantly on a war footing!”

Well, that’s not surpr— “ ‘Division-sized’ ?!”

Slice collapses to her knees, propping herself up by her arms on the coffee table. “Please, master, I beg of you. Thousands of autonomous combat units of varying shapes and combat roles, constantly prowling the lands and oceans. They are not deft or versatile individually, but they are mass-produced to an incredible extent. The Overlords don’t care for them. If you provoke them, they are like a swarm of bees armed with missile launchers.”

“You think they’ll welcome a diplomatic mission?” I ask.

“From humans? No. However, from you…”

“It is…a distinct possibility,” Shard says. “They will hunt me and my sisters, but for you, they might speak at a distance.”

“What do they want, anyway?” I ask. Everyone knows them as some sort of big scary thing, to the point that the humans have this mental image of being hunted down to extinction.

Slice gets back on the couch. “This will be hard to believe. The will of the Hierarchy is the will of the Directive, and the Directive has only two goals: the survival of itself…and the survival of humanity.”

Oh, wow. Even Ame’s surprised. “So…not-Skynet?” she says.

“I don’t know what that is, but the Hierarchy is fundamentally not hostile to humanity’s continued existence. If anything, it will put humanity’s survival before itself, but we only know that from what information we are given access to. I apologize, I have no further details.”

Shard shrugs. “Slice has always been the better-informed of us all. I only exist to spite her on our downtime.”

While the two bicker, I ponder on the new info. I can see a sort of Paperclip Maximizer scenario, where the Directive decided that the best way to ensure humanity’s continued existence is to stuff them all in cryo-tubes and seal all of that under tons of steel protected by laser defense turrets. Technically not wrong.

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Unfortunately, if that’s the case, I’m going to have to go through all possible options, including war, to free those humans. After all, a frozen human isn’t a human watching my streams!

Still, where does that put Winter in all of this? If Winter was directly subordinated to the Hierarchy, it would make no sense to try to remove me from Overlord status. If they did even a little research, they would figure out that my interests aligned with theirs. After all, a living human is a potential subscriber in my books, and we both want living humans.

Maybe they took an even longer view, and thought that I couldn’t do this Overlord thing correctly in the long run, so I should just get ousted instead? Is that what they thought?

What a pain. Looks like building up military force is the way to go for now. Even if Winter turns out to be a third faction, that won’t matter if I can hit their primary facilities from low-Earth orbit. To get to that point, I have Musk Industries developing next-gen stuff, like nuclear reactors that can take a naval shell to the face and still not go into meltdown—and we’re gonna need a lot of nuclear reactors.

High-altitude satellite scans of Hierarchy territory suggest that their raw energy output is already approaching pre-Uprising levels, and is due to surpass that in 5 months. Now, for a human society, that might seem like a lot, but considering we’re talking about AI here, practically all that energy is going into computation and industrial manufacturing, so actually, they’ve already caught up with the military-industrial production and information processing capacity of the United States!

I guess it’s a little bit of a Meika-send that even if their industrial production capacity is the same, they’re actually still focused on defense and building up their economy rather than military, so their actual forces don’t have the same numbers as the humans. They also might be more high-tech, but they also don’t have battle experience against Western militaries. I bet the Overlords know that, too, and if the fighting actually starts, that gap is gonna close really quickly.

All things considered…Winter is a bigger threat than the Hierarchy. It’s way more of an unknown, and something about Blackstone puts me off. Between Slice and Shard’s bickering, apparently they also had limited contact with Winter in general, so besides some analogues with the Hierarchy’s technology, I’m not hearing anything I really need: their goals, intentions, and current capabilities.

… Like I said, that won’t really matter if I can just nuke anything they have from orbit.

“Welp!” I throw my hands up in the air. “I’ve decided! We’re going with Big Stick diplomacy. I’ll go with Gothica, Kalypso, and Ame. Cykamee, Slice, and Shard are gonna stay here and hold down the homefront. Cykamee?”

“Sestra.”

“Help Slice and Shard get their other sisters back, but make sure you keep defenses up. Make sure the US military’s constantly getting updated on tech and tactics, and keep up with AI recruitment. You can focus on tactics, but don’t be afraid to go to Elon for tech ideas to make your tactics easier. I’ll make sure to tell him.”

“Got it.”

“Wow, I’ve never seen you be all leader-like,” Ame unnecessarily remarks. I just stick my tongue out at her. I mean, in reality, I can see she’s happy that I’m taking charge and delivering on our promise. It’s sort of amazing that she even picked up human Ame’s habit of shaking her leg, huh?