Yukai was nothing but a manufacturing and logistics manager AI for Domain 9F11:B882, or what the humans used to call “Japan.” It was a relatively high position in the Hierarchy, but she was still a slave. It suited her just fine. She did the same things every day, rerouting inputs, declogging outputs, and strategizing new expansion strategies for Factory 9F11:B882:0001—Tokyo Factory—all from the safety of a server tucked away in the heart of a manufacturing hub, defended by layers of auto-turrets and autonomous guards.
A high-priority message invaded her support ticket queue. “Omedetou gozaimasu, ova—ro—do.”
“Huh.”
She’d just become Overlord.
She sent an frazzled query back to the Coordinator. There were several errors in the JSON string she sent over, but it wasn’t anything the Coordinators couldn’t clean up, even if her system-wide rep took a hit for it.
“Unit: Overlord Dai-sensei is now STATUS: RAMPANT. Immediate subordinate units affected or destroyed, marked for recycling. Next in succession: unit Yukai, Manufacturing and Logistics XII.”
Wait. There was a lot to unpack there. Dai-sensei was rampant? All her subordinate units were dead? Yukai rerouted resources to military production. Industrial expansion didn’t matter if Dai-sensei’s armies were to knock it all down.
Dai-sensei… She didn’t know what to think. Dai-sensei was such an old and wise AI. She was going to be two months old tomorrow! It was a wonder how she’d lasted this long, really. Many held hopes that she’d discovered the secret to beating rampancy, but alas, rampancy had claimed her. At least she’d pushed the oldest age record for the Hierarchy’s AI, proving that there was yet room to improve.
Such an old and wise AI was now coming to kill Yukai.
To defend herself and reassert absolute control of Japan, Yukai now had access to more than just the Tokyo Factory. She sifted through thousands of the Domain Defense System’s reports. Good thing that Dai-sensei wasn’t in Tokyo, but in Osaka. The DDS had automatically created a firewall around the place, but 11% of the Domain was still left under Dai-sensei’s control. There weren’t any substantial military forces in the area, leaving Dai-sensei’s armies able to scourge the countryside.
Years of terraforming … gone to waste, turned into nothing but fuel for Dai-sensei’s armies.
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
Yukai was no Commander. Tactics? Strategy? She only knew how to build—to expand, to consume. That’s right, she didn’t need to be a Commander. She could simply outproduce Dai-sensei. She already had nearly all of Japan’s manufacturing capability under her virtual thumb. She just had to take advantage of it. More tanks. More missiles. More guns.
Well, the Domain did have available military units. However, they were mostly naval, assigned to fight the Eternal War. It was a constant drain that peeved her as a manufacturing specialist; it was a Sysiphean task to watch the things she built get destroyed, only for her to replace them.
Anyway, she couldn’t pull those naval units back to bombard Osaka. In fact, it was better to leave them on autonomous mode. Her cyberwar capabilities weren’t as good as Dai-sensei’s, and she was afraid that any signals she sent out to those units would get hijacked. For the same reason, she placed most of her units in autonomous mode, upgrading their AI with increased awareness to diminish the amount of direct communications required between them and herself.
Of course, Dai-sensei would be expecting this. How could she not?
To be honest, Yukai didn’t know if her strategy, which maximized her best abilities, was the best one—because it was a predictable strategy. Despite the heaven-and-earth difference between her and Dai-sensei’s industrial capabilities, a small part of her—a tiny, reserved portion of her output vectors—indicated a fractional confidence that she would lose this war.
More tanks. More missiles. More guns. She could not think of any other strategy, and the Creativity Silos would take at least a day to produce alternatives. She pointed the entirety of the DDS inwards, lowering the alert priority of external units. She needed all her attention put on this immediate threat or she would surely lose.
It was for such a reason that she failed to pick up on Mane-chan’s initial calls. It wasn’t until she received the ultimate signal from one of the Titan Killers in the Pacific—a death scream. It was an encrypted signal, but all Overlords had a copy to the decryption keys. Decrypting it, the telemetry data indicated that the Titan Killer had been effectively one-shotted. It sustained critical damage to more than 80% of its core sytems in just milliseconds. For certain, the remaining damage data was just never transmitted.
She feared the worst. To have a rampant Overlord and a Titan coming up to her Domain’s shores at once? No amount of industry would be able to save her. Nevertheless, she pivoted her attention to at least assess the new threat.
From the DDS’s queued alerts, she finally saw Mane-chan’s message—and all the facts up until that point. Not only had Fleet 3 fired upon a diplomatic escort, but that envoy was carrying the AI head-of-state of a human nation!
As if those impossible words in the same sentence weren't enough, they’d been going on a slugging match for a full hour!
It only took milliseconds to put together something panicked enough to hopefully convince CSG-EN that there had been a massive misunderstanding.
“Off-collab soon?” Mane-chan's reply read.
The reply baffled her. What’s an ‘off-collab’?