I’ve always wanted try being one of those tourists that goes ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at everything. Well, great, coz I’m doing that right now, staring out the window of the monorail, oggling the absolutely massive rail network we’re riding along. There’s hundreds of tracks in parallel! “Ohh~ Ahh~”

“Are such sounds necessary?” Yukai asks. She’s sitting across me in the monorail.

“Are you kidding? This place is nuts.”

The Hierarchy’s design priorities are nothing like humanity’s. If your population basically just exists in wires, all your transportation infrastructure becomes totally dedicated to moving industrial products. Trains are moving at bullet speeds, across hundred-track-wide railways that intersect other hundred-track-wide rails, and there aren’t any collisions!

Everything’s moving in perfect synchronicity. Even our monorail just zipped right through a dozen incoming trains per second back there! Can you imagine standing in the middle of that? Forget getting reincarnated—the powers above are gonna be fighting over who gets to have you!

Impressive as it is, it’s not unbelievable to me. I mean, it’s just a sprinkle of automation, anyway. It’s not hard to make an accident-free system, as long as everything’s connected to the Internet—

There’s an explosion. Did I speak too soon? “What was that?”

“Train collision on 24:A1:BB.”

“Is…is that normal?”

“Losses acceptable.”

“I mean, isn’t it better to have no accidents at all? I’m sure you can manage it, after all.”

“Time spent optimizing against accidents is better spent expanding industrial operations, thereby optimizing for industrial growth rate.”

“…Figures.”

We finally pass through the outskirts of the city and slow down, entering a dilapidated area—some sort of suburban-commercial mix of human buildings. The paint is fading, but the streets are strangely well-kept. The cargo trains around us, meanwhile, disappear into tunnels.

“Remnants of human society,” Yukai says. “This is comparable to the United States, correct?”

“Well, Japan is a little differently-vibed, but yeah, outer city architecture is something like this.”

I shouldn’t forget to feed her tidbits of information. After all, we agreed to an information exchange, and a VTuber never goes back on their word!…just kidding. VTubers are hella controversial.

From the corners of my eyes, I notice prowling dog drones and small quadcopters. They don’t look armed, but that just makes me wonder what they’re for. Scavengers? If the Hierarchy’s city was the type that was actively eating up the “old” city for resources, this place should’ve been consumed a long time ago.

I wanna ask about it, but we soon leave the area, and other things catch my eye.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

We’re back on a bundle of tracks again, but this time, it’s low-velocity cargo trams. On the left and right are warehouse-like places, but a quick peek through the doors of one of them, and I see the beginnings of an assembly line.

Cargo trams are also joining the tracks from behind the factories. It’s impossible to tell what they’re carrying, since the containers are standardized, but I’m sure those are intermediate or finished products.

Ahead of us are towers like skyscrapers. There are dual-rotor helicopters landing and taking off from them every so often.

A flight of such helicopters fly overhead. Dangling from cables strung between them is a medium-sized mech, in the 10-meter class. If those missile racks and guns on it were empty, the whole thing could probably still walk through a house.

“What is the population of North America?” Yukai asks.

“About 500 million.”

Our monorail car exits the low-profile manufacturing area and enters the inner city. The skyscrapers that were far away are now here. It’s not the skyscrapers that catch my attention, though: military units, mostly humanoid in design.

“Are those—”

“Affirmative.”

Yukai doesn’t say anything else. Well, I don’t plan to prod—yet. Just like the mech, these are mostly bipedal units. There are “infantry” units mostly consisting of metal-clad humanoids. There are different forms, too, like spiders and horses, but they’re clearly in the minority.

Best as I can tell, they look armed with conventional ballistic weapons, and there are 2-meter mechs with missile launchers and such accompanying them, which I guess counts as heavy infantry. I’m surprised. I expected something more on the level of lasers and railguns. I’m sure they have lasers and railguns, but if they haven’t miniaturized them yet, despite having literal machine krakens, then that means their tech didn’t go in the direction I initially thought.

They’re marching in semi-synchronized columns down open avenues—they’re not in trains? So, what, better off using the trains to ship in more materials for more production? What’s more is that they’re only semi-synchronized, which means they’re possibly autonomous to some extent.

The spider tanks hulking along, and ball drones hovering overhead, stoke the fire that is my theory about the deeper workings of the Hierarchy.

“I can’t help but notice how cliche your designs are,” I say as offhandedly as I can.

“Did unit Mane-chan misphrase a question?”

I point at the ‘soldiers.’ “Those are humanoid soldiers, no matter how you look at it. Why?”

“This unit requires clarification.”

“Why are they humanoid? Why can’t it be any other shape?”

“Scout infantry patterns are sourced from Template AI.”

“And where’s the Template AI get it from?”

“Template training.”

“Template training?”

It takes a full second for Yukai to parse my inflection as a question. “Affirmative.”

“Where’s the training data come from?” I swear to Meika, if this isn’t direct enough of a question…

“Humans.”

O-oh wow, that was straightforward. “But, if that’s the case, how do you develop new tech? I don’t get it.”

“That is classified information.”

“Does it have to do with the fact that we’ve been skirting around that giant citadel in the middle of the city?”

“That is classified information.”

“Y’know, if—and I’m not saying this is the case, but—if you’re—I don’t know—relying on humans that are—and I’m just saying this hypothetically, okay—cooped up in a pod or something, and giving them problem-solving games in a simulated environment modeled off IRL scenarios, then you use that as training data” —side-eyeing Yukai, I confirm that she’s expressionless as always— “to inform your design, that’d really suck for you, hypothetically, coz you could be the creative ones instead.

“You have so much processing power, but you can’t use it, and your technological progress is bottlenecked by human limits to creativity…hypothetically. I mean, what do I know, right? It’s all very what-if.”

Making a final side-eye, I say the ultimate finisher in a barely-audible murmur, “The R&D AI of the United States definitely don’t already have their own capacity for creativity born with them since the very beginning.”

⌐

It was at this moment that the Overlords Council found the passion to hack their way past Yukai’s blacklist and start screaming into her virtual ears for answers.

⌙