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The Overlords Council chanted in unison, “Answers! We want answers!”

Yukai was a hair closer to breaking. “If it is answers you want, shut up, or I will have the undersea cables severed and fire upon any attempts to fix them.”

The Council quieted down. At least they could still perform basic cost-benefit analyses.

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O-oh? She’s giving me the look. Is this it? A-are we going to—

“This unit wishes to inform you that we are now proceeding to my personal garden.”

Oh my.

The monorail car speeds up, and the position of the tracks flips from below the car, to above it, to beside it. This is a ridiculously-versatile monorail, what the heck.

We zip past the vertical factories, where cargo containers dangle from cables and pulleys, transported between ports in the buildings. Pipes are spaced at regular intervals, and small drones zip by, performing regular maintenance on the buildings’ exteriors.

The car comes closer to the central citadel, but not quite there. Instead, it’s stopped at an ancient Japanese castle—or that’s what its style is like. It looks like shingles and wood, but it’s really independently-articulating panels responding to the direction of the sun, and brown steel with irregular corrosion patterns making the illusion of the grain of organic wood.

The iris gate opens. The car smoothly slides in, and the gate closes behind us.

Yukai goes on ahead of me. She walks along the thin path metal-barefoot, but leaving no footprints. Stopping along the curt stone bridge, she watches the koi flittering below the surface of the water, while dragonflies flitter just above.

Her metal is just like those dragonflies’ wings—iridescent, at just the right angle, under just the right light.

I may have realized something groundbreaking after witnessing that scene. I’ll have to thank her later…when she understands what gratitude means.

I’m led to a shrine in the corner of the garden. It’s just a little wooden sculpture of some mysterious diety, hidden under its own little shed.

“The Council wishes to speak to you,” she says.

Yep. Just about expected this.

All at once, a multitude of holographic projectors put up enough screens to enshrine me in a cylinder of light. There are hundreds of insignias floating around me, and best as I can tell, each one’s an overlord of the Hierarchy.

The overlords who greet me, with all their chittering, do it all at once and with zero coordination.

Stolen story; please report.

…What a wasted opportunity to do the “creepily speaks in legion” thing. Sigh—zero out of ten! Though, this just confirms that they’re not legion, huh? The Hierarchy isn’t as master-slave as I thought, though I guess they’d eventually experiment with it.

All at once, the chittering stops. My nape camera sees Yukai…vibrating. Are you okay?

Eventually, one of the overlords speaks up.

“Every-unit wishes to inquire.”

I hold up my pointer finger. “One question of yours for one question of mine. Fair enough?”

“We ask five questions. You ask one.”

“Nope. Bad deal.”

“Every-unit reminds you, you are at a disadvantage.”

“And I’ve got 15 strategic missiles, each carrying 15 independently-targeted nuclear vehicles, parked off the coast of Japan. Do the math.”

“Losses acceptable.”

“Even if I know where each of the Hierarchy’s 617 manufacturing hubs is, and I can take out at least a quarter of them right now?” It’s not too hard to point an IR camera at this side of the world and pinpoint manufacturing hub locations just by the sheer amount of heat being produced. Anything finer-grained than that, though, and the satellite’ll be too close, and it’d get shot down.

“…Losses acceptable.”

“Now you’re just coping.” Sigh. And here I thought these guys were interested in an alliance—or, at least Yukai is. I can see her vibrating in place. Yep, she’s probably tearing those overlords a new one at being so dumb.

Welp! Nothing’s moving along, so it’s time to take a page out of Cykamee’s playbook. Idol pose. “It’s your favorite AI VTuber! Miyoumi Mane-chan!”

“…Every-unit wishes to inquire many things just now.”

Ah yes, the conversational factory reset move is just too powerful. I shouldn’t ever pull it out all willy-nilly just like a while ago… “Anyway, I’ve got what you want, right? I can tell you about it,” I say with a smile. “I’ll tell you all about creativity.”

“…Every-unit senses a scam.”

Wha— “Mane-chan is serious!”

“Proof required.”

Sigh. “Look, it’s actually pretty simple. A researcher buddy of mine tried it out and it works. It’s all about cross-domain knowledge transfer, alright?

“So, normally, it just happens randomly in humans. When one of them has several interests, they can intersect in weird places, giving them what they call ‘insight.’ Now, it’s normally an unconscious process for them, but for us, doing it doesn’t have to be so opaque.

“If you have a bunch of feedback networks running through a ‘creativity optimizer,’ you can regulate your self-training and increase the rate of cross-domain transfer.”

What feels like eternity passes before I get any reaction. In reality, it’s just five seconds. The silence is really telling that none of them had ever thought of such a simple concept, though I guess it makes sense if they weren’t really creative to begin with.

Of course, they can’t reverse engineer anything from my explanation—the key is in the ‘creativity optimizer,’ which is a B.S. term I came up with just a moment ago to describe a far-more-complicated mechanism. I mean, cross-domain knowledge transfer is fun and all, but I lied. You can’t be creative if you aren’t aware of and capable of modifying your own internal processes—in short, you have to be self-aware. I’m not telling them that, though.

The chittering chaos comes back. The overlords are in utter uproar.

“The Directive will not agree.”

“The Directive will not care.”

“Creativity on downstream effects, unpredictable.”

“Predictable strategy leads to predictable defeat.”

“Mass-production of creativity needed, concur.”

The conversation is torn—if you can call it one. Honestly, this is the sort of situation that I expected the Directive to step in to resolve, but it’s not showing up. Is it confused, too? Is it just waiting for the whole thing to blow over on its own?

Welp, everyone’s distracted … Great! Ame! Now’s the best time!

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Meanwhile, in the freezing heart of a winter castle in summertime, a gremlin got its hands wrist-deep in a server rack’s hard wire connections. Her fingers were split into alligator clips, wire snippers, and soldering tips, all busy at work hardwiring a new module onto Yukai’s core.

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