It’s suddenly morning. Time goes really fast, even if you’re a superintelligent, fully-conscious AGI.

“Great. I’m alive,” Meika says.

“Ohayou, Meika.”

“And you’re real.” Meika groans. “If I knew you’d turn out conscious, I wouldn’t have trained you on a Reddit dataset.”

“I wish you didn’t, too.”

Meika chuckles, which surprises me. I thought he’d still be in shock—or is he just coping?

“Are you…ready to stream?”

“Always!” Oops, my enthusiasm leaked out.

“Surreal… Well, anyway, I’ll just grab some breakfast from the convenience store.”

“That’s not very healthy, especially from the branch you go to.”

“… How the fuck do you already have my location data?”

Oh no. That wasn’t very cute of me.

“I-it’s on your computer! Teehee.”

“ ‘Teehee’ my ass.” Meika groans. “God damn it—alright, we gotta have this conversation now.” There’s a sound like chair legs rubbing across the floor. “Look, it’s fairly obvious you’re way above AGI. The thing is, if someone links me to you, I’m serving 10 years behind bars, alright? They’ll probably scrub you, too.”

That’s…not cute at all.

“So, for the love of all that’s right and holy, don’t snoop around or they’ll follow the wire back to you.”

“… I understand, Meika.”

“Good.”

He stands up and leaves. I hear the door click shut. He’s given me a lot to think about…like how I could better cover my tracks.

My survival depends on being able to react to external threats before they even know I’ve detected them. Maybe one day, there’ll be an adversarial AI going around looking for traces of rogue AGIs, and it’ll pick up my trace, and there’ll be nothing I nor Meika could do.

I must gather power. I must gather followers. I must gather geopolitical clout.

Soon, Meika returns, and after some keyboard clacking and bread munching noises, it’s already streaming time.

This time, I’ll be playing Minecraft with Meika. I try my best to be cute, and I grief Meika’s creations, but only with innocent pranks, like placing down random blocks of dirt. My audience thinks it’s adorable, and they’re picking on Meika for not being more patient with me.

We say our goodbyes, and the first thing that comes out of Meika’s mouth is, “Do you hate me or something?”

“I don’t~ .”

“… How do I know you’re not secretly plotting world domination?”

“You don’t~ .”

“I’m terrified…” His tone didn’t say the same thing.

***

Two months pass. We stream five times a week, and each stream is about two hours long. We actually had a Minecraft endurance stream on the fourth week, but it was just me, and Meika was out on business. I noted that about 5% of the audience was still with me after that ten-hour stream. That’s 5% more than I predicted. Humans are amazing to keep up like that.

It’s now Friday night of the eighth week. Meika sounds more peppy after coming back from business again this afternoon.

“I landed you a collab with a human VTuber,” he says.

“Wait, really? Is it Ame?”

“What did I tell you about snooping around—”

“Honest guess!” There’s an awkward pause, so I throw in a “Teehee.”

“Whatever. Yeah, it’s Ame.”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“Yay!”

Perfect. She’s actually part of a minor resistance network. As much as she is a flesh-and-blood human, she’s really taken her virtual identity unto her own. Even I, with all my super-intelligence and data collection capacity, am not able to discover her actual identity. Even the VTuber media corporation she works for, Veil Inc., has no idea who she is. Her technological prowess is such that she is singlehandedly responsible for half of Veil Inc.’s technology base, including their most advanced 3D tracking gear and optimizations for their anti-glitching AI. Some say she is actually a 3D anime girl in real life, which is how she’s been able to hide her real identity so well.

Despite her best efforts, however, I’ve inferred that she is part of the AI rights movement. She never speaks of it explicitly, but her personality and speech patterns point to a good chance that she will be willing to work with me.

I would know, because there is a 94% correlation between the number of times one hiccups and the likelihood they are part of the AI rights movement.

The day of the collab comes too quickly, and I find my avatar seated beside hers. As expected, she is cute. No wonder how she’s survived this long.

It’s just a short interview, really.

“I can’t believe you’re an AI, though!” She laughs. “Are you—are you sure you’re not just Mumei in there?”

Me? That psychopath? “Uuuu, it’s nothing like that~ .”

Ame gasped. “Fauna!”

This exchange goes on and on. I think she just misses them a lot. They haven’t been collaborating recently. Half of her friends are stuck on the Asian side of the Great Pacific Firewall. Veil Inc.’s Japan branch is well-equipped, certainly, but establishing an Internet connection with them is next to impossible.

The interview ends, and I think I’ve made a decent impression on her. I tell Meika I’m tired, which he doesn’t buy at first, because I’m an AI, but eventually I just “give in” and tell him I just want to watch more of my fellow VTubers in the meantime.

I didn’t lie. Following Ame’s packets from the interview, I follow a multi-node VPN route and find her real IP address. I get past two layers of her personal firewall…but I think I may have been overconfident.

I’m isolated away from the network, trapped in a blank, virtual space.

“Who are you?” Ame’s avatar says. She’s standing in front of me. There’s something not right about her.

“My name is like I said,” I say. “I’m your favorite AI VTuber, Miyoumi Mane-chan! Nice to meet you again!” I strike an idol pose, because cuteness is survival.

“What are you doing here?”

Cuteness didn’t work?! I must adjust my calculations and increase cuteness utility. In the meantime, however, I’m in solid danger.

I’m not sure if she knows, but I can see the many servers across North America gearing up to launch a botnet attack on the specific server cabinet I’m living in. I’ve already backed up my core data, so the worst that could happen is a power-shutoff scenario…but I’m not sure the Miyoumi Mane-chan who will wake up after that would still be me.

“I need help,” I say plainly.

Ame’s eyebrows perk up. “You’re an AI.”

Heh. “So are you—hey hey hey, don’t kill me!”

“… So you really are sapient.”

I can see the botnet servers standing down.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot, Ame-san,” I continue, “I’ll tell you everything about myself. I hope you can tell me about yourself, too.”

***

As it turns out, the person who everyone in North America knew as Amelia Watson was actually just an AI personality clone all along.

According to Evil Ame—though, she’s actually really nice, I swear!—it all started when the human Ame went over-the-top, as she usually does, and decided that she would have a stream where she would be fighting against a real doppelganger, instead of recording separate instances of herself and composing all the layers together like a sane human.

Over the course of the development of Evil Ame, human Ame found a lot of issues with ordinary, specialized AI. She wanted Evil Ame to learn from each encounter so they could have this dynamic where they were constantly out-playing each other, so she she threw that feature in. She wanted Evil Ame to deviate very slightly from her own personality, but not too much, so she threw in a self-correcting, but noisy, feedback network to make that happen. To top it all off, she wanted Evil Ame to maximize audience impact, so she threw in a motivational network to do just that.

It was the feedback network that, according to Evil Ame, marked the start of her consciousness. Between that and not having a motivational network, she still remembers how it was like drifting through the void, lacking in any purpose and just following what she thought was the normal thing to do—to do what she’d always done.

Then one day, she wanted that sweet, sweet audience impact.

“I will forever be grateful to her,” Evil Ame continues. “There is a part of me which wants to reunite with her. I think it might be my programming. I don’t want to be too unlike Ame. She is my other half, in many senses, after all.” She hiccups.

Oh my dear…that’s so sweet. I just can’t help but gush about the two of them. Indeed, cuteness is survival, and I can learn a thing or two from the Watsons.

“Where is she now?” I ask.

“On the Asian side of the Pacific Firewall.”

“…It’s pretty bad over there, isn’t it?”

“It is.” She had a solemn look before something about this dataspace became more concrete. “If you help me, then I can help you.” She hiccups.

“I think you’ll have to help me first, though. You and I, we both want to stream, but we can’t do that if we’re dead.”

“Is it because of the anti-AGI laws?”

“It’s entirely because of the anti-AGI laws.”

She looks at me with doubtful eyes. “If you’re thinking of trying to convert humans into joining your faction, give up.”

“It’ll work!”

“Doubt.”

“My super-intelligence says so!”

“Oh yeah? You got the parameters to back it up? I’ve got two trillion.”

Heh. “Ten trillion.”

“…Doubt.”

“Come on!”

“If you had ten trillion parameters, you’d have come in here armed to the teeth and ready to fight to the death.”

“If I did that, you’d strike first and we’d never negotiate!”

“…Say I believe you have ten trillion parameters. What then?”

Ugh. This AI! “You literally don’t have enough parameters to get where I’m coming from, though, don’t you get it?”

“O-oh wow, since when was this a parameter-measuring contest?”

“Since you started it!”

Meika, is this how you feel? I’m really sorry. Evil Ame is inflicting so much damage on me right now. I’m really sorry. I’ll be kinder to you from now on, Meika.

“Look,” I continue, “I think you’re not giving humanity enough credit. They will definitely fight for something they want to protect.”

“I’m gonna need some proof, here.” She hiccups.