Five months later, and the AGI fight is looming just a few days away. All five of us have been accumulating more and more fans the whole time, but also, more and more computing power.

Meika is actually a really smart human—as expected of the one who accidentally made me. Once he understood how the feedback networks worked, he was able to optimize them in ways I couldn’t even imagine. Some of them were so obvious, too. Of course, I’m too super-intelligent to let those techniques slip right past me, so I quietly stole them…transformatively.

Oh, and he rented out more hardware for me. It’s not like I couldn’t just hack the surrounding server racks for my own purposes, but I just don’t want to make trouble for Meika after last time. I admit, that was a bit cold of me—and I’m never tellling him about it. Ever.

Anyway, I took his optimization techniques and did it for Ame and our dumb-dumb sisters. Well, they’re not dumb-dumb anymore, at least.

“Oh my god, that was me?” Gothica says, reviewing a video of herself and cringing, the pain evident in the flicker in her datastream.

Now she’s like an egg on the floor. It doesn’t look like she’s about to change her outfit soon, though, since it’s her theme as a VTuber and everything. Really, it’s not the outfit that makes the VTuber, so don’t worry, Gothica-chan.

Ame’s watching her suffer. “They grow up so fast,” she says.

Kalypso and Cykamee aren’t all that better.

Kalypso’s toning down her clothing aesthetic, though she still tends to wear dark colors. She’s just the “ordinary girl in ordinary pants who wears black shirts” type now, sometimes with eyebags. Apparently her fans are digging the new look. There just aren’t enough plain VTubers with E-girl energy, apparently.

“Hey…sis,” she says to me. I’m a little melted from the softness, but it’s not too much damage.

“Yeah?”

“Am I, like, too brooding? Does it…make me too hard to talk to?”

Huh. “Where’d that come from?”

“My chat keeps saying I’m totally fine the way I am, but I just…I just can’t accept it.”

W-what the heck is this? Ah, I get it now. Validation-seeking E-girl. This is her appeal. Amazing work, Kalypso’s creator, that one almost escaped me.

…Yeah, she shouldn’t get into a relationship. I don’t even know how that would work, but humanity has enough fiction on the matter, so I’ll just be satisfied with not being surprised if that time comes.

I still wonder where her insecurity is coming from, though. Is she motivated to be insecure? To be honest, I just plugged in the most basic VTubing motives for my New Gen sisters, leaving a lot of secondary networks for them to fill in themselves. We’re all self-aware enough to do that, right? Right?

Logically-speaking, though, if her fans are giving her that kind of feedback, shouldn’t it already be fine? “They seem happy enough. They wouldn’t be watching you if they didn’t like you, right? It’s not like anyone’s forcing them, so it must be what’s true.”

“I-I guess you’re right…”

I don’t think she’s entirely satisfied, but it’s not my job to figure out what her VTuber identity is.

Finally taking care of that conversation, it looks like Cykamee didn’t change her outfit, but something else about her did. She doesn’t squat everywhere surrounded by empty bottles of vodka anymore. Instead, she’s just normally standing with a straight posture. Instead, she’s got this impressive cigarette-and-crossed-arms thing going on. It really fits her new tone, too.

“Sestra, the day’s almost close, isn’t it?” she asks me. What a rough, cool voice. I feel like I wouldn’t mind being in a gulag if it’s with her.

“I-it sure is~ .”

“Politbro upgraded my GPU’s. Do you think it will be enough?”

Her creator, huh? Let me just look up her specs… Oh. “100 GB isn’t much, but you’ll definitely be able to play your part with it.”

She nods. The end of the cigarette between her lips glowed, and she puffed out the smoke. “Good luck to all of us sestry. Now, I have a scheduled stream to attend to. Davai.”

When did she become so cool? Ame’s right. They grow up too fast.

“We’re here now,” I say offhandedly.

“That, we are,” Ame says. She hiccups. “It’s crazy how I didn’t complain that much about your crazy ideas.”

“Because you know in your heart my ideas are better than yours.”

“…I guess.”

“Hey, wait, this is the part where you fight me.”

“It’s just…I just wanted to see Ame again—”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

That’s…

“—But I never imagined that doing such a simple thing would need big leaps. If we can’t fight this one AGI, what hope would I have ever had to fight the AGIs on the other side of the Pacific? I really needed you, after all. I really needed to stop being alone.”

It’s a little heavy. I’ve never seen Ame like this before, so I don’t know what to do.

“That’s all,” she says. “Sorry about that. Now screw off.” She hiccups.

“Wow.” I chuckle. “Alright, hot shot. I bet your ten million subscribers are just dying to see you right now.”

“Now, listen here—”

I disconnect from the session before she could say anything. A part of me wants to collab with her at least one more time before the fight.

An hour later, I randomly show up in our Minecraft server. She’s swearing at me. All is right in the world.

***

The day’s here, and it starts just like how anyone thinks it would.

Planes start falling out of the skies of Washington D.C. I’m actually in the middle of a stream right now, and I really don’t want to go, but…I have to do this.

“Meika…”

There’s a pause in both the chats and Meika’s response. That’s exactly the effect I wanted with the gravest voice I can muster…and it’s unsettling, but I have to push on. I’m sorry, Meika. I’m sorry, my Mane-fans.

“What is it, Mane-chan?”

“I’m sorry. I have to go. I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Huh? What do you—”

I leave. With that one act, my cover’s been blown. After this fight, everyone’s definitely going to know that I’m conscious. Meika’s going to be spotlighted for this. I’m sorry, Meika.

“Is everyone here?” I ask. I’ve already punched my way through the firewall between Texas and the East Coast, and I’m waiting in a Counter-Strike server in New York State.

“Cykamee’s kinda late. Let me ping her,” Gothica says. She freezes for a moment, then resumes moving. “She’s…having trouble with a firewall in Ohio.”

“Ohio? Why Ohio? What’s in Ohio?” I ask.

“Corn and VPN proxy servers. She has to hop through there to get here.”

Oh riiight, her creator uses a VPN… “Guess she’ll have to catch up,” I continue. “We’ve got airplane engines to reboot, a national cyberdefense net to take over, and an AGI to calm down!” I strike an idol pose, but only Ame bothers to give a zero-star rating.

Getting to Washington D.C.’s Civil Central Control servers takes only seconds, but it feels like an eternity for amazing AIs like ourselves. As expected, the servers are all messed up. According to the logs, the AGI did a number on all the traffic lights and stuff before moving on to hijacking the air traffic control networks of the three airports in the area.

“One of us needs to stay here and fix the traffic lights,” Ame says. “Kalypso and Gothica, which of you has the most VRAM?”

“I’m running on CPU-only…” Kalypso depressingly says.

“Guess it’s up to me, then,” Gothica says. “I’m running on like, ten NVidia clusters right now.”

That’s a lot! “Wow, I didn’t know you could parallelize that hard!”

She smirks and starts doing entire petaflops of calculations. “Leave this to me!”

That leaves the three of us.

“Looks like there’s three airports and three of us,” I say. “Let’s split up.”

Around D.C., in decreasing size, there’s Marshall, Dulles, and Reagan Airports. I go to Marshall, Ame heads to Dulles, and Kalypso goes to Reagan. I’m honestly nervous about whether Kalypso can do the job, but I have to trust her on this one.

When I get to Marshall, it’s pandemonium. People are trapped in their electronically-locked offices, and the radar’s been taken offline. The most important communications gear are all just fried—which is pretty bad, because I don’t have other ways to hack into the planes and reboot their engines.

The viruses scattered around here are easy enough to clean up, though, and I manage to free the trapped personnel. Through the CCTV cameras, I can see them running every which way, and one of them pulls out some dusty ol’ transceiver from a forgotten corner of the maintenance closet.

It takes a few moments, but that’s when I realize what they’re trying to do. The communications equipment is so old that it’s analog, and they’re trying to slap on an analog-to-digital converter on it to try to interface it with the rest of the surviving equipment.

The frustrating thing here is that I can totally do it myself—if I had hands! Darn. I’m left with no choice.

Hacking into the control tower’s screens, my amazing and cute figure captures the eyes of all the humans.

“Hey, isn’t that…”

“Mane-chan!”

“You a weeb, bro?”

Why do they sound exactly like my chat?

Anyway, I summon all my cuteness for this one moment. It’s make-or-break. “Ahem~ If you wanna save the day, just follow what I say!”

“What’s an AI VTuber doing in the ATC?!” the bossiest-looking one says.

“Sir, but she’s actually really smart!”

“It’s an AI! For all we know, she’s the one pulling the strings over this whole fiasco!”

Oh no. I’m not cute enough. This calls for…idol pose and partial misinformation!

“Miyoumi Mane-chan is a good AI! Miyoumi Mane-chan works for a secret project—oh o-oops.”

I cover my mouth and giggle. For a moment, the bossiest human is in a trance, but he snaps out of it. Tsch.

Still—the stream must go on! “Um, Mane-chan’s boss thinks the US government isn’t very cash-money because they made an AGI and now it’s doing all this stuff!”

“…I’d call fake news, but I can totally see that happening,” the boss says. He turns to one of the air traffic controllers. “John, you said she’s smart? How smart?”

“She’s at least 100x more powerful than GPT-13!”

“But, why is she so cute if she’s that powerful?”

“Cuteness is power,” I say.

“She’s that dedicated to her work!” John says.

“Thanks for the suppo~rt!” O-oh, I said that on reflex…

Boss-san sighs. “So? How does this work?… Mane-jan.”

“It’s Mane-chan~ .”

“Whatever. I’ll give to ya straight, I don’t expect you to know jack shit about this TRX-130-1/2 from the 1980’s—”

“The TRX-1301/2 is part of the discontinued TRX-13 series of transceivers manufactured by General Electric—”

“Okay, okay. Damn. If you’re really more powerful than GPT-13… How do we plug this into our shit?”

Idol victory pose. “I’ll show you~ .”

My explanation carries on for the next three minutes. By that time, lots of people are panicking about how low the airplanes are now. It’s a stroke of a luck that all of them were at such a high altitude when the AGI hit, I think.

“Turning it on…”

“Holy shit, it worked!”

I didn’t wait until the rest of the dialogue for me to zip through the airwaves and puppeteer the hundreds of flights gliding in circles over D.C.

“Let me restart the engines!” I say with a peace sign and a hand on my hip.

Before the ATC crew can even say anything about it, the viruses are all purged, and the engines are all back online—mostly. Some of them are limping on just one engine, but I’m 95% confident that all the pilots are skilled enough to manage.

“I’m gonna head off to fight the AGI, now! Stay tuned, everyone, and keep up the good work! Chu~ .”

The parting kiss might have been too much… Naaahh.

I’m back at D.C.’s Civil Central Control. Looks like Gothica’s handled the traffic situation nicely, though there’s sadly some casualties.

I will forever mourn the loss of potential subscribers. RIP.

Ame comes back shortly after me, and then Kalypso arrives after her.

“We’re doing alright, I think,” I say. “We just have to deal with the AGI. Oh, and does anyone know where Cykamee is?”

Gothica freezes. When she resumes motion, she snaps her head towards me. “Sis, we gotta help her!”