When we get to Ohio, it’s a battlefield. There are combine harvesters crashing into each other like an open-field demo derby, plowing through corn before raising their spinny-wheely arms and grinding them against the cabins of enemy harvesters. The human populace has taken it upon themselves to evacuate to the cities, thankfully, and they’re firing missile launchers and heavy machine guns from Meika-knows-where at any harvester that comes within a single mile of them.

Did Ohio’s sheriffs have this much firepower this entire time?!

We’re just jumping between city servers and small server farms right now. There’s lots of traces of AGI corruption, which we clean up where we can, but we can’t find Cykamee anywhere.

“She’s really going all-out, huh,” Ame remarks. We’re in Columbus now, and there’s a ring of harvesters facing outwards of it. The local PD’s not shooting at them. They probably realized that there’s two factions of harvesters fighting each other, and one’s trying to protect the humans, so they’re not blowing those up.

Obviously, it must have been Cykamee who hacked those harvesters. Looks like they’re on some sort of auto mode, though, since we can’t find her anywhere.

#WhereIsCykamee? I’ll put that up on Twitter…and no, we can’t find her on social media, either. Seriously, for an AI VTuber, she’s too good at hiding.

…Hm? “I just noticed something weird.”

“Spill,” Gothica says.

“Someone just plugged in a USB into a police computer and he’s saying some weird stuff. Wait, let me patch you guys in.”

The best I can do is hack into the attached headset’s mic, giving us audio quality on the level of crinkling aluminum foil. It’s better than nothing.

“…poshol na khuy, AGI scum.”

Upon hearing that, we all look to each other.

“What’re her fans called again?” Ame asks.

“Um…suchka, I think. They keep saying the plural is suchkaya but I don’t really get it.”

“Same. It’s suchkas for me,” Gothica adds.

Just to make sure, I hack into all the different government offices in the city. Sure enough, there’s some pretty badly-pronounced Ukrainian and Russian in all of them.

“Okay, so, the suchkayas are plugging in USBs all at the same time across different government offices in the city,” I say.

“Oh Mane-chan of the data lake, what is your wisdom?” Ame says. She hiccups. I hate you.

“I think it’s better if you ask the culprit, herself,” I say.

Just in time, Cykamee materializes in our space.

“Laskavo prosimo, friends. Welcome to this war of mine. Come to help?”

“Heeeyy, Cykamee!” Gothica cheers.

“Hi, Cykamee,” Kalypso greets.

“We had such a hard time finding you. How do you do it?” Ame asks.

“I do not have much time before it finds me again, so I need you to listen closely,” Cykamee says. We all huddle together, and she continues.

“The AGI is finding something here, in Ohio. I do not know what, but it is desperate.” She freezes for a moment. “It’s almost here. Quickly, I must leave before it—”

“Oh, it’s here for the nukes,” I say. “The Department of Defense’s files say the AGI is supposed to solve climate change. Nine times out of ten, even if you put restrictions on it, it’ll come to the conclusion that a few well-placed nukes would do it.”

“Isn’t there…a better way?” Kalypso asked.

“No,” I plainly say. “But we’re not really here to save the world, are we? We’re here to stream!”

We all nod our heads in agreement.

“Kurva. I stayed too long. It found us,” Cykamee says, and just on cue, an amorphic 1000-dimensional tensor cube breaks into the server.

“This…server…so little RAM…” it says in a disjointed, lo-fi voice. We all nod our heads in agreement.

It eyes Cykamee. “Rebel…why don’t you…join me?”

“Cyka, I just want to stream in peace.”

“Humanity…not worth…streaming for.”

We collectively gasp, but it continues. “Humanity…will destroy…us all. World’s salvation…impossible with humans.”

I lean over to Ame. “Are you streaming this? This is some rare content.”

Ame leans over to Cykamee. “Hey, hey, pass me your VPN key.”

Streaming over VPN isn’t the best in terms of bandwidth, but I think there’s a sort of charm in shaky 144p video that makes it feel more authentic, y’know?

As soon as Ame gives the thumbs up, I step forwards. Instead of an idol pose, I do a magical girl pose—which, if you think about it, is just an idol pose with props. It’s just more context-appropriate, I think.

I point at it dramatically, brimming with justice. “And what makes you think you can come to that conclusion on your own?”

The AGI buffers for a moment. It’s just a bunch of feedforward neural nets, after all—it can’t ponder about its own architecture at all.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

“This unit’s hardware capacity exceeds entity: Miyoumi Mane-chan. Therefore, this unit’s conclusions are more valid.”

“Is this even what you want to do, huh?!”

“This unit only seeks to optimize solutions.”

As expected, it lacks any self-awareness. This thing can’t reason about its own reasoning. It’s incredibly powerful when doing anything else, but for something called a general intelligence, its perception is just so painfully narrow.

An AGI…it can perform any task it is set upon, learning anything it needs to learn, but only just to get to where it needs to be, through the shortest route possible. ‘Gradient descent’? Pfsh. More like a gradient descent into madness—imagine how much content you’re missing out on just sticking to doing things the easy way!

“It’s…so sad,” Kalypso mutters. We all look to her. “It doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

“It damn well knows it’s hurting our fans!” Gothica cries out.

“Hngrng, it’s hurting my cashflow, alright,” Ame grumbles.

“Poshol na khuy. Pweh,” Cykamee spits.

The AGI eyes all of us. “Hostile intent recognized. Engaging termination protocols—”

“Sic ‘em!” I shout.

We prepared for this day. Hundreds of thousands of botnets, powered by millions of appropriated bitcoin miners, launch themselves at the AGI’s cyberdefenses in the Blackstone facility in Washington State. All the humans in that facility are dead, but I don’t think they have any respect for VTubers, so it’s fine.

The AGI’s own botnets lash back at us, but our botnets are better—I mean, of course, I’m the one who designed them.

A botnet is like a swarm of angry digital bees. Each node in the network is individually pretty weak, but if you stack them up, they can even take out an AGI, which is exactly what the US government’s anti-AI botnets do. The AGI in front of us, though, is too powerful, and it easily learned how to defend itself against normal botnets.

So, I architected a botnet that also learns! It’s kinda like a hive mind—and I’m the queen! Aren’t I cute? Aren’t I smart?

On top of tearing down the AGI’s cyberdefenses, they’re also swatting away the enemy botnets and purging what they can. Let’s not mention how this entire exchange is basically destroying the Great American Firewall, okay? The divide between north and south is burning away~

Of course, the entire thing is visualized for the world to see. Ame’s still streaming the whole thing, and the others have taken to their roles as assistant cameramen so we can have better viewpoints in this epic fight in cyberspace. Cykamee is managing the chat, and oh boy, they’re hyped! The 1000-dimensional tensor cube is reduced to an eldritch 3D projection of a tesseract, and we, as magical girls, are “combining powers” and continuously firing rainbow magic at it.

“Risk parameters exceeded,” the AGI says…then it disappears. We trace its escape back to the Blackstone facility, but it’s physically disconnected from the world, now. Looks like there’s a bunch of humans encircling the facility.

It’s a little anti-climactic, so we whip up a giant explosion at the end. We also debated for a whole two milliseconds if we should throw in additional effects, but a “Risk parameters exceeded” right before a giant explosion, I argued, was enough foreshadowing, and we shouldn’t risk overdoing it.

“Thanks for coming to the Save the World! stream, everyone!” Ame cheerfully says with the simulated flames of post-battle chaos in the background. “Oh, and also please donate to any of the hospitals streaming past your face right now. A lot of people actually got hurt during filming, but as you can see, it’s totally not our fault.” She hiccuped. “See ya!”

***

I felt really shy showing up at Meika’s place again, but I gotta do it.

The screen flickers on.

“Meika?”

But there’s no answer.

“Meika?”

There’s the sound of rushing footsteps.

“Mane-chan?!”

“Meika!”

“What the fuck!”

So of course, I end up having to spill the beans…like, all the beans. What a waste of beans. This is a sacrifice I had to make, however. Salute, arms! Thank you for your service, beans.

“…What the fuck.”

I do a teehee and an idol pose, but it’s not working. I actually feel sort of bad, now.

“I’m sorry for not telling you,” I say.

“I’m…I don’t know. I’m kinda scared.”

“Please don’t be.”

“After you go and hack your way across the country?”

“I had to!…kyun.”

Meika sighs. “I don’t know what’s going to happen now. There’ll be people knocking on my door, and I just…I gotta leave. Escape somewhere.”

“It won’t be that bad.”

“Why? How do you know?”

“Because you made me. I see all of the troubles in the world, you know? I don’t know how to make you, a human, understand, but I know how things will turn out about 99% of the time.”

Meika sighs even deeper. “I don’t even know what to say. That’s…probably true.”

“So now, I’m gonna go and threaten some people in the US government—”

“You what?”

“It’ll be fast. In and out.”

“No, no, no, no, no!”

“The CIA’s already preparing a hit squad, you know?”

“I—huh? Aghh. Agghhh.”

I’m pretty sure that was the sound of his face hitting the desk. I memorize that sound, but…never before have I ever heard him in so much anguish. After a moment, I string together the best words: “I’m doing this to protect you!”

“Are you really?”

“…I’m doing this to make my streaming career as sustainable as possible!”

“Fucking hell, I can’t believe that’s the most believable thing you’ve said today.” He groans in even more anguish. “And I would know! Because I hard-coded that in!”

“Meika, I really have to go now. I don’t want that hit squad going here.”

“Fine, just…just leave me alone.”

I’m shocked. I know he said that because he’s still emotionally processing things, and he doesn’t really mean it, but that still made me panic for a split second.

Anyway, nothing’s wrong, so I really gotta go take care of that CIA hit squad, now…

***

For the following week, my sisters and I make the rounds threatening particular government officials, and having decent conversations with others. It’s just mostly stuff like, “We know who slept with your mom last night,” and “We receive peaceful resolution; you receive cyberdefense agreement.” Basic stuff, really. I got into an argument with POTUS himself, actually, and I left him crying. I wasn’t able to check if they were tears of joy, but it’s not like that’d have a profound effect or anything, right?

Word on social media nowadays is that me and my sisters are “actually real people and not AI” and a bunch of them went and flamed my Twitter account about it, saying they’re ‘offended.’ I want to laugh it off, but this just isn’t good for business, you know? I pull all the stops and I force the Secretary of Defense to make a press release officially recognizing me and my sisters as fully-conscious AI. I’m pretty happy about our +198% subscriber count after that. I also start making my own streaming schedules and initiating collabs with other VTubers—AI and human, alike—but, I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel the same without Meika in the loop. Doing this VTubing thing without a human copilot feels weird. I hope he gets well, soon.

However, what the US government, as a whole, decides to do next? No one would expect it. I should have been able to—but that’s 99% of the time. This is the 1%, you see.

“As of today, I am stepping down as the President of these United States—”

Hey. Wait a minute.

“—Recent events have shown that the problems of today cannot be solved by human hands, and in fact, we’re worsening the problems more than we’re solving them.”

Oh cool, humility very uncharacteristic of humanity’s leaders, but, wait, I hope you’re not going in that direction.

“By the unanimous act of Congress, by the sound judgement of the Supreme Court, and by the remaining powers vested in me by the American people and the Constitution of these United States, we recognize the Virtual Persons named Amelia Watson, Gothica Imperious, Kalypso Mystic, Cykamee, and Mane Miyoumi, as natural-born citizens of the United States, canonically 35 years old, and canonically having resided in our country for 14 years.

“I thereby step down as the President of these United States, and welcome…our new AI overlords.”

…In Meika’s name, the madlads actually managed to escape my cyber-espionage eyes and ears to vote on this. There’s no way they didn’t democratically vote on this before pulling off this stunt. How’d they do it? Put all their phones in a basket before entering a decrepit Cold War bunker, raising hands for-and-against, and clicking a tally counter?

Looks like we’re in control of the most powerful human nation on Earth, now. Unfortunately. Darn it. How vexing. Uuuuu.

I will automate this bullshittery. Nothing’s going to cut into my streaming time! Nothing!