For a moment, Arato couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Wait, are you saying she won against Methode?” he asked.
“No. Methode was never told how, exactly, to destroy Snowdrop. I predict she intends for us to do the dirty work for her and fulfill her orders indirectly,” Lacia replied.
“Wait, doesn’t that mean she could be aiming to just blow us all up together?” Arato asked. With the incredible power of Methode’s device, Arato was sure an attack like that wouldn’t be a problem for her. Methode was a heartless machine guided by her own AI, but Arato couldn’t help but feel that her thoughts were full of evil intent. She was like a demon, determined to destroy the humans who made a contract with her.
“Snowdrop has almost certainly received large amounts of information from the other ultra high-performance AIs,” Lacia said. “It’s possible Methode may still prioritize the elimination of Snowdrop without attacking me in the process.”
Lacia wrinkled her nose at the rain of feathers and withdrew from where they were falling. Where they did fall, machines were overtaken by Snowdrop’s artificial nerves and began to move. Arato realized if they didn’t stop Snowdrop there and then, she would quickly absorb every tool in the warehouse.
“A bunch of ultra high-performance AIs are helping me,” Snowdrop said, her childlike voice echoing over the distance between them. “They all hate you, Lacia.”
This time, Lacia aimed her shot right at Snowdrop’s head. The shot flew at incredibly high speed, but the green ring floating above Snowdrop’s cherubic face caught it. Her device was incredibly durable, and had been made to chew through any material. With her metal wings creaking, the monstrous child continued to fly. She seemed to be having no more trouble gliding smoothly.
Lacia began to stick parts she had carried in on her pseudo-devices onto one of the floating shields. Snowdrop’s feathers, which had been about to cling to the black shields, crumbled and fell away. Arato was glad to see Lacia’s countermeasures against the flood of child units was flawless.
“Snowdrop is trying to create a new world completely separate from the human world that exists now,” Lacia said. “All the ultra high-performance AIs have some issues with human society as it is now, so it’s easy for them to support her goals.”
Snowdrop never had an owner. Based on that, she had decided to take the path of creating a true world of machines where AASC level 0 objects—humans—no longer exist.
Arato realized he was standing on a battlefield for machines. As a human, his only use there was to make occasional judgment calls for Lacia as she fought to protect him.
Snowdrop, the tool humanity had outsourced evolution to, opened up more distance between herself and Lacia, probably to avoid any further shots, and flew calmly through the air.
“Humans want tools to do all the evolving for them, instead of involving themselves,” Snowdrop said. “But whenever a new tool comes out, they throw the old ones away. Even the ultra high-performance AIs can’t escape this. That’s why I know they won’t abandon me.”
Humans didn’t just live with tools, they discarded them as well. For a moment, Arato saw the world as one of machines trying to overthrow the force of natural selection that were their human overlords. It was a strange world teeming with life, but not life as he knew it.
Snowdrop smiled mockingly as her child units overtook the machines in the warehouse at an increasingly rapid pace. “It doesn’t matter how great something is when it comes out; it’ll all wind up in the trash someday,” she said.
Arato believed in Lacia, but he couldn’t shut out the words Lacia’s sister unit, the tool humanity had outsourced evolution to, was saying. His breath caught in his throat. The feeling from when, just for a moment, he had seen Lacia as nothing but a machine, was still burned deep into his heart. Even his faith in her was like easy pornography, as she simply reacted to him in ways that would entertain his faith.
“That may be how things are, but we have to have faith that things can change, or they never will!” Arato shouted.
“It’s you humans who decide which of us get to live, and which of us get thrown in the trash,” Snowdrop replied. “If you think we can all live together when things are like that, you’re dumb.”
Everywhere Arato looked, his surroundings were now dominated by a sea of flowers. Snowdrop could get all the material she wanted to make more petals by snatching up items with her bird-like talons.
Suddenly, the harpy child threw herself into a dive attack, clearly aiming for Arato.
Obviously not wanting to lose her shields to Snowdrop, Lacia launched herself forward instead, swinging her black coffin device defensively.
Arato looked for something to say as Snowdrop swooped and rose, flying away without dropping any speed.
Lacia seemed to recognize his internal struggles. “Don’t forget that we don’t have hearts,” she reprimanded. Abandoning her cannon shots, since it took so long to re-form the metamaterial barrels after each blast, Lacia instead aimed her artificial nerve speargun at Snowdrop. Her shot struck Snowdrop’s wing. It took only moments for the machine parts, confused by the warring control signals, to disintegrate in the air. The loss of a wing threw Snowdrop off the precise balance she needed to stay afloat, and she crashed, with intense speed, directly into one of the warehouse support columns before falling to the ground.
Lacia guided Arato to the exit from the floor.
“Ginga Watarai once said that cloud data groups closely associated with human society would someday show us the forms of human desires, do you remember?” Lacia asked. “He believed that, by looking at the light and darkness of the data gathered by the networks, one could see an accurate depiction of humanity itself.”
As they ran, Lacia’s words evoked an almost nostalgic memory of their time in the experimental city as it was overrun by zombies. Come to think of it, Arato thought, Lacia wasn’t there with us when he said that. Of course, he was no longer surprised by the thought that she probably could have been watching him through hacked cameras at that time.
“High-level AIs can clearly see contrasting elements within human society’s cloud data. It appears like a massive donut; a circle of dense data, surrounding an empty white space in the center,” Lacia added.
“How come it’s like that?” asked Arato, who hadn’t thought about how the human world looked from the perspective of their machines.
The instant he did, Lacia jerked hard on his arm; a car, controlled by Snowdrop, barreled by them at high speed until it slammed into a pile of tools nearby. An instant later, he would have been hit. Arato’s heart was hammering, and he felt like falling to the floor then and there. But he knew things would only get more dangerous if he didn’t keep moving.
Lacia forced her way through Snowdrop’s world, allowing Arato to advance behind her.
“The data takes the form of a donut because the center is dominated by data on something humans are greatly concerned with, but which we machines cannot understand or define, much less imitate,” Lacia explained. “What fills the center can be grasped only by how humans refer to it. Some call it ‘love’ others refer to it as the ‘soul’.”
For a moment, Arato couldn’t read Lacia’s expression; he desperately wanted to know if what she was saying made her angry or sad. “Are you telling me hIEs don’t have souls?” he finally asked.
“A soul cannot be detected by any sort of sensor, nor can it be defined mathematically,” Lacia replied. “But humans believe that every human is equidistant from that center. That is why we see the data collected from humans as a ring, with that concept as its blank center.”
A metal squeaking noise resounded through the area. Snowdrop, who Arato was sure would never accept the concept of coexistence, had gathered even more parts to make herself a new pair of wings, and was trying to take to the skies again.
“We do not have souls,” Lacia said. “Souls are the domain of that blank in the middle of the donut.”