“I have neither a firearm license nor programming on how to use one. Let’s leave them here,” said Vivy. Without any preprogrammed know-how, she didn’t even have to decide not to follow the Three Laws. She analyzed the guns’ structure, removed the bullets, and chucked everything out of a nearby window.
“Should we continue like this, and you can just take down everyone who stands in our way?” Matsumoto asked Vivy.
“I think that has a low chance of success.”
Vivy’s abused right arm’s functionality had fallen by 41 percent. She’d lost enough dexterity that she had to ask Aikawa to help tie up the men.
Aikawa shot a nervous glance at the room that now housed the unconscious criminals. “I guess it’s going to be much more difficult than we thought to get out. If only we could contact the outside…”
“That wouldn’t be easy either,” said Matsumoto. “They’ve cut off contact between the building and things outside and jammed all communication signals. They probably want to avoid interference.”
“Quite the large-scale operation…”
“Why, I should scold them for not being thorough enough! Now, what should we do?” Matsumoto completely rejected Aikawa’s opinion, then appeared to fall into deep thought as he sat down on a table.
Vivy grabbed him by the head. “Stop messing around,” she said. “What are my next orders?”
“Okay, okay. Guess my joke didn’t land, did it?”
With Matsumoto giving up on his flippant comments, Vivy carried him back to the records room. Aikawa followed, a frown on his face.
“Why are you going back to the records room? I don’t think there’s any way of getting outside from there.”
“You’re too shortsighted,” said Matsumoto. “This building houses all the data OGC manages. If we expose the massive AI corporation’s conspiracies to the light of day, they’ll experience a social death. Then we can keep you out of this kind of situation.”
“Teddy Bear-kun, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but OGC isn’t hiding anything. Significant investigations took place when this building was selected as a case model for corporate automation.” It was clear Aikawa had learned how to handle Matsumoto, even in such a short time. He then glanced at Vivy, who was scanning the room, but she was hardly paying attention to the records. “Besides, it looks like your partner has no interest in documents.”
While the records room was a storage room for paper-based records, the practice of printing out and filing data had long since fallen out of fashion. The room wasn’t very large, and the documents that were housed there had been carefully preserved and stored. Even if there had been high-security locks on the documents, Matsumoto could have unlocked them in less than five seconds. Vivy simply had no reason to ask that of him.
“You may be right, Assemblyman Aikawa. That wouldn’t solve the problem immediately. It might even be a big win for us if we left it for future historians to decide what was right or wrong…”
“I’m not sure you or I could rest in peace after that.”
“Perhaps not. Which is why we’re going to go with a different solution, though it isn’t quite as clever. The enemy has eyes on the elevators and the fire escapes, and it would probably be difficult for us to force our way out…”
“Probably?”
“Or we could try having the oldie here go back to old-model ways for a more primitive approach.”
“When you say primitive, what—ah?!”
Aikawa jumped at a loud crash behind them, his face contorted in genuine shock. He turned to see a massive hole in the ceiling—and below the hole was a stack of boxes Vivy had used to create a path to the floor above.
She held a hand out to the gaping Aikawa and said, “Please take my hand, sir.”
“You seem…used to dealing with people like that,” he replied, and though Aikawa was bewildered by her behavior, he placed his hand in hers.
. : 7 : .
“THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE a fortress of the latest and greatest in electronic security, but I guess there are holes everywhere…” Aikawa said.
“Don’t worry,” Matsumoto replied. “This is the only place in the building that has a structural flaw in the ceiling and a floor between floors. It’s a weak point you could only spot if you looked at the blueprints. It would be impossible to find unless the building designers and architects were being investigated for a different incident and the concealed document for this building was discovered.”
“You’re being awfully specific…”
They climbed through the hole in the ceiling, Aikawa using his rarely exercised back and legs while Matsumoto joked in poor taste, almost exposing the Singularity Project. Thankfully, a rational adult like Aikawa would have a hard time believing in such a fanciful-sounding thing.
Still, Matsumoto was walking a line he didn’t need to. Even so, it was the truth; the building’s blueprints had been included in his data from one hundred years in the future.
“Opening a hole in the ceiling might lead to the incriminating records being discovered sooner than later, but that would be fairly abnormal. I think a more beneficial action would be to come up with a policy that allows employees to go home instead of working overtime in order to combat human error,” said Matsumoto.
“You sure do have a lot to say,” Aikawa commented. “There should never be another human error in this building again.”
“Yep, yep, yep! This building will be the model for office automation. The building’s systems will all be AI-controlled… Thus, you won’t need any human management.”
“…”
“Excluding regular maintenance, humans won’t need to work in the building at all. All the work humans have done inefficiently before now will be entrusted to much more efficient machines, which should result in cost savings in the long term. The decision to automate is entirely rational.”
“And yet I can hear barbs in your words.” Aikawa frowned, but being doubted didn’t seem to bother Matsumoto at all.
“I am not inserting any personal opinions, mind you. I am simply confirming the facts and admiring your foresight, Assemblyman Aikawa.”
“Admiration even though this project has put my life in danger?”
“If you hadn’t done it first, someone else would have. It is the direction the world is headed. You’re just ahead of others in the field. The first to do anything always gets the worst of the mudslinging.”
“But we don’t want you to shed blood,” Vivy added, causing Aikawa to look at her in utter surprise.
Vivy and Matsumoto were protecting Aikawa in order to prevent humanity’s destruction in a hundred years, but the group who had occupied the building and targeted Aikawa were thinking about the present day.
“As efficiency increases through mechanization, humans will naturally lose jobs, the same as they did when the internet first became widespread. Computers changed the way humans work, and AIs will too,” Vivy went on.
“That’s…”
“Yes, there’s the fear of losing jobs to machines, but the human thirst for advancement knows no bounds. There will come a day where humans won’t even sing. Only AIs will,” said Matsumoto.
“…”
Matsumoto didn’t miss the chance to make a joke at Vivy’s expense, though it was a dicey comment to make when they hadn’t explicitly stated the obvious: They were AIs.
“I knew I had a lot of enemies, but this is too much,” said Aikawa, finally grasping the gravity of the situation. He smiled uneasily. “The inspection was supposed to be secret, so I find it hard to believe the information was leaked so easily. They either have a man on the inside or they’re working with someone capable of entering the control room.”
“Those in the highest positions tend to cling to their jobs the hardest, especially since humans operate out of self-preservation. There’s nothing you can do to stop it,” Matsumoto said.