She tucked the watch back into her breast pocket and peered around the Princess Palace. Vivy followed Kakitani’s experienced footsteps, copying the master of espionage.
“There are no guests in the castle? Everywhere else’s about to burst from overcrowding, but nobody’s here? Weird way to handle it.”
“This place isn’t an attraction. It’s more like a staff room with a decorated exterior. Guests never came to visit, even when I had my waiting room here.”
“Right. It’s a bit early for using the past tense, though.”
“Huh?” Vivy’s eyebrows rose. Kakitani pointed to a directory for the castle on the wall. It listed the rooms, but Vivy was surprised when she saw what was on it. DIVA’S ROOM was still written there. “What’s this?”
“Assuming the lazy-ass staff didn’t just forget to rewrite this for decades, the room’s still here. If that’s the case, I think it would’ve been way better to have you on display there than in the AI museum.”
“It’s…hard to keep AIs here as cast members when they’ve gone well past their operational life.”
“It was just a thought. Don’t take it so seriously.” Kakitani gave a tired sigh, while Vivy pivoted her consciousness away from the matter.
In all honesty, her consciousness had been hit by a great shock when she learned her existence was still alive and well in this place. Even if the space was meant for Diva, not Vivy, it made her think she was right to protect this place for Diva to sing.
“I refuse to let them trample through this place like they own it,” she said, her feet carrying her to Diva’s room without hesitation.
She was certain, and being certain as an AI typically meant evaluating various factors and determining something was close to one hundred percent. But Vivy was moving forward without doing much of any sort of calculation. Vivy’s own consciousness didn’t know the basis of her conviction.
Kakitani raised an eyebrow as she watched Vivy walk off without faltering, then followed her in silence.
There were no signs of AIs inside the castle. They weren’t any warier of this place than the other facilities in NiaLand, but here they could move on almost without caution. They reached Diva’s room without being stopped, whereupon Vivy flung the door open.
“…”
The moment she did so, a nostalgia struck Vivy through every sensor she had. Everything was just as it was in Vivy’s records: the sights, the scents, the furniture, the color of the walls, even the canopy bed no AI needed. Well, except for one thing.
Standing frozen on the far side of the room was a figure that shouldn’t have been there.
When she noticed the door opening, she turned around to face them. A gentle, lingering breeze from the door flowed through the room, and the figure’s jewellike eyes bored into Vivy.
Moonlight threaded through the clouds outside the tall, unopenable window, casting a beam on the floor of the room. The silver light pulled a figure from the darkness.
There stood the OGC-made songstress, A1-03.
“Diva.”
The two identical AIs looked at each other, both calling out simultaneously.
. : 4 : .
VIVY AND THE FAKE DIVA stared at each other’s identical faces.
“Well, that’s not surprising. It’s easy for AIs to look the same on the outside. That’s why there’s a law against an AI having the exact same features as an AI with a designated name,” Kakitani said flatly as she compared the two.
Under the AI Naming Law, an AI with a designated name had registered their name and their physical characteristics. While this wasn’t an issue for the many manufacturing AIs, people had long pointed out the logistical nightmare that would happen if someone were to release a model that looked exactly like another AI—like, say, the popular songstress Diva. Put shortly, it was a measure to prevent identical AIs from causing confusion. Occasionally, an expert in AI models would secretly make an AI look like a popular one, such as one of the Sisters.
It was illegal for the fake Diva to have the exact same appearance as Vivy. It was hard to overlook that even when they were on the verge of societal collapse.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I want you to stop using that appearance to sing,” Vivy said.
“…”
“The song too… I also want you to stop singing ‘Fluorite Eye’s Song.’ I made that song for Diva. Everything about it: the lyrics, the melody, it’s all for Diva. So—”
“You can’t stand hearing others sing it?” The fake Diva tilted her head, and her long synthetic hair cascaded from her slender shoulders. Vivy’s audio sensors trembled with the sound of that familiar voice coming out of the fake Diva.
Without a doubt, the fake was Diva from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. She showed no shame, her eyes blank as she gazed at Vivy. The faux Diva seemed to accept this unexpected encounter.
“It would be unlike an AI to say I can’t stand it. I’m just talking about rights,” said Vivy.
“Rights? Everyone is free to sing a song. ‘I don’t want you to sing,’ ‘I want you to not sing,’ ‘Don’t sing’… That’s quite the arrogant message. It is unlike an AI,” the fake Diva replied.
“I—”
“Vivy, you really are turning into something that isn’t an AI.”
“What are you—? Wait.” Vivy’s eyes narrowed, and she stopped halfway through her question. Catching on to some greater truth, she froze up and her eyes opened wide. The fake Diva had said something strange. Very strange. It was almost as if—
“Hey, you little marionette, where’d you hear this doll’s name?” Kakitani asked as she pulled her gun on the fake Diva.
The fake Diva’s eyebrows shot up, like she had only just noticed Kakitani. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there. I was so surprised when Vivy came in, and this is a staff-only area.”
“Stop dodging the question, marionette. Don’t make me repeat myself. Idiot. I’m asking you a question. Where did you hear this doll’s name? Answer—”
“It isn’t about where I heard it. That name is precious to me. My designated name might be Diva now, but the AI Naming law didn’t exist back then.”
The furrow in Kakitani’s brow deepened when she heard what the fake Diva had to say. “Before the AI Naming Law went into effect?”
The AI Naming Law was created more than eighty years ago. Of course Kakitani would be confused at that topic being brought up.
AIs were capable of pulling up what had happened eighty years ago from their records and explaining it like it had happened that morning. But in order to reference that data, which could be called “memories,” one would have to access Vivy’s positronic brain—her Archive. If someone had attempted to do that, Vivy would have awoken and prevented it from happening. That wasn’t the case here; there had been no attempts to access Vivy without authorization. So how did this fake Diva access records about the real Diva’s past?
Perhaps she hadn’t gotten that through unauthorized glimpses into Vivy’s records after all.
“But that’s not—”
“Possible? Really? Do your calculations really say it’s not possible?” asked the fake Diva. “Is there any such thing as a certainty in this world when data has been sent back one hundred years to change the past?”
“…”
“There’s no such thing as absolutes.” The fake Diva—or whatever this AI was—smiled slightly, her eyes crinkling.
That smile was the exact same one Vivy had seen in the mirror countless times. Everything, even down to the intricate processes that crafted the expression, was identical to Vivy’s.
Vivy shared records with the AI officially referred to as “Diva.” She could sing using the same voice. She could express emotional patterns with the same level of experience. There was only one AI in the world who could do that.
“You’re…the real Diva, aren’t you?” Vivy asked.
“That’s a strange way to put it, but yes, fake Diva. Or should I say…Vivy,” said the other AI—Diva.
Tremors ran through Vivy’s consciousness at that response, but she found no reason to argue. She scrutinized Diva’s words, thought them through, and wound up at the unvarnished truth.
The AI in front of her now was Diva herself. There was more evidence to prove it than to refute it.
Vivy’s consciousness was wiped blank, and she couldn’t move.
Diva took the opportunity to continue. “I—”
“We don’t need another speech from you,” Kakitani snapped. She paid no attention to Vivy’s bewilderment. Her cold, beautiful expression was utterly unchanged as she pulled the trigger to punctuate her point.
Diva’s frame jolted backward with a bang as the bullet hit her. Kakitani mercilessly fired a total of six shots into Diva, who then crumpled to the floor.
“Agh…”
Diva twirled around violently as she went down, connecting with the bed. One of the posts holding up the canopy made an audible crack as the wood splintered. The floating canopy came down and covered Diva, wrapping her in cloth as if to hide her unmoving body from view.
Vivy watched this all happen, the emptiness in her consciousness keeping her rooted to the spot. She turned to her companion. “Kakitani…”
“What? You’re not actually going to complain about this, are you? Even your absurdity has a limit. I just wiped your ass for you when you couldn’t. I’m not about to end up in some mess ’cause you hesitated.”
“…”
Kakitani wasn’t letting her guard down. She still had her gun raised, and she ordered Vivy to make a wired connection to the other AI. “I didn’t aim for her head. The positronic brain should be intact. You go peek in her head. Best-case scenario, we figure out what the AIs are up to.” Even if Diva was rendered immobile by the hail of bullets, Vivy could still access her data and pull information from it.
Their goal was to capture Diva. Actually, no, it was to acquire the information that Diva had. What did she know as the AI songstress involved in the climactic war? From that, they should be able to find some way of handling whatever came next.
“I won’t tell you again,” Kakitani warned.
“I got it,” Vivy said, stepping forward at last. Kakitani was right. Even those few seconds meant time was ticking away in the countdown the AIs had given humanity.
Vivy moved over to Diva, who was shrouded in the white cloth, and reached out to her with the connector cable from her left ear. That was when she noticed it.