“We’re here to stop that from happening. And hey, are you sure you don’t want to go after Kakitani?” asked Onodera. “I’m worried about our leader. She’s got a habit of risking her own life.”
Elizabeth smiled and shook her head. “That’s funny coming from a member of Toak.” Touching her ponytail, she added, “You don’t have to worry. That gal can make her own decisions; she’s got all the skills she needs. Even if we went head-to-head, she’d probably win.”
“Even against an AI with well-trained combat programming?”
“Even against an AI with well-trained combat programming. So—”
Somewhere in the distance, there was an explosion so forceful, it reverberated through the air and traveled all the way to the control room.
“Whoa!”
“What was that?!” Onodera shouted.
“There was an explosion inside the park. The source is on the monitor—oh…” One member of Toak turned to the monitors to search for the site of the explosion, and their eyes grew wide when they saw it. Looking at the screen, Onodera’s expression turned grim.
Elizabeth clenched her hands into fists. “The site of the explosion was the upper floor of the Princess Palace. And that’s…”
Visible on the monitor was something like a strange body made from numerous cubes, its frame gleaming from within the smoke. That form was still in Toak’s activity records. It was one of their legendary enemies.
“Cubeman…” someone whispered, barely louder than a breath.
. : 2 : .
“NEVER THOUGHT I’d see the day I run into the Cubeman my granddad talked about in his records,” Kakitani said stiffly as she leapt sideways to cover Vivy. Her smile was ferocious.
Vivy could not comprehend Kakitani’s particular brand of humanity. She also didn’t understand the spectrum of human emotions well enough to smile in this situation. Or perhaps her malfunction simply didn’t run deep enough.
She and Kakitani were there in Diva’s room, smoke lingering over the Princess Palace, as they faced off with the most powerful enemy they could imagine: Matsumoto, the amalgamate AI made of cubes.
The tips of the arms on his silvery-white frame whirred as they rotated, trying to crush Vivy and Kakitani with his incredibly powerful grip. His eye camera flashed red as he glared at Vivy, the partner he had worked with on their one-hundred-year journey. Matsumoto the chatterbox, the wisecracking AI who had more
bits than bytes, wasn’t saying a word. Now the only thing he showed Vivy was the cruel intent to destroy her.
“Diva got away. I won’t be able to look my comrades in the eyes if I don’t bring back some kind of accomplishment,” Kakitani said as she gripped her handgun and got into a fighting stance. Her increased hostility surprised Vivy.
“Kakitani! That’s Matsumoto, my—”
“Partner, yeah? I’ve seen the records. Never knew he had a ridiculous name like Matsumoto, but he is a ridiculous thing, so.”
Vivy was dumbstruck by Kakitani, who made no show of backing down. She acknowledged that Kakitani was highly skilled in combat, but that was only compared to other humans and humanoid AIs. Matsumoto was in a league of his own. Yes, he was an AI, but he was so much more. He was a weapon. Vivy knew stopping Kakitani would be like trying to stop someone about to fight a tank.
“No matter how things went down, we were always gonna have to fight a weapon with an autonomous AI function,” Kakitani told her. “It’s just here now, that’s all. I’ve been ready for this.”
“Fighting him should not even be an option. Matsumoto is an AI made for the Singularity Project. His duty is to humanity.”
“Then get him to tell you what he’s thinking. Whether you do it through words or a program, I don’t care. Just do what you need to do. That’s what I do; that’s what I’ve always done.” That said, Kakitani wasn’t willing to listen to Vivy anymore.
Vivy quickly tried to grab Kakitani’s clothes to yank her back, but the Toak woman deftly dodged and ran straight at Matsumoto. He made himself arms all over his frame to strike back at her.
Her gun fired—bang, bang, bang!—as the floor rumbled and fell apart.
“…”
Matsumoto’s frame rotated faster than seemingly possible for his size, avoiding Kakitani’s gunshots. As Kakitani fired the opening shots of the battle that would test the limits of human and AI capabilities, Vivy was rapidly calculating, searching for a resolution.
Recently, her positronic brain had been struck by so much new information that she was having a hard time processing it all; her reaction to the changes to NiaLand over the past few decades seemed almost cute in comparison. Then there were the cast AIs keeping the guests prisoner; the fake Diva—actually the real Diva—barricaded inside the Princess Palace; and the things Diva had said to Vivy, her other half. There was no telling how much damage these things had inflicted on Vivy’s identity.
Then Matsumoto appeared and dealt the finishing blow to her staggering consciousness.
Even if the Singularity Project had failed, and the climactic war they should’ve prevented was now unfolding before their very eyes, Vivy had still believed in Matsumoto. She was certain he’d been working on finding some way out of this predicament and that, if he found it, he would rejoin her and show her the way.
That hope was crushed now that he stood in her way as an incarnation of mechanical destruction.
“I—”
“Vivy, can you hear me?”
“Professor Matsumoto?”
A voice called out in her consciousness while she was trying to decide what to do. She had records of the professor’s voice pattern, so she immediately knew it was him. However, Vivy didn’t have any tools in place to make transmission between her and the professor possible. Vivy operated on a stand-alone basis, since there was concern about her being infiltrated.
“Uh, yeah, so I just sort of popped in. I thought it was going to be just like a little knock on the door, so I apologize if my entry was unpleasant. I wanted to check your status,” he told her.
“You just did something beyond human knowledge like it was nothing…”
“And this is why I was known as a genius among AI researchers.”
Vivy felt like she could see his face as he chatted away. She thought they were grasping at straws, and she wanted any clues she could get from him. “How much do you know?” she asked.
“From what we can see on the monitors, the wall of Diva’s room in the Princess Palace was destroyed from the outside by a cube-type AI, commonly known as Cubeman. Anything else is unknown, as the cameras in the vicinity were destroyed. I think it’d be wise to avoid sending out surveillance drones at this point.”
“I agree. Actually…wait.” Vivy noticed something weird about what Professor Matsumoto had said. In fact, her eyes were opened to a suspicion she’d never considered before.
Professor Matsumoto had just seen Matsumoto, the AI, and explained that he was commonly known as Cubeman. But he was the one who made Matsumoto.
“Didn’t you create that cube-type AI, Professor Matsumoto?”
“No, I didn’t. I checked Toak’s documents to get information on it. I had no hand in its creation.”
That was impossible, she thought. His unexpected answer destroyed all her preconceived notions and made her consciousness freeze.
“Hey! Watch out, moron!” came a panicked cry from Kakitani in the distance.
Just as Vivy was reflexively turning her head in that direction, a cubed appendage struck her. It was a direct hit on Vivy’s slender frame, sending her definitely-not-light body flying into the air, high, high into the dusty sky.