It was an odd sight, but anything was possible in The Archive. On the other hand, it was flawed in that you couldn’t control it as much as you liked. It was an environment that laid bare your inner self for all to see. Therefore, it didn’t surprise her to see a different scene on the other side, a runway at nighttime that she had seen before. The place was carved deep into her memories, a place she would have trouble ever forgetting, and not just because she was an AI.
A runway at night. A fatal plane crash. Vivy had rushed to this runway after they finished modifying the first Singularity Point and Matsumoto stopped her attempt to save human lives that shouldn’t be saved. As it so happened, this confrontation and defeat was what caused Vivy to conduct her combat simulations against Matsumoto.
Vivy hadn’t expected to find this scene, something so hard for her to forget, in Matsumoto’s Archive.
“Ah!” Once again, something rushed past, just outside Vivy’s detection range. It was small and quickly slipped through her blind spots. She turned to face it and reached out a hand without thinking. “Wait!”
It didn’t stop. The moment she moved to run after it, something changed on the tarmac.
“…”
A plane approached from somewhere else along the dark runway. Its nose dipped straight down at a clearly unsafe angle as it entered the scene. Vivy’s eyes opened wide, and she could see the passenger seats through the windows as it passed by.
She spotted a little girl in a window seat.
“Mo—”
It exploded. The blast and flames rushed toward Vivy, the heated gale sending her hair and clothing fluttering. The intense heat was enough to melt an AI’s synthetic skin. But Vivy felt no heat even as she took the blast head-on. Of course she didn’t. This was inside The Archive. It wasn’t actually happening. So she lowered the arm she’d reflexively brought up and peered into the flames.
“Oh!”
Now the ground disappeared from below her frame. She somersaulted in the air, her footing gone. Her body spun slowly, never stopping.
“…”
She lacked control over the space, and disorientation gripped her as she tried to look around.
An inky blackness flew into her sight, dotted with spinning, twinkling lights. Their locations aligned with the stars in the night sky, and Vivy realized she was in a zero-gravity environment—in space.
First there was the runway at night, and now there was zero gravity in darkness. Vivy’s consciousness realized the connection: She was reliving the Singularity Points, tracing through them in order.
“Ah…”
There shouldn’t be any sound in the vacuum of space, but the voice still slipped out of Vivy’s throat. It was further proof this was a manufactured world, not a reflection of real space.
The moment Vivy realized where she was, Sunrise swept from one edge of her vision to the next, plummeting at immeasurable speeds. It was heading to an azure-blue planet that appeared out of nowhere. As Sunrise made its way to Earth, each part of its massive structure came off one by one, reducing its volume. The structure lit up with a heat so intense no words could describe it, and it burned, melted, and disappeared.
“…”
While Sunrise was losing its form, the sun peeked up from the other side of the blue planet. Sunrise and the real sun. Two impossible acts taking place on the stage of space burned into Vivy’s eyes. The white light of the sun leapt right into Vivy’s retinal sensors, stealing her vision. Then she was on the ground, all four limbs touching solid earth.
“Now I’m…”
She slowly looked up with a certain prediction in mind as she scanned her surroundings.
“…”
A helicopter flew into view, the harsh sound of its rotor blades cutting the air above. Transport drones with onboard explosives approached the helicopter. Fire lit the fuse the moment the helicopter was within range of the explosives, and they burst. The combat helicopter tried to escape the attack, but the effort was in vain, and it fell. AIs flung themselves into the sea and charged the landing craft atop the ocean. The ship jerked up as it rode up on underwater rocks and exploded, lives scattering along with the red flames.
Vivy saw this scene of AIs slaughtering humans at Metal Float, the facility the AIs had controlled. The historical outrage would be repeated until all of humanity was eliminated if Vivy and the others didn’t make it in time. It was hard for Vivy to forget the impact this sight had on her: the ones she couldn’t save, the ones who refused to be saved, and the ones she probably could have saved but chose not to.
“Ah…”
Vivy walked across Metal Float until she could see her face reflected in the ocean’s surface, then she felt something push her from behind. In the blink of an eye, she was plunging headfirst into the water. Her entire frame went underwater, and she sank, nothing but billowing bubbles around her. The surface raced away from her at an unbelievable speed as she drifted deeper into the dark depths that had swallowed so many AIs and human lives.
“…”
She couldn’t see anything in the underwater gloom. Her back struck the ocean floor. Suddenly her body was no longer floating; it was rotating. Her frame broke through the ocean floor, and she flew backward into a sky filled with thick clouds. She was inside something like a giant soap bubble, swinging back and forth as though she were tiny, the weight of her frame irrelevant as she descended slowly through the sky.
A cold wind blew, and speckles of some white, ephemeral substance fell through the sky like her. It was snowing. She looked down to see a rooftop blanketed in a sheet of pure-white snow, with two unmoving figures snuggled together upon it. A small, entirely black body was crammed into the arms of a larger frame.
Vivy focused her eye cameras on them, trying to see them clearly, but the blowing wind and snow stood in her way, yanking the giant soap bubble from its descent and sending it spinning off into the sky.
It flew past cities, leapt over the sea, and raced rapidly through the heavens.
“…”
With a pop, the bubble split, and Vivy fell to the ground. Her aqua-colored hair streamed in the air. She gently bent her knees as she landed, then raised her face to see where she’d fallen.
“The Main Stage…”
This place meant so much to Vivy and especially Diva, who’d performed here her entire career. Having fulfilled Diva’s duty as a songstress here, they had more records of this place than any other.
Diva had spent so much time here. And as for Vivy…
“This was the place we met,” she said.
“Yes, it was,” came Matsumoto’s voice from a small frame of cubes. “Well, I didn’t have my totes-on-fire, silvery-white body, so you can’t quite call it our first in-person meeting.”
“Totes-on-fire…?” Vivy said with a frowning emotional pattern. The word “totes” was so old, she actually had a hard time translating it.
In response, Matsumoto closed and opened his eye camera in a way that resembled a bemused smile. A sense of accomplishment washed over Vivy now that she’d finally seen him acting like the AI she remembered.
“Does that mean this is our first meeting?” she asked.