“Let me just say, that is totally wrong,” Matsumoto said as he broke into Altair through Vivy’s wired connection.
With God Mode activated, Vivy’s frame was borrowing Matsumoto’s calculative abilities, making her essentially another part of Matsumoto’s frame, just not in cube shape. And while Vivy might not have liked making that comparison, there was no arguing against it considering what was about to happen.
“…”
Vivy watched Matsumoto move deeper into Altair, taking over his opponent, while she calculated what Altair’s abnormally gigantic frame had accomplished up until now. How many duties had he carried out with AIs for the future of humanity? All of that would crumble here and now.
“I’m not sorry,” she said.
A human might consider it polite for the victor to apologize to the loser, but that sort of reasoning didn’t apply to AIs like Vivy. Admittedly, she did give him credit for what he had done, her consciousness calculating an emotional pattern close to what you might call respect. But if two AIs held conflicting interests, and they couldn’t come to a compromise, then the only thing left to do was label each other obstacles and for one to remove the other.
AIs didn’t see anything special in results that came from doing your best.
“Mission complete.”
Vivy said nothing more, standing before Altair’s positronic brain as Matsumoto silenced his massive frame.
. : 6 : .
“I DON’T REMEMBER TALKING about you doing it like that,” said Kakitani with a frown. Vivy and Matsumoto had just rejoined Toak after disabling Altair and stealing his control key.
During that time, Kakitani and Toak fought Vega in Kingdom’s central control room—where he just happened to be stationed—and now the whole group had reunited.
Fortunately, their strategy seemed to have worked well enough, since they had already taken over the control room. The room had rows of monitors and control panels, and it felt quite small for something meant to handle all of Kingdom, but that was to be expected from a facility fully controlled by AIs.
Given that the management AIs and their subordinates ran the place, the control room must have been for the handful of engineers who visited Kingdom a couple of times a year. The AIs didn’t need a physical control room, since they were all connected through The Archive.
“It sounded like monsters fighting monsters out there. When we split up, didn’t you say something about how quietly you’d be able to move since the other AIs wouldn’t bother you?” Kakitani asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
“You wound me, Miss Kakitani. Allow me to provide this answer to your question: I don’t recall,” Matsumoto replied,
borrowing the answer from some old politician. An AI saying he didn’t remember was also its own form of dark humor.
Kakitani’s expression didn’t soften in the slightest. She grunted and jerked her chin toward the back of the control room. There, Professor Matsumoto was already at work in front of a control panel, his lab coat dirtied. The cube Matsumoto had left with them was beside him, plugged directly into the system.
“Vivy, you’re back! And Matsumoto too. Glad to see you’re all right,” said the professor.
“And I’m glad you’re safe. How’s the work going?” Vivy asked.
“Just getting started. We should just manage to stop the satellites falling if I can get help from Matsumoto’s main body. But…”
“But?”
Professor Matsumoto’s expression darkened as he worked on the terminal. Vivy followed his eyes to see what was wrong and saw someone on the floor in the corner of the control room.
It was Onodera, his back against the wall and his legs stretched out, beads of sweat dotting his strained face. He wasn’t wearing his bulletproof jacket anymore, just the shirt below, and there were thick bandages wrapped around his muscular torso. Quite a lot of blood had already soaked through the bandages, showing it wasn’t just a light wound.
“He was covering the professor, and they got through his defenses.”
Then she spotted another figure. “Oh, Elizabeth…”
The AI was tucked away in the corner opposite Onodera, and her condition was nothing like when they parted. Her cocky features were exactly the same as always—the problem was from the waist down. Her equipment had been no weaker than that of the other Toak members, but her lower abdomen was smashed, and her legs were gone past the knees. One look was enough to see she had taken a nasty hit.
“Things kind of blew up here once the two of you got started,” Elizabeth said. “That management AI might’ve looked frail, but he was pretty darn strong. Did this to us while we were duking it out.”
While she was talking, she pointed with her chin to a row of lumps in the middle of the control room floor, each covered with a white cloth. The quantity matched the number of Toak members who weren’t off doing other things. They were corpses—more than ten bodies of Toak members who had sacrificed themselves to defeat the management AI and take over the control room.
“Don’t tell me you overly smart AIs expected to get a surrender with no wounds and no blood,” Kakitani scoffed.
“…”
“I could tell just how dangerous that massive freak you were fighting was, even from far away. I hate to admit it, but if we’d swapped teams, there would’ve been only the smallest chance we walked out of there alive. Wouldn’t have been surprising if everyone was wiped out except me.”
“I’m shocked at my inability to doubt your confidence,” Vivy said.
Even though their main force had suffered many casualties, Kakitani was going strong. Her ability to keep herself alive was extraordinary. Still, even she was quite depleted at this point. Her face showed obvious signs of fatigue. She’d probably fought on the front lines for Toak this whole time without taking much of a rest.
She must have guessed Vivy’s calculations because she said, “What? Are you trying to show some human consideration for me? Don’t. It’s disgusting.” Her attitude toward Vivy was the same as ever as she walked over to Elizabeth and Onodera.
Professor Matsumoto watched their exchange out of the corner of his eye as he typed on the terminal. With a wry smile, he said, “Don’t let it hurt you, Vivy. She’s not trying to be mean.”
“I don’t have a function for being hurt by words. I do have negative emotional patterns, though.”
“It’s just a figure of speech.”
He didn’t spare another glance at Vivy as he continued his work with such intense drive, it was almost AI-like. If Vivy tried to help, she could end up holding him back. Then again, it shouldn’t have been possible for an AI to lose against a human if they were competing on even footing.
Vivy slowly shifted her eyes from the control room to the outside.
The control room was in the center of Kingdom, and she could see flames and smoke rising from various locations throughout the area. The once-prosperous kingdom had been driven to collapse. Vivy and Matsumoto’s extreme fight against Altair was partly responsible, but the biggest source of damage hadn’t come until after the three management AIs were destroyed.