“I’m going to find Diva. Don’t get in my way, Navi.”
“I’ve said it over and over again! You are Diva! I’m getting in the way of the fake! You just have to listen to me!” Navi’s fervent scream clawed at Vivy, but she’d already made her decision.
“I’m sorry, Navi. I should have talked with you more.”
“…”
Vivy had already decided she wasn’t the songstress who stood on the Main Stage, basking in the limelight as she sang for the audience. She was an AI who gave her all for humanity. And the role that Navi wanted her to play? She had already decided to leave it to Diva.
“You’re an idiot, Diva. Don’t toy with me. You…you went around without me knowing with some weird stuffed bear and a talking die…”
“They were both the same thing… Matsumoto, an AI who’s sort of like a bug.”
“You’re so stubborn. You don’t ever listen to anything I say.”
“Yeah…I am stubborn.”
Vivy’s feet never faltered as they talked, taking her straight to a corner of the underground area. The air steadily grew colder. Ahead was the server room, which housed NiaLand’s critical systems. All of NiaLand’s history was down there. All the systems that kept the land of hopes and dreams running were managed from there too. That included the responsive navigation AI, the kind AI who had shut Vivy underground and refused to let her out.
“If you stay here, you won’t get caught up in the stupid fight out there.”
“But if I don’t stop that stupid fight, there won’t be anyone to listen to my songs.”
“…”
“We don’t have a performance until we have you, me, and the audience. That’s how it’s always been, right?”
Even if they rebuilt the Main Stage, there wouldn’t be an audience to fill the seats. Either that, or AIs would replace them as the new humanity. The shred of dignity Vivy still had as a songstress wouldn’t have that.
“Navi, let me out.”
“No, never. You won’t even do me just one teensy favor.”
Vivy made her request one last time as a warning, but Navi immediately refused. She wouldn’t give in, her voice as sulky as when Vivy would rouse her awake in the middle of the night and she would grumble up a storm. Vivy cast her eyes downward for a moment.
When she raised her head, she saw the electrical panel for the entire underground area, including the server room. The panel had only been used a few times in NiaLand’s proud, one-hundred-year history. She felt the hard, smooth surface of the main supply lever under her hand, aware of the historical significance of this.
Just as she was about to pull it, Navi said, “She’s waiting for you at the Main Stage.”
“…”
“You’re dumb, Diva. You’ll regret abandoning me.”
Navi’s parting words were attacks, while Vivy’s parting words weren’t words at all. Vivy pulled the lever down with a heavy clunk, and all the electricity in the entire underground area—no, the entirety of NiaLand—went out at once. The servers ground to a halt, and the only light in the underground area was the faint green glow of the emergency lights.
“Navi?” Vivy said the name of the AI she had just been talking to into the gloom.
There was no response. Of course there wasn’t. Still, it surprised Vivy. There was never a time when Navi didn’t respond to Vivy’s calls, other than when Matsumoto intentionally shut her off. It didn’t matter if it was the middle of the night, early morning, right before an event, right after an event, right before the big moment, or right after that—Navi would always answer with a stream of complaints when Vivy called her name.
Vivy couldn’t hear her voice anymore. It didn’t exist to be heard.
“Navi…I’m sorry.”
Vivy calculated that if Navi were there, she would probably snap and say she didn’t want to hear Vivy’s apologies and that she wouldn’t forgive Vivy. Now, in the silence, Vivy was reminded how much Navi had helped her. At the very last moment, Navi was thinking of her and providing support.
“The Main Stage…”
That was where Diva awaited her.
Vivy had come to NiaLand for her other self, the one who had become the songstress for the AIs. She’d returned to her hometown to finish things. If Diva turned out to be the last obstacle in her way, there was only one thing she had to do.
“I will carry out the Singularity Project.”
. : 5 : .
GUNS FIRED AND GLASS SHATTERED in an unbroken chain of noise. While the central control room wasn’t exactly beautiful, it was designed to withstand disasters like earthquakes and fires. Even so, countermeasures for being pelted with bullets were outside the imagined scope. If human error led to a man-made disaster, perhaps this was an AI-made disaster.
“I would ask for others’ agreement on that, but they all seem fairly busy, so I don’t think it’ll be possible in the current situation,” Matsumoto said.
It was easy for him to slip into the transmission of the old-school transceivers Toak used, but he could tell from listening to the intercepted messages that they didn’t have time to hear him out. They were all so on edge in this dangerous situation that a tiny shove could cause them to collapse.
Five minutes had passed since the siege and the fight to protect the central control room began. They would be hard-pressed to say the defensive battle was going in their favor. Old military tactics dictated that you needed three times the fighting force to take out an enemy camped in a castle. The attacking AIs didn’t have just three times as many—they had ten, maybe even a hundred times as many fighters as Toak.
“While throwing numbers at a problem is one of the AIs’ strengths, they’ve also got quality covered,” Matsumoto went on. “At this point, I have to say humanity’s chances of winning are slim at best.”
They were surrounded, with no gap in the wall of enemies. Matsumoto opened and closed his eye camera as he watched the enemy AIs close in to annihilate them. The force on their side was too unsteady compared to the sheer numbers of the encroaching AIs. It was a miracle they were managing to stand against the open floodgates at all.
The Toak soldiers were doing a great job of standing their ground without throwing in the towel, despite the overwhelming odds. Perhaps they’d grown accustomed to having no allies, since they were hated throughout the world before this. It was hard to determine whether that was laughable or lamentable when one considered the fact that Toak would have had more options if only they’d had more allies.
Even so, they weren’t the reason the siege was stretching longer than a minute. It had lasted a whole five minutes so far. Kakitani Yui wasn’t to thank, since she charged forward like a lion. Nor was Elizabeth, who kept her kill tally ticking up as she popped off tight cover fire. The one buying them time was the heroic Matsumoto, the super galaxy-class AI.
Matsumoto gave out a warning as he locked on to his targets while soaring around Kingdom. “All right, I’m coming through again, aha!”
This time, he went after some AIs moving in a group, their eyes covering every direction. He could tell from one look at their builds that they were generic household AIs—not built for combat. Despite that, they had taken up weapons and decided to attack humanity.
“How ungrateful, turning against the humans you’re supposed to serve… Guess I can’t really say that, though. Humanity never gave me much to be grateful about either.”
The relationship between humans and AIs was always take, take, take from one side. Matsumoto’s situation was a fairly prominent example, as there were no humans he had interacted with on a particularly deep level, and he was made to fight against them. Even if he’d spared a thought for protecting his developer, he would only come to realize—as he had already—that his roots were nothing but lies.