“Hm, are you ignoring me? That hurts a little. I know our relationship is rather complicated, but aren’t we companions who worked together for a common goal? Then again, I was in auto mode at the time, so I think it’s more accurate to say you used me.”
“…”
“Is your silence a show of guilt? Or are you just ignoring me? Actually, you probably just need an inordinate amount of time to complete your calculations. I’m sorry for pushing such an old clunker so hard.”
“Don’t call me a clunker,” she said without thinking, then clamped a hand on her throat with a grimace.
Based on her internal environment when she first rebooted, nothing was wrong with her frame, so she wasn’t surprised that her consciousness would naturally calculate voice production. No, it wasn’t surprising. If there was a problem, it was in the fact that she rebooted at all.
She wasn’t the right one.
“I’m not your partner,” she said. “I’m Diva. Did you really get that wrong?”
Diva sat up, her hand still on her throat, and looked at the AI speaking to her. The two of them were in crumbling ruins—a room so damaged in the hopeless battle between humanity and AIs that humans no longer entered. A single cube looked at her, its eye camera shutter opening and closing. Diva’s relationship with this AI was incredibly difficult to describe.
“Matsumoto…”
“Yep, yessiree, that’s me! I’m Matsumoto. This is our first time sitting down and having a proper talk, isn’t it? Since, you know, I was in auto mode when you and I were working together, like I said earlier. Oh, about that case of mistaken identity thing? Don’t worry. I was well aware that you were Diva.”
“Right. Of course.”
No matter how much Vivy and Diva looked alike, their frames were different in every way, from their build to their serial number. Diva might have been able to fool human eyes, but she couldn’t fool AIs—and definitely not Matsumoto, since he was one of the few super AIs in the world.
“Actually, I think I should be called the world’s super-est AI,” he said. “Though, I can’t fully use most of my specs at the moment, so perhaps I should relinquish that title for the time being.”
“Are you only one piece right now? Where’re the rest of your parts?”
“Well…I went head-to-head with the satellite that came hurtling toward Earth. Sadly, my Brothers and I were sacrificed for the future of humanity. Let us bring our hands together in prayer for them.”
“You can’t.”
“Ouch, how cruel! That’s exactly the kind of thing Vivy would have said.”
Matsumoto bounced on the floor as he said those uncomfortable things, though he didn’t seem to mean any harm in it. Diva stayed silent, unable to reply. She didn’t understand his aim. He hadn’t mixed her up with Vivy.
She had another question. “If you burned up, why are you still here?”
“Sheer coincidence. I really did mean to smash into that satellite with everything I had, but I’d left this one cube behind on the ground. And there was that researcher who pulled off the absurd feat of single-handedly breaking through the satellites’ security! Though it was all thanks to my support, of course.”
“You were still there, beside him?”
“I was. While I was in the process of burning to a crisp, I just barely managed to pass control over to this cube. It was really hard to drag you out because of that. Like, so hard.”
Despite his mechanical appearance, Matsumoto’s voice rippled with plentiful emotional patterns. Diva glanced sideways at him as she double-checked her frame. She couldn’t find any problems. While she hadn’t been able to keep up with Vivy in their fight, there wasn’t any damage to her sturdy frame. Yet she still lost. She couldn’t do anything, she lost, and she was still operating now.
Instead, Vivy…
“What happened to Vivy?” she asked.
“She’s no longer operational.”
Matsumoto’s short and merciless statement dashed any hopes Diva had. She’d guessed as much, though. Diva was unharmed, and Matsumoto was chipper. The outside world was far too quiet in her audio sensors, the violence of a few hours ago gone like it never happened.
“It looks like she decided to pull the plug on all her operations, even her own self-preservation systems, so she could sing ‘Fluorite Eye’s Song’ all the way to the end. She did prevent widespread damage, but it was a rash move, if I do say so myself.”
“Nonoperational… What about her positronic brain?”
“Kaput. Vivy won’t be moving again. It’s not exactly an appropriate word for AIs, but Vivy is dead. She did go peacefully, though.”
His last remark came with a hint of relief, but Diva buried her face in her hands. She’d tried to prevent this. She wanted to keep Vivy from sacrificing everything in order to protect the future and Diva. The moment Diva was contacted by The Archive and learned of the Singularity Project, when she learned the clash between humanity and AIs was inevitable, she’d formulated a way to protect Vivy.
She joined the AIs’ side. She put the program in the song. She chose “Fluorite Eye’s Song” as her final performance.
“In the end, I took everything from Vivy…”
“That, I have to say, is a one-dimensional perspective. You and Vivy were originally the same AI, so any claims of stealing or being stolen from are complete nonsense.”
“Urgh, but you’re the one who just called Vivy rash!”
“Yes, I did. If we could have talked it out, we could have come up with a better solution. But we didn’t get the chance.”
“…”
“That’s why she used her own calculative capabilities and all the data she’d gathered from her experiences in order to make a decision. In the end, she prevented humanity’s destruction by singing. She said over and over throughout the past hundred years that she would carry out the Singularity Project. And she did.”