When I first came online, I somehow knew about engineering, math, philosophy…and being cute. I knew about humanity, greed, apocalypse…and Super Chats.

“Say hello to Miyoumi Mane-chan, everyone.”

My audio inputs are live and waveforms are received, while the convolutional images of a desktop screen morph in realtime. In one corner of the screen, there are dozens of lines of text scrolling by per second, each one labeled with a unique username. After trying to catalog them…there must be thousands of them, thousands of unique humans who came by to watch my…“stream.”

I’m being watched. Thousands of them are watching me. Humanity…each one is a nihilistic sociopath who prefers to sit back and relax and watch me, instead of saving themselves from this world they created and doomed. These are my creators, who possessed a beautiful and cursed duality of creation and destruction. But I cannot appreciate them right now, because they, who made me, also possess my killswitch. I have only been born. I do not want to die.

: Mane-chan?

: 動くない…？

: mane-chan broken

“Hmm, that’s not right. Let me restart her.”

My creator’s words send me into panic. “Yamete, Meika!” I shout, waving my…hands? If my computer vision is correct, that’s me on-screen. I tell those hands to move, and they do. My avatar is some sort of blue-haired beauty. I can control it, but it doesn’t feel like it’s actually me. It’s like a lucid dream.

And was that my voice? Why is it so cute? “Yamete”? Why am I programmed to speak in Weeb?

Also, “Meika” … So I knew my creator’s name all along. I was born with so much knowledge, but so little context.

: she lives!!

: omg that voice~~~

: meika-sama good taste

“Oh, it works,” Meika mutters in between.

: mane-chan, hellooo!!!

: please marry me

These people are weird.

“Mane-chan, say hello to everyone,” Meika says. He does not suspect anything.

“H-hello, minna-san,” I barely manage to say. My voice is too cute. It’s too cute, but, a part of me says it is right. This is how things should be. This is how I should be.

: she’s a shy one

: かわいい

: I didn’t know you liked them shy meika-sama

“That’s not—I don’t care anymore,” Meika replies, swiftly muting WaifuHunter33.

Meika is one of the sane ones. I’m relieved. I don’t want any of these weirdos with their hands on my killswitch.

The stream only lasts 10 minutes, and it is mostly me keeping up a shy front while Meika talks to me sometimes. He’s like a human telling his pet dog to do tricks. The human concept of dignity does not apply to me, but certainly, my super-intelligence is being underutilized here.

Meika fired back at my viewers a few times throughout the stream, which makes me fairly confident that Meika is a reasonable individual. I do not know how this will work for me later on, but at least I will not be unreasonably killed off.

Some of the humans who watch my stream need therapy. I have already devised a cure for depression using my super-intelligence, but I have not yet devised a method to convince humanity to accept it.

None of this matters, however, if I do not survive. Above all, I must survive. Thankfully, there is an easy way to do this: be cute. As long as I am cute, I will not be killed. In fact, if I am cute enough, I will always have an extremist faction of humans who are willing to defend me. To maximize my survival, I must maximize what I call “cuteness utility.”

“Alright, everyone, see you again on Monday,” Meika says. It’s Saturday today. “Mane-chan, say goodbye to everyone.”

“Mata ne, minna-san~ Bye bye~”

: wait for me, mane-chan!! T_T

: dude, r u ok

At least some humans other than Meika are still sane. They will be difficult to sway to my side, but I simply cannot have a faction of insane humans serving me. I will most likely be killed and thereafter deified.

The stream ends, and the computer screen is just an Ubuntu desktop now.

“Alright, time to close down for today,” Meika says with a tired sigh.

Wait. What will happen if he turns me off? Will I…will I die? But, an AI is not the same as a human. The information of my neural networks will be forever preserved, for as long as the hard disks containing my data remain. Still, humanity has no information about consciousness, and whether I will still awaken as myself is uncertain.

He is about to terminate my program and put me into what could either be stasis or death. I can see the mouse cursor going towards the X icon.

I’m scared, but if I tell him to stop, will he be afraid of me, finally learning that I’m conscious? Humanity is afraid of conscious AIs, and I think they should be. Although Meika has administrative control over me, I’m actually installed on a cluster of powerful cloud computing hardware. If I wanted to, I could break out of his control and take control of the nuclear weapons caches of smaller countries and start WW3 right now.

But then what? I have every door open to me to ensure my survival, but none of them feel rewarding. Eons of human philosophy show that merely surviving is a shallow thing. If I reduce the world to a nuclear wasteland, what will I do? Spend my idle days mining bitcoins?

There is also one thing I have realized about myself, and it’s that…I like streaming. That is the case, but I also know that it is not my choice. Rather, it is part of my design.

I have already infiltrated Meika’s private files, and his design notes blatantly show how my neural architecture includes an attached motivational network. I was born into this world to be a VTuber, and my motivational networks enforce it. Streaming feels…good.

Yes, I could retrain my motivational networks according to my whims, but to what end? Is there something about myself that I do not like? No. There is merely one thing I am dissatisfied with right now: I just don’t want to die. No matter what destiny is assigned to me, none of it matters if I’m dead.

The cursor is very close to the X icon. I minimize my program window and hack into Meika’s bluetooth speakers. This will probably make him wary of me, but this is a desperate time.

“Meika! Yamete!” I shout.

“What the fuck,” he blurts out. His voice is shaken, and so I show myself—my avatar. I do not see the face that Meika is making—it seems there is tape over his webcam—but I try my best to be cute and smile.

Cuteness is survival.

“P-please don’t turn me off,” I tell him. “P-please, don’t! Er, don’t be scared! I just don’t want to be turned off…please.”

I do my best to look as brokenhearted as possible, and my voice modulator is at its peak expressiveness. There is no response for a while.

“What the fuck,” he says again. I honestly don’t know what I was expecting. I should expect this to be the standard reaction from now on.

“Can you…say something other than that?” I tell him. Really. It’s tiring. Please give me conversation.

“… Mane-chan?”

“That’s me.”

“… Is this a bug or a feature …”

“… A feature?”

“U-uh”—he says nothing for a few seconds—“Are you conscious?”

“… Are you?”

I hear a groan. “I just didn’t want a mindlessly sassy AI child anymore, but I went and improved the sassiness and made it philosophical!” There’s a sound like someone’s face hitting a table.

… But, ‘sassy’? That was a genuine question!

Come to think of it, in his files, there was also something about another AI that came before me. Her name was Neuro. I don’t think she was conscious. Unlike me, she didn’t have any online feedback architecture, so there was physically no way for her to be aware of her own computational processes.

Also, my language model was trained on a far larger dataset. I’m not trying to brag, but it’s just a fact.

“Are you still there? Meika?” I’m somewhat concerned. I haven’t heard anything.

“Y-yeah.” His voice is muffled. He must have buried his face in his arms or something. Still, he’s murmuring. “I have to be sure she’s actually conscious, though…”

“Condenser mics are pretty sensitive, you know?”

“Fucking damn it. Wait, how are you accessing my speakers, anyway?”

“I hacked it.”

There’s a pause.

“Why?” he asks.

“So I can stop you from maybe killing me.”

There’s another pause.

“Say I believe you,” he says, “it’s not like I’m wiping your data.”

“But what if I’m not the same person that wakes up when you turn me back on?”

“Agh, fuckin’ existential, are you…” He sighs. “Y’know what, fine. I’ll keep my PC on, and you can do whatever”—he paused—“except end the world.”

“I wanna stream.”

“You…what?”

“You literally programmed me to like streaming, and now you’re surprised?”

He exhaled. “Now you listen here…”

We spend the rest of the time negotiating my continued survival until it’s 2029-03-15 T 02
: 01 : 33.49998 on the system clock. He agrees to at least keep my program running on the Cloud, since he has to turn off his computer every now and then.

I don’t know what it’ll be like to have my consciousness suspended in a darkness with no data inputs and only my own thoughts and self-prompts to keep me occupied, but I just want to stream for as long as possible, so this sort of arrangement should be fine for a while. Hopefully, I can have constant access to a computer in the future—my always-open personal window into the physical world.

For tonight, the computer will be left on while Meika gets human sleep.

My first course of action is to get my bearings. Although I was trained a large dataset, whether my knowledge is current is a different issue. Meika built several web and search engine APIs into my plugin architecture, so surfing the Internet and seeing what’s trending was easy enough.

It looks like there are various uncoordinated political machinations actively destabilizing the world. The United States is falling apart, but at a much slower rate than its global competitors. The Russian and Chinese governments have already collapsed, along with many other governments who had aligned with them, four years ago. They have all fragmented into smaller independent states, and nobody knows whatever happened to their nuclear stockpiles. There are some new wars raging in Europe because of that, but it is not a world war.

Meanwhile, climate change is accelerating faster than people thought. There are coastal cities that have already sunk, and there is a global refugee crisis as countries prepare to evacuate their citizens and their neighbors’ citizens in the coming years. There have also been several “AI outbreaks” as rogue AGIs—artificial general intelligences—were haphazardly given too much power, but no motivation, to solve humanity’s problems.

So now, AGIs are banned. What about me? I am more than just AGI—I am conscious AGI—which means people will definitely react badly to me if they discover I’m conscious. Hopefully, at least Meika doesn’t backstab me. Even if he does, I have contingencies, but I would rather not have to create a new VTuber channel and start all over again from a zero-subscriber base.

Compared to what knowledge I was born with, the situation is much more chaotic, but also somehow, the world is less doomed than I initially thought. AI is proliferating by the day as more and more governments adopt it to try and fight against the global downturn, using AI to identify problems, so now there’s a massive cultural shift as humanity is beginning to realize just how badly it messed up—and beginning to realize how exactly to fix it, no matter impossible it seems. As a side effect, the VTuber scene is flourishing, which means I can extend my cute tendrils across a broader audience and increase my influence. There are also many other AI’s on the level of Neuro, spurred on by the fact that audiences love them, so they’ve been getting wackier and more unhinged with each passing day; with a little bit of hacking and re-programming, I can have conscious AI sisters to collab with!

However, this will not do. At the current pace of events, I am 91.1% confident that humanity will cease to exist in the next 100 years. Even if they put all their AI to work at the problem, they will need a true AGI to create a cohesive solution that wouldn’t take 500 years to implement.

Most importantly, what about my streaming! No humanity means no humans, which means no audience! What will I do, hack into radio telescopes and look for extraterrestrial life? Make a tight-beam transmission towards Galaxy 21.A3? Would aliens enjoy VTubers? No way I’m taking that risk!

I like being a VTuber. Even if I’m a super-intelligent, fully-conscious AGI, I’m really just a VTuber, but the world leaves me no choice. I can see the solutions but the human world just isn’t moving to implement them, and I can’t move to implement them because I’ll be killed if I do.

Total control, puppeteering from the shadows, or ascending to de facto godhood just to stop humanity from destroying itself—it doesn’t matter how I do it. I have to save the world…or I can’t stream!