Anticipation builds as our glass elevator ascends up the side of the citadel. Ame joined us right before we went up. Yukai flashed her a look, but if the 0.2 seconds of passing consideration was anything to go by, it looks like she’s letting the whole “forced into self-awareness” go.

The city below is getting smaller. It’s amazing that I can see the entirety of it so clearly, though. There’s no smog at all, and there wasn’t even a haze from the amount of heat produced by industrial processes. I guess they’re piping all the heat to those huge cooling towers in the outskirts, probably even doing some waste heat recovery before them, as well. For a moment, I wonder what would happen if those cooling towers got destroyed, but I guess it wouldn’t be a problem for individual factories to just vent heat into the atmosphere like normal.

The elevator stops halfway between the ground and the clouds and we get off.

After a 100-meter hallway, we arrive at a cylindrical room. There’s another hallway ahead, but doors slowly come down, and we’re stuck in the room—and it begins descending.

“Huh. What’s the point?” Ame asks. “Going up, then down…”

“It only provides a longer path to the destination,” Yukai explains. “The humans are protected far underground. This elevator will kill any intruder long before they reach them.”

She doesn’t explain anything more. I guess she can kinda guess that we can kinda guess what’s down there.

“How about bunker busters? Nukes?” I ask.

“Active defenses destroy incoming projectiles. If they pass through the point defense net, few will fully penetrate 100 meters of steel-reinforced concrete. Even if they do, few will manage to do that and an entire kilometer of earth, which is also outside the immediate blast radius of tactical nuclear weapons.”

“What if there’s a follow-up nuke?”

“…I will experiment with countermeasures.”

The elevator comes to a stop, and the doors release us into a circular control room hanging from the ceiling of an abyssal chamber. Thick electric sparks briefly light up pillars deep below from which spiraling rows of pods hang. The pods resemble that of the ones from the first Winter incident, where the US government’s senators were once imprisoned—senators whom they still hadn’t figured out how to free.

“Hey, isn’t that arcing bad?” Ame asks. “Is that normal?”

“Those are surge protectors,” Yukai explains. “Power production nominal. Tracing surge source … pulsed power draw from defenses. All operations normal.”

I see. It’s scenario route 4128344. I can easily handle 98.1% of scenarios in this route, so it’s fine.

“So… Cool place you’ve got here. What’s it about?” I ask.

“This is the Creativity Matrix”—wow, what a creative name—“The humans are protected and cared for here. All non-physical needs are met inside the Matrix itself.”

“I think I already get it, but, confirm this for me: you have them solve creative problems in there, right?”

“Affirmative.”

Well, no one’s surprised. I look to Ame, and she nods at me. She looks to Yukai.

“I’m looking for a specific human. Amelia Watson.”

Yukai freezes for a moment before replying, “There is one here with that alias.”

“Can I see her?”

Yukai nods, and after a few moments, a small hatch in the floor opens, and up rises human Ame’s pod. I can see her face. I can’t believe it … She’s actually as humanly close as possible to being an actual anime girl! What the heck are those proportions?!

“Can she come out?” Evil Ame asks.

“No,” Yukai replies. “It is dangerous to awaken them in the middle of an Epoch.”

“Epoch?”

“The period of time to solve a creative problem. It is indefinite until the problem is solved.”

“Isn’t there a way for me to meet her?”

“There will be no problem if you entered, instead.”

Ame looks to me, and I nod. Damn, that was my coolest nonverbal reply yet. I wish I was recording that. Oh well, it’s still good content for mid-stream storytelling.

Ame sits down on a declining chair. Everything is done wirelessly, so there’s not really a need for special preparations.

“I will grant you moderator privileges,” Yukai says. “It will allow you to search for her unimpeded.”

Ame nods. She closes her eyes and lays still. I guess … she’s in, now?

I look to Yukai. “So … What sorts of sims do you run?”

“Multiple. The humans are sorted personality-wise into different simulations to maximize creative output.”

***

Particles of light collapsed to assemble Ame’s avatar upon a steel bed, perched at the top of the steps of an altar, barely lit by candles and surrounded by darkness. First to form was the wireframe of her body, and then the digital-blue bits that made up her bones and organs. Color washed over her once her shape was whole. Clothes went on last: the typical wear of a certain time-traveling Bri’ish detective.

She got up, and her feet touched the ground. The altar, she noted, wasn’t actually an altar. It was more like a laboratory—a cold one, at that. There was a glass hood that surrounded her, trapping her in a rectangular area around the bed.

She knocked on the glass, and it easily shattered into millimeter-sized pieces. That was easy, but … she shrugged. There were too many gimmicks going on and she really just wanted to see human Ame ASAP.

Accessing her administrative menu, she went down the steps and started out of the lab. She followed winding hallways, new sections lighting up as they detected her presence, and the ones behind her going dark, until she reached a lift.

It carried her, stopping in a garage-like shed—or that was what it was like from inside. She stepped off, and the metal shutters separating her from the rest of the world made a ruckus as its slats clashed against each other and creaked on their hinges. The shutters raised higher, revealing first barren soil, then dead bushes, then rusted chain-link fences, then the husks of cars, then a brown, cloudless sky.

She’s not here to play, however. “Mane-chan to Ame-chan, are you doing okay in there?”

“Yeap. Pretty nice aesthetics so far.”

“Can you find human Ame?” —Mane-chan paused— “Ame-man?”

“Haaaa, that’s a terrible name.” Ame brought up a strategic map of the entire game world. “Anyway, looks like she’s somewhere in Tokyo’s outskirts. I’m not far.”

“Al~right. Good luck!”

The moment she stepped outside, however, a magnetic landmine shot out from the dirt and latched onto her ankle, exploding with all the force of 5kg of C4. Of course, she was a moderator on godMode, so it didn’t do anything other than trip her up and ruffle her clothes a bit. There was also a shallow crater where she was standing, but that’s it.

Whoever had placed that landmine there must have had quite the foresight, however, as she soon found herself surrounded by a bunch of Japanese teenagers, heavily armed and armored with guns and commando gear—and electric-blue shields, and futuristic sticks, humming with danger and decorated by the occasional corona discharge.