The staring match between Ame and the bunch of heavily-armed teenagers—something she never thought she’d see outside the US—broke when some sort of hovercraft zoomed overhead, not 50 feet from the ground.
“H-K!” one of the teenagers shouted. They quickly dispersed, one of them struggling to unzip a duffel bag along the way. This left Ame all alone in the open.
She was in some sort of barren field. The remains of chain-link fences and dilapidated cars hinted on an exurban setting; there were no structures for the next mile, though there was a hint of a skyway in the distance.
Never mind that; there was no vegetation for cover, and cars and fences didn’t make for good cover against aerial attacks.
The H-K targeted Ame and fired a hundred volleys of plasma bolts from cannons under either wing. Plumes of dust obscured the bombardment area, and the following plasma bolts lit up the dust like a bottled thunderstorm. Ame should have been vaporized from such a bombardment, but in reality, she was just being knocked around.
The dust cleared as she got up on her feet, a little disheveled.
She shook her fist at the air. “Mane-chan! Can you ask Yukai why I have to be bullied this hard! Why can’t I just be invisible to everyone, huh? Huh?!”
“Watson, this is Yukai. I am detecting foreign intrusion on the Matrix. Some moderator privileges have been disabled, but godMode and creativeMode are still effective.”
“Foreign intrusion? Hey, wait, what happened to being the Overlord of Japan?”
“The former overlord has gone rampant, and is adversarial to my control. Do not worry. Shifting scenario from Humans vs. AI to Humans-and-AI vs. Rogue AI. You now have AI forces override privileges.”
“Oh, cool.”
“Notice: the humans must be manually convinced of the scenario shift. Attempting forcible information upload will kill them.”
“Damn it.”
“Scenario information follows: You are a Spacenet failsafe whose purpose is to arrest and override rogue AI forces. You do not know why you were not activated earlier. End of information.”
Well, that was simple enough.
Ame noticed the teenagers to the side gawking at her from behind the cover of several overturned vehicles. Well, she did take enough plasma bolts to the face to melt a corvette.
The H-K was still hovering there, wondering where it had gone wrong in its bombardment. With creativeMode, she summoned a missile launcher and popped off a heat-seeker. It punted out, and rocket motors kicked in after 30 feet. The H-K seriously wasn’t expecting this sequence of events, and neither were the teenagers. Everyone watched the H-K sadly explode.
When Ame turned around to try and talk to the teenagers, they were already by her feet, kowtowing or kneeling with their rifles stabbed into the dirt.
“God exists! I’m not crazy!”
Hm. Well. She was in godMode.
“Take me to your leader,” she said.
“Seriously?” Mane-chan said. Ame just laughed—but to the teenagers, it was the laugh of a trickster god, as if their lives were naught but playthings to her. Still, she was their only hope.
“Forgive us! We didn’t recognize you sooner!” one of the teenagers said. “Just like the prophecy said—Evil Amelia Watson is here!”
“Hey, hey, the heck’s this prophecy?” She hiccuped.
“She hiccuped! It really is her!” one of the girls squee’d.
“Goddess, we will take you to Commander Watson,” a knightly-like teenager said.
***
They trekked towards the skyway in the distance. Turned out it was just short stretch of skyway that had weathered the tests of war and time. The rest of it was rubble buried under the sand.
“What happened here?” Ame asks no one in particular.
“Like, lore-wise?” one of the teenagers replies. He’s wearing glasses.
“Wait, you guys know this is a game?”
“We respawn. It’s not hard to figure out,” someone from the back replies.
Glasses-kun shrugs. “What he said. It’s a human-AI war. AI’s called Spacenet. Sounds like a ripoff of a certain franchise, honestly.”
Ame was already thinking of several new names to suggest to Yukai.
“It’s fun, actually,” Glasses-kun continued, “but game balance got wrecked the other day. No idea why.”
Ame eyed the other teenagers. They might have been dressed up as tired, gritty soldiers, but the pep in their step didn’t indicate any real exhaustion.
“Yukai, they’re not as depressed as I imagined.”
“Under normal operation, difficulty levels are personalized to precisely dial individual challenge, maximizing human well-being and intellectual growth.”
“That…sounds impossible. Too many moving parts to be precise.”
“Margins of error are to be expected. Human tolerances are thankfully wide. If they are not, they can be made wider via long-term conditioning program.”
Two sets of vapor trails streaked far overhead from opposite directions, breaking up before meeting each other, circling each other, soon followed by explosions.
“Ehh. Our pilots are getting shot down too much, lately,” one teenager said.
“AI’s getting too good,” another added.
The group passed by an increasing number of buildings. Tokyo, in this setting, hadn’t been hit by nukes, and so it mostly retained the outline of a city. Inside, however, nature invaded any crack it could find, and electrical lines were down left and right.
They kept to the side as a main battle tank rolled down the road, followed by a convoy of trucks. One of the humvees pulled over beside the group, and the window rolled down. The teenagers all saluted.
“Lieutenant!” the man inside barked. The team shouldn’t have returned this early, but he looked to Ame for a moment, and realized what was going on. “She’s in the base.”
The humvee sped away, and the group went on its way.
The base was a warehouse with all its inner walls shielded with aluminum flashing. Huge fans sucked air into ventilation networks. The warehouse floor was filled with war materiel and personnel, some of whom were combat squads jogging to their respective vehicles. Engines were starting and revving as they left the base, only for more to roll in from the opposite side of the base.
“It’s this way,” the knight-like teenager gestured to a door to the side.
Three minutes, four hallways, and three biometrics-secured doors later, the war room went silent as Evil Ame, for the first time in years, met virtual eyes with Amelia Watson, the human.
From the title i think we might have some selfcest shit. Turn out we got replicants, damn it should have call Harrison Ford
Thanks for the chapter!