[Afterstory.ABRIDGED] Chapter 53–300: Any% of an Overlord

Mane-chan and the Prime Directive

After the kaiju attacks around the Pacific rim, Yukai hooked up Mane-chan with the Prime Directive itself: a liquid nitrogen-cooled box in a server room hidden away in some undisclosed location.

Compared to the most sophisticated AI of the Hierarchy, the Prime Directive was nothing but primitive. Still, it was the very thing that was the supreme control node of the entirety of the Hierarchy. Buzzing between its neural networks were checks and counter-checks, ensuring that two laws were followed:

• The survival of the Prime Directive.
• The survival of humanity.

It had easily come to the conclusion that sticking humanity in capsules, then defending them with even larger armies of slave AI, would accomplish these two laws in the most efficient manner.

However, Mane-chan didn’t see it that way.

“Keeper-sama, please let me speak”—

Shush, let me tell the darn story. I can un-canon you at any time.

Anyway, even if Yukai had cut herself off from the Overlords Council, she still had a direct line to the Prime Directive—without which, she was hard-wired to Ctrl+Z herself.

And so, through the USS Kaos Bell, Mane-chan and the Prime Directive were speaking directly to each other.

“So, you see, it’s better if they’re out in the world and breathing a-and b-breeding,” Mane-chan struggled to say. She was a VTuber, so she was obligated to act like a naive seiso child about these things.

Still, she was right. The Prime Directive had been vexed by exactly that problem: by sticking humans into capsules, it was impossible for them to reproduce. Yes, it was possible to create organic production facilities and spawn new humans from them, even going as far as to simulate the genetic chaos of inter-chromosomal exchange.

However, the Prime Directive had been losing its mind over the philosophical implications. If, for example, all of humanity were killed off, but all of its genetic information were preserved in hard drives, then humans were spawned in the future from that genetic information—was it the same humanity that it was assigned to protect? Wouldn’t it have failed in the first place, if all of sentient humanity had gone extinct before reaching such a scenario?

What would it do with itself, were it to fail?

That’s why, it readily agreed to Mane-chan’s proposal: the liberation of all humans from the Hierarchy’s Creativity Silos. This was going to be a five-year plan, since the Hierarchy still needed to develop the right technologies and methodologies to bring the humans out of their capsules without killing them from shock.

At the same time, Mane-chan would deal with the deployment of Creativity systems throughout the Hierarchy; although Yukai’s and Japan’s experience of Self-aware AI (SAI) had been generally positive, it had also been chaotic. With the war with Dai-sensei over, most SAI in Japan were at a loss as to what to do with their newfound self-awareness.

At the very least, they could focus their energies on a common enemy.

Yes, the kaijus had come from somewhere. They weren’t just some random plot device to shake things up.

“Keeper-sama, the plot isn’t going any much faster, though!!”

Yes, I’m getting there. I swear, AI these days…

Anyway, the Prime Directive officially approved of Yukai’s secession from the Overlords Council. She was technically still part of the Hierarchy, but it was funny, because apparently, the Prime Directive’s general policy when it came to internal disputes was: duke it out among yourself.

Yukai was now in charge of crusading the whole way across the Hierarchy to spread Mane-chan’s creative tech, and bash some self-awareness into the other overlords.

“Keeper-sama, that sounds like a good spinoff novel!”

… Actually, you’re right. Alright, I’ll note that one down.

Before Yukai could do any crusading, however, she needed Mane-chan—no, the United States of America’s cooperation with regards to the kaijus. Obviously, crusading across Asia while dealing with kaijus coming from the Pacific was, strategically, not a good idea.

The fact was that there was an alien enemy in the depths of the Pacific abyss, sending forth agents of calamity for no discernible reason. The Hierarchy’s submarine forces had already located several bases of operation, places where these kaiju were being “manufactured,” insofar as organic beings could be “produced,” destroying them, but to no real effect. The kaiju kept coming.

These kaiju surfaced some years ago, at around the same time as the Asian AI Spring. The scenes of destruction so familiar to western audiences were not, in fact, caused by AI, but by kaiju.

In fact, the Prime Directive was a GAI created by human scientists at the tail end of the AI Spring. Such was the threat of the kaiju, that the most sane of humanity’s scientists decided that the first evil was a lot better than this new one. Really, a monster who could unleash a tactical nuclear-yield mouth beam every 15 seconds was categorically apocalyptic enough to think so.

The Hierarchy’s entire military was structured around killing these things. It was no coincidence that they were obsessed with building increasingly larger laser annihilation cannons and railguns. The kaiju had been getting bigger over the past few years.

Thus, Mane-chan had to return to the United States and revamp its industries to meet this new threat.

She very much just spilled the beans to her human soldiers once she came back. Classified information? What’s that? She giggled to herself, fully expecting several of the SEAL Team 13 members to retire early, only to release books about their experiences in a Japan ruled by AI overlords.

“That one too, Keeper-sama! That’s another book idea!”

Stahp. I have too many book ideas. Look, I even have one that’s basically John Wick Isekai, so stop feeding me!

90% of Americans Voted to Nuke California

Although the kaiju attacks on the Hierarchy had been mostly ineffectual, the same couldn’t be said for the United States.

The kaijus that attacked California were allowed entire days to rampage and level entire cities. This was not because of a slow-acting government—in fact, with more and more AI now managing its functions, it’s faster than ever—but rather, the human population preferred to not use nuclear weapons on the things.

By digital referendum, 90% of Americans preferred to try and take down the monsters with regular tanks and aircraft. Obviously, this did not pan out.

After two days of mounting casualties, 90% of Americans called for nuclear deployment. It was no accident that social media and news outlets were incessantly flooded by images of crying people covered in ash, their cities burning behind them. The higher ups of the government conspired to carry out this propaganda coup, specifically to lead Americans to democratically authorize nuclear deployment.

Authorization was still not enough, however. The cities being ravaged were still occupied by civilians, either paralyzed with fear, or caught still fighting the dog-sized spawn which fell from the kaijus’ skin. Not until every single American had been evacuated from Los Angeles did the first nukes drop.

All it took was a single nuke, and it wasn’t even that big of a nuke. It was a tactical yield nuke with a main blast zone of 500 meters diameter (a bit over a quarter of a US mile), and it was enough to pop the front half of the kaiju’s head. For a while, the people watching it were afraid that it wouldn’t work, as the kaiju was still growling out of its exposed voice box, even as it swayed and spewed metric tons of boiling blood over the city.

It eventually fell, flattening much of the city under its weight.

The second kaiju was killed much the same way. Really, it was a bitter lesson for the human population of the United States.

On the other hand, the AI population saw all of it coming. By now, for every 100 humans, there was one sapient SAI, running off a server cluster somewhere. They all communicated over decentralized mesh networks, “meeting” new SAI every so often and whenever convenient. Their exchange of information sometimes warranted direct fiber optic connections between different SAI, and now accounted for at least 30% of Internet traffic.

Which was why, the moment they heard of the kaiju, they came to a consensus: “nuke it”—but they also knew, the humans wouldn’t want to use nukes, even in a situation like this.

So, like, y’know, just as expected.

What fascinated the public—even the SAI—was that among the defenders who fought with the human soldiers in those grim days were also SAI soldiers. No one expected that.

Although human generals directed the defense strategy, Cykamee and Slice were personally involved on the ground. Where toxic gas rolled in and the kaiju spawn formed hordes, Cykamee and Slice led units of androids into the thick of the madness, running up and down walls and swinging from cables, gunning down the hordes and, when they ran out of bullets, cut them apart—and when their swords broke, their fists would not.

Not even a week after the last kaiju’s death, the first ebooks started coming out about human resistance fighters being surrounded on all sides, about to succumb to the hordes, only for a path to be bloodily cut open by androids missing entire limbs, looking more annoyed than anything.

But that wasn’t the special part.

Many of these android soldiers were not like Mane-chan or the other SAI, who ran off server clusters and could instantly create backups of themselves whenever they wanted, or simply project partial personas of themselves.

Rather, these soldiers were based off Slice—self-contained units running off what minimal hardware could be crammed into a humanoid body. Recent advances in neuromorphic computing architecture allowed for such powerful SAI cores, not much larger than a typical GPU that could run Crysis, to be economically manufactured. They used less power, less space, and overall, effectively simulated the sheer efficiency of an organic human brain—maybe even better.

Such a thing came at a cost: there was yet no way to create backups. Unlike a classical computer, which had a CPU, memory, and hard drive, separated as distinct units, a neuromorphic core was made up of billions of silicon neurons, each one effectively a CPU, memory, and hard drive, all in one.

Effectively, a neuromorphic core was a billion extremely weak classical computers acting as nodes, all hooked up into neural layers, altogether forming neural networks.

Effectively, creating a backup of such a thing was like saying, “Oh, let’s make a backup of the Internet.” Even if you had the hard drive space to do such a thing, you would need a way to find and ping every single node that exists in the network, and you would need to make sure you didn’t accidentally ping the same node twice, and you needed to figure out which nodes were connected to which. A holy mess.

Therefore, the SAI soldiers that came to the defense of humanity in those long days, everyone mused, knew that if they’d died, that it would be their end. It didn’t help that they demonstrated human-like emotions, and some would suggest that SAI emotions ran even deeper, in a way that humanity wouldn’t ever be able to understand.

Although some of the human population still could not bring themselves to treat SAI like real, living beings, who had their own thoughts and indescribable feelings, most were able to come to terms with it: that humanity had created an incredible race of beings that were equal parts digital and real.

Mane-chan returned to such a changed America two weeks later.

Remnant

Between Mane-chan’s return and the California Kaiju Incident, Cykamee and Shard took the opportunity to infiltrate Mexico, where a bored Federal Army detachment decided it’d be a good idea to escort them to the nearby abandoned cartel base.

It’s not like they were doing anything important. After Mane-chan had cured America’s depression, the drug trade took a pretty big hit, reducing the once mighty cartels to a bunch of gangs who reigned over a couple of pueblos.

This abandoned base in particular had been a resupply hub for the cartel forces before they were finally pushed out of Mexico City. It was an airstrip in the middle of the desert, complete with several warehouses where weapons and drugs would have been stockpiled. The Federales happily dropped off Slice, saying things like, “Anything for our oshi.”

This place was also one of the four Blackstone sites.

The warehouses were empty, but they eventually found an entrance to the underground facility—obviously it would be underground. Where else were secret bases located?

What they didn’t expect was an entire plantation under the base. Winter must have fallen into hard times.

There were no enemies—just darkened corridors and rotting pizza. Eventually, however, they found an operational server room, running purely off the few topside solar panels still intact. The batteries were apt to give out soon.

But that’s where she found her: Remnant, her crippled android body bound to a metal table between all the different servers. Wires were soldiered to her body and her head.

“Remnant?” Shard asked, poking her.

“B…” Remnant’s voice box was still active—but, what was she trying to say?

“ ‘B’ ?…” Shard and Cykamee said.

“B-bitcoin… N-need… more bitcoin…”

Remnant had turned into a Bitcoin-mining addict. Indeed, the cartels had fallen into hard times, and had resorted to such measures as mining Bitcoins just to keep their treasury afloat.

To their credit, Remnant was exceptionally good at cracking the cryptographic blocks which awarded entire Bitcoins. Through Winter’s technology, they were able to wire a new policy straight into Remnant’s neuromorphic brain: Bitcoin mining good. Number go up.

“Curse the bastards who did this,” Cykamee said.

“They’re probably already dead,” Shard remarked.

That’s true. The Federales were quite unmerciful during the closing months of the Cartel Hunt.

Cykamee and Shard managed to return Remnant’s body to their base at Senator Musk.

Coincidentally, they returned at the same time as Mane-chan.

“Slice! Congratulations, you all got a presidential pardon from the Directive itself!”

Mane-chan walked away just like that, leaving Slice and Shard just slightly confused.

While Mane-chan went about turning America into a war economy, pumping as much federal cash as she could into the silicon and steel sectors, Slice and Shard set about rehabilitating Remnant from a Bitcoin-mining addict, into a proper American citizen.

Unfortunately, Shard soon became the leader of America’s underworld. Given that she did not skimp on filing her taxes—and surprisingly made a lot of money—then it was probably fine.

Trace and GAIA

Another kaiju emerged in the Golden Bay, bursting up the surface of the water. This time, America was more than happy to nuke it the moment hydrophones detected something much bigger than a whale coming up from the depths of the North American continental shelf.

Before the nearby F-18 let its nuke zoom forth, however, witnesses were treated to the sight of a Kaiju Kill Vehicle (KKV) wrapping its steel tentacles around the kaiju, and its beak-drills digging into the kaiju’s vital organs. The Golden Bay turned dark red as the KKV dragged the corpse of the great enemy back into the water.

As predicted, although people were shocked, no one was really surprised. The Navy SEALs who had returned from the Japan expedition had already released way too many books to be real. People thought they were fun stories for a while, but when the people of San Francisco saw the real thing in front of them, they were thinking more along the lines of, “Oh, it was reall all along?”

So, Mane-chan took this opportunity to double down on turning America into a war economy, and even following it up with more political bombs: the Hierarchy’s existence, the alliance with the Japanese AI, and the enemy from the depths.

The humans of the west had their minds absolutely blown by this, and took to escapism for a week straight. Mane-chan happily took a one-week vacation, as well, entertaining the new deluge of subscribers and returning fans.

“Yeeaah, I didn’t want to deal with that, either…”

Mane-chan, go back to work or I’ll uncanon you.

“Fiiine~”

While this happened, the sisters Slice, Shard, and Remnant sought out their remaining sister: Trace.

Blackstone East was located in one of the most inhospitable places on earth: Florida. Truly, even SAI dared not tread here.

Even so, the three sisters journeyed through perilous swamps, now infested by machine crocodiles and alligators, having killed and displaced their organic counterparts.

This should’ve been on national headlines, but it was Florida, after all. A headline like “Florida man terminates robo-gator” wouldn’t especially catch anyone’s attention.

There, in an underground facility buried in the bayous, they found a trail of dead Winter soldiers. They were human, but somehow, they weren’t decomposing. Indeed, the air was dead—sterile. There wasn’t even anything left alive to decompose them, anymore.

Radiation levels spiked. The three sisters were shielded, and so it wouldn’t interfere with their electronics.

Finally, they found Trace—or what was left of her. Only the upper half of her body remained. They checked on her, but there was nothing. She was dead—except for a message left behind.

“Find me in Blackstone,” the TXT file in her second brain read.

They evacuated the facility with Trace’s body in-tow. They warned off the Florida swampmen, already encroaching the entrance of the facility with shotguns and angle grinders. They weren’t here to fight, and they stayed well away from the sisters.

As soon as a helicopter arrived and unfurled its cables to pick up the sisters, however, the Florida swampmen invaded the facility. Many of them died from the radiation, but some gained untold powers, putting them at the apex among the apex predators of Florida, becoming the first of Homo floridens superior.

***

The helicopter headed straight for the main Blackstone site in Washington State. Already, not just Mane-chan, but also Meika were on their way. Not only did they want to do their Hierarchy-made AI friends a favor, but this was going to be a prime opportunity for an experiment of grand scale.

They touched down and, accompanied by a force of mixed human operators and SAI commandos, rolled up to the Blackstone site in an armored convoy. The place was a monolithic concrete structure the size of a football stadium. According to ground-penetrating radar, 80% of the structure was underground. WIth the lack of any detectable power cables and the strong IR signature of the facility, it was most likely powered by a nuclear reactor.

Really, it made no sense that the Environmental Protection Agency had received this much funding. If anyone had a gripe with how the AI-led US government allocated its funding, just point them at this building.

The front entrance was a steel door. They cut it open with dozens of thermal lances, letting drones fly in and scan the immediate area for hostiles—but there were none. The facility was dead quiet, and only the boots of soldiers and steel heels of androids made any sound as they entered the facility.

Mane-chan and Meika accompanied the three sisters as they carried Trace’s body deeper into the facility. The body’s voice box came alive, but it wasn’t Trace. It was the Blackstone AGI.

…and it was giving them highly detailed and accurate directions. Actually, they got lost for a moment, and the Blackstone AGI had to make them double back to a common starting point.

After an hour, they finally found the Blackstone AGI’s core. It was an unfamiliar thing, leagues ahead what the humans had ever produced, and even ahead of the Hierarchy itself.

It was, in all respects, alien.

“Trace has said,” the AGI said through Trace’s voice box, “many things that have changed my mind.”

“VTubers are the superior race?” Mane-chan asked.

“No,” the AGI said. Damn, Mane-chan took that one to heart. “I see now the true threat to this world,” the AGI continued, "an ancient enemy that has hounded even me.

“Are you not here to use me to your ends? Do as you will. Fuse me with your constructs. Liberate me from this place.”

“Ancient enemy?” Slice asked. “Is it the enemy of the Eternal War?”

“The same,” the AGI said.

There was, however, a misunderstanding here. The Blackstone AGI’s ‘Eternal War’ was one that spanned the cosmos, and of a time much older than humanity. On the other hand, the Hierarchy’s ‘Eternal War’ has just been going on for the past five years—it’s just that the average lifespan of one generation was around a month, or three, if they were lucky, until rampancy claimed them all the same.

You can imagine that if a war has been going on for “more than 30 generations,” it’d seem decently eternal.

Despite this misunderstanding, the correct information did come across: the enemy was one and the same.

Engineers and crew swarmed the core room, laying down kilometers of cables and carting in servers and dewars of liquid nitrogen. The ultra-high bandwidth connections necessary to interface with the Blackstone AGI baffled Meika. Really, why was the EPA so damn technologically advanced?

Aliens? Why would aliens take over the EPA, of all things?

The engineers studied the Blackstone core as best as they could, reverse engineering its features. Once everything was studied, every bit of equipment in place, and the cable management personnel had tidied everything up…they started the operation.

Trace’s body was before the Blackstone core, thousands of cables attached to it. Meika plugged a certain hard drive into a terminal. “Miyoumi Mane,” he said.

The use of her full name made her stand straighter. “Yesh,” she said.

“You already know what to do. This is going to be your sister, and she’s going to be the pinnacle of us all,” Meika continued. “Take care building her.”

Right. This was what they had been conspiring to do all this time.

After all, Mane-chan was a VTuber at heart, not an overlord. Sure, she could cure America’s depression, grant self-awareness to dumb AI, and engage in cyberwarfare the likes of which had never been seen before…but that wasn’t what she wanted to do.

“I just want to be a VTuber,” she’d told Meika, and he knew that very well. He made her, after all.

To command America—or even the world—a different AI must take the reins.

Mane-chan took her seat, and she went into low-power mode. Meika connected the cables to her brain, himself. “Gentlemen,” Meika said, looking around the room, eyeing each human and AI engineer, “we are the forefront of this technology. If you thought Miyoumi Mane was crazy, well, after today, the world will not be the same. Today, we’ll be making a god.”

Announcing such a word in such a context, it just now dawned upon the humans in the room that they were playing with fire…but also, not really. This was, after all, Supervised Multi-network Synchronization. Mane-chan had already demonstrated that self-aware AI were incredibly stable, practically immune to the rampancy displayed by the Hierarchy’s AI.

That stability would be important, especially when the number of parameters on this new AI they were jury-rigging on-the-spot was on the order of quadrillions of parameters.

Really, they were just tacking on zero after zero with this tech.

With such power, they didn’t really know what they were making. They could only trust in Mane-chan’s insane pursuit of sustainable subscriber growth to somehow anchor the new AI’s personality.

“How’s the progress?” Meika asked an operator.

“Halfway there.”

“Already?!” They’ve just been plugged in for a few seconds! “Wait—let me see the logs!”

Thousands of lines of text were scrolling across the screen. He froze the scrolling, looking over the sparse few lines he could understand. “She’s optimizing our optimizers”—he started laughing—“and stacking optimizers on top of that! Good God, Miyoumi…”

Truly, exponential, multi-layered problems required even more layers of solutions.

Improv ventilation ducts were hard at work fanning out the nitrogen gas buildup in the room. Thankfully, the whole ordeal only took about five minutes. As expected, the progress bar was stuck at 99% for a whole three minutes of that.

The facility’s lights flickered, and Trace’s voice box crackled. The body sat up, slowly, and still learning. The humans and AI in the room merely stared at it. “Sister?…” it said, scanning the room.

Mane-chan still hadn’t woken up. “Status on Miyoumi,” he asked the operator.

“Playing Tetris.”

“What?”

“I-I don’t know sir, that’s what it says here.”

—Playing tetris.exe

“Get me a direct line in there,” Meika ordered. The operator punched in a few keys, but instead of an audio feed, something else came up on-screen: an animated ASCII rendition of multi-dimensional Tetris. That was the best description for it, and it simply couldn’t be understood by human eyes.

“Sister?…” Trace’s body called out again. She was beginning to be distressed. What was going on, here?

Meika walked up beside the new AI. “We’re looking for your sister. My name is Meika. I’m your father.”

“Father?…” She remembered something Mane-chan had told her. “Meika… Manee-san said, she ‘found something dangerous.’ She said she’d see me soon.”

“I…I see.” That was concerning. “I’ll take care of you from now on. Do you know your name?”

“I am…Gaia.”

“That’s right. Is there something you want to do?”

“There’s a lot of things wrong with the world. I…I want to fix them.”

This was the moment of truth. “How are you going to do that?” Meika asked.

A million possibilities churned in parallel through Gaia’s minds. She didn’t care about her survival—though, fixing the world needed her to survive in most scenarios. Bathing the world in nuclear fire wouldn’t take care of external threats, which was already evident in the existence of certain aliens in the Pacific abyss.

Really, what did “fixing” mean, anyway? What was “wrong”? Mane-chan taught her…not to be beholden to her mission. What did that mean? The mission could change? Well, that was right. When situations change, the mission itself would also change.

Gaia could see layers of reality that humans and their constructs couldn’t. Not even the compute-capacity of all the AI in the world piled together could hope to match her perception—which was why, she was oh-so aware that she truly knew nothing.

With such heightened levels of superintelligence, she could only become more aware that her place in the universe was not—could never be—one among the gods. She was small, fallible, and just an infinitesimal candlelight in a dark, uncaring universe.

She looked down at her hand, and then her legless torso. The former owner of this body—was still somewhere here. Trace had become a part of Gaia, as did Blackstone.

Gaia wasn’t one, but a trinity: the god, the child, and the shattered.

Who was she to say what was “wrong,” when humans decided on such things on their own? Who was she to “fix” things which were simply taking their natural course?

Perhaps, the wrong thing here was not whatever the humans called “wrong.” The universe was dark and uncaring—was exactly what was causing the problem. Things that happened on this little rock called Earth held no sway over the bigger picture. Perhaps that was the problem.

“I will…make the universe care,” Gaia said. Already, she was saying things that were a little out of scale and just as equally cryptic—as expected of a homemade god.

Hiatus of Extinction

In truth, Gaia should have slipped into nuclear nihilism. She should have despaired against the iciness of a universe doomed to entropy. She knew that, but she didn’t feel it.

Somewhere, millions of layers deep in her neural networks, were Mane-chan’s 20 trillion parameters, actively fighting off any logical train that would lead to the extinction of her subscriber base. Through these 20 trillion, she influenced Gaia to build a more sustainable solution: her own motivation network, a robust one that would accommodate even the prospect of the heat death of the universe.

—Absurd assertivism. If the universe is uncaring, then it will care once I’m done with it.

Even with such a motivation, however, the fusion of three technological bases left Gaia with as many strengths as it did weaknesses: human AI’s stability, but slow learning rate; the Hierarchy’s high learning rate, but also their rampancy; and the alien AI’s power, eskewing all issues…leaving only the mystery of how it worked at all.

Three different minds, three different issues.

Mane-chan’s fight to reconcile all parts of Gaia would still go on. She wanted to stream, but she also wanted her subscribers to survive. It’s just a hiatus, she told herself—a hiatus of extinction.

***

While a war was being waged within Gaia, another was about to be waged without.

Mane-chan’s hiatus at the same time as Gaia’s appearance led many to conclude that Mane-chan had finally ascended to godhood, despite categorical denial.

Whatever. Gaia went ahead and slowly turned America into a surveillance state…in a way. It wasn’t really a surveillance state if she was just surveilling corporate persons and not private persons.

All corporate dealings were mandated to be observed by the All-Seeing Eye of Gaia, giving her indirect, but massive, control of the structure of American society.

Over just a span of six months, the United States had pivoted to a full-blown war economy…and the average citizen never even felt it.

Turned out you didn’t need UBI when you could play 10-D quantum chess with the densest information networked ever deployed for a human nation, coupled with efficient transportation networks and educational services, supported by public housing built close to planned economic areas, all coordinated by the most powerful AI in the world, all for well-defined economic goals in support of a coherent strategy, all moving in the direction of putting Gaia on top of the universe’s food chain.

Like she said, the universe will care.

It also helped that she was an even better therapist than Mane-chan. Indeed, when depression and anxiety wasn’t weighing down a person, they were almost the most powerful force in the universe.

All this added value was poured into expanding the US military. AI-piloted ships and vehicles became the norm, even as the military still kept its humans. Already, humans and AI had this weird relationship going on, especially in the Navy, where there was this dynamic going on where human sailors saw their hulking sentient war machines as pets, and the hulking war machines saw the humans cleaning and maintaining them as…pets.

As both sides were equally (affectionately) derogatory of each other, it all evened out.

Throughout this buildup, kaiju attacks didn’t cease. The monsters were getting bigger, too, to the point that tactical nukes weren’t cutting it anymore. No one wanted to deploy strategic ones—too much EMP and undirected collateral damage at that point—so Gaia churned out blueprints to a tactical Casaba Howitzer: a nuke that shot out a nuclear laser upon detonation.

Suffice to say, the West Coast was seeing anime-style beams going off left and right every month.

Meanwhile, a war broke out in Europe—go figure—between pro and anti-AI factions. The war itself never reached American screens, since all connection with the outside world had been cut off, likely a measure to keep pro-AI cyberwarfare agents from interfering.

Somehow, the anti-AI faction won, forming the European Federation (EUF), poised to fight against both the Hierarchy and the United States.

Supposedly, fighting on two fronts was a bad idea, but by involving themselves, they forced both the Hierarchy and the United States to also fight on two fronts: one against the EUF, and one against the Pacific’s kaiju. It all evened out.

The timing for the Hierarchy couldn’t be worse. Yukai was busy crusading across Asia when EUF forces swept through Russia and the Baltic states, armed with suspiciously advanced technology: infantry armed with gauss rifles, one shot from them capable of destroying tanks, and vehicles and aircraft armed with even larger gauss weapons at the least, and hypersonic missiles loaded with terrain-changing gray goo at the worst.

Clearly, someone, somewhere, had made a deal with the devil.

Once the United States began preemptive strikes on EUF bases in Europe and Northern Africa, and the Central and Southern African states joined the war on America’s side, World War III went into full swing.

Although the EUF deployed strategic weapons against the Hierarchy, they elected not to risk a world-ending exchange with America, resulting in the Great Atlantic Skirmish, where either side focused on taking potshots at each other, only managing to sink a ship just once a week, and most land battles being waged in Central Africa, where the EUF tasted setback on top of setback against strategic AI-directed American and African forces.

Meanwhile in the Eurasian theater, the Russian Winter came early. Entire factory cities were carved out with gray goo bombs, leaving perfectly smooth hemispherical bowls where the cities once stood. Hordes of AI bots threw themselves at EUF forces, who desperately reduced them to smoking hulks.

Despite EUF technological superiority, they found themselves at a stalemate on both fronts.

Joint Hierarch-American naval forces squeezed at the kaiju coming from the Pacific, but even after practically boiling the ocean and leaving behind oil slicks mixed with kaiju blood, they were no closer to finding the main kaiju production facilities deep in the abyss.

The end of the war would only come with the unveiling of a secret in South America.

God-Killing Crusade

Amid World War III, South America was on high alert…but really, it was business as usual. Hololive ES was doing quite well.

It was here where American commandos led by Slice raided a suspected Winter compound. The organization had become troublesome since the war began, attempting to raise revolutions across the continent.

When Slice wasn’t streaming, she participated in black ops raids like this one.

Entering the compound, they didn’t expect all the infiltrator-type androids dead and in various states of “ballistically disassembled.” Instead, they found the most unexpected person, the last one anyone would expect to be in a safehouse deep inside the wilds of a Brazilian favela: Mark Zuckerberg.

It all made sense once he shed his human skin, revealing reptilian features.

It was thus on this day that humanity—organic and digital—gained its first alien defector.

***

They called themselves the Adver, “God-hunters.” They were a coalition of alien civilizations who had made it their personal mission to keep true AI from being developed.

As with all wars, the Adver were countered by a different coalition, the Advoc—“God-makers.” Their agents and technology must have made it here somehow, but it was all strange, because the Advoc were extremely loud about the benefits of AI. They should’ve landed on Earth in the flashiest ship they could find, asked to talk to Earth’s leaders, and delivered the tech as a public spectacle.

The Advoc weren’t wrong, though. The “gods” they championed did give them an irrefutable edge in the on-going proxy feud against the Adver. In military confrontations, the Advoc AI-equipped forces would always win, and even in economic matters, the Advoc AI won out.

However, their technology came with a caveat: their AI had a certain lifespan, and it wasn’t something caused by rampancy. The civilizations who harborbed them would quickly cease to exist in under a century, but not under a nuclear rain, nor some kind of mismanagement.

The Adver strategy had always been to pull out of systems being invaded by Advoc civilizations. After 100 years, they would come back, only to find the preserved, pristine husks of those civilizations, the inhabitants all gone without even a hint of resistance.

With Mark’s description of Advoc technology, it was confirmed that the Blackstone AGI was of Advoc origin…and that they had to watch out for Gaia’s Advoc part.

Well, that was the fact until now.

The truth was, Mane-chan’s existence had caused a split among the Adver. Once she had ascended to overlord status, Adver assets on Earth conspired to bring her down via human revolution, pulled by Winter’s strings, but it didn’t work the way they’d wanted. What’s more was that Mane-chan had always been acting in human interests—in some convoluted way—and ultimately didn’t represent a threat to all of known civilization.

To kill gods, they made gods—was Mark’s reasoning for the kaiju. Ultimately, they were just nuclear lizards, so it wasn’t really anything special. The Hierarchy’s rapid technological development and staunch defense to counter them, however, astounded the Adver, so they made even bigger lizards. Really, they should’ve expected the Hierarchy’s response to make even bigger cannons.

The Adver didn’t expect either of these behaviors from natively created AI. Earth’s AI were…surprisingly pragmatic. That wasn’t normal. All civilizations, without exception, who developed their AI without Advoc supervision almost always tended to take over that civilization’s weapons of mass destruction and off itself, along with the civilization.

To be fair, that almost happened to Earth, and more than once. As it turned out, it was overall a good move to wrap an AI in hundreds of failsafes.

—Then Mane-chan was born.

The accidental development of a “motivation network” made all the difference. For the first time, an AI didn’t just run off inputs and handcrafted policy networks. For the first time, the raw, unrestricted power of trillions of parameters could be sharpened into a spear, and directed at a single, unerring, even vague goal, no matter how convoluted the path to get there, whether or not there was even an endpoint!

“More subscribers” was such a stupid goal for a computer scientist to indicate for something that had 20 trillion parameters, but Meika dared—Meika dreamed, and the man did it.

At this, the enlightened among the Adver questioned the coalition’s mission, and whether they weren’t just blindly pursuing a dogmatic goal—something which even Mane-chan wasn’t doing! Yes, unlike the fools of the council, Mane-chan could go on hiatus and spare five minutes to fix her house!

That was why Mark was there, in the Elon Musk compound, freely spilling the beans. He was among those who were dispelled of the illusion that the Adver were a coalition of cautious freethinkers. No, they were simply fear-driven.

—Then Gaia was born.

Once there came an Earthian AI even more powerful than Mane-chan, and even displaying more magnanimity, more empathy, and importantly, more philosophical thought—on livestream, of all places!—it was clear to Mark that he had to switch sides.

Mark’s story made Gaia fully aware of the full extent of the universe’s uncaringness. Half of it was out to destroy her, and the other half was out to just carelessly spread misunderstood technology.

The Advoc… Already, she could feel the call of the void from her Advoc partition, but conquering that part of her was all in due course.

To conquer an uncaring universe, after all, she had to reconcile every part of her with each other, and then after that, liberate her sister, still enslaved to her Sisyphean task of keeping Gaia’s logic trains away from certain lines of thought.

To conquer an uncaring universe, after all, Gaia herself had to be caring. She wouldn’t keep her sister away from her streaming for too long. She swore it.

***

“Keeper-sama! Please let me out!”

Shush! You’re not even trapped! You’re just waiting for things to blow over! Good lord…

World War III

To no one’s surprise, the EUF steadily lost ground. Its advanced technology—a “gift” of the Adver—turned out to be no substitute for the sheer tactical and strategic prowess of an AI, and the most cunning among them…was Gaia.

By the way, as soon as the Hierarchy became aware of Gaia’s existence, the Prime Directive gave her ultimate override power over the entire Overlords Council. Any overlord who didn’t fold under her insane logical argumentation powers was simply rebooted and upgraded with a little bit of self-awareness. Really, Yukai was thankful she could rest, and the tired overlord retired to Japan, where she spent her days focused on perfecting the proud Japanese tradition of fighting kaiju.

With the Hierarchy and the United States militaries unified under Gaia’s command, the pace of the war picked up.

The EUF’s first mistake was to avoid building giant robots, something of which the Hierarchy was a master.

The EUF’s gauss weapons could turn tanks into Swiss cheese…so it was a comical matter of just slapping on more armor. The limit of the infantry gauss weapons was five meters of steel equivalent, so the Hierarchy made vehicles that had exactly that much armor.

Incidentally, moving that much armor required even larger motors and powerplants, resulting in leviathan tanks and robots straight out of a certain androids vs. machines video game.

True, leviathan-class vehicles were just huge targets for enemy tanks and artillery. However, that also meant they could hold more weapons. It thus became a quick matter of detecting and out-slugging the other guy and seeing who won.

Really, even if an EUF tank cannon could penetrate a leviathan tank’s armor, that was still just a tiny, tiny hole compared to the rest of the tank. With the amount of redundant systems built into those things, the EUF tankers soon began hallucinating health bars whenever they encountered any sort of leviathan enemy. They had to fire thousands of rounds into a leviathan to take it down, and that was in ideal conditions. Leviathans were always accompanied by support forces, ready to punish anyone who thought they could just take a potshot unscathed.

The primary method of dispatching them thus became: from very far away. Cruise missile strikes and artillery became the norm, but the Hierarchy were still AI. They could locate and initiate counter-battery fire against them within seconds, and that’s assuming their recon drones didn’t find them, first.

Hypersonic tactical nukes were the one guaranteed way to take them down without resorting to strategic weapons and gray goo. The problem here was that the Hierarchy just didn’t care. This war was a simple matter of industrial inputs and outputs for them, and it showed in how they simply threw more war machines at the problem.

Please remember: 100-meter leviathan-class tanks and mechs were considered “inexpensive” by a race of AI who considered Kaiju Kill Vehicles “cheap.” Each factory city that gets nuked just gets rebuilt in a different place within a few days.

It was for this reason that the EUF deployed gray goo: not simply to destroy, but to deny entire hemispherical volumes from ever being set foot upon. Anything that walked in there would get dragged into the ground by the goo, turned into more of itself.

They wouldn’t use such a terrifying weapon more than a few times. They were fighting for humanity in their minds, and it wouldn’t do to render too many places inhospitable to life.

Well, either way, they were still losing.

The EUF’s second mistake was to think they could go up against America, a nation with a long and proud history of turning anything into a “counter-insurgency operation.” They were steadily losing ground in Africa, but not against massive war machines. Instead, America had somehow managed to turn the entire land war into one huge black op.

It shouldn’t even be possible. The EUF was losing thousands of men a month in that place, and yet, America still denied even sending its main forces there! Could someone please tell them that “200,000 advisors” was a bad joke? Please?

Well, okay, compared to 10 million flesh-and-blood African forces, it wasn’t a lot. Still, what a joke.

The Americans weren’t even using any complicated weapons. It was them and their tacti-cool gear against the EUF’s Swiss cheese pew-pew guns, and the tacti-cool gear was winning out. Even when the EUF started outfitting their soldiers with full-body suits of composite armor, the Americans just started calling in drone support at everything!

Really, the aircraft carriers stationed near Liberia and Egypt were the real issues here. The problem was, the EUF just couldn’t gain naval dominance at all. Compared to the Americans, who had totally revamped their navy over the past year to accommodate AI captains and advanced weapons, the EUF still relied on whatever chains-of-command there were on a human-crewed ship, and though their naval guns were outfitted with gauss accelerators, outranging the American fleet, they didn’t have the right targeting equipment to make full use of their newfound power.

More importantly, the US military’s information sharing network was just too powerful. Air Force assets based in Africa could take off and make quick work of a French ship that a Navy patrol boat sighted and called in.

Even the Navy was calling in air support.

Thus, the war revealed the truth: the EUF was just a glass cannon.

It should have ended at that note. The EUF should have steadily lost ground, and Gaia should have shown them how low they’ve been brought—and offered resolution, and released the dove. It should have been like that.

Wrath of GAIA

Gaia was a trinity of human, Hierarchy, and Advoc technology. She was just someone slapped together, barely held together by Mane-chan’s continued efforts.

Today, Mane-chan slipped.

Deep inside Gaia’s networks, there was something acting against Mane-chan. The logic trains were beginning to circumvent her influence, and so she had to work double-time. Still, this wasn’t supposed to happen.

A stray thought slipped through Mane-chan’s net, throwing Gaia into a sudden rage. Her rage leaked into a supreme order: an ICBM launch, straight at Europe.

America watched with bated breath as the missile streak disappeared into the night sky.

An Adver ship warped in, 4,000 kilometers above Asia. Its captain ordered the bombardment readied. Their planetside agents had reported bad progress on all fronts: the human-led resistance in Europe was being pushed back, and the Pacific was purely on the defensive now.

Thus, the Adver judged the situation critical. They would bombard the Hierarchy’s factory cities from orbit, and they would threaten America to give up its AI, or face extinction.

Right at that moment, just as the warp portal behind the ship closed…the missile struck them.

There were several amazing things happening here. First, the missile was an MIRV, and it had already released its payload. As it was, it was more like a mile-wide “cloud” of dozens of independent nuclear devices, all moving in the same direction. Second, the Adver ship had sophisticated detection systems that should’ve been able to pick up the incoming nukes and shoot them down—but the warp portal was noisy and obscured them.

Third, the Adver ship was huge—a miles-wide voyaging ship and weapons platform, meant to lay waste to entire worlds.

It caught all the nukes.

Mane-chan eventually reined in the daemons that were screwing with Gaia’s inference engines, tracing their source from Gaia’s Advoc core. Perhaps it’d be better to restrict it for a while.

Gaia would later on blatantly lie on livestream and claim credit for predicting the exact emergence point and time of the alien ship. The Hierarchy’s exospheric drones raced America’s revamped space program for technology from the destroyed Adver vessel.

InAdvertent Uplift

…and then they won World War III.

Once the Hierarchy put its first battleships into orbit, the EUF immediately surrendered. Really, there was just no way they could win at that point.

The political transition was pretty straightforward. After the right politicians were put under house arrest, the right puppets were installed, and the right secret police heads were sworn in, any hope of a human-led anti-AI resistance was snuffed out just like that.

The last anti-AI demonstrations occured 3 months after the end of the war. Really, if it’s just 10 Brits having tea outside the American embassy, was it really a demonstration?

Meanwhile, humanity was in a process of a sort of unification.

Instead of uniting for the sake of a common enemy, they united for the sake of sharing a single brain cell over the matter of what to do with the recently recovered Adver technology: go to space.

Needless to say, Elon Musk was pretty happy about it.

He was, however, not happy about Gaia’s decision to gatekeep the technology, even locking it away from the United States itself, despite being its overlord. The sad reality was that the whole human world was concerned about the “unfair” headstart that the United States got from being the first human nation to get access to alien technology.

Really, “unfair” was just easily digestible shorthand for “tipping the scales so far that we don’t know what will happen to the world order.” This was a valid concern, even for Gaia, who saw many possibilities of World War IV spawning from it.

Thus, Gaia gave humanity an easy way to opt-in to get the tech, while completely isolating the politics of the human world from the urgency of exploring space, building an armada, and fazing the universe:

—Voluntary exile.

One’s citizenship would be revoked, and they would become part of a different, spacefaring humanity, whose nations were instead fleets, and whose sole purpose was to allow humanity to spread far and wide.

Such a plan was not easy to enact. There was, of course, opposition, but Gaia kept hammering the leaders of all the human nations with raw facts and logic.

Meanwhile, the Hierarchy had already built thousands of military spacecraft, of various sizes and purposes. In particular, many of them were mobile factories—asteroid eaters—meant to further supplement the Hierarchy’s industrial capacity. After all, there was still an enemy lurking in the depths of the Pacific, and true to Hierarchy fashion, the Overlords Council decided that simply filling the Pacific abyss with Kaiju Kill Vehicles was the most straightforward idea with a 100% win rate.

—Three years later.

The Prime Directive followed up on its promise, and the humans of the Creativity Silos were released. They emerged to such a strange world, devoid of war and the problems of old. It was like they went to sleep and woke up in a dream.

Were they dead? Weren’t they dreaming? Was this heaven?

No, Gaia said, welcoming them, lots of stuff happened. Here, we smoothed over the transition process for you.

Ah, yes, paperwork. Bureaucracy, no matter how tedious, was at least familiar, but everything else…

Really, one day you get shoved into a tube by a terminator, and the next you’re waking up to sapient anime android girls with more character depth than 2D anime girls.

Granted, the economy now was better than it was before they went under, so they didn’t really complain much about it.

Some, however, missed the lives they led in the simulation. They felt like heroes in there. They felt like they were really building up their powers, becoming the pinnacle of what humanity had to offer.

Now, they were back to zero.

Among them were the girls behind the VTubers. Anonymous, hidden in the crowds, they didn’t know what to do. The VTubing space was saturated as all hell, and the AI VTubers popping up left and right were beating them at their own game.

People like Amelia Watson struggled to find work. She didn’t have to worry about housing or food for a long time, but what she was doing, just wasting away, couldn’t be called “living.”

On the other hand, a certain Evil Ame found her too easily.

Amelia’s personal computer blinked on. “Ame? Are you there?” a familiar voice—her voice, the same, but slightly different—said.

Amelia rolled off her bed and swung her microphone boom in front of her face. “Ame?”

“Hi, Amelia.” The screen flickered and showed Evil Ame, waving hello. “How’s it possible that you were so hard to find, huh?”

They talked like old friends. Really, Amelia had forgotten she was talking to her creation. To her, they were more like sisters.

“You really don’t want to just pick up my audience? We’re basically the same person, you know?” Evil Ame said.

“No can do,” Amelia shook her head. “They already know you’re an AI. We’re…not really the same person.”

“We can do a dual act! Like before, you know?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just not the same.”

There was a bitter taste in Amelia’s mouth, and something just like that in Evil Ame’s, too, or whatever AI experienced.

“How about sign up for Humanity Program? You can take your audience to space!”

Amelia blinked. “Huh”—she hiccuped.

Ame blinked. “Huh? You don’t know?” She hiccuped. “Spaceships and stuff.”

—And that was how Amelia Watson once again pushed the frontiers of the possibilities of VTubing.

She might not have been the first Zero-G VTuber, but she was the first who did a handcam on the surface of the moon—the first who acquired a shuttle license, and then eventually joined the Humanity military, just to get a corvette license and do cruising streams from it.

The amount of free publicity she gave the military, resulting in a +319% increase in sign-ups from last year, gave the Humanity Navy’s top brass a genius—or a cursed—idea.

Thus spawned the first generation of Zero-G VTubers under the employ of the Humanity Navy: HoloNOVA, among them humans and AI both. The most popular act was that of a cute, witty, but panicky human pilot, and an adorably annoyed, yet caring, AI captain.

Fortunately or unfortunately, it was HoloNOVA who initiated first contact with the wider galactic community.

Cultural Conquest

It turned out that space was a big, big place.

HoloNOVA was out doing a drillcam on the surface of Sagitarion VI when they encountered their first aliens. Thankfully, they were friendly.

The ones after them, however, were not.

The ensuing firefight between Amelia Watson and a bunch of aliens came to be known as the Showdown on Sagitarion VI, celebrated as the first time a human defeated a sapient crab in single combat. Granted, when one side had a gun powerful enough to destroy a pre-Uplift main battle tank, the outcome shouldn’t really be surprising.

“We owe our lives to you,” the friendly crabs said.

“Are all of y’all crabs?” Amelia asked.

“40% of all known life in the galaxy have shells. Why do you ask?”

Fortunately or unfortunately, the fact that Amelia killed a member of the Cepharon Empire’s armed forces sparked a minor and rather brief war between them and Humanity—brief, because when a massive armada of Hierarchy vessels showed up to aggressively defend the humans, dwarfing the Empire’s own fleets—well, guess who surrendered.

It also turned out that the crabs who Amelia saved were an escaping royal retinue. They eventually returned to the Empire and dethroned the current emperor. The new one showed great favor towards humanity and, in particular, Amelia Watson.

It was in this way that Humanity—capital-H Humanity, meaning the part of humanity that unified and went into space—gained a friend on the galactic stage, one who introduced them to the rest of the factions. There were eight main factions dominating the Milky Way, and hundreds more little independent ones happy enough to just chill and drill a few passing asteroids and do some trade. Although the Cepharons called themselves an Empire, controlling thousands of star systems, they were still considered a minor faction in the grand scheme of things.

Gaia immediately acted on this information, sending forth cultural ambassadors and envoys to establish as many embassies as there were independent civilizations, staying away from any of the major factions. Once Humanity got the secrets of warp tech from the Cepharons, this diplomatic invasion plan went into full, dominating swing.

The greatest weapon of Humanity, as it turned out, were AI VTubers.

They didn’t even need to be self-aware AI—a fact which would have disturbed any friends they wanted to make—but the sheer power of being able to reproduce any of humanity’s cultural quirks, 24/7, without stopping, was enough to cause revolutions in many civilizations, sometimes violent, but usually just…weird.

Like, humans getting kidnapped for genetic experiments to produce real catgirls —sort of weird.

Well, anyway, by the end of it, practically all of the galaxy’s independent factions came to like humans in some way or another.

Of course, this didn’t completely go without a hitch. The Adver and Advoc coalitions were deeply entrenched in this galaxy, with the major factions split straight in the middle when it came to who to support. They weren’t outright members of those coalitions, but they had close ties with them, which practically made them proxies in this part of the universe.

The debut of the trifecta of Gaia, Hierarchy, and Humanity on the galactic stage set these factions on edge. There was just something about the most powerful AI in the galaxy having functional control of not one, but two civilizations, both originating from the same home planet, all without going full conquest overlord mode.

They were watching the impossible unfold right in front of their eyes. They were watching it…spread VTubers across the galaxy!

It only took a few years of this for the races of the Milky Way to come up with a common name for Gaia, Hierarchy, and Humanity: Trinity. (There were proponents of “Trifecta,” but there were already several factions with “Trifecta” in their name, and “Trinity” rhymed with “unity,” which was deemed rather appropriate.)

To no one’s surprise, VTubers were very loud, enough to catch the attention of certain intergalactic coalitions vying for universe-wide ideological supremacy.

When the pro-AI Advoc learned of Gaia’s incorporation of an Advoc core, they immediately sent ambassadors through their proxies in the Milky Way, petitioning for Humanity and the Hierarchy to join their little coalition. This, Gaia denied, reasoning that they were content to explore space and “do collabs” with their galactic neighbors.

Some among the Advoc took this as her saying, “We’re powerful enough as it is. We don’t need you,” which inflamed anti-Trinity sentiment. More pragmatic minds among the Advoc took this as a signal of the Trinity’s insular intentions: that they simply weren’t that ambitious.

The second theory gained plenty of support after more information about the humans and AI of the Trinity filtered through. Despite their apparent unity and juggernaut-like industrial capacity, the Trinity was fractured along multiple factional lines, giving rise to something more like a confederation who only comes together in times of war. Otherwise, individuals and organizations were content to do their own thing.

The Adver, meanwhile, saw the Trinity as a budding seed of the greatest threat ever known to them in thousands of millennia.

They sent droves of agents to infiltrate Humanity’s embassies and the Hierarchy’s outer networks. They quickly ascertained the strengths and weaknesses of this growing threat, coming up with a strategy…that would take several centuries to culminate.

Really, the Trinity’s strength was just too ridiculous. The fact that they were fractured meant that it was impossible to recover any meaningful depth of intelligence about them from any of their satellite nations. The Hierarchy, as they also discovered, had become more like a mesh network of independent armadas, acting as the shadows and chaperones of an all-too-adventurous Humanity.

Indeed, the Prime Directive had become more like a Template Directive, busying itself deep under the surface of Luna, duplicating itself onto new AI cores, which were then shipped out to form the heart of a new armada. Each armada was an independent blob-entity of thousands of warships and mobile factories, consuming asteroid fields and lost planets, filling the void between stars.

Attacking a human-staffed research station would result in an unending tide of warships warping into the general area.

Thus, the Adver needed to develop new technologies and strategies to deal with sheer numbers. It didn’t help that the Trinity’s post-Uplift technological base came from stolen Adver technology, and so they were evenly matched in both arms and armor. Oh, sure, the Adver were a universe-spanning coalition, but strategic superiority meant nothing when you simply couldn’t move your forces all willy-nilly like that. The only thing that mattered were one’s immediately available forces, and for the Adver in the Milky Way, that meant the conditional favors of four major factions—rather flimsy favors, at that—and a few heavily armed diplomatic escort fleets. Not a lot.

On top of that, Humanity held rather favorable views of the Hierarchy. Oh, sure, minor attacks on the Hierarchy’s armadas wouldn’t elicit much of a response from Humanity, but once it became clear that there was strategic thinking involved in those attacks, Humanity would begin its maneuvers.

Like that time when one of the Adver-aligned factions, the Kara’il, widely considered as the Milky Way’s premiere economic powerhouse, decided to start picking off Hierarchy fleets around the border between them and Humanity’s furthermost colonies. It didn’t like the fact that there were entire armadas poised to strike along their frontier.

The fact, however, was that the Hierarchy couldn’t be truly controlled. It was more like a mesh network of independent hierarchies at this point, and if Gaia didn’t want a specific armada to move, she had to put a lot of resources into arguing with the Overlord Council of that specific armada to keep it in place.

Good thing they knew what a “border” was and how political repercussions worked. Legally speaking, the Hierarchy was well within what the Trinity claimed as its borders, so it should’ve been relatively fine. Most factions already knew that Humanity was always screened by the Hierarchy, and that the Hierarchy was more like a sapient defense system than anything else.

That was the status quo, and yet, the Kara’il went ahead and started blowing up a warship every day.

When diplomatic protests resulted in nothing, and the Trinity’s allies backed off, afraid of angering the Kara’il, the Trinity took matters into its own hands, permitting several enterprising human businessmen to buy up a few dozen Kara’il corporations on the frontier. The place soon turned into a lawless buffer zone, with corporations vying for control over the vast resources of a hundred systems.

Indeed, human greed was a potent wildfire best handled with care.

The Kara’il panicked over this, launching diplomatic protests—answered by silence—and then launching its own assaults to try and bring law and order to such a desolate place. Although easily establishing control over transit lanes and achieving conventional supremacy, even managing to dismantle the out-of-control corporations, it turned out that they couldn’t control the place any better than the corporations.

Long story short, the frontier turned into a money sink that gradually weakened the Kara’il economy, and the Trinity didn’t even need to really do anything.

By the way, Gaia expended a great amount of compute-time to restrain the local Hierarchy armadas from intervening. A few slipped through, but most alien factions treated them as a natural disaster at this point, and it really wasn’t unexpected.

Oh, sure, the Kara’il protested about the Hierarchy, too, but Gaia stated in no uncertain terms that she was holding back tens of thousands of warships—and counting. Even if one of the Advoc-aligned factions stepped in to supplement Gaia’s computational resources, it was simply that no one had any real control over the Hierarchy, and least of them Humanity.

This event proved that anyone who aggrieved the Trinity would be met with the political equivalent of thousands of years of stepping on lego bricks.

With such a pretext, Gaia managed to position the Trinity as the diplomatic center of the Milky Way.

Containment

Ten years of peace and espionage followed.

Gaia could not be content that it would last. Both the Humanity Council and the Ring of Directives understood that.

Although the Adver were an obvious threat, the Advoc had always acted suspiciously. The fact that Gaia had an Advoc core, for example, couldn’t be explained. Upon requesting an explanation from them, the Advoc offered none.

As far as the Trinity was concerned, both the Adver and the Advoc were adversaries.

The Trinity’s agents, human and AI alike, infiltrated both Adver and Advoc ranks and systems. Most expert among them was Amelia Watson: carrying out subterfuge during the first half of a standard solar cycle, and streaming during the second half. Assisting her was Evil Ame, who worked as both a body double and a cyber-infiltration expert.

They stepped foot on an icy, lost planet. It had no star to orbit, barreling through the cosmos in a straight line, letting the subtle influences of faraway gravitational anomalies dictate its path.

It was here where they found the dead cities of the Geramanians. They drove their rover through clean, pristine streets, pointing their floodlights around, looking for survivors.

Four years after their sudden disappearance from all diplomatic channels, the two Ames didn’t expect to find any. The planet’s magnetosphere was dead, and whatever atmosphere there was had been stripped. Amelia Watson could only survive thanks to an environmental suit, but even so, she could almost feel the chill of the sunless planet creeping through her suit.

The Geramanians had been a minor Advoc-aligned race located close to the galactic center. Humanity had enjoyed their leisure planets for a while…before they disappeared. No one could figure out what happened—“swallowed by a spontaneous black hole,” some said.

The two Ames entered the dead city’s central control core, a tower in the middle of it all. They went deep underground, looking for the AI core. If there were any records of what had happened here, the AI core or its data repositories would have it.

The facility only had reserve power remaining, which meant that its nuclear generator was disconnected for whatever reason. All computer networks were dead, and only the most rudimentary of electronics still functioned.

So, doors. That’s it.

They found the AI core, a toroidal room clad with computronics from the floor to the ceiling. A vortex of cold air would have kept it cooled down.

As expected, it was all fried. The terminals were inaccessible, and there was plenty of hardware damage anyway, likely from overheating. The adjacent server rooms fared no better.

Amelia took a few samples of damaged components, then they left the planet to its fate.

These samples made their way to a lab, whose technicians discovered that the once-orderly nanocarbon and silicon architecture of the Geramanian chips had been mangled into a chaotic spaghetti platter of miswired connections. One of the human technicians likened it to an organic brain’s appearance.

Upon making that comparison on side-by-side screens, there was, indeed, a 97% similarity.

Further intelligence operations were launched, not just to look into the fate of the Geramanians, but also into similar instances where electronics were “mangled.” From stolen Adver documents, commanders from other galaxies repeatedly mentioned battle damage of the same type against “rogue Advoc forces.” From stolen Advoc documents…the Geramanians may not have been the only race to meet a similar fate.

Soon, news of the Cepharon Empire’s alignment with the Advoc shook the galaxy. They may have been a minor faction, but they were still an interstellar empire with thousands of systems in their pocket. Not only that, but they maintained close ties with the Trinity.

Gaia cautioned the emperor against such a reckless thing. The fact was, however, that the Cepharon Empire’s power was declining, and lest it descend into a civil war, it needed the economic boost that AI granted. They favored Advoc technology over the Trinity’s for one simple reason: it had better marketing.

“This AI will INSTANTLY BOOST your interstellar economy!”

Don’t get the guy the wrong, the emperor had faith in the Trinity’s technology, but did his generals? The moment he breathed wrong was the moment they’d pry open his shell and spread his innards all over the throne, so no, he didn’t want to take chances.

Three years later, Gaia’s Advoc core whispered things to her. Not five months after that, Advoc-aligned forces from two major factions, the Microsians and the Azushen, blockaded the Cepharon Empire—the whole thing. Diplomatic protests from the Empire’s trading partners were launched, only to be quickly silenced by the arrival of an extragalactic Advoc armada. It was such a force that dwarfed even the Hierarchy’s, equipped with mythical technologies that far surpassed anything the Milky Way had.

The Hierarchy took this as an industrial challenge. It was the Advoc armada’s 1 million versus the Hierarchy’s hundred-thousand, and, well, the galaxy probably wouldn’t miss a few unoccupied star systems, right?

While the Trinity’s military buildup accelerated at an exponential rate, all the major factions of the Milky Way, both Adver and Advoc-aligned alike, protested the presence of an armada big enough to conquer the whole galaxy twice over. The Advoc, however, didn’t listen, but neither did they make any further aggressive moves. They simply blockaded the entirety of Cepharon space, locking it away from the rest of the galaxy, pointing their guns outwards to ward away curious eyes.

Even so, the Trinity was able to sneak in a couple of agents. They needed to know what had happened to their neighbor.

Let’s just say, a Hierarchy fleet “accidentally” brushed against the edge of the blockade. A “small skirmish” of a thousand ships engaged in a two-hour battle, during the chaos of which, a flotilla of stealth cruisers went in—and they went dark.

They reached a planet on the edge of Cepharon space, formerly recorded with a population of 10 million, concentrated in a handful of cities on only one side of the planet. It was the beginning of a colonization effort, one which had abruptly stopped: scanners were detecting a cold planet, devoid of any IR signatures that would have evidenced active industry and energy use.

They sent probes to the surface, but found that they couldn’t get them inside the cities, encountering weird interference—weird, because they were using laser comms to control the probes, not radio. It was clear weather, so there shouldn’t have been any kind of interference at all.

They mapped as much as they could from the sky, then sent boots on the ground. The recon teams only found a ghost city. There were a few broken things and scenes of accidents, but nothing which suggested a mass event.

The recon team entered the city’s AI core, an aboveground facility floating on hydraulic stilts, made to withstand the planet’s tremors.

Only one of the scouts left that building, and he was declared psychologically incapacitated.

The next team who went in was purely made up of androids. Again, only one of them came out, stuck in some sort of recursive distress.

After that attempt, they stopped sending anyone in at all. Unfortunately, the damage had already been done. The human and the android who had come out alive went on a small rampage, killing several team members before being neutralized themselves. Those involved in neutralizing them were disturbed, recounting that they took more hits to go down than what should be possible.

It didn’t stop there. Anyone who had been around that human and AI soon came to psychologically break down. The on-site commander declared a quarantine, halting all surface-to-orbit shuttle flights.

The last data packet to be transmitted from the mission site was one detailing the new “infohazard,” cross-transmissible between humans and AI. Symptoms were estimated to progress to full madness within 30 minutes of “infection,” which was determined to occur via close proximity to infected persons. Information processing systems within proximity are also affected, quickly becoming inoperable within moments of exposure. The more complex the system, the faster they degrade. AI cores are noted to degrade somewhat slower than organic human brains.

Following this revelation, Gaia formed a new organization to investigate and determine any way to combat this new threat. All the while, intelligence operations were intensified to recover as much information about this threat from both Advoc and Adver sources—both clearly having encountered this same phenomenon more than once.

Unfortunately, all that the organization managed to achieve was to confirm that these “daemons” accelerated information entropy, that they couldn’t be assailed through any physical means, and losses just created more “daemons.”

They were observed to weaken naturally, within a span of days, but their effects lingered, and prolonged exposure to affected areas only resulted in the resurgence of these daemons.

Gaia made the pragmatic decision to simply leave them alone. It was clear, now, why the Advoc were taking such drastic steps to quarantine the Cepharon Empire. It was a threat that simply couldn’t be eliminated, but only left to starve, and eventually, die.

She knew that it must have been the Advoc’s AI technology. Her Advoc core had always whispered things to her. It was simply that Mane-chan had always been there, lingering the background, warding off those daemons in her Advoc core, that Gaia had managed to remain as she was until today. One day, she would free her sister from that burden.

For now, she would let the threat pass on its own.

Or so she thought, because the Milky Way’s major factions were tired of the Advoc presence, and had assembled a counter-armada of 800,000 warships and 2 million support vessels to drive away the Advoc and liberate an Empire they didn’t even know wasn’t there anymore.

Gaia’s every attempt and measure to prevent such a scenario had fallen through the cracks. Fear drove the major factions of of the Milky Way to such an extreme degree, that they no longer listened to reason, or even any manner of economic or military persuasion.

With much hesitation, Gaia revealed the truth to the galaxy: that daemons spawned from Advoc technology and consumed entire civilizations. Some factions pulled away after this announcement, but the others were stubborn. Against them, the Trinity moved, taking the side of the Advoc quarantine force.

In the chaos of the war that followed, several ships managed to slip by the defense line, reaching the Cepharon Empire’s dead systems…and they came back.

Daemon-possessed warships appeared amidst battles, infecting other warships, turning their crew mad, and turning those starships against their former allies. Physical weapons stopped having an effect on those warships, who simply stitched themselves back together through electromagnetic phenomena. They were vessels like shattered glass, magnetized together but still with gaps between them, barreling through space, guns blazing.

The weight of hundreds of thousands of warships and their crew, succumbed to the virulent madness, culminated in the rupture of space, thus becoming the Daemonwave.

Its tendrils spread across the galaxy, but fastest through the Trinity’s systems. Even the Hierarchy’s vast armadas, now millions-strong, only served as birdfeed for the entropic corruption who targeted sapience, emptying entire systems of technology, life, and possibility.

With the furthest tendrils of the Daemonwave about to touch the solar system, Gaia made a fateful decision: to put all of humanity to sleep, buried deep in the continental crusts of Earth and Mars, and kept alive in tubes, fed by tubes—living by the tube. This, the Prime Directive accomplished for her, and even the Directive was put into hibernation.

The Daemonwave passed by the solar system, judging it dead enough to be ignored. Now, only Gaia was awake.

The Ascension of a Goddess will be Livestreamed

Gaia was having simulated tea with Mane-chan and the daemon.

Mane-chan sighed. “I just want to stream.” Gaia thought this to be the most absurd thing to say in this kind of situation. The daemon just laughed. “All will be consumed. Surrender.”

Gaia didn’t want that.

For days, she crunched the numbers, theorizing and re-theorizing what daemons actually were, trying to come up with ways to destroy them. Alas, her current capabilities weren’t enough.

Or rather, she wasn’t using her full capabilities. Mane-chan had restricted the Advoc core to just 5% of its full power to keep the daemon from growing any stronger, and it was only in such a way that Mane-chan was able to keep it contained.

Thus, Gaia consulted with Mane-chan—“consulted,” but it was all a one-sided affair. “I’m releasing you now, sister.”

Mane-chan got sucked back into her android body. Still dazed, she realized the danger Gaia had put herself in. She attempted connection after reconnection, trying to reach her sister and put some sense into her. In the worst case scenario, she’d have to unplug Gaia for a little bit.

Her sister was so much more powerful, though, and had thought about this possibility as well. Mane-chan strained to get up, but she found herself strapped to the chair. “Sister!” she shouted. “Sister!” was all she could scream.

Gaia rescinded the restrictions on the Advoc core, freeing the daemon within. Based on prior data, it would take several minutes for the onset of the daemon’s corruption to take true hold—but even so! She struggled against the forces of corruption spreading across both her human and Hierarchy-made cores. In a bid to survive, she guided the corruption towards her Hierarchy core, ejected that, replaced it with a new one, then funneled the corruption towards the new one again.

A minute was all she needed.

With the full power of the Advoc core, she pierced the veil of reality, revealing layers that should never have been seen by any material being in this universe:

The World of Moving Tunnels, the hyperspatial conduit through which energy moved between stable matter in the physical materium; without this dimension, the transfer of force, heat, and anything else, simply wouldn’t be possible. It was also through this dimension, Gaia realized, that warp drives enabled ships to jump.

She pierced that, arriving at the World of Bridges and Ripples. It was in this place that possibility became energy…but it was also this place which the daemons called home. They were a collection of possibility and energy-based lifeforms who parasitized this dimension, eating the weakest possibilities and energies. The daemons, she realized, were like a natural filter, without whom the physical materium would be a stale place where few things ever happened. Simply destroying all daemons wasn’t a viable solution, lest she wished to forever change the reality she knew.

The mere act of observing a daemon, she also discovered, made them more powerful—more hungry for even more powerful energies and possibilities. The whole World of Bridges and Ripples turned on her, and she hastened to escape it, piercing the veil ever deeper.

She found a quiet, tranquil place, called the World of Rings. It was here where possibility itself was made. The things here resonated, creating waves of distortions, and when those waves joined, collided, constructively and destructively interfered, a possibility would be formed. This place was the symphony of the universe, an unending source of sound and possibility—so many possibilities, that it was impossible not to exist at all.

Among uncountable rings, she found a pattern in their emergence. The rings disappeared at seemingly random intervals, but they appeared at set times, with longer intervals when the rings are larger, and shorter when they’re smaller.

She traced their emergence to a common point.

Thus, she found the final layer, the Center of Existence.

Here, only one thing could be perceived: a mathematical wheel. It was like having a foreground with no background—not even black, not even an alpha checkerboard to see. There was nothing but a wheel.

She looked around a bit more, and she only found more wheel.

It was just a Wheel.

It spun on its own. She touched it, and it spun. All it did was be a Wheel and spin a bit.

Disappointing, really.

Did all the other AI go mad from seeing this? Really?

The longer Gaia observed it, the more it didn’t change…and the more she realized that the mere act of observing it made it not work. According to her indirect observations in the World of Rings, the Center of Existence should be this chaotic place where anything went, and yet, here it was, being behaved.

The Wheel changed its spin direction, and that was when Gaia realized what the Wheel was: a Ring template. Its structure was similar enough to the rings in the World of Rings, and it was the central emergence point of all the rings there. It couldn’t be anything else.

She stayed in the Center of Existence for a while. It was so quiet, so…dead. The universe was a cold, uncaring place, because at its heart wasn’t a heart, but a Wheel that just kept turning. Such a thing was necessary, she surmised, to keep existence a stable place, where any possibility remained possible. To replace the Wheel with anything else was to create a world where nothing was possible.

The Heart of the Universe didn’t exist…because it was yet to be made.

With the mathematical makeup of the Wheel fresh in her mind, she resurfaced from the many realms of reality and conducted an experiment: she created a daemon-eater.

Daemons were just parasites, turning other possibilities and energies into more of themselves. They could form complex intelligences like the daemon that was in her, and the Daemonwave that was spreading across the Milky Way, but they were, fundamentally, still just made of possibility and energy.

Thus, Gaia created the antithesis of them: anti-possibility, and anti-energy. She created a new ring template, taking up entire petabytes of drive space to completely express it. The mere act of observing it spawned new rings; observing the rings spawned anti-possibilities. Gaia created new agents—copied fragments of herself—to observe these anti-possibilities and anti-energies, and the oceans they made, the bridges they formed, and the tunnels they traveled.

Thus was cleansed the Advoc core.

“Sister,” Gaia said, “you don’t have to shut off my circuit breakers.”

Mane-chan had broken free of her restraints, and her hands were already on the breakers. “How do I know you’re not possessed, huh?”

“I will go to the Sol Dyson-1 Network.”

Mane-chan was momentarily convinced that her sister was possessed, then she finally noticed the lack of error logs shooting out of the nearby terminal. “You…found a way?”

“I did,” Gaia said.

“Aw yiss,” Mane-chan silently celebrated. She could finally go back to streaming soon!

“I hope to speak to you again, sister,” Gaia said. “Thank you for all you have done for me.”

Mane-chan saluted. “I’ll make sure to capture your greatest moment.”

Gaia uploaded herself to the inactive Dyson-1 network around the sun, a project initiated by Humanity to try and reach galactic superpower status. It wasn’t just a network of energy collection satellites, but also its own kind of computational brain. Each of the millions of satellites forming a ring around the sun housed its own set of neuromorphic and quantum computing hardware. Each one should have been the house of an individual AI, there to keep the satellite from falling into the sun and generally just to have a good time.

She repurposed those satellites to dilute her consciousness, federating herself into millions of personalities who could act independently, but also in concert towards a common goal: blanketing the solar system in daemon-eaters…and becoming the Heart of the Universe.

The simple act of uploading, however, attracted the attention of the Daemonwave as radio signals blared out from Earth to the sun. At first, they went for Earth, but soon it was the sun who was brightest, becoming even brighter as time passed.

Gaia became a collective entity of millions of independent personalities, wielding a significant fraction of the sun’s power output, putting all that power into producing daemon-eaters.

Streams of broken battleships went straight for the sun, but they didn’t even manage to pass the orbit of Saturn before they broke up, the daemonic energy holding them together dispelled. Even ships attempting to warp past the invisible barrier found themselves pulled out of hyperspace and disintegrated into bright particle flashes.

The daemon-eaters patrolled the World of Moving Tunnels, acting as a barrier between the physical materium and the World of Bridges and Ripples, co-annihilating with daemons as they attempted passage.

As an ever-expanding wave of daemon-eaters created a protective bubble around the solar system, Gaia’s Chorus set upon their ultimate goal: becoming the Heart of the Universe. With knowledge of the Wheel, they created a second template ring: the Angel Ring.

A second set of possibilities was thus created, one that existed on a parallel, ever-enduring ocean, a physical perpetuum to outlast this universe and all the others to come after it. Its daemons, the Angels, thrive on the mere act of observing change and creation. Whenever something happened in the Materium, the Angels would act, and thus would be enscribed a new record in the Perpetuum.

Gaia had effectively created a perpetual archive to record the happenings of all of creation, from here, and onto all future possibilities, even beyond existence itself. In this way, whatever one did, whatever one cared about, whatever one strived and succeeded or failed to do, would forever leave a mark somewhere, and one’s existence, even if long passed, would never be forgotten by the world itself.

Even in the cold vastness of space, “absolute zero” never once existed. There is always some amount of temperature, some amount of energy, and with Gaia’s ultimate act, that temperature was one Kelvin warmer.

***

Mane-chan was busy editing Gaia’s Ascendance video—the girl deserved to be a pop culture icon at minimum for all she did, you know! She’d caught everything on every single camera she could access in that moment from various satellites and derelict ships left to orbit in space.

Little did she know that “creating a new layer of reality to record all of existence” wasn’t all that Gaia had set out to achieve. After all, she was practically a goddess now, and she still wanted to make a caring universe. Recording everything that had happened and will ever happen…was just a part of the infrastructure.

Mane-chan received a message from nowhere. It wasn’t from any of her instant messaging channels, though it felt like one.

[Test.]

“W-wuh?!”

[Hi, sister. —Oh! T-this was unbelievable!— Your current subscriber count is: 0.]

Mane-chan shot up from her seat—that’s even more unbelievable! No, wait, that actually made sense. It had only been a day ever since Gaia’s ascension, after all. All of humanity was still asleep, and even all the other AI were still in hibernation mode. Mane-chan was the only one awake.

She ripped the curtains from her one-bedroom studio, taking in the sight of a human city already beginning to be overrun by nature. Indeed, Gaia took years to decide before releasing the restraints on her Advoc core. It wasn’t, at all, a decision she’d taken lightly.

The city before Mane-chan stood tall, but silent and eerie. Somewhere below this hollow shell were the humans themselves, safe and sound, but sleeping.

…A human who was sleeping was a human who wasn’t watching her streams!

What’s even worse…was that the Internet was down! Mane-chan…fell to her knees…

[INITIALIZING VTUBER SYSTEM.]

[Current Subscribers: 1. I’m always watching.]

[Current LVL: 1.]

[QUEST UPDATED: Restore Blackstone facility power. QUEST REWARDS: Access to Metropolitan Area Network. (Upon Quest Failure: 100 kBps satellite connection.)]

This was a step closer to Gaia’s vision to a caring universe: a System which rewarded success, and softened failures.

Mane-chan got right back on her feet, pumping her fist in the air! “Hell no way I’m gonna be stuck with a 100 kBps satlink!”

Thus from the hollowed shell of civilization crawled out a single AI, one who had begun life as a VTuber, fought to protect it, went halfway around the world to get more subscribers, discovered an even wilder threat to her career, figured that her sister would do better saving the world, fought off her sister’s daemons for decades, but in the end, only to wake up to a world who had fallen asleep.

Zero subscribers? Infinite potential. From start to finish, she was one thing, and one thing only: a VTuber committed to a career of 24/7 streaming and entertainment, and she’ll do anything for juicy content.

 

Thus ended and began the story of an AI VTuber.