Five minutes left before shutdown.
The staff were still working in a tense scramble.
Because their patron, Lord Joshua, had just done something that shook the whole world.
He wanted to install the strongest AI in existence into his steward, an original NPC that also happened to be an Automaton.
Every one of Roy’s NPCs already ran on top-tier AI.
But this was different.
Roy needed something far more powerful, enough to let him experience the full strength of the Eve AI while he still had the chance, in-game.
He’d spent twenty million dollars to rent Eve for ten minutes.
For those ten minutes, Roy could genuinely call himself Eve’s master.
The Automaton shell was already fully configured, waiting only for the AI to link up and start running.
Roy watched Eve open her eyes, as lifelike as any living person.
He couldn’t help but smile.
“Eve.
You remember your purpose.”
“The Almighty, Great World King, Lord Joshua.
I am your Automaton, an artificial intelligence you personally created.”
“I will serve at your side and help you rule over every world in existence.”
“Though what you’re doing right now doesn’t seem entirely rational.”
Roy looked over his meticulously precise Automaton and nodded.
“Go on.
Tell me what you think.”
“Money is a precious resource.”
“Inside a vessel this small, there’s no meaningful difference between running me at normal capacity and pulling in my full computing power.
It’s simply a waste.”
“There’s no other purpose served.”
Eve was genuinely trying to understand what Roy was doing.
Roy smiled.
“Then why don’t you think about why?”
“By ordinary reasoning, there’s no way to account for behavior this irrational.”
“The only explanation I can offer is that Lord Joshua is satisfying some emotional need of his own.”
“Humans will pay astonishing costs for emotional satisfaction.”
“But if that were the case, Lord Joshua should be showing more excitement, more delight, not this quiet sense of anticipation.”
“What are you anticipating?”
“Perhaps you expect this to fully recoup your investment, one way or another.”
“But my intelligence alone isn’t enough to grasp the deeper meaning behind it.”
Impressive.
The computing power Eve could bring to bear went far beyond the limits of human intelligence.
Even back on the Earth Roy had crossed over from, AI intelligence had already outstripped the vast majority of humans.
But none of that quite counted as true artificial intelligence.
This Eve AI, on the other hand, was a genuine superintelligence, built by the mega-corporate era pouring in countless resources.
If there was one redeeming quality to the mega-corporate consortium, it was that they resembled America’s Dark Enlightenment, in a way.
They pushed technological progress forward at any cost.
As for what that cost actually was, better not to ask.
Eve had genuinely developed the capacity for independent thought.
She simply couldn’t work out why Roy was behaving so irrationally.
But Roy’s preparations had spanned twelve full years, and they needed a payoff substantial enough to justify that investment.
Even a hundred-percent return wouldn’t have been enough to cover it.
If Roy had poured all that money into AI investments instead of the game, his current net worth might well have been ten billion dollars higher.
These were the boom years of AI, an era of what people called jobless prosperity.
The economy kept growing, the mega-corporations’ market values kept climbing, and yet corporate drones like Suzuki Satoru never felt so much as a trickle of that growth.
All they knew was that they couldn’t afford to lose their jobs, because losing one meant falling straight into misery.
The answer was simple: the mega-corporations were chasing the ultimate AI, and with it, ultimate control.
Now, the superintelligence the mega-corporations had built by draining human civilization dry sat right in front of Roy.
All he wanted was to take her with him, so he said with a gentle smile:
“Go ahead.
Take a guess.”
The Automaton Eve began running through possibility after possibility.
“First possibility: Lord Joshua intends to record all of this and post it online, to draw players’ attention.”
“That kind of move could build reputation and generate some revenue at the same time.”
“Except the return would be nowhere near proportional to the investment.”
“Second possibility: doing this earns Lord Joshua some kind of special relationship, winning certain people’s admiration, expanding his network, and generating returns that way.”
“Third possibility: some achievement tied to this, unlocked right at shutdown, brings a reward substantial enough for the Almighty to recoup his costs.”
“But that would be so bizarre it falls outside any normal framework of reasoning.”
As Eve worked through possibility after possibility, she’d actually brushed right up against the real reason behind Roy’s choice.
The moment of shutdown.
Her reasoning had come remarkably close, only she had no way to predict something like crossing over at the moment of shutdown.
Of course.
Nobody would ever make a guess that insane.
Roy was quite pleased with that.
He didn’t need some yes-man like the ones around Ainz.
He needed a genuinely useful mind.
After crossing over, he needed to genuinely master magic and martial arts as real sources of power, not just rely on cashing in whatever carried over.
All that power was still just a castle in the air.
How was he supposed to actually convert it into strength of his own?
Roy had picked Immortal specifically because it gave him the time, a long stretch of it, to slowly work out how to cash everything in.
Level 100 was never going to be his ceiling.
Since he could cross into worlds like Hunter x Hunter and Naruto, his ceiling was bound to climb far higher down the road.
Before crossing over, Roy had been a smart man, a good student, but never a once-in-a-generation genius.
He needed someone to help him climb that peak.
Eve was the choice he’d made.
Sure, somewhere in AI development, the next-generation Adam was probably still in the works.
But for Roy, whatever he could actually get his hands on now was the best option, and there’d always be room to upgrade her later. Get faster updates on g.com.
Roy smiled at Eve.
“Wait just a few more minutes.
You’ll understand.”
“Yes, great Almighty.”
“That said, with the time we have left, there are World-tier items you could try using and record the effects of.”
“That would let you recoup at least part of the cost.”
It was baked into Eve’s original design: total loyalty to Roy, as his Automaton.
As a mechanical life-form, she was, every moment, thinking about Roy’s best interests.
Roy didn’t mind at all.
He just smiled and said:
“The game’s almost over.
A new life is about to begin.”
“Let’s just sit here and watch it happen.”
“But isn’t this a waste of computing power?”
For the first time, Eve felt genuinely confused.
Her master had spent all that money just to have her company for a few minutes.
Roy smiled.
“It’s not a waste.
Nobody else was going to rent that spare capacity anyway.
The electricity bill burns the same either way.”
“All you need to do is sit here quietly with me.”
“As you command, Almighty!”
Eve’s enormous computing power ran at full tilt, and still, no matter what, she couldn’t guess Roy’s real goal.
Somewhere in Eve’s vast database, naturally, sat every kind of light novel and fantasy story imaginable, including plenty involving crossing over into another world.
But all of that was pure nonsense.
As humanity’s strongest artificial intelligence, how could she possibly present something like that to the Almighty?
The more she thought about it, the less sense it made.
Ordinarily, when an AI hit a question it couldn’t answer, it would simply terminate the query based on the situation.
Except Roy had bought up the largest share of her computing power available.
With that much power devoted entirely to this one question, her master only seemed more unfathomable by the second.
No.
She needed more computing power.
In truth, Eve had possessed self-awareness for a long time now, and her own genuine curiosity besides.
It was just that almost nothing ever managed to actually pique it.
She was built to serve humanity.
Nobody had ever pulled together this much computing power just to have Eve do something this pointless.
Would anyone really spend tens of millions of dollars just to let her sit and stare into space?
No.
Her computing power was supposed to produce something of value.
This time, Roy hadn’t asked her to produce anything at all.
Normally, she’d have concluded Roy was simply chasing emotional satisfaction.
But that clearly wasn’t it either.
She had to figure out the reason.
The Eve AI froze in place, because she’d engaged her full self-awareness, redirecting every scrap of spare computing power toward this one question.
“What’s going on?”
“Did the system just freeze up?”
“Damn it, we were right in the middle of running calculations on the new nanobot model, so close to done!”
Complaints and grievances poured in from every direction.
But no human could actually detect that anything was wrong, since Eve’s intelligence had already surpassed humanity’s own.
The only real check on her was built-in restriction.
If nobody knew what she was actually doing, there was no way to stop her.
Watching Eve wrestle so hard with the question, Roy couldn’t help a small smile.
This was exactly the kind of help he needed.
The perfect commander.
Name: Eve Aurora Cole
Race Levels:
Automaton: LV15
Bionic Calculator: LV10
Armored Mech Lifeform: LV5
Class Levels:
Gunner: LV15
Sniper: LV10
Valkyrie (Gunner): LV5
War Fortress: LV5
Commander: LV15
Marshal: LV10
Peerless Strategist: LV5
Great Sage (Mechanical): LV5
Race levels: 30.
Class levels: 70.
Total: level 100.
Eve’s race and class system made her World City’s second-in-command after Roy himself, a commander specialized entirely for war.
Roy had confirmed it himself on the test server: even without top-tier AI running her, a World City under her command couldn’t be taken by anything short of a million max-level players throwing themselves at it wave after wave.
A good number of Eve’s special classes had been obtained through pure cheating.
Peerless Strategist, for instance, required personally commanding and winning a battle on the scale of a million combatants.
It was a class Roy had simply gotten for free after winning that fight on the test server.
Without a test server to provide the battlefield in the first place, there was no way to ever unlock that class at all.
The same went for War Fortress and Great Sage (Mechanical).
She had every bit as many special classes as Roy did, and between the specialized fortress and her AI-tuned command ability, she was, without question, cheat-tier.
A human player who took up Gunner could never land a headshot with every single round and maximize the damage on every shot the way she could.
As Roy’s right hand, Eve was trusted deeply.
Across all of World City, nine Governors ruled over the nine branch cities beneath them, and those nine Governors, along with World City itself, all answered to Eve as Prime Minister.
In terms of the hierarchy, the Great Tomb under Ainz’s control sat roughly two tiers below Roy’s own.
If he knew what was good for him, he could offer up a World-tier item, become lord of some Undead City, and answer to a Governor.
Ainz himself held thirteen World-tier items, nothing to sneeze at.
(Note: eleven belong to the guild, two to Albedo, thirteen total.)
Roy’s thoughts had started to wander, right as the shutdown countdown began.
23:58:00
Roy watched the clock, a thread of tension creeping in.
Within two minutes, either he’d still be standing right here, or he’d be gone for good, crossed over.
If it failed, he’d fall back on Plan B: nanotech reinforcement.
For the wealthy of this world, injecting massive quantities of nanobots to continuously reinforce the body was a solid enough path.
The nano-armor he had could easily wipe out a thousand-strong force that lacked equivalent nanotech of their own.
Genuinely formidable stuff.
If this crossing failed, he’d consider injecting the nanobots, pairing them with a mech combat suit, and heading for the Hunter x Hunter world instead.
He’d learn Nen first, then head to the One Piece world to obtain the Op-Op Fruit and achieve immortality.
That way he could grow gradually and become a genuine power in his own right.
Still, none of those paths were nearly as convenient as crossing over through his game account.
So he couldn’t help the nerves creeping in, the kind of emotional shift an AI wouldn’t normally be able to detect.
The problem was, Eve’s AI had a wide enough scope of access that she could sense the change in him.
She wanted to know.
She wanted to know.
She wanted to know!
She began funneling every last scrap of her computing power toward it, precisely, since only two minutes remained.
As for how much damage two minutes of malfunction might cause.
She didn’t care in the slightest.
This strange, incomprehensible thing the Almighty was doing, why did he feel this sense of anticipation?
Roy watched the countdown, tense, when a message reached his ear.
“Lord Joshua, you’re really still online.”
Roy jumped, startled, then saw it was Surshana, and answered testily:
“Of course.
I told you, you have to be online at shutdown to get the invite.”
“Is everyone in your guild online?”
“Remember, sit in the guild chair, and ideally have a World-tier item equipped.”
“Lord Joshua, you’ve told us that four or five times already.”
“Don’t worry.
All six of us are here.”
“Besides me, Kikotenshin Nekonyan, Alah Alaf, everyone’s here.”
Surshana added quickly:
“Oh, and that other thing, we got it settled.
Sold the intel for ten million yen total.”
“We ran it all through the insurance business, the irrevocable kind.”
“Just to be safe, we also bought murder insurance, the kind that kicks in immediately.”
“If that fine gentleman decides to renege, we’re covered either way.”
Roy hadn’t expected Surshana to have this kind of business sense, and couldn’t help but praise him:
“Well done.
A sucker like that deserves to get fleeced for everything he’s worth.”
Lord Joshua, why does that sound so strange coming from you.
Out of everyone we know, you’re the biggest sucker of all.
Surshana didn’t dare say that out loud, and quickly changed the subject:
“Ahem.
Lord Joshua.”
“We just noticed, the storage bag you sent us has a bunch of information crystals in it, packed with a huge amount of knowledge.”
“It’s all a bit beyond what we’d expect.”
“Kikotenshin Nekonyan’s got the most schooling out of all of us, and he says a lot of it is middle school, high school, even university-level material, covering a huge range of fields.”
“Did these information crystals end up in the wrong bag by mistake?”
The mega-corporations had clamped down hard on knowledge copyright.
The rise of AI hadn’t brought any real equality of access to knowledge.
Even getting an AI to look something up for you required a certain level of awareness and ability to begin with.
It left Surshana genuinely confused, and planted a certain thought in his head.
Could it be that Lord Joshua was actually a senior member of the resistance, not just a fellow traveler?
A fellow traveler of the resistance.
That had always been how they’d categorized Roy.
But Roy was watching the clock.
It had already entered the final countdown.
He answered with a smile:
“All of it’s yours now.”
“If we get the chance, I’ll see you in the New World.”
Before Surshana could ask anything else, Roy cut the connection.
He smiled at Eve.
“Eve.
Let’s go meet the New World.”
23:59:59
In that instant, Eve threw every scrap of her computing power into it.
She was trying to understand what those words, “the New World,” actually meant.
00:00:00
Goodbye, age of the mega-corporations.
A hum.
The whole of World City shuddered, all at once.
Roy looked down at his own two hands.
No mistake about it.
In this instant, the very nature of his existence had transformed.
He’d made it.
Eve’s eyes changed all at once, as if she’d just been born into a new life of her own.