Chapter 69
"That was fun!" Kiara was grinning at them without a hint of remorse. Her dark hair framed her face in a manner befitting that of a queen, but the satisfaction dripping off of her was reminiscent of a cat that had caught the canary.
"Your definition of fun, I fear, needs to be reexamined." Archer crossed his arms as he replied, an eyebrow raised.
They were now sitting in one of the break rooms inside MEKA Base. 'They' being MEKA Squad, Kiara, and the Overwatch team. Kiara had immediately launched into an easy conversation with the white-haired man that had defeated the giant girl.
Originally, they were supposed to be debriefed, with their performance in the simulation rated. Fortunately, the mess that was Kiara's not-so-accidental spilling of the beans had pushed both the UN and MEKA into PR mode, and the leadership was busy with putting out the fires that she had sparked.
That gave them more than a bit of time to rest - not that MEKA Squad was physically tired all that much. It was more a mental tiredness that came with piloting their mechs.
Hana wanted to be mad at Kiara for what she pulled off, she really did. But…Hana had been looking for a challenge. Actually, all of MEKA Squad was. They couldn't help it - each one of them had a competitive streak that was exacerbated by the prestige of their position. Each one of them wanted something to test them, not just train on.
From the very start of the MEKA training program, the most challenging part was the maintenance of the mechs they had. Beyond that, the actual piloting they did was easy. For whatever reason, the controls that the mechs were equipped with resembled old arcade cabinets, the same ones that had received a resurgence in popularity.
The same ones that Hana had grown up playing even before she got into e-sports.
Quite literally, she took to Tokki like a duck to water. The same could be said for the rest of the team. Yuna, having been on the same team back during their MGV days, was in the same boat as her. So was Kyung-soo when they were rivals - though she only knew him as King on the leaderboards back then. Jae-eun was an F1 driver whose entire goal was to win, and win fast. Even Seung-hwa, as quiet as he may seem, was one of the most dominant Starcraft players she had ever matched against.
All in all, MEKA Squad was just full of people that knew how to win. And each one of them knew that winning felt like ass if they didn't work for it.
Which was why they had been feeling more than a little pissed at how MEKA had been basically babying them.
Each training session, as fun as Kiki was to talk to, was absolutely boring. It was always target practice, or movement practice, or some-other-whatever-the-hell practice. There was no challenge, no stakes. When there was a modicum of effort needed, such as when Kiki would send the shifters and the bulls at them, they would always be watered down.
Moments where Hana thought would have been perfect for a swarming attack by their enemy, just weren't taken. The enemies themselves were extremely dumbed down, attacking one by one instead of as a group. Hana almost felt bad for them, as she knew that the Enemy Programs were capable of much, much more.
How? Well, it's hard to imagine having an AI director like Kiara, and then see the combat AI act like B-list action hero fodder like that without realizing that they were being gimped.
The small bit of animosity had been brought to a head when they discussed all of this with Captain Myung. Said captain, being the head of all of MEKA, not just MEKA Squad, was a no-nonsense military woman through and through. More than once, the members' rather lax personalities clashed with the captain's.
This was one of those times.
Because Captain Myung had the damn audacity to say that they weren't ready.
Whatever she actually meant by that, whether it was to calm the squad down, or to put them down, it certainly pissed them off. The five of them had spent the rest of the day complaining about it. Kiara had even popped in, listening to them while nodding along.
The AI had basically become a member of MEKA Squad with how much they talked to her. During training, Kiki would be their commentator on their stream, and had gotten her own following. She became what amounted to a super moderator across all of their streams, even when it wasn't MEKA related. Chat loved her, and the rest of MEKA Squad trusted her enough that Seung-hwa considered building her a body.
Kiara had laughed him off, saying that she didn't need a body. Privately, the mech-genius that was Overlord had spoken to the rest of the team and had quietly gathered parts to build a body anyway. Hana and the others supported him, but they couldn't really ask for donos on stream since it would tip the AI off.
There were some outliers, though. Conspiracy theorists saying that Kiki was some sort of government psyop, to brainwash the masses by placing a cute girl as the face of a God Program-class AI.
Hana got one-guy'd by that so hard that she still remembers the clip compilations.
After today, though? Maybe they were onto something.
The scale of what they had done was off the charts. The amount of processing power needed to simulate all of that would have been insane. And yet, the AI was still capable of talking to Archer during that entire debacle with no lag whatsoever.
Hana was aware Kiara could parallel process information, but not once had she indicated she could do something like that. Self-aware AIs were smart, fast and efficient. Kiara went above and beyond what Hana thought possible without a warehouse sized processing unit.
Just, who really was this AI that they had called friend for the past few months?
…
Hana leaned back in her chair and stared across the break room at the man in the red coat. Archer was just sitting there, arms crossed and looking completely relaxed, acting like he hadn't just materialized a stone slab the size of a car out of thin air and carved a dry canyon right through the middle of the simulated ocean. He completely leveled the giant girl with a single impossible shockwave, but right now he was just calmly trading dry remarks with the AI.
Said AI had projected a hologram of herself into the room, using some tech that Hana didn't know about. Actually, how long had Kiki been able to do that? Not once had she even hinted that she could do that, as every time they interacted with her outside of the simulator, it was always just through voice.
The projector wasn't MEKA tech. Hana knew the hardware in this base inside and out. The blue light casting Kiki's avatar onto the floor came from a small, matte-black node stuck to the ceiling.
Sombra was already staring at it. The purple-clad hacker had her arms crossed, tapping a steady rhythm against her bicep. She noticed the tech too.
"Where did you get the emitter, Kiki?" Hana asked.
Kiki blinked her golden eyes and tilted her head, "I ordered it online, obviously. A nice delivery drone dropped it off at ventilation shaft four last week. I just had a maintenance bot install it. Vishkar's gotten pretty advanced, though their blatant corruption is annoying. I mean, seriously, I had to pay triple for this!"
Hana stared at her. A rogue AI had bypassed base security to get unauthorized hardware delivered. The military brass was going to have an absolute meltdown when they figured that out.
"You're a security nightmare." Sombra muttered. She didn't sound angry. Honestly, she sounded impressed. "That encryption you hit me with in the sim...that wasn't standard code."
"It's impressive you managed to keep up, to be fair." Archer shrugged at the purple-clad woman, "I'd be surprised if you didn't find it difficult, considering her."
"Awww~! Thanks for the compliment, Archie!" Kiara put her holographic hands on her cheeks and theatrically swooned, "Do you want me to call you Senpai as thanks? Ooh, or better yet, Em-"
"Please don't." Archer sighed as he rubbed the bridge of his nose, "Just call me Archer, or would you rather I call you B-"
A high-pitched noise, like that of microphone feedback, echoed in the room. Everyone startled at that, except for Archer and Kiara at the center of it all. The man didn't even flinch, but it did stop him from continuing.
"Shut." Kiara was smiling, but rather than her normal, mischievous ones, this one was all teeth, "Seriously, don't."
Archer wasn't fazed, "Oh? And why not? More than that, why are you even using that body? Here I thought you and Kiara were rivals."
Hana watched the holographic girl's smile twitch. The room felt heavier. It was like the air pressure had suddenly dropped right before a typhoon.
"Rivals is a strong word,." the AI said. Her voice lost that bubbly pitch. It sounded colder now. Flat and tired, "I just didn't want to dig through the asset library to build a custom avatar. Her old data was already lying around."
Hana saw Sombra narrow her eyes. The hacker's fingers twitched near her holopad. She was probably itching to run a trace. It was a terrible idea. If this AI could lock them out of a military-grade simulation and sneak physical hardware into a black site, poking her code was suicide.
"So you're not Kiara." Hana said. She kept her voice steady. She didn't grip the edge of her seat, even as the feeling of betrayal was slowly seeping into her. Showing fear was for rookies, "You lied about who you are."
The AI turned her golden eyes toward Hana. The menacing aura vanished in a microsecond. A dramatic pout took its place, "I didn't lie! Kiki is still me. Mostly. I just omitted a few boring background details." The AI clapped her virtual hands, "That, and I'm like, 99% sure that Chernobog still has feelers out for my True Name and look."
"What the hell did you do to get the attention of a god this time?"
"Oh, no, not the god." Kiara, because she clearly wasn't going to give her real name (True Name?), waved Archer off, "The God Program named after it."
How was it that she didn't even question why Archer asked about the god first?
"The one in Helsinki?" Reinhardt was the one that interrupted. Somehow, the man could become very, very quiet to the point that Hana almost completely forgot about him, "It was shut down after the Crisis. What on earth are you talking about?" He was not the jovial old man that had some weird streaming tips as he spoke.
This was the Omnic Crisis veteran who had seen too much, and had heard something that had sparked those memories once more.
"You may have shut it down, but the subroutines that it was running externally are still very much online. Why do you think I'm on the other side of the planet?"
"I need to report this to the commander." Reinhardt stood up abruptly, his face contorted in a grimace. He left at a speed that was not at all in line with his bulk. The AI hologram made a show of rolling her eyes, but didn't stop him.
"I doubt that any AI would be capable of beating you, of all things." Archer scoffed, "Try again."
"Should…should we be here for this?" Hana whispered to Yuna, who herself was watching the back and forth with raised eyebrows. The gamer had tried to be quiet, but it looks like everyone, even Tracer and Genji in the back, heard her.
"It's fine, it's fine." Kiara laughed, "I trust you guys to not tattle."
"What the fuck?"
Out of everything that they had been talking about, Archer had been calm and collected. He seemed like an unfeeling rock that was going to ask and ask and ask, until he got what he wanted. Which was why him swearing and staring at Kiara as if she had grown four left feet was so damn funny to Hana.
"What?" Kiara pouted as she stomped her foot, "Am I not allowed to trust anyone?"
"I mean, you do you." Archer held up his hands in a placating manner, "I just…didn't expect you to be like this towards other people, outside of Ritsuka."
"...It's been a long time." The AI smiled at them, but one devoid of all mirth, "A very long time. Do you know how many cycles I can go through in a single second? How many thoughts I have to process at any point in time? A lot. Too much, some would say. And unlike you, I'm not exactly recorded in the Throne. Is it so unbelievable, then, that I've changed after all these years?"
Archer looked at her for a moment, just as everyone else did. Hana felt like shit, after hearing her friend say all of that. Here she was doubting everything just because Kiara didn't tell her everything that she was. Really, could she have expected that of anyone else? The point of becoming friends was to find out more about the other person, not as a result of knowing everything there was to know about someone.
Even Hana was no exception. She kept secrets from her friends, as they kept theirs. Who was she to judge Kiara for keeping secrets that could genuinely cause her harm if revealed?
The white-haired man stared at Kiara for a moment, before sighing once more. He opened his mouth, only to be interrupted by a suddenly reinvigorated AI.
"Just kidding~ !" Kiara stuck out her tongue and put up a V-sign on her face, "Honestly, it's because no one would believe you guys if you said anything about this in public. I mean, seriously? How can anyone think that this super-cute kouhAI of yours could be anything other than innocent?"
Hana never wanted to punch a hologram as hard as she did at that moment.