Chương 512: 243.Hyperactive AI 2

By the time I got back to the residential deck, the ship had gone considerably quieter. The corridor lights had shifted to night mode, dimmed to just enough for walking. Occasionally a staffer in coveralls still passed by — someone carrying a terminal, someone pushing a tool cart, footsteps light, as if the whole ship were quietly making its own final preparations for tomorrow. I was heading straight for my room. The door had only slid halfway open when I saw someone was already inside.

Maki was sitting on the small sofa by the window. Not like she'd broken in — more like the room had always had a space meant for her. She'd traded the sharp, public-facing version of herself for lighter shipboard clothes, her hair a little looser, though her posture was still perfectly straight, as if even relaxing came with its own internal management. I stood in the doorway for a second. She looked up.

"You're back."

"... Yeah." Two completely ordinary words. Somehow, coming from her, they made the room feel genuinely quiet for the first time all night. Infuriating. I shut the door, walked in, set my keycard on the desk.

"Is the Seitokai president moonlighting as night patrol now?"

"If I said yes, would you cooperate?"

"No."

"Then no." She answered so fast I nearly choked on air. Her eyes lingered on my face for a moment, as if checking something, then she asked, mildly:"How was the sync test?"

"Came back alive."

"I can see that."

"Then why ask." She didn't answer right away — just glanced at how much tension was still sitting in my shoulders, reading the result off the smallest details. That was the part I least wanted to admit. Maki wasn't the type to wear concern on her face. But she watched. And she was frighteningly good at it.

"So?" she asked again, lighter this time.

"Is SUSANOO usable?" I dropped into the chair across from her and let out a long breath.

"Usable. Loud. But usable." Something shifted at the corner of her mouth — not quite a smile, more like a pen tip drawn lightly across still water.

"Then he suits you." I glared up at her.

"Is that a compliment for the machine or an insult to me?"

"You can pick whichever version is easier to live with."

"I'm not accepting either."

"Then that's on you." She said it so calmly I briefly wondered if she was just in an unusually good mood tonight. Looking closer, she wasn't. She'd just buried her exhaustion deep enough that anyone who didn't know her wouldn't catch it. There was a faint shadow under her eyes; her shoulders weren't held as tight as they'd been during the day.

She'd spent the whole day managing an entire ship's worth of people, equipment, briefings, lodging, and boarding logistics — and she still had it in her to sit in my room and ask how a sync test had gone. A normal person would already be asleep. Maki had never once counted herself among normal people. I looked away, pretending to scan the room casually. And landed, of course, on the bed. The one clearly a size larger than standard. Damn it.

She noticed the pause and didn't follow it anywhere, acting as if the concept of cabin-grade differences simply didn't exist. Too natural. Natural enough that calling her out on it would feel petty. I sneered inwardly. Fine. Play dumb. Two could do that.

"What about you?" I deliberately steered the topic elsewhere.

"Everything's handled, and you still have time to personally check on your subordinates?"

"Not a subordinate." She corrected it instantly. I blinked and looked at her. She caught herself a beat too late, and patched the rest of the sentence in a tone gone suddenly, deliberately official.

"Confirming the status of a core team member." Perfect. The phrasing was bureaucratic enough to file. It also arrived half a second late, leaving a gap wide enough to drive a transport through. I didn't call it out. Because calling it out would only make the rest of the night complicated. The room settled into quiet. Outside, a cart rolled somewhere down the deck, trailing the tail end of low staff conversation, the whole ship turning over quietly in the dark. In moments like that, the room felt especially still.

Not awkward — just the kind of still where one more sentence could tip the mood somewhere neither of us was ready for. Maki broke it first.

"Don't push yourself tomorrow." I almost laughed.

"Bit late for that, isn't it?"

"Late's still better than never said." She held my eyes, voice still carefully even.

"I know you'll make your own calls. I know you don't like being managed. But Orpheia isn't somewhere you can muscle through on stubbornness alone. When it's time to fall back, fall back. When it's time to hand off, hand off. Don't mix up holding on with forcing it." My first instinct was to argue. To say I wasn't an idiot, that everyone already knew this, that the Vice President wasn't installed just so people could lecture her. The words didn't come. Because she wasn't lecturing me.

She was just making sure this, specifically, got said out loud. And she was only saying it to me. I looked down at my own hands.

"... I know."

"Good." Just that. No pushing for more. No demanding a second promise. That was the most infuriating thing about her. She always stopped exactly where she should, which made pushing back feel more petty than principled. When she stood, I stood too. At the door, she paused and looked back.

"Get some rest, Shimo." Not Vice President. Not core team member. Just Shimo. Something tapped lightly against my chest. Not pain. Just clarity. I frowned and made my voice deliberately careless.

"Got it. You too, Madam President."

"I'll consider it."

"There's something to consider about sleeping?"

"There is. Because some people are hard to stop worrying about." With that, she left. The door closed behind her. I was alone with an overcompensating bed and a pile of details I had no interest in examining further. I stood there for a while, not moving. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. Then swore quietly under my breath. Not at her. Not at myself.

More at the whole situation — at tomorrow, at Orpheia, at SUSANOO, at this ship, and at a certain person who was extremely good at taking care of people while insisting she was only doing routine management. Then I fell backward into the bed. Damn it. It really was bigger. My first thought upon waking was that this bed was excessive. Not comfortable enough to move you — comfortable enough to be suspicious.

The kind of you're about to go fight gravity and Spore Haze on a rotten planet and you still slept this well suspicious. The size was its own problem, too. I'd dropped onto it carelessly last night and woken up still on exactly the same side, as if the bed had politely but firmly folded me into place. I lay there staring at the ceiling for three seconds and decided not to chase that thought any further.

Any further, and I'd just end up back at the room that was clearly a grade larger than everyone else's, and a Seitokai president who'd maintained total innocence about it from start to finish. Wonderful. First thing in the morning, hadn't even brushed my teeth, and I'd already managed to annoy myself. The room terminal lit up.

"Good morning, Lieutenant. The time is now 0630. If you wish to arrive at the tactical briefing in optimal condition, I recommend leaving the bed within seven minutes." I closed my eyes. Right. Almost forgot. On top of the universe, the tournament, and Maki, I now also had an AI keeping track of my sleep schedule.

"You're managing my wake-up now too?" SUSANOO's voice came through the bedside terminal, steady enough to make me want to unplug it.

"If your first action of the day is passive avoidance, I am obligated to offer counsel, Lieutenant."

"I sincerely recommend you learn the virtue of silence."

"Logged. Lieutenant prefers quiet. This does not affect delivery of necessary reminders." I sat up and dragged a hand through my hair.

"You're really annoying."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"Understood, Lieutenant." That particular talent — absorbing someone's irritation and handing it right back, perfectly unchanged — was, frankly, more infuriating than most people managed. Once I'd washed up and changed, I opened the door onto a ship already fully into its morning cycle. The corridor was brighter than last night, though still carrying that specific Kushima restraint — nothing glaring, floors clean enough to throw back a reflection.

A line of Kushima staff moved past at a brisk clip in the distance: someone with a datapad, someone with an equipment case, someone confirming parameters with a technician in low voices as they walked. Everyone busy, busy enough that this stopped feeling like a ship carrying students to a competition and started feeling like a precision factory gearing up for a production run. And we were just the important components temporarily slotted into the process. That thought, oddly, leveled my mood out a little.

At least I wasn't the only one being run through the machine. The smell of miso soup hit me before I reached the mess. I stopped, checked the sign, and felt a genuinely absurd sense of dislocation. In a few hours we'd be heading toward a high-gravity, spore-choked world with an unmapped, hostile surface. And what sat in front of me right now was a Japanese breakfast service clean enough to use as a textbook example.

Wooden lattice dividers, long tables, a serving line, rising steam, neatly stacked trays, and a handful of Kushima staff already partway through their meal — coveralls, tool tags clipped to their chests, flipping through data between bites. Not the leisurely pace of a tour group. The industrial pace of people who needed to eat and get back to work. Watching it made me feel, irrationally, a little better. At least there were people on this ship even less human than the Seitokai.

"That expression," Jess said, "makes it look like you're wondering if this place secretly runs a hot spring resort on the side." She sat further in, in front of a full, textbook Japanese breakfast — rice, grilled fish, tamagoyaki, miso soup, side dishes, nothing missing. She glanced up at me with the standard lethargy of early morning.

"I'm just thinking that if House Kushima ever pivoted to running premium convalescent ships, no one would be too surprised." I grabbed a tray and sat across from her.

"Assuming the patients are willing to ignore where the ship eventually drops them off."

"Fair point." Jess poked her tamagoyaki with her chopsticks.

"A proper breakfast right before despair sets in is somehow more suspicious than no breakfast at all."

"That's how civilization usually works," I said, ladling miso soup and picking up a piece of fish.

"Make you comfortable first. Then send you off to suffer." She stared at me for two seconds.

"Being this good at killing a mood right after waking up is genuinely impressive."

"Thanks. I pride myself on consistency." A low laugh sounded nearby. I turned. Irena had set her tray down beside Jess. Her color was better than last night — at least the trace of working hard not to show the pressure had eased slightly. She set her soup down and glanced at my tray.

"Good to see you still have an appetite."

"I'd rather not get lectured by gravity on an empty stomach."

"That's surprisingly reasonable."

"Most of what I say is reasonable. You people just don't want to admit it."

"No," Jess corrected me with total sincerity.

"Most of what you say is just very aggressive."

"Aggression is a form of efficiency." I'd barely finished when the chair on my other side scraped back. Emily sat down with her breakfast, and the air pressure at the table dropped a noticeable degree. Not because she was doing anything to cause it — she just had that effect. In light training gear, she looked even sharper than last night, the pale morning light from the side windows landing on a face that was clearly tired, which only made her don't approach quality more obvious.

No cigarette, for which I was grateful. Otherwise I'd have had to weigh miso soup against secondhand smoke before I'd even finished breakfast. She glanced at me as she sat.

"Shame you didn't die in the sync test." My chopsticks stopped halfway to my mouth.

"Thanks for the team spirit."

"Don't mention it." Emily lifted her soup, voice as flat as if she were discussing whether it needed more salt.

"I was actually looking forward to the AI driving you insane first."

"Relax. He hasn't won yet."

"Then his specs must be solid." Jess nearly choked on her own soup. I looked at Emily and thought, not for the first time, that she and SUSANOO might genuinely get along — assuming they could first agree on which of them counted as more human. Down at the other end of the mess, a few greetings sounded. Lan, Hedwig, Akari, and Freya Nikaido had arrived, each collecting breakfast and finding a seat. The mood was a little looser than last night, but only a little. Everyone looked like they'd slept.

No one looked like they'd actually rested. Fair enough. No mattress on this ship, and no artificial hot spring, however well designed, was going to wash Orpheia out of anyone's head overnight. Akari took a deliberate breath before sitting down.

"I am currently working very hard to convince myself this isn't the last act of tenderness before the firing squad."

"That killed the mood worse than anything I've said today," I told her.

"That's because you infected me."

"No. That's called growth." Hedwig set her tray down, crisp as always. She glanced at me, then at Emily eating quietly beside us, then back at her terminal.

"At least there's one thing worth being glad about." I raised an eyebrow.

"What?"

"The staff on this ship clearly understand basic human maintenance better than the tournament committee does." I nearly laughed into my miso.

"Hedwig, that's a sharp way to open the morning. I'm touched."

"Not sharp." Her tone stayed level.

"Observational." Her particular brand of deadpan wasn't the same as Maki's, but the damage was comparable. Speaking of Maki — I spotted her almost immediately after. She was seated a little further off, not deliberately separated, just at the distance that let people eat without feeling watched while she still worked. A simple breakfast sat beside an open datapad; two Kushima staff leaned in, confirming something in low voices. She listened while dragging a few fields aside with one finger, barely pausing.

A very Maki picture. Most people ran on coffee in the morning. She ran on workflow. Then, as if sensing it, she looked up. Straight at me. No wave. No extra expression. Just one glance — confirming I was there, eating, still functional — and then her attention dropped straight back to the data. Infuriatingly brief. And more than enough to make it obvious she'd been checking. I kept my face perfectly blank and took a sip of soup, swearing silently. Irena spoke, unhurried, beside me.

"Your ears are a little red." I nearly choked on the soup.

"It's the heat."

"I didn't say what kind of red."

"You did now." Jess collapsed onto the table, laughing. Emily glanced at me, didn't laugh, and the faint ah, I see on her face was somehow worse than if she had. I decided to shut up and focus on the fish. Any more of this, and the first fight of the day was going to break out in the mess. After breakfast, we filed toward the tactical briefing room in stages. The walk from the mess wasn't long, but it felt strange all the same.

The lattice screens and the smell of hot soup, which had briefly given the morning a sense of the ordinary, dropped away entirely after one turn — replaced by clean shipboard corridors, wall lighting, direction markers, and the occasional glimpse of prep crews through a side hatch. As if the ship itself understood perfectly well: breakfast was breakfast, and the moment you set your tray down, it was time to switch back to pre-deployment mode.

Tactical Room Three was larger than last night's briefing room, the main projection wall already lit. This wasn't a departure notice. Not room assignments. Not an equipment crating check. This time we were actually going to talk about how to get through ten legs on the ground without taking ourselves — or each other — out. I walked in and immediately saw SUSANOO's connection marker glowing in the lower right corner of the projection. Of course he was here too.

I sat down, and a split second later his voice landed on my private channel.

"Good morning, Lieutenant. Your heart rate is elevated relative to breakfast. Probable cause: tactical briefing stress, or a short-term physiological fluctuation triggered by a specific interpersonal interaction." My fingers tightened.

"Shut up."

"Received. Entering low-interference standby." He actually went quiet. I blinked, briefly thrown.... Fine. At least he wasn't completely incapable of reading a room. When Maki stepped up front, the room went quiet on its own. No preamble today. No repeating the committee regulations everyone had already half memorized. The main projection lit and split into sections: public race conditions, controllable risk, uncontrollable risk, team assignments. Very her. Sort the things that can kill you first.

Then make everyone learn to survive inside the sorting.

"We confirmed the full committee notice last night," she said, voice clear and even.

"We're not wasting time rereading it. Today we're only talking about three things: what we can control, what we can't, and who does the right thing, and when." The air in the room pulled tight the instant that landed. Not from volume. From accuracy. Maki compressed the public rules down to their simplest core: ten legs, ten runners, handoffs that cannot be fumbled, checkpoints that cannot be missed, storm calls that cannot be argued with, one flare and the whole team is out. Then she pulled up the first point.

"First: handoffs." The center of the wall shifted to a segmented course diagram.

"A handoff point isn't a formality. It's the line between winning and losing. If anyone here thinks reaching it counts as finishing it, you're welcome to leave this briefing right now and go back to bed. It would save everyone time." No one spoke. Because however harsh that was, there wasn't a gram of exaggeration in it. Hedwig raised a hand and followed her rhythm with two questions. Lan pushed on equipment weight and endurance distribution. Irena focused on fatigue accumulation and pacing.

Akari, nervous as she clearly was, still laid out the checkpoint risks with precision. Jess looked scattered at first, but the moment the conversation turned practical, she was faster than anyone at spotting exactly where the course was most likely to kill someone. Listening to them, I realized this was the state we actually knew how to be in before something like this. Not adrenaline. Not rallying cries.

Not the pretty, irresponsible let's all do our best together that people throw around when they have no intention of paying for it. Just a group of people who already knew this was going to be bad, sitting down to take it apart piece by piece. When the discussion reached environmental risk, Maki glanced my way.

"On the Spore Haze." She didn't elaborate — just tapped the connection marker on the table in front of me. The meaning was clear. The one who'd just spent last night syncing with the system had work to do. I swallowed the urge to roll my eyes and opened SUSANOO's public channel. His voice came through the room, low and steady.

"Good morning, everyone. I am AS-00, 素戔嗚 — commonly designated SUSANOO. Regarding the Spore Haze interference expected on Orpheia's surface: this unit carries a correction algorithm capable of assisting with terrain contour identification, heat-signature error compensation, and moving-target boundary detection in high-scatter conditions." The room went still for a beat. Not because the content was shocking.

Because roughly half the people present had never heard a chassis address a room with that much unbothered authority before. Jess recovered first, turning her head slowly toward me.

"What exactly did you bring back from sync last night?"

"A talkative military-grade headache."

"Lieutenant's description carries emotional bias," SUSANOO said.

"See what I mean." A few people laughed at once, and the room finally let out half a breath. Maki didn't stop it — she just carried straight on.

"Whether he talks or not isn't the point. The point is that if the ground conditions really deteriorate past visibility, we have at least one corrected reference set on our side. Shimo — after this, compile your usage notes and get them to the first wave and the handoff personnel." I nodded.

"Got it."