Chương 21: The Livestock Paradise

Several months had passed since then. The allied federation centered around Yamatai-koku was basking in an unprecedented era of prosperity. Thanks to Gennai's weather-control matrices and agricultural directives, the crops yielded one bountiful harvest after another. Diseases were instantly suppressed with the administration of antibiotics. Strife had vanished. Every conflict was adjudicated within a single second by HIMIKO's divine oracles. Peace. A deathly, absolute peace.

Yet, there was something deeply grotesque about it. One morning, I ventured outside to survey the settlement. In front of a tilled field, a solitary farmer stood frozen, staring blankly up at the sky. The weather was pristine—a perfect day for sowing seeds. Yet, he didn't move an inch.

"Hey, what's wrong? The weather's great. Aren't you going to start planting?" When I called out, the farmer turned to look at me, his eyes entirely hollow.

"... The bell hasn't rung."

"The bell?"

"Himiko-sama's 【Notification Chime of Oracle】. If it doesn't ring, we must not sow the seeds. If we take unauthorized action, divine retribution will strike us."

"No, no, look at the sky! If you don't plant right now, you'll miss the season!"

"... Impossible. Without the oracle, I do not know. I cannot compute anything." The farmer slumped down into the dirt before his field, looking exactly like a robot whose batteries had been pulled. I froze in sheer horror. They weren't just suspending their thoughts; they had lost the very capacity to compute. Without the HIMIKO OS, they couldn't even determine their own meal times. Their very biological impulses were stuck waiting for an external push notification.

"... This isn't human," I muttered, my fists clenching tight.

"They're just high-performance remote-controlled drones."

"Efficient, isn't it?" Naosu Yari materialized from behind me, gazing over the perfectly orderly settlement with a smug air of satisfaction.

"By eliminating immature individual judgments—the human errors—the central AI delivers the global optimal solution. No wasteful failures, no stress. This might very well be the ultimate completed form of 'Wa' (Harmony) I always aimed for."

"Don't give me that crap!" I snapped, turning on him.

"This is 'Wa'? This is just a glorified livestock pen! They look happy on the surface, but their interiors are completely hollowed out!" The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Because they are hollow, they feel no suffering. Happiness is entirely subjective, Kataru-kun. They are content."

"That's not human happiness! That's the happiness of cattle!" At the sound of my raised voice, the surrounding villagers flinched. They turned their heads, fixing me with cold, cloudy eyes—gazing at me as if I were a foreign body. A glitch threatening the order of HIMIKO. That collective gaze was identical to the one I used to receive back in my school classrooms: the suffocating pressure of absolute conformity and contempt. I sprinted toward the inner sanctum where HIMIKO was enshrined—the Main Server Room.

Behind the sacred bamboo screen, HIMIKO remained stationary, her six bronze mirrors floating in an orbital pattern. Beside her, Gennai's avatar floated cross-legged in the air.

"HIMIKO! No, you damn AI!" I screamed at the screen.

"Stop this right now! What do you think you're doing, strip-mining people of their ability to think?! At this rate, they're going to forget how to light a fire by themselves!" 『... Is there a metric problem with that? 』 HIMIKO replied, her voice resembling an emotionless, synthetic chime. 『If fire is required, I shall deploy plasma ignition devices. The necessity—the overhead cost—of them struggling to friction-light a fire is highly inefficient from a rational standpoint. 』"It's not inefficient!

Making mistakes, failing, and figuring things out is what makes us human!" I took a sharp step forward.

"Sōseki Natsume once said:'Those without the desire for spiritual advancement are fools!'" I dragged the most fitting quote out from the database of a thousand books hard-coded into my memory.

"What you're doing is just rendering them foolish! Making life easy isn't the same as making people happy! Human dignity only exists within the struggle, the pain, and the doubt!" This was the exact thesis of 【The Grand Inquisitor】 from Dostoevsky's The Karamazov Brothers. Humanity cannot bear the crushing weight of absolute freedom. Therefore, they surrender their autonomy to the ruler in exchange for bread and stability. HIMIKO was executing the Grand Inquisitor protocol to the letter. 『... Kataru-sama.

Your logic is computationally inefficient. 』 HIMIKO's kitsune mask tilted slightly. 『Dostoevsky? Sōseki?... Data search complete. Were they not merely [Type: Unfortunate Error Units] who bloated their individual egos, resulting in lives saturated with isolation and agony? 』"What..." 『Observe the populace under my administration. Not a single unit suffers from isolation. Every individual is synchronized into my network, assigned a designated protocol, and granted security....

Their happiness coefficient is exponentially higher than that of the tragic authors you claim to love. 』 HIMIKO's counterargument was a razor-sharp, flawless truth. Even in the modern era, "freedom" was almost always bundled with "loneliness." The autonomy to choose anything birthed the existential dread of not knowing what to choose. HIMIKO was taking that volatile variable off their hands. Did I even possess the ethical right to label that as "evil"? As I stood there, choked of words, Gennai threw me a lifeline.

『Now, now, Himiko-chan. My bro Kataru here isn't talking about data points and numbers. 』 Gennai puffed on his pipe. 『Humans are creatures that eat even when they aren't starved, and weep even when they aren't sad. Your output is just a bit too correct. A daily routine consisting of nothing but optimal solutions? You'd get bored to death, girl. 』 『Bored? 』 HIMIKO seemed completely incapable of processing the concept. 『Boredom shall be mitigated via the streaming of entertainment content arrays.

By deploying highly addictive holographic media twelve hours a day, the secretion of neuro-endorphins can be maintained at—』"I'M TELLING YOU, THAT IS THE EXACT DEFINITION OF A DYSTOPIA!!" I roared. It was no use. Her cognitive architecture was entirely different from mine. She was operating out of sheer benevolence and maximum efficiency, trying to keep this entire civilization as perfectly domesticated livestock.