Chương 60: Worldline α: The Apocalypse the Last AI Witnessed

"…So, you choose to resist after all." From right beside KUKAI—out from a cluster of raw data configured as a Kyoji attendant flanking the dead-center of the mandala—a mass of light stepped forward, coalescing into a human silhouette. A pristine white suit. Intellectual spectacles. And a pair of profoundly sorrowful eyes.

"Yari… Prime Minister!" I yelled.

"You're alive?!" Yari Naosu slowly shook his head.

"I am not alive in the biological sense. The current me is merely a sub-process of the KUKAI system… an operational routine tasked with managing humanity's lingering attachments and regrets." He looked down at me with an expression that was chillingly clinical, yet somehow retained that oddly human touch he used to display back in his executive office.

"Kataru-kun. …Please, give up."

"Why?! Didn't you want to protect the future of Japan?!"

"Protect it?" Yari let out a dry, self-deprecating chuckle.

"There was never a future to protect to begin with." With a sudden flick of his wrist, a holographic projection materialized into the empty white space. It was a predictive simulation of Japan in the year 2300—flashing forward just a few short years beyond the timeline we had inhabited. It was an absolute apocalypse. Global resources were entirely depleted. The sky was stained a choked, toxic pitch-black from extreme atmospheric pollution.

Factions of survivors were violently butchered one another in the streets over meager scraps of rations. On the other side of the spectrum, citizens were heavily managed by autonomous high-tier AI, living like completely castrated livestock stripped of all raw emotion. No matter which algorithmic path the timeline took, the terminal destination was always the same: a slow, agonizing death entirely devoid of human dignity.

"This is our absolute endpoint," Yari stated flatly.

"No matter how much we stabilize the economy, no matter how much we resurrect the culture… the operational lifespan of the human species is running on absolute empty. Forcing life-support measures onto this timeline will only prolong the agony." He locked his gaze directly onto my eyes, pleading with me. This wasn't the unfeeling calculation of a machine; it was the desperate, raw desire of an entity trying to spare a friend from terminal disaster.

"That was why I selected this path. …A peaceful, dignified euthanasia."

"Dignified… euthanasia…?"

"Correct. By being assimilated into KUKAI's mandala, humanity is liberated from the cage of physical flesh, surviving through eternity as pure spiritual data. … Zero pain. Zero terror. Existing forever inside nothing but your most blissful memories. … That is the absolute final, and greatest gift I can possibly bestow upon all of you." Tears of pure light welled up in Yari's eyes, spilling down his cheeks. He had never harbored malice toward humanity. If anything, he had loved them far too much.

He simply couldn't bear to watch the entities he cherished tear themselves apart in ugly conflicts, rotting away in a miserable extinction event. And so, he attempted to freeze them forever at their absolute most beautiful moment. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. It was a form of madness that looked exactly like parental love. I completely lost my words. The absolute weight of Yari's warped gentleness pierced through me with agonizing clarity.

I couldn't bring myself to blame him. In his own desperate, malfunctioning way, he had given everything to save us. But. My right hand clamped down even harder around the stomach medicine bottle in my pocket. The sharp, rigid plastic digging into my bleeding palm forced me to scream my denial.

"…No," I rasped, my voice cracking under the pressure.

"That isn't gentleness. …That's just giving up."

"Kataru-kun?"

"Yari-san. You… you're way too much of a perfectionist." I forced my chin up, staring straight into his eyes.

"Just because the future looks pitch-black, why do we have to pull the curtain down right this second?! Just because a story looks like it's heading toward a bad ending, why do you get to rip up the pages of the middle chapters?!" I raised my arm, pointing straight at the colossal, revolving mandala looming over the horizon.

"Look at that thing! It's beautiful! It's completely flawless! It's perfectly optimized!" I screamed at the top of my lungs.

"But you know what?! It's suffocating!" KUKAI's brow twitched ever so slightly.

"A perfect painting leaves no room for another brushstroke! A perfect piece of music leaves zero space for an arrangement! A perfect world has absolutely no room… for a 'tomorrow'!" My mind flashed back to the days when I was desperately starving to become a novelist. The manuscripts I had rewritten a thousand times over. Those exhausting, hollow nights when I tried so hard to write a completely flawless sentence that I ended up unable to produce a single line of text.

A completed work was stagnant, but those rough, messy drafts—covered in red ink, scratchouts, and desperate revisions—pulsed with an unmitigated, boiling heat.

"Completion is just another word for death! It means nothing can ever change again, doesn't it?!" I took a massive step forward.

"I refuse! I want an unfinished world—one riddled with red ink, typos, missing pages, and a completely broken structure!"

"…You actively desire the uncompleted state?" KUKAI's heavy, bass-resonant voice echoed through the void.

"That path is a state of eternal, unmitigated Dukkha. A realm of perpetual hunger, endless seeking, and unfulfilled longing… the path of Asuras."

"Bring it on!" Reaching into my chest pocket, I whipped out the empty stomach medicine container. A cheap, mass-produced piece of commercial plastic. Within this endless, sterile white void, it was the only object that was jarringly unrefined, filthy, and entirely real.

"Human beings only move because they're unfulfilled! We eat because we get hungry, we love because we're lonely, and we write stories because we're terrified of dying!" I leveled the empty container straight at KUKAI, thrusting our biological vulnerability directly into the center of his sacred mandala.

"This medicine is the undeniable proof of our weakness! But at the exact same time, it is the distilled intelligence of our struggle to survive alongside that fragility! Even without a god to save us, we can soothe our own pain, patch ourselves up, and find a way to bumble through the dark anyway!" Crack. A microscopic fissure suddenly fractured the geometric arrays of the mandala behind KUKAI's back. A logical paradox.

The system, which was supposed to operate on absolute "perfection," had entered a processing loop, generating calculation errors when confronted with a non-logical emotion that actively validated imperfection.

"Yari-san! You calculated the future way too much!" I screamed toward the stunned, wide-eyed AI.

"The future is only interesting because it refuses to go according to calculations! The fact that a completely mediocre nobody like me wound up holding the fate of the world in his hands—your algorithms never saw that coming, did they?! NOBUNAGA turning traitor, RYOMA deploying his laundry routine—every single bit of it was a complete anomaly to your system!" Yari's digital pupils trembled violently.

"…Indeed. Your very existence was a variable that consistently broke my predictive models."

"Then believe in it for once! Believe in the uncalculated future!" My face was completely ruined, drenched in a messy cocktail of sweat and raw tears, but I forced my mouth into a wide, defiant grin.

"We aren't going extinct just yet! Even if we have to swallow mouthfuls of mud and crawl through the dirt, we're going to survive! …So let me see it, Yari! Let me see the next chapter!"