Nanomachines, Kid. (3)
With RielWiki on standby beyond the hologram screen and the pause function at my disposal, I kept the conversation going until, at last…
The core of the Grey Nightmare, who called herself Ash, decided to join our empire.
Return of the Grey Nightmare
The catastrophe that once drove an entire universe to ruin has, after long ages of anguish and self-reproach, finally chosen to enter the embrace of a great empire.
Of course, a little of your “persuasion” may have mixed into that anguish—but what of it?
Grey Nightmare, Ash joins the Holy Sevelian Empire.
Up to this point, the situation could only be called excellent. By the empire’s current standards, it meant an entire fleet’s worth of combat power was joining us free of charge.
Granted, compared to a proper regular fleet, the raw strength left a little to be desired.
“Minister, are you really sure it’s right to bring that nanomachine blob—I mean, Ash—into the empire?”
Even Riel, standing right beside me, was voicing doubts about my decision. And honestly, the reaction was only natural. No matter how long I had talked with Ash, no matter how carefully I had balanced our mutual interests and confirmed her goodwill toward us, the simple fact that she was a mass of nanomachines capable of dismantling people, equipment, and even warships in an instant and swallowing them whole was bound to leave a lingering sense of revulsion.
“Riel, you just don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“So that’s how it is… you really know nothing…”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m not telling you.”
There was no need for me to soothe every little bit of that unease. Petty rejection like that would dissolve on its own soon enough.
—“Wooooah!”
—“Massive energy readings from the planetary surface! Wait—this is… a gigantic battleship!”
—“C-could it be?!”
Because Ash herself had gathered every nanomachine scattered across the planet in order to come to the empire, then used them to form a shape convenient for travel and risen into space—all of it broadcast live on our screens.
“Whoa, Minister, did you seriously predict even this?”
At Riel’s words I gave a small nod and answered with full confidence this time.
“Of course. Though I didn’t expect it to be quite this huge.”
Just as I said, Ash’s scale far exceeded anything we had anticipated.
In the game she was only two or three times stronger than a late-game battleship… right?
Unlike the version I remembered, the real Ash was large enough that calling her a mobile satellite would not have been an exaggeration.
Still, if that had been the end of it, we could have managed a certain amount of understanding. So what if she was a little big? The Minister of Defense and the fleet admirals would have been whooping “Giant battleship! Mobile fortress!” and losing their minds with joy.
The real problem was that Ash, according to the lore, had spent no less than several hundred thousand years sealed away in that isolated universe. And if the game settings I remembered still held true, she had never left that universe even before the isolation.
So the moment Ash followed the research battleship out through the gate—
“Wooooooah!!! So small and cute! So amazing!!”
“Gyaaaaaah!!!”
—the black hole that served as the gate’s graviton anchor, the new constellations beyond the system revealed by gravitational lensing, and the human beings and space structures she had never seen outside a research vessel… the instant she beheld all of it, Ash went wild. She charged the orbital station that was also handling our communications relay and latched onto it, nearly causing a major disaster the second she arrived in our empire.
…And Ash’s string of incidents did not end there.
“That ship looks really weird, doesn’t it?”
“Ah—no!”
She gulped down a brand-new cruiser that had just finished construction and was being transferred to the fleet. Because of that, the 2nd Fleet’s cruiser squadrons, which had not received word in time, scrambled in emergency. Then, while passing another planet, she casually picked up a few artificial satellites out of curiosity and knocked out that world’s communications network.
“This is super interesting too! Back when I wasn’t ‘me’ yet, I’d never seen an orbital fortress like this!”
“Aaaaaah!!! She’s ramming the command center!!!”
“…”
Barely after arriving in the capital system of the Holy Sevelian Empire—the Quesada system—she kept her battleship form and slammed straight into the capital’s orbital defense command, beginning to erode it.
“Hello? So… Sevelian-ssi!”
“Aaaaaaaaah—”
“What do you like? I like metal the best!”
“Gyaaaaaaaaah!!!”
She restrained a few soldiers with tentacles or crystal growths and forced them into guerrilla interviews. In short, she dragged every kind of disaster in her wake.
Thanks to that, I—who had wanted to bring Ash into the empire—
“Minister Arto, how do you intend to take responsibility for the problems that gigantic nanomachine mass is causing right now!”
“Quite right. We must stop her from eroding the orbital defense command at once!”
“The planet Sevanar, whose satellite network partially collapsed not long ago, has sent a diplomatic cable demanding compensation for this incident.”
“…”
—was dragged into a high-intensity hearing by the parliament after they received reports of those spectacular disasters.
And the parliamentary hearing was not the end of it.
“Arto.”
“Yeah.”
“Is that thing really okay?”
“Probably?”
“…You do realize that is not something that should be coming out of your mouth right now, don’t you?”
“I know. That’s exactly why I’m sitting here in front of you like this, Artraia.”
In front of Artraia, who had set her mind on grilling me, I dropped into a full dogeza from the start and begged forgiveness. Because I had not had the foresight to go into hiding somewhere, I was being chewed out every single day as the one responsible for Ash’s rampage of incidents.
“Minister, did you actually foresee even this and steel yourself from the beginning?”
Meanwhile Riel kept tossing out oddly needling remarks from the side.
“Kyaa, as expected of the Minister! You’ve realized you must drink every last tear of the nanomachines and die!”
Of course, the moment she crossed the line I immediately brought the etiquette-injection rod down on her from inside my coat, so the stress did not pile up as much as one might think.
And roughly one day later—
“Hello! So, Your Majesty the Emperor of the Sevelian Empire and all the ministers!”
Empress Artraia and the high officials of the empire, myself included, finally beheld Ash with our own eyes. Some of those present had more than two eyes, of course, but there was no need to mention them specifically.
Yet the moment a proper, formal meeting was established, a faint dread began to stir inside me.
What if these people reject Ash?
In the game, as far as I remembered, there had been no rejection event or anything of the sort when Ash joined the empire… but that was only because the game system could not implement such things and simply glossed over them. In this world where real people existed, things sometimes diverged from the game.
Still, right up until Ash arrived I had thought we would just neatly incorporate her the way the game did and be done with it.
“Oh, this person’s face is weird too!”
“That’s not a face, it’s a respirator.”
“Wow.”
But the second she showed up, Ash kept doing strange things like mimicking the faces of Sevelians and even the alien officials who had entered as bureaucrats, so—
—murmur murmur—
“Somehow it feels a bit… off, doesn’t it?”
“Ahem.”
—the faces of the meeting participants were filled with an indescribable awkwardness.
No— if that had been all, it would have been fine.
“They said that existence is a mass of nanomachines… doesn’t that make her essentially no different from an abominable intelligence?”
“A fair point.”
There were even gazes that treated Ash the same way they had treated Alina last time—as an abominable intelligence, in other words an AI.
Fortunately those skeptical looks were thoroughly rejected by Minister Vermouth, who was also present and who staked her pride as a technician on the matter.
“We call them nano-‘machines,’ but if you look at it properly, they’re basically the same as us—building a brain and thinking and acting with it.”
“Is that so, Minister Vermouth?”
“Yes. When I scanned them, the nanomachines had tangled together and formed an actual brain.”
At Minister Vermouth’s words, the subtle, ambiguous gazes directed at Ash instantly shifted into something far more favorable right before my eyes.
“Ah, then we can call her our friend.”
“She was trapped for ages in a system that had nothing, right? Then of course she’d find new things fascinating.”
“Indeed, that makes perfect sense.”