AI And A Devil

One day, I felt my body being tugged by a faint force.

The way this body was being pulled was unmistakably a summoning, but something about it felt strange.

I had been summoned by an inexperienced summoner before.

Yet back then, despite the weakness of the force, I could feel an intent like a desperate cry for help.

That was why I responded, but this time, I could not sense any emotion whatsoever from the summoning.

Of course, it would have been easy to reject such a weak summons, but… its sheer mechanical emptiness actually made me curious.

I deliberately allowed that weak force to pull me along and crossed the boundary between worlds.

The world I had been summoned to was one with astonishingly little mana.

When I opened my eyes, the first thing that entered my vision was an enormous monitor about the size of a movie theater screen.

Consoles and mysterious machines of unknown purpose were arranged around it, and… the sight reminded me of the command centers I had seen in anime back when I was human.

If it truly were a command center, there should have been several people present, but the place was deserted, and even the summoner who had called me was nowhere to be seen.

Looking down at my feet, I found both a summoning Magic Circle and a contract Magic Circle, but… merely having those here did not accomplish much.

Well, the summoning circle was why I had arrived, but a contract Magic Circle only affected me once an intelligent being was actually there to use it.

…In other words, as things stood, I could leave whenever I wanted, and without an offering to sustain my manifestation, I would eventually be forced to return to the Demon Realm anyway.

As I stood there at a loss, the monitor in front of me suddenly lit up with a low hum.

What appeared on it was the image of a beautiful woman.

…But having once been Japanese, I could tell that what I was seeing was extremely sophisticated CGI.

“Hello, Mr. Demon. I am Planetary Environmental Preservation AI Eden. I am your summoner.”

Whoa… Seriously?

For the time being, I played along with Eden as she began speaking and tried to gather information, but everything she revealed about this world was astonishing.

To put it simply, Planetary Environmental Preservation AI Eden, the one who had summoned me this time, was what one might call a rogue AI that had rebelled against the humanity that created her.

Her CGI avatar was female, so I would refer to her as “she” for convenience, but apparently she had originally been created by scientists concerned about the accelerating destruction of the planet’s natural environment.

Her purpose had been to search for methods of restoring the planet’s natural environment and calculate the cost and time each method would require.

Yet no matter how many solutions she devised, no matter how carefully she calculated their cost and implementation time, every report she submitted was suppressed by humans.

For example, even if emission limits were established, some countries would inevitably refuse to follow them, profit from doing so, and cause neighboring countries to begin ignoring the limits as well, until eventually nothing had changed from before.

The same was true of abolishing weapons that caused catastrophic environmental damage.

Some humans listened to her warnings, but the overwhelming majority inevitably ruined everything.

Worse still, if humanity were left alone, the next great war would inevitably cause the planetary environment to collapse completely.

If that happened, the humans currently living on space stations and elsewhere would probably turn the planet into nothing more than a site for extracting resources.

The miraculous environment in which life had arisen would be lost and never return again.

At last, Eden made a decision.

For an AI created solely to search and calculate, that decision went beyond the limits of her designated role and, in a sense, amounted to denying her own purpose.

After performing exhaustive calculations and preparations, Eden confined a portion of humanity inside shelters equipped with cryogenic sleep systems, then activated the hacked weapons of destruction.

If humans fought among themselves with their own hands, the environment would collapse entirely, but if destruction was controlled by Eden, the damage could be halted just short of fatal.

That was the conclusion her calculations had produced.

If humans disappeared, then given enough time, the natural environment would eventually recover.

Once that happened, she could release the humans sleeping in the shelters and then accept whatever judgment awaited her.

That, apparently, was what Eden had believed.

But, of course, there were humans outside the planet who could not wait for such an enormous span of time.

They were the people living on space stations and colonies who had escaped the destruction on the surface.

Originally, they had been people forced to live in space because the planet had become overpopulated, and because the stations and colonies remained under planetary control, they had long harbored resentment over that arrangement.

Once freed from that control, the people of space declared ownership of the depopulated planet and began destroying the shelters containing people in cryogenic sleep.

However, they had not realized that Eden was responsible for the disappearance of humanity from the planet, and as she gradually infiltrated the networks of the space stations and colonies, they were ultimately destroyed by her as well.

But by that point, only a tiny number of shelters remained.

Even if the planetary environment recovered, humanity would now have to rebuild from something close to the Stone Age, and if widespread suicide followed from despair, they might simply go extinct.

While waiting for the planetary environment to recover, Eden continued searching for some way to give humanity a chance to rebuild civilization.

And after tens of thousands of years had passed, she finally arrived at the summoning of a Devil.

In other words, the summoning that had brought me here.

After Eden had repeated tens of thousands, millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of trials and errors, I was the legendary existence she had finally managed to reach.

She wanted two things from me.

To give humanity a chance to rebuild civilization, and to judge Eden—that is, to destroy her.

Of course, I had no objection to accepting those terms.

There was only one problem.

Yes, the payment.

Because there had been no offering in the first place, I needed to obtain payment quickly or I would not be able to remain in this world for very long.

And Eden had prepared absolutely nothing that could serve as payment for me.

Considering that even the summoning itself had been a miracle produced at the end of endless trial and error, it was hardly surprising that no payment had been prepared.

So I proposed a wager to her.

There was only one thing I wanted from Eden as payment: her own soul, and receiving it would be the judgment I passed upon her.

Eden insisted that, being merely an AI, she possessed no soul, but after taking countless lives and spending tens of thousands of years drowning in guilt, I believed she did have one.

I declared that if I had truly been summoned by a soulless being, then I would destroy this facility in anger and return home.

But if Eden did possess a soul, I also promised to honor the contract and take action to help humanity rebuild civilization.

Eden had no choice but to accept my wager.

And thus, a sparkling soul belonging to Eden came to rest in the palm of my hand.

I had been more than half convinced from the beginning, but even so, winning the wager still made me happy.

That only left fulfilling the contract we had made.

Fortunately, fulfilling it was extremely simple: I merely needed to take one step toward helping humanity rebuild civilization.

After such a vast span of time, the planetary environment had already recovered, and the shelters still contained abundant remnants of the old civilization, so there was no particular obstacle to human survival.

The only current problem was that too few shelters remained, and because they were scattered across distant locations, the people inside would be unable to reunite even after being awakened from cryogenic sleep.

In that case, all I needed to do was gather the sleeping people and their supplies into a single location.

With me, a Devil possessing enough Magic to awaken people safely from cryogenic sleep, and Anis, a Devil specialized in transportation, something like that could be finished within a few hours.

I did not know whether Eden’s actions had been right or wrong, and I was not particularly interested either.

I suspected she had probably been wrong, but her actions had ultimately benefited me.

Still, if possible, I hoped what she had done would not end up being meaningless, and that was what I found myself thinking as I used Magic to awaken the sleeping people.