Inside the Prava Divine Kingdom, in the towns and villages now ruled by <Paraiso>, the churches had been completely destroyed and cleared away.
The purpose was to leave a powerful impression that everything was now fully under control by eliminating the church as a symbol of authority.
And then, an additional measure was introduced.
Most churches had been built at the center of a town. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say the town had spread outward around the church.
In any case, the basic structure of the Prava Divine Kingdom was that a church stood in the center, and the town spread outward from there in a radial pattern.
Those churches had been reduced to empty lots, and even the rubble had been cleanly removed. Then <Paraiso>’s multi-legged heavy machines arrived and leveled the ground at an astonishing pace.
It had already been fairly flat land to begin with, but they smoothed it with absolute precision, compacted it, drove in piles, and laid down pure white tiles across the entire surface.
In every town and village, the former church sites were paved over in pure white tile within a single day and night.
At the center of that leveled ground, a pedestal had been prepared.
Beside that pedestal stood a doll-machine communicator guarded by the bipedal escort units <Primates> used for VIP protection.
At the sight of something so clearly different from the ordinary, the residents gradually began to gather. Normally, if they loitered too long, the sheriff units would urge them back to work, but on this day the sheriff units merely stood around the square. That alone told the residents that something special was about to begin.
And so, nearly everyone who was capable of moving gathered in the square.
At that moment, a rotorcraft approached the town. Its spinning blades scattered a loud BATTER-BATTER-BATTER of noise through the air, but by now the residents were used to that.
Again, something was coming down from the sky.
Thinking that, they fixed their attention on the rotorcraft.
The rotorcraft being used this time was an ultra-large transport model meant for carrying heavy loads. And sure enough, a massive structure was hanging beneath its belly.
When the rotorcraft arrived directly above the square, it slowly began lowering the huge structure it carried beneath it.
A deep hole had been opened in the pedestal, and that structure was set into place there.
What was installed at the center of the square was a gigantic black slab.
A monolith, in other words.
After the rotorcraft finished unloading its cargo and disappeared beyond the horizon—
the monolith emitted a faint glow, and words appeared across its surface.
“From this point on, one new passage will be added here once per day.”
“Compliance with these words is required.”
Those words were written in white letters across the black surface of the slab.
“If there is anything you wish to ask, I will answer.”
And then—
the doll-machine communicator, which had stood there without the slightest movement, spoke.
“If you have questions, I will answer them today. From tomorrow onward, pray aloud here in this square. It will not be possible to answer everything, but on the following day, this monolith will show the way.”
And so, within the Prava Divine Kingdom, a stone monument that would bring civilization had appeared.
◇◇◇◇
“So? What do you think?”
“Well, I do think it makes for an interesting spectacle.”
Since the other side was a religious state, this kind of presentation would probably be accepted surprisingly smoothly.
Instead of a monk delivering a sermon, the monolith would speak for them.
“It looks like it even has a scrolling function, too. Very considerate. Nobody has to worry about missing anything.”
“We will add one passage every day for all 380 days of the year. Someone will ❖ Nоvеl𝚒ght ❖ (Exclusive on Nоvеl𝚒ght) probably copy it all down. Having them compile their own scripture on their own is convenient too.”
Whether it was really convenient or not was another matter, but there was certainly a major benefit in no longer needing to dispatch doll-machine communicators to every town one by one.
The doll-machine communicator was too versatile a unit to waste on messenger duty alone. It was something they wanted to reserve for solving major problems.
Of course, if nobody ever showed up at all, the sense of reverence would start to fade.
<Ayame Zero> would probably handle that balance well enough.
Incidentally, the monolith’s power source was a nuclear battery. Since it could operate maintenance-free for decades or even centuries, it was well suited to this sort of use.
That said, the monolith itself would still require maintenance, so its total service life would naturally be shorter than that. Of course, with regular maintenance, that limitation would not apply.
“This thing has its own AI core too, right?”
“Yes-affirmative, Commander Ma’am. For the moment, it is at Yaakari Port. In the future, it will be relocated inland to a geologically stable location.”
The monolith and its core AI were integrated into the network grid and shared information with one another. Even if natural disasters or something similar caused a local disconnection, overall communications across the whole system would not be lost. By operating multiple core AIs at the same time, fault tolerance would also increase dramatically.
Domestic administration in the Prava Divine Kingdom would be managed by this monolith network. Without <Ringo> intervening directly, and with doll-machine communicator dispatches kept to a minimum, it would serve as a touchstone for the operational model of entrusting domestic governance to locally managed AI.
“I don’t think there’ll be any problem with operation itself, but predicting how much resistance we’ll get from the locals is the hard part.”
“Yes-affirmative, Commander Ma’am. We estimate that precisely because this country already has religion as its underlying framework, and because it is accustomed to accepting instructions from higher beings with little resistance, it possesses the foundation necessary to accept this.”
No human face appeared; instructions came from the monolith.
Certainly, it was dry and impersonal. And what sort of reaction humanity would show when placed in a society like that—they had no knowledge or experience to draw on. That was why this governing structure had been built in a half-experimental way.
In other words, they were collecting data.
“The Hall of Wisdom in the Aphrasian royal capital turned into something pretty interesting too.”
In the royal capital of the United Kingdom of Aphrasia, they had built the Hall of Wisdom. There, they had adopted a system in which instructions were delivered to the dukes by voice, but because they were also using doll-machine communicators in parallel, evaluations were getting split up, making it difficult to measure the results clearly.
That said, because they were reusing local forces for public-order maintenance, changing the system now would be difficult.
Vested interests were not something that could be eliminated overnight.
Of course, one possible solution was simply to crush everything flat, but at this point, it was far too late for that. Removing them all of a sudden without any major problem to justify it would be emotionally difficult for the residents to accept.
And when there truly was a problem, the doll-machine communicators had personally come down and crushed it, which had led to them being recognized as an institution of righteous enforcement.
“I honestly thought they’d be more wary. Or at least keep their distance more.”
“The doll-machine communicators are being accepted by the locals more smoothly than anticipated. At this point, it is safe to conclude that their position within the United Kingdom of Aphrasia has become unshakable.”
The unified currency circulating throughout the United Kingdom of Aphrasia, the fox-girl-branded daily goods, agricultural fertilizer, medicines.
Various tools as well—basically all of it was being supplied by <Paraiso>.
And because all of it was being sold at fair prices, naturally its popularity was only going to rise.
Of course, the labor provided in return was not being wasted either.
They had people working in farming, livestock raising, and Fuelstone mining. Some were also being employed in the manufacture of metal goods, woodworking, and porcelain production. Naturally, the performance of those products could not even begin to compare with <Paraiso>-made goods, but since they could not continue supplying everything forever, they were currently in the middle of devoting a certain amount of labor to education.
And then they would gather the know-how from all of this and feed it back as needed.
The United Kingdom of Aphrasia, and now the Prava Divine Kingdom as well, would become vast testing grounds for the sake of <The Tree>.
“The learning index is improving too, so it’s not bad. Hm... maybe external stimulation really is important after all.”
“Yes-affirmative, Commander Ma’am. In particular, the results indicate that for Brain Units, information gathering through use of the five senses is the most efficient.”
When they compared Brain Units using doll-machine communicator terminals with Brain Units that were not, there appeared to be a difference in the growth speed of the neural network.
<Ringo>’s assumption was that this was because the density of information being input was different, and because the feedback in response to output was far more varied.
“The environment for safely operating doll-machine communicators is now taking shape. We should be able to accelerate the education of the Brain Units even further.”
