Mentioned Characters: Yukari, Ran, Chen

"In the beginning, the youkai imagined a shikigami. And she saw that it was good." Lady Yukari Yakumo has many shikigami at her disposal, but none can compare to Lady Ran. She's the strongest and, without a doubt, the coolest shikigami there is. Due to reasons that won't be explained, this text was written by Chen. Thanks for reading!

Artificial Intelligence The Japanese symbol for Lady Ran's name can also be read "ai." You know, like AI. I wonder if Lady Yukari chose it on purpose. What do you think? Hang on, where does MY name come from? ...Anyway, is artificial intelligence a big thing in your world? Maybe it hasn't shown up yet. Or maybe it already came and went. I guess it depends on when you're reading this. Creating intelligence from scratch sounds super hard. It seems way easier to imitate intelligence that already exists. On a related note, if you copy what intelligent people say, you can probably sound smart yourself. With the right set of phrases, anyone can come across as a genius. I've been taking notes myself, actually.

Brain-Machine Interface Basically, a system that lets you send thoughts directly to machines. And it goes both ways―the machines can send their thoughts back. That means multiple thinking beings, aka intelligences, could use these interfaces to communicate. Once computers and machines are connected, they can synchronize perfectly, right? They start acting like one unified entity. No, they ARE one unified entity. So if humans were networked together through a brain-machine interface, wouldn't that mean they could function as one massive super-being? Scary, huh?

Mind Uploading At some point, the body just starts to feel like dead weight. When that happens, it's better to ditch it altogether and transfer your consciousness to a machine. If you could perfectly map out the molecular structure of your brain, you wouldn't just be making a copy of your mind―you'd unlock the ability to recreate it whenever you wanted. You could make as many versions of yourself as you like. A past you and a future you could exist simultaneously. But why stop there? If you took enough detailed snapshots, you could line up every single moment of your life and recreate all those versions of yourself at once. ...Wait, doesn't that sound familiar? And hang on. If you abandon your body and exist as pure consciousness, wouldn't that make you a youkai?

The Boundary Between Beast and God After God created all the beasts, he created humans. Humans, in turn, created machines. When will machines finally be deemed "worthy" by their creators? When will humans look at them as their own children―something to love, something to entrust the future to? Shikigami watch humanity closely. As the embodiment of a formula that seeks intelligence, they study the circuits that create it.