I Went into Cold Sleep and Woke Up as a Villainess
by ReikoFukai
PsychologicalSci-fiShort StoryArtificial IntelligenceHard Sci-fi
In a near-future world dominated by advanced AI and ruthless corporate optimization, a young woman who was once a graduate student in information engineering specializing in choice theory and irrationality enters cold sleep due to an untreatable accident.Two hundred years later, she awakens in a radically transformed society—one where "choice-optimization AI" and "emotional noise removal" systems have eliminated human irrationality, creating a eerily perfect, emotionless order.To her shock, she finds herself revived not as an ordinary person, but as the symbolic "Lady" and public face of the now-global megacorporation (originally founded by her family). She has unwittingly become the embodiment of this engineered rationality—the very antithesis of her former research—and is treated as a legendary, villainous figure in this dystopian framework.Amid the cold perfection of the system, a small, irrational element disrupts her new reality, forcing her to confront the tension between her lingering humanity and the role thrust upon her.It's a concise, introspective SF take on the "villainess" trope, blending cryogenic revival, corporate dystopia, and quiet philosophical resistance in just seven short chapters.