Compared to the main control room in the Lower Shaft, this room was quite small. The control console was a simplified version, too, and the desks and chairs here were cheap.
Higa and Rinko stood at the desk rather than using the chairs. They set up the laptop on the desk, accompanied by the frightening Ichiemon.
Once she was certain the robot was on standby and wouldn’t make any sudden moves, Asuna approached the two adults. In college, they’d been members of the same seminar—along with Akihiko Kayaba and Nobuyuki Sugou, in fact—and they were debating the project in the rapid-fire informal conversation of old friends.
“I think the bottleneck’s in the balancer’s processing. Don’t you have the budget for faster chips?”
“We’re at maximum capacity if you consider cooling and battery usage. Our only option is to pick up slack by tuning the EAP actuators…”
“But those polymer muscles are so last-generation. Use CNT and it’ll lighten right up.”
“N-now, that’s a surefire way to kill our budget…but we do have enough for one unit, I suppose…”
“Still haven’t gotten over your need to skimp on materials, huh?” Rinko said, shaking her head. She noticed Asuna standing there and ducked her head guiltily. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Asuna. I didn’t mean to be so noisy.”
“Actually, I think Kirito likes it when things are lively,” she replied with a grin, then looked at the robot. From what she could understand of their conversation, the actuators moving its body were artificial muscles made of organic materials. It was cutting-edge technology, for sure, but seemed unrelated to Rath’s main work in developing AI.
Higa seemed to sense her skepticism. He leaned back against the table and said, “The old guy wanted us to make this, too.”
“Uh…Mr. Kikuoka does? But why…?”
“Well, I’m not sure how serious he is about it.” Rinko sighed. “But if we’re going to bring the fluctlights from the Underworld back here, they’ll need a body to move around in, right?”
“Then…then this robot is meant to house an AI?”
“That seems to be the plan.”
“Yep, exactly.”
Rinko and Higa answered the last one together. Asuna gave Ichiemon another piercing examination. The overall form was human, yes, but the frame was too blocky, the joints jutting out, and no amount of silicone rubber was going to hide that and make it look like a person.
“…No disrespect to Ichiemon, but…won’t the AIs be shocked if they have to live in a body like this…?”
At the very least, Asuna and Kazuto’s top-down AI “daughter,” Yui, would absolutely refuse to inhabit such a thing, she suspected.
Higa waved frantically. “Oh, no, no, we wouldn’t put them in this. Ichiemon’s just a prototype for data collection. His processor’s using old architecture, which is why he’s so chunky. We have a second unit for testing with onboard AI, and that one’s much more advanced.”
“Second unit…And would that one’s name be…?”
“Niemon,” he answered matter-of-factly.
“Ah…for ‘two.’ I should have figured,” she said, shaking her head. “So what is it that makes the onboard-AI prototype more advanced?”
“Well, its sensors and balancers are way, way more effective at their job…or so we hope,” Rinko answered for Higa. She stepped sideways and, for some reason, pulled her feet together and balanced on tiptoe. Then she spread her arms a bit and held that position, wavering slightly.
“Even when we human beings are standing still, our entire bodies are working to fine-tune our balance—almost entirely unconsciously, in fact. Even right now, as I’m struggling not to fall over, I’m not thinking, ‘I’m leaning this far to the right, so I need to straighten my right leg more than my left.’ My brain—my fluctlight—is controlling my muscles and bones with its own autobalancing function.”
She dropped her sneaker heels back to the floor and grinned. “Ichiemon has servos that re-create that autobalancing function through mechanical and electronic means. But like you saw when he was slowly going up and down the stairs, it takes a huge number of sensors and balancers, a high-powered CPU, batteries, and cooling systems, plus a frame strong enough to support all those things. That’s why we can’t make Ichiemon any smarter than he already is.”
“Even this is way more human than we could get a decade ago.” Higa smirked.
“Meaning…if its brain functions aren’t handled by an old CPU but an artificial fluctlight, it should have the same balancing ability that any human being does?” Asuna asked.
“Yep! That’s the idea. That way we can shrink the servos to a fraction of the size, make the frame lighter, the actuators smaller, and get it far closer to the actual human body…we hope. It’s still a bit of a pipe dream. Like I said, Niemon is much more human—well, the silhouette is, anyway.”
“Well, if you’re that proud of it, show us alr—” Rinko started to say, then stopped herself. She frowned, deep in thought, then said in a much lower voice, “Higa…Niemon can’t walk around autonomously yet, can it?”
“Huh? Of course not. It’s got the CPU in there, but the actual control program’s just an empty shell. Even if you loaded Ichiemon’s program, the difference with Niemon’s sensory systems would make it fall over by the third step, I bet.”
“…Oh…”
Rinko considered this, then took a deep breath and turned to Asuna to change the topic. “Have you had breakfast yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Then let’s go to the mess hall. Higa’s going to eat here with Ichiemon.”
Asuna thought that was a joke, but Higa pulled an energy bar out of his shorts pocket and waved them off with a “Take your time.” Asuna shook her head in equal parts exasperation and wonder, then followed Rinko.
Before she left, she looked at the STL room and mouthed the words I’ll be back.
In the hallway leading away from Subcon, someone was approaching from the elevator. It was two men, in fact, both wearing lab coats over T-shirts. They were probably more of Rath’s employees, of which there were supposedly at least a dozen, but Asuna didn’t know their names yet. They probably still assumed that she was Rinko’s assistant, the way she had been disguised when she’d snuck aboard.
She bowed to them after Rinko, and as the two men passed, she followed them out of the corner of her eye. She didn’t recognize the profile of the man with the scruffy whiskers and the ponytail. But something itched in the back of her mind. It was that sense of danger that, if back in Aincrad, would at least have her hand on the hilt of her rapier, if not drawing it entirely…
“What is it, Asuna?” Rinko asked quietly, and she realized that she had stopped still. The men continued down the hall, flip-flops slapping against the floor as they made their way to Subcon.
“…No. It’s nothing.”
They continued walking, Asuna attempting to pin down the source of that strange sensation all the while. But after she exhausted the possibilities, it began to fade away and eventually vanished.
CHAPTER SIX
PRISONERS AND KNIGHTS, MAY 380 HE
1
Even now, there were times I thought back to when I was held prisoner in Aincrad.
Back then, especially that first year of the game of death, every single day lasted forever. Whenever I was outside of town, I had to watch my back at all times for monster (and occasionally player) attacks, and leveling at maximum efficiency required some truly grueling daily schedules.
I cut down my sleeping time as far as I could without sacrificing concentration, and I dedicated even the scant time I had for eating to memorizing data I bought from info brokers. By the later stages of the game, I was the black sheep of the advancement group, a guy who could spend an entire day taking a nap, but I never thought of myself as simply wasting my time. It felt like the fourteen years before SAO and the two years in Aincrad occupied an equal amount of time in my mind.
Compare that to this
…
The days since coming to this mysterious Underworld seemed to fly by. I wasn’t letting them slip past out of laziness—not at all. If anything, the two years from leaving Rulid to joining the Zakkaria garrison to being a student at the Swordcraft Academy in Centoria were a time of constant activity. Perhaps even busier than my time in SAO. And yet when I thought back on them, it felt as though they’d passed in a blink.
Perhaps the reason for that was the lack of danger of my life—their concept of HP—running down to zero. Or perhaps the reason was that compared to real life, the passage of time here was vastly accelerated.
When I took on a job for the mysterious tech company Rath, they explained that the maximum FLA (fluctlight acceleration) of the STL was three times that of normal time. But that was probably—no, definitely—false. Based on a number of data, I estimated that my current FLA ratio was closer to a thousand to one. If true, then the two years I’d spent in this simulation had passed in just eighteen hours in the real world. Surely the lack of mortal danger and the knowledge that all of this was passing in the blink of a (real-world) eye were making the days feel shorter.
But…no.
Perhaps there was another reason.
It was because my life here…especially at the Swordcraft Academy, with Eugeo, Sortiliena, Ronie, and Tiese, had been so enjoyable. Even though what brought me to the school to polish my skills was to get out of this place as soon as possible. Perhaps my secret desire for this enjoyment to last was making the time pass quicker.
If so, that was a betrayal. A betrayal of Asuna, Sugu, Sinon, and the others, all waiting and worrying about me in the real world.
Perhaps this was my punishment for that betrayal. My time at the academy ended in a bloody catastrophe and got me locked down beneath the earth, where no ray of sunshine could penetrate…
I stopped reflecting and sat up, causing the steel chain locked around my right wrist to clink. A few moments later, I heard a dull whisper from the darkness nearby.
“…You awake, Kirito?”
“Yeah…have been for a while. Sorry, did that wake you?” I whispered back, so as not to attract the attention of the jailer. I heard a dry, exhaled chuckle.
“Of course I can’t sleep. I’m normal—not like someone else who started snoring away from the moment we got locked in here.”
“That’s the second secret to the Aincrad style: Sleep when you get the chance,” I improvised, then glanced around us.
We were surrounded by deep darkness, with the only light coming from the jailer’s station down the hall on the other side of the steel bars. If I squinted, I could just make out the silhouette of Eugeo on the adjacent bed.
I’d mastered the elementary-level sacred art of sparking a light on the end of a stick long ago, of course, but this prison was thorough enough to block any kind of spellcasting inside it.
I looked in the direction of Eugeo’s face, though I couldn’t make out his expression, and, after mulling it over, asked, “Well…feeling a bit calmer now?”
My internal clock told me it was about three in the morning. If we were locked in this basement prison at midday yesterday, that meant only thirty-five hours or so had passed since the incident of two nights before. Eugeo defied the Taboo Index to attack Humbert Zizek with his Blue Rose Sword, then witnessed Raios Antinous lose his mind and die—an almost incalculable amount of shock and trauma for him to undergo.
After a long silence, an even softer voice responded, “It feels like…all this has been a dream…That I turned my sword on Humbert…and that Raios ended up like that…”
“…Don’t think too hard about it. You need to focus on what comes after this instead.”
It was the best I could come up with. I wished I could rub his back to reassure him, but the chains kept me from reaching the other bed. After a few moments of watching his outline closely, I heard him whimper, “Got it. I’ll be all right.”
I was the one who had severed Raios Antinous’s wrists, not Eugeo. The wounds themselves shouldn’t have been fatal if treated promptly and properly, but I suspected that he got stuck in an infinite mental loop trying to assign priority between his own life and the Taboo Index, which caused his fluctlight to collapse.
I did feel guilt at causing the death of an Underworldian, of course. But already, two years ago, I’d killed two goblins in the cave north of Rulid to save Selka, the sister in training. They had fluctlights just like Raios did, so it would almost be an insult to that goblin captain’s memory if I fell to pieces over killing Raios, who was far weaker than them.
But even then, something sat wrong with me.
My running suspicion was that Rath and Seijirou Kikuoka, the people operating the Underworld, were attempting to create a true artificial intelligence.
The artificial fluctlights here already had emotions and intelligence on par with real human beings. If their one flaw was absolute, blind obedience to the law, then Eugeo had crossed that wall by drawing his Blue Rose Sword and striking Humbert down to save Tiese and Ronie. In other words, he’d completed his final breakthrough and evolved into true artificial intelligence.
And yet, thirty-five hours of internal time later, the world showed no signs of shutting down. Either the acceleration rate was so high that Rath still hadn’t noticed the change or there was some kind of horrible accident going on that I couldn’t even imagine…
“What comes…after this,” Eugeo repeated from the other bed. I set aside my concerns and took my eyes off the ceiling to look at him again. In the darkness, his familiar silhouette bobbed and continued, “You’re right, Kirito. We’ve got to get out of this prison and find out what happened to Alice…”
I was relieved that my partner seemed to be recovering from his shock, but something very important in his statement stuck with me. He’d said, “Get out of this prison” like it was just that simple. To him, this prison—a symbol of the Axiom Church’s power if there ever was one, the place we would remain until we received God’s forgiveness—was less important than Alice. The recent events had indeed prompted a major change in the way his mind worked.
But I didn’t have time to delve into that now. Soon the sun would rise, and some inquisitor or executioner would come drag us out. Like Eugeo said, we could consider deeper matters once we had escaped.
“Yeah…I’m sure there must be a way to get out.”
But only if it’s your typical RPG locked-in-a-jail event, where there’s always a means of escape.
I brushed the chains holding me in place. They were cold and almost unbearably tough metal. They were welded to a ring of the same material that was locked around my wrist, which in turn was connected to a similar ring embedded in the wall. It was quite clear that no amount of pulling would break any part of the binding apparatus.
Yesterday morning, Eugeo and I had finally crossed the wall into the Axiom Church’s Central Cathedral, our ultimate goal ever since leaving the very northern tip of the world. We hadn’t planned on doing it by dangling from the legs of a dragon, however.
We had barely had any time to admire the chalk-white tower that stretched up into the clouds before they sent us marching down a deep spiral staircase behind the spire, and at last we reached this underground prison and were handed over to its fearsome jailer.
Alice Synthesis Thirty had finished her duty and left without a word. After that, the beastly, burly jailer with a metal mask like a kettle slowly but surely chained us here in this cell.
For food that night, we got one meal of hard, dried bread and a skin of lukewarm water, tossed through the bars. Compared to this, even the treatment of the orange players in the jail at Blackiron Palace in Aincrad was like a suite at a luxury hotel.
We’d tried and failed at every method of freedom yesterday: pulling on the chains, gnawing, sacred arts. If we had the Blue Rose Sword or my black one, we could cut through them like butter, but sadly, the weapons that the girls tore their palms bloody to bring to us had been taken wh
o-knew-where by Alice. Ronie’s homemade lunch thankfully escaped confiscation, but it was now long gone.
In short, we just “needed a way out.” However, we’d tried and failed at every conceivable option so far.
“I wonder…if Alice was chained up down here, too…” Eugeo mumbled, sitting on the bed of metal frame and rags.
“Yeah…dunno,” I said, which was not much of an answer. If Alice Zuberg, Eugeo’s childhood friend and Selka’s sister, had undergone the same treatment, that meant she’d been locked in this horrible place alone by that iron-masked jailer at the tender age of eleven. It was hard to imagine a more terrifying experience.
Eventually she would have been summoned to make a confession, then sentenced—and then what…?
“Say, Eugeo. Stop me if I’m off, but…are you absolutely certain that this Alice Synthesis Thirty is the same person as the Alice you’re looking for?” I asked hesitantly.
After a few seconds, a pained response came: “That voice…her golden hair and blue eyes…I’d never forget them. That was Alice. But…otherwise, she seemed like a totally different person…”
“For being old friends, she sure smashed you pretty good. So perhaps…her memories are being controlled in some fashion…or her thoughts limited, even…?”
“But there were no sacred arts like that listed in the textbook.”
“But the fancy bishops of the Church can manipulate life itself, right? Surely they’ve got some means to mess around with memories.”
And in fact, the Soul Translator I was using to dive into the Underworld could do just such a thing. If they could manipulate the memory of a biological brain, surely it would be even easier and more effective on an artificial fluctlight saved on its own medium.
“But,” I continued, “if that knight is the real Alice, then what was that thing two years ago, in the cave north of Rulid…?”
“Right…you mentioned that, when you were healing me with Selka, you heard a voice that sounded like Alice’s…”
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