Alicization Running

by Reki Kawahara

  “Then what if you set the level of civilization in the sim far back in the past? In a time before science and philosophy, when they all lived and died in remote little areas…Wouldn’t that still work in terms of raising your soul archetypes?”

  “Yes. It’s quite a significant detour, but we do have plenty of time…within the STL, that is. At any rate, as Dr. Koujiro just indicated, we tried raising our first-generation AIs within a very limited space. More specifically, a sixteenth-century Japanese village. But…”

  Kikuoka paused. He shrugged again, and Higa took over the explanation.

  “It turns out it’s still not as easy as we hoped. After all, we have barely any idea of the customs and social construction of that time. When we realized just how much information was necessary to create even a single house within the simulation, we went back to the drawing board…and then we figured it out. We didn’t need to model the real world at all. If we wanted a limited space, the ability to dictate our own customs, and a worldview that would allow us to explain away any potential issues as ‘magic’—well, there are already plenty of those. The networks that Kirigaya and Miss Yuuki are already familiar with.”

  “VRMMO worlds…” Asuna gasped.

  Higa snapped his fingers. “I’ve done my fair share of time in them as well, so I figured out how well it would work for us pretty quickly. And the best part is, there’s already this perfect game-creation tool package out there that somebody put together, totally free for anyone to use.”

  “…!”

  Rinko instantly recognized that Higa was talking about The Seed…a compact version of the Cardinal system that Kayaba had created and Kazuto Kirigaya had shared with the net. She gasped—and recognized that neither Higa nor Kikuoka seemed aware of the program’s birth.

  Immediately, she decided to keep that under wraps and casually brushed her fingers on Asuna’s shoulder. Asuna got the message and said nothing.

  Higa failed to notice that anything was amiss and continued, “Creating a virtual space in the STL doesn’t actually require 3-D data, but when you monitor the process externally, you only have raw data to look at, and that’s no fun. So we tried downloading this Seed package, as it’s called, and slapped together a little village using the editor program, then converted it to mnemonic visuals for the STL.”

  “Ah…Meaning it’s a dual-layer world? There’s a VR world made of ordinary data on the server below, while the STL mainframe above it converts that into its own VR format, with the two sides being mutually converted in real time?”

  Higa confirmed Rinko’s suspicion, so she continued, “Then…could you dive into the lower server with just an AmuSphere, rather than having to go through the STL?”

  “Er, well…theoretically, it’s possible. But you’d have to lower the operating speed down to times-1…and I doubt the mnemonic and polygonal data would be perfectly in sync…” Higa said, trailing off into mumbles.

  Kikuoka rubbed his hands together and said, “At any rate, after all this testing, we finally had our little sandbox to work with.”

  There was a hint of nostalgia in his eyes, as if he was reminiscing on the distant past. “In that first village, we had sixteen soul archetypes making up two farming families…We managed to raise those AI babies up to the age of eighteen.”

  “H-hang on. Raised? Who raised them? Traditional AIs?”

  “We looked into that, but, as high-functioning as The Seed’s NPC AI is, it’s not advanced enough to raise children. We had people act as parents for the first generation. Two men and two women on staff spent eighteen years in the STL acting as the farmer and wife of the two farms. While their memories within the system were ultimately blocked out at the end, it required an incredible amount of patience during the test. There’s no bonus big enough to repay them for that service.”

  “I don’t know, it sounded like they enjoyed it,” Higa commented. Rinko just stared at them having a casual conversation about this. Finally, her lips sounded out the words.

  “Eighteen…years…? From what I understand, the Soul Translator is capable of accelerating subjective time…but how long did that take in the real world?”

  “Just about a week,” Higa answered. Again, she was stunned. Eighteen years would be 940 weeks. That meant the STL was capable of accelerating time to the point where one real second would last a thousand in the simulation.

  “And…and the human brain is capable of running at a thousand times speed without issues?”

  “Remember, the STL doesn’t access the biological brain; it’s the field of photons that makes up our consciousness. The biological process of electrical signals causing neurons to release neurotransmitters can be completely cut out of the picture. In other words, in theoretical terms, we can accelerate the mental clock however much we want without damaging the structure of the brain at all.”

  “So there’s no limit…?”

  Rinko had a basic familiarity with the Soul Translator’s fluctlight acceleration (FLA) feature, thanks to the materials she had received before the trip, but finding out the actual hard numbers it was capable of reaching left her speechless. She had thought the STL’s ability to copy the human soul was its biggest accomplishment, but this time-speeding revelation was just as huge. This meant that the efficiency of any process in the virtual space was essentially unlimited.

  “But, since we don’t know what kind of undiscovered issues might be lurking out there, we’ve capped the machine at times-1500 for now,” Higa said. His withdrawn expression dashed cold water on her stunned mind.

  “Issues?”

  “Well, some have suggested that unrelated to the biological structure of the brain, the soul itself might have a fixed life span, too…”

  Higa noticed her confusion and glanced back at Kikuoka, seeking guidance as to how far to proceed. The military officer looked briefly like the caramel he was sucking on had gone nasty and bitter.

  He explained, “Well, it’s only in the realm of theory for now. Let’s say that the quantum computers that we call fluctlights have a limit on their information storage space, and crossing that limit causes the structure to degrade. We can’t actually test this hypothesis, so we can’t be sure it’s accurate—we just set an upper limit on the FLA amplification in the interest of safety.”

  “…Meaning that in physical time, it’s less than a week, but after spending decades inside your mind, the soul degrades accordingly? Then what’s the point of the acceleration? Is there no way to avoid that phenomenon?” Rinko asked, reverting to researcher mode for a minute.

  This time, it was Higa who looked sour. “Er, well, there is a way, in theory…or more like in imagination. If we created a device like a portable STL to be worn at all times and used that to save to external memory while in acceleration, it wouldn’t use up the capacity of the original fluctlight. But at our present state of technology, it’s impossible to get the STL that small, and even if we could, it creates another major issue: When you remove that portable STL, you lose your accelerated memories, because they’re all stored there instead.”

  “…This isn’t imagination. It’s outright science fiction. Overclocking brains, non-volatile memory that can be attached and removed…I wish I’d had this tech when I was a grad student,” Rinko muttered, shaking her head. She wanted to get back to the main topic. “At any rate, it sounds like there’s no way for you to avoid pressure on fluctlight capacity at present. Which means…Hang on. Mr. Kikuoka, you said that staff members spent eighteen years in the STL to raise soul archetypes. What happens to their fluctlights? Doesn’t that mean their mental abilities will start to degrade eighteen years earlier than expected in the future?”

  “No, no, that…shouldn’t happen.”

  She glared at Kikuoka when he said the word shouldn’t, but he just ignored her in his typically aloof way.

  “Based on the total size of the fluctlight and the rate at which it fills, we calculate that the life span of the soul—if you want to cal
l it that—is about one hundred and fifty years. That means that, assuming perfect health and good enough luck to avoid any neurological maladies, one’s mental abilities can last at maximum until age one hundred and fifty. Naturally, none of us will actually live that long. Therefore, even with a healthy safety margin, we estimate that a good thirty years can be spent in the STL without adverse effect.”

  “Assuming the next century doesn’t see some revolutionary new life-prolonging methods,” Rinko said sarcastically.

  Unperturbed, Kikuoka continued, “Even if that comes to be, regular old people like us will not be the beneficiaries of its gift. Of course, that might ultimately hold true with the STL, as well…But at any rate, let’s take the life span of the soul for granted and continue on. Thanks to the devoted efforts of our four staff members, we raised sixteen youngsters, whom we call ‘artificial fluctlights’ for convenience. The results were very satisfactory. They learned language (Japanese, of course), basic mathematics, and other critical-thinking skills to a level that allowed them to survive in the virtual world we’ve built. They were great kids. They listened to their parents, drew water in the mornings, chopped wood, tilled fields…And they displayed individual differences. Some were calm and withdrawn, others a bit rowdier, but they were all essentially obedient and good-natured.”

  Was it just a trick of the eyes that there seemed to be a tinge of anguish to Kikuoka’s gentle smile?

  “There were four males and four females in each of the two houses. When the siblings grew, they even started to fall in love. We determined that they were capable of raising their own children now and considered the first stage of our test to be concluded. We separated those sixteen youngsters into eight couples and gave them each their own individual house and farm to run. The four staff members who had served as their parents were then ‘killed’ by a sudden plague and exited the STL. Their memories of the eighteen years in the machine were blocked off, which meant they emerged into reality in the exact same state they had been in a week earlier. Yet when they watched on the monitor as the children cried and held funerals in their honor, they shed tears, too.”

  “It was a touching scene,” Higa added wistfully. Rinko cleared her throat to bring them back to reality.

  “Ah…where was I? Once the staff members were out, there was no need to worry about the FLA rate, so we shot the simulation’s acceleration up to five thousand times normal speed. We gave those eight couples around ten soul archetype babies each to raise, and they promptly grew to adulthood and started families of their own. We then removed the NPCs playing villagers bit by bit, until the village was large enough that it was made entirely of artificial fluctlights. Generations went on, producing more and more children, and after three weeks in the real world and three centuries in the simulation, we had an entire society of eighty thousand individuals.”

  “Eighty…?!” Rinko gasped. Her mouth worked soundlessly for a few seconds. “Then…you didn’t create artificial intelligence…you simulated an entire civilization.”

  “Indeed. But in a sense, that was inevitable. Humans are social creatures; we only improve ourselves through interaction with others. Over three centuries, our fluctlights have spread out from their little village and conquered the entire map that we built for them. They constructed a central ruling structure without any ugly wars, and they have discovered religion as well…That last part may be thanks to the fact that we had to use the concept of God to explain certain system commands to the children at the very start of the experiment. Higa, call up the overall map on the monitor.”

  Higa promptly started entering commands on the console. The monitor had been dark since that grotesque demonstration several minutes ago, but now it showed a detailed terrain map, almost like an aerial photograph.

  Naturally, it did not look like Japan or any other country on Earth.

  It was a circular map of flatlands, with no ocean whatsoever, surrounded by a ring of tall mountains. The land was rich and fertile, with many forests, plains, rivers, and lakes. According to the scale displayed at the bottom of the map, the diameter of the circular realm was nearly a thousand miles. Based on total land surface, that would make it nearly eight times larger than the island of Honshu, the biggest part of Japan.

  “Only eighty thousand people living in an area this huge? The population density must be paltry.”

  “Actually, I think Japan’s the outlier on that front.” Higa grinned. He moved the mouse and swung the cursor in circles around the center of the map. “This is the capital right here. Twenty thousand citizens, which sounds like nothing to us, but it’s quite a magnificent city. There’s even a governing structure here the fluctlights call the Axiom Church. There’s an elite class called priests who undertake the duty of governing, and their control is impressive. This huge map is run without any armed conflict whatsoever. At this stage, I considered our fundamental experiment a success. Within the virtual world, we’ve proven that artificial fluctlights can be raised with the same intelligence as humans. I thought for certain that we could then move to the next step, in terms of building a highly adaptive artificial intelligence capable of what we want. But…”

  “That was when we discovered a very serious problem,” Kikuoka finished, staring at the monitor.

  “…From what you’ve said, I can’t imagine what problem that would be.”

  “The problem was that there were no problems. It was all too peaceful. The operation was too neat, too tidy. We should have realized the issue when those first sixteen children ended up surprisingly obedient to their parents…It’s normal for humans to fight and compete. In fact, that’s one of our defining natures. But there’s no strife in this virtual world. There have been no wars in our simulation—not even any murders. That was part of the reason for our startling population growth. We set up the world to practically eliminate disease and natural disaster, so people only die of old age…”

  “It sounds like a utopia,” Rinko remarked.

  Higa smirked and asked, “Has there ever been a utopian story that actually turned out to be a utopia?”

  “…Well, it’s not much of a story that way, is it? And the goal of your virtual society isn’t to be entertaining, is it?”

  “Certainly not. But we are looking for realism,” Kikuoka said. He walked away from the console and toward the giant screen, wooden sandals clacking. “Those artificial fluctlights should have the same desires as us, so why is there no conflict? We studied the way they live, and we realized that there was one ironclad rule system built into the world. A massive book of laws, created in excruciating detail by the priests of the Axiom Church, called the Taboo Index. One of those laws forbids murder. Of course, we have that law in the real world, too. But all you need to do is watch the morning news to find out how closely we actually follow that law. Yet the fluctlights follow the law…to a troubling degree. Put another way, they are incapable of breaking the law. Something built into them prevents it.”

  “…Isn’t that a good thing?” Rinko wondered. “Based on that, it almost sounds like they’re superior to us.”

  “You might argue that is, in fact, the case. Higa, put the camera back on Centoria.”

  “Sure.”

  Higa tapped a key on the console. The footage of that foreign city that had been on the screen when Rinko and Asuna entered the room came back. People dressed in simple but pristine clothing walked to and fro among chalky white buildings adorned with tree roots.

  “Oh…! You mean this is—?” Rinko asked, staring at the screen in wonder.

  Higa nodded proudly. “Yep, this is Centoria, the capital of our artificial fluctlights’ world. Of course, what we’re seeing is the polygonal data rendered on the lower server, so it’s nowhere near as detailed, and the display speed is at a thousandth of the speed it’s actually happening.”

  “Centoria…So they’re actually capable of coming up with their own proper names, too? Does the world itself have a name, according to them?” R
inko wondered idly.

  Kikuoka looked a bit embarrassed and cleared his throat. “Actually, it does have a name…but it’s not originally from the fluctlights. We had our own project code name for our virtual world, and it seems to have stuck inside the simulation. The name of this realm is the Underworld.”

  “Under…world…”

  Rinko had already heard this name from Asuna, but she didn’t know it was also used within the world itself. She supposed that Higa and the others had chosen it out of Alice in Wonderland not to refer to a subterranean realm but a world that existed under reality itself. Yet the beautiful city on the monitor looked more like heaven than anything.

  Kikuoka seemed to have read her mind. “Yes, this city is beautiful. We, too, are impressed that our humble little wood-built village has led to architecture of this scale and complexity. But if you ask me, this city is too neatly contained. There’s not a single piece of litter on the streets, not a single pickpocket, and most certainly not a single murderer out there. And it’s all because no one dares to violate the extreme laws handed down by that Axiom Church in the distance.”

  “And what’s the problem with that?” she asked again, but Kikuoka didn’t respond. He seemed to be searching for the right words. Higa was suspiciously avoiding her gaze. He wasn’t about to speak up.

  Asuna, who had been listening all along, eventually broke the silence in Control Room One. The youngest person present said, with cold, quiet precision, “Because that’s not what they want, Dr. Koujiro. The ultimate goal of this massive project isn’t to simply create a high-functioning, bottom-up AI…It’s to create an AI that can kill enemy soldiers in a war.”

  “Wha…?”

  Rinko, Kikuoka, and Higa were all speechless. Asuna stared at each of them in turn. She continued, “The entire time coming here, I wondered why Mr. Kikuoka—the military Self-Defense Force—would be trying to create an adaptive AI. For a long time, Kirito and I suspected that you were interested in VRMMOs as a means to assist police and military training. So at first, I wondered if the AIs were meant to model enemy soldiers for training purposes. But the more I thought about it, there’s no actual danger in doing VR training exercises, and if you need to emulate real soldiers, just have the trainees work against one another in teams. We’ve done mock battles like that ourselves.”