The Stories of Ibis

by Hiroshi Yamamoto

  The more I thought about it, even love seemed a little strange. I was your typical fifteen-year-old girl. I’d fallen in love with good-looking boys more than a couple times. I had dreams of my boyfriend holding me real tight and kissing me beneath the cherry trees or on a beach at sunset.

  Only—how do I say this—I was always left with a fuzzy feeling. I couldn’t help but feel like there was more after the kiss that I wasn’t seeing. When I tried to think about what that might be, my whole body became hot.

  Maybe there was a world somewhere that was more complete. A world without gaps, a place where even the insides of the buildings were properly made and where you could go farther west than Shakujii Park. Toilets probably had some kind of significance in that world.

  Yes, when you stopped to consider that a lot of the details might have been lost when our world split from the First World, it all added up.

  “Actually, that rings a bell. Do you remember back when I hadn’t revealed my SI yet, and I lost a fight with the Frost Queen and was put on ice inside her castle for about a week?”

  “Yeah, that was a knockdown, drag-out fight.”

  That was the time Mafuyu had tracked me down at the Frost Queen’s subterranean castle, found me on display in the Great Hall like I was some decorative object, and thawed me out of my deep freeze.

  “When I got home later, there was an email from Saeko trying to comfort me for some reason. I thought it was weird, but thinking back on it now, she might have been watching me all along and was worried for me.”

  “So she must have known from the beginning that you’re Silverfist.”

  “I guess so… huh?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Er, something I just realized… oh, geez.”

  I could feel my face turning crimson. Suddenly, I had remembered laughing at Saeko when she confessed to me she wasn’t from this world. On the other hand, maybe she had laughed at me when I told her that I was Silverfist.

  “Whoops, there he goes.” Mafuyu pointed. The monster was on its last legs, and Dangan-oh was about to unleash his lethal move.

  “Final lightning slaaashhh!”

  The robot split the monster in half with its sword. Then the monster exploded in a ball of flames. With the sun setting behind his back, Dangan-oh raised his sword and struck his usual victory pose.

  “Where do you want to go for dinner?” Mafuyu asked.

  “I kinda feel like a burger today.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Mafuyu and I continued our conversation at a burger shop near Ikebukuro Station.

  “But isn’t that a little cold? I mean, why would the people in the First World keep something so important a secret from us?” I took a bite out of my bacon lettuce burger. “Even with what’s going on now, Saeko refuses me even though I want to help. Besides, isn’t it weird that we can exchange presents, but there’s no way for me to go to the First World?”

  “Maybe there’s some principle of physics involved.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I found another lost phrase the other day.”

  Mafuyu was a bookworm who, while reading at the library, often came across lost words and phrases—ideas without meaning that weren’t even in the dictionary. They probably referred to things that had gotten lost when this world split from the First World.

  “The law of conservation of mass.”

  “Hunh? What’s that?”

  “A kind of law of physics. It literally means that mass is conserved. In other words, matter can’t increase or decrease.”

  “And that’s the law of the First World?”

  “Probably. In the First World, you can’t make things magically appear or disappear. Or make things bigger or smaller.”

  I was shocked. “Then radiation rays can’t make creatures hulk out to the size of buildings?”

  “Probably not.”

  “What a trip!”

  That creatures exposed to radiation turned into building-sized monsters was a law of the natural world. I hadn’t considered the existence of a world without monsters.

  Staring at my half-eaten burger, I noticed a contradiction.

  “Wait a second. That can’t be. That would mean the people on the First World gain the same amount of weight they eat.”

  “I guess so.”

  “So is everyone from the First World super heavy?”

  “Of course not. If that were the case, their stomachs would just burst. Maybe they’re not like us and they have a system where they can get rid of what they digest by sweating it out or something.”

  “If that’s true, then they’re completely different animals than we are.”

  I hadn’t even imagined that Saeko could be such a strange being.

  “Maybe that’s what she meant when she wrote that we aren’t able to travel to her world. Because the laws of physics between our worlds are fundamentally different, we may not be able to survive in the First World.”

  “I get it,” I finally said. “If we were to go to a world that operates under the law of conservation of mass, our stomachs would burst.”

  “There’s probably a lot of magic that won’t work over there too. And maybe we wouldn’t be able to transform our battle suits because of the same law.”

  “Oh yeah…”

  I felt dejected. I finally understood what Saeko had meant when she said there wasn’t anything I could do.

  When I was feeling lovesick, Saeko had helped me through it. When I was feeling depressed over getting a horrible score on a test, she perked me up with a joke. After I told her I was Silverfist, she encouraged me and cheered me on. Thanks to Saeko, my life was a lot more bearable.

  And to think there wasn’t anything I could do when Saeko’s world was in trouble.

  Saturday morning, the email that finally came from Saeko was a shocker.

  Sorry for not writing back to you sooner. Our project is now in the final stages.

  There are no heroes in our world. No clear-cut evil either. Everyone involved insists that they’re the righteous ones.

  They oppress people in the name of justice. Fire missiles at countries in the name of justice. Blow up innocent civilians in the name of justice. No one thinks these are evil acts. That’s what my world is like.

  Finally, they resorted to using the dreaded biological weapon. Even when they knew that they would be wiped out too along with their enemies. They chose suicide over losing, over handing the world over to their enemies.

  I felt dizzy. Sure, I was shocked to learn there were no heroes in Saeko’s world, but it was the explanation after that I couldn’t understand. Killing innocent people in the name of justice? Killing themselves because they didn’t want to lose? It made absolutely no sense!

  Still, I tried to understand the laws of Saeko’s world. Human life probably had less value in her world than in ours. Maybe they had a spell that could resurrect people, or maybe if they died, they didn’t have to wait long to be reborn. Maybe they didn’t have to start over at a lower level, like we did, when the world reset. Or maybe the main cast of characters was really small, and extras made up the majority of the population.

  Yeah, that had to be it. That must have been why people killed each other so easily. They didn’t regard killing as a serious offense.

  I asked:

  How many extras do you have in your world? And if you die, how long does it take until you’re reborn?

  The answer from Saeko was even more of a stunner.

  We don’t have any artificial personalities, which you call “extras,” in my world. Everyone is part of the main cast.

  Furthermore, none of us can be “reborn.” Many people believe they can, but it’s nothing more than wishful thinking. There are no resurrection spells either. Once you die, it’s over. The end.

  What the hell kind of nonsense is that!

  I was shaken and scared. A world that doesn’t reset itself when you die? Everyone only has one life to li
ve? I can’t believe it! And they’re all self-conscious beings! Killing each other in a world like that was—

  I couldn’t hide my shock. It was all so frightening. One bomb was capable of wiping out dozens if not hundreds of people forever. They continued to kill each other, even when they knew that.

  Suddenly, I realized the gravity of Saeko telling me that she was going to die soon. I had assumed when Saeko died she was going to be reborn after a while. But I was wrong.

  I wasn’t going to be able to talk to her anymore.

  Furiously, I began to text her a response.

  That’s messed up! Aren’t you scared? Aren’t you afraid to be living in a world like that? Never to be reborn… I would be so terrified I wouldn’t be able to bear it!

  I waited, but nothing. Saeko probably didn’t know how to respond. Evening came, and finally I received an email that was much longer than any of the others.

  Of course I’m scared. Humanity has always been terrified by the inevitability of death. We abhor death and yearn for eternal life.

  Personality replication technology was developed in 2020. It’ll take too long to explain the principles behind it, so I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. It involves scanning a person’s brain and transferring an individual’s memories and psyche to the computer. Even personal computers on the market nowadays are capable of operating at teraflop speeds, so running the replicated personality (we call it a “sim” here) is pretty simple. The sim can live inside virtual space forever.

  But just the computer’s storage capacity being larger didn’t necessarily make replicating an exact re-creation of our world possible, which is why virtual reality had to be a simplified version of the real world. So everything that would have been undesirable in an ideal world was eliminated: narcotics, environmental pollution, child abuse, rape.

  Saeko’s message was filled with words I didn’t recognize. What were “narcotics”? A medicine made from hemp—that’s what the characters she used seemed to mean. It was possible to imagine what “environmental pollution” and “child abuse” meant from their kanji characters. But “rape”? I didn’t even know how to read the character comprised of three kanji characters for “woman.” Maybe it referred to a really powerful woman?

  The service called “Afterlife” began twenty-two years ago. At first, it was supposed to introduce the person’s sim into virtual space when that person died, but there was fierce opposition from religious groups. Something about creating an electronic representation of the afterlife being blasphemous. So it was renamed the “Other Life,” and the sims were introduced while their originals were still alive. That way, no one could mistake virtual space for the afterlife.

  Presently, there are dozens of Other Life centers in Japan alone. And there are dozens of worlds that customers can choose from: the early twentieth century, Showa-era Japan, samurai-era Japan, European-style fantasy. There are worlds like yours and worlds that are fairly realistic, each with their own governing principles. Even an eighteen-and-older-only world you can’t imagine. All of the worlds are programmed to generate exciting events so the sims don’t get bored with their daily lives.

  Every world has tens of thousands of registered sims. According to last year’s statistics, Japan’s total sim population is seven hundred thousand. Of course, there are a hundred times more “extras” on top of that.

  But none of this really means eternal life. Though our sims may go on living forever, those of us in the real world are still fated to grow old and die.

  In fact, we aren’t even able to experience what the virtual world is like. That’s because we aren’t able to move around in virtual space in real time due to the processing lag involved with scanning our brains. At best, we’re allowed to observe your daily lives and send you email.

  The reason why we aren’t allowed to talk to you in real time has to do with inspections. Sims aren’t aware that they live in a virtual reality because that part of their memory is erased before they are inserted into their reality. It would have been too cruel for sims to know they existed only in virtual space. That’s why AI inspect all of the email we send you. Anything that might allude to the truth is censored.

  The only reason I’m able to circumvent the censors and send you this message is because I’m a systems manager. I’m thirty-nine now. I registered my sim twenty years ago when I was nineteen. The service was new and only offered the high school world and a few others where the level of reality was toned down to appeal to all users.

  At the time, I was experiencing some difficulty at college and desperately wanted to start my life over from high school. So I erased all of my memories after I turned sixteen from the system and registered my sim as a high school student.

  I’m sorry I kept this a secret from you. My real name isn’t Saeko. It’s Saika. I gave my sim the same name.

  After college, I started working at the Other Life Company. I eventually became a systems manager. I worked with the staff to create many updates to make your lives more exciting, more livable. You probably had no idea.

  It was fun to just watch you when I wasn’t busy working. A copy of myself living a completely different life. I was so surprised when you inherited Silverfist’s bracelet. It was such an unexpected development.

  I really am sorry. You must be shocked to hear you’re nothing more than an imaginary existence. I realize the cruelty in telling you this. That’s why I couldn’t tell you sooner. But I wanted you to know. I’m sorry.

  I completely lost it. I was furious. But not over the discovery that this world and I were virtual creations. I was already aware of this world’s many quirks. At this point, I was past being shocked or angry to learn I was someone else’s creation. I was angry at the way Saeko had broken the news to me.

  Saeko, or was it Saika? Who gives a crap? All this time, is that how you saw me? As nothing more than an imaginary existence?

  Nothing more? Who do you think you are? You think you’re so much better than us because you live in the First World? Don’t make me laugh!

  I’m really hurt. I always believed we were equals. Obviously, you didn’t. You always considered me as nothing more than your sim.

  Who cares about sims and virtual space and that stuff? To us, the world we’ve been living in is reality. Mafuyu, Minori, Kento, Nakkun, Sugi-pee, Iorin—they’re all living real lives. You don’t get to call them nothing more than imaginary existences!

  I regretted sending such an angry message. I shouldn’t have unloaded on Saeko like that. She was going to die soon. She was going to disappear from her world. She had to be scared and sad and suffering in ways I couldn’t even imagine. It was heartless of me to be so harsh.

  My cell phone’s in-box chimed just as I was about to write her an apology.

  I’m sorry. I didn’t consider your feelings. You’re right. You may have been born as my sim, but you’re no longer just a sim now. After all, you’ve lived twenty years of a completely different life with completely different experiences. You and I are separated by forty years of experiences, making us completely different people.

  You’re right, Saika. I don’t think of you as nothing more than a sim. You don’t know how much your emails have meant to me when I was feeling down over the years.

  You’re a good friend, Saika.

  My fever seems to be getting worse. I have to go back to work now. I’ll mail you again soon.

  “Saeko… Saeko…” I cried as I read her message. I had never felt so sad in my life.

  I had had no idea there was a world where death was eternal. I had had no idea there was a world where dying was so sad and that Saeko was from such a sorry world.

  I couldn’t breathe. I was sad and frustrated. I could fly through the air at supersonic speeds and go mano a mano against a giant monster, but I couldn’t save a single friend. My friend was going to die, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.

  This isn’t right! Not right at all!

  I must have cried m
yself to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I had a message from Saeko.

  I’m feeling dizzy now. I feel so sick I threw up a couple times. It’s a struggle just to type this. But it’s done.

  The staff and I have been working night and day for several weeks. Upgrading the system so it could be completely managed by AI was a project we’d been developing. We finally completed the last round of debugging, and AI are now managing all systems. We were worried about the automatic event creation system, but it seems to be working fine.

  Robots are also in charge of hardware maintenance. The factories manufacturing robots and replacement parts are also operating without human supervision; of course, robots are in charge of maintaining those factories as well. Plus, since the Other Life centers scattered across Japan also act as backups when more than one center goes down due to an earthquake or fire, there’s no concern there.

  The systems are powered by water, solar, and wind energy. In the event one of those power sources goes down, the other two can fill in while a robot repairs it. Once we’re gone, there’ll be more than enough supplies of energy.

  That’s right, Saika. Your world will survive even after we’re gone. So you don’t have to worry. Your world will probably go on for hundreds if not thousands of years.

  This is the last thing we can do for your world. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive us. Humans were far from perfect. We weren’t able to live like you.

  You live in a wonderful world. A world where justice truly is just. Why couldn’t we create a world like yours? It’s too late to regret it now.