Naturally, all existing VR games had to be created by game designers from a development team. While the buildings, trees, and rivers all looked like they just existed on their own, all of them were modeled and fashioned according to the whims of an artist, of another human being.
Every time she was reminded of this fact while playing the game, a deep part of her woke from a reverie. It was the recognition and acknowledgment of the fact that they were all dancing on the palm of the “gods” who developed the game for them to play.
Shino hadn’t even started Gun Gale Online for the purpose of having fun. Even though she’d overcome some of her emotional baggage, she still believed there was a real-life meaning to what she experienced in the virtual world. She didn’t share the sentiments of those squadrons who collected model guns in real life and wore their uniforms with matching medals in the game. No, she believed that the perseverance and self-control that Sinon developed in the game might in some way transfer over to Shino Asada in the real world. If not, then why had she been spending so much time and money on this activity?
The fact that such a shy person could get to be so friendly with Asuna after just a few months was a sign of major progress, Shino thought. The other girl always carried a hint of a smile, but Shino was certain that they shared the same views. VRMMOs weren’t an escapist pleasure but a tool to improve herself in the real world. Asuna was like that, too. And Kazuto…well, it needn’t be said.
Which was exactly why she didn’t want to think that a VR world was just a construction, and that everything that happened inside of it was fiction. She didn’t want to think it, but someone, of course, built every one of them.
On the night she’d stayed at Asuna’s house last month, Shino had clumsily revealed in the darkened bedroom this sense of alienation. Next to her in the large bed, Asuna thought it over. Then she said, “Shino-non, you could say the same thing about the real world. Everything about the environment we live in, from our homes and cities, to our status as students, to the structure of society itself, was designed by people…For the purpose of getting stronger or being able to pursue the path that we want, I think.”
She paused, then smiled and continued. “But I’d kind of like to see a VR world one day that wasn’t designed by anyone. If that was an actual thing, I kind of feel like it’d be an even realer world than the one we live in…”
“A realer world,” Shino muttered without realizing it. Asuna glanced at her and nodded, clearly remembering the same conversation.
“Kirito, are you saying…that if you use the STL, you could create a reality that is subjectively the same or greater than the real world? A true alternate world without a human designer?”
“Hmmm,” he mumbled, then slowly shook his head. “No…I think that would be very unlikely right now. You might be able to generate natural terrain like forests or fields, but I think it’d be impossible to create complex cities in a logical manner without the involvement of a human mind. As far as other possibilities…I guess that if you get a couple hundred testers and make them build a town or a culture itself on empty plains, that might be considered a world without a godlike Creator…”
“Wow, that sounds like a real long-term project.”
“It would take months for the map to be finished.”
The girls laughed at Kazuto’s joke. But the furrow between his brows stayed put as he continued to ponder the idea. Eventually he muttered, “So it’s a culture-development simulation? That might not actually be far off the mark. If the STL’s FLA function evolves further…but that’ll require a limit on the memory you bring inside…”
“S to the F to the L to the what now?” Shino asked, lost in the string of acronyms.
He looked up in surprise. “Oh…right. It’s the second magic power of the Soul Translator. I said the STL’s virtual world is like a dream, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you ever have a really long dream, and when you wake up, you’re just exhausted? Especially when it’s a nightmare…”
“Oh, sure,” she said, scowling. “It’s like you’re running and running from something, and you know it’s a dream partway through, but you can’t wake up. Only after you’ve been running all night do you wake up—and then it turns out you’re still in the dream.”
“How long does it feel like those dreams go?”
“How long? Two hours…three, maybe.”
“That’s the thing. When you measure the brain waves, even the times that people feel like they’ve been dreaming forever, the actual period of dreaming is just for a few minutes before they wake up,” Kazuto said. He held out his hands and covered the phone screens lying on the table. Then he impishly asked, “Sinon, if we started talking about the STL at four thirty, what time do you think it is now?”
“Uh…”
She wasn’t expecting that question. It was just past the solstice and there was plenty of light outside, making it impossible to tell the exact time just from the amount of light coming through the windows. She had to guess.
“Umm…about four fifty?”
He pulled away his hands and turned the screen toward Shino. The clock said it was well after five.
“Whoa, it’s been that long?”
“See, the flow of time is very subjective, not just in our dreams but in the real world as well. When there’s an emergency and you get a rush of adrenaline, time goes slowly. On the other hand, when you’re relaxed and enjoying a nice chat, you look up and it’s hours later. In their study of fluctlights and human consciousnesses, Rath put together a rough theory of why this happens. At the center of your mind there’s a pulse they call a ‘thought-clocking control signal,’ though they don’t know much about its source yet.”
“Clocking…?”
“Yeah, like a computer. How they measure the number of gigahertz of your CPU and stuff.”
“The number of calculations per second?” Asuna prompted. Kazuto tapped his finger on the table.
“They always list the maximum value for the catalog, but it’s not constantly going that fast. Usually it goes at a fairly slow pace to keep it cool and conserve power, but as you ask it to process more and more…” He increased the speed of his tapping. “It pulls up the processor clock to increase the speed. The photon computer recreating a fluctlight acts the same way. In an emergency, when the amount of data to process gets much greater, it speeds up the thought-clock in response. Don’t you feel like the bullets in GGO slow down when you’re concentrating really hard?”
“Well, when I’m in a really good rhythm, yeah. But I can’t do that bullet-dodging stuff you pull off.” She pouted. He frowned and shook his head.
“I couldn’t do that right now, either. I’ve got to retrain before the next BoB…Anyway, the thought-clock affects your perception of time. When the clock is running fast, your perception of the passage of time will slow down. This becomes especially pronounced while sleeping. The fluctlight speeds up quite a lot to process all that memory data, and you end up having several hours’ worth of dreams within a few minutes.”
“Hrmm…”
Shino crossed her arms. It was already crazy enough that they were talking about a computer that read her mind with light—all this stuff about the act of thinking causing her mental speed to go up and down had to be taken with a grain of salt. But Kazuto was grinning as though there was even more to the story.
“So extrapolate from there. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could do your homework or your job in your sleep? In just minutes of real-world time, you could do hours of work.”
“Th-that’s crazy.”
“Exactly. You can’t control your dreams to do exactly what you want,” Asuna protested.
But Kazuto’s smile did not falter. “The reason actual dreams are so scattershot is a by-product of the memory filing process. The dreams you see in the STL are far clearer—in fact, it’s basically just a VR world that works on dream logic. When you’re inside that world, it interferes
with the mind’s thought-clocking pulse and speeds it up. Then it synchronizes the passage of time within the virtual world to speed it up, too. As a result, the amount of actual time the user experiences within the virtual world is multiplied. That’s the greatest function of the STL: Fluctlight Acceleration, or FLA.”
“…This all…just…”
Doesn’t seem real, Shino thought. It was more than “just a little” different from the AmuSphere.
Just the introduction of regular access to full-dive tech had brought about significant social change. In the almighty search for cost-cutting measures, businesses began holding virtual presentations and meetings. Multiple fully 3-D shows and movies came out each day, offering the viewer the ability to inhabit the scene from any angle. Seniors loved the tourist software that specialized in highly accurate recreations of popular destinations. And as Kazuto mentioned earlier, it was also finding use in military training.
The sudden increase in the range of interests that could be enjoyed indoors led to a predictable counter-surge in “Walkers” who insisted on going outside and strolling the town without a destination. Bizarrely enough, that led to a very successful line of Virtual Walking Simulators. Even the big fast-food chains had gotten into the business with virtual locations you could visit.
So society wondered where exactly the virtual world would send the real world that we live in. What would happen once the Soul Translator appeared and people could speed up their consciousnesses? Shino felt something chilly run across her skin.
Meanwhile, Asuna repeated, “A long…dream…” then looked up at Kazuto and smiled. “I suppose I should be grateful that SAO happened before the Soul Translator was developed. If we were playing it on the STL, Aincrad instead could have been a thousand floors and taken twenty years to beat.”
“Ugh…spare me,” he groaned, shaking his head.
Asuna smiled again and asked, “So all this week, you were just having one long dream?”
“Yeah. It was a function test for long-term consecutive use—three days in a dive without food or water. I think I did lose some weight…”
“More than a little! There you go, getting yourself into crazy business again,” she said, putting on a cutesy tantrum and crossing her arms. “I’m visiting Kawagoe tomorrow to cook you some food! I’d better ask Suguha to stock up on plenty of veggies.”
“J-just go easy on me.”
As Shino watched the two banter with a grin on her face, a sudden question occurred to her. “So, um…does that mean that during the three-day-long dive, that thought accelerator was working? How much time did you actually experience in there?”
He tilted his head, trying to remember, and said, “Well…like I explained earlier, my memories of the dive are limited…but I recall them saying that the current maximum amplification factor of the FLA is a bit over three…”
“So…nine days?”
“Or ten.”
“Hmm…I wonder what kind of world it was and what you were doing. If you can’t take out the memories, could you at least bring your memories in with you? Were there other testers?”
“Honestly, I have no idea about any of that. They said having advance knowledge will affect the test results. But even if they block memories from within the dive, I don’t know if they can limit your existing memory…At any rate, the place I go in Roppongi only has one experimental STL in it, so I’m guessing I was the only one diving. They wouldn’t tell me anything about the inside. What’s the use of being a beater if you can’t get an advantage as a beta tester? All they would tell me was the code name of their test world.”
“And what is that?”
“The Underworld.”
“Like…an underground world? I wonder if that’s the design theme.”
“I don’t even know if it’s meant to be realistic, or fantasy, or sci-fi. But with a name like that, I’m guessing it’s dark and subterranean…”
“Hmm. It doesn’t really stick out to me,” Shino murmured.
Meanwhile, Asuna put a finger to her slender chin and said softly, “Maybe…that has to do with Alice, too.”
“Alice…?”
“Like I said with the source of the name Rath, maybe this one comes from Alice in Wonderland. Well, the original manuscript title was Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that. The more I hear, the more this company sounds like it came from a fairy tale,” Shino noted giddily. “In fact, both Alice books were big, long dreams in the end, right? I wonder if that means you were having tea parties with rabbits and playing chess with a queen while you were under, Kirito.”
Asuna giggled at the thought. But Kazuto himself was staring at a fixed point on the table, lost in thought.
“…What’s wrong?” Shino asked.
“…Oh, uh…”
He looked up, still squinting, then blinked in obvious confusion.
“When you said ‘Alice’…I felt like I was about to remember something…It was just one of those things, you know? Where you’re on the brink of recalling something huge, but you can’t remember what it was, so it just sits there on your shoulders like this big ball of anxiety?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s kinda like when you have a nightmare and wake up from it, but you can’t remember what it was about.”
“There’s something…something I’m forgetting that I was supposed to do right away,” Kazuto lamented, scrunching up his hair.
Asuna looked at him with concern and asked, “Is it a memory from the test…?”
“But you already said that all the memory from the virtual world gets deleted,” Shino reminded him. He shut his eyes and groaned, then gave up and slumped his shoulders.
“Well, it was ten days of memories. Maybe there are little fragments here and there that they couldn’t block out entirely…”
“I see…If that’s the case, if you still had the memory, you would be a whole week older than us compared to before, mentally speaking. That’s…kinda scary to think about.”
“I don’t know…I kind of like that,” Asuna said. She was a year older than him. “It’s like it closes the gap a bit.”
Kazuto gave her a weak smile. “Speaking of which, from the end of yesterday’s dive to about the middle of school today, I got this weird feeling. It was like…all the familiar parts of town and TV shows and everything were all fresh, like I hadn’t seen them in forever. And when I saw people in class, I was like…‘who is that again?’”
“Oh, don’t be dramatic. It was only ten days,” Shino snapped.
“Yeah, you’re going to make me worry,” Asuna complained. “You have to stop participating in that dangerous experiment, Kirito. It’s definitely going to affect your health, for one thing.”
“Right. The long-term consecutive diving test was a major success, and all the big hurdles as far as the fundamental construction have been passed. Next comes the stage where they shape it into a functional machine, but I can’t begin to guess how many years it will take to shrink that enormous thing down to a commercial level…I’m not going for any side jobs anytime soon. I’ve got finals next month, anyway.”
“Ugh,” Shino said, grimacing. “Don’t remind me. You two are lucky; you barely even have any paper tests. We still have to use Scantrons. I wish they would get with the times.”
“Hee-hee! Well, we should have a study session sometime soon,” Asuna suggested. She looked up at the wall behind Shino and gasped. “It’s almost six! Time really does fly when you’re chatting.”
“I guess we should wrap it up. I feel like we only talked about the main point of the meeting for about five minutes,” Kazuto said, smirking.
“Well, the BoB is way far ahead, and we can decide on character build and finer strategy once you’ve converted,” Shino suggested.
“Good idea. I won’t use anything but a lightsaber, though.”
“You have to call it a photon sword!”
He laughed and picked up the bill, offering to
pay it with the seventy-two straight hours of wages he’d just earned, and took it to the counter. Shino and Asuna loudly chimed in their thanks for the meal and started for the door.
“We’ll be back, Agil.”
“Thanks for the baked beans; they were great,” Shino called out to the owner, who was busy preparing for the night traffic, as she took her umbrella from the whiskey barrel. The door bell clattered when she opened the door, letting in the sounds of bustle and rain.
It wasn’t yet sundown, but the heavy clouds blocked most of the light, so it felt as dark as night along the wet street. She opened her umbrella and took one step down the small staircase, then stopped. She quickly scanned the area.
“What’s wrong, Shino-non?” Asuna asked behind her. Shino came back to her senses and rushed down into the street, then turned around.
“N-no, it’s nothing,” she said shyly. She wasn’t going to admit that the sniper sense on the back of her neck had just crawled. The possibility that her instinct for sensing a sniper while out in the open had transferred into real life was not something she wanted to confront right now.
Asuna was still curious, but then the door bell jangled again, prompting her to continue down the steps.
Kazuto emerged, stuffing his wallet back into his bag. As he descended to the street, he muttered, “Alice…”
“Are you still going on about that?”
“Well…now that I think about it, I must have heard something from the staff talking among themselves before the STL dive on Friday…A, L, I…Arti…Labile…Intelli…Hmm, what was it again…?” he muttered, mostly to himself.
Asuna extended her umbrella over him and chuckled. “Once he gets his mind on something, he can’t stop. If you’re that curious about it, just ask them the next time you go there.”
“Yeah, good point,” Kazuto said. He shook his head a few times to clear his thoughts and finally opened his own umbrella. “Well, Sinon, we’ll meet again to plan out this GGO conversion.”
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