by Blitz Kiva
“Yuri, so cool!” Iris called.
“Thanks.”
“I’m taking us back onto the thoroughfare!” Tiramisu cried, then charged back onto the main street exactly as described.
The street was very wide, and Duplichiro, seeming to think he had them now, began firing off even more powerful attack magic Arts than before. Iris cringed.
Yuri slashed her hands through the air to repel the approaching “Spiral Blaze.” The deflected attack impacted around them, sending dust clouds and rubble rising once more.
“T-Tiramisu... will we be able to hold out until we reach our destination, the ravine?!” Nem cried.
“I’m not sure. His attacks are more aggressive than I was expecting.”
“You think I made him too angry?” Iris asked.
Tiramisu turned back and smiled uncomfortably. “Well, you may have talent for it.”
“I don’t think that’s a compliment...”
The young heir... What on Earth was the young heir off doing, while the account he had put so much time into was on the rampage?
Well, thinking about it wouldn’t solve anything, Iris decided, and she began thinking up her next bit of bait.
It was right around that time that said young heir was finally arriving at his own destination.
They were in America; specifically Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It had once been a flourishing steelmaking city, but it had since gained a reputation as a college town for engineering and a host to cutting-edge robotics, biology, and nuclear engineering laboratories. It normally had a 14-hour time difference with Japan, but with daylight savings time in practice, it was currently 13.
That meant that by the time Ichiro reached Pittsburgh, it was already night. But despite the hour, Ichiro wasn’t the kind of person who would hold back in carrying out his objective. Without hesitation, he pushed his way to the robotics engineering lab at the center of the city.
“So, Ichiro. How was your flight?” Charles asked the aggravating intruder.
“Hm, I was rather nervous,” said Ichiro. “It has been quite a while, and it was night. But the runway lighting made it easier than I thought it would be.”
“You flew the plane yourself?!”
Ichiro was walking down the hallway with Charles, a heavyset white man in a lab coat. He was about 20 years older than Ichiro, but in truth, they had graduated from Harvard at the same time. Naturally, they’d chosen different fields; Charles was an engineer. Whenever they talked about majors, Ichiro would always say, “If you wanted engineering, you should have gone to MIT.”
“Honestly, why do you always push your way in here?” he griped. “You’ve always been a pretentious little brat, and I see it hasn’t changed.”
“Nonsense. I am who I am. That’s not going to change anytime soon.”
“Last time we spoke, you decided you wanted to research VRMMOs and ended up running off with a room full of equipment!”
“I won’t try to excuse my actions, but there was a reason behind that. I said I wanted kenkyusho—research documents—and my servant thought I said kenkyujo, a laboratory. I immediately realized that might be better, so I asked them to send me your laboratory... equipment.”
“That’s a stupid Japanese joke! You and your oyaji gags. Honestly, if you weren’t my sponsor, I’d throw you out on your ass.” With that, Charles cast a glance behind Ichiro.
Two children stood there, looking all around them.
Charles Morgan, director of the Pittsburgh Maid Robotics Laboratory, leaned in to whisper into Ichiro’s ear. “Which one’s Asuha?”
“The one on the right with the long hair.”
“Oho. She’s as cute as I’d expect your cousin to be. Who’s the other?”
“Her friend.”
Both were apparently in junior high. Japanese people really did look very young. By white people’s standards, they would still be in primary school. The mysteries of the Orient. The fountain of youth. The land of gold, Zipang. Banzai, baby.
As if noticing Charles’s eyes on her, Asuha drew behind her friend’s back. Said friend looked at him with a glare, then asked a pointed question.
“What are you researching here?” the friend asked in Japanese.
Charles was well-versed in Japanese through his love of “Japanimation,” and he cleared his throat and began his explanation.
“Robots, of course. But not just any robots. Maid robots. It’s any man’s dream.”
“Oh?” The young person looked away, disinterestedly.
Ichiro whispered, “That’s Sera,” which must have been the child’s name.
Sera murmured, “Not games, huh?”
“We have games here, too,” Charles assured the child. “It’s part of our artificial intelligence research. Since games are becoming more intimately connected to the human experience lately, we have to come up with NPC algorithms to match them.”
Then Charles turned back to Ichiro, and began speaking in English again. “For instance, that VRMMO you’re playing, Ichiro.”
“Narrow Fantasy Online.”
“Yes, Narrow Fantasy Online! I’ve played it, but the NPC AI routines still have room for improvement.”
Sera stared straight at Charles. The child had an androgynous figure that was hard to call either boyish or girlish, with a dark gaze that seemed almost accusatory. A gaze like that caused Charles’s most deviant feelings to rear their heads.
“And, um, right. Let’s have some coffee first,” Charles said, after inviting the three into his personal lab room. The room was a pigsty, with documents scattered everywhere. He could see Asuha and Sera’s faces both draw harshly in a wince of pain.
“He wants to know if you want something to drink,” Ichiro interpreted into Japanese for the two children, then turned back and spoke in English. “Ah, Charles, I’ll take mine black.”
While Charles was making some instant coffee, Asuha started cleaning, seeming unable to take the sheer amount of entropy in the room. Ichiro and Sera didn’t seem willing to go that far, but Sera had picked up a few scattered documents and was staring at them fervently.
“Sera, that’s not anything a child would find interesting...” Charles said with a wince, and Sera looked up, holding the documents.
“Mr. Director. This is an image processor and motion tracer you bought around mid-July.”
“Hmm?” Charles couldn’t help but do a double-take at the words, which he wouldn’t have expected to hear from the mouth of a child. He looked over at Ichiro, who was merely sipping his instant coffee with a cool expression.
“You probably use these in your game AI development arm, right?” Sera asked. “And does the fact that you’re intentionally using IPU instead of GPU suggest that it’s for VR games? Your lab isn’t creating bots for VRMMO use, is it?”
“H-Hey, Ichiro.”
“Hmm?”
“How is this kid guessing everything just from reading one invoice in English?”
“Sera is a gamer who loves games, no more,” Ichiro said. He added that image processors and motion tracers were used in boosting the performance of Miraive Gears.
Still, Charles thought, the kid was in junior high...
The face of a ten-year-old boy he’d met in college drifted into his mind. Thirteen years later, that same boy was sitting here drinking coffee with a hatefully unflappable smile on his face.
“Sera also plays Narrow Fantasy Online with the avatar name Kirihito.”
“Kiri...” Charles hesitated, thinking the name sounded familiar. Then he gasped. “Sera, are you the legendary strike soldier ‘Kiriko’ who struck terror into the hearts of players of the FPS Code: Assault three years ago?!”
“Oh, yeah. That’s me.” Sera nodded casually, and Asuha looked up from tidying up to respond.
“Kiryu, you play those, too? We even knew each other three years ago...”
“Then five years ago, what was it... the ‘Kiriel’ that plunged into the world of fighting games and b
rought all opponents to their knees?!”
“Also me, yeah.”
“But you weren’t the ‘Kirilla’ who took MMOs by storm ten years ago, right?”
“That was my mom.” Sera swept up more of the documents and pulled out a few pages of interest to the gamer.
Asuha, who seemed to have grown exasperated, said, “Kiryu, help me out!” but rebelliously, Sera just replied, “Mr. Tsuwabuki’s taking it easy...”
Still, after a while, the young gamer began helping obediently, apparently unable to disobey her.
Charles just watched it all in bewilderment.
“Nante kotta, panna cotta...” he muttered, reciting a bad old Japanese pun.
“So, Charles. About the favor I asked you...” Ichiro said, smoothly ignoring the gag Charles had put so much effort into.
“R-Right...” Charles responded with a shake of his head.
Over the phone, Ichiro had told him to investigate whether there’d been an illegal access into the laboratory. Charles had found it unlikely, but he had investigated, and had found traces of said access. The lab had been hacked. Charles was genuinely grateful to Ichiro for letting him know.
“It was just like you said, Ichiro. There was an unauthorized access, and ever since then, an unknown program has been running in one of our unused server machines. It’s creeping me out, so I wanted to delete it, but I remembered what you said...”
“Thank you. This all but confirms my speculation.”
Charles had no idea what Ichiro was talking about.
Meanwhile, as Asuha and Sera tidied up the room, Asuha was asking about a term Sera had mentioned before. “Kiryu, what’s a bot?”
“It’s short for robot. Online game characters are controlled by input into a program, so if you set up a program with automated input, you can have a machine that controls your avatar. It’s a simple way to keep leveling up even when you can’t log in due to school or work.”
“Huh? Isn’t that cheating?”
“Yeah, it is. And it puts a huge burden on the server, so lots of games forbid it. NaroFan doesn’t have a clear rule on it, though. Given the incredible amount of input data it would require, it has been believed that current bot technology was insufficient to create a bot that could be used in VRMMOs.”
Sera cast another glance at Charles. As one might expect from a legendary gamer, the child knew what they were talking about.
Setting aside whether they were good or bad, bots and macros—programs to autopilot MMOs—had been around for a very long time. In this laboratory, during the process of developing the independent thought algorithms for artificial intelligence, they had had the idea of developing bots that would set goals for themselves and then complete those goals, over and over again. Could they create an artificial intelligence that, given an avatar, could think for itself, take on quests, and proceed through the MMO like any other player? The architecture was assembled, and it had been completed.
Originally, they had developed the bots, partly, to fill in slots in games like FPSes. The completed autonomous action bots, including “HARO9000,” picked up experience at the feet of friendly company. And while they had never quite reached the level of having feelings, they had gained something like individuality with regards to accomplishment of their goal settings.
Currently, the people at the lab were researching ways to customize a few of them to VRMMOs, as well.
“That reminds me. I never asked what this was all about,” Charles added. The small talk would continue forever if he let it, so the director decided to cut to the chase.
Unhurriedly, Ichiro brought the coffee cup to his lips, took a drink, and then spoke again. “I have good news and bad news.”
“Oho, just like a movie, eh?” A grin appeared on the director’s bear-like face. “I’d better hear the bad news first.”
“There’s a chance that your laboratory is being used for hacking in Japan.”
“Bluh!” He instinctively spit out his coffee. It didn’t actually reach Ichiro, but the man still made a face. “Hacking?! You mean we hacked someone, not that we were hacked, right?”
As he asked, Ichiro opened his mouth and began enunciating a line of letters and numbers. It sounded like an incantation, but after some thought, Charles understood it.
“That is your IP address, isn’t it?” Ichiro asked.
“Yes, that is ours, but...”
“I only caught a glimpse of it from the screen of the security supervisor, but I’m positive it’s yours,” Ichiro said. “Three instances of illegal access, every one of them using a VRMMO account. The last one may have infiltrated the management server.”
The director narrowed his eyes. Ichiro was an unpredictable man, but he didn’t seem like the kind of person to fly across the Pacific just to make jokes in bad taste. “You mean they’re using us as a transit point?”
“Not quite, but it’s something like that.”
“But Ichiro, why are you playing cyber detective anyway?”
“The account that was stolen was mine.”
It took Charles quite a lot of effort not to spit out his coffee again. As a result, it went down his windpipe and caused him to choke. “D-Do they know that?”
“I think so.” Ichiro drank down the last of his coffee. His manner was as cool as ever, and there was no trace of anger in it. But the fact that he had come all the way from America to tell Charles about this suggested that he found it quite intolerable. Charles never would have expected Ichiro to get that deep into an online game.
The hacking of their lab, the insertion of the unknown program into the server, and the hacking of the Japanese game company from their lab. They were all tied together. That was why Ichiro had come here. But even so...
“What would the culprit gain by doing all this?” Charles wondered. That was the biggest mystery of them all.
Ichiro fell into thought, as though he wasn’t fully sure yet. Just then, despite it being unlikely that they were listening to the contents of their conversation, Sera plucked out a document from the pile, and whispered...
“They wanted to create an Ichiro Tsuwabuki.”
6 - Noble Son, Reach the Truth
The chase scene was entering its second half. Iris and the others had plunged into the winding mountain roads of the Doom Range. No matter how bad the road, the horses’ running performance didn’t decline at all. Horses in this game were an excellent way of moving around, but the long period of continuous running and the continuous attacks of the pursuing Duplichiro were shaving their endurance down to the limits.
Yuri was also looking to be at the end of her rope. They had run out of potions and fatigue restorers a little while ago, yet while maintaining her standing balance on horseback, she still continued deflecting Duplichiro’s fireballs. Duplichiro himself showed no signs of tiring out. This was surely against the rules.
The situation was looking bad for them. Iris was starting to feel a creeping unease inside her. The mountain roads had more ups and downs and obstacles than the streets of Delve or the Sandsea they had crossed earlier, which meant that it was more suitable terrain for the flying Duplichiro. It was questionable whether they’d be able to reach the ravine or not. She regretted that she couldn’t contribute anything physical to the fight.
Iris’s role had been to draw Duplichiro’s aggro. She could say with total sincerity that she had fulfilled that role. Her aggressive vocabulary, honed to perfection through her high school (or more precisely, trade school) girl trash talk, had combined beautifully with her natural-born talent to create a perfect weapon for psychological attack. To be honest, she wasn’t happy about it, but it had caused Duplichiro’s rage to pierce not just the roof, but the stratosphere. Maybe he wasn’t good at expressing the emotion of anger. His expression looked calm, but it would be obvious to anyone that he was in the grips of uncontrollable fury.
“Yuri!” Nem called.
“I-I’m okay... Nem...”
The system
was set up so that excessive exhaustion would actually put a small burden on a player’s state of mind. It wasn’t enough to deeply influence their stamina, just enough to add spice. But right now, Yuri was clearly having trouble standing.
Shaking in anger, Duplichiro slowly closed the distance over the slope. He unleashed his umpteenth Spiral Blaze. Yuri calmly traced its path with her eyes and deflected it with a chop. Just then...
“Ah.”
Duplichiro’s movement accelerated. He was gliding. The distance between them closed in an instant to a single meter’s length. He had entered melee range. Yuri was still in the cooldown time for Weapon Guard, and her response didn’t come in time.
At last, Duplichiro’s punch dealt a fatal blow to Custard. The system shouldn’t have had mechanics for a horse to trip, but perhaps in an exception, its leg got caught, throwing its two riders onto the mountain road. The horse’s body toppled onto the gravel road and then lay there perfectly still.
Iris let out a shriek as she rolled down the slope. Tiramisu used her “Soft Falling” Skill to right herself in an instant.
“Custard!” Tiramisu called her beloved steed’s name, but as an item that had reached zero durability, it showed no response. But she set aside her emotional pain (what of it there was), and turned to face Duplichiro. He spread his wings and slowly descended, his expression gradually returning to its usual grin.
“Tiramisu! Ai!” Yuri called.
The horses on which Yuri and Nem were riding stopped suddenly, and the both of them were thrown off. Nem hit the gravel road face-first, but they had no time to worry about her.
Despite her exhaustion, Yuri struck a fighting stance, while Tiramisu drew her Celestial Sword. They were absolutely ready to fight. But there was a slight trace of nervousness on Tiramisu’s face, and as Duplichiro slowly started moving closer, she inched back, maintaining the distance.
“A wise judgment.” Duplichiro nodded. “You can’t beat me. This has already been proven. It would be nonsense on both sides for us to repeat the same result.”
Iris remembered the fight between Duplichiro and Tiramisu from the day before. King’s interference had pushed him back then, but prior to that, it had been a one-sided battle for which the term “loss” did not seem fully adequate. To put it plainly, Tiramisu was afraid. The fear of losing again the way she had yesterday was probably rearing its head.