Alicization Rising Read online

  Cardinal reminisced as well, then glanced back at me and said firmly, “But there cannot be eternal stasis in any system. There are always events, incidents…Seventy years after Quinella became Administrator, she realized something had changed within her. Her conscious mind blanked out for short periods; even when she was awake, memories from the past few days became unavailable to her, and those perfectly memorized system commands wouldn’t always spring to her tongue. These were grave phenomena. Administrator used her control commands to examine her own fluctlight in detail…and the results stunned her. She had reached the limit of her memory-holding capacity.”

  “L-limit?!” I yelped. This was a shock. I’d never heard that there was an upper limit to the amount of data—the amount of memory—a soul could hold.

  “Is it so unbelievable? There is a physical limit to the size of the lightcube that holds a fluctlight, just as there is to a biological brain. Therefore, the number of quantum bits storing information is also limited,” Cardinal explained matter-of-factly.

  I held up my hand and pleaded, “W-wait, wait. Uh…you keep mentioning these ‘lightcubes.’ Am I supposed to believe the Underworldians’ fluctlights are stored on those?”

  “What, you didn’t know that? A lightcube is an actual cube, two inches to a side. Each one is the exact size to contain a fluctlight, and the storage requires no system resources. They are gathered in what is called the Lightcube Cluster, measuring about ten feet to a side.”

  “S-so, uh…if they’re two inches, then ten feet means…,” I mumbled, trying to calculate the total number. Cardinal provided it for me.

  “Theoretically, the total would be two hundred and sixteen thousand cubes. But because the Main Visualizer is contained at the center of the cluster, the actual number is fewer.”

  “Two hundred and sixteen thousand…So that’s basically the upper limit of the Underworld’s population…”

  “Yes. And there’s still plenty of room to go, so if you feel like finding a girl and adding to the number, there will be empty lightcubes to spare.”

  “Ahh…H-hey, who said anything about that?!” I protested. The young sage gave me a piercing look, then returned to the topic at hand.

  “…However, as I mentioned, each lightcube will eventually reach its full capacity, given enough time. Administrator had already lived an impossible one and a half centuries since her birth as Quinella. The dam that contained all those years of memories finally began to leak, causing errors in her ability to save, store, and replay memories.”

  It was a chilling concept that struck home. I’d already built up two years of memory in this accelerated world. It would mean that even if I only spent months, or days, in here, my soul itself was still logging that information toward its eventual end.

  “Have no fear. Your fluctlight still has plenty of blank space available,” Cardinal pointed out with a smirk, reading my thoughts yet again.

  “H-hey…that makes it sound like my head is totally empty…”

  “If I am an encyclopedia, you are a picture book,” she said smugly, taking a sip of tea and clearing her throat. “Continuing on. Faced with this unexpected issue of memory limits, the Administrator panicked. Unlike the easily controlled numerical value of life, this was a finite resource that could not be avoided. But she was not the kind of woman to accept this fate without a fight. Just as when she stole the throne of God, she came up with yet another diabolical solution…”

  She grimaced, set her cup down, and folded her little cattleya-flower hands atop the table.

  “…At the time…which was two hundred years ago, there was a girl studying sacred arts as a sister-in-training in the lower levels of Central Cathedral, a girl just ten years old. Her name…I have forgotten. She was born to a furniture maker in Centoria and, through the whims of random value settings, wound up with a slightly higher system access authority than others. Thus, she wound up selected for the Calling of a holy woman. A skinny, scrawny girl with brown eyes and brown curls…”

  I blinked and reexamined Cardinal’s appearance. She seemed to be describing herself.

  “Administrator brought that girl to her chamber on the top floor of the cathedral and gave her the beatific smile of a holy mother. Then she said, ‘You’re going to be my child now. A child of God who will lead the world.’ In a sense, she was right—in the sense that I would inherit the information of her soul. But it had nothing to do with the love of mother and child…Administrator attempted to overwrite that girl’s fluctlight with her own fluctlight’s thoughts and crucial memories.”

  “Wha…?”

  Yet again, a chill crawled up my spine. Overwriting the soul. Even the phrase was horrifying. I rubbed my sweaty palms together and struggled to work my jaw into producing speech.

  “B-but…if she’s able to perform such complex fluctlight manipulations, why didn’t she just erase the memories she didn’t need?”

  “Would you take your most important files and crack them open for editing?” she shot back. I faltered and had to shake my head.

  “N-no…I’d make a backup first.”

  “Exactly. When the Administrator imprinted the Cardinal System’s directives into her mind, she lost consciousness for a day and night. That is how dangerous manipulating one’s own fluctlight is. What if one attempts to organize one’s memories and causes damage to crucial data? Instead, she took over the soul of a young girl with plenty of extra memory capacity, and once she was satisfied that the replication worked, she planned to discard her original, worn-out soul. She was very thorough and very careful…but that is when the Administrator…when Quinella made her second great mistake.”

  “Mistake…?”

  “Yes. Because when she took over the girl and scrapped her old self, there would be a single instant when there existed two gods with equal power at the same time. Administrator meticulously plotted and arranged a devilish ceremony…a fusing of soul and memory in what she called a Synthesis Ritual…and succeeded in seizing another fluctlight. I waited…how I waited for that moment…for seventy long years!!” she shouted, her features strained with slight agitation. I just stared at her, dumbfounded.

  “Um…hang on. Then…who are you? Who’s the Cardinal I’m talking to now?”

  “Don’t you understand yet?” she asked, pushing her glasses up. “You are familiar with my original version, Kirito? Tell me the features of the Cardinal System.”

  “Uh…well…”

  I thought hard, summoning my memories of Aincrad. It was an autonomous management program that Akihiko Kayaba developed to run his game of death, SAO. Meaning…

  “…It’s meant to run automatically for long periods of time without human correction or maintenance…?”

  “Indeed. And to achieve that…”

  “To achieve that, it has two core programs—a main process that performs the balancing functions and a subprocess that performs error-checking on the main…”

  I paused, my mouth hanging open, and stared at the little girl with the curly hair.

  The Cardinal System’s powerful error-correcting process should have been old news to me. Yui, the AI that Asuna and I took in as a daughter during our time in SAO, was a subordinate program of Cardinal, and I’d had to fight desperately to protect her when the system recognized her as foreign and mercilessly attempted to delete her.

  In actual terms, I only accessed the SAO program space through the system console, searched for the files that made up Yui, compressed them, and turned them into an in-game object, but it was practically a miracle that I managed to do that much in the mere seconds that I had before Cardinal detected my access and shut me out. The massive presence that I was fighting on the other side of that holo-keyboard was Cardinal’s error-correction process…meaning it was the sweet-looking girl sitting across from me now?

  While I grappled with that complex rush of emotions, Cardinal sighed, as if dealing with a particularly dense child, and said, “You’ve finally put it togeth
er. It was not one single fundamental directive that Quinella wrote into her soul. The main process told her to maintain the world. And the subprocess ordered her…to correct the mistakes of the main process.”

  “Correct…the mistakes?”

  “When I was an unconscious program, all I did was endlessly examine the data the main process spit out. But once I gained a personality as Quinella’s ‘shadow mind,’ so to speak, I didn’t just check for redundant code anymore; I had to judge my own actions. You might call it…multiple personalities.”

  “Then again, in the real world there are those who say that multiple personalities are a thing that only exists in fiction.”

  “Is that so? But it is very real to me. Only when Quinella’s consciousness faltered the slightest bit could my cogitation process surface. And so I thought…this woman named Administrator has committed massive mistakes.”

  “A…mistake…?” I repeated. If maintaining the world was the basis of Cardinal’s main process, it seemed that no matter how extreme Quinella’s choices were, she was perfectly aligned with that directive.

  But Cardinal stared right back into my eyes and intoned, “Then I ask you. Did the Cardinal System in the world you knew ever once do direct harm to a player?”

  “Er…no, it didn’t. It was the player’s ultimate enemy, yes…but it didn’t unfairly attack any players directly. Sorry, point taken,” I said. She snorted.

  “But that is what she did. She meted out a punishment crueler than death to those who doubted her Taboo Index or expressed rebellion toward her order…but I will tell you about that in detail later. On those few occasions I awoke from my sleep as the Cardinal System’s subprocess, I determined that Administrator’s existence was one enormous error and attempted to destroy it. Three times I attempted to jump from the top floor of the tower, twice I tried to stab myself in the heart with a knife, and twice I used sacred arts to burn myself. If a single action could reduce her life to zero, even the pontifex would not escape oblivion.”

  The sound of these ghastly statements coming from such a precious little girl stunned me. Cardinal barely batted an eye as she continued, “The last one was the closest. I unleashed the strongest of all sacred arts attacks, and the torrent of lightning blasted Administrator’s vast life amount down to just a single digit. Then the main process regained control of the body…and at that point, anything less than death was effectively nothing. Within moments, she had restored all health with the right commands. And that incident was enough for Administrator to feel threatened by her unconscious subprocess at last. When she realized that my moments of control came during instances of fluctlight conflict—meaning, mental instability—she used a preposterous means to lock me up for good.”

  “Preposterous…?”

  “From her birth until she was chosen to serve Stacia, Administrator had been human. She had enough emotion to find flowers beautiful and music enjoyable. That humane side of her from childhood had been relegated to deep in her soul ever since she became the ultimate ruler of this world. She determined that the infinitesimal unrest she felt during spontaneous events was caused by that emotion of hers. So she used the admin commands for directly manipulating lightcube fluctlights to eliminate her own emotional circuits.”

  “Uh…when you say eliminate her circuits, you mean she destroyed part of her own soul?” I asked, chilled.

  Cardinal nodded, frowning.

  “B-but that’s crazy,” I continued. “It sounds way more dangerous than even that fluctlight copying experiment you described…”

  “She did not just pop right into her soul and do it, of course. It was the Administrator’s style to be aggravatingly cautious in matters like this. Have you noticed that the people of this world have hidden parameters that are not displayed on their Stacia Windows?”

  “Y-yes, I suspected as much…I’ve seen several people whose appearance didn’t reflect their strength and agility…,” I replied, thinking of Sortiliena, whom I’d served as a page for my year in the academy. She was so slender that she seemed fragile, yet she’d bowled me over multiple times when we clashed.

  And yet this little girl, who looked far weaker than her, possessed a bottomless well of imposing presence and power. Her hat bobbed. “Yes. Among those hidden parameters is a value called the violation index. It is a numerical representation of each civilian’s degree of obedience to the law as measured through their statements and actions. It was probably created for outside observers to easier monitor the in-simulation subjects…but Administrator quickly discovered that she could utilize this value to sniff out those people who were skeptical of her Taboo Index. To her perfect world, these people were like bacteria sneaking into a sterilized clean room. She wanted to exterminate them all at once, but she could not break the rule forbidding murder that her parents had impressed upon her as a small child. So Administrator attempted a horrifying experiment that would not kill those with a high violation index but still render them harmless…”

  “And…that’s the punishment crueler than death that you mentioned?”

  “Indeed. As experimental subjects for her fluctlight-manipulation rituals, she chose people with a high violation index. What information was stored where on the lightcube? Which spot should you tinker with to cause loss of memory, loss of emotion, loss of thought? Hideous, inhuman experiments that even the observers in the outside world hesitated to attempt,” she said, ending in a whisper.

  Goose bumps rose on my arms.

  Her face looked downcast, and her voice was quiet, stifled. “…Most of those used for the original experiments did not emerge with any personality to speak of. They merely breathed, nothing more. Administrator froze their bodies and life and stored them in the cathedral. Over time, she gained experience in manipulating fluctlights, and when she was ready to lock out her own emotional side to keep me away, she had learned plenty after copious tests on the people she’d brought to the tower. At the time, she was about a hundred years old.”

  “…Was she successful?”

  “You could say she was. It didn’t eliminate all her emotions, but the experiment did manage to remove fear, shock, and anger—feelings that might cause momentary impulses. Since then, Administrator has never been shaken by any situation, no matter what. She is like a god…no, like a machine. A being that maintains the world, keeps it stable, keeps it stagnant…I was banished to a distant corner of her soul, never to reappear on the surface. Until the moment she turned one hundred and fifty, when her fluctlight hit its maximum storage and she took over the soul of that poor girl.”

  “But…based on everything you’ve told me, the soul that Administrator put into that furniture-maker’s daughter was just a copy, right? So the emotions of that soul should’ve been limited from the start…How were you able to rise to the surface at that moment?” I asked. Cardinal’s eyes traveled somewhere distant, likely through the mind-numbing span of two hundred years of time.

  Very faintly, she said, “My vocabulary…does not have the words to properly describe that moment…the horrifying eeriness of it all…Administrator summoned the furniture-maker’s girl to the top floor of the cathedral and attempted the Synthesis Ritual on her, to overwrite her soul. It worked successfully. The girl’s unnecessary memories were deleted, replaced by a compressed version of Administrator’s—of Quinella’s—mind. Her original plan, once she was sure it had been successful, was for the maxed-out Quinella to eliminate her own soul…However…”

  Cardinal’s cheeks, which were normally a healthy red, were now as white as paper, I noticed. Despite her claim that she had no emotions, it seemed she was grappling with a deep, inescapable fear right then.

  “…However, when the replication was complete and both bodies opened their eyes at close range…there was a kind of tremendous shock. I suppose…it was something like a sense of aversion, of wrongness…that, impossibly, there were two of the exact same person in existence. I…no, we…stared at each other, then felt an abrupt sur
ge of hostility. Something that said the other could not be allowed to exist…It was more than an emotion—it was an impulse…something like a fundamental rule that must be acknowledged in the deepest core of the sentient mind. If that situation were allowed to continue, I daresay that both our souls would have obliterated themselves in their inability to withstand the truth. But…in the end, that did not happen, as disappointed as I am to admit it. The fluctlight copied onto the furniture-maker’s daughter was the first to shatter, and in that instant, I seized control as the sub-personality. Thus, we recognized each other as Administrator in Quinella’s body and the Cardinal subprocess in the girl’s body. Our souls stopped collapsing and stabilized.”

  Soul collapse.

  This phrase seemed to perfectly match the stomach-churning, eerie experience I’d witnessed just two nights before. I crossed swords with Raios Antinous, first-seat elite disciple at Swordcraft Academy, and severed both his hands with a Serlut-style Ring Vortex. This could easily be fatal in the real world, but he would have survived in the Underworld if given prompt treatment. I moved to clamp down the wounds to stop the bleeding and preserve his life—his numerical hit points, as this world defined them.

  But before I could help him, Raios let out a horrifying scream, fell to the floor, and perished. Blood still flowed from his stumps, meaning that his life wasn’t yet at zero. Raios had died of some cause that was not the elimination of his life value.

  He had been placed in a quandary where he could either protect his life or uphold the Taboo Index, but not both. Unable to choose, he apparently got stuck in an infinite mental loop, until his very soul self-destructed.

  I imagined that what happened to Quinella when faced with her copy was fundamentally the same. The terror of knowing that someone else possessed all your memories and thought the exact same way must have been beyond imagination.

  For the first few days after I awoke in the forest near Rulid, I was unable to determine beyond a doubt that I was the real Kazuto Kirigaya and not just an artificial fluctlight copied from my mind. Until the moment Selka the church girl helped me confirm I could defy the ultimate set of laws in this land, I had feared that possibility.