Phantom Bullet 1 Read online

  “Oh? Break it down for me.”

  “Well…we’ve got over a hundred claims of virtual asset theft or damage just for November alone. On top of that, thirteen cases of real-life assault stemming from trouble within VR games. One of which led to death…You’ve probably already heard about that one, since it was all over the media—the one with the replica Western-style sword that was honed to an edge, then swung around at Shinjuku Station, killing two. Four feet long and eight pounds, yikes! I don’t know how you swing something like that around.”

  “Apparently he was hallucinating because of the drugs he took to keep him going through all those play sessions. It sounds horrifying when you look at that one case, but while I don’t want to minimize it, if that’s all there is, compared to the big picture…”

  “Yes, exactly. It’s just a tiny fraction of the total number of assault cases nationwide, and it would be silly to suggest a short-sighted conclusion, like VRMMOs are brewing social unrest. But I remember what you said earlier…”

  “That VRMMO games lower the mental barriers to causing others physical harm in the real world. Yes, I’ll admit that,” I said. The waiter appeared without a sound and placed two plates and a cup in front of me.

  “Will that be all for today?”

  I nodded, and he placed the receipt on the corner of the table facedown, so as not to display the shocking total price. I took a sip of the nutty, fragrant coffee and continued.

  “PKing is becoming more and more customary in certain games, and you could see that as a training exercise for real murder. The ones who are really pushing the boundaries even have realistic blood spray for severed veins, and guts that spill out of your stomach. The people who get really obsessed with those even commit suicide as a means of logging out.”

  I heard a cough, and looked over my shoulder to see two high-class ladies glaring at me, aghast. I ducked my head and lowered my voice.

  “It’s not hard to imagine someone who does that every day in their spare time deciding to try it out in real life. I agree that some kind of measures need to be taken. But outlawing it won’t work.”

  “No go?”

  “No go.”

  I carefully scooped up some of the many-layered cake of fine sponge and pink cream with the golden spoon, and lifted it to my mouth. It occurred to me that a single spoonful of this dessert probably cost a hundred yen. The cake practically melted on my tongue.

  “You’d have to completely isolate them on the Net. In terms of the actual bandwidth consumed, VRMMOs are actually fairly lightweight. If you try to crack down domestically, the users and developers will just go overseas.”

  “Hmm…”

  Kikuoka looked down at the table, silent for several seconds.

  “…That mille-feuille looks really good. Can I have a bite?”

  “…”

  I sighed for the third time and pushed the plate over to him. The dignified government employee gleefully tore off about 280 yen of cake and shoved it into his mouth.

  “Well, here’s what I wonder, Kirito…Why do they want to kill each other, rather than get along? Seems like that would be more fun.”

  “…You’ve played a bit of ALfheim Online, so you should understand. Even in the days before full-dive technology came along, MMORPGs have always been about competition. When you have an online game with no set end point, what keeps the players motivated? When you get down to it…they want that instinctual feeling of superiority, of being the best.”

  “Oh?”

  He raised an eyebrow as he chewed, seeking elaboration. I wondered why I had to explain all of this, then vindictively decided to give him what he wanted.

  “It’s not just about video games. Isn’t the desire to be praised and be better than others the cornerstone of our society? You must know that from personal experience. You see other bureaucrats in the ministry who came from better schools, and you’re jealous of their more rapid career success. Meanwhile, it feels good to mingle with those not on the career fast track, and see how much better you have it. You can only stuff yourself with that cake because you’ve found an equilibrium between superiority and inferiority.”

  Kikuoka swallowed the mille-feuille and smiled awkwardly.

  “Wow, you don’t hold back, do you? What about you, Kirito? Have you gotten that equilibrium?”

  “…”

  I had a mountain of an inferiority complex, but I wasn’t going to admit that to him. Instead, I kept a straight face.

  “…Well, I do have a girlfriend.”

  “And in that one sense, I am exceedingly jealous of you, Kirito. Mind introducing me to a girl in ALO sometime? I wouldn’t mind getting to know that sylph leader.”

  “Just to warn you, if you try to hit on her by saying you’re a high-ranking bureaucrat, she’ll cut you in two.”

  “At her hands, I wouldn’t mind. So?”

  “So, it’s extremely difficult to gain that kind of superiority in the real world. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t come without a ton of work. Work to get good grades, work to get better at sports, work to be handsome, or pretty…They all take an incredible amount of time and energy, and they don’t guarantee you any success.”

  “I see. Like how I nearly studied myself to death for college entrance exams, and I didn’t get into Tokyo University,” he said, grinning for some reason. I decided not to crack on him, and got straight to the point instead.

  “But in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game, if you spend your time there at the expense of real life, you’re guaranteed to get stronger. You’ll get rare loot. Sure, it takes effort, but it’s all a game. It’s way more fun than studying or lifting weights. When you walk down the main street of town in your expensive gear and that high-level indicator next to your name, you can feel the jealous stares of the characters weaker than you…or at least, you feel like you do. If you go out to hunt monsters, you can destroy them in one hit with your overwhelming power and save parties in need. Then they thank you and look up to you—”

  “Or at least, it feels that way?”

  “…It’s a one-dimensional view, I admit. There are other facets to MMOs. There have been online games for the purpose of communication above all else for years and years, but they’ve never been a hit the way MMORPGs have.”

  “I see what you’re saying. Because you don’t feel the satisfaction of superiority in those games?”

  “Exactly. Then VRMMOs came along. Now you can actually feel those stares as you walk down the street. You don’t have to imagine them coming through the monitor.”

  “Uh-huh. I’ve seen the jealous looks that you and Asuna get when you stroll through Ygg City.”

  “…Wow, you don’t hold back, do you? At any rate, anyone playing a VRMMO can enjoy that superiority if they sink the time into it. And it’s a kind of superiority that’s simpler, more primitive, and more instinctual than what you get for good grades, or being good at soccer.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “Meaning strength. Physical, muscular strength. The power to destroy your opponent with your own hands. It’s like a drug.”

  “…Strength…The greatest power of all,” Kikuoka murmured nostalgically. “Every boy dreams of having that kind of strength someday…You read a fighting manga, then imagine going through the same training. But once you realize it doesn’t come that easy, you switch dreams to something that’s a little more realistic…You’re saying that in the VRMMO world, you can experience that dream again?”

  I nodded and, after my lengthy speech, quenched my dry throat with a sip of coffee.

  “That’s right. One of the heavy martial arts simulation games is so focused on reality, they formed partnerships with actual martial arts schools.”

  “Oh? Meaning?”

  “Meaning that if you raise your in-game character to a certain level, you can actually be a registered expert in Whatchamacallit Karate, or So-and-So Kung Fu. They set the game in a realistically modeled Shinjuku a
nd Shibuya, and you get to dole out justice to a bunch of unruly thugs. The problem is, it doesn’t teach you the proper mind-set of a martial artist. So anyone who gets completely sucked into that kind of game only goes through the motions, if you will…and sadly, I can’t deny the possibility that some of them will be curious to try out the moves they learned in the real world.”

  “I see…So you’re worried about the presence of strength in a VRMMO bleeding over into reality. Say, Kirito,” Kikuoka said, looking directly into my eyes, “do you really think that’s just a mental thing?”

  “…What do you mean?”

  “Do you think it’s not just lowering the mental hurdles to violence and teaching the player the knowledge and skill to fight…but that it could also be having some kind of physical effect on the bodies of the players?”

  Now it was my turn to stop and think it over.

  “Are you asking if that guy swinging an eight-pound sword in Shinjuku might have earned his arm strength through a game somehow?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “Hmm…Well, I hear that they’ve only just begun studying the long-term effect of the full-dive system on human nerves. I mean, your actual body’s just lying down, so your core strength would obviously fall, but maybe there’s some effect on our ability to tap that subconscious panic strength…Wouldn’t you know that better than me, though?”

  “I did an interview with what they call a cerebro-physiologist, but I didn’t understand a word of it. Now, I know it was a very roundabout way to get to the point, but this is what I wanted to talk to you about. Look at this.”

  Kikuoka tapped at the tablet and showed it to me. I examined the screen and saw a head shot of an unfamiliar man along with a profile containing an address and other details. He had long, unkempt hair, silver-rimmed glasses, and heavy fat around his cheeks and neck.

  “…Who’s this?”

  Kikuoka took the tablet back and traced it with his fingers.

  “Let’s see, it was last month…November fourteenth. At an apartment building in the Nakano Ward of Tokyo, the landlord was cleaning and noticed a funny smell. He narrowed it down to one unit, but there was no response to the intercom or the phone. Yet the lights were on in the apartment. So he undid the electronic lock and entered the apartment to find…Tamotsu Shigemura, age twenty-six, dead. They determined he was dead for five and a half days. The room was cluttered, but not ransacked, and the body was lying on the bed. Around his head was…”

  “An AmuSphere,” I finished, envisioning the full-dive headgear unit made of two metal rings, one of which was in my own room. Kikuoka nodded.

  “That’s right. They contacted the family at once, and had an autopsy performed. The cause of death was sudden cardiac arrest.”

  “Cardiac arrest? Meaning that his heart just stopped working? Why did it stop?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “…”

  “Too much time passed after his death, and the likelihood of criminal involvement was low, so they didn’t bother with a detailed autopsy. The one thing we know is that he hadn’t eaten anything in about two days, and was still logged in.”

  I furrowed my brow again. It wasn’t all that rare to hear stories like this. Eating “food” in the virtual world caused a false sense of fulfillment that lasted several hours, even if the user hadn’t eaten anything in the real world. The ultra-hardcore gamers found that this cut down on food costs and gave them more time to play, so it wasn’t rare to hear about players who only ate one meal every two days.

  Naturally, if that pattern continued, there would be ill effects on the body. Malnutrition was an obvious outcome, and if you had a seizure while living alone, unable to care for yourself…the natural outcome was much like this case. It happened from time to time.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and said a silent prayer for Shigemura, then opened my mouth.

  “It is very sad, but…”

  “Exactly. It’s sad, but common nowadays. This kind of death isn’t news anymore, and it’s hard to get a tally because families don’t want people to know about them dying while in a game. In a way, this is also a case of VRMMOs contributing to the death numbers…”

  “But you didn’t bring me out here just to talk about ordinary cases, did you? What really happened here?”

  Kikuoka took another glance at the tablet before answering.

  “There was only one VR game installed on Shigemura’s AmuSphere—Gun Gale Online. Have you heard of it?”

  “Well, of course. It’s the only MMO in Japan that has pro players. I’ve never tried it myself.”

  “He was apparently the very top player in Gun Gale Online, which they abbreviate to GGO. He won a tournament they held to determine the very best back in October. Player name: Zexceed.”

  “So…was he logged in to GGO when he died?”

  “Actually, he wasn’t. He was in character as Zexceed while appearing on the MMO Stream online channel.”

  “Oh…on This Week’s Winners, then. Now that you mention it, I seem to recall a story about a time they had to cancel an episode because the guest dropped out partway…”

  “That’s probably the one. He had the heart attack in the middle of the program. We know the time down to the second, thanks to the recorded log. Now, as far as what we haven’t been able to confirm yet, there’s a very strange blog post someone put up about an event that happened in GGO right at the same time.”

  “Strange?”

  “You know how MMO Stream plays even within the world of GGO?”

  “Yeah, they air it in pubs and places like that.”

  “Well, it was being streamed in a bar within SBC Glocken, the capital city in the world of GGO. And at exactly the time in question, they reported that a player was acting very strangely.”

  “…”

  “Seems he fired his gun at the image of Zexceed on the TV, shouting about judgment and that he needed to die and so on. One of the other players at the scene just happened to be in the process of a sound recording, and he uploaded it to a video site. The file had a Japan Standard Time readout on it, and according to that, he fired at the TV at precisely…eleven thirty PM and two seconds, November ninth. And Shigemura suddenly disappeared from the program at eleven thirty and fifteen seconds.”

  “…Gotta be a coincidence,” I said, pulling the other plate in front of me.

  I split the brown, circular object with my spoon and took a bite. The chill of the dessert caught me by surprise; I’d thought it was a cake, but it was some kind of ice cream. My mouth was filled with a rich chocolate flavor with only the barest level of sweetness, the bitterness only amplifying the unpleasant nature of Kikuoka’s story.

  Once I’d tucked away about a third of the dish, I continued.

  “The jealousy and hate the best player in GGO gets has to be far and away worse than any other MMO. It would take some guts to fire a gun at him directly, but it doesn’t seem that crazy that someone would shoot a TV.”

  “Right, but there’s another one.”

  “…What?”

  The spoon stopped halfway to my mouth. Kikuoka still wore his excellent poker face.

  “This one happened about ten days ago, on November twenty-eighth. Another body found in a two-floor apartment building, this time in Omiya Ward of the city of Saitama. A door-to-door newspaper salesman got angry that there was no response despite the lights being on, and thought the resident was ignoring him, so he turned the knob and found that it was unlocked. Inside he saw another person on their bed, AmuSphere in place, with a decomposing smell…”

  A very intentional cough interrupted our conversation, and Kikuoka and I looked over to see the same two ladies staring at us with the power of floating beholders. Kikuoka had nerves of steel, though, and gave them a slight bow before continuing his story.

  “…Putting aside the state of the body, it was once again determined to be heart failure. This one was…well, the name doesn’t matter. Male, age thirty-one
. Another influential player in GGO. His character name was…Usujio Tarako? ‘Lightly Salted Cod Roe’? Is that right?”

  “There was a guy in SAO named Hokkai Ikura, meaning ‘North Sea Salmon Roe,’ so maybe he was a relative. And was this Tarako on TV as well?”

  “No, this one was actually in the game. Based on the AmuSphere’s log, the signal died about three days before the body was found, at exactly ten o’clock and four seconds PM, November twenty-fifth. That about lines up with the estimated time of death. At the time he was at a meeting with his squadron—that’s what they call guilds, apparently—in the central square of Glocken. As he was delivering a fiery speech on the pulpit, a player invaded the meeting and shot at him. You don’t take damage in town, from what I understand, but when he turned to yell at the intruder, he just dropped offline. Of course, this information comes from a message board, so it’s hard to get an accurate picture…”

  “Was the player who came up firing the same one as with Zexceed?”

  “I think we can assume so. Said something about judgment and power, and dropped the same name as the previous time.”

  “…Which was?”

  Kikuoka looked at the tablet and squinted.

  “Looks like…Death Gun.”

  “Death…Gun…”

  I put the spoon down on the empty plate and let the name echo inside my head. A character’s name, no matter how goofy it might sound, was a huge part of the first impression you gave to others. The name Death Gun suggested the coldness of black metal to me.

  “And you’re certain that it was cardiac arrest that both Zexceed and Usujio Tarako died of?”

  “Meaning?”

  “There wasn’t any…damage to their brains?”

  The instant I said it, Kikuoka grinned in understanding.

  “I wondered about that myself, and I asked the doctors who performed the autopsies, but they didn’t find any bleeding or blockage in the brain that suggested any kind of abnormality.”

  “…”

  “Besides, with the NerveGear—er, do you mind if I bring that up?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “With the NerveGear, when it killed its user, it sent a flash of microwave power that was so powerful it burned out the emitters and destroyed a part of the brain. But the AmuSphere was built so that it couldn’t emit waves that strong. The developers swear that it only sends exceedingly low-level information signals to the sensory center of the brain.”