Alicization Lasting Read online

  “How long will the reactor fuel last?” said the voice, rather unexpectedly. Higa blinked in surprise.

  “Uh…well, that’s a pressurized water reactor for submarines, so…if it’s just maintaining the cluster, another four or five years, maybe…”

  “Then roughly speaking, for that time, there is no need to replenish the fuel. In other words, as long as we prevent interference from the outside, the Underworld will continue to exist, correct?”

  “P-prevent interference…? The Ocean Turtle doesn’t have any weapons systems to begin with!”

  “I said that I would fight,” said the voice, quiet and gentle, but with a steel edge.

  “F…fight…? But the satellite connection is down, and we can’t even contact the Ocean Turtle…”

  “There is a line. There must be.”

  “Wh-where?!” Higa said, leaning forward. The answer was not what he expected to hear.

  “Heathcliff…Akihiko Kayaba. We need his power. First we must search for him. I trust…we’ll have your help?”

  “K…Kayaba…?!”

  That man was dead now…In fact, he’d died twice.

  The first time was at the retreat in Nagano. The second time was in the engine room of the Ocean Turtle.

  But Niemon’s mechanical body, where Akihiko Kayaba’s thought-mimicking program was lurking, had vanished from the ship.

  “He’s still…alive…?” Higa gasped. He was in a daze—he had completely forgotten about checking on the timer at the top of the window.

  What was going to happen?

  Former archenemies, a copy of Akihiko Kayaba and a copy of Kazuto Kirigaya. If these two ever came into contact…what would happen?

  Maybe…I’ve actually opened some kind of horrible Pandora’s box…

  But the trepidation lasted for only a moment in his mind before it was pushed out by a cavalcade of excitement.

  I want to see that. I want to know what will happen.

  Higa inhaled deeply, exhaled, then said, “All right. I’ve got a few old contacts…I’ll try sending out some encrypted messages…”

  There was no going back now.

  Higa squeezed his eyes shut, wiped his sweaty palms on his T-shirt, then began to type furiously at his keyboard.

  On the monitor, the massive glowing cloud that stretched beyond the boundary of the window frame flickered and pulsed periodically, gently observing the movements of Higa’s fingertips.

  7

  I looked around my room for the first time in two whole months.

  A very plain computer desk and wall rack. A pipe-frame bed and simple curtains.

  I would have found it nostalgic…if I hadn’t been put off by how barren it all was. In subjective terms, it had actually been two years and eight months since I was last in here—I’d spent two and a half years in the Underworld.

  My room at the North Centoria Imperial Swordcraft Academy had had heavy wooden furniture, beautiful carpet, painting frames, flower arrangements, and all manner of pleasing and comfortable details. And of course, I’d always had Ronie, Tiese…and Eugeo’s smile nearby.

  Though they were just memories now, a painful and vivid sting hit my chest and put a lump into my throat.

  I dropped my bag full of clothes onto the floor and walked a few steps to sit down on the bed. I lay down on my side and smelled the fresh linen of the sheets. They must have just been cleaned.

  I closed my eyes.

  I heard a faint voice.

  If you’re going to nap, you should finish your sacred arts lesson first. Or are you going to copy mine again?

  Oh, listen, I added a wrinkle to that technique you taught me. Let’s go to the training hall later.

  Hey, you snuck out to buy sweets again! You’d better have some for me!

  C’mon, wake up, Kirito.

  Kirito…

  I rolled over slowly and buried my face in the pillow.

  Then I did something I’d been resisting ever since I woke up in the Roppongi lab.

  I clutched my sheets, gritted my teeth, and cried. I bawled like a baby, the tears coming and coming, my body shaking.

  Why…?

  Why couldn’t I have had all my memories removed?!

  All of those two and a half years, starting from waking up in the forest, walking along the brook, hearing the ax, and meeting that boy at the foot of the great black tree!

  I cried and cried and cried, and still the tears wouldn’t stop.

  At last, there came a soft knocking on my door.

  I didn’t reply. The knob turned, and I heard quiet footsteps. My face was still pressed into the pillow. Then the bed sank a little.

  Fingers hesitantly stroked my hair.

  I didn’t want to lift my head. A voice spoke that was gentle and soft but with a firm insistence at its core.

  “Tell me, Big Brother. Tell me what happened there—the fun things, the sad things, all of it.”

  “………”

  I held my silence for a few moments more. Eventually, I turned my face to the right and, through teary vision, saw Suguha—my only sister—smiling at me.

  I was back. Back home. With my family.

  The past gets further away, and the present continues. Onward and forward.

  I shut my eyes, wiped the tears, and through trembling lips said, “When I first met him…right at the start, in the deepest part of the woods…he was just a lumberjack. It’s impossible to believe, but they’d spent generations—over three hundred years—trying to cut down a single cedar tree…”

  It was August 16th, 2026, when I finished my physical therapy and returned home to Kawagoe in Saitama Prefecture. I spent that entire night telling Suguha about the things that had happened in the Underworld.

  The next morning, I was awakened by a phone call.

  It was an alert that Alice had vanished from Rath’s Roppongi office.

  Monday, August 17th, nine AM.

  “V…vanished?! Like…electronically speaking?!” I said into the phone, dressed in my nightwear of a T-shirt and boxers.

  Dr. Koujiro was on the other end of the line. She kept her voice level, but there was clearly a considerable amount of anxiety in it. “No…I mean her entire machine body. According to security footage, she undid the security locks herself at nine o’clock last night and snuck past the guards to get outside.”

  “All by herself…?” I asked, letting out the breath I’d been holding.

  There were enough formal organizations and loose groups in Japan who did not think highly of Alice that you couldn’t count them on just two hands. Beyond that, I couldn’t begin to guess how many individuals might seek to destroy her for practical, religious, moral, or emotional reasons. She didn’t have a sword or sacred arts to defend herself; if someone like that captured her now, she would be helpless.

  Rath had upped their security protocol at Roppongi to fortress-like tightness in recognition of the danger. The one thing they hadn’t counted on, apparently, was Alice vanishing on her own.

  The only other question was why Alice would do such a thing. I recalled something I’d heard her mumble a week earlier, right before our voice chat was cut off when I was in ALO.

  With great distress, Dr. Koujiro said, “I was worried that we were putting too much stress on Alice. But every time I asked her ‘Are you tired? Do you need a break?’ she would just smile and shake her head…”

  “Well…of course. She’s a proud and noble knight—she would never admit weakness to anyone.”

  “Except for you, that is. Kirigaya, I think that she’s going to contact you. So…I hate to ask this, considering that you just got out of the hospital, but…”

  As she trailed off, I stepped in and said, “Yes, of course, I understand. If I hear from Alice, I’ll rush to her location. But, Doctor…is it even possible for her to get that far?”

  “That’s what we’re worried about. On her internal battery, a full charge will last for about eight hours of walking, and half
of that if she runs. If her power runs out somewhere around Roppongi…and some unfriendly person happens across her…”

  “And she does stick out,” I noted, grimacing. That was another thing to worry about: Alice’s bright-blond hair, pure and pale skin, and painstakingly crafted features made her quite visible in a crowd, even before you got to the robot part.

  “We have every available employee out searching the area now. We’re tracking Internet posts, too, and even have a bot infiltrating public camera networks and looking at the recordings.”

  “Then I’ll just go to the office for now. If anything happens, I want to be able to get there ASAP.”

  “That would be a great help. Thank you, Kirigaya,” she said and promptly hung up.

  I pulled a random outfit out of the closet; stuck my arms and legs through it; grabbed my backpack, smartphone, and motorcycle key; and rushed out of my room.

  Down the stairs, the first floor was quiet. My dad and mom were on vacation for the Obon holiday and had gone somewhere together, and Suguha was probably at morning kendo-club practice. We were supposed to be celebrating my discharge from the hospital as a family tonight, but this was more important.

  I chugged some orange juice straight from the bottle while standing by the fridge, popped the bagel sandwich Suguha must have left for me into my mouth, and raced for the door. I stuck my feet into my riding shoes and was just turning the doorknob when the intercom right next to me on the wall rang.

  My heart nearly skipped a beat. Had Alice somehow found a way to get to my location on her own?

  “Ali…”

  I opened the unlocked door, the name catching in my throat.

  Instead, it was a young man in the blue uniform and cap of one of the major delivery companies. It was exquisitely bad timing, but I couldn’t help but notice the beads of sweat on his face as he said “Hello, home delivery!” so I couldn’t just ask him to come back later.

  I leaned over to grab the official family stamp left on top of the shoe cubbies to stamp his shipping forms, but then he delivered the bad news: “Payment on delivery!”

  “Oh…right.”

  I started to get my wallet out of the backpack but then remembered that this world had a convenient thing called electronic funds. Instead, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and held it up to the tablet the man was carrying.

  “Thanks!” he said, trotting off. I took a look at the box he’d left in the doorway.

  It was surprisingly large. The cardboard box had to be over two feet to a side. If it wasn’t perishable, I was going to leave it and continue on my way, but I checked the sender just in case. It was labeled ELECTRONIC GOODS. And the sender…

  “What…?”

  OCEANIC RESOURCE EXPLORATION & RESEARCH INSTITUTION. That had to be one of the shipping labels they kept around the Roppongi Rath office. My address was right there in the destination field. I didn’t recognize the awkwardly angular handwriting.

  If Dr. Koujiro had sent this, she would have mentioned it in the call. So perhaps it had come from Kikuoka or Higa. Which would mean…it was some kind of electronics related to the Underworld or the STL?

  I bit my lip, made up my mind, and reached for the edge of the tape seal, carefully peeling it off. Then I lifted the two flaps out to the side, and…

  “…Aaaaah!!”

  …screamed in horror.

  Packed tightly into the box, bent at awkward, unnatural angles, were human hands and feet. I bolted backward, eyes bulging, and then screamed a second time.

  “Eyaaaaaa?!”

  In the shadows beneath the hands and feet, a single eye stared back at me.

  I flopped backward, but my right hand was still holding the edge of the cardboard box. A pale hand reached up out of the box and grabbed my wrist.

  Before I could scream a third time, an annoyed voice said, “Stop making noise and pull me out already, Kirito.”

  Three minutes later, I was sitting on the lip of the wood floor in our entranceway, holding my head in my hands.

  I was valiantly attempting to come to grips with the real-life actualization of that trope from popular fiction, “beautiful girl robot delivered to your door.” But it was not going well.

  “…I can’t!!” I shouted, giving up and jumping to my feet.

  I turned around to see a beautiful girl robot dressed in a familiar uniform rubbing the pillar in the hallway with a finger out of great curiosity.

  Eventually, the robot—Electroactive Muscled Operative Machine #3—housing a true bottom-up AI, the third-ranked Integrity Knight of the Axiom Church, Alice Synthesis Thirty, smiled at me.

  “This house is built of wood,” she said. “It’s just like the house in the woods of Rulid. But much, much larger.”

  “Ah…yeah…It’s probably been around for seventy or eighty years,” I said weakly.

  Her blue eyes widened. “I am amazed that its life lasts for so long! They must have used quite a mighty tree…”

  “I suppose…I mean…Hang on!”

  I stomped across the hallway, grabbed Alice by the shoulder, and tried to ask her what the hell was going on, when she gave me a smile like a flower blooming.

  “Speaking of life, might I recover the life of this steel-element body? Let’s see…I believe that in your words, it is called ‘recharging.’”

  Allow me to elaborate on my earlier point: beautiful girl robot delivered to your door who recharges using a standard home power socket.

  While I’d been away in the Underworld, the real world had apparently advanced quite a ways into the future.

  “Oh…you need to recharge…? Go ahead, take as much as you need…,” I said, prodding her shoulder toward the living room.

  She pulled a charging cable out of her uniform pocket; stuck one end into her left hip, near the waist, and the other end into the wall socket; then sat on the sofa with her back perfectly upright. From there, she continued to swivel her head, looking around.

  I guess I should make some tea for her, I thought, getting up—and then I realized that Alice couldn’t eat or drink anything here. I was still rattled by this experience, I could tell.

  The best way to calm down would be to solve some of the more basic questions, so I asked, “Um…first of all, can you tell me how exactly you pulled off the feat of putting yourself through the mail…?”

  The golden-haired, blue-eyed girl shrugged her shoulders as if this was a very stupid question and said, “It was simple.”

  According to her, she found pay-on-delivery shipping forms, packing tape, and a reinforced cardboard box at the Roppongi office, and then she made sure the security cameras recorded her leaving her living quarters.

  Later, she put the box together away from the view of the camera at the entrance, filled out the shipping form with my address, pasted it on, then undid the joint locks of her body and got inside the box. She placed the tape on just one side of the top lid, then pulled it down from the inside to seal it and ran another line of tape on the underside for reinforcement.

  Then she sent a message to the shipping company, announcing a package for pickup. The deliveryman would have stopped at the security gate, but the message was sent from the building’s premises, and the package was there at the entrance. Without realizing that a beautiful robot was hiding inside, the courier redid the insufficient tape job and placed the box in his truck, where it waited until it was delivered in Kawagoe, Saitama, the next morning…

  “……I see……,” I murmured, sinking back into the sofa.

  Now it made sense that they hadn’t been able to track her. She hadn’t actually taken a step outside the Roppongi building. What was most surprising to me wasn’t the sophistication of the trick but the fact that Alice had come up with the idea after spending only a month in the real world. When I brought that up, the uniformed girl just shrugged again.

  “When I was a newly minted novice knight, I once snuck out of the cathedral and went to visit the city.”

  “�
��I…I see.”

  What would happen once Alice was intimately familiar with information technology? She could dive into virtual spaces without an AmuSphere; in a way, she was already a child of the network.

  But I pushed that frightening thought aside and sat up on the couch. It was time to get to the real question.

  “But…Alice, why did you do this? If you just wanted to visit my home, you could have told Dr. Rinko, and she would have set aside time for you.”

  “I suppose so. She is a good person…She is very concerned for my well-being. And therefore, if she had given me the chance to visit your home, it would have been with a small squadron of men-at-arms in black.”

  Her long, delicate eyelashes lowered. It was hard to believe that they were artificial.

  “…I feel bad that I essentially fled from there. I’m sure that Dr. Rinko is very worried and searching for me now. I will make whatever apologies are necessary when I return. But…I just wanted this bit of time very badly. Time to be with you…not in an assumed form, but in your real body, face-to-face, where we can speak to each other alone.”

  Her large blue eyes were staring right into me. I knew that they were just optical devices made of CMOS image sensors and sapphire lenses, but there was something breathtakingly beautiful about them. Perhaps it was the light of her fluctlight itself, shining through the brief circuit to those eyes.

  Alice stood up in one smooth motion, motors whirring quietly. She rounded the glass table and approached me, step by step.

  Then the charging cable plugged into the wall went taut, preventing her from walking farther. A faint look of frustration settled over her features.

  I breathed in deep and stood up as well. Two steps put me right in front of Alice.

  Her eyes burned and flickered with intent, just below the level of mine. Her lips moved, emitting a voice that was sweet and clear, but with a slightly electronic aspect to it.

  “Kirito. I am angry.”

  I didn’t have to ask her what she was upset about. “Yes…I suppose you are.”