3

What an unbelievable thing they’ve built.

The machine was created with data she’d provided herself, and yet Rinko Koujiro couldn’t help but marvel at it.

On the other side of the thick glass wall, two massive cuboid shapes loomed, nearly tall enough to reach the ceiling. Their exterior was plain aluminum sheeting, but that dull gray shine only accentuated their mechanical nature. They were several times larger than even the Medicuboid, to say nothing of the NerveGear apparatus.

Naturally, there were no manufacturer logos, just a simple English font on the side reading SOUL TRANSLATOR, as well as large numerals designating unit numbers. The machine on the left was 4 and the one on the right was 5. The soul-reading devices were right there in view at last, and Rinko gazed at them for nearly half a minute before she finally spoke.

“Four…? So that’s the fourth one? And the other is Unit Five?”

It was the only way to interpret the numbers, and yet there were only two machines in the clean room on the other side of the glass. A hushed voice on her right began to explain.

“Test Unit One is at our Roppongi branch office, utilizing a satellite connection. Units Two and Three are also on the Ocean Turtle, but as you can see from their size, there isn’t enough room here. They’re located in the lower shaft. Or, more accurately, Units Four and Five couldn’t fit down there, which is why they’re here in the upper shaft.”

The voice belonged to the person who had guided Rinko and Asuna here, but it was not Kikuoka, Higa, or Lieutenant Nakanishi. It was not even a man. She wore a white uniform over her tall, shapely body, flat-soled slip-on shoes, and the distinctive hat of a nurse.

It was strange to imagine a nurse in a place like this, but given the sheer size of the ship, there would naturally be an infirmary somewhere and medical staff to operate it.

The nurse, who sported braided hair and rimless glasses, tapped her tablet device and turned it to show Rinko. It displayed a cross-section map of the Ocean Turtle. Her finely trimmed nails traced a vertical line through the center of the craft.

“There is a reinforced tube at the center of the pyramid that we call the ‘main shaft.’ It’s about sixty feet across and over three hundred feet deep. Not only does it support each of the floors of the ship deck, it’s also the barrier that separates and protects our most sensitive and crucial capabilities. That includes the control system for the ship itself and the core of the Alicization project—the four STLs and the Lightcube Cluster that serves as its mainframe.”

“Ah…So what makes them upper and lower shafts, then?”

“A barrier wall made of the same titanium alloy as the vertical walls splits the main shaft horizontally. So the space above the barrier is the upper shaft, and the space below is the lower shaft. We’re currently in Control Room Two, located in the upper shaft. The staff calls this one Subcon for short.”

“I see. So I’m guessing that Control Room One down in the lower shaft is normally called Maincon?”

“Very perceptive, Dr. Koujiro,” the nurse said with a smile.

Rinko turned to her left toward the silent girl. Asuna Yuuki had her hands pressed to the glass as she gazed intently at Unit Four. Specifically, at the boy lying on the gel bed connected to the base of Unit Four.

There were a number of monitoring electrodes under his white hospital wear and a micro-injector placed in his left arm. His face was out of sight, swallowed above the shoulder by the STL. But Asuna could tell that he was Kazuto Kirigaya, the boy she sought.

She had eyes only for Kazuto, showing no sign that she noticed Rinko’s attention. Eventually, her long eyelashes lowered, and her lips moved without sound. A little drop grew at the corner of her eye, trembling in place without falling.

Rinko tried to say something, anything that could comfort Asuna, but to her surprise, the nurse spoke first. “It’s all right, Asuna. I’m sure that he will come back to us.”

She strode forward to Asuna’s side and reached out to the girl’s shoulder, but Asuna turned to avoid the touch, brushed aside her tears, and put on a confrontational attitude.

“Of course he will. But…why are you here, too, Ms. Aki?”

“What…? You know each other?” Rinko asked, surprised.

Asuna nodded. “Yes, she was the nurse at the hospital in Chiyoda. I don’t know what she’s doing out here on the open sea, though.”

“I’m taking care of Kirigaya, of course.”

“What about your job? Or was the nurse thing just a front, like with Mr. Kikuoka?” Asuna accused. The nurse named Aki grinned and shrugged, totally unfazed.

“No. Unlike his little disguise, I really am a nurse with national credentials. It just so happens that I graduated from SDF Tokyo Hospital Nursing School.”

“…That explains many things,” Asuna said.

Rinko was still unsure. “Umm, I’m afraid I don’t quite understand…What kind of person is this Ms. Aki?”

“Well, it’s true that she’s a nurse. It’s just that there’s more to the story than that,” Asuna explained. “As a basic rule, nurses who graduate from the school attached to the SDF hospital then go on to work at SDF hospitals. Yet she was looking after victims of the SAO Incident at the hospital in Chiyoda. Which means that Mr. Kikuoka had something to do with that. Correct?”

“Very perceptive, Asuna,” Aki said, repeating the compliment she had given Rinko just a minute earlier.

Asuna glared at the tall nurse and added, “One more thing. I read in the school’s career guidance materials that registering at the SDF hospital’s nursing school is essentially treated like joining the SDF itself. So doesn’t that mean that in addition to being a nurse, you’re also—?”

Nurse Aki slashed her hand out, cutting off Asuna’s question. She then lifted it to her forehead in a crisp salute.

“Sergeant First Class Natsuki Aki, on duty! Kirigaya’s physical health and general well-being are under my jurisdiction! Tee-hee…” she said with a little wink.

Asuna stared at her, half in shock and half annoyed. She sighed and bowed her head. “Please be good to him.” Then she turned back toward STL Unit Four and gazed at the boy lying on the gel bed, just ten feet away, yet out of reach behind the glass. “You’ll come back…won’t you, Kirito?” she mumbled.

Nurse Aki bobbed her head and actually got a hand on Asuna’s shoulder this time. “Of course he will. His neural network is repairing as planned, so it won’t be long before he wakes up. Plus…he’s the hero who beat SAO, after all.”

Those words brought a sharp, prickling pain to Rinko’s chest. She took a deep breath to numb the sensation, then walked forward to Asuna’s other side and looked up at the massive machine.

Eight o’clock PM.

Rinko looked up from her wristwatch and summoned the determination to press the metal button marked CALL. Within a few seconds, the speaker next to the door replied, “Yes?”

“It’s me, Koujiro. May I talk with you for a bit?”

“Hang on, I’ll open the door.”

The intercom panel’s light changed from red to green, and the motorized door slid open.

Rinko walked into the room. Asuna bowed in greeting from her position next to the bed; there was a remote control in her hand. The door shut behind Rinko, and the lock clicked into place.

The cabin interior was exactly the same as Rinko’s across the hallway. The standard-size room was lined with off-white resin paneling and contained only a fixed bed, table, and sofa, plus one small computer for accessing the ship’s network. While escorting them here, Lieutenant Nakanishi had described them as “first-class cabins,” so Rinko had envisioned some kind of luxury cruise suite, but apparently the only thing that defined these as first-class was the presence of a small private bathroom.

The one difference in Asuna’s room was a narrow window on the other side of the bed, meaning it was positioned along the outer edge of the Ocean Turtle, where the generator panels were. They had climbed several floors on the elevator, so the sunset view through that window would have been gorgeous, but it was now pitch-black outside. The cloud layer hid even the stars from view.

“Please, sit down,” Asuna said.

Rinko set down the bottles of oolong tea she had bought from the vending machine next to the elevator and sat on the stiff sofa. She very nearly let out a “Hoo-boy!” when she bent down. Rinko considered herself to be young, but in the presence of the dazzling beauty of Asuna in her T-shirt and short pants, she felt acutely conscious of her approaching thirties.

“Go ahead, have some tea,” she offered, pushing one of the bottles forward.

Asuna tipped her head and smiled. “Thank you, I was just feeling thirsty.”

“Did you give the tap water a try?” Rinko smirked. The girl rolled her eyes.

“It made the water in Tokyo taste good.”

“Well, it’s made from desalinated seawater, so at the very least, you don’t have to worry about those carcinogenic disinfectants. It might even be better for you than those bottles of deep-sea water they sell at the store. Still, one mouthful was enough for me.”

She twisted off the cap of the tea bottle and took a deep swig of the cold liquid. She would have preferred a good beer, but she’d have to travel down to the cafeteria for that.

Rinko exhaled and glanced at Asuna again. “It’s too bad you couldn’t get a look at his face.”

“Still, he seemed like he was doing well to me. Maybe he was having an enjoyable dream,” Asuna said with a smile. It was as though the panic that had gripped her the last few days had finally run its course.

“You’ve got a real headache of a boyfriend, kid. Going ghost on you, popping up on a cruise in subtropical seas…You’d better get a collar around his neck.”

“I’ll look into it.” Asuna chuckled. She inclined her head deeply toward Rinko. “I’m so grateful to you, Dr. Koujiro. I can’t believe you indulged this crazy request of mine…There’s no way I can ever properly thank you.”

“Oh, stop it. Just call me Rinko. Besides, this is just a drop in the bucket for what I did to Kirigaya and you,” she said, shaking her head. She summoned her courage and stared Asuna right in the eyes. “There’s something…I need to tell you. Not just you…Everyone who was stuck in SAO…”

“…”

Rinko made certain not to break away from Asuna’s direct gaze. She sucked in a deep breath, exhaled, and undid two buttons on her cotton shirt. She lifted a silver necklace out of the way of the gap to expose a diagonal surgical scar to the left of her sternum.

“Do you know…what this scar is from?”

Asuna stared unflinchingly at the spot directly above Rinko’s heart. Eventually, her head bobbed. “Yes. It’s the spot where the remote-detonation micro-bomb was implanted, wasn’t it? That’s how the guild leader—Akihiko Kayaba—was able to keep you in line for two years.”

“Correct…That’s how he forced me to participate in his awful project and manage his physical body while he was in that long-term dive…At least, according to the rest of society. That’s how I avoided prosecution or having my identity made public, and I got to escape to America…”

Rinko put her necklace and shirt back in place, then summoned the courage to continue. “But the truth is different. The explosive they detected at the police hospital was real, and it could have gone off. But I knew that it wouldn’t. It was just camouflage. He put that weapon inside me as a bluff, to ensure that I wouldn’t be tried for my part in the scheme after it was all said and done. It was the only present he ever gave me.”

Asuna’s expression never changed. Her pure, clear eyes seemed to penetrate to the deepest layers of Rinko’s heart. Staring, ever staring.

“Kayaba and I started dating my first year of college, and we were together for six years, until I finished my master’s. But…I suppose I was the only one who believed that. I was older than you are now but far, far stupider. I had no idea what was going on in his mind. I never, ever realized the one thing that he really wanted.”

She glanced out the window at the endless night sea and slowly, bit by bit, began to utter the things that she’d been holding in for the last four years. The name that had brought a sharp pain to her chest just at its recollection slid out of her mouth with surprising ease.

Akihiko Kayaba was already in charge of Argus’s third development team when he went straight into one of the most prestigious engineering schools in Japan. As a high schooler, he had sublicensed a number of game-creation programs that had launched Argus from being a third-tier company to an internationally renowned one, so it wasn’t hard to believe that he’d be placed in a management position there soon after beginning college.

Kayaba’s income at age eighteen was said to be in the hundreds of millions of yen, and the sum total of all his licensing fees thus far had to be astronomical. Inevitably, a number of female students on campus had gone after him in their own ways, but none of them could withstand the liquid-nitrogen gaze that he turned upon anything that did not pique his interest.

So even now, Rinko didn’t understand what it was about a plain, boring, younger girl from the mountains that Kayaba did not reject immediately. Because she was totally unaware of his fame? Because she was smart enough to take part in the Shigemura seminar as a first-year, when he was a year older than her? It was obvious it wasn’t just a physical attraction.

Rinko’s first impression of Kayaba was of a malnourished bean sprout. His face was pale, he wore a ratty old lab coat, and he was almost never seen without observation devices of some kind attached to him. The memory of the day that she’d dragged him to the beaches of Shonan in her little beater car was so vivid, it might as well have been yesterday.

“Some ideas won’t occur to ya till ya see the sun!” she had scolded him in her accent from back home. Kayaba just stared at her in a daze from the passenger seat. Eventually, he had muttered something about needing to emulate the skin sensation of natural sunlight. She had groaned.

It wasn’t until later that she learned about Kayaba’s celebrity, but she wasn’t socially skilled enough to be able to treat him differently because of it. To her, he was just a scrawny guy who needed more nutrition, and every time she visited his apartment, she made sure to feed him some home-cooked food.

Afterward, Rinko often asked herself if the reason he never rejected her was because he wanted her help, and she just never realized it. But every time, she decided the answer was no. Akihiko Kayaba was a man who never sought anything from anyone else. All he wanted was a “world away from here,” the door to a realm that mere mortals could not reach.

Kayaba spoke a few times about a gigantic flying castle in his dreams. That castle was made of countless floors, with each floor containing its own towns, forests, and fields. If you climbed up the long staircases that connected floor to floor, you would eventually reach the top and a dreamlike, beautiful palace…

“And who is there?” Rinko had asked.

Kayaba had smiled and said he didn’t know. “When I was very small, I went to that castle every night in my dreams. Each night, I would climb a different set of stairs, getting closer and closer to the top. But one day, I was no longer able to go there. It was a stupid dream; I almost forgot all about it.”

But the day after Rinko finished her master’s thesis, he left on a journey to that castle in the sky and never came back. He made the castle real with only his own hands, taking ten thousand players up with him and leaving Rinko alone on earth…

“When I found out about the SAO Incident on the news and saw Kayaba’s name and face on the report, I still couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t until I drove past his apartment and saw all the cop cars there that I understood it was real.”

Rinko felt an ache in her throat; it had been ages since she had talked continuously for this long.

“He never said anything to me, all the way to the end. Not a single e-mail when he left. I guess…I was just stupid. I helped with the basic design of the NerveGear, and I knew about the game he was building at Argus. And somehow, I never realized what he was thinking about…When he went missing, and all of Japan was going crazy searching for him, it took a miracle for me to remember. Somehow, I recalled that I had once noticed a strange set of coordinates in the mountains of Nagano in his car nav history. Instinctively, I knew that was the place. If I’d told the police about it right then and there, the SAO Incident might have played out differently…”

Perhaps, if the police had stormed that cabin, Kayaba would have killed all those players with him, as he had originally threatened. But Rinko sensed that it wasn’t her place to say that aloud.

“I evaded police detection and went to Nagano alone. It took me three days to reach the cabin itself, using nothing but my own memory. I was completely covered in mud by the time I found it…But I wasn’t going to those desperate lengths so that I could be his accomplice. I…I was going to kill him.”

Kayaba had greeted her with a look of total bewilderment, the same expression he wore when they had first met. She could still recall the sensation of the heavy, cold survival knife in the hand she held behind her back.

“But…I’m sorry, Asuna. I couldn’t kill him.”

Her voice trembled despite her best efforts, but at least she managed not to cry.

“I feel like anything I say after this will only sound like a lie, no matter how I phrase it. Kayaba knew I was holding a knife. He just said, ‘What am I going to do with you?’ like he always did, put the NerveGear back on, and returned to Aincrad. He’d been in his dive all along, so he was filthy and unshaven, and I saw several IV marks in his arm. I…I…”

Rinko couldn’t go on. She could only breathe, over and over.

Eventually, Asuna said, “Neither I, nor Kirito, have ever once hated or blamed you.”

Rinko looked up with a start into the face of the girl ten years her junior. There was a faint smile there.

“In fact…while I can’t speak for Kirito in this regard, I’ll admit…I don’t even know for certain if I truly hate the guild commander…er, Akihiko Kayaba.”

Rinko recalled that Asuna had been a member of Kayaba’s guild in that fantasy world.

“Yes, it’s true that four thousand people lost their lives in that event. Imagining the sum of all their fear and despair before they died…makes it clear that his actions were unforgivable. But…if I can voice my own very selfish opinion, I think of the short time I spent with Kirito in that world as the very best memories of my life,” Asuna said. Her left hand moved to her waist, making a squeezing motion. “Just as he is guilty of his sin, so am I; and Kirito; and even you, Rinko…And it is not a sin that can be absolved through someone else’s idea of punishment, in my opinion. There might never be a day of forgiveness for them. And that means we must continue to face those sins and acknowledge them.”

That night, Rinko dreamed of that long-lost time—when she was just an ignorant student.

Kayaba always slept lightly and got up before Rinko. He had slipped out of bed to read the morning paper with a cup of coffee. Once the sun was up, Rinko awoke at last. He gave her the exasperated look of a parent to a child who slept in.

“What am I going to do with you? I can’t believe you came all this way.”

The sound of that gentle voice caused Rinko’s eyes to peel open. She got the sense that a tall figure was standing next to her bed in the dark.

“It’s still the middle of the night…” she grumbled with a grin, and closed her eyes again. The air shifted, and crisp footsteps proceeded toward the door, which she heard open and shut.

Just before she could slip back into sleep, Rinko gasped and shot up to a sitting position.

“!!”

Her pleasant slumber was gone in an instant, her heart pounding away in her chest like an alarm. She couldn’t tell where the dream ended and reality had started. She reached around for the remote to turn on the lights.

The windowless cabin was empty, of course. But Rinko could sense the last vestiges of some human scent.

She got out of bed and hurried barefoot to the door, smacking the control panel hastily to disengage the lock and rush through the opening to the hallway.

The interior corridor, bathed in dim orange light, was empty as far as she could see in both directions.

Was I just dreaming…?

But she could still hear that low, soft voice in her ears. Without realizing it, Rinko clutched the locket she always wore around her neck.

Brazed and sealed inside the locket was the micro-bomb that they’d extracted from above Rinko’s heart. The pendant felt hot against her hand, as if it were giving off a heat of its own.