7

Gabriel and Critter’s secret plan completely took Rath by surprise. Even if the staff had realized it was happening, they would have had no way of shutting off the satellite connection, since the main control room had been taken over.

But when Critter uploaded the link in question to the Internet, the packet containing the URL was caught and observed by just one person.

It was Yui, the top-down artificial intelligence. Yui had been monitoring the situation on the Ocean Turtle from Asuna Yuuki’s phone when she detected Critter’s message, accessed the teaser site, and accurately assessed and identified Gabriel’s plan.

She tried to warn Rath about the situation, but the sub-control room was physically isolated, and with the phone left in Asuna’s ship bunk, no one was going to hear its alarm going off, even at maximum volume.

Yui was left with no other option but to focus her senses on distant Japan across the Pacific. She called a number of other phones at the same time.

In the real world, Shino Asada was a junior in high school, but in the virtual world, she was a deadly sniper. As soon as she heard the notification from her cell phone, she bolted upright in bed.

The clock at her bedside said it was three in the morning. Despite the unexpected wake-up at such an odd hour, her sleepiness was instantly gone: The ringtone that awoke her was the one she’d set for calls from Kazuto Kirigaya.

Can it be? A call from Kirito, who’s not only unconscious but missing?

When she pressed the device to her ear, however, she heard the stressed voice of a young girl.

“Sinon, this is Yui!”

“Wha…? Y-Yui?!”

She knew about Yui the AI, Kirito and Asuna’s “daughter,” of course. When she’d talked with Asuna and the other girls about Kirito’s whereabouts just a week ago, she’d marveled at Yui’s capacity for information processing and emotional expression.

But Shino never expected to receive a phone call directly from the AI and was at a loss for words. Instead, the sweet but faintly electronic voice continued on its own.

“I will explain later. Make preparations to leave the house immediately and take a taxi. I will send the destination and quickest route through your phone. The cost of your fare will be added directly to your electronic cash account.”

There was a prompt ringing sound, notifying Shino that her device had received an online deposit. That detail finally banished any thought from her mind that this was a dream or prank of some kind.

“A…taxi? To where…?” She stood up as commanded, pulling her legs out of her pajamas, alarm still blaring in her head. What Yui said next was like a bucket of ice water dumped onto her mind.

“Please hurry. Papa and Mama are in danger!!”

“D-danger?! Big Brother and Asuna?!”

Suguha Kirigaya fastened her jeans button with one hand as she spoke—a high school kendo team member in real life and a sylph magic warrior in the virtual world, as well as Kazuto Kirigaya’s younger sister.

“Don’t shout too loud, Leafa, or Miss Midori will wake up,” Yui instructed calmly from the cell phone. Suguha clammed up.

“Y…you’re right. Now that I think of it…this is the first time I’ve ever snuck out of the house at this hour…”

“Unfortunately, there isn’t enough time to explain everything to her and ask for permission to leave. I think that recording a message on the home server about leaving early for a morning training session for your club should be enough.”

“A-all right. Wow, you’re really clever, Yui,” Suguha marveled as she finished dressing. She snuck down the stairs and put her hand on the front door. While it was a fairly old Japanese home, it did have a modern security system active at night, the alarm of which Yui had apparently deactivated.

Since Kazuto had gone missing, their mother had returned home early every day. Suguha felt guilty about leaving without saying anything, so she said a silent message as she passed through the doorway.

I’m sorry, Mom. Don’t worry—I’ll find a way to save him.

As soon as she made her way through the residential block to the main road, there was a taxi parked on the sidewalk. Yui must have ordered one online. The driver gave her a suspicious look when he saw how young she was, so she gave him an excuse about a sick relative in the hospital and checked her phone for the address.

“Um…take me to Minato Ward of Tokyo.”

She felt as though it would be better if she didn’t tell him her destination would actually be in Roppongi.

The half-eaten energy bar dropping from Takeru Higa’s mouth to his knees was enough to jolt his eyes open. He blinked a few times and checked his smartwatch. It was just before four in the morning by Japan Standard Time. A visual sweep of the room gave him a glimpse of his fellow staffers packed into the sub-control room, looking exhausted.

Dr. Rinko Koujiro was sitting in one of the console chairs, her head nodding in sleep. Even Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka, though awake, did not have the usual sharp, alert look in his eyes behind his black-framed glasses as he stared at the main monitor.

The only others were four engineers as still as corpses on the mattresses lined up along the wall. There was no eliminating the possibility of an information leaker among the SDF security members, so Kikuoka had them guarding the pressure-resistant barrier a floor below the sub-control room.

It had already—or finally, depending on perspective—been fourteen hours since their unknown attackers had infiltrated the craft. It would be ten more hours until the Nagato defense ship assigned to guard the Ocean Turtle rushed in to neutralize the threat. Given the circumstances, it was a devastating length of time. Especially for the Underworld, where time was drastically accelerated to stretch it out.

Ten hours had passed since Asuna Yuuki had logged in with Super-Account 01. Since the FLA ratio was normally set to its limit of times one thousand, that meant ten thousand hours had passed inside the simulation—over an entire year of subjective time. Yet there was still no report from within the Underworld of success or failure in the mission to capture Alice.

“Was the World’s End Altar really that far from the human settlements…?” Higa muttered to himself, envisioning the full map of the Underworld, which was designed to look very much like Rath’s logo.

Just then, the receiver on the console made a series of connected, shrill beeps, nearly causing him to jump out of his seat. “K-Kiku, phone call,” he said to the man seated next to him, assuming it was regarding something on the lower floor.

The Hawaiian-shirt-wearing commander bolted upright with the same kind of surprise and lunged for the receiver, losing a wooden sandal from his toes’ grasp.

“Sub Control! Kikuoka!” he said, hoarse but still commanding. After a few moments, the speaker emitted the voice of not Lieutenant Nakanishi downstairs but a young man, audibly bewildered and overwhelmed.

“Um…you’re in the STL Development Lab at Rath headquarters…right? My name is Hiraki from the Rath Roppongi office…”

“Huh? R…Roppongi?” Kikuoka repeated, his voice squawking at this unexpected communication. Higa was just as startled.

Why would the Roppongi office be contacting them at this moment? The employees there didn’t know that Rath itself was just a mock venture capital firm secretly funded by the national defense budget or that its real headquarters was not in Japan at all but floating in the sea to the south in the form of the Ocean Turtle or even that the title of their research was Project Alicization.

And of course, they didn’t know that Rath was currently under attack by an unknown enemy force. The Roppongi office was just a lab for STL research and development.

That’s right…STL…

Suddenly, there was a brief glimpse of some kind of epiphany in Higa’s mind, but before he could seize and identify it, Kikuoka distracted him by clearing his throat loudly.

“Ah, y-yes. This is Kikuoka, STL Development.”

“Oh! Hello, sir! I met you once before. I’m Chief Hiraki of the Roppongi development team!”

Enough of the workplace formalities! Just get to the point!! Higa wanted to scream. Kikuoka had the same expression on his face, but he did a very good job of assuming his business persona verbally.

“Ah, yes, I see, Chief Hiraki. Are you really working overtime this late?”

“Actually, I was out drinking after work and missed the last train. Roppongi’s a terrible place for an office, I tell you! Oh, and please keep that comment off the record, heh-heh.”

You’re talking to the boss, you idiot! The head honcho! Just get to the damn point!! screamed Higa. Thankfully, his psychic message seemed to sink in, as Hiraki tightened up and got down to business.

“Well, uh, the reason I’m calling is…I guess you could call it a problem…Whatever it is, it’s strange. We’ve just had a cold call from some outside people with no appointment…”

“Outside? A partner?”

“No, someone completely unrelated to the company…In fact, it just looks like two teenage girls…”

“Huh?!” Kikuoka, Higa, and even Dr. Koujiro, who had awoken from her light slumber, gaped. “T…teenage…girls?”

“Yes. I tried to send them away, of course. We have a very confidential arrangement here, after all. But the things that they’re saying, I just can’t dismiss out of hand…”

Higa was getting sick of Hiraki’s reticence and stood up, placing both hands on the console. Kikuoka exhibited more patience as he gently asked, “What exactly did they say?”

“Well, sir, they told me to contact Seijirou Kikuoka at Rath headquarters right away and confirm the FLA ratio of the Underworld immediately…”

“Wh-whaaaat?!” the entire room screamed in unison.

How did some random teenage girls know those terms? You would never in a million years stumble across that series of words unless you knew the entire workings of Project Alicization.

Higa shared an openmouthed look with Kikuoka, then turned to the console in an automatic daze and began typing commands on the keyboard. The current acceleration rate appeared on the dark monitor: X1.00.

“Wha—? We’re in real time?! Since when?!” Higa gasped. Kikuoka tore his eyes away and shouted into the phone receiver, “N-names! Did the girls name themselves?!”

“Er, they did. But it seemed like a joke…They clearly aren’t their real names. They said that if I told you they were named Sinon and Leafa, you would understand. But they looked perfectly Japanese to me…”

Thonk.

Kikuoka’s other wooden sandal fell to the floor.

When Yui confirmed through the phone that the lock on the building containing Rath’s Roppongi office had opened and allowed Shino Asada and Suguha Kirigaya to rush inside, the artificial intelligence exhibited signs of relief. Specifically, that meant that she exhaled and dedicated the majority of her processing ability to a parallel task she was dealing with.

Yui expected that great trouble would interfere with the potential success of their mission. It was something that she on her own could never hope to achieve. But at the same time, she knew that failing would mean exposing her beloved Kirito and Asuna to great danger.

She pulled her attention away from Shino’s cell phone and focused her large eyes on four fairies sitting before her.

They were in the living room of Kirito and Asuna’s in-game home on the twenty-second floor of New Aincrad in the VRMMORPG known as ALfheim Online.

Yui flitted about in the form of a tiny navigation pixie. Sitting across from her on the sofa was Silica the cait sith, with her triangular ears, little fangs, and long tail.

Next to her was Lisbeth the leprechaun, her puffed-out hair a metallic pink color.

Leaning against the table farther away was the salamander Klein, a flashy bandana spiking his red hair upward. Standing by him with arms folded was Agil the imposing gnome.

All of them were experienced VRMMO players who had survived the incredible gauntlet that was Sword Art Online, the original game of death, and they were lifelong friends of Kirito and Asuna. They had logged in to ALO in the middle of the night upon Yui’s summons and had just gotten a briefing on the situation.

Klein scratched his forehead through the bandana. With the gravest tone he could muster in his normally aloof voice, he said, “Man…he’s really gotten himself wrapped up in a crazy one this time…A virtual world created by the military, with a true AI named Alice? We’re way beyond the bounds of video games at this point.”

“So this AI isn’t like an NPC in a game but is pretty much…the same as us human beings?” Lisbeth asked.

Yui bobbed her head. “Yes, that’s right. It’s fundamentally different from traditional AIs like me. This is a true soul. Within Rath, they call that an artificial fluctlight instead.”

“And they want to take that AI and put it on fighter jets…,” murmured Silica, who looked away from Yui to the little dragon pet curled up on her knees, Pina.

“Rath seems to hope to use that technology for demonstrations both domestically and internationally,” Yui explained, “but the attackers in control of the Ocean Turtle right now have a much more direct application in mind, I suspect.”

Klein spread his arms. “So who the hell are these guys sieging the ship?”

“There is a very high possibility that American military or intelligence is involved.”

“M…military?! The United States?!” Lisbeth gasped, pulling her head back.

Yui nodded. “If Alice falls into the American military’s hands, she’ll be placed on combat drones as an AI pilot in the not-too-distant future, I am certain. And Papa and Mama would do anything to keep that from happening. Because…because…”

The little pixie stopped, alarmed. She was getting an unexpected reaction from her own emotional modeling program. Large droplets of water began to spill down her cheeks.

Tears.

I’m crying. But why…?

But even this question was shoved aside by the unfamiliar sensation pushing her onward. Yui clasped her little hands before her chest and continued, “Because Alice is the evidence of the existence of all the VRMMO worlds, beginning with SAO, and the many people who lived in them. She is the fruit of all the time, material, and mental resources that were expended there. I am certain that the purpose of the Seed package in the first place was none other than the birth of Alice.”

The four people listened to her in silence. Yui went on, the tears still streaming from her eyes. “Through all those countless linked worlds, the laughter, tears, sadness, and love of all those many people…the feedback of all those souls glimmering with life brought about the birth of a new humanity in the Underworld. Papa, Mama, Leafa, Klein, Lisbeth, Silica, Agil, Sinon…It was from the cradle woven of your hearts and so many, many more people in one great tapestry that Alice was born!”

She stopped there, but not one of them rushed to fill the ensuing silence.

Yui had no means of knowing the thoughts and emotions happening in the minds of the humans congregated around her. It was she most of all who understood that, being a top-down AI and an amalgamation of information, she had no true emotions and could not understand them in the realest sense.

Even this powerful urge to help Kirito, Asuna, and those people she loved was nothing more than a part of the source code that someone had compiled so she could function as a mental health counseling program. Even before this conversation began, Yui had been afraid that the things she said might not register a real difference in the hearts of the human beings across from her.

So when clear liquid sprang from Lisbeth’s eyes and ran down her cheeks, Yui was taken aback.

“Yes…you’re right. It’s connected. It’s all connected. Time, people, hearts…It’s all one big river.”

Silica leaped to her feet, eyes watery, and enveloped Yui in her arms. “It’s all right, Yui. We’re going to go rescue Kirito and Asuna. We’re going to see to it that they make it out of this safely…so don’t cry.”

“You bet. Don’t be so distant with us, Yuippe. You know we’d never abandon Kirito like that,” said Klein, voice hoarse, pulling his bandana lower, over his eyes.

Agil bobbed his head deeply and pronounced, “I owe him a whole hell of a lot. This is a chance for me to make up just a little bit of that.”

“…Everyone…,” Yui squeaked, wrapped in Silica’s arms. It was all that she could utter; the mysterious tears from an unknown source kept coming and coming and refused to stop.

But we don’t have time. There are so many things I still need to explain. My priority should be to calmly and effectively relay information. I wonder if my emotion-mimicking circuits have broken down.

But in the thrall of a single bit of code that dominated her priority system, Yui could do nothing but sob and hiccup, repeating the same words over and over.

“…Thank…you…Thank you…everyone…”

Minutes later, her tears stopped at last, and Yui told the four the current situation as she understood it and her expectations for what would happen in the near future.

The situation: The attackers on board the Ocean Turtle with Kirito and Asuna had uploaded a fake game teaser site in an attempt to recruit players to their cause. The expectation: Players drawn to the site would soon appear in the Underworld in great numbers.

There was a deep furrow on Klein’s brow. He growled, “So that’s thirty thousand VRMMO players diving from America, at minimum, possibly up to a hundred thousand…and to them, the human army soldiers with Kirito and Asuna are nothing more than PvP targets?”

“Why don’t we post on those American VRMMO sites, too, then?” suggested Lisbeth. “We could tell them about the experiment and the ongoing attack and ask them not to take part in this fake beta test…”

But Yui just shook her head. “At the root of all of this is a struggle for military secrets between Japan and America. If we let them sense even a bit of that, it will only have the opposite effect of what we want.”

“So saying that they’re real people and you shouldn’t kill them…is only going to make matters worse…,” Silica murmured, looking downcast.

Klein broke the heavy silence that followed. “Heh! Then we’ll just do the same thing! We’ve got at least as many shut-in game addicts as the US does. If we whip up our own beta test page and spread it around, and the Rath folks set up as many accounts as we need, I bet we could get thirty or forty thousand, no problem!”

“Actually, there is one big problem,” Agil warned, crossing his massive arms.

“What’s that?”

“The time difference. It’s four thirty in the morning in Japan, the least active part of the day. While in America, it’s twelve thirty in the middle of the day in LA and three thirty PM in New York. They’re going to have way more active players right now.”

“Hrrng…,” Klein groaned. It was true.

Yui was already concerned about that very thing. She said, “Agil is correct. After the difference in VRMMO population itself, we’re also lagging in time zone, and they have a big head start in promotion. I don’t think we will be able to recruit anywhere near ten thousand people from Japan. If we use accounts of the same level as the enemy side, our chances of fighting them back are exceedingly slim.”

“But there aren’t any more god accounts like the one Asuna used, right? And there’s no time to build up from nothing the way that Kirito did,” Lisbeth murmured, concerned, “so I guess we’ll just have to make do with the strongest accounts we have available…”

Yui stared at her. “Actually…there are accounts. They are much more powerful in level and gear than the defaults that the enemy side will be utilizing.”

“Huh…? Wh-where?”

“You already have them. They are the very accounts you’re logged in with at this moment,” Yui said, revealing the true core of what was being asked of them—and received four dumbfounded looks in return.

She knew that she was suggesting a tremendous price—the sacrifice of their alter egos, the personas they spent half their lives enriching—but she also knew with all of her being that these people, especially, would rise to the occasion.

“You must convert! You and many other VRMMO players must take the characters you’ve built up through all of the many Seed worlds that exist—and convert them to the Underworld!”

(To be continued)