CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

AWAKENING, JULY 7TH, 2026 AD / NOVEMBER 7TH, 380 HE

1

“I hope that was…in time…?”

Takeru Higa shook out his arms, which were cramped from overuse.

In less than an hour, he’d managed to convert the accounts of about two thousand characters sent to the Ocean Turtle from the Japanese Seed network to the Underworld. He could still feel the keys against his fingertips.

“It was in time. I guarantee it,” said Dr. Rinko Koujiro, who handed him a sports drink. He took the bottle, struggled to twist off the cap with his exhausted wrists, and gulped it down. The liquid was lukewarm, but he felt it lubricating his insides pleasantly.

Once he was half done with the bottle, he exhaled and shook his head weakly. “Man…I can’t believe how careless I was…”

When he’d been told that two teenage girls calling themselves Leafa and Sinon had shown up at Rath’s Roppongi office and warned that the attackers were trying to get American VRMMO players to dive into the Underworld, Higa’s mind had simply shut down for a good five seconds.

And he had to admit that he’d been caught blind when he’d learned that this threat had been detected by an existing model of AI connected to Asuna Yuuki’s cell phone.

The high school girls, who’d claimed to be acquaintances of Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka, had dived into the Underworld from Roppongi’s Soul Translators using the remaining super-accounts. And after great effort, Higa had completed converting the two thousand players to allow them to drop on Asuna Yuuki’s present location.

If they couldn’t eliminate the much larger assortment of American players, Alice would almost certainly fall into the enemy’s clutches. In fact, Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka and Lieutenant Nakanishi had even discussed climbing up the outside hull of the Ocean Turtle to physically destroy the satellite antenna.

But to get outside would require unlocking the pressurized door splitting the Main Shaft into top and bottom sections for several minutes. If the attackers got wind of that, they would be able to commandeer the sub-control room, too, the worst of all outcomes.

So instead, Kikuoka and Higa had decided to place everything in their new allies’ hands: the three teenage girls in the Underworld as the three goddesses of creation and the VRMMO players of Japan who’d agreed to come to their aid, at the risk of losing their characters forever.

The moment they’d been allowed to connect, the majority of the confidential secrets around Project Alicization had essentially become public knowledge. But that wasn’t really the problem anymore.

Not compared to what would happen if the attackers, and the American military conglomerates that were most likely behind them, got their hands on Alice and seized complete control over the coming age of drone warfare.

“That’s right,” Higa mumbled at a volume no one else could hear as he slumped into his desk chair. “Alice isn’t some control AI for UAVs. She’s a new form of humanity, born in a different world from the rest of us…And you knew that way before any of us did. Isn’t that right, Kirigaya…?”

He glanced from the main monitor window showing the situation in the southern Underworld to a smaller window displaying Kazuto Kirigaya’s fluctlight status.

The gently radiating light contained a cold void at its center, as usual. That was his damaged, missing core…his self-image.

It hurt to see that window open all the time, so Higa finally grabbed the mouse so he could minimize it. But just before his finger clicked the left button, it stopped.

“Hmm…?”

He lifted his glasses and squinted at the rolling log graph for fluctlight activity. Just forty-five minutes ago, despite being essentially unmoving until then, there had been one sharp peak in the line chart. Higa squeezed the mouse and slid the log to the left. About ten hours earlier, there had been one even larger peak of activity.

“Um…come here and look at this, Miss Rinko.”

“Don’t call me that,” Dr. Koujiro snapped. She looked at the main screen. “This is Kirigaya’s fluctlight monitor, right? What’s that fluctuation?”

“His lost consciousness broke into activity for just a moment…I suppose. But supposedly he’s not supposed to be supposedly active now.”

“Calm down—you’re talking nonsense. Do you think he received some kind of powerful stimulation from an exterior source?”

“Well, any senses that might register such a stimulation are completely blocked off at the moment. Let’s see, at this point here…”

Higa clicked the peak in the graph to bring up the time. But confirming that point in time couldn’t actually tell them what was happening inside the Underworld at that moment.

And yet…

“Wait a moment,” Dr. Koujiro said, her voice tense. “That time stamp. Both of these…are when the girls used the STL to dive in, aren’t they? The first peak was Asuna, and the second one was for Sinon and Leafa from Roppongi…”

“Wow, really…? Wow, really!” Higa gasped. It was true; the two brief peaks on the line chart corresponded to the points in time when the young women had gone down into the Underworld.

“But wait, what does that mean…? Is it just that he had a stronger reaction when familiar people came close? But…the kind of damage he’s suffered isn’t going to heal itself with a fairy-tale explanation like that. There must be a reason…A physical, logical reason…”

Higa stood up from his mesh chair and walked around the front of the console. The movement caught the attention of Kikuoka, who was nodding off in a nearby chair. The other engineers slumping against the wall watched him with suspicion.

He didn’t notice their attention, however. Higa was lost in thought.

“The self…The subject…The image that one has of oneself…Was there some kind of backup of that quantum pattern somewhere…? No, that’s not possible…We never copied Kirito’s fluctlight, and even if we had, it would be impossible to just cut his self-image out of that and overwrite his original…Is it some kind of living quantum pattern that can connect to his fluctlight…? But where…where…?”

“Hey. Hey…Higa.”

He looked up only when he realized that someone had already called his name several times. “What is it?”

“You keep talking about the ‘loss of the subject.’ What exactly does that mean?”

“Um…it means…”

He stopped to arrange his thoughts for a few seconds before continuing rapidly, “That which sees—and thus knows…It’s you, inside your head. In philosophical terms, the subjective, rather than the objective. The human being’s main processor, which receives and sorts information from the senses.”

“Uh-huh…So through the STL, you’ve combined materialism with dualism. That’s fine. What I’m asking is, can you really separate the subject and object that clearly and easily?”

“…Huh?”

Higa blinked a few times, surprised. Kikuoka and the engineers maintained their silence, leaving the room quiet except for the low hum of the cooling fan and Dr. Koujiro’s husky voice.

“That which observes: the subject. That which is observed: the object. These are simply philosophical concepts to explain the relationship of things. I don’t think that they can be applied directly to the structure of the fluctlight, as a visible model of our individual consciousness. Humans are social creatures; we’re not perfectly isolated individuals. The other people who exist in my mind, the me that exists in other people’s minds…these things are connected into a kind of network. Do you agree with that?”

“The me…in other…minds…”

As soon as he put it in words, Higa recognized that the concept was one of the things he tried to avoid the most.

How do others see you? How do you compare?

How does Rinko Koujiro see you?

How do you compare to Akihiko Kayaba?

I see…

I barely even remember my own face. If I had to draw a self-portrait, it wouldn’t really look like me. And it’s because I’ve always tried to avoid facing myself—my exterior and interior, my existence that couldn’t compare to Kayaba’s in any way. That’s the extent of my subjective sense anyway.

In fact, if you collected the Takeru Higa who exists within all the people around me, I feel like you’d be able to re-create me in every unflattering detail…

Higa was just snorting sardonically in his own self-hatred when at last, the intent of Rinko Koujiro’s words sank in.

“…A backup self-image,” he murmured, looking up with a start. The note of self-pitying loathing was totally gone from his face. “That’s it…Then we do have something! We have the data that can complete the hole that was blown into his subjective self-image! It’s right in the fluctlights of the people he’s closest to…!!”

His pacing resumed, as fast as he could go short of running. “But we’ll need the STL to extract that data…and the level of re-creation’s going to be weak coming from just one source. We’ll want two…no, three…”

Higa paused with a deep breath.

Who would know Kazuto Kirigaya best and have the most detailed image of him stored in their soul? That would be Asuna Yuuki. And she was resting in the STL right next to Kazuto’s.

Higa looked over to Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka and said hoarsely, “Kiku, are the girls diving from Roppongi…connected to Kirigaya somehow?”

“…Yes, they are,” Kikuoka replied, his black-rimmed glasses reflecting the light. “Sinon helped solve the Death Gun incident half a year ago with Kirito’s help. And Leafa is Kirito’s sister.”

There was a brief silence. Higa’s rounded glasses glinted in the same way.

“…Here we go. Here we go, then! We can do it…We might be able to restore Kirito’s self-image! If we can extract the image of him that’s stored in their fluctlights and connect it to the lost regions…then that data should be able to take to Kirigaya’s fluctlight, activate, and repair the subjective sense that’s supposed to be there…”

Driven by a fresh source of enthusiasm welling up from within, Higa smacked his hands together.

Exactly one second later, all that heat and excitement vanished, and his skin went cold.

“Oh…ohhh, no…It can’t be…aaaah!”

“Wh-what? What’s the matter, Higa?!” Rinko demanded.

He looked at her and mumbled absently, “The only place we can do that…is in the main control room…”

Heavy silence fell over the room again like ash, gathering on the floor of the sub-control room. Eventually, their commanding officer, Kikuoka, sighed heavily.

“That’s right…Of course it’s set up that way…Don’t get down, though, Higa. Let’s consider it a positive that we’ve shed some light on how to rehabilitate Kirito. We can perform the actual operation once this situation is over, and those people have been driven from the ship…”

“But…that’s too late…,” Higa said, cutting him off. “If the escort ship Nagato sends in a command team, and there’s a major battle in the Main Shaft, the power’s going to go down in Subcon. Hell, they might even damage the equipment in Maincon. Kirigaya’s Soul Translator will shut down, and he’ll be logged out of the Underworld, still unconscious. And my guess…is that he’ll never be able to connect to the STL again. In his current state, he won’t pass the initialization stage…Whatever we can do to heal him has to be done while he and those girls are in the Underworld.”

As he spoke, Higa felt a kind of determination flood through him once again. What would he do in this situation? Not long ago, his subjective self would have answered, I can’t do anything. Who am I, Akihiko Kayaba?

But that wasn’t his real self-image. That was an escape. It was an excuse.

The Takeru Higa I know, the genius who crafted the STL and the Underworld, would say something like this:

“…I’ll go, Kiku.”

“Go…where?” grimaced the commander in his aloha shirt. Higa turned to him and sucked in a deep breath.

“I’m not sayin’ I’m going to barge my way into the main control room, fists flying. Just listen…STL Room Two, where Kirigaya is now, and Maincon on the other side of the pressure-resistant isolation wall are connected by a cable duct that runs through the aft end of the Ocean Turtle’s Main Shaft. There should be one connector location on the cable for maintenance purposes. If we slip into the duct from STL Room Two and go down the ladder inside, we should be able to connect a laptop to the maintenance jack and manipulate Kirigaya’s STL.”

Kikuoka’s eyes went wide behind the black-framed glasses when he first heard Higa’s plan, but he soon returned to his usual stern look and argued, “But the maintenance connector’s on the other side of the isolation wall that separates us from the attackers. In order to access that point, we need to briefly undo the lock on the wall of the cable duct. The duct is accessible from STL Room One on the Maincon side, so if they learn we’ve unlocked it and sniff out our plan, they could attack us from below.”

“So we’ll go with a decoy plan.”

“A…decoy…?” Kikuoka repeated dangerously, eyes flashing.

Higa shook his head. “I’m not saying we’re going to send valuable manpower to do it. If we undo the lock on the isolation wall, we can use the personnel stairs on the opposite side of the duct to send down…well, you know.”

“Aha…you mean Ichiemon. Thankfully, it’s in storage in the Upper Shaft. Will someone go and bring it over here?” Kikuoka ordered. Two of the staffers along the wall got up and trotted out of the room.

Dr. Koujiro, meanwhile, looked worried. “Look…if you’re going to use Ichiemon as a decoy, all it can do is slowly go up and down stairs. There’s no way it can draw the enemy’s attention and then race back up.”

Ichiemon, officially named Electroactive Muscled Operative Machine #1, was an experimental machine body meant to load an artificial fluctlight. It was, in essence, a humanoid robot with metal bones and polymer muscles. Because it was an experimental prototype, no effort was made to give it a pleasing exterior. It was all exposed mechanisms and wires, with no bulletproofing whatsoever.

Yesterday, Higa had asked Rinko to fine-tune Ichiemon’s autonomous walking balancers. Despite a lot of grumbling, she took the job very seriously, so she would naturally have something to say about a plan to use Ichiemon as a decoy. Higa regretted the idea greatly, of course, but this wasn’t the time to prioritize equipment over lives.

“…I feel bad for Ichiemon, but we need him to do this for us. And hey, given how he looks, the enemy might not shoot him right away, thinking that he might explode.”

“…I suppose…”

While they spoke, the sliding door opened, and a large wheeled cart rolled through. Sitting atop it with arms around its legs was a blocky robotic body, its head equipped with three lenses.

Dr. Koujiro stared at Ichiemon with a conflicted expression, then turned away. “Well…with a look like this, it’s certainly going to stick out, and it’ll convince them that we’re up to something ridiculous…”

“At the very least, they can’t ignore it. While the enemy’s reacting to Ichiemon, I’ll sneak into the lower part of the cable duct and operate Kirigaya’s STL through the maintenance connection. The only question is how many minutes this guy will buy me…”

Kikuoka waggled the wooden geta sandal hanging from the foot he had crossed over his other leg and said, “Can we throw Niemon in there, too?”

“I’m afraid we can’t,” Higa said definitively, shrugging. “Niemon’s got better mechanical capabilities, but it’s built entirely upon the premise of an onboard artificial fluctlight for control. Unlike Ichiemon, it has no autonomous balancing system. As soon as it starts to step down the stairs, it’ll fall over.”

“I see,” the commander murmured.

Rinko turned away from him and focused her eyes on a spot on the floor with an odd expression. Then she snapped back to attention and said, “But, Higa, even if you’re able to fool them about the lock on the isolation wall, that doesn’t completely eliminate the chance of you being detected. Shouldn’t you take someone along to guard you in the duct?”

“No…at this point, the military officers here are too valuable to risk that way. Besides, the only person with any mobility in that cramped duct will be me, the skinny short guy. I’ll just zip down there and zip back up.”

He answered in his usual cheery, aloof tone, but just imagining that experience made his heart rate jump a bit. If the enemy spotted him and shot from the bottom of the duct, there would be no escape. When the Ocean Turtle had been attacked, he’d only heard the guns firing and never even witnessed any of their attackers.

But…I—no, all of Rath owes Kirigaya too much not to do this, Takeru Higa thought, burning the words into the back of his mind.

Memories blocked or not, they had forced him into a dive that was three days in the real world, and ten years of internal time in the Underworld, giving the artificial fluctlights the crucial trigger they needed. There was no doubt that Kazuto was deeply involved with the birth of the breakthrough fluctlight Alice, from start to finish.

After that, they hooked him up to the STL with all its safety limitations off for the purpose of recuperation—and caused great damage to his fluctlight. And it happened because he was fighting a desperate, painful battle against the power structure of the Underworld in an attempt to save Alice, losing many friends in the process. As long as the possibility of healing him remained, they had to take every risk they could to tackle it. It was the only way to make it up to him.

Takeru Higa clenched his fists and started to motion to Kikuoka— when a fourth voice made its presence in the sub-control room known.

“Um…I would like to go with Chief Higa…”

They all turned to look at a Rath engineer who’d been sitting on a mattress along the wall the entire time.

He was just as small as Higa, but his hair was long and tied into a ponytail in the back. Despite his bold proclamation, the way he got to his feet was rather timid.

“As you can see, I’m quite skinny, too…but I might serve as a bullet sponge for you, Chief…Plus, I’m the one who’s been maintaining the cables, so…”

Higa stared at the man with the quiet, mumbling voice. He was much older, probably past his mid-thirties. Even for having been on the Ocean Turtle for months, his skin was pale. Higa recalled that this man had quit a major game developer before coming to join Rath.

He would be a vast downgrade from one of the military officers in a fight, but it felt better just knowing that someone was risking everything with him. Higa got up from the chair and bowed to the staffer.

“…To tell the truth, I’m not a hundred percent sure about the location of the maintenance connector. So I’d be grateful for your help, Mr. Yanai.”