Alicization Beginning, Page 8

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  It was the first nickname she’d had in five years. Shino couldn’t help but smile as she got to her feet.

  “Hi, Asuna.”

  Asuna Yuuki strode across the natural wood floor so that they could clasp hands and share in the delight of reunion. They sat down in adjacent chairs, and Kazuto asked in surprise, “When did you two get to be so close?”

  “Oh, I stayed at Asuna’s house last month.”

  “Wh-what? Even I’ve never been to her house.”

  “And whose fault is that?” Asuna chided, fixing Kazuto with a glare. “Who keeps claiming he needs more time before he’s ready?”

  His response was to sulk and sip at his drink. Still, Asuna smiled at him with kindly understanding, and when she noticed Agil approaching with water and a damp towel, she stood up to greet him.

  “It’s nice to see you again, Agil.”

  “Welcome. This reminds me of the time you two stayed upstairs at my place.”

  “You’d better watch out, or we’ll crash your current store in Ygg City, too. Now…let’s see what I want today…”

  Asuna, who was old friends with the imposing-looking café owner, looked over the corkboard menu. Shino, meanwhile, peered at the phone Kazuto had left on the table. The little blue blip was fixed right on the café.

  “…I think I’ll go with the ginger ale, spicy,” Asuna decided.

  When Agil went back to the counter to get her drink, Shino smiled and said, “You guys track each other’s GPS? You really must be close.”

  Kazuto waved his hand with a straight face to indicate the contrary. “What you see there is technically the coordinate of Asuna’s phone, and she can make it invisible if she wants. Mine is nowhere near that friendly. Show her, Asuna.”

  “Okay,” she said, and pulled her phone from the bag slung over the back of the chair, presenting it to Shino with the welcome screen activated. It was set to display a cute animated background.

  In the center of the screen was a pink heart with red ribbons, pulsing regularly once a second. There were two numbers on the bottom of the heart, but she wasn’t sure what they meant at first. On the left was the number 63 in a large font, while smaller and on the right was 36.2. As Shino watched curiously, the left one rose to 64.

  “What is…?”

  Kazuto sheepishly asked her not to stare at it. At last, she figured out what the numbers represented.

  “Wait…this is your pulse and body temperature in Celsius, Kirito?”

  “Bingo. You catch on quick, Shino-non,” Asuna said, clapping. Shino looked back and forth from the phone to Kazuto’s face a few times, then asked the first question that came to mind.

  “B-but…how?”

  “Under the skin, right here,” Kazuto said, pointing to the center of his chest with his thumb. He reached out toward Shino and made a gap with his fingers less than a quarter of an inch wide. “There’s a tiny sensor about this big stuck in there. It measures my heart rate and temperature and sends it to my phone through Bluetooth. From there it goes through the Net to Asuna’s phone, giving her a real-time status update on me.”

  “What? A biometric sensor?” Shino squawked. Two seconds later, she wondered, “B-but why…? Oh, is it an anti-cheating system?”

  “N-no, no!”

  “It’s not that!”

  Both Kazuto and Asuna shook their heads with perfect synchronization.

  “Actually, when I started my new job, the client recommended having it implanted,” he explained. “It beats having to stick the electrodes to my chest each and every time I go in. When I told Asuna about it, she strongly recommended that I send her the vital data. So I put together a little app and installed it on Asuna’s phone.”

  “I mean, I don’t want some company to monopolize Kirito’s body data. In fact, I was against him getting that weird object put in him in the first place.”

  “Oh, really? Who was it who happily said she liked to check the monitor when she had a moment to spare?” he prodded. Asuna’s cheeks went just a bit red.

  “I don’t know…it just calms me down, I guess. The thought that I’m seeing your heart beating just…sends me on a little trip, I guess…”

  “Whoa, that sounds kinda creepy to me, Asuna.” Shino laughed, looking down at the phone again. Kazuto’s pulse had gone up to 67, and his temperature was rising, too. Outwardly, Kazuto wore a poker face as he crunched on his ice, but the data faithfully showed that all the attention had made him a bit bashful.

  “Aha, I see…On second thought…this is kinda nice,” she mumbled, then looked up with a start. Kazuto and Asuna were staring at her. She shook her head. “Er, uh, I mean, not in a serious way or anything. I mean…in GGO there’s a heartbeat sensor, but it’s for use when fighting in poor visual conditions. It’s not as…romantic as this, that’s all.”

  She hastily handed the phone back to Asuna and babbled on. “Oh, r-right. I forgot about why I brought you here. Anyway, I already asked Asuna through e-mail about the next BoB. Do you think you can compete? I’m not going to demand it if you don’t want to convert your characters.”

  “Oh, that’s fine. I have an alt account for ALO, so I can stash my house and items with that one while I’m in the other game,” Asuna said with a gentle smile.

  This eased Shino’s bout of agitation, and she took a deep breath before continuing. “Thanks. Having your help will be huge, Asuna. You’re the machine gun to my pillbox! I’m pretty sure that you’ll have the knack of the photon sword after a few days of practice.”

  “I’ll convert about a month before the tournament. You’ll show me around the city, right?”

  “Of course. In fact, the food in GGO isn’t that bad. So, um…I know this is getting a bit ahead of ourselves, but…Put ’er there.”

  She held out her right hand, which Asuna took ahold of with willowy fingers. Once they’d shaken hands, Shino disengaged and rapped on the tabletop.

  “That ends the business discussion. Now…” She turned to Kazuto, who was still crunching his ice across the table. “Let’s hear more details. What is this fishy job you’re doing? Knowing you, it’s probably just an alpha test for some new VRMMO or something.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, then clarified her suspicion: “Well, you’re not right, but you’re not wrong.”

  Kazuto smirked and traced the center of his chest where the microsensor was embedded. “Yes, it’s true that I’m a tester. But what I’m testing isn’t a new game, but the brain-machine interface of an entirely new full-dive system.”

  “Ohh!” Shino exclaimed. “So they’re coming out with a new generation of the AmuSphere? Are you testing it for Asuna’s dad’s company?”

  “Nope, RCT has nothing to do with it. In fact…I’m not really sure what the whole scope of the company is. It’s a venture I’d never heard of before this, but their development funding is massive. I wonder if they’ve got some huge investment fund backing them,” he said, putting on an enigmatic expression.

  Shino tilted her head and asked, “Oh…what’s the company’s name?”

  “It’s called Rath.”

  “No surprise, I’ve never heard of it, either. Hmm, is that an English word…?”

  “I wondered the same thing. Asuna knew the answer.”

  Next to Shino, Asuna finished her sip of ginger ale and nodded. “It’s from the poem ‘Jabberwocky’ within the text of Through the Looking-Glass. The raths are fictional creatures within the poem. Some say they’re supposed to be like pigs; others say they’re like turtles.”

  “Ohhh…” Shino had read the book years ago, but she didn’t remember that word at all. She tried to imagine a pig’s head sticking out of a round shell. “Rath, rath…And they’re going to sell their own next-gen full-dive console? Rather than doing a joint development with a bunch of other companies like with the AmuSphere?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Kazuto said, still maddeningly vague. “The actual body of the machine is kinda h
uge. Combined with the control console and cooling system, it would probably fill this entire room…From what I hear, the very first full-dive prototype was that big, and it took them five years to get it down to the size of the NerveGear. And they say RCT’s pushing to get the AmuSphere’s successor out next year…Wait, was that supposed to be a secret, again?”

  Asuna laughed and said, “It’s fine, they’re going to announce it at the Tokyo Game Show next month.”

  “Oh, RCT’s got a new one, too? I hope it’s not that expensive,” Shino opined, throwing an innocent look at Asuna, who nodded gravely.

  “I know, right? They won’t even tell me the price, though…But I’m really enjoying ALO, so I’m not in any hurry to upgrade. It’s tempting when they talk about how much better the graphical power is, though. They said it’s going to be backward-compatible.”

  “Whoa, really? Maybe I should look into a job, too,” Shino said, consulting a mental spreadsheet of her finances. She looked over at Kazuto and asked, “Does that mean that huge full-dive machine Rath is working on isn’t for commercial use? Is it industrial?”

  “I think it’s still before that stage of development. In fact, if you’re going to be specific, it’s a completely different thing from the current full-dive system.”

  “Different…? But it’s still a virtual 3-D world that the user dives into, right? What’s it like on the inside?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. Then he matter-of-factly dropped the most shocking detail yet. “It’s probably for the purposes of secrecy, but I can’t actually bring the memory of what happens in the VR world back to real life. I’ve completely forgotten everything I saw and did during the test.”

  “Wh-what?!” Shino shrieked, then lowered her voice to ask, “You…can’t bring out your memory with you? How is that even possible? Do they put you under hypnosis at the end of your shift?”

  “No, it’s a purely electronic measure. Or…quantum measure, I guess,” he said distractedly, then glanced down at his phone on the table. “It’s four thirty. How are you two on time?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ve got time, too.”

  With that settled, Kazuto leaned back against the antique wooden chair. “Then I’ll start by explaining the broad picture. What the Soul Translation tech is all about,” he said slowly.

  The unfamiliar name sounded like a spell in a game, Shino thought. Something about it didn’t seem to fit the concept of cutting-edge technology. Next to her, Asuna wondered, Really…? “Soul”…?

  “Yeah, I thought the name was pretty overblown the first time I heard it, too,” Kazuto said, shrugging. Then he abruptly asked, “Where do you think the human mind is?”

  “The mind?” Shino asked, taken aback. The answer seemed obvious. She cleared her throat and said, “Inside the head…the brain.”

  “Then if you zoomed in and looked at the brain in detail, where would you find the mind?”

  “Where…?”

  “Well, the brain is just a mass of brain cells. Like this…”

  He held out his left hand toward Shino, fingers extended, then used his right index and middle fingers to trace a circle in his palm, then a larger one around it.

  “You’ve got a nucleus in the middle, then a cell body that surrounds it…”

  He tapped his five fingers in order, then drew a line from wrist to elbow.

  “You’ve got dendrites, and an axon, then the connection to the next cell. Which part of this brain cell contains the mind, do you suppose? The nucleus? The mitochondria?”

  “Umm…” Shino mumbled.

  Asuna spoke up. “You just mentioned that it’s connected to the next cell, Kirito. Isn’t it the network of all those neurons tied together that makes up the mind? It’s like if you asked someone what the Internet is—you can’t explain the answer if you only look at individual computers.”

  “Yes,” he said, satisfied. “At present, the neural network is the mind, in my opinion. But…I feel like the question of what the Internet is, for example, would get you a lot of different answers. I mean, it’s a construct of computers all over the world connected through a common protocol…”

  He pointed to his own phone on the table, then to Asuna’s. “In terms of making up that network, you can say that these individual computers are the Internet. You might even claim that the users operating those computers are part of the Internet. All these things together make up what we know as the Internet.”

  Kazuto took a breath there and asked for a sip of Asuna’s ginger ale. He swallowed and closed his eyes. “Wow…the ginger ale here really is sharp.”

  “It’s not at all like the stuff they sell at the store. It’s supposed to be for mixing cocktails, but I like drinking it straight. You really taste the ginger.”

  Shino’s first experience with the Dicey Café ginger ale was half a year ago, when Kazuto first invited her to the place. If she’d never met him in GGO, she would never have set foot in this odd establishment. The way your life could change from the smallest things…

  “So…what does the human mind have to do with the Internet?” she prompted.

  Kazuto gave the glass back to Asuna and made a spherical gesture with his hands. “Well, the shape of the Internet is this giant net of servers, routers, computers, and mobile phones.”

  “The shape…”

  “So what is its essence?”

  Shino thought it over and asked, “You mean…what flows through that network? Electronic bits and bytes…?”

  “True, but the electric and light pulses are just the medium. The essence of the Net is what is passed through the medium: information put into words. Let’s use that definition here.”

  He stopped gesturing and steepled his bony fingers on the tabletop. “Now, let’s return to the network made up of tens of billions of brain cells. If we view this as the shape of the mind, then what is the essence we should be looking for?”

  “The stuff being transferred through the medium…through the electric pulses in the brain cells. So…information?”

  “Actually, the pulses are more like,” Kazuto said, forming a fist with his right hand and pushing it toward his open left palm, “a trigger that releases a transmission substance into the synapses between neurons. Just the consecutive firing of cells along a particular route can’t be called the essence of the mind, I think.”

  “Umm…so…” Shino mumbled, frowning, and Asuna stepped in at last.

  “This isn’t really fair, Kirito. After all, even modern science doesn’t have a clear answer about what the mind is, does it?”

  “That’s true,” he said, grinning.

  “Wh-what?! You set me up into racking my brain over something I could never figure out!” Shino fumed.

  Kazuto merely looked away at the rainy neighborhood through the window and said gravely, “But there is one person who approached the answer, while working on a particular theory.”

  “A…theory?”

  “Quantum mind mechanics. It was originally proposed by an English scholar toward the end of last century and treated like fringe science for years. Now Rath is building that monstrous machine based on it…First of all, let me clarify that I barely understand everything after this point. But anyway, remember how I described the structure of the brain cell?”

  Shino and Asuna nodded.

  “Inside the cell is a frame that supports the whole structure. They’re called microtubules. The thing is, those little ‘bones’ don’t just support, they’re also like a skull. For the brain inside the brain cell.”

  “Huh…?”

  “They’re tubules. Hollow tubes. Just very, very small ones…nanometers in diameter. But they’re not empty. There’s something stored inside those tubes.”

  Shino looked over at Asuna, then they both looked at Kazuto. She asked, “What’s inside them?”

  “Light,” he said. “Photons. Evanescent photons, they call them. A photon is a quantum of light. Their existence is indet
erminate in nature and fluctuates constantly in a probabilistic manner. According to this theory in question, this fluctuation is, in fact…the human mind.”

  Those words sent an instantaneous, inexplicable chill across Shino’s back and upper arms. The human mind is flickering light? The image was mysterious, beautiful, and, in her opinion, eerily holy in nature.

  Asuna’s brown eyes wavered nervously as she considered the same concept. In a hoarse voice, she said, “Earlier, you said the name of the new full-dive machine is…the Soul Translator. Are they claiming the aggregate of all that light is the human soul?”

  “The Rath engineers call it a quantum field instead. But given what they named the machine, I’m certain that’s how they feel about it…That this quantum field is the soul.”

  “So what does that mean? That the Soul Translator is a machine that connects not to the human brain but to the soul itself…?”

  “When you say it that way, it sounds less like a machine and more like a magic item in a game.” He grinned, trying to lighten the mood. “But it’s not powered by magic or holy miracles. To explain how it works a little more: It records a microtubule photon as a unit of data called a ‘cubit,’ based on its spin and vector. So the brain cell isn’t just a gate switch that allows signals through but a tiny little quantum computer all its own…And even that surface explanation is beyond my understanding…”

  “Don’t worry, you lost me ages ago.”

  “Me, too…”

  Shino and Asuna signaled their resignation, and Kazuto heaved a sigh of relief.

  “So this amalgamation of photons acts as both a processor and memory, and it might just be the true form of the human soul…Well, Rath decided to give it their own special name. It’s based on the term fluctuating light, which is combined as…”

  He paused.

  “Fluctlight.”

  “…Fluct…light,” Shino mumbled, repeating the strange word. If everything he’d just told them was correct, then one of these fluctlights was inside her own head. In fact, it was what she was using to think… Her own consciousness…

  That shiver returned, and she rubbed at her bare arms where they emerged from her short summer sleeves.