Alicization Running

  Asuna reached out and recharged her mug with hot tea using the pop-up menu, then took a big swig. When she exhaled, she felt ready to attempt a reassessment of the enemy’s power.

  “Assuming Rath is our enemy, it’s looking like we’re dealing with something much bigger than just a venture-capital experiment. They have the means to use a fake ambulance and a helicopter to stage abductions, they have this monster STL machine in an unknown location, and their goal is to create an AI that has human-level intelligence and sophistication. Kirito got involved with Rath on that job through Chrysheight—Mr. Kikuoka from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Maybe that wasn’t because he happens to have many connections with the VR industry but because Rath itself is connected with the government…”

  “Seijirou Kikuoka,” Sinon muttered, looking suspicious. “I figured there was more to him than the dopey four-eyed look…And you still can’t reach him?”

  “He hasn’t answered any calls since two days ago and won’t return any messages. I figured if I had to, I could visit the virtual division at the ministry office, but I doubt anything will come of it.”

  “I suppose not…Kirito said he tried to tail the man once, but Kikuoka shook him off before he knew it…”

  Four years ago, after the SAO Incident began, the Ministry of Internal Affairs had created a “Victim Rescue Office” that was reconfigured into an official division to handle VR-related problems after the initial incident was resolved. Government official Seijirou Kikuoka, characterized by his black-rimmed glasses, maintained a friendly relationship with Kazuto after his return to the real world. For some reason, he highly valued the teenager’s skills, going so far as to hire him for help in the Death Gun investigation.

  Asuna had met him in real life on multiple occasions, and she’d partied up with him in ALO, where he played the undine mage Chrysheight. But she always stayed wary around him, unable to shake the sensation that his too-friendly exterior hid something unknown behind it. He liked to claim that he was trapped in a boring, dead-end position, but Kazuto often told her in private that he suspected the man’s true affiliation was in a different department.

  Kikuoka was also the man who had brought Kazuto the part-time job offer with the mysterious Rath, and while Asuna had tried to make contact with him several times since Kazuto’s disappearance, Kikuoka’s phone would immediately reply with an automated message claiming it was out of a service area.

  When she finally got fed up and called the ministry itself, they had told her Kikuoka was on assignment overseas. That would explain his unavailability, but given the suspiciously unfortunate timing, part of her wanted to suspect that he was connected to Kazuto’s disappearance.

  “But,” Leafa started, looking at Asuna’s and Sinon’s scowls, “assuming Rath and the government are connected through this Kikuoka person, what’s the point of keeping everything so secret? A company needs to maintain their secrets in order to protect their business property, but if the country itself is involved in this incredible project, wouldn’t they try to promote it as much as possible?”

  “That’s…true…” Sinon murmured hesitantly.

  In recent years, virtual reality development was considered one of the two great frontiers of scientific progress, along with space development. Nations around the world like America, Russia, China, and Japan were busy promoting their space programs with planned projects like orbital spacecraft without external boosters, manned moon bases, and the construction of space elevators. Asuna couldn’t see why they would bother to cover up a project with just as much impact (if not more so), like the creation of a true artificial intelligence.

  And if Kirito’s abduction was part of some top-secret national project, there was nothing simple teenagers like them could do about it. It would be beyond even the scope of the police. Asuna felt the weight of her own helplessness bearing down on her. She glanced at the table and noticed the little fairy watching her.

  “Yui…?”

  “Please cheer up, Mama. When you were trapped here in Alfheim, Papa never once gave up.”

  “B-but…I…”

  “Now it’s your turn to search for Papa!”

  Despite the fairy’s claim that all her reactions were the result of a simple learning program, Yui’s encouraging smile was astonishing in its gentleness and warmth. “The thread that connects us to Papa must be intact. I believe that even the government of Japan cannot sever the connection between you two.”

  “…Thank you, Yui. I’m not going to give up. If the government is our enemy, then I’ll march right into the National Diet Building and take it up with the prime minister directly!”

  “That’s the spirit!”

  Asuna and her daughter beamed at each other, while Sinon looked on, frowning.

  “…What is it, Shino-non?”

  “Er, well…thinking realistically, just because Rath is working on secret research with the government doesn’t necessarily mean that the entire government and the Diet are entirely aware of the nature of that research.”

  “True…And?”

  “If this is a top-secret project being undertaken by a single ministry, wouldn’t there still be one thing they absolutely couldn’t hide?”

  “What’s that…?”

  “The budget! It’s clear that this research facility and STL must cost an astronomical amount. I don’t know how many billions of yen this costs, but it’s got to be enough that they can’t simply sneak it out of the treasury or our tax money. It has to be listed somewhere in the national budget, under one name or another.”

  “Hmm, but according to what Yui searched, there are no VR-related projects commanding that level of funding…Oh, I see! Unless that’s the wrong keyword…Maybe artificial intelligence, rather than VR?” Asuna wondered, glancing at Yui. The fairy nodded seriously, told them to wait a moment, and spread her arms. The ends of her fingers began to crackle with purple light. She was connecting to the net from within ALO.

  After several seconds of hopeful and concerned anticipation, Yui’s eyelids opened. In a flat, electronic affect totally unlike her previous tone of voice, she announced, “I have accessed the publicly released budget appropriation submissions for each ministry last year. Searching for keywords like artificial intelligence, AI, and thirty-eight other related terms…I have found funds earmarked for eighteen universities and seven nonprofit organizations, but all are in fairly small amounts…The Ministry of Education and Science is working on an AI project for nursing robots, but I conclude this is unrelated…The Ministry of Land and Transport’s marine resource probe project…Self-driving automobile project…Both concluded unrelated…”

  Yui continued rattling off dry, official-sounding projects, but she judged all of them to be irrelevant and shook her head at the end.

  “…I did not discover any unnaturally large budget requests that would match the expected scope of a project like this in the general accounts or special accounts. It’s possible that they are spread among multiple smaller invoices or fraudulently represented, but it would be very difficult to determine either case based on public records alone.”

  “Hmm…so they didn’t leave us any obvious trails that would easily identify them.” Sinon groaned, crossing her arms.

  Desperate to cling to any possibility, Asuna suggested, “But maybe Rath’s budget is hiding somewhere in those projects Yui just found under a different name. Is there any way we could figure that out? I mean, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with finding underwater resources…Why did that particular research show up in your search?”

  “Well…” Yui said, half closed her eyes again, accessed some distant database, then looked up. “It seems the research is on small drone submarines that can autonomously search for oil and rare metal deposits on the seafloor. The budget in question is for the AI that would pilot the device, but it showed up in my search filter because the amount seemed a bit large for the level of priority.”

  “Wow, they’ll even make r
obots for stuff like that…I wonder where they’re developing that?”

  “The project is labeled under ‘Ocean Turtle,’ a self-propelled mega-float completed this February for the purposes of marine research.”

  “Oh, I saw that in the news,” Leafa interjected. “It’s more like a pyramid floating on the ocean than a ship.”

  “Right, I heard about that, too. Ocean…Turtle…” Asuna murmured. She frowned, glanced down briefly, then back up. “Say, Yui…do you have any images of that research ship?”

  “Yes, just a moment.”

  She waved her right hand, and a screen appeared over the table, turning into a holographic depiction of the ocean, as it had done with the map earlier. Many little lights turned into a tiny wire frame, with textures filling in before their eyes.

  The model that appeared was indeed a black pyramid at first glance, floating on the water. But when viewed from above, the base was not square but rectangular, with the long side about half the size of the short side. The height of the pyramid seemed roughly equal to the short side. Aside from some long, narrow windows, the surface was perfectly smooth, a shining dark-gray color. On closer look, the surface appeared to be crammed with hexagonal solar panels.

  At each corner of the pyramid base were large, protruding structures that were probably to help steer it, and on one of the short sides was a bridge structure that looked like a small building. The H symbol on top had to signify a heliport. The model itself was so small that they were stunned to see that according to the scale measure on the side, the long end of the float was nearly a quarter of a mile in length.

  “I see…Between the four legs, the square head, and the shell-like pyramid, it does kind of look like a turtle. A very big one…” Sinon noted, impressed.

  Asuna glanced over and pointed at the bridge section of the massive Ocean Turtle craft. “But…look. See how this part here on the head kind of juts out like it’s flat? Doesn’t it look like a different kind of animal?”

  “Ohh, you’re right. It’s a bit like a pig. A swimming turtle-pig,” Leafa chimed in jokingly.

  Then she realized the implication of what she’d just said and gasped. Her lips worked soundlessly, and she eventually managed to wring out, “A turtle…and a pig…”

  Asuna, Sinon, and Leafa shared a knowing look, and they spoke in unison.

  “Rath!”

  2

  The EC135 helicopter passed through the patch of thick ocean fog, and then there was nothing but deep blue on the other side of the window.

  It was a brilliant close-up on whitecaps and breaking waves, nothing like the high-altitude view from a passenger jet. Rinko Koujiro wondered how many years it had been since she’d swum in the ocean.

  Santa Monica Bay was about an hour’s drive away from Rinko’s current place of employment, the California Institute of Technology. She could easily go and work on her tan every weekend if she wanted, but in the two years she’d been on the job, she had not once set foot on the beach.

  She didn’t have anything against sun and sand, but it was going to take her a long time to be able to enjoy leisure activities on their own merits again. Rinko suspected it would take a decade or two of living in a foreign land where she was a total stranger before her past could truly vanish.

  So it felt strange that, despite her assumption that she’d never be back, she was returning to Japan for just a single day—and to a place connected to the past she’d tried to abandon.

  Four days ago, when she had received that very long e-mail from a surprising source, she had had the option to delete it and move on. But for some reason, she hadn’t. She had slept on the proposal for just a single night before giving a positive reply. She knew that it completely invalidated the last two years spent locking away her mind and memories, and yet she had done it anyway.

  What was it that propelled her onward, toward the place that weighed so heavily on her past?

  Rinko sighed, and pushed away the question she’d asked herself many times over the course of the trip, from Los Angeles to Tokyo, overnight at the Narita hotel, and here on this small craft. She would learn the answer once she had seen and heard what she came for.

  At the very least, the last time she had bathed in seawater was ten years ago, when she was an unsuspecting young college freshman. She had asked out Akihiko Kayaba, two years her senior, and driven to Enoshima in the little car she’d bought on loan. She was eighteen years old, so innocent and unsuspecting of the fate she was setting up for herself…

  Before Rinko could delve too much further into her distant past, the person sitting next to her brought her back to the present, shouting to be heard over the rotors.

  “Look, there it is!”

  She followed the gaze of the other passenger, whose eyes were shadowed behind sunglasses and long golden hair. Indeed, through the curved cockpit windshield, there was a small black rectangle in the flat expanse of sea ahead.

  “That’s…the Ocean Turtle…?” Rinko murmured. Just then, the black solar panels reflected the sun toward them in a brilliant rainbow array. A man in a dark suit sitting in the copilot seat answered her.

  “That’s right. We’ll be landing in about ten minutes.”

  The helicopter decided to cap off the 150-mile trip from Shin-kiba in Tokyo with a final spin around the massive marine research vessel Ocean Turtle before finally settling in to land.

  Rinko gaped at the absurdity of the sight. The word ship was totally insufficient to describe the structure. It was more like an enormous pyramid rising out of the ocean. It was one and a half times the length of the Nimitz, the world’s largest aircraft carrier. She couldn’t even begin to guess how much the construction of this structure cost. She had heard the rumors that they had invested virtually all the profits from the recent mining of rare metals in Sagami Bay, but Rinko hadn’t believed them—until she saw its size for herself.

  Outwardly, the purpose of this mega-float was to find and develop new deposits of minerals and oil on the seabed—but on the inside, it might possibly contain a research lab developing a new full-dive machine called a Soul Translator that interfaced with the human soul, according to the e-mail Rinko had received the previous week. She wasn’t sure she could accept that at first, but now that she was here, she had no choice but to believe it.

  It made no sense. Why would anyone go this far, off to the remote Izu Islands, to research a new brain-machine interface? But the hard truth was that within that vast black pyramid was a machine descended from Akihiko Kayaba’s NerveGear and the Medicuboid Rinko had helped develop.

  Two years overseas had numbed Rinko’s mental wounds but not healed them. Would what awaited her inside this ship help heal the scars or just rip them open to bleed anew?

  As the helicopter descended, she steadied her breathing and turned to the passenger next to her. She met the eyes behind the sunglasses, nodded, and prepared to disembark.

  The pilot must have been a real veteran, as the helicopter landed on the Ocean Turtle’s bridge heliport with hardly a single shake. Their guide in the suit nimbly slipped out of the craft to exchange greetings with another man in a suit running up to them.

  Rinko headed to the exit hatch next. She waved off the man who extended a hand to her and hopped down the foot and a half to the ground, relieved that she had decided to wear jeans. The surface below her sneakers was so firm and steady that it was hard to believe they were floating on water.

  The other passenger exited next, blond hair gleaming in the sun, and stretched back. Rinko followed suit and stretched her arms, breathing in a lungful of salty sea air.

  The tanned man waiting for them at the heliport greeted Rinko with a no-nonsense manner.

  “Welcome to the Ocean Turtle, Dr. Koujiro. And this is…?” He gestured toward the other passenger.

  Rinko said, “My assistant, Mayumi Reynolds.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said the other passenger in fluent English, and stuck out her hand. The man accepted it
awkwardly.

  “I am Lieutenant Nakanishi, and I’ll be your guide. Please leave your bags here; they will be taken to your quarters later. Right this way,” he said, motioning toward a staircase at the end of the heliport. “Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka is awaiting you.”

  The air inside the bridge building still had that midsummer heat and ocean salt to it, but after an elevator, a long hallway, and a heavy metal door that marked the interior of the black pyramid, the inside breeze was cold and dry on Rinko’s face.

  “Is the AC this strong all over the ship?” she asked the lieutenant without thinking. The young SDF officer turned back and nodded.

  “Yes. There are many high-precision machines inside, so we must maintain a temperature of around seventy-three degrees and humidity under fifty percent.”

  “And the solar panels provide all the power for that?”

  “Oh, no. The solar modules don’t even meet ten percent of our power consumption. We use a nuclear pressurized water reactor for our main source.”

  “…I see.”

  At this point, anything goes, she decided, resigned.

  There were no other people in the pale-gray hallway. From the materials she had had the chance to read beforehand, there were supposed to be nearly a hundred research projects underway here, but the facility was so huge that it still seemed like there was extra space to go around.

  They walked about two hundred yards, turning right and left, until they came to a door dead ahead, attended by a man in a navy-blue uniform. It could have been a private security uniform, except that the crisp salute he gave to Nakanishi identified him as military personnel.

  Nakanishi returned the salute and announced, “Our resident researcher, Dr. Koujiro, and her assistant, Miss Reynolds, will be entering Sector S-3.”

  “I’ll run the check now,” said the guard. He opened a metal device and gave Rinko a piercing facial comparison to the picture on the monitor. Once he was satisfied, the clean-shaven guard looked at her assistant. “Excuse me, but I need you to remove your sunglasses.”