3

A virtual world that was indistinguishable from reality.

It was a theme that numerous fictional stories had covered for decades. Shino could name right on the spot at least five books or movies based on the idea.

When the age of full-diving, NerveGears, and AmuSpheres in every home had arrived, the media was overrun with thought pieces and blog articles wondering if the time had finally come when we’d lost track of whether or not our reality was truly real life. Shino remembered being nervous about the concept before she took her first dive.

But once she tried it, for better or for worse, that concern vanished. The AmuSphere’s VR experience was a true miracle of cutting-edge technology. The full sensory experience of the virtual world was brilliant and beautiful—which only highlighted its difference from the real world. The sights, sounds, and textures of everything were too pure, too…simple. There was no dust in the air, no clothes fabric fraying with wear, no scratches or dents in the tables. Every 3-D object that was coded had a hard limit in terms of the designing company’s manpower and the CPU power of the device displaying it. That might change in the future, but in 2026, technology could not create a virtual world that was indistinguishable from the real one…

Or so Shino had thought, until she heard what Kazuto Kirigaya had to say.

“But Kirito…that means that you could be in the…STL, they call it? Right at this very moment. They could be feeding you memories of Asuna and me,” Shino said with a teasing smile, trying to hide the shiver crawling over her skin. She figured he would just laugh it off, but even worse, he frowned and stared at her.

“H-hey, stop that! I’m real!” she protested, waving her hands, but Kazuto looked even more suspicious.

“If you’re the real Sinon…you’d remember the promise you made to me yesterday.”

“P-promise?”

“You said that as thanks for coming out here to meet you, I could have as many Dicey Cheesecakes as I want. It’s the most expensive dessert on the menu.”

“Wh-what?! I never made that deal with you! Oh…b-but that doesn’t mean I’m a fake! Come on, Asuna, tell him I’m real!”

She looked to her friend for help. Asuna grabbed her hands and whispered, “Shino-non…did you forget? You promised me I could have as many Berry-Cherry Tarts as I wanted…”

“Whaaat?!”

Maybe she was the one who was trapped in a virtual world and having her memory manipulated. Then both Kazuto’s and Asuna’s cheeks puffed out, and they burst into laughter. Shino finally realized that she was not the teaser but the teased.

“How dare…Not you, too, Asuna! I’m going to hit both of you with a hundred homing arrows each next time I see you in ALO!”

“Ha-ha-ha! Sorry, Shino-non, forgive me!” Asuna laughed, hugging the girl. The simple friendliness of that gesture filled her heart with warmth, which she tried to hide by turning away in a huff. Still, she couldn’t keep a smile away for long, and she soon joined in the laughter.

Kazuto added a slow comment to the more relaxed atmosphere. “The tech sounds really creepy when you hear all these terms like fluctlight and pneumonic visuals…but I think I actually connect with the world the STL creates more than the AmuSphere’s. When you get down to it, it’s basically more like a waking dream…”

“A…dream?” Shino said, not expecting that word to come up. Rather appropriately, the boy who played a spriggan fighter with a penchant for putting others to sleep in ALO continued. “Yeah. You’re calling forth objects that exist as saved memories, creating a world by combining them together, then doing stuff in it…Doesn’t that sound like how dreams work? In fact, they say the brain patterns of people in the STL are very close to those of being asleep.”

“So your job is basically to dream? You slept for three whole days and made a bunch of money doing it?”

“Th-that’s what I told you right at the start. I didn’t eat, didn’t drink, just slept. I mean, I had an IV for water and nutrition.”

Now that he mentioned it, she did remember him saying that just after he’d shown up at the café. But she figured he was just lying on a gel bed, not literally engaged in a very, very long dream.

Shino looked up and murmured, “A three-day-long dream…You could do all kinds of things in that time. And you wouldn’t have to worry about waking up before you get to eat that delicious piece of cake.”

“Sadly, I don’t remember what sort of things I ate on the other side. Let’s just say I had cake for every meal…” he joked, but let the words trail off. Shino looked down and saw that his eyebrows were pensive under those long bangs.

“…What’s wrong, Kirito?” Asuna asked, but he didn’t respond. He made the motion of grabbing something and bringing it to his mouth.

“…It wasn’t…cake…Something harder…and salty…but it was good. What was it…?”

“Y-you remember? What did you eat in the virtual world?”

“…Nope. Can’t remember. It was something I’ve never eaten in reality…I think…”

He scrunched up his face for several more seconds, thinking hard, but eventually exhaled and gave up. Shino couldn’t hold back the question that popped into her head.

“Wait, is that even possible, Kirito? Eating something in the STL that you’ve never tasted in real life? I thought you said the STL creates a virtual world constructed from parts that it finds in the user’s memory. So in a basic sense, it can’t show you things you’ve never seen or feed you things you’ve never eaten, right?”

“Oh…yeah, right. Good point, Shino-non. Wouldn’t that mean the STL’s virtual world is extremely limited in nature, despite its realism? You couldn’t create a true fantasy realm like they did for Aincrad or Alfheim.”

He acknowledged her point with a nod and smiled to dispel the awkward atmosphere he had created. “That’s very sharp of you two. As a matter of fact, I didn’t recognize that limitation the first time I heard about pneumonic visuals. I only realized it just before this long-term experimental dive, and I asked the Rath staff about it, but I guess it went right to the heart of the STL’s tech, and they wouldn’t tell me too much about it. The one thing I can say is…the staff described the virtual world as being built from memory but did not say that it came from the memory of the diver.”

“Huh…? What does that mean…?” Shino asked, but Asuna sucked in a short breath.

“You mean…other people’s memories? Or…or that they can create memories that belong to no one, right from scratch…?” she asked in a half whisper. Shino understood at last.

What if these pneumonic visuals were saved in a format that other human beings could process? What if they’d already cracked that format itself? That would fundamentally make this idea possible. New objects, new tastes, scenery that had never been imagined…The creation of a truly “real” dream.

Kazuto confirmed her suspicions. “It’s been a little over two months since I started working at Rath…There was no memory limitation on the first few tests, so I remember a couple of those VR worlds. One of them was just a big room that happened to have a couple hundred cats hanging out in it.”

“…So many cats…”

Shino let a smile play across her features as she imagined that paradise, then shook her head to dispel the image. She nodded to Kazuto to continue, and he made a face as he tried to recall the others.

“From what I remember…there were a bunch of cats in there from breeds I didn’t recognize. And not just that…Some of them had wings and flew around, and others were all round and poofy and bounced off the walls. I couldn’t have ‘remembered’ things like that.”

“And they couldn’t have come from anyone else’s memory, either,” Asuna added. “I mean, no one’s ever seen a cat with wings in the real world. Either someone on the staff created that flying cat to show you…or the STL system generated it from scratch.”

“If it’s the latter, that would be a major feat. If the system is capable of doing that much for one object, it could ultimately create an entire world.”

They sat on his words in silence.

A virtual world created without human input or labor.

Something about that concept caused Shino’s heart to soar. Recently she’d found a growing alienation within her toward the arbitrary design of VRMMOs like GGO and ALO.

Naturally, all existing VR games had to be created by game designers from a development team. While the buildings, trees, and rivers all looked like they just existed on their own, all of them were modeled and fashioned according to the whims of an artist, of another human being.

Every time she was reminded of this fact while playing the game, a deep part of her woke from a reverie. It was the recognition and acknowledgment of the fact that they were all dancing on the palm of the “gods” who developed the game for them to play.

Shino hadn’t even started Gun Gale Online for the purpose of having fun. Even though she’d overcome some of her emotional baggage, she still believed there was a real-life meaning to what she experienced in the virtual world. She didn’t share the sentiments of those squadrons who collected model guns in real life and wore their uniforms with matching medals in the game. No, she believed that the perseverance and self-control that Sinon developed in the game might in some way transfer over to Shino Asada in the real world. If not, then why had she been spending so much time and money on this activity?

The fact that such a shy person could get to be so friendly with Asuna after just a few months was a sign of major progress, Shino thought. The other girl always carried a hint of a smile, but Shino was certain that they shared the same views. VRMMOs weren’t an escapist pleasure but a tool to improve herself in the real world. Asuna was like that, too. And Kazuto…well, it needn’t be said.

Which was exactly why she didn’t want to think that a VR world was just a construction, and that everything that happened inside of it was fiction. She didn’t want to think it, but someone, of course, built every one of them.

On the night she’d stayed at Asuna’s house last month, Shino had clumsily revealed in the darkened bedroom this sense of alienation. Next to her in the large bed, Asuna thought it over. Then she said, “Shino-non, you could say the same thing about the real world. Everything about the environment we live in, from our homes and cities, to our status as students, to the structure of society itself, was designed by people…For the purpose of getting stronger or being able to pursue the path that we want, I think.”

She paused, then smiled and continued. “But I’d kind of like to see a VR world one day that wasn’t designed by anyone. If that was an actual thing, I kind of feel like it’d be an even realer world than the one we live in…”

“A realer world,” Shino muttered without realizing it. Asuna glanced at her and nodded, clearly remembering the same conversation.

“Kirito, are you saying…that if you use the STL, you could create a reality that is subjectively the same or greater than the real world? A true alternate world without a human designer?”

“Hmmm,” he mumbled, then slowly shook his head. “No…I think that would be very unlikely right now. You might be able to generate natural terrain like forests or fields, but I think it’d be impossible to create complex cities in a logical manner without the involvement of a human mind. As far as other possibilities…I guess that if you get a couple hundred testers and make them build a town or a culture itself on empty plains, that might be considered a world without a godlike Creator…”

“Wow, that sounds like a real long-term project.”

“It would take months for the map to be finished.”

The girls laughed at Kazuto’s joke. But the furrow between his brows stayed put as he continued to ponder the idea. Eventually he muttered, “So it’s a culture-development simulation? That might not actually be far off the mark. If the STL’s FLA function evolves further…but that’ll require a limit on the memory you bring inside…”

“S to the F to the L to the what now?” Shino asked, lost in the string of acronyms.

He looked up in surprise. “Oh…right. It’s the second magic power of the Soul Translator. I said the STL’s virtual world is like a dream, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you ever have a really long dream, and when you wake up, you’re just exhausted? Especially when it’s a nightmare…”

“Oh, sure,” she said, scowling. “It’s like you’re running and running from something, and you know it’s a dream partway through, but you can’t wake up. Only after you’ve been running all night do you wake up—and then it turns out you’re still in the dream.”

“How long does it feel like those dreams go?”

“How long? Two hours…three, maybe.”

“That’s the thing. When you measure the brain waves, even the times that people feel like they’ve been dreaming forever, the actual period of dreaming is just for a few minutes before they wake up,” Kazuto said. He held out his hands and covered the phone screens lying on the table. Then he impishly asked, “Sinon, if we started talking about the STL at four thirty, what time do you think it is now?”

“Uh…”

She wasn’t expecting that question. It was just past the solstice and there was plenty of light outside, making it impossible to tell the exact time just from the amount of light coming through the windows. She had to guess.

“Umm…about four fifty?”

He pulled away his hands and turned the screen toward Shino. The clock said it was well after five.

“Whoa, it’s been that long?”

“See, the flow of time is very subjective, not just in our dreams but in the real world as well. When there’s an emergency and you get a rush of adrenaline, time goes slowly. On the other hand, when you’re relaxed and enjoying a nice chat, you look up and it’s hours later. In their study of fluctlights and human consciousnesses, Rath put together a rough theory of why this happens. At the center of your mind there’s a pulse they call a ‘thought-clocking control signal,’ though they don’t know much about its source yet.”

“Clocking…?”

“Yeah, like a computer. How they measure the number of gigahertz of your CPU and stuff.”

“The number of calculations per second?” Asuna prompted. Kazuto tapped his finger on the table.

“They always list the maximum value for the catalog, but it’s not constantly going that fast. Usually it goes at a fairly slow pace to keep it cool and conserve power, but as you ask it to process more and more…” He increased the speed of his tapping. “It pulls up the processor clock to increase the speed. The photon computer recreating a fluctlight acts the same way. In an emergency, when the amount of data to process gets much greater, it speeds up the thought-clock in response. Don’t you feel like the bullets in GGO slow down when you’re concentrating really hard?”

“Well, when I’m in a really good rhythm, yeah. But I can’t do that bullet-dodging stuff you pull off.” She pouted. He frowned and shook his head.

“I couldn’t do that right now, either. I’ve got to retrain before the next BoB…Anyway, the thought-clock affects your perception of time. When the clock is running fast, your perception of the passage of time will slow down. This becomes especially pronounced while sleeping. The fluctlight speeds up quite a lot to process all that memory data, and you end up having several hours’ worth of dreams within a few minutes.”

“Hrmm…”

Shino crossed her arms. It was already crazy enough that they were talking about a computer that read her mind with light—all this stuff about the act of thinking causing her mental speed to go up and down had to be taken with a grain of salt. But Kazuto was grinning as though there was even more to the story.

“So extrapolate from there. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could do your homework or your job in your sleep? In just minutes of real-world time, you could do hours of work.”

“Th-that’s crazy.”

“Exactly. You can’t control your dreams to do exactly what you want,” Asuna protested.

But Kazuto’s smile did not falter. “The reason actual dreams are so scattershot is a by-product of the memory filing process. The dreams you see in the STL are far clearer—in fact, it’s basically just a VR world that works on dream logic. When you’re inside that world, it interferes with the mind’s thought-clocking pulse and speeds it up. Then it synchronizes the passage of time within the virtual world to speed it up, too. As a result, the amount of actual time the user experiences within the virtual world is multiplied. That’s the greatest function of the STL: Fluctlight Acceleration, or FLA.”

“…This all…just…”

Doesn’t seem real, Shino thought. It was more than “just a little” different from the AmuSphere.

Just the introduction of regular access to full-dive tech had brought about significant social change. In the almighty search for cost-cutting measures, businesses began holding virtual presentations and meetings. Multiple fully 3-D shows and movies came out each day, offering the viewer the ability to inhabit the scene from any angle. Seniors loved the tourist software that specialized in highly accurate recreations of popular destinations. And as Kazuto mentioned earlier, it was also finding use in military training.

The sudden increase in the range of interests that could be enjoyed indoors led to a predictable counter-surge in “Walkers” who insisted on going outside and strolling the town without a destination. Bizarrely enough, that led to a very successful line of Virtual Walking Simulators. Even the big fast-food chains had gotten into the business with virtual locations you could visit.

So society wondered where exactly the virtual world would send the real world that we live in. What would happen once the Soul Translator appeared and people could speed up their consciousnesses? Shino felt something chilly run across her skin.

Meanwhile, Asuna repeated, “A long…dream…” then looked up at Kazuto and smiled. “I suppose I should be grateful that SAO happened before the Soul Translator was developed. If we were playing it on the STL, Aincrad instead could have been a thousand floors and taken twenty years to beat.”

“Ugh…spare me,” he groaned, shaking his head.

Asuna smiled again and asked, “So all this week, you were just having one long dream?”

“Yeah. It was a function test for long-term consecutive use—three days in a dive without food or water. I think I did lose some weight…”

“More than a little! There you go, getting yourself into crazy business again,” she said, putting on a cutesy tantrum and crossing her arms. “I’m visiting Kawagoe tomorrow to cook you some food! I’d better ask Suguha to stock up on plenty of veggies.”

“J-just go easy on me.”

As Shino watched the two banter with a grin on her face, a sudden question occurred to her. “So, um…does that mean that during the three-day-long dive, that thought accelerator was working? How much time did you actually experience in there?”

He tilted his head, trying to remember, and said, “Well…like I explained earlier, my memories of the dive are limited…but I recall them saying that the current maximum amplification factor of the FLA is a bit over three…”

“So…nine days?”

“Or ten.”

“Hmm…I wonder what kind of world it was and what you were doing. If you can’t take out the memories, could you at least bring your memories in with you? Were there other testers?”

“Honestly, I have no idea about any of that. They said having advance knowledge will affect the test results. But even if they block memories from within the dive, I don’t know if they can limit your existing memory…At any rate, the place I go in Roppongi only has one experimental STL in it, so I’m guessing I was the only one diving. They wouldn’t tell me anything about the inside. What’s the use of being a beater if you can’t get an advantage as a beta tester? All they would tell me was the code name of their test world.”

“And what is that?”

“The Underworld.”

“Like…an underground world? I wonder if that’s the design theme.”

“I don’t even know if it’s meant to be realistic, or fantasy, or sci-fi. But with a name like that, I’m guessing it’s dark and subterranean…”

“Hmm. It doesn’t really stick out to me,” Shino murmured.

Meanwhile, Asuna put a finger to her slender chin and said softly, “Maybe…that has to do with Alice, too.”

“Alice…?”

“Like I said with the source of the name Rath, maybe this one comes from Alice in Wonderland. Well, the original manuscript title was Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that. The more I hear, the more this company sounds like it came from a fairy tale,” Shino noted giddily. “In fact, both Alice books were big, long dreams in the end, right? I wonder if that means you were having tea parties with rabbits and playing chess with a queen while you were under, Kirito.”

Asuna giggled at the thought. But Kazuto himself was staring at a fixed point on the table, lost in thought.

“…What’s wrong?” Shino asked.

“…Oh, uh…”

He looked up, still squinting, then blinked in obvious confusion.

“When you said ‘Alice’…I felt like I was about to remember something…It was just one of those things, you know? Where you’re on the brink of recalling something huge, but you can’t remember what it was, so it just sits there on your shoulders like this big ball of anxiety?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s kinda like when you have a nightmare and wake up from it, but you can’t remember what it was about.”

“There’s something…something I’m forgetting that I was supposed to do right away,” Kazuto lamented, scrunching up his hair.

Asuna looked at him with concern and asked, “Is it a memory from the test…?”

“But you already said that all the memory from the virtual world gets deleted,” Shino reminded him. He shut his eyes and groaned, then gave up and slumped his shoulders.

“Well, it was ten days of memories. Maybe there are little fragments here and there that they couldn’t block out entirely…”

“I see…If that’s the case, if you still had the memory, you would be a whole week older than us compared to before, mentally speaking. That’s…kinda scary to think about.”

“I don’t know…I kind of like that,” Asuna said. She was a year older than him. “It’s like it closes the gap a bit.”

Kazuto gave her a weak smile. “Speaking of which, from the end of yesterday’s dive to about the middle of school today, I got this weird feeling. It was like…all the familiar parts of town and TV shows and everything were all fresh, like I hadn’t seen them in forever. And when I saw people in class, I was like…‘who is that again?’”

“Oh, don’t be dramatic. It was only ten days,” Shino snapped.

“Yeah, you’re going to make me worry,” Asuna complained. “You have to stop participating in that dangerous experiment, Kirito. It’s definitely going to affect your health, for one thing.”

“Right. The long-term consecutive diving test was a major success, and all the big hurdles as far as the fundamental construction have been passed. Next comes the stage where they shape it into a functional machine, but I can’t begin to guess how many years it will take to shrink that enormous thing down to a commercial level…I’m not going for any side jobs anytime soon. I’ve got finals next month, anyway.”

“Ugh,” Shino said, grimacing. “Don’t remind me. You two are lucky; you barely even have any paper tests. We still have to use Scantrons. I wish they would get with the times.”

“Hee-hee! Well, we should have a study session sometime soon,” Asuna suggested. She looked up at the wall behind Shino and gasped. “It’s almost six! Time really does fly when you’re chatting.”

“I guess we should wrap it up. I feel like we only talked about the main point of the meeting for about five minutes,” Kazuto said, smirking.

“Well, the BoB is way far ahead, and we can decide on character build and finer strategy once you’ve converted,” Shino suggested.

“Good idea. I won’t use anything but a lightsaber, though.”

“You have to call it a photon sword!”

He laughed and picked up the bill, offering to pay it with the seventy-two straight hours of wages he’d just earned, and took it to the counter. Shino and Asuna loudly chimed in their thanks for the meal and started for the door.

“We’ll be back, Agil.”

“Thanks for the baked beans; they were great,” Shino called out to the owner, who was busy preparing for the night traffic, as she took her umbrella from the whiskey barrel. The door bell clattered when she opened the door, letting in the sounds of bustle and rain.

It wasn’t yet sundown, but the heavy clouds blocked most of the light, so it felt as dark as night along the wet street. She opened her umbrella and took one step down the small staircase, then stopped. She quickly scanned the area.

“What’s wrong, Shino-non?” Asuna asked behind her. Shino came back to her senses and rushed down into the street, then turned around.

“N-no, it’s nothing,” she said shyly. She wasn’t going to admit that the sniper sense on the back of her neck had just crawled. The possibility that her instinct for sensing a sniper while out in the open had transferred into real life was not something she wanted to confront right now.

Asuna was still curious, but then the door bell jangled again, prompting her to continue down the steps.

Kazuto emerged, stuffing his wallet back into his bag. As he descended to the street, he muttered, “Alice…”

“Are you still going on about that?”

“Well…now that I think about it, I must have heard something from the staff talking among themselves before the STL dive on Friday…A, L, I…Arti…Labile…Intelli…Hmm, what was it again…?” he muttered, mostly to himself.

Asuna extended her umbrella over him and chuckled. “Once he gets his mind on something, he can’t stop. If you’re that curious about it, just ask them the next time you go there.”

“Yeah, good point,” Kazuto said. He shook his head a few times to clear his thoughts and finally opened his own umbrella. “Well, Sinon, we’ll meet again to plan out this GGO conversion.”

“Roger that. We can meet in ALO, too. Thanks for coming.”

“So long, Shino-non.”

“Bye, Asuna.”

She waved to the couple as they headed off to their JR train, then turned the opposite direction to walk to her subway station. She peered out from under her umbrella again, but the prying gaze she’d felt just moments earlier was gone, as if it had never been there.