“Here you go, a pillow and blankets. There are more in the wardrobe in the back if you’re cold. Morning prayer is at six, and breakfast is at seven. I’ll come to check on you, but please do wake up on your own. There’s a curfew once lights are out, so be mindful of that.”
I accepted both the onslaught of words and the heavy pile of wool blankets with outstretched arms.
A girl of about twelve years was standing before me as I sat on the bed. She wore a black habit with a white collar, and her light brown hair hung long down her back. Her big, busy eyes held none of the downcast obedience she’d displayed in the presence of the sister.
Her name was Selka, and she was a sister-in-training, studying sacred arts at the church. She was also charged with watching over the other boys and girls living at the church, which was probably why she bossed me around like a big sister or mother, despite being several years my junior. It was hard to keep the grin off my face.
“Umm, is there anything else you need to know?”
“No, I think I’ve got it. Thanks for all the help,” I said. For a brief moment, Selka’s expression softened, and then it was back to fussy business as usual.
“Good night, then. Do you know how to put out the lamp?”
“…Yeah. Good night, Selka.”
She nodded briskly and spun to leave the room, the hem of her slightly-too-large habit swaying. Once her quiet footsteps trailed away, I let out a long sigh.
They had put me in a little-used room on the second floor of the church. The room was about a hundred square feet, with a cast-iron bed, matching desk and chair, a small bookshelf, and a wardrobe next to it. I moved the blankets and pillow off my knees and onto the bed, then put my hands behind my head and rolled back onto the sheets. The flame in the lamp overhead briefly sizzled.
“What the hell…”
Is going on? I replayed all the events that had transpired between entering the village and now.
The first thing Eugeo had done was head for the guard station right next to the gate. There was another youngster in there named Zink, who glanced at me suspiciously at first but accepted Eugeo’s story that I was a “lost child of Vecta” with almost laughable ease and granted me entry to the village.
The entire time Eugeo was giving the story, my eyes were locked onto the simple sword hanging from Zink’s belt, so the specific words all went in one ear and out the other. I desperately wanted to borrow the aged sword to see if my skills—technically, the virtual swordsman Kirito’s skills—would still function here, but I valiantly resisted that urge.
After leaving the station, we walked down the village’s main street, attracting a slightly unnerving amount of attention. Several villagers asked who I was, and Eugeo stopped to explain each time, so it took us nearly thirty minutes to get to the small village square at the center of Rulid. One old lady carrying a large basket got teary-eyed when she saw me. “You poor thing!” she exclaimed, and pulled an apple (or something close to one) out of the basket for me. I felt a bit guilty about that.
By the time we got to the church standing on the small hill overlooking the village, the sun was almost entirely gone. Sister Azalia, a nun whose picture ought to be in the dictionary under the word stern, answered Eugeo’s knock on the door. She looked so much like Miss Minchin from A Little Princess that I was certain our plan would end in disaster. But at odds with her appearance, Sister Azalia welcomed me in almost instantly and offered me dinner to boot.
Eugeo promised to meet me in the morning, and thus left me at the church. Aside from Selka, the oldest, there were six children to meet, and we shared a quiet but peaceful meal of fried fish, boiled potatoes, and vegetable soup. As I feared, the children assaulted me with questions afterward, which I hoped I answered without dropping the ball. After that, I was sent to the bath with the three boys, and after undergoing all of these many trials, I was free at last to lie here, in the bed in the guest room.
The fatigue of the day rested heavily on me; I was certain that I’d fall asleep as soon as I closed my eyes, but the waves of confusion washing over me prevented that from happening.
What does all this mean? I asked myself silently.
In conclusion, there was not a single NPC, as I would define them, in the entire village.
From Zink the guard; to the passing villagers and the old lady with the apples; to the stern but kindly Sister Azalia and apprentice, Selka; to the six orphan children who’d lost their parents. Every one of them had realistic emotions, conversations, and subtly unique body movements, just as Eugeo did. They were all real people, as far as I could tell. At the very least, they were absolutely not the automated-response characters found in every VRMMO.
But that shouldn’t be possible.
There was one Soul Translator at Rath’s Roppongi office and three more almost ready for operation at their headquarters. That’s what Higa told me, and he was one of the developers. Even if there were a few more than that in reality, it certainly wasn’t enough capacity to create an entire village of this scale. From what I could tell on our trip through town, there were at least three hundred residents of Rulid, and they couldn’t mass-produce that enormous STL test unit on that kind of scale. If you actually factored in all the other villages, towns, and that center capital they talked about, there was no way they could hire tens of thousands of testers in secret, even if they had the capital to create and run that many machines.
“Or else…”
Were Eugeo and the others not real human beings—players with limited memories? Were they actually automated programs operating in a realm far beyond common sense, to a level of unfathomable perfection…?
The term artificial intelligence floated through my head.
The use of AI had been advancing rapidly in recent years, mostly in PCs, car navigation systems, and appliances. They would take the form of human or animal characters that could receive spoken commands or questions and perform actions or answer questions with remarkable accuracy. In a sense, the NPCs in the VR games I played were a kind of AI, too. Mostly they existed to provide information on quests and events, but if spoken to without a particular reason, they could give natural answers to a certain shallow extent. There were even people who exhibited what they called “NPC-moé,” who followed around the pretty girl NPCs to talk with them all day long.
But that did not mean those AIs had true intelligence, of course. They were just a complex set of orders—“if they say this, answer that”—and could not provide real answers to questions outside of their parameters. If that happened, nearly all NPCs would offer a confused smile and say something along the lines of, “I don’t understand your question.”
Had Eugeo responded in that way even once throughout the entire day?
He reacted to my every question with natural displays of surprise, hesitation, laughter, and so on, and he gave me proper answers to everything. And not just Eugeo—Sister Azalia, Selka, and even the younger children never gave me a reaction that suggested what they heard wasn’t “in their databank.”
As far as I knew, the highest-level artificial intelligence of that sort was one named Yui, developed to be a mental counseling program for the old SAO and now considered a virtual “daughter” to Asuna and me. She had monitored countless player conversations for two years, collecting a vast amount of detailed data and compiling it into a complex database. She was perhaps the best current example of the boundary between automated program and true intelligence.
But even Yui wasn’t perfect. Occasionally she would react to a statement by claiming that word wasn’t in her database, and she sometimes mischaracterized more complex emotional expressions, like feigned anger or acting grumpy to hide embarrassed pleasure. All it took was a brief moment in a conversation for her “AI-ness” to show itself.
Yet I saw none of that in Eugeo or Selka. If human hands programmed all the people of Rulid into boy AIs, girl AIs, elderly AIs, adult AIs…it would be an even more preposterous case of super-advanced tech than the STL itself. It was impossible to take seriously…
I paused my roiling thoughts there and sat up so I could put my feet on the floor.
Fixed onto the wall behind the head of the bed was a cast-iron oil lamp that emitted a wavering orange light and a faint burning smell. I’d never touched one in the real world, of course, but there had been a similar lamp in the place where Asuna and I stayed in Alfheim, so I did what came naturally and tapped the surface.
When no control window appeared, I realized my mistake and made the two-fingered gesture—the “sigil of Stacia.” When I tapped the lamp after that, the purple window appeared as expected. But all it displayed was the durability of the lamp itself and no buttons to turn it off or on.
I felt a rush of panic when I realized that I’d dismissed Selka’s offer to teach me how to put out the lamp, but that vanished when I noticed the small dial on the bottom of the lamp. I gave it a clockwise twist. The metal squeaked, and the flame narrowed until it died out, leaving a brief line of smoke. Now the room was shrouded in darkness, with the only light coming from the faint moonlight streaming through the gap in the curtains.
With that surprisingly difficult task out of the way, I turned back to the bed, placed the pillow where I liked it, and lay down again. It was a bit chilly, so I pulled Selka’s thick blankets up to my shoulders and felt sleep closing in.
They’re not human, and they’re not AIs. So what are they?
In a corner of my mind, an answer was already forming. But it was too terrifying to put into words. If what I was thinking was even possible, then this Rath company had plunged its hands deep into the realm of God. Compared to that, reading people’s souls with the STL was as harmless as prodding the key to open Pandora’s box with one’s fingertips.
As I fell asleep, I heard my own voice rising from the depths of my mind.
This wasn’t the time to be searching left and right for an escape route. I had to go to the city. I had to find out the reason this world existed…
Clang.
Somewhere far off, I heard what sounded like a bell ringing.
No sooner had my dreaming brain processed that than something prodded my shoulder. I wriggled deeper into the blankets and groaned, “Urr, ten minutes…just five more minutes…”
“No, it’s time to get up.”
“Three…just three minnis…”
The prodding continued, sending a signal of confusion through the sleep clouding my brain. My sister, Suguha, wouldn’t wake me up in such a timid way. She’d scream at me, pull my hair, pinch my nose, or even use the cruel nuclear option: yanking the covers off the bed.
At last I remembered I wasn’t in the real world or Alfheim, and I popped my head out from under the blankets. Through parted eyelids, I saw Selka, already in her nun’s habit. The apprentice sister looked at me in exasperation.
“It’s already five thirty. All the children have risen and washed up. If you don’t hurry, you’ll be late for worship.”
“…Okay, I’m getting up…”
I sat up slowly, lamenting the loss of the bed’s warmth and the comfort of peaceful sleep. Just as I remembered it from last night, I was in the guest room on the second floor of the church in Rulid. Or within the Underworld created by the Soul Translator, if you preferred it that way. My odd experience would not end as a brief one-night dream, it seemed.
“So it’s a dream, but it wasn’t a dream.”
“What was that?” Selka asked, catching the statement I hadn’t meant to say out loud.
I shook my head in a mild panic. “N-nothing. I’ll just change and get ready. In the chapel downstairs, right?”
“Yes. You might be our guest and a lost child of Vecta, but if you’re going to sleep in the church, you must pray to Stacia. Sister Azalia always says, even a cup of water contains the goddess’s blessing and must be appreciated…”
I slipped quickly out of bed before her lecture could start dragging on. I lifted the hem of the thin shirt they gave me as nightwear, and this time it was Selka who called out in a panic, “Uh, y-you only have twenty minutes, so don’t be late! Make sure you wash your face at the well outside!”
She trotted off and quickly opened the door to disappear through it. That was definitely not an NPC reaction…
I took off the shirt and reached for my “starter equipment”—the blue tunic draped over the back of the chair. Out of curiosity, I lifted it to my nose but didn’t smell any sweat. Surely they weren’t simulating the bacteria that produced odors. Perhaps the measure of item degradation, like when something gets filthy or starts fraying, was summarized by the durability counter they called life.