Interlude III

In the middle of the massive Ocean Turtlemarine research facility

was a vertical shaft sixty feet across and over three hundred feet

deep.

This Main Shaft, which was reinforced with titanium alloy,

both supported the ship's various floors and protected its central

functions. In addition to the ship's control and propulsion systems, it housed the mysterious Rath's many advanced machines.

There were four Soul Translators (STLs)—incredible full-dive

machines capable of reading and writing the human soul—and,

connected to them, one Lightcube Cluster that served as their

mainframe.

The cluster was installed right in the center of the shaft. STL

Units Two and Three were in the Lower Shaft, while Units Four

and Five were in the Upper Shaft. STL prototype Unit One wasn't

on the ship but in Rath's Roppongi office far away.

Kirito—Kazuto Kirigaya—was currently in Unit Four, connected to the system as a means of repairing his neural network

while he struggled to recover from his coma. So in order to reach

him, they had to enter the shaft at the bottom and take an elevator to the upper portion.

It was 7:30 AMon Monday, July 6th, 2026.

Asuna Yuuki adjusted the collar of the loose summer sweater

she wore over her T-shirt as she climbed the dim spiral staircase.

Her feet sounded loudly on the galvanized metal steps, lit by

the orange emergency LED lights. The experience couldn't help

but remind her of a place far, far from here, in a metal castle

floating in an infinite sky, where she climbed many staircases like

this one—those spiral stairs that connected the boss chamber of

each floor of Aincrad with the next one above…

In most cases, she had walked behind Heathcliff, leader of the

Knights of the Blood, with the other guild members celebrating

their triumph behind them, but there were exceptions. Before she

joined the KoB, near the very start of the game of death, she

walked with a solo player dressed all in black.

With his easy, aloof manner that belied the exhaustion of battle, he would tell bad jokes to annoy her or give her information

on the next floor. On those few occasions, he was the one to guide

her onward when she felt crushed by the fatigue of their endless

quest.

"…Kirito…"

She mumbled the name of her lover under the sound of her

clanking footsteps.

There was no answer, of course.

She pushed down the welling sensation of loneliness that

threatened to overcome her. Unlike just two days ago, Kazuto was

no longer missing. He was waiting for her in that little room at

the top of these stairs. She couldn't converse with him yet—but

even if she couldn't hold his hand, she knew his awakening was

approaching, moment by moment. Natsuki Aki, his nurse, said

that if the STL's treatment continued well, his neural network

might be repaired within a day or two, moving him toward the

stage of consciousness again.

Asuna hadn't explained everything to her parents about the

journey to the Ocean Turtlefloating off the Izu Islands. She'd enlisted the help of Dr. Rinko Koujiro to explain to them that she

would be assisting the doctor on an observation of a high-tech research facility for the next few days—an explanation that wasn't

entirelyuntrue.

She knew it was a weak excuse, but her mother, Kyouko Yuuki,

just gave Asuna a searching look, then said, "Take care." Perhaps

she instinctually understood everything that was going on.

At any rate, Asuna had only three days of time here, from July

5th to the 7th. That meant that tomorrow evening, she had to be

on the regularly scheduled helicopter going from the Ocean Turtleto the heliport back in Shinkiba. She didn't know if she'd be

making that return trip to Tokyo with Kazuto yet, but if Nurse Aki

was right, she'd at least be able to talk to him.

When that happened, she'd get her chance to rage at him, to

cry, and to laugh.

She stopped in the middle of the staircase, took a deep breath,

then resumed climbing.

After another twenty steps, the stairs came to an abrupt end. It

wasn't a dead end; there was a heavy round hatch in the ceiling,

through which she needed to climb a retracting ladder.

That layer of metal, eight inches thick, was the titanium composite wall that split the upper and lower halves of the Main

Shaft. Lieutenant Nakanishi bragged that it was strong enough to

protect against rifle fire at close range, but it was unclear why

such a situation would arise on a nonmilitary mega-float.

Between him and Mr. Kikuoka, these people sure like to make

grandiose statements, Asuna thought as she ascended the aluminum alloy ladder through the hatch. The dark spiral staircase

continued after that, but the lights were green up above. It really

was as if she'd ascended to a new floor in a game.

Now she was in the Upper Shaft, where they kept the

Lightcube Cluster, the physical center of the entire Alicization

Project. It was probably just on the other side of the staircase

wall, in fact.

The Lightcube Cluster was top secret, so she didn't really know

how it worked other than that it was a literal cluster of an extreme number of lightcubes, as the name stated.

Lightcubes were the physical media that stored the artificial

fluctlights—the "souls" of the Underworldians who functioned as

bottom-up AIs—and they had lined up hundreds of thousands of

them around one enormous cube. Instead of souls, that cube contained the massive amount of mnemonic visual data for all the

Underworldians. It was the core of the STL, the Main Visualizer…

Takeru Higa, Rath's chief researcher, had explained the Underworld's workings to Asuna in a general sense, skipping over

some company secrets here and there, but to be honest, it still

sounded like a bunch of gibberish to her.

When she suggested they let her see the Lightcube Cluster itself, given all the things they were telling her, Higa seemed a bit

flustered and said the cluster's metal shell just made it look like a

big box. And nobody could open it now—not Higa, not the other

staff members, not even project overseer and SDF Lieutenant

Colonel Seijirou Kikuoka.

So all Asuna could do was imagine a vague concept of the cluster. Endless rows of tiny crystals, lined up in darkness. Between

the perfect square of their array and the larger crystal in the center, fine little lines of light were threading to and fro, like the stars

clustered at the center of a galaxy…

She was so lost in thought envisioning the image that Asuna

was slow to notice someone coming down the stairs from above.

"Oh, sorry," she said automatically, dodging to the left. The

other person continued by without a word. With each descending

stair, the footstep made a zshunk, vweemsound.

"Hmn…?"

A part of her brain latched on to that strange sound, and just

as the figure passed her position, she looked up and stared to the

right.

"Ah…?!"

Instantly, she backed away, pressing herself against the wall.

The question wasn't whowas coming down the stairs but

what. Because whatever it was, it was not a human being.

The overall silhouette was humanoid, but instead of a skeleton, it had a bare metal frame with resin-cased cylinders attached

to its limbs and waist. Fine exposed gears made up its joints, and

colored signal cables ran up and down its length like arteries.

On its back was a large box, while its "face" was just three

lenses: large, medium, and small. Asuna subconsciously wondered why they hadn't just put two identically sized lenses for

eyes, then realized what she was thinking.

She let out the breath she was holding and whispered, "A…

robot…?"

Instantly, the mysterious bipedal machine stopped moving.

The gears in its legs whirred, pulling back the foot to its previous

perch. Once it was standing on the same step as Asuna, it rotated

its body in place to the left to face her. The two bigger lenses were

dark, but there was a red light in the small one, flickering unevenly as though watching her.

"Mm—!"

A little squeak escaped from her throat. She tried to back

away, but she was already pressed against the wall of the stair-

well. Asuna leaned right, then left, but the red light continued

tracking her face.

Monsters aren't supposed to pop up on the staircases between

floors—and there're no robot mobs in the first place—and anyway, I'm in real life, not a game!Her mind raced from thought to

thought, and she was about to turn and dart back down the way

she had come when there was a voice from above.

"Hey! Knock it off, Ichiemon!"

A man was descending the stairs with an expression of alarm.

He wore a print T-shirt, shorts, thick metal-framed glasses, and

had his short hair spiked back—this was the lead researcher on

Project Alicization, Takeru Higa himself. He had a well-used laptop in his hand.

The machine-man pulled its lenses away from Asuna and rotated ninety degrees toward Higa, as though reacting to his spoken command.

Asuna finally relaxed, then looked at the researcher on the

next step upward and demanded, "Mr. Higa…what is this?"

"Er, well…it's Ichiemon. The official name is Electroactive

Muscled Operative Machine, or EMOM, and it's the first of its

type, so 1EMOM—which we've nicknamed Ichiemon," he answered, his expression shifting between embarrassment and

pride.

She glared at him and asked, "And…what is Ichiemon doing

here?"

It wasn't Higa who answered the question. "Higa's just helping

me fine-tune my program. I don't know why—it's not like we're

cohorts back at the college seminar anymore."

That answer came from a woman descending the stairs behind

him. She had a white lab coat over her denim shirt and jeans, and

her hair was parted straight down the side, a look that screamed

intellectual. This was Dr. Rinko Koujiro, the very person who

helped Asuna infiltrate the Ocean Turtle.

"Good morning, Asuna."

"Good morning," she replied, then gave Ichiemon another examination from top to bottom and asked the researchers, "This…

isn't part of Project Alicization, too, is it?"

Ichiemon took the lead back up the spiral staircase until they

reached the sub-control room, where Asuna finally pushed her

questions aside and rushed down the hallway to the STL room.

She couldn't go in the door at the end of the narrow tunnel,

but the left-hand wall was made of clear reinforced glass. She

pressed her hands and forehead against the window and peered

into the barely lit storage room.

The two massive rectangular objects were Soul Translator Unit

Four and Unit Five. Unit Five was powered down, but there were

a number of soft lights, some of them blinking, active on Unit

Four. If she squinted, she could see a thin silhouette on the gel

bed connected to the main device.

That was Kirito, aka Kazuto Kirigaya. Asuna's partner in so

many different ways.

A week ago, a suspect in the Death Gun incident had attacked

Kazuto on the street in Setagaya Ward. The attacker injected him

with deadly succinylcholine, temporarily paralyzing his heart.

Emergency measures were successful at preventing his death,

but the stoppage of blood flow had damaged his brain—the doctor

said that Kazuto might even be in a permanent vegetative state.

In the end, it was Lieutenant Colonel Seijirou Kikuoka, leader of

the Alicization Project, who flew him here to the Ocean Turtleon

life support. He claimed that it was a difficult decision that he'd

made with the belief that the STL could help heal Kazuto.

Apparently, Kazuto's mind was currently in a medical-use VR

environment called the Underworld. By activating his consciousness—his fluctlight—they hoped to regenerate his neural network.

It was hard to understand everything they were trying to explain

to her, but she at least understood that he wasn't in a simple

coma now.

She was looking at only his body; his mind was in a far-off virtual world. She supposed this was how Kazuto had felt while

Nobuyuki Sugou held her captive in the fairy world of Alfheim.

If only I could do what he did back then and go dive into the

Underworld to save him…

After over a minute of watching and thinking, Asuna pulled

away from the glass. She gave him a silent promise to return by

midday, then returned to Subcon.

Compared to the main control room in the Lower Shaft, this

room was quite small. The control console was a simplified version, too, and the desks and chairs here were cheap.

Higa and Rinko stood at the desk rather than using the chairs.

They set up the laptop on the desk, accompanied by the frightening Ichiemon.

Once she was certain the robot was on standby and wouldn't

make any sudden moves, Asuna approached the two adults. In

college, they'd been members of the same seminar—along with

Akihiko Kayaba and Nobuyuki Sugou, in fact—and they were debating the project in the rapid-fire informal conversation of old

friends.

"I think the bottleneck's in the balancer's processing. Don't

you have the budget for faster chips?"

"We're at maximum capacity if you consider cooling and battery usage. Our only option is to pick up slack by tuning the EAP

actuators…"

"But those polymer muscles are so last-generation. Use CNT

and it'll lighten right up."

"N-now, that'sa surefire way to kill our budget…but we do

have enough for one unit, I suppose…"

"Still haven't gotten over your need to skimp on materials,

huh?" Rinko said, shaking her head. She noticed Asuna standing

there and ducked her head guiltily. "Oh, I'm so sorry, Asuna. I

didn't mean to be so noisy."

"Actually, I think Kirito likes it when things are lively," she

replied with a grin, then looked at the robot. From what she could

understand of their conversation, the actuators moving its body

were artificial muscles made of organic materials. It was cuttingedge technology, for sure, but seemed unrelated to Rath's main

work in developing AI.

Higa seemed to sense her skepticism. He leaned back against

the table and said, "The old guy wanted us to make this, too."

"Uh…Mr. Kikuoka does? But why…?"

"Well, I'm not sure how serious he is about it." Rinko sighed.

"But if we're going to bring the fluctlights from the Underworld

back here, they'll need a body to move around in, right?"

"Then…then this robot is meant to house an AI?"

"That seems to be the plan."

"Yep, exactly."

Rinko and Higa answered the last one together. Asuna gave

Ichiemon another piercing examination. The overall form was

human, yes, but the frame was too blocky, the joints jutting out,

and no amount of silicone rubber was going to hide that and

make it look like a person.

"…No disrespect to Ichiemon, but…won't the AIs be shocked if

they have to live in a body like this…?"

At the very least, Asuna and Kazuto's top-down AI "daughter,"

Yui, would absolutely refuse to inhabit such a thing, she suspected.

Higa waved frantically. "Oh, no, no, we wouldn't put them in

this. Ichiemon's just a prototype for data collection. His processor's using old architecture, which is why he's so chunky. We have

a second unit for testing with onboard AI, and that one's much

more advanced."

"Second unit…And would that one's name be…?"

"Niemon," he answered matter-of-factly.

"Ah…for 'two.' I should have figured," she said, shaking her

head. "So what is it that makes the onboard-AI prototype more

advanced?"

"Well, its sensors and balancers are way, way more effective at

their job…or so we hope," Rinko answered for Higa. She stepped

sideways and, for some reason, pulled her feet together and balanced on tiptoe. Then she spread her arms a bit and held that position, wavering slightly.

"Even when we human beings are standing still, our entire

bodies are working to fine-tune our balance—almost entirely unconsciously, in fact. Even right now, as I'm struggling not to fall

over, I'm not thinking, 'I'm leaning this far to the right, so I need

to straighten my right leg more than my left.' My brain—my fluctlight—is controlling my muscles and bones with its own autobalancing function."

She dropped her sneaker heels back to the floor and grinned.

"Ichiemon has servos that re-create that autobalancing function

through mechanical and electronic means. But like you saw when

he was slowly going up and down the stairs, it takes a huge number of sensors and balancers, a high-powered CPU, batteries, and

cooling systems, plus a frame strong enough to support all those

things. That's why we can't make Ichiemon any smarter than he

already is."

"Even this is way more human than we could get a decade

ago." Higa smirked.

"Meaning…if its brain functions aren't handled by an old CPU but

an artificial fluctlight, it should have the same balancing ability

that any human being does?" Asuna asked.

"Yep! That's the idea. That way we can shrink the servos to a

fraction of the size, make the frame lighter, the actuators smaller,

and get it far closer to the actual human body…we hope. It's still a

bit of a pipe dream. Like I said, Niemon is much more human—

well, the silhouette is, anyway."

"Well, if you're that proud of it, show us alr—" Rinko started to

say, then stopped herself. She frowned, deep in thought, then said

in a much lower voice, "Higa…Niemon can't walk around autonomously yet, can it?"

"Huh? Of course not. It's got the CPU in there, but the actual

control program's just an empty shell. Even if you loaded

Ichiemon's program, the difference with Niemon's sensory systems would make it fall over by the third step, I bet."

"…Oh…"

Rinko considered this, then took a deep breath and turned to

Asuna to change the topic. "Have you had breakfast yet?"

"Not yet."

"Then let's go to the mess hall. Higa's going to eat here with

Ichiemon."

Asuna thought that was a joke, but Higa pulled an energy bar

out of his shorts pocket and waved them off with a "Take your

time." Asuna shook her head in equal parts exasperation and

wonder, then followed Rinko.

Before she left, she looked at the STL room and mouthed the

words I'll be back.

In the hallway leading away from Subcon, someone was approaching from the elevator. It was two men, in fact, both wearing lab coats over T-shirts. They were probably more of Rath's

employees, of which there were supposedly at least a dozen, but

Asuna didn't know their names yet. They probably still assumed

that she was Rinko's assistant, the way she had been disguised

when she'd snuck aboard.

She bowed to them after Rinko, and as the two men passed,

she followed them out of the corner of her eye. She didn't recognize the profile of the man with the scruffy whiskers and the

ponytail. But something itched in the back of her mind. It was

that sense of danger that, if back in Aincrad, would at least have

her hand on the hilt of her rapier, if not drawing it entirely…

"What is it, Asuna?" Rinko asked quietly, and she realized that

she had stopped still. The men continued down the hall, flip-flops

slapping against the floor as they made their way to Subcon.

"…No. It's nothing."

They continued walking, Asuna attempting to pin down the

source of that strange sensation all the while. But after she exhausted the possibilities, it began to fade away and eventually

vanished.