S.A.O Project Alicization - OC/Male Reader Insert

Project Alicization ----- Chapter Fourteen

"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. Shi 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 Shi mentioned earlier, it was also finding use in military training.