March 378 HE, Underworld Human Realm
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There had to be some way. It was often said that a nearly perfect VR world was indistinguishable from reality, but I didn't believe it was possible for absolutely every aspect of the real world to be represented in perfect accuracy.
For nearly five minutes, I sat among the short grass, pondering the possibilities. But ultimately, I did not come up with a simple idea that I could test on the spot. If I had a microscope, I could examine the soil for bacteria. If I had a plane, I could try flying to the ends of the earth. But with only my own two hands and feet, the best I could do at the moment was dig in the dirt.
Loneliness set in again, and I bit my lip.
"Oh..."
I leaped to my feet. The sound of the clearing grew faint.
What in the world? I have to be crazy not to have thought of that until just now.
Of course I knew. I was quite familiar with the technology to create a VR world that far surpassed what was available today, a type of "super-reality." Which meant this world had to be...
"Inside the Soul Translator...? Is this the Underworld?"
No one responded, of course, but I barely registered the lack of an answer as I stared around, dumbfounded.
Knotted, ancient trees, indistinguishable from the real thing. Waving grasses. Fluttering butterflies.
"So this...is the artificial dream it wrote into my fluctlight..."
On the very first day of my stint with Kirito and Rath, we got an explanation (more like bragging) about the rough working of the STL and the realness of its world from research/operator Takeru Higa.
On my first test dive, I realized that his words were not hyperbole in the least-and all I saw was a single room. While the desk, chair, and various items were all indistinguishable from reality, the space itself was much too small to be considered a "world."
But the size of the forest around me now had to be miles wide in terms of real-world scale. In fact, if the faint outline of mountains in the far distance were real, then it was tens, hundreds of miles in scope.
You'd have to scour together all the data space in the entire Internet to create and run such an environment using existing technology. It would have to be an entirely new form of tech...something possible only through the STL's pneumonic visuals system-but even I'd never imagined that it would be like this.
And if my supposition that this was the Underworld, the STL's virtual realm, was correct, then it would be essentially impossible to confirm that through any kind of user action from within.
After all, every object I could see was no different from the real thing, as far as my consciousness perceived it. If I pulled out every blade of grass, my fluctlight would receive the exact same information as if I did that action in real life. Discerning the difference from real life was fundamentally impossible.
If the STL was ever going to be put to a functional use, it would definitely need some kind of notable marker that identified its VR world as such, I noted to myself as I got up to my feet.
So I didn't have any certain proof yet, but it was reasonable to assume for now that I was in the Underworld. Meaning that in the real world, my body was lying in the STL test unit in Rath's Roppongi lab, making two thousand yen an hour.
"But wait...is that right?" I wondered, after my momentary period of relief.
I could have sworn that Higa had told me my memories as Shi Saiko were blocked during testing to prevent data contamination. But the only part of my memory that was blank was the single day between seeing Asuna and Kazuto off and then getting into Rath's STL. That was too narrow to qualify as a memory block.
Plus-yes, that was right! I'd decided not to visit Rath for a while so I could study for my finals.
So if this was an STL test dive, I had to assume that some issue had arisen. I looked up at the sky through the branches and shouted, "Mr. Higa! If you're monitoring this test, call off the dive for a bit! I think there's a problem!"
More than ten seconds passed.
Countless leaves shook in the breeze beneath the pleasant sun. Butterflies flapped their wings sleepily. Nothing changed.
"Man...I don't know about this..."
A possibility suddenly occurred to me. Was this situation actually a test I'd elected to undertake?
Perhaps they'd blocked only the brief bit of memory before the dive and tossed me into the STL's ultrarealistic world to collect data on what a person would do if he wasn't able to discern if his setting was the real world or a virtual one.
If that was true, I wanted to smack my head for agreeing to such an unpleasant experiment. If I had assumed that I would easily escape my predicament through quick thinking and action, then it was a breathtakingly thoughtless decision.
I used my fingers to list a number of possibilities that explained my situation, along with totally arbitrary percentages.
"Let's see...Chances that this is somewhere in the real world: three percent. Chances that this is an existing type of VR world: nine percent. Chances that this is a voluntary STL test dive: twenty percent. Chances that there was a spontaneous accident during the dive: 70.9999 percent. Which means..."
There's a 0.0001 chance I got summoned to a real alternate world, I added mentally. Racking my brain for an answer wasn't going to get me much further. If I wanted to be more certain, I had to brave danger to interact with another person, be it game player or test diver.
It was time for action.
The first step was to quench my thirst, which was reaching persistent levels. I did a full 360-degree turn in the middle of the grass. The sound of flowing water was coming from what I estimated to be east, based on the position of the sun.
Before I started off, I reached behind my back just in case, but there was no sword or even a stick there, of course. I strode forward before I could start to feel lonely about that, and picked up Kazuto over my shoulder.
"Knowing him, he won't wake up until I force him up, but I'll just carry him for now"
And in less than ten steps, I was out of the grass. Two huge trees stood at my sides like natural gateposts, and I headed through them into the dim forest.
It was mysterious and eerie within the woods, with their velvety carpet of moss underfoot. The canopy of leaves far above blocked out nearly all the sunlight, so only the rare tendril of golden light reached the ground. The butterflies of the grass clearing were replaced with strange insects somewhere between dragonflies and moths that hovered and slid through the air in silence. Occasionally I heard the cry of some unfamiliar creature. It wasn't like any place I knew on Earth.
I walked for fifteen minutes, praying all the while that I didn't run into any large, hostile animals or monsters. Relief set in when an array of ample sunlight appeared in the distance ahead. Based on the increased volume of sound, I could tell there was a river nearby. My thirst spurred my legs into a quicker pace.
At the edge of the thick forest, there was a ten-foot buffer of grass, followed by the reflective silver of a water surface.
"W-waddah," I moaned piteously, crossing the final distance to the riverside and its soft undergrass. "Whoa," I grunted as I stared into the water at point-blank range on hands and knees.
It was beautiful. The river was not very wide, but the water in its gentle curve was stunningly clear. It was absolutely colorless but for a drop of blue, the white sand of the riverbed clearly visible through the pure mountain water.
Given that, just a few seconds ago, I had been leaving room for the faint possibility that this was the real world, it might be dangerous to drink unfiltered natural water. But I could not resist the allure of a stream that looked like melted crystal in its pristine beauty. I gasped at the cutting chill of the water against my hand, but it did not stop me from scooping it up to my mouth.
It was practically nectar. The taste of such sweet, fresh, pure water made me never want to spend money on a bottle of mineral water at the store again. I scooped up the water over and over with both hands, until eventually I just lowered my mouth to drink directly from the stream.
With the intoxication of that life-water running through my veins, I finally eliminated from my mind the possibility that this was a standard full-dive VR world.
No existing unit, such as the AmuSphere, could model liquid perfectly. Polygons were just a set of coordinates connected by a plane and not well suited to depict the complex, random shifting of water. Yet the water that rippled and spilled over my hands was utterly natural in appearance.
It was tempting to dispel the notion that this was taking place in the real world, too. I sat up at last and surveyed the area. The beautiful stream; the fantastical forest that continued past the far bank; the odd, colorful fauna of the woods-none of it seemed to match up with a real-world location. After all, wasn't it true that the more untouched by human hands a place was, the more severe it was likely to be? How could I be walking around in this light clothing and not have been bitten by any bugs yet?
Thinking about that last question seemed likely to prompt the STL into summoning a cloud of poisonous insects, so I pushed it from my mind and got to my feet. I rounded down the likelihood of a real-world location to just 1 percent and looked around.
The river flowed from north to south, curving gently. Both ends visible from here vanished among the massive trees. But based on the state and temperature of the water, I felt certain that I had to be close to the source. I'd be more likely to find civilization following the river south.
I had just set off downriver, thinking it would be a much easier trip with a boat to ride, when the breeze shifted slightly, bringing a strange sound to my ears.
It was the sound of something large and tough being struck by something even harder. Not just once. It was happening at a steady pace of about once every four seconds.
It couldn't be an animal or a natural occurrence. It was a virtual certainty that a human was producing this noise. I imagined someone chopping down a tree, perhaps. Briefly, I wondered if it would be dangerous to approach them, then smirked at myself. This wasn't a kill-and-steal PvP MMORPG. My best option was clearly to make contact and gain information.
I turned around and headed back upstream in the direction of the sound.
Suddenly, I experienced a brief, strange vision.
A glittering river on the right. A deep forest on the left. Straight ahead, a green path advancing with no end in sight.
Four children walked down it abreast. A boy with black hair, another boy with flaxen blond hair, and between them, a girl wearing a straw hat with flowing golden locks, standing next to her was a boy with similar pure silky silver and white hair as me carrying about a small steel sword. They threw off dazzling light from the setting summer sun.
Is this...a memory?
Long-distant days that would never return. Days he'd believed would continue forever, that he swore to protect and cherish, but that vanished as easily as ice left in the open sun...
Those nostalgic, heady days.