Sword Art Online - Volume 18 - Chapter Ep6

Epilogue Part 6
Higa Takeru’s mind wandered this way and that as he hesitated for almost an hour.

A ramshackle keyboard lay across his kneecaps. Should he or shouldn’t he press the input key on the bottom right that gleamed smooth from nonstop friction?

His roughly eight-mat Higashigotanda apartment was stuffed with machinery accumulated since his school years. The outmoded A/C did nothing to expel the machines’ heat, making the air indoors damp and stifling hot. To reduce heat production as much as possible he had even refrained from switching on the lights, which shrouded the room in darkness. The only thing visible was the sporadic blinking of red, green, and blue LEDs all around him.

Higa was kneeling upon a zaisu6 opposite a 32-inch monitor perched atop a kotatsu7 and emitting a muffled glow. The computer desktop showed zero movement, with a single, unembellished window displaying nothing at all.

Sighing for the umpteenth time, Higa leaned into the backrest. The rusted frame promptly creaked.

He had only told the RATH technicians that he was heading home to pick up a change of clothes; in 30 or so minutes he would have to return to the Roppongi branch. In place of the apparently-dead Kikuoka Seijirou, Dr. Koujiro was occupied every day with public relations, so Higa was now the actual supervisor of Project Alicization.

But if they were to find out he had used his position to smuggle something out, he’d be reprimanded — no, demoted for sure.

That something was now enshrined to the right of the kotatsu, connected to a bizarre, sophisticated apparatus. This apparatus, a hand-assembled frame crammed full of circuit boards and wiring, was undoubtedly the most valuable and advanced object in the entire room. It was the only Light Cube interface apart from the one in Alice’s mechanical body that was not sealed within the Ocean Turtle.

Connected to it was a metal container about six centimeters wide.

Higa stared at the cube’s cold sheen and murmured:

“…There’s no way it’s going to run.”

His index finger shied away from the input key.

“It’s going to collapse immediately. That’s what the copies of me and Kiku-san did. There’s no way a human soul preserved within a Light Cube can handle the realization that it’s a copy of itself. Even if… Even if it’s…”

Without finishing his sentence, Higa sucked in a sharp gasp and held it within his chest—

His fingertip stretched once more and pressed down the input key.

The program began running. The whirring of the large fan in his full tower PC intensified.

At the center of the black window on the screen, polychromatic rays of light surfaced into being, like the birth of a star.

Innumerable peaks sliced powerfully at the darkness. They wavered, trembled, and gleamed.

At last, a familiar voice carried quietly from the speakers on either side of the monitor.

“………You’re Higa-san, right?”

Higa swallowed a great deal of saliva and responded croakily: “Y…Yeah.”

“I wasn’t deleted? To be precise… I must have been copied.”

“How… How on earth was I going to delete you?!”

Higa’s suppressed voice grew to a shout, as though in justification of his own actions.

“You’re the first Fluctlight to ever survive past 200 years’ time! Not even… You’re the first person to ever live the longest life in human history! How on earth was I supposed to delete you… Kirito-kun, huh?!”

He called his name, feeling sweat building in both palms.

Digital numbers on the monitor indicating the elapsed time since bootup clicked by at a hectic rate. 32 seconds… 33 seconds.

The copy of Kirigaya Kazuto’s Fluctlight — the one that had stuck out 200 years of the maximum acceleration phase in Underworld and just awakened, now knew that it was a duplicate of something else.

Every experiment up until this point, without exception, had resulted in the copy losing composure, descending into panic, letting loose a bizarre scream, and collapsing. Higa grit his teeth, waiting for a response from the speaker.

Seconds later—

“…I knew that something like this was going to happen…”

Calm words, as though they were being murmured.

“…Higa-san. Am I the only Fluctlight you copied?”

“Y…Yeah. I had to do it during the memory deletion, right under the noses of Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka and Dr. Koujiro, so yours was the only one I could copy…”

“I see…”

Another silence, and then the copied consciousness sealed within the Light Cube continued in that exceedingly steady voice:

“I spoke to the Queen… to Asuna about this. About what to do if something like this happens. She said that if she were the only one copied, then she would request her own deletion right away. If both of us were copied, then we would spend the little remainder of our time on working to reconcile the real world and Underworld…”

“Then… what if it was just you? What happens then?” Higa probed, as though he were hanging on to every word—

—but the response sent a deep shiver rippling through him.

“Then, I will fight for Underworld only. Because… I’m the protector of that world.”

“F… Fight…?”

“Underworld is in a very unstable situation at the moment. Am I right?”

“That is… indeed the case…”

“That world is powerless against the Real World to a pitiful extent. Whether it’s energy, hardware, maintenance, or networking… the upkeep and management of every single piece of infrastructure depends solely on the people of the Real World. There’s no way of guaranteeing its long-term safety like this.”

Two minutes had passed now. But the copy’s tone remained quite calm, showing not a single sign of impending collapse.

His back as straight as a rod against the zaisu, Higa countered without thinking:

“But there’s nothing we can do about that. We cannot move Underworld’s body, the Light Cube Cluster, away from the Ocean Turtle. The ship’s under state control now. At the slightest whim of the government, they could shut down its power tomorrow, causing the entire Cluster to format…”

“How long will the reactor fuel last?”

Disarmed by the unexpected question, Higa couldn’t help but blink a few times.

“Uh… Well, it’s a pressurized-water reactor meant for a nuclear submarine… if it’s just maintaining the Cluster, I’d say four or five more years…”

“Then, in principle, we don’t need to replenish any fuel before then. That is, as long as we prevent interference from the outside world, Underworld can continue to exist, right?”

“B-But, when you say ‘prevent’… there aren’t any weapons aboard the Ocean Turtle, none at all!”

“I said I would fight.”

The short utterance of his voice was calm and steady, yet reminiscent of a steel blade.

“Fi… Fight…? But, with the satellite uplink cut off, we can’t communicate with the Ocean Turtle…”

“There is a uplink. There should be.”

“W-Where…?!”

Leaning forward in spite of himself, Higa received an answer beyond imagination.

“Heathcliff… No, Kayaba Akihiko. I need that man’s power. We need to find him first. Higa-san… are you willing to help me?”

“Ka… Kayaba-senpai…?!”

He should be dead… or, dead again.

First, in a cottage up in the Nagano mountains. Then, in the Ocean Turtle engine room.

But the body of Niemom that the imitation of Kayaba Akihiko’s consciousness had lurked within had suddenly vanished.

“Is he… still alive…?”

He moaned, distracted, already forgetting to check the timer on the window.

Why had things turned out like this?

A copy of Kayaba Akihiko, his former arch-rival, and a copy of Kirigaya Kazuto. If these two things… or rather, two humans were to meet, what would come out of that?

Could it be… that I’ve pried the lid off of something unthinkable…

The thought flashed across his mind for an instant, but it was banished immediately by overwhelming excitement.

He wanted to see it. To know what would happen after that.

Higa drew in a sharp breath, exhaled, and spoke in a trembling voice:

“…I understand. I’ve got a few old pipelines, so… I’ll try encrypting the message and distributing it…”

There was no turning back anymore.

Higa shut his eyes tight, wiped his sweaty hands on his T-shirt, and began furiously punching the keyboard.

No longer contained by the window on the monitor, the enormous rays of light swayed the multicolored glow in periodic motion, as though gazing intently at Higa’s fingertips.