[720] The World We Live In (1)
"Argo?"
No matter how narrowly he squinted, the hologram in front of him was undeniably Amy.
-What do you see?
"Uh, well..."
Shirone's answer sounded unimportant as Argo nodded and continued.
-Concentration of emotion is important for reincarnation. It's rare, but if your focus weakens, errors can occur in the reincarnation program. The appearance you see now is the pattern that emerges when your brainwaves are at their most focused.
"Amy..."
He missed her more than usual today.
-Treasure it. If an error occurs in the reincarnation program, memories can be lost in reality too. If the code is lost, recovery is difficult.
"I'm not amnesiac."
-I know. Your brainwaves don't match that pattern. You seem to have come from a different time stream. That happens sometimes.
Argo seemed to know a great deal—so much that Shirone wondered if it knew everything.
"How can I get out of here?"
-You sound like an engineer. Interesting. Would you like to follow me? I'll show you around.
Shirone hadn't met the person he wanted, but he thought he could at least talk with Argo, so he followed it into the elevator.
Like the drones that perfectly controlled gravity, the elevator made no noise and had no vibration.
-This world is called Utopia. It originally had many names, but after the last dissenter against reincarnation died, representatives of each nation met and settled on this one. Currently about 16 billion people live in Utopia.
"They're alive?"
He'd considered the possibility they were dead.
-Yes, all alive. And their number neither increases nor decreases. Humanity seems to have chosen to live endless new lives here.
When the elevator arrived and the doors opened, a vast space the size of the tower's circumference spread out.
The ceiling reached the top of the tower, and along the cylindrical walls countless people lay inside the glass capsules Shirone had seen from the outside.
There had to be more than ten thousand.
Stunned by the scale, Shirone asked Argo.
"What kind of world is this?"
-The same world. I don't know exactly what kind of world you came from, but it wouldn't be different. It just converges endlessly.
When Argo raised its hand, a three-meter-high hologram switched on and a stream of images passed by.
-Prototype Argo. The first fully synchronized simulation program. It connects to a human brainwave to let you experience an entirely different world.
The large hologram shifted and the life of a young man flashed by at high speed.
"So the people sleeping here enter the glass capsules and live entirely different lives?"
-Yes. When Argo was first offered, it was merely an entertainment product with commercial intent. Virtual reality has limits—the thought that you can always return lowers the sense of reality.
Only being trapped is real.
-So humanity made a drastic decision. They closed the world so the Argo program couldn't be recognized as a simulation.
"They closed the world?"
-It wasn't easy. There's a huge technical difference between providing a virtual world and making people believe it's real. Then there are stability and ethical issues...
Argo skipped the unnecessary details.
-Anyway, Utopia solved humanity's age-old problem of immortality. They completed the final Argo program.
Shirone, spotting a shadow, looked up to see a gigantic iron orb floating with a mechanical lens attached.
He hadn't noticed it when it was small, but the enormous eye definitely resembled something living.
"Anke Ra?"
Amy's hologram placed a hand on her stomach and bowed politely.
-Allow me to introduce myself properly. I am the reincarnation administrator of Utopia—the Akashic Record Argo.
Shirone had met a digital Ra during the Apocalypse, but this place was only a collection of information remnants, so he had no memory of that.
"I really don't understand any of this."
-Let me introduce Utopia. There are spare slots available. If you want reincarnation, I can assist.
When Argo lifted its head, two drones flew in and faced each other right in front of them.
Electricity flickered in Amy's holographic eyes, and the two drones began communicating in their own language.
-Crrrk! Crrkkk! Beep! Crrkkk!
When the eerie electromagnetic sounds ended, screens reflecting each person's life appeared before more than ten thousand glass capsules.
Shirone felt his fingertips tremble as he looked over the pale faces on the screens.
-Argo is an immortality program. For humanity to be immortal, I must be immortal as well. An AI capable of self-system recovery. Therefore, even if reset, I do not perish.
"A reset?"
-There is no perfect system. Sometimes an initialization is necessary. Though it's a virtual world, there are specific intents. If the world doesn't progress according to those intents, we reset and try again. In other words, in Argo's world they develop the immortality program again. They live forever through the void.
For the first time, Shirone felt fear.
-Another problem is someone opening a closed world. That's classified as the most severe error. In that case, we either reset or erase the individual.
"Erase?"
He remembered the Geopin erasure.
-It means removing specific information. But doing so causes confusion in the system, and if certain conditions aren't met, I don't have the authority to erase either.
Even if it's virtual, it would be troubling for Argo to be able to delete information at will.
-In Utopia, Argo manages reincarnation, but it's also linked to the worlds humans dream of. However, in those linked worlds even I do not recognize that it's a simulation. No being must know. It must remain a confined world.
World 9999 was entirely different from the world Shirone had lived in, but he still wondered if that claim was true.
"So they live like that? Never suspecting it's fake, deluding themselves into thinking it's reality?"
Argo pulled a screen up into front of Shirone showing someone's life.
-Photons mediate the signals between Argo and humans. Biological signals use electricity, and precision systems sometimes use quantum transmission, but the basic medium is light. It's so sophisticated you can never think it's fake.
Argo scanned the screens as it spoke.
-Because virtual-world time is based on the speed of light, no material can move faster than light. And since light is the basic medium, its speed remains constant.
It was the law of the invariance of the speed of light.
-If perception occurs at light speed, time appears to stop, but that is within normal bounds. However, if something exceeds light speed, the system experiences temporal disturbance. If a time paradox occurs, the system overloads. That's a serious problem.
Shirone watched the life of a soldier fighting on a battlefield on the screen.
He'd been grievously wounded and was screaming.
"Did they choose this life?"
-No. It's not that you can't artificially set a life, but it's outlawed. On screen he's a soldier, but the person actually dreaming is female. The system decides what form the next reincarnation will take. It uses Kaar as a basis.
"Kaar?"
-It indicates the degree of violation of causality. The lower the Kaar, the easier the system can predict; the higher the Kaar, the harder. Usually Kaar increases through repeated reincarnations, but it's not set to exceed ninety percent. That would threaten the system.
The soldier on screen was dying from an arrow wound.
"What happens when they die?"
-They wake from the dream. When they exit the capsule, drones perform a detailed check. They may rest in Utopia for a few days or undergo reincarnation again.
"But they don't know until the moment they die, right? The stress must be intense. Aren't there side effects?"
-I can't say there aren't.
Argo admitted that plainly.
-This was the biggest obstacle to the Utopia project. A closed world is fine, but no one wants to experience the terror of death. So the representatives of each country developed a very efficient program.
"What program?"
-God.
Amy's hologram raised an index finger.
-When the God program was introduced, system stability improved dramatically. The concept that it isn't the end lowered stress indices by over ninety percent. Thus, in Argo, entities above a certain Kaar are set to construct a god.
The soldier on screen was shown praying to a god, and then sudden noise appeared.
"What is this?"
An endless first-person view of a tunnel streaking with multicolored light filled the screen.
-This is the near-death experience program. It's the electromagnetic tunnel that appears during the transition when a life's cycle ends and you update back to reality. It restores memories of reality here. Sometimes variables occur during loading and the person loops back, but the God program absorbs those errors.
Argo's lens tightened and then relaxed.
-Fortunately, they transmitted safely. Caring for people who return to reality is also the administrator's role.
The screen shifted to Utopia's backdrop, showing the glass capsules installed inside the buildings.
"No!"
As the lid opened, a blonde woman suddenly bolted upright.
It had been a horrific death, but she soon recovered her real-world memories and sighed.
"Ugh, annoying. Why did they fire arrows at me only?"
Though it had been a lifetime, she reacted like someone who'd woken from a single nightmare—hollow and monotone.
A drone flew up to her and opened its lens.
-Did you enjoy your journey? This is Utopia.
"I know."
She answered dismissively, climbed out of the capsule, and walked as the drone rolled after her.
-We will begin a detailed examination. Do you need anything?
"Water. A sedative."
The drone extended a hose to the woman's mouth and moisture appeared instantly.
Then it descended to the nape of her neck and injected a sedative with a soft click. Her shoulders twitched, and that was the last reaction.
While undergoing the drone's check, the woman asked, "The next reincarnation?"
-Kaar value sixty-seven percent. The system can select from 2,598 possible types.
"Can I be born human?"
-Possible.
She stretched and muttered.
"Sixty-seven percent is still a long way off, isn't it? Among the people left now, what's the record for how far someone's gotten?"
-Currently, by radiant-power standards, Omega 876 years.
"Wow, that's fast."
Shirone, watching the screen, asked Argo.
"Omega 876 years?"
It was the time unit written in the records Geopin left at Babel.
-Omega is a unit dividing the beginning and end of a time span into percentages. The core of the Utopia project is to dig deeper into simulations. When you reach Omega 1,000 years you enter the next simulation, so the frequency of returning to reality decreases.
Even the few days they spend in reality aren't consumed; they still live forever.
-The more simulations you repeat, the shorter the period to reach Omega 1,000 becomes by the standards of this place's time.
Because it's the void.
-Ten years, five years, two years, continually shortening until finally one second, half a second... Eventually you live eternity in an instant.
Shirone couldn't believe it.
"But time still passes here, right? In a hundred years they'll die too."
-Of course. But that future will never come for Utopia's residents. In the void-world, time is infinitely subdivided.
It was the secret of true immortality.