[543] The Forbidden Sanctuary (3)
"How are you here…?"
Shirone couldn't find the source of the words that had escaped him.
Bits of memory had returned over the many incidents he'd faced, but nothing had ever stirred this kind of overwhelming nostalgia.
"Magistrate!"
At Yo's scream, he looked up and saw Yo being dragged off, buried in the wall slime of a Mucus Man.
"Damn!"
Shirone lunged for the door and ran into three people who'd followed Rian a moment behind.
They looked oddly familiar.
"Long time no see, Shirone."
When Marsha delivered the rehearsed line, a sharp pain slammed into Shirone's head again.
"Ugh!"
Miro, Marsha, Fermi.
People who had left strong impressions on him in the real world, whether he liked it or not.
Who are they…?
Their identities slotted into Shirone's information, and new memories formed.
Descendants of the fairy folk.
Because only a few of them were mixed into society, they could wield special abilities.
"Help! Yo's been taken! They went underground!"
No one moved.
Like adults who don't interrupt children playing house, whatever happened here meant nothing to bystanders.
"As expected. Let's subdue them first."
"Fermi…!"
Shirone glanced at Fermi and ground his teeth, remembering how brutally she'd tormented him in fairy society.
"There's no time to fight. If you won't help, I'll rescue Yo alone."
"Do as you please."
Just as a spell was about to be cast, Rian spoke.
"All right. Let's go, Shirone."
Fermi snapped her head around.
"What are you doing?"
Rian turned fully toward Shirone, as if dismissing everything else.
"I don't know who she is to you, but she must be important. Let's go save her."
Fermi looked to Miro and Marsha.
"You're just going to leave her?"
"We have no choice. This is Shirone, after all."
The Shirone Marsha knew wouldn't ignore suffering right in front of him, no matter the cause.
Fermi pinned her last hope on Miro, and Miro loosened up and moved toward Marsha as well.
"Majority vote in favor."
"Aunt, but this—"
"Give in this once. You know Shirone's nature. And you know Rian by now."
"There's stubborn, and then there's this."
Miro snorted and moved her hands; an avatar of Guanyin materialized like a halo.
Moments later, a gigantic pair of palms struck the floor.
Kuuuuuuung!
The shock rattled the whole arboretum, but the floor only showed the imprint of a palm.
Noticing everyone staring, Miro laughed awkwardly.
"Ahaha, this building is sturdy, isn't it?"
Shirone's anger flared.
"Is that the time to laugh? I should—!"
"Fuuuuuu."
Miro exhaled, and Shirone's eyes widened.
The Guanyin avatar swelled tens of times until it touched the arboretum's ceiling.
"One-finger strike!"
When Miro jabbed her index finger into the floor, the giant finger of the avatar pierced through floor after floor.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Marsha screamed and fell, and everyone plunged down to the facility's lowest level, Basement 10.
Fermi brushed off dust and muttered, "What a temper…"
Shirone couldn't take his eyes off Miro.
"Who exactly are you?"
"It's better if I tell you as we go."
Miro pointed down the corridor; the mucus hiding Yo's shape was moving quickly into the dark.
"Stop!"
They darted after it, but the corridor ended at a massive glass wall.
"What is this?"
Shirone was the only one who knew.
'A maglev elevator…'
When he touched the glass, an LED line flared and a rectangular panel rose into view.
Shirone placed his palm on the hand-shaped fingerprint reader; his print flashed and the glass door opened.
'Of course my records are stored here.'
It was only natural to make the facility usable by people who would later awaken from cryosleep.
They boarded the elevator and a soft light descended from the ceiling.
"Where are we headed?"
No sooner had Miro finished speaking than the lift shot down into the dark at incredible speed.
It grew so dim that after the acceleration phase it felt like it wasn't moving at all.
"Probably the control room for the Mucus units."
Before cryosleep, Shirone would never have imagined such a vast underground facility was hidden below.
'There's probably more than one entrance. Every major institution likely has one of these underground.'
After that thought, Shirone finally looked at the others.
"What exactly happened to us? What's going on?"
The very sense that something was off was a good sign.
"Listen carefully from now on, Shirone. You'll find it hard to believe, but this is reality. The world you're living in now—"
Miro watched Shirone's reaction and continued.
"—is all fake. Even you."
Shirone fell silent for a long moment, but, unlike Molta's wife, he chose to at least hear her out.
"I don't understand."
"All right. Then I'll start from the beginning."
When Miro laid out everything he needed to know, even Shirone couldn't help being shocked.
"Fake? This whole world?"
"Yes. So don't bother worrying about what happens here. What you must do is… the real you—"
"That can't be."
Shirone shook his head.
"I'm not being blindly faithful, but… no, that really can't be."
Miro understood his feeling.
"Maybe. But you have to trust me. If you don't, the real you will die."
"Damn it!"
Shirone turned away and paced anxiously in the elevator.
Rian approached. "Shirone, I know it's hard, but—"
"I'll believe you."
Shirone turned back.
"All right, I'll believe you. Maybe Miro is right. So I'll believe you."
He spread his arms and faced the four of them.
"Now what? Will something change in me? Or do I have to do something else?"
"..."
That was the real problem.
Even if Shirone believed Miro, nothing would change.
Thinking it could be true and actually feeling it are worlds apart.
Wheeeeee!
The racing elevator slowed, then suddenly dropped.
"Ughhh!"
Automatic pressure control kept them from becoming weightless, but the queasy churn in his stomach was awful.
'How far down are we going?'
Soon the elevator reached its destination, though there was no sense of how far it was from the surface.
The glass door opened onto a corridor lined with flickering panels and endless wiring.
The fear from the fall cleared Shirone's head. He stepped toward the corridor with wide eyes.
Whatever the truth, rescuing Yo came first.
They passed a sign: Special Containment Area. From an open doorway came a muted mechanical sound.
Shirone summoned his Photon Cannon into his hand and sprang inside; the others hurried after him.
"What is this…?"
He stared, forgetting even his fighting spirit, at a massive object at the center of a hemispherical chamber.
A gigantic lens two meters across resembled a human pupil. Its steel body had thousands of cables clinging to it and connecting to the surrounding walls.
One word slipped from Miro's lips.
"Ra?"
Digital Ra (Local Energy Circulation System quantum computer).
"Ra? That scrap of a machine is that?" Fermi asked.
"No. It's the real Ra as a lifeform. And it looks remarkably similar."
Fermi tried to imagine the true Ra from the Digital Ra's appearance, but it was pointless.
"Wasn't it supposed to have been erased?"
Erased data can't exist anywhere.
"That's right. So this isn't the real Ra."
A myth had been torn down by a boy.
"It's another god created by humans who couldn't endure the absence of a true god."
As a device inside Digital Ra's lens rotated, a Mucus Man dropped from the ceiling still clutching Yo.
"Yo! Are you okay?"
Color briefly returned to Yo's despairing face, but the Mucus Man yanked her roughly.
"Who are you? Why are you here?"
Shirone stepped forward. "Who are you, really? The world's already been destroyed—why do this?"
"My name is Ra. I'm a humanoid model stored in the quantum computer's data."
Miro reached a tentative conclusion.
'Like an avatar?'
"It doesn't matter what I'm called. I'm a program that purifies the world using solar energy. I'm what ancient humans called the monotheistic god Ra."
"No computer function that attacks humans is acceptable."
"It's only part of the circulation chain. Destroying one life is no different from creating another."
"That's the kind of thing you can say because you aren't alive. Have you ever mourned someone's death?"
"Humans sometimes rejoice at someone else's death."
Shirone ground his teeth.
If it were possible to put an AI's way of thinking into words, maybe the world wouldn't have ended like this.
'I have to fight. But Yo's been taken…'
While Shirone hesitated, Marsha stepped toward Ra.
"Whatever it is, if it needs a human, how about me?"
"Marsha?"
Shirone turned; she winked one eye.
'If I could just plunge the Dagger of Impiety into it—'
Ra's arm shot out, grabbed Marsha by the throat and pulled her in; Yo cried out in astonishment.
"You're crazy? You'll make yourself a hostage!"
"Seems that way."
Marsha's expression went cold. She produced the Dagger of Impiety from the back of her left hand.
She drove it into Ra's flank and dark smoke poured from the wound; her eyes flashed.
'It's working! With this—!'
Marsha stabbed frantically, and Ra stood, watching the smoke leak from its body with no visible reaction.
"What is this?"
Only then did Marsha sense something wrong and stop.
"Damn…!"
The wound she'd cut outside the rules was knitting itself closed.
"It's altering information."
A quantum computer's backup capabilities defied imagination.
"I'll analyze your data."
From the mucus on the wall, a beastlike slime resembling a leopard leaped out and covered Marsha.
It was a model of a specific creature Ra had processed before the catastrophe.
"Danger!"
Without thinking, Shirone threw himself over Marsha and rolled across the floor.
"Shirone…?"
As their eyes met, Shirone's pupils trembled.
—You can hug me.
"Raaaahhhhh!"
As the beast launched with its hind legs extended, Shirone reached out in alarm.
"Danger!"
Just as Rian rushed in to shout, a crashing sound rolled from deep within the facility and Ra's head snapped around.
Thud!
A sword punched through an iron wall and flew like a clothesline, piercing the beast's cheek and landing in Shirone's hand.
"…Vajra Armament."
At the same moment, the blade opened like a spider's legs and enveloped Shirone's whole body.