Koizumi seemed to be gauging my reaction. He had apparently made up his own mind about something, nodding to himself.
“Perhaps it is time. I think I’ll be allowed to speak without interruption.”
I considered what that meant and worked it out.
“Ah…yeah, I’ve had my doubts about this world any number of times, but every time it felt like a switch flipped inside my head.”
“Like your thoughts were forced into a different lane?”
Like a forced stop on my train of thought.
“And our very memories are unreliable.”
I feel like I should be remembering something but can’t. Trying makes my mind go fuzzy.
“When exactly were we thrown into this world?”
In spring of my first year of high school, I met Haruhi Suzumiya, we formed the SOS Brigade, and what happened after that I mostly didn’t want to remember…
But when I tried, I got stuck, like the memories were flattened under a giant boulder in my brain. Which was obviously messed up. I felt like things had gone down over the summer, and something else had happened after the seasons changed, but couldn’t remember what.
But the wand and hat Nagato briefly wore had looked familiar.
“In the Prohibition speakeasy, yes. The phrase ‘Star Ring Inferno’ rang a bell. It did seem rather like a name Suzumiya would come up with.”
It was pretty dumb, yeah. Haruhi tended to come up with dumb names.
“As for where we are…”
Koizumi’s smiles were always zero yen.
“First, let us establish a major premise.”
Should I start?
“This world isn’t real,” I said.
Koizumi’s faint smile grew less faint. Perhaps it was a fifty-yen smile now.
“Almost certainly. This a virtual space. A virtual reality, in the parlance of the times.”
The way things worked and felt seems more like a simulated space than a physical transportation to an alternate universe. For all the world like we were in an exceptionally real 3D action RPG, with all the background and props made with computer graphics. I had no such praise for the story. Talk about incoherent. One minute it was a fantasy, the next a space opera. We’d get flung into a western, then shortly after, forced to play poker with the mob. I had to assume the scriptwriter was drunk.
“Which means,” Koizumi continued, “the five of us aside, everyone here are NPCs prepared by the game master.”
I pictured the crew in the mess hall.
The kitchen was entirely run by a muscle-bound bald guy and Asahina, and the rest of the crew members were gathered around the table, yukking it up, drinking, and chowing down.
Asahina was learning to cook, and doubling as a waitress, but as she approached the crew, they’d sit bolt upright, going very quiet—and start making a racket again once she moved away. Total background noise. Just extras there to set the scene.
And they all had bog-standard NPC faces. So generic you’d forget them the second you looked away.
“I once attempted to determine how capable their thought processes are.”
The Turing test?
“I merely asked a simple question. Ever heard of a city called Tokyo? They said they hadn’t heard of it. Do you have any brothers? They said they didn’t. Same answer for all of them. None of them ever said anything like ‘What’s a Tokyo? Why are you asking?’ Just the same responses every time, verbatim.”
Sloppy work. That old-timer who kept showing up—and maybe the mob boss—must have been exceptions.
“When I pressed the point and kept asking, they eventually began ignoring me.”
How many times did that take?
“Around fifty.”
Even an NPC would get annoyed. I felt sorry for both parties in that dreary Q&A.
“For that reason, I’ve concluded that this world is not real, but a VR space.”
No arguments here. The problem is how we wound up here. I couldn’t remember the beginning.
Koizumi held up two fingers.
“Two possibilities. First, we have donned a brain-dive-type interface, sending our minds alone into this world. Our real bodies are unconscious or asleep.”
No memory of that, and if a machine that fantastic actually existed, you’d think it would have made the news.
“Secondly, we are merely copies of our actual minds.”
A shadow crossed the self-proclaimed psychic’s face.
“Cut off from our bodies, nothing more than a clone of our minds. In which case, the real ones are going about their lives in the real world. We would be mere copies, cognitive twins.”
So someone scanned our brains, made a backup of that, supplied physical data, and reconstructed us in a virtual space.
Even if you could copy a human mind, that would be a ridiculous amount of data. Where would they keep it?
“On the server of a quantum computer. Or perhaps…”
No use thinking about it?
“Then who’s behind it?”
Just making sure—what if this was Haruhi’s power gone berserk?
“I am becoming quite an expert on Suzumiya’s powers and mental state. And I’m quite certain it isn’t.”
He rarely sounded that firm.
“It goes without saying that the agency is incapable of doing anything like this. I do not believe it to be the work of any human. Perhaps in the future things will change—but in that case, Asahina is far more duplicitous than we’d imagined.”
It was possible she’d just not been informed, but I had to agree this wasn’t the work of any human. It was too fundamentally weird to have been developed by anyone from our world.
“So,” I said. “What do we do? Do we just keep up the shitty role-playing as the stage keeps getting swapped in and out?”
“If we are cognitive clones in a VR space, then this will continue indefinitely. At least until the administrators tire of it and hit the delete button, or power down the server.”
If we died in here…I guess we did that already in the fantasy world.
“If they shut it down, our minds will vanish, but that’s all. Our real selves will keep on living normal—or abnormal—lives.”
“However,” he added, tapping a finger on his temple, “if our minds are still connected to our bodies, brainjacked into this world, then our flesh is likely on a bed, couch, or gaming chair, unable to wake up. In that case, if we’re removed from this world…will our bodies simply wake up, go on sleeping never to wake again, or some even worse outcome? I cannot begin to tell.”
I highly doubt that.
“On what grounds?”
Haruhi and I are one thing, but if you, Nagato, and Asahina aren’t waking up from a coma, do you think the forces behind you are just gonna twiddle their thumbs? They aren’t being psychics, aliens, and time travelers for their health.
“That’s a good point.”
Koizumi flicked his bangs with his fingertips.
“But that does leave us in a bit of a pickle. If we’re cognitive copies, then there’s nothing we can do. Just as an NPC in an online game has no capacity to change the world.”
I’m less sure. I mean, imagine an exact copy of Haruhi. Clone or doppelgänger, she’s still Haruhi.
“You have a lot of faith in Suzumiya.”
Don’t make it creepy. Don’t give me that look. It’s a simple statement of fact.
“Getting back on track,” I said, since at least one of us had to try to advance this plot. “How would we determine which of these hypotheses is accurate?”
“There’s no way to tell. For the simple reason that we don’t remember how we got here. Are we the originals or merely copies? In our current state, we have no way to determine that.”
Got it. Raising the white flag. I turned around and held up a hand.
“Nagato, hate to interrupt your reading, but can we borrow you?”
I figured she’d have worked stuff out by now.
She’d been reading in the shadow of the main mast, out of the direct sunlight. Her head slowly came up.
“…………”
Her gaze rested on me a full second before she closed the book and quietly got to her feet. She walked toward us on silent footsteps, her tiny frame clad in pirate sailor garb.
“…………”
She stopped behind us, staring down with eyes like the sea at night.
I’d called her here, but that didn’t make it easier to say the next bit.
Honestly, I was afraid to ask. The answer could spell our doom…and if you can laugh at me for hesitating, laugh away.
“I know how you feel,” Koizumi said. “I myself have been putting it off, hoping against hope we might spontaneously return to reality.”
I let this small comfort go in one ear and out the other, getting to the point.
“Did you hear us talking?”
Nagato’s emotionless face moved slightly, nodding.
I took a deep breath.
“Is the Data Overmind behind this?”
“I cannot rule out the possibility,” Nagato said flatly, her expression never budging. “But the odds of it are not high.”
Really?
“I cannot detect any traces of the Overmind’s involvement. The faint noises I detect in this space are similar, yet distinct from the Overmind I know. An unknown sensation I cannot properly verbalize.”
Koizumi leaned in. “Essentially, it doesn’t feel like the way the Overmind does things?”
Nagato neither nodded nor shook her head. Perhaps this was a concept human words could not explain.
“Are you in contact with the Overmind?”
“I cannot detect the Data Overmind at all. The link is severed.”
That should be a big deal, but she seemed unconcerned. I sighed dramatically.
If Nagato’s boss was behind this, there’d been a chance we could persuade it, but that hope had just been crushed.
“Nagato,” Koizumi said, uncharacteristically eager. “Of the two hypotheses I mentioned—either one—which do you see as the more likely explanation?”
“…………”
Nagato’s head tilted wordlessly to one side.
It felt like a long time since I’d seen her use body language to communicate anything but a yes or a no.
A response rare enough that Koizumi’s eyes actually widened.
“Then…assuming it is true that this isn’t reality, am I wrong to declare this a binary choice between our bodies in a brain-dive device or our minds copied over?”
Nagato nodded. “Not confirmed. Speculation,” she said, her voice almost a sigh. “Listen accordingly.”
Her eyes locked directly on me.
“We are not on a computer server. We are not data in any sort of mechanical memory conduit. We are quantum information in a data space.”