This was the instant that Aincrad, the world of Sword Art Online, stopped simply being a fun game, a pleasant diversion.
✦ ✦ ✦
Klein took one step backward, held out the index and middle fingers on his right hand, and swung them downward—the action that called up the game’s main menu screen. With a sound like bells jingling, a translucent purple rectangle materialized in midair.
I took a few steps backward myself, sitting down on a nearby rock to open my own window. My fingers traced the display as I sorted the items I’d earned from fighting boars.
The next instant—
“Huh?” Klein muttered, perplexed. “What the heck? There’s no log-out button.”
At those last words, I stopped moving my hand and looked up.
“No button? That can’t be true. Look closer,” I said, exasperated. The tall scimitar-wielding hero leaned over, his eyes wide beneath the ugly bandanna as he stared at the window.
In its default state, the elongated horizontal window featured several menu tabs on the left and a human silhouette on the right detailing the user’s inventory and equipment. At the very bottom of that menu was a LOG OUT button that enabled the player to leave the world—or at least, there should have been.
As I returned my gaze to the list of items I’d earned over the last few hours of battle, Klein repeated himself, louder this time.
“No. It’s just gone. You should see for yourself, Kirito.”
“I’m telling you, it has to be there…” I sighed, then tapped the button in the upper left of the screen that led back to the main menu.
My item storage display closed smoothly, returning the window to its default state. The silhouette reappeared, several equipment slots still empty, and the list of menu tabs materialized again on the left.
With a familiar motion, I slid my finger down to the bottom button…
And all of my muscles froze solid.
It was gone.
During the beta test—in fact, just after logging in at one o’clock today—the log-out button was right in the corner, but as Klein noted, it had simply disappeared.
I stared at the blank space for several seconds, then moved my eyes upward, carefully scanning the menu tabs to ensure that it hadn’t simply changed positions when I wasn’t paying attention. Klein tilted his head at me as though to say, See?
“…Gone, right?”
“Yep. Gone,” I reluctantly agreed.
He raised his cheeks in a grimace and stroked his shapely chin.
“Well, it is launch day. Bugs happen. I bet tech support is getting drowned in calls. They’re probably tearing their hair out right now,” he said nonchalantly, to which I gave a barbed retort.
“Is that all you have to say about it? Weren’t you just talking about getting a pizza delivery at five thirty?”
“Oh crap, that’s right!”
I grinned despite myself at the sight of him bolting upright, wide-eyed with alarm.
The red glow of my inventory screen subsided as I discarded enough junk items to squeeze back under the weight limit. Standing up, I walked over to Klein, who wailed on about lost anchovy pizzas and ginger ale.
“Look, you should try opening a support ticket with the GMs. They might be able to boot you off from the system side,” I suggested.
“I tried that, but there was no response. Man, it’s already five twenty-five! Kirito, was there any other way to log out of the game?” he pleaded pathetically, his hands outstretched.
My lazy grin stiffened. A vague sense of anxiety began to chill my spine.
“Let’s see…Logging out, logging out…,” I muttered.
To leave the game and return to my room back in the real world was simply a matter of opening the menu window, hitting the log-out button, then confirming the action when a safety prompt appeared. It was quite easy—but I didn’t actually know of any other way to leave.
I looked up at Klein’s face above me and slowly shook my head.
“Nope. There’s no way to manually log out other than through the menu.”
“But that’s crazy. There has to be a way out of this!” Klein wailed, as though denying my answer would make it untrue. “Go back! Log out! Exit!!”
But nothing happened. SAO did not respond to voice commands.
He continued shouting and chanting, eventually growing agitated enough to leap about, until I called out in a low voice.
“It won’t work, Klein. The manual doesn’t say anything about an emergency termination method, either.”
“But…but that’s crazy! I know games have bugs, but not the kind where you can’t even get back to your own home, your own body, your own free will!”
Klein turned around to me, his face aghast. I agreed with him. This was crazy. It was absurd. But it was the reality we were facing.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me…This can’t be happening. We’re trapped inside the stupid game!” Klein ranted, breaking into a panicked laugh. “I know—I’ll just power off the machine. Or rip the NerveGear off my head.”
Klein rubbed his hands over his head as though removing an invisible hat, but I felt the cold anxiety return.
“We can’t do either of those things. We can’t move our actual bodies. The NerveGear intercepts all the commands going from our brains to the rest of our limbs.”
I tapped the back of my neck with my fingers.
“The system translates those commands into actions within the game. It’s the only way we’re able to move our avatars like this.”
Klein fell silent and slowly lowered his arms.
We remained locked in place for a moment, our minds racing.
In order for the NerveGear to successfully create the full-dive experience, it has to read the movement signals going from the brain to the spine, cancel them out, and translate them into digital actions within the game world. No matter how desperately I waved my arms inside the game, my real body would remain motionless on my bed, ensuring that I wouldn’t bruise myself hitting the corner of my desk by accident.
But it was that very feature that now physically prevented me from disengaging the dive.
“So does this mean we either have to wait for the bug to be fixed or for someone to pull the headgear off of our bodies?” Klein muttered, still dumbfounded.
I gave him a silent nod.
“But I live by myself. You?”
I hesitated, then answered honestly. “I live with my mom and little sister. I bet that if I don’t come down for dinner, they’ll eventually force me out of the dive.”
“Oh? H-how old’s your sister?” Klein leaned forward, his eyes suddenly sparkling. I pushed his head away.
“That sure got you to take your mind off the situation, didn’t it? Look, she’s on a sports club at school and she hates video games. She has nothing in common with people like us. Besides”—I waved my hand, trying to change the subject—“don’t you think this is weird?”
“Sure it is. The game is buggy.”
“This isn’t just any old bug. Not being able to log out is a huge deal. It could spell disaster for the game’s future. Even as we speak, your pizza is getting colder by the second. That represents a real monetary loss for you, doesn’t it?”
“Cold pizza is worse than nattō that doesn’t get sticky,” Klein muttered cryptically. I continued.
“A situation like this means the programmers have to shut down the servers and force all the players offline. And yet, even though it’s been at least fifteen minutes since we discovered this bug, not only are we still online, there hasn’t even been an official announcement within the game. It makes no sense.”
“Yeah, that’s a good point.” Klein rubbed his chin, finally looking suitably serious. His slender eyes glinted beneath the bandanna stretched over the high bridge of his nose.
I listened to Klein continue, struck by how odd it was that I was discussing such real-world affairs with a person I’d only met by sheer chance and would likely never see again if I simply deleted my game account.
“Argus, the developers of SAO, made a name for themselves based on their customer outreach. The fact that their first online game was so highly anticipated is a sign of how much trust the community has in them. How could they ruin that reputation with such a stunning screwup on their very first day?”
“Exactly. Not only that, SAO is the very first example of a VRMMO. If this turns into a huge controversy, the entire genre could get regulated out of existence.”
Klein and I sighed slowly at the same time, our virtual faces turned to each other.
Aincrad’s climate was attuned to the real-life season, meaning that it was early winter in the game, just as it was outside.
I breathed in the chilly air deeply, filling my lungs with virtual oxygen, and looked skyward.
More than a hundred yards above, the bottom of the second floor glowed a faint purple. As I followed the flat, rocky surface toward the horizon, my eyes finally rested on a vast tower far in the distance—the labyrinth that would lead to the next level of the castle. Beyond that, I could even see the aperture on the far side of the floor.
It was now past 5:30, and the sliver of sky to be seen over the vast distance was glowing crimson. The setting sun shone through, lighting the rippling fields in a dazzling gold, and I found myself at a loss for words despite the gravity of our situation.
✦ ✦ ✦
In the next instant…
The world changed forever.