“Please do,” Ryuk pulls himself to his feet and returns to his bed. A prompt appears on his pane of vision as Hajime accesses his feed.
[Will you allow Hajime, Model 08-67-53-09 to access your feed?]
[Yes/No]
“Yes.”
“Good. I would like to review your feed from when you followed Tamana into the train station. You did actually see her, correct?”
“I did,” he gulps, “right before she jumped.”
Ryuk’s stomach still churns from his unexpected encounter with a Thulean, in Tokyo. If he just hallucinated a Thulean warrior, what could Tamana possibly have seen?
“Maybe … ” he sniffs. “Maybe she was seeing something too, just like I did!”
“Clearly,” Hajime’s eyes flash, “but what I was checking was in regards to your feed.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let me show you.”
Hajime approaches the Holoscreen attached to Ryuk’s wall.
Ryuk rarely uses the thing – why watch anime on a screen when you can simply lie back and watch it on the inside of your eyelids? Still, it is helpful, or at least it was helpful, when he was enrolled at Waseda University.
As soon as the screen comes to life, the Waseda University bear mascot does a little dance in the bottom right corner. Ryuk has been meaning to fix that, but he still entertains the possibility of re-enrolling.
“Give me a moment to arrange the videos.”
Hajime stands in front of the screen and the volume icon appears. It adjusts itself, and once it is at a low level, two iNet feeds come up in split-screen. On the left is what Ryuk saw at the subway. On the right is his view of what just happened in his bedroom.
“This may be a bit disorienting,” Hajime warns as the videos start up. Sure enough, Ryuk can actually see the Thulean on his most recent feed, big as life and twice as ugly in his black scaly armor. All he can see on the left is Tamana running and leaping and …
No! Ryuk turns his head away at the very last moment. No sense in seeing her do that again.
“Now observe what happened just now from my perspective.” Hajime’s feed comes up. In the feed, Ryuk screams and scrabbles for no reason. Hajime surveys the whole room too fast to follow, moves behind Ryuk and pulls him into his arms.
Ryuk drops his face into his hand, suddenly confused and overwhelmed by what he’s experienced over the last thirty minutes. “What just happened?”
“I think something just hacked your iNet feed, and apparently this very same something also hacked Tamana’s feed,” Hajime concludes. “Based on the message you received and your feed, whatever she saw chasing her at the time of her death was real to her but to no one else. She leapt to avoid it; I don’t think she intended to kill herself.”
“What about my feed?”
“This appears to affect only the individual who experiences the digital hallucination, and is apparently quite subjectively real. I’ve collated some data about apparent Proxima dreamworld intrusions in the real world environment that caused lethal results.”
A chart springs to life on the holoscreen, its main line ticking upwards.
“This chart shows the number of dreamworld users who have experienced an unexpected or unusual death within seventy-five minutes of logging out, beginning in 2070. As you can see, the chart spikes from no reported cases in 2070 to fifty-six deaths in just the first two months of this year.”
Magazine and iNet articles flash on the screen in various languages with Japanese subtitles.
“The mainstream outlets are not carrying these stories,” Hajime points out, “most of these come from Proxima fan sites and Proxi-blogs. Based on what you have just experienced and what happened to Tamana, statistical probability indicates that something, likely NPCs, is coming through the digital dreamworlds and manifesting itself through the users’ iNet feeds. This is causing people to do horrible things to themselves and those around them.”
Ryuk shakes his head. “Are you telling me that there are killer NPCs?”
“No, you are saying that, but something is happening, and it’s manifesting from the Proxima Galaxy, from the online worlds that players around the world dive to, like the world you and Tamana frequent, Tritania.”
Ryuk buries his head in his hand. “Tamana,” he whispers. Just the sound of her name makes him want to sob again.
“She’s not dead,” Hajime says.
“What?”
“You of all people should know what I mean.”
Ryuk’s eyes go wide. “Her … her RPC!”
Hajime places his hands behind his back. “Yes, her Reborn Player Character, set to spawn in the Proxima Galaxy in the world of her choosing once she dies in the real world. I’m surprised you didn’t think of that already.”
“I just saw her die!” Ryuk cries out. “I was … ” He gets control of himself and remembers that Hajime is homo machina, very different from Ryuk.
“Do you think the online world of her choosing is Tritania?”
“Of course it is,” Ryuk says, “we haven’t been to another world in years. That’s definitely where her RPC would go.”
“Reborn Player Character,” Hajime muses, “the same thing as an AI generated NPC but with all the former users data.” The humandroid nods towards Ryuk’s NV Visor. “You should log in. I never thought I’d find myself saying this, but that may be the best thing you can do at this point.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he finally says. The more Ryuk thinks of it, the better it sounds. He can see Tamana in Tritania, be with Tamana, and together, they can uncover why NPCs are taking peoples bodies.
“You took new avatars, didn’t you?” Hajime asks.
Ryuk’s eyes dart to his dive rig. “Yes,” he says hurriedly. “It was her idea and I went along with it. We’re resetters now.”
“I remember you saying that your former guild was quite powerful,” Hajime adds. “Maybe they would be interested in what has happened here today.”
Ryuk shakes his head bitterly. “I, we can’t contact them. Like I said, we’re resetters now. Our guild – well, former guild now – has a ‘no communication clause’ with resetters to deny them any in-game advantages. Sounds stupid, but our previous guild’s leader doesn’t want someone to be able to call on their powerful friends.”
“Then go to their guild physically,” Hajime says. “I’m sure they’ll want to hear this.”
“Their guild is on Polynya, the second floating continent of Tritania. All new players, and resetters like Tamana and me, start on the first floating continent, Hyperborea. We can’t travel there yet.”
Hajime considers this for a moment. “Okay. Log in, meet Tamana’s Reborn Player Character, hash out what’s happened here with her, and go to Polynya and contact your former guild.”
A pained expression paints across Ryuk’s face. He swears he’s explained the basics of Tritania before, and besides, now of all times, is not the time. He gives Hajime the quickest explanation about the world’s mechanics that he can muster. “Okay, Tritania has three floating continents. All players start on Hyperborea and to go to the next continent, Polynya, we need to be at level 15. To go to the final continent, Ultima Thule, we need to be at level 35. Three continents with level requirements to get to the final two continents.”
“And your levels now?”
Ryuk shakes his head. “Two. We’re both at level two.”
“Then log in,” Hajime nods towards Ryuk’s rig. “Start your journey. You have a little time before you have to meet your brother later.”
Ryuk cringes. His brother, the bane of his existence. Meeting him will only make the day worse and he can’t say no.