Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Misaki SS (section)

===Part 6===

The old woman viewed the Academy City nightscape from a large passenger plane’s window.

A notebook-sized tablet sat in her lap. The body was transparent, so the circuit boards and electronics were visible.

It was known as the Urban Processor.

That one device was her final project.

(You could say this is more of a diorama than a doll.)

She looked down at the deluge of light below. Streetlights and headlights followed the roads and the high-rise buildings provided as many lights as they had windows. It almost looked like the data and energy moving throughout Academy City had been visualized and linked together like a spider web.

The exact same thing would be flowing through the tablet in her lap.

Its CPU was virtually reproducing Academy City’s roads, train racks, water pipes, power lines, gas pipes, internet lines, and all other infrastructure as if storing an aerial photograph of the city on microfilm. The electric signals running through the semiconductors reproduced all of those currents and perfectly modelled the “pulse” of Academy City inside the computer.

Flipping the Urban Processor over and looking through the clear casing would reveal glass tubes several millimeters long packed in tight.

There were 512 small vacuum tubes in all and their role was to give free random access between Data A and Data B with no distinction between cause and effect. This system allowed the reproduction of how humans came up with and associated ideas in a way impossible for previous computers that thought only in ones and zeroes.

Those two things together created an extremely interesting ability that some might find incredibly frightening.

(The Urban Processor can recreate the ‘movements’ created by Academy City. Just as Misaki contains Shokuhou Misaki’s speech pattern.)

Tendencies, fads, self-control, imagination, creation, as well as academic theses, technological invention, and product production. This computer would indefinitely produce the exact same data as Academy City. One could say this small tablet had become a second Academy City.

And at the same time, the speed of the signals running through the circuit boards could be changed and the speed of the city could be increased tenfold or more, like fast-forwarding a video. Once that happened, it was no longer the same as Academy City. It became the academic institution that Academy City would be decades or centuries in the future.

It was the ultimate model that could change the world.

The old woman’s objective was to ''bring it outside of Academy City.

She had been imprisoned deep in that doll museum because she was far too dangerous and yet it would have been a waste of her talent to kill her.

“I have no reason to regret anything. I already have the same thing as you, after all.”

She started to turn away from the window, but then the mass of light below seemed to squirm like an amoeba. As if she were looking at an electronic sign, the light completely ignored the locations of the buildings and roads as it moved around. It all formed a single meaningful screen.

It seemed to display the face of a girl with long honey-blonde hair.

“Oh? So this thing’s really that valuable♪?”

A sweet voice slipped deep in the old woman’s ears.

The unexplainable phenomenon continued.

She quickly focused inside the plane once more and found the tablet had vanished from her lap. The young man who should have been sitting next to her had also vanished. Instead, Academy City’s #5 girl was waving the Urban Processer around.

“How did you catch up to me? Is one of your pawns a teleporter esper?”

“You still haven’t figured it out?”

Immediately, everyone in the plane turned their heads to look at the old woman.

At first, she assumed Mental Out was controlling them all, but…

“No… That’s right. It makes no sense for you to be on the plane. It doesn’t even make sense for me to be on the plane. After all…”

“Yeah, I slipped into that doll museum pretty late. The last flight would have long since left and the airport itself would’ve been closed.”

“That’s why we decided to use a ground route instead. I was waiting for him to bring the car around, so why am I on a plane? Why didn’t I question this!?”

“That’s what Mental Out will do to you.”

As soon as Shokuhou Misaki said that, everything in the plane, even the surface of the coffee being carried by a flight attendant, froze in place.

No, it was not limited to the plane. The unnatural nightscape outside the window had completely stopped moving.

The old woman realized she was trapped, but she had no way of knowing ''where'' she was trapped.

“I could always just ''leave you here''.” Shokuhou Misaki spoke cruelly inside the stopped plane. “If you don’t want that, then tell me what you were trying to do with this dangerous thing.”

“If you want information, can’t you just look directly into my mind?”

“I already tried. Hadn’t you noticed you were thinking almost too much about the Urban Processor’s details? And a portion of your memories has been unnaturally overwritten. You probably filled your mind with a few different versions of the truth using self-suggestion, but since I can read them all, I can’t prove which one is the right answer.”

“The suggestion was added on later. …The first thing you found is probably the correct one.”

“I see. In that case…”

“My objective has not changed since the beginning,” spat out the old woman inside the plane which felt like clear plastic had been poured in and allowed to harden. “If I know something will be lost, I cannot allow it to leave nothing behind. That’s why I have sent new projects into the world like the Anatomy Mechatronics and the Urban Processor. If I didn’t, how could I feel such great motivation?”

“You’re saying Academy City ''will be destroyed soon''?”

“I can’t find any other answer.”

“So you want to leave a backup of the city in the farthest reaches of the world before it’s lost?”

“If I do that, Academy City can eventually be reconstructed somewhere. And even if it isn’t, its influence will remain in the world. …So if you are trying to stop me, I can only think you are culling this city yourself because you wish to see it disappear.”

“Did it never occur to you that the destructive ability you fear could be caused by this tablet itself?”

“Think of it like Noah’s Ark. What would have happened if that story’s protagonist gave up on gathering every animal and instead went around telling all of his friends and family about the boat? That decision may have made him a beloved figure, but nothing would have remained afterwards. None of them would have had anything to eat and everyone he loved would have begun eating each other.”

“You seem to be making one major misunderstanding.”

“And what is that?”

“That story’s protagonist did not cause the flood. If he said he was going to use up the planet’s resources to build the boat, his family and friends would have ganged up on him to stop him.”

“The result would be no different.”

“But only using the logic of the god who flooded the planet to make a better world. Humans like to worry about the process and the cause, so I don’t think that’s something we could accept.”

“Are you saying the process leading me here included something you refuse to accept?”

“The doll you made never said a bad word about her ‘parent’ even after having her good will trampled on.”

“…”

“That isn’t just a digital sequence of commands. You created her, so wouldn’t you know that better than anyone?”

“How do you know there was good will behind that? Did you use your power to open it up?”

“Don’t be silly. You were so skilled that I was hesitant to open that box.”

“I see,” muttered the old woman under her breath. “You will lose everything.”

“Perhaps.”

“When the time comes, you will rue the decision you made today.”

“Even if I will, there are some things I can’t accept. If that changed, I think I would be more of a doll than a human.”

“Then promise me one thing.”

“?”

“Now that you have crushed one avenue of salvation, do not give up on this. Just as I pursued my methods, you protect Misaki with your own methods.”