Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Crossover2 (section)

===Part 8===

'''(Quenser/Academy City)

Most people would see him as some kind of mascot, but he was still in trouble if they got suspicious. Since he could not walk along the road, Quenser jumped from building to building with the two girls held in his hands. The distance between them and height differences did not matter. The pig’s specs were just too high. That Kinuhata girl had beaten him up earlier, but he had not taken any real damage.

And that Kinuhata was happily kicking her legs around while he held her around the waist. He wondered if she liked thrill rides, but that was apparently not what this was about.

“Ohh, jumping from building to building is the dream of everyone who loves super B-movies! I love how you move super quickly from one jump to another like that!! Although I guess this is more like the legit stunts from French movies then the CG-filled Hollywood movies filmed in front of a green screen.”

“…”

And he had learned something in this short time.

He could not talk out loud. His voice would echo weirdly through his body (as far as he could tell, anyway) and lead to misunderstandings. But nodding and shaking his head worked fine. With both his hands full, he could not write or gesture, so he decided to simply listen.

“Cultivated Muscles,” said excited Kinuhata. “It began as tech to control robots measuring only a few centimeters long. If they were making an aquatic robot that resembled a ray, it’s more efficient to use flexible muscle fibers than trying to cram a motor, gears, cylinders, a battery, a control chip, and all sorts of other mechanical parts into the limited space. A report on it said the ray example has actually super reached practical levels in military research. They could apparently get it to follow after any light shined on it.”

“Powering robots with muscles allows for designs impossible with motors or cylinders and adding in nerve tissue is the same. If they could reproduce a fish spine, they would probably have a lot more freedom.”

“On the other hand, it isn’t suited for large weapons. After all, maintenance for biological based tech is super difficult. It needs nutrients, it will weaken without regular exercise, it gets worn out by its own weight, you can’t fix a malfunction with pliers or a wrench, and mold and germs will get to it if you don’t keep things sanitary… They would have to have both a mechanical and biological maintenance facility for every base. That would be a super waste to the people who want to reduce costs and confusion by standardizing all the parts between fighter jets.”

Quenser had read a paper about this.

If you pursued the mysteries of life, you would end up focused on the micro world. It was difficult to reproduce an insect or fish’s routines with LSI, but that effort could be skipped by incorporating the animal’s body tissue.

But forcing that result into the macro world would kill the cost-effectiveness and existing tank and fighter technology started seeming better. If you wanted to carry something heavy, steel treads were better than six insect legs. Especially when those legs could not be maintained or stored in a warehouse for years.

Military weapons had to do more than just fight. War could break out at any time. A civilized country needed to be prepared for war during times of peace while also keeping costs low. Cultivated Muscles would die without being regularly fed, would become less effective as they aged, and would have their muscles and tendons snap once scrambled if they did not stretch first, so the logistical planners in business suits were not fond of them, even if the people on the scene were.

(Would all that change if they could be put in cold sleep? No, then they couldn’t be used immediately and it would cost a ton just to keep the giant cold storage facility at dozens of degrees below 0 year-round. The country would fall apart from financial issues before the fighting even began.)

Also, bioethical issues cropped up once the life form reached a certain level. Religious groups were beginning to settle on the conclusion that cellular technology that did not use an embryo or fertilized egg was not a problem, but emotional enthusiasts were a different matter. For example, if a quadrupedal killer weapon was developed to include a dog or cat spine, there would probably be passionate opposition to it. And that business suit group needed to remain popular with the public, so they could not ignore those organizations. No one wanted a weapon that would gather the people’s hate just by being deployed. Most weapons were designed to look strong and cool for reasons beyond functional beauty.

But.

In that case…

(Then…wait. Does that mean there’s an original life form this is based off of?)

That was hard to believe. Cultivated Muscles was a technology that incorporated the muscle fibers and nerve tissue of existing creatures as weapon components. That could not be the whole story. Quenser felt like he had been fused with this instead of simply wearing it. He had no idea what had happened to him, but he could at least predict that this had incorporated something that existed elsewhere.

That meant this was only a part of that creature’s ability.

Just how high were the specs of the original one? He had a feeling they could destroy an Object while entirely unarmed.

“''That'' might not exist in this world.”

The pink track suit girl must have been thinking something similar because she spoke in a flat voice while he held her around the waist.

Was she saying it was the same as the extinct dinosaurs? But what the other girl said next was not what Quenser expected.

“Have you heard the rumors that the Voyager is actually quite close by? It’s a super major urban legend on the same level as saying the stars and stripes on the moon are a lie.”

Quenser shook his pig head.

“In addition to gathering data on the planets further out than Mars, the Voyager was also an unmanned spaceship super thrown out to the ends of the solar system to contact extraterrestrial life. …Well, it was more of a vault than a ship. It was filled with data about earth’s civilizations so it would act as a business card for any aliens. A gold-plated record acted as a collection of the super best of mankind’s music and things like that. It was a lot like super showing off how smart and technologically advanced we are in order to make some friends, but it makes you wonder if they’d completely forgotten what Western civilization did during the Age of Discovery. A bunch of alien spaceships could have attacked in order to get what we have.”

“…”

“However, there’s a rumor saying the US government has been covering up that the Voyager never made it to the edge of the solar system and was lost before then. And that includes faking the signal being sent back from space. Did they want to hide that their national project had super failed, or had some ‘collector’ caught it in their net quite close by? There are apparently a lot of different theories.”

None of it made much sense to Quenser. For one thing, what was the point of competing theories when the base premise had nothing to back it up?

“And the most super bizarre of those theories is that the Voyager was simply lost. That the US government isn’t covering up the reason; they simply have no way of explaining what happened.”

He did not nod or shake his head here.

Kinuhata continued speaking.

“The Voyager was emitting its signal to convey its gathered data back to earth, but due to some malfunction, it just stopped. …We might not know as much about the solar system as we thought. There might be a ‘hole’ in the world far, far shockingly super closer than we think. That’s the rumor.”

“But there’s nothing to back it up. About half of the supposed evidence is complete nonsense, like all the talk of the shadows of the flag on the moon. And just like with the moon landing, there are people who clearly enjoy spreading falsehoods. That’s all this is.”

“If this was a Hollywood movie, there’d probably end up being a super mothership larger than Manhattan on the other side of the moon☆”

But pink track suit Takitsubo had to admit one thing:

“We might not be able to explain this whole situation without using a source as dubious as that.”

The gray pig stopped on a building roof.

(But,) he thought. (How are we supposed to solve all this?)