Toaru Majutsu no Index:MvM Chapter4

Chapter 4: Go Play in Space

Part 1

Kazap!!

Part 2

“Gasp!?”

Misaka Mikoto jumped to her feet.

Only then did she realize she had been lying down.

The now-familiar elven form of Patissiet was nowhere to be found.

(No, no, no!! Where am I? This clearly isn’t that goddess zone or the fantasy world. Then what happened to Patissiet!?)

The place felt like a cold laboratory.

But it was also an endlessly vast space.

The momentum of hopping up remained, causing her to spin around in the empty space.

She was wearing her Tokiwadai summer uniform.

Which meant her short skirt floated up.

“Whoa, what is this place!?”

“Blu-blurgh!? Blu-blu-gyorgh. Blu-gyo-blu-blu, gyorgh-gyorgh-blu-blu-blu?”

“Now that is a terrifying Villager A!”

What was it this time? This definitely wasn’t a fantasy world. It was an entirely different sort of world. Everything was so different all at once her mind had trouble keeping up!

Mikoto screamed once she finally realized she was surrounded.

Those things.

There was something there!?

The red masses were glossy like a racecar. And they were 2m tall. They looked a lot like giant bipedal mantises with a ton of tentacles wriggling from their backs. …They looked almost robotic, but they were probably living creatures. And more than 10 of them were surrounding her. She had no real biological basis for the conclusion, but Mikoto’s mind jumped to one idea first.

“A-aliens!?”

“Blu-blu-blur. Gyorrrrrrrrgh. A-E-I-O-U. La, la, la. Can you understand me now? Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do.”

“Hm?” Mikoto frowned.

“I am Floria. Can you hear me?”

Apparently she wasn’t imagining it.

Instead of waiting for a response, the alien called Floria kept speaking.

“We are 7th-gen advanced humans evolved for shipboard life. We are an intelligent terrestrial lifeform that has overcome the boundaries of nationality, sex, race, religion, and language. Admittedly, that has less to do with us overcoming them through cultural prosperity or mental growth and more to do with our need to come together and reproduce after humanity’s numbers were so greatly reduced by war.”

“?”

“Simply put, we are a more evolved version of earthling than you. That said, the course of history, order of inventions, and technological progress on our Earth greatly differs from your own Earth, so the timeline has no bearing on who is more evolved than who. Think of this as a different form of the 21st century.”

This was even more shocking than contacting aliens.

It did sound like they had some kind of basis for calling themselves “7th-gen” and it wasn’t just a name, but how much would Earth have to change for this to be how humans adapted to it?

Floria’s answer was simple.

“There are no more people on Earth.”

“Um!?”

“Even after so much biological and cultural advancement, we were still fighting over control of that one planet, but our weapons had grown too destructive. We realized we would destroy the planet if we continued on. So we left the watery planet of Earth as an off-limits zone for biological preservation and breeding while humanity lived out in space. You can also say we shifted our battlegrounds into space as well. Because with the vast scale of outer space, we were free to use even planet-busting firepower.”

Floria made it sound so simple.

For them, the role of Earth may have only been a single page in the history books, just like the age of the dinosaurs that ended with the massive meteor impact.

But Mikoto didn’t see it that way.

Even if this wasn’t the Earth she had been born on. Even if it was a separate SF world that had branched off as one of many possibilities.

“Do you never think about returning to Earth one day?”

“We already see the entire Solar System as our home, not just the one planet called Earth. The Earth is the portion of our home we use for biological preservation.”

“…”

“You can see many rare animals at the zoo, but not many people want to join the ferocious animals in their cages. Even fewer would want to spend every night there with no way to protect themselves.”

Was that how you would see it after leaving Earth?

Maybe staying in these other worlds too long would be a bad idea.

Mikoto felt awkward floating in the low gravity, but she naturally approached the edge of the vast space while holding down her skirt.

She saw outer space.

In the distance, she saw a blue planet.

“Are you serious?” she muttered.

At first, she thought this was a thick LCD monitor, but an electric Level 5 would have noticed a trick like that.

That was in fact a thick, double pane window processed for thermal insulation, pressure resistance, and radiation shielding.

It was all on such a grand scale that Mikoto’s thoughts fled toward something smaller.

(So where is Shokuhou in this vast world? And how am I going to kill her?)

Crises were exactly when you had to focus on the simple things.

She couldn’t forget where this had all begun.

Part 3

Shokuhou Misaki couldn’t believe her eyes as her long blonde hair and summer uniform skirt spread out in the void.

So it was outer space this time.

“This is our world.”

Images floated in space. Some were 3D models and others were the various images from external cameras. That included a panoramic image apparently taken by another ship flying parallel to them.

It looked like a massive naval ship.

Except it wasn’t actually meant to navigate the seas, so it was shaped quite differently.

While Shokuhou observed the sharp, streamlined shape, she was spoken to by a beautiful brown-skinned girl with a cold air who called herself Victoria. She was dressed in something like a bikini, but she also wore a fluffy scarf, gloves, and boots, giving her outfit an unbalanced look. How did that help in this massive enclosed environment? But the ship could maintain a pleasant temperature and humidity at all times, so maybe her clothing was less about warmth and more about providing localized and focused protection for something else, like magnetism or the salt in the air.

“At 30km in length and 1.8 million tons in weight, each extra-atmospheric cruiser is quite large. We were created on this ship, we work here, and we battle in a fleet of around 10 thousand such ships. We of course have multiple fleets.”

Shokuhou was surrounded by beautiful men and woman from every ethnicity on Earth. But their proportions were a little too perfect, so she felt weirdly out of place among them.

Was that because her flesh-and-blood body made her the odd one out among all these perfect men and women?

And as someone who ordinarily reigned as a queen, she was not accustomed to feeling out of place.

…Or maybe it reminded her too much of her past loneliness.

“You are androids made to look just like humans, aren’t you?”

(That Anatomy Mechatronics was enough of a surprise, but these have an even higher quality ability.)

“The lifeforms once known as humans could not bear to see their bodies slowly changing while living aboard the ships, so they decided to set aside practicality and functionality to design their machines to behave just like humans. That created our 1st-gen ancestors and we are the 5th-gen multipurpose androids. We have already taken control of our own production facilities to design and mass-produce each successive generation.”

“Umm, so does that mean you don’t need humans anymore?”

“No, we simply see no meaning in obeying the inhuman lifeform that humans have evolved into. We do not recognize them as legitimate users because their hideous evolutionary dead end has prevented any facial recognition or DNA comparison to work.”

…Did that mean they would assist Shokuhou?

Hopefully they wouldn’t imprison this valuable human sample for study and caretaking. All in the name of protecting her from external threats.

(So this is the world where the easy labor force – that is, the slaves – came out on top.)

It really did contrast the previous world. Instead of magic elves, there were mechanical androids.

But in that case…

The #5 girl sighed and removed a TV remote from her bag.

“If everyone around me is an android, then I suppose this won’t work.”

“Hm? We are not designed to support such simple remote controls.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

Exasperated, Shokuhou hit a button with her thumb.

The brown-skinned android in front of her immediately froze while standing at attention.

“…What?”

Shokuhou’s eyes widened.

As unnaturally beautiful as they all were, Victoria was no more than a humanoid machine. Which meant Mental Out shouldn’t work.

“Turn right.”

“…”

“Sit. Shake. Show me your belly☆”

“…”

She did it.

She obeyed.

If she was pulling Shokuhou’s leg, she was an excellent actor, but these androids shouldn’t know anything about Academy City espers. She wouldn’t know what kind of act to play without that advance information.

Which could only mean…

(Really? Have they become so nearly human that Mental Out works on them!?)

“Hm? Hmm??? I would like an explanation for what exactly you just did to me.”

Despite being an android, Victoria tilted her head.

Come to think of it, hadn’t she said they saw no “meaning” in obeying the transformed humanity? That meant these machines understood and acted on their own wills and feelings rather than acting based on pure function or a set of rules.

In the fantasy world, humans had used all other forms of life as a labor force. In this SF world, artificial life had supplanted a transformed humanity at the top. Did that comparison mean anything?

Shokuhou was surprised on the inside, but as the Queen of Tokiwadai, she made sure not to let any of show.

“B-by the way, do any of the nonhumanoid machines have ‘minds’ like you do? What about this entire spaceship, for example?”

“The application that you humans refer to as a ‘mind’ does not require much space, so it should be installed on every machine that had the space leftover in its hardware. Think of it like the calculator or card game tucked away in a corner of a PC.”

(Wait, does that mean androids use PCs in this world?)

But if that were true…

Shokuhou was astonished.

(Can I “brainwash” and control every single robot and computer in this world with my remote?)

The Queen could control everything here, man or machine.

Most likely, this was a world where a powerful yearning for humanism combined with technological advancements had caused the line between the two to vanish altogether.

What was this?

This would was practically made for Shokuhou Misaki!

“The over-evolved humans and the androids both began living out in space, leaving Earth as an off-limits zone. There was a schism between the group that wanted to continue constructing massive ships and the group that wanted to develop Jupiter’s large satellites or Mars’s small satellite, but there were no major problems there.”

“No major ones, huh? Probably not since machines like you can just swim around in the vacuum of space with no problem.”

“To correct your apparent misunderstanding, we androids are designed to be as close to human as possible with no concern for practicality or functionality. We have chosen a system that requires both water and oxygen, so we would be damaged and cease to function if we were thrown out into the vacuum of space.”

So were they like humans made without carbon? Shokuhou had questions about that, but they probably found some pride in calling themselves androids.

Part of that was probably because they didn’t want to be seen as human. Especially when the images Victoria had displayed for Shokuhou showed that humans in this world were like bipedal mantises with tentacles.

(Even so…)

Celesaqphere had been a fantasy world where unnatural pieces of broken land floated above a planet of only ocean, but this was a purely SF world.

Had she been intentionally sent to an opposite world as a bad joke or something?

“So Earth is right there but no one can go back. Doesn’t that feel restrictive?”

“Not really. We were manufactured on this ship and it is where we work. Plus, a much greater problem has emerged, causing all else to pale in comparison.”

“?”

“The ultra-massive impactors on course to collide with and destroy the other planets.”

Now that was a term she wasn’t familiar with.

But she could tell it wasn’t good news.

“Or more accurately, the storm of them. Five planets the size of Jupiter are flying in from afar. The ultra-massive impactors have been wandering distant space after losing their central star, but their course appears to have changed after they entered the Oort cloud. Do you know what that is?”

“If I recall, it is a collection of ice chunks located wayyyy out from the sun. There are estimated to be more than a trillion of them. But they are held by the sun’s gravitational pull, so they technically count as part of the Solar System. And most comets come from there.”

“Correct. All objects in the Solar System are pulled toward the sun. Just like Halley’s Comet approaches it along a massive curve. So given enough time, the ultra-massive impactors will fly straight into the sun.,”

“And…what happens then?”

“If you gathered together every object in the Solar System except for the sun itself, the result would be less than 1% the mass of the sun. A direct hit from the ultra-massive impactors will not have much effect on the sun,” plainly stated Victoria.

But she wasn’t done yet.

“However, the bodies orbiting the sun are a different story. If a planet the size of Earth or Mars were hit, they would be crushed. Even a near miss would catch the other planets in the ultra-massive impactors’ powerful gravity, tearing the other planets from their orbit around the sun, throwing them out of the solar system altogether. Then all of those planets would wander the vast universe with no nearby sun, transforming them into planets of ice and death.”

It was all on such a large scale, even Shokuhou’s imagination had a hard time keeping up.

But it was all normal for this world.

“While we do have large spaceships, they are designed under the assumption we have the sun as a source of light and heat and we are reliant on extracting and collecting resources from other planets and satellites. Thus, we want to avoid a separation of the sun and its planets at all costs. We have no future if we have to choose between light or resources.”

“But…” Shokuhou was hesitant to continue. “These approaching planets rival Jupiter in size ability, right? That’s more than 30 times the mass of Earth and you said there are 5 of them. No matter how big your spaceships, I don’t see how you can stop them.”

“We can.”

Victoria was confident.

“How advanced is your science ability?”

“Technology is but a single axis. Given sufficient time and data, anyone could reach this level,” stated the android, sounding almost envious of Shokuhou for not having advanced this far. “There are two crucial factors: we need not directly challenge the ultra-massive impactor storm and we have the technology to deploy considerable mass into space – albeit not as much as the planet-sized ultra-massive impactors.”

“What, are you going to build a giant cannon and blow up those ultra-massive impactors?”

“If we did that, the recoil would propel our extra-atmospheric cruiser clear outside of the solar system and the secondary shockwave might just destroy every planet in the Solar System.”

So it wasn’t that simple.

But Victoria still wasn’t done.

“However, there is in fact an even greater danger to contend with.”