.Hack//ZERO RE:2000

RE:2000

There had once been a time when – true to its name - The World had been a certain girl’s whole reality.

And it hadn’t been all that long ago.

In The World, she was able to be whoever she wanted to be. She could be loved by and give strength to others.

In The World, time lost all meaning. If she wished it, her days could pass much more quickly or much more slowly than they did in reality. And if she wished it, she could have lived there for all eternity.

She had lived happily within The World.

Now, in real life, she was tied down one meter above the ground.

Her visibility was low and narrow.

Her lower body was heavy and gaunt, and she often drew the attention of others, usually in the form of pity, contempt, and scorn.

Being real meant that she was constantly exposed to those kinds of dirty looks.

She didn’t yet have the armor needed to shrug them off, but neither did she have the strength to try and fight back.

Furthermore, she was already hurt and confused herself.

The World could have made all of her pain and suffering go away. It could have made it seem like none of it existed in the first place.

However, she had already decided to leave that world behind.

She crossed over from a city constructed of 1s and 0s to the unruly land of reality.

She left The World behind because she finally realized that she had been a fraud there.

A liar. None of it had been real.

She could have pretended it was real if she had stayed in The World. If nothing else, she had at least stayed true to the role she wanted to play in The World.

But the real reason she had logged into The World had been because she’d sought salvation.

Because she’d wanted to escape from reality.

Once she had stopped acting, however, all she found left behind was herself, as uncertain of herself and skeptical of others as always. It had been the same both online and in real life.

Her role in The World was meant to be her armor, but in the end, it had been broken all too easily.

Anything she had said or done had just been her trying to emulate things she’d seen in movies or read in novels.

All lies. Just something to distract her from reality.

She had turned her back, run away, and tried to forget about it. She didn’t even want the chance to hate it.

Because if she had felt anything at all, it would have meant acknowledging that it was real.

However.

She had returned to reality in order to feel that hurt.

To know the pain.

And to share that pain with the people she loved.

Without even needing to think about it, her fingers moved to type in her password.

The former player chuckled at the fact her fingers still remembered all the login procedures.

But when she saw the title screen with a twilight cover display, she did not feel any sense of nostalgia. She didn’t miss it, and she didn’t feel any draw to return to it. The only thing it was, was familiar.

That was just how much The World had become a part of Subaru’s – of Mariko Misono’s daily life.

And Mariko felt like it was still very close to who she was.

It had been three months since she’d last logged in to her account, and it seemed she now had over a hundred e-mails piled up in her inbox.

It was in reading the names of those who had sent them that Mariko finally felt that sense of nostalgia.

Names of the Crimson Knights which she had once overseen. Her guildmembers.

Mariko opened the letters one-by-one in order of date sent and read each one carefully.

Many openly lamented the fact that it had been so long since she had logged in, and some even spoke bitterly about it, but as time went on, they gradually grew more distant.

It seemed that the more intense the sender was, the quicker they lost interest.

The last of the e-mails was from two days ago, and was from a member who – as Subaru’s second-in-command – had opposed the dissolution of the Knights right to the very end.

Mariko smiled as she recalled his by-the-books manner and the way he always stood so straight as though it would make him seem taller.

The tone of his e-mail was somehow softer than that image of him, however. He asked how Mariko was doing in real life while explaining his own situation.

He stated that he was now working part-time as an assistant manager and looking to become full-time.

And towards the end, he casually mentioned the commotion that was recently occurring in The World.

There seems to have been an incident at the area <Hidden Forbidden Holy Ground>.

It seems that a total of 38 PCs (this is according to the official forums) were suddenly warped to the area at once.

The PCs who were ‘summoned’ had nothing in common, and many were even transferred in from different servers.

There aren’t any spells or items capable of doing this (obviously).

But I am curious about the location.

Also, the claim that they were all ‘called’ by a young girl seems a bit far-fetched.

Well, that’s enough for now I suppose.

It was the most interesting story I’d heard of recently.

Mariko read the text over and over again.

After having logged in for the first time in so long, she was curious what all the fuss was about.

She opened the BBS immediately.

The discussion seemed to have already died out, but there were so many threads that it took her two hours just to skim through them all, both the useful and useless ones.

People were excited. They wanted to talk about it, know more, and be a part of it.

The people that experienced it were worshipped like gods, and the rest listened and hung on their every word.

However, both the incident and its cause were still unclear at the moment.

She had sorted through the information, eliminating rumors as much as possible, and found that the PCs in question were warped to the Cathedral abnormally, causing such an overload of data that it became unplayable, forcing them all to log out.

Even if a server were being overtaxed from an excessive number of players, there was no way it would end up forwarding people to a different area. Even if it did, it wouldn’t be using any less data – if anything, it would require even more.

If it really had happened, it would have to have been a programming error by CC Corp., but then it would also be strange that the system had been running normally until just the day before, only to suddenly go haywire. But if it were just a bug, it wouldn’t have affected so many people all at once; not unless they had all entered the same command at the same time.

It was theoretically possible that a hacker had tampered with the game’s code, but that was hardly likely. Just cracking into the system would be a challenge, but hacking it to the point of creating such an irregular phenomenon was just crazy.

Beyond that, even the accounts from those who had experienced the incident first-hand were mixed.

Some people had been warped from a field with their party, while others said they found themselves there suddenly after walking into a shop in town. And then some claimed they had been pulled away from their parties while fighting in a dungeon, leaving everyone but them to be wiped out.

And yet some players said they hadn’t even realized they were in <Hidden Forbidden Holy Ground> when it happened, and claim that what had started as a blinding light covering their vision then condensed into various different images, ranging from a shrine divided between night and day, an inverted rainbow, a comet crossing over an altar, a pillar of light reaching up from the ocean floor, or Celtic writings in the sky.

A few people in the thread tried to analyze the meaning of the scenes symbolically, but most of them ended up being more pedantic than insightful.

The one thing that caught Mariko’s attention was the general agreement that there had been two PCs there already who were talking to each other.

They claimed to have seen a young girl with a tall woman standing near the altar. However, the game had frozen after just getting a glimpse, so they couldn’t even be sure if they had been PCs or NPCs. Both had appeared female, but they said the taller one could have been a male with long hair.

But among all the other details making the affair sound like some kind of religious experience, that part was so mundane that everyone else was brushing it off.

Mariko wished she knew what kind of PC they really were, but it may have already been too late.

As soon as a statement had been released by CC Corp. about the incident, the people’s focus shifted to rejecting their explanation of the event rather than continuing their search for the truth.

Whether in real life or online, people were quick to change their minds. In fact, often times that change seemed to happen even faster online.

Once an apology was posted by CC Corp., their interest quickly waned.

There were still a few people posting about it, but they just ended up reiterating what had already been said while trying to find new context to mix things up.

Mariko finished reading the posts and then began searching through the threads that had been made since the incident.

She searched for the words ‘Morganna’, ‘Tsukasa’, and then ‘Harald’.

Each search got anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred results, but none of them looked important to Mariko.

She tried typing in the word ‘girl’, hit search, and as expected received several thousand results.

Then she tried adding ‘Aura’ to the search criteria.

It took a moment for the page to refresh and bring up the new batch of results.

And there, Mariko finally found what she was looking for.

“I knew it……”

Without realizing it, Mariko had begun to use Subaru’s tone of voice.

Half a day later, Mariko received a strange e-mail. And rather than finding it in the address she had under CC Corp.’s domain, she found it under the one she used for school – which she had of course never shared with her acquaintances from The World.

The sender’s name was listed as ‘Ichiro Sato’ – but that was obviously a pseudonym.

Under normal circumstances, she would have deleted it without even reading it, but Mariko opened it because the e-mail’s subject line read ‘Tsukasa is survived by Aura’.

It was an ominous title. In Japanese, it could be translated as ‘Tsukasa has left Aura behind’

But for some reason, Mariko reflexively read it more as ‘Tsukasa is being kept alive by Aura’.

She was confident in her English – she would even say she enjoyed it. Her grades were high enough for her to be considered at a university entrance exam level.

So, Mariko looked again at the original phrase and read it back that way.

‘Tsukasa is survived by Aura’.

It was true that Tsukasa had departed from The World, so the metaphor that Tsukasa’s essence was being maintained within Aura would not be entirely mistaken.

But either way, it was disturbing the way it had been phrased.

Mariko hesitated for a moment, but gathered up what little resolve she had and opened the e-mail.

Unfortunately, her effort was met with disappointment. The text was completely blank.

Mariko stared at the empty e-mail for quite some time.

Questions danced in the air around her, and confusion crept into her heart.

Mariko’s past was calling out to her from beyond the veil of twilight with white arms spread wide. All the things she’d thought and seen during that time came instantly back to her.

She did not feel afraid.

Rather, a sense of nostalgia for The World finally rose up within her.

Perhaps it was the difference between what ‘Tsukasa’ had experienced and what ‘Subaru’ had experienced.

Tsukasa likely would not have felt nostalgic – not now, at least.

Mariko and ‘Tsukasa’ – An Shoji – had spent a lot of time together without discussing a single word of what she had been through before. It was an incident which could neither be considered a dream or a real experience.

An incident in which the PC ‘Tsukasa’ had become trapped within The World.

Tsukasa became unable to log out of The World and could do nothing but wander while the real An Shoji had fallen into an unexplainable coma.

Aura had been the cause of Tsukasa’s entrapment, but she was also the cause of their release.

Tsukasa had been chosen to act as Aura’s ‘core’.

However, that purpose was not fulfilled, and so Tsukasa was able to miraculously return to reality.

Tsukasa and Subaru then met anew as An Shoji and Mariko Misono, and became close once again.

They couldn’t see each other very often at the moment, but they made the most of things through phone calls and letters.

When they woke up, what books they were reading and their thoughts on them, the budding trees outside their houses, or the taste of a new chocolate brand.

They mostly talked about trivial things like that, but the two of them still kept exchanging those pleasantries as if it were all part of a secret game they had created for just them.

A game comprised of completely innocuous and innocent conversation.

They gave each other advice while taking great care to not be intrusive.

But most of all, they gave each other love.

They never talked about serious concerns or frustrations, like what had happened in The World.

Maybe they were just afraid, even if there was no reason to be.

But the hurt the two of them felt was so real that they subconsciously hesitated to acknowledge just how deep their wounds really were.

Even after having experienced what they had in The World and choosing to return to reality, the pain was still there.

For now, all they could do was pay attention to their own footing.

Mariko was aware that An had been thinking about Aura for a long time, even though she had erased her account in The World herself after relocating.

It wasn’t that she was avoiding it, she just couldn’t bring herself to mention it.

However, Mariko would occasionally catch An freeze up for a moment, and could only imagine she was thinking about Aura in those moments.

Mariko wasn’t ignoring her, but she didn’t want to make a big deal out of it either. Still, whenever they talked, she did feel a vague sense of regret for not knowing what her true feelings were.

After all, nobody can know someone better than they know themselves. Even if you thought you understood, there would always be a discrepancy between your own perception and theirs.

That was why Mariko had only asked An about it just once before.

What was Aura to Tsukasa? What had she meant to them, really?

An had fallen silent over the phone and thought about it for a long time.

“I don’t know.”

She eventually confessed.

“I didn’t think of her like a family member, or even a part of myself. Even the warmth I felt from her at the time may have been fabricated.”

“But she was important to you, wasn’t she?”

“Probably,” was the only answer An gave her.

After that, Mariko decided not to pursue the matter any further.

Would An slowly forget about Aura in the future? Or would she continue to question what Aura meant to her? No one could know for sure what the answer to that was.

Forcing An to give her an answer now would be worse than useless; it would only hurt her.

It may have been the kind of question that An needed time to answer on her own.

And as for Mariko – Subaru could only quietly watch over Tsukasa. Just as she had done in The World.

“It’s because Subaru was there.”

Those had been An’s words while resting her cheek on Mariko’s knee.

This was only the second time they had met in person.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“That’s not true.”

An shook her head and kneeled down to look up at Mariko in her wheelchair.

“Subaru is the only reason I’m still here.”

Mariko actually felt the same way.

But instead of saying it out loud, Mariko just stroked An’s hair.

She felt the shape of An’s head through her hands. She couldn’t feel anything through her legs, but that fact didn’t disgust her like it used to.

At the moment, An was living at a boarding school near Kanto. In addition to catching up on her studies, she also had physical rehabilitation to attend and was trying to build up new relationships from scratch. She always gave Mariko a positive report of her time there, but she was probably struggling to handle it all.

So, she didn’t think it would be a good idea to bother An with thoughts of The World again.

Before doing something like that, Mariko decided she had to investigate the contents of this strange e-mail first.

Once she had some concrete information on what was going on, then Mariko could let An know about it.

But for the time being…

Mariko had only one clue on the screen in front of her.

Aura. A girl. The Cathedral. Basho’s disciple. A character wrapped in bandages.

I would like to know more about these things.

Please share what you know.

This post had been written two days ago, but no one had responded yet.

And for obvious reasons. Nobody would have the slightest clue what they were talking about.

The post was so vague without any details that Mariko had to wonder if they were deliberately trying to stir up some chaos, but that didn’t really seem to be the case.

The strangest part was that they had attached an e-mail address.

They had intentionally written their post in a way that was difficult to understand.

And it had probably been done to avoid scrutiny and getting bogged down with useless information.

Someone had written this post, but for what purpose? Mariko tried to imagine the kind of person that would be on the other side of the monitor.

What emotions were driving them? Was it simple curiosity; or something more?

And why had they made their request so politely? Why had they said, ‘please share what you know’ instead of simply ‘tell me what you know’?

There was something oddly earnest in their short, well-mannered sentences.

Mariko blinked once and started drafting a new e-mail.

“Nice to meet you.”

Her FMD’s microphone picked up her voice, and the words she spoke were automatically written down as text.

“I hope I’m not bothering you. I saw your post and would like to speak with you.”

Mariko began her story with a brief self-introduction.

She had to speak with this person. Of that much, she was certain.

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