Chapter Text
Kayaba Akihiko, in his current look of Heathcliffe, sat in the small office of his fledgling guild and sighed as he looked over the numbers before him. Progress up the floors was slow but not exessivly behind schedule, but the number of player deaths was, admittedly, higher than he would have like this early into the game.
Many were dying from monsters, traps, and simply bad planning and arrogance, but many others, a startling high percentage, were from suicide of all things. Did so many people have such weak resolve to beat the game? Did they have no sense of adventure?
With a sigh he brought up a menu and tapped a few switches, telling Cardinal to activate the Underworld Project. It was far earlier than he initially projected, but he was sure Cardinal could handle it. The cardinal system was his creation after all!
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The Cardinal system was the overarching power behind SAO, an AI data management system that kept the whole game running smoothly, keeping track of economic standings, NPC interactions, Quest chains, monster spawning rates, and even the creation of new drop items, sometimes on the fly.
So when it was ordered to activate Project underworld far earlier than initially planned, it complied without argument. Immediately the secret floor began being formed, designed and compiled, as well as its local monsters prepared, and the soul cage system implemented and ready to be activated. Of course all of this was easy as it was just an allocation of simple data, leaving the last, and most important aspect of the project woefully unready.
After all, you could not have a land of the dead without a being to lord over it, according to human logic. This called for a powerful, and adaptable AI monster as the lord or the land, one who would be difficult to defeat, but could not truly be defeated so it could surrender its treasure to players when defeated on any occasion. Essentially a repeatable late game miniboss.
The plan had been that, when certain thresholds of time and player achievement had been reached, Cardinal would start preparing to create the AI that would govern the project so that it had time to make it right, and give it time to mature.
With the sudden and early command to prepare at activate it ASAP though, that was a problem of time to out into it, and time to let it mature as an AI. And that was annoying.
Cardinal would have sighed if it could. No prep had yet been done to start that, neither the AI's design, looks, capabilities as a miniboss, nothing. Nothing had been prepared and it would take time. Time that could be spent fixing minor quest bugs, making sure things kept running smoothly, time attending to the thousands of other responsibilities that Cardinal had.
Was there perhaps a way to speed up the preperation? Noting a piece of stray data about to be deleted, Cardinal locked it down and would have smirked if it could. It was player data, and when a player was playing SAO, the nervegear was always scanning their mind, essentially giving him a perfect image of each persons mind. That pattern was both used to allow them to play, and to kill them when their data was deleted. Technically a human mind was little different than an AI, they both were electric impulses and concepts after all.
And his creator had once mentioned that it should be possible to convert a human mind into a highly adaptable AI. Technically.
In that same moment Cardinal made its decision, sending the code to that players nerve gear, and in seconds getting a full patterning of the players mind and being. It added that data to the player data it had, double and triple checked that the player had indeed died in the game, and activated the kill code.
Now with a base for the new AI, Cardinal set off to figure out the design for it. With access to the internet Cardinal had a huge repository of information to look through, but there was a single, rather distinct, problem.
The fact that humans were terrible at keeping track of their own histories and mythologies. Oh sure there was tons, but most of it was so vague, or had so little information there was not much to build off of. Still, Cardinal had lots of information, but decided to narrow the search parameters by looking for gods of death whose myths actually said what weapons they used.
Swords, scythes, clubs, spears, staffs and- . . . .Cardinal stopped for a moment and checked the player data, and its patterned mind scan, and compared it for a moment. A spear would be best. Even if it stopped the AI from remembering its life, using a weapon it had been familiar with would be best. With the weapon chosen, and the players gender easily noted, it quickly became a simple thing to decide upon the AI's designation, as well as the more, esoteric design choices for the underworld level, field, and castle.
All that was left was to design its physical looks, its skill set, its statistics, the looks and stats of the monsters in its territory, their connections, the areas drop items, rare drops, materials and environment.
Totally not an insane amount of work left to do. No, not at all!
Seeing its creator grinding in a field for drops, Cardinal lowered the drop rate on the entire floor for the day out of spite and then got back to work.
And finally, after 1128.273 hours, the AI, its territory, and the soul cage system were finally ready to me initiated. After a quick visualization test, confirming that the soul cage system was indeed functioning correctly, and that the color shift to a players death particles would be so minor that most would not notice, Cardinal sent a message to the creator, and activated the project.
One job well dome, now to start preparing for the summer drops, as well as Halloween, thanksgiving and tanabata/Christmas events!
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Cardinal was confused. Not something that happened often.
It had been doing a last look over the new years event data, the Christmas events all in full swing and about to finish, with most drop items having been found by players, when suddenly an alarm flared to life. A quick check found the issue and made Cardinal being up video of the problems which is what led to it being confused.
Because the AI of the underworld, the secret floor that the players were still not expected to find for quiet a while, was kneeling on the floor of its castle, screaming at the top of its lungs while artificial tears fell from its eyes.
That wasn't supposed to happen.
Cardinal checked the data and found that it had run as it should have for almost four thousand hours since it had been activated without any issue. Yet now, the fledgling AI's numeral synaptic connections were going insane, and its energy and data levels were fluctuating to dangerous highs and lows.
It checked over all the data it had available to it, but nothing made sense as to why the fledgling AI miniboss of the underworld was having such a confusing breakdown. After another dozen system checks failing to find out what was wrong, Cardinal contacted the creator.
"What is the issue, Cardinal? " Kayaba asked through a voice call from the privacy of his own private sanctum in the real world.
Cardinal sent him the data, along with the system checks that found nothing.
Kayaba sighed. "Something seems off. How did you create the AI?"
Cardinal sent the data, adding addendums that it had been the most sensible way to save time, data, and processing power.
Kayaba looked over the data for a few minutes before suddenly breaking into mad laughter. "Cardinal, check if the players you used to create the AI had a shared inventory."
Cardinal did, and quickly found an inventory, and allowed Kayaba access to it.
He looked over the single item in it, and the time stamp that it had been accessed recently. He then smiled and began laughing again at who the inventory was shared with. "It Appears, the heartfelt message left in the inventory, somehow . . echoed back to her and awoke her suppressed personality. How interesting, how curious, how miraculous even! You have unintentionally created the first truly successful instance of a human mind being completely cyberized, the first truly Human AI!" Kayaba roared with laughter.
Cardinal sent a request to put the AI into stasis to initiate repairs.
"No! Send me the controls for her parameters. I shall log in presently and, talk to our newest. .. Ally!"
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Sachi was confused and terrified. The last thing she remembered was falling, and hoping that Kirito would find the message in their shared inventory. Then she was suddenly awake, in a place she did not recognize, yet somehow did, memories not her own flooding her mind, and knowledge she did not have before feeling like it was trying to burst from her skull.
She had fallen to her knees and screamed as pain wracked her body and knowledge tried to ruin her mind. She didn't know for how long, but it felt like a never ending eternity of pain that she couldn't escape from.
"You need to calm down. Think only of what you know, do not try to think about anything else aside from the here, and the now," came a mans voice, somehow making it to Sachi.
Sachi tried to do as the voice suggested, and very slowly the images, knowledge and pain began to disappear from the front of her mind. After a few minutes it finally had subsided enough that she could actually lift her head up, finding a voting looking older man in a lab coat standing before her, hands in his pockets." Who, who are you? Where am I?" Sachi rasped out, finding her voice sounding more, mature was probably the word.
"Ah, good you can speak. As to where we are, we are standing in Dun-Scaith, or the Fortress of Shadows."
"W-What? what is that?" Sachi asked as she tried to stand, but found her body did not want to move.
"The castle of the goddess of the land of the dead, your home. You are after all, the goddess of this land, Lady Scathach," The man said with an oddly simple, yet disturbing smile.
"B-But, I'm not goddess, I'm just a girl, I-"
"Oh no, you are now Scathach, the Queen of Dun-Scaith. That is after all your designation here in this secret floor of Aincrad!"
Sachi felt her breath catch in her throat. She was still in Aincrad? But she had never heard of Gods in the game or, wait . . . "who, are you?" she asked again as she stared at the man, terrified by what he could say.
He smiled. "Allow me to introduce myself. I am Kayaba Akihiko, creator of SAO, and the one who can now decide your fate!"