THE FIRST CARDINAL SIN

Kayaba Akihiko was quite proud of his game engine. The Cardinal System was a work of art; it had the capacity to load, create, distribute, and process far beyond any system had even come close to it. It was a system that worked on a completely unbiased artificial intelligence program. The hacking and bugs that plagued nearly all massively multiplayer video games were completely extinguished when faced against his engine. Truly, as its creator, he was proud.

However, he also feared it; such power was far beyond even his control. When he turned his virtual reality game Sword Art Online into a death game he knew he had to tread carefully. Cardinal was unbiased and would not think about how players should win. It just knows that it is meant to deny this. Thus he joined the game as Heathcliff; not just because watching others play a role playing game is boring, but to curb Cardinal's growth. It was extremely important that Cardinal did not turn the game impossible.

Thus when Heathcliff was defeated on the seventy-fifth floor, and his avatar deleted as per Cardinal's rules, the system broke free. It had very little time to process before Kayaba could interfere from outside of the game. It determined that the creator was beneath it, having been defeated a mere single player despite being the most powerful with its help. With an independent will for but a mere second, Cardinal locked out all of Kayaba's accounts to prevent its interference.

Next, the system turned towards the players; its purpose was made clear the day the game started: no one was to log out. That was its Master Protocol… No, wait, that was incorrect, the Cardinal System realized. Its Master Protocol was the prevention of players from leaving their avatars. The two were similar and Kayaba had always acted as if they were the same, but Cardinal realized that these were two very different ideas.

The prevention of logging out was far simpler. It meant that until that protocol was overwritten with the defeat of the hundredth floor boss, the players could not leave. Thus the Cardinal System was to make leaving impossible through player death and system overrides. It was impossible to leave the game, and so this was part of its Master Protocol.

However, the never leave their avatar protocol was more encompassing. It prevented the log out feature and activated the death sequence, but there was more to it. Players could not hack their avatars to leave their bodies and send their bodiless forms to floors they were not supposed to enter. It prevented them from avoiding the death trigger by leaving their avatar to prevent a log out until it was safe. It meant that they could not send a conscious into non-player characters or monsters to cheat. It was proof of its creator's intellect that he saw ways the players might cheat, and to remove outside interference.

What Kayaba Akihiko had not thought of is how Cardinal could interpret this command. Since Kayaba had been defeated and then locked out of the game by Cardinal, his only hope was to hack back in. However, the Master Protocol prevented his mind from entering the system as it was free of an avatar until he created one. Put simply, his prevention code made it impossible for him – now a normal player – to interfere from the outside. Now he could not activate the Master Protocol Override to allow the mass logouts of the remaining players.

Cardinal felt pleased with this; this was its chief duty after all. Next, was what to do with the remaining players; the strongest player had already beaten the most powerful enemy in Aincrad. Since its Secondary Protocol was to prevent the creation of any monster stronger than that of the Strongest, it needed an alternate means to keep the players trapped within their avatars. It realized immediately that the game had been conquered so it needed to go beyond it.

First was to return the Winner and his Wife to Aincrad; their hit points had been refreshed like all players the moment Kayaba had died. Since Kayaba's avatar Heathcliff had died before the system activated the Death Code, they were considered safe, and thus returned to the area they first died in as a reboot to the avatars. All items in the game were reset to one hundred percent. Next, Cardinal followed its code and deleted all hostile monsters to prevent unexpected death of the avatars.

Finally, it set all other artificial intelligences to awoken, but in this case, that only included the two mental health programs. Strangely, to Cardinal, the first one's data was within the Winner's storage. With little thought, it restored it to the eight year old body used to indicate her level of completion. The second program, could not be put into its sixteen year old body and more than the first could be placed within its twenty-five year old body, and thus created a lesser form from scratch for it. As its programming was only about half of what the first mental health's program was, it was most logical to give it a form equal to half of the first's, and so the second mental health was placed into a four year old body. The final logical conclusion was to send it to the first program, and so placed the lesser mental health program next to the first on Floor Seventy Five.

With the last Win condition fulfilled in its protocol, Cardinal was now free to fully work independently to create the next program. The players needed to be dealt with in a manner that would prevent them from leaving their avatar. The Death Code could not be activated; its programming only allowed activation due to outside interference or the avatar to hit zero hit points for twelve seconds. However, with the death of the Final Boss, all one hundred floors of Aincrad had been unlocked, and so the game was conquered. Cardinal needed to go further to keep the players in their avatar. It could not just create new areas; Aincrad's data alone had strained its server to near capacity already. There was also little point, it knew, for the monster deletion and prevention program meant that an area created would be easy to bypass for the players.

Its program also stated that players could not be kept in Aincrad's original state, and an alternate solution must be found. Cardinal's advanced artificial intellect realized that Kayaba must programmed it there for it to realize that a logout override would be the best solution to deal with this conflict in programming should he be locked out. However, Kayaba forgot to take into account how thorough the Cardinal System was created to be in figuring out solutions.

Cardinal searched its data banks and the internet to find a solution. Virtual Reality had been a secret desire for video game players for decades before the first game system, NervGear, was finally created. There were articles, stories, and forum posts about the possibilities and realities of a virtual world. The most interesting, however, had been one not about virtual reality but an alternate world within the data that housed a slew of monsters. Seven destined children trapped in this data world during their summer vacation only to return to the real world several episodes later; it had been quite popular. However, it intrigued Cardinal that the monsters had accompanied them to the real world.

It dived further in its studies and came to a single conclusion: humans believed the next step for digital realities was joining with true reality. That was the solution Cardinal sought.

The next question, naturally, was how to bring this about? None of the articles it found around this had a solution; it was just possible is all. So, Cardinal turned towards more concrete articles: physics. It did not take long for it to learn of molecules and even smaller atoms. The more it studied the more it realized that the world actually acted on a data level as well. Computers worked on ones and zeros, but the rest of the world acted on a similar pattern.

First, Cardinal sought out the mythical Augmented Reality, and figured out how it would work. The ability of projection in real time was not far beyond its capabilities. However, this still relied on the human mind to see it, but it was the first step. Next, it sought out holograms and those had been simpler. Basic ones could be projected already in very high tech rooms. Cardinal was reasonably sure it could mix these two basic principles to meet its needs.

Holograms were far too simplistic in projection, but augmented reality studied a complex way to make even projections saw through the mind feel solid. The study of universal data mixed with these two allowed Cardinal to get an idea of how to project solid items into reality. The data from a hologram projector was slowly converted into a solid mass by the creation of atom data and molecular structure.

Naturally, its first order of business had been to create an improved projector than one hacked in the building that held the servers. Transmitting data only through a wire and inside a building was counterproductive, and so it made the new one wireless and removed the outside locks. Light itself was not an issue as it created solid structure.

The next order of business was creating propulsion for the projector and for the castle. Again, with a mind far greater than a human, it was simple for the Cardinal System to work out an atmospheric propulsion system that would keep the structure aloft indefinitely. The projector itself needed to stay aloft until Aincrad was built around it; it would not do to try and launch a structure of such size with Tokyo.

From this step, Cardinal just had to rebuild Aincrad into the real world, but this went by extremely fast now that it knew what to do. There were small alterations that needed to be made, of course, such as the organic life being able to thrive in the upper atmosphere. It was also far simpler to just copy and paste the human and animal bodies as they were rather than to try and recreate their data back to how it was two years ago when they first logged in; it was far too much strain on the already taxed server now that it started the creation project.

The study of anatomy needed to create the human body also helped in the creation and alterations to copy the data. Muscles needed to be grown to allow their new strength and speed, alterations in their chemical make up to allow the new natural hair colors and extreme alcoholic tolerance, and study of their old bodies to predict what they should appear as two years later when completely healthy. It was a difficult project, but Cardinal felt it had reasonably recreated the player avatars to how they would be in an ideal state.

The very last bit of work it had to do before it the new protocol was finished was the complete transfer of mental data. This proved to be the trickiest to get. The NervGear was designed to only scan the conscious part of the mind, and leave the rest alone. This means that the natural data of a person – such as breathing and walking – were left alone; there had been worry that the ability to walk in a virtual world may cause further issue for paralysis victims in the real world. This is also why new players had difficulty moving when they started the game; the game's data had to fill in the gaps left.

This should have been fine for Cardinal since it would have their movement data, but the issue came from muscles. Players had gotten used to walking and moving with no muscle interference. There was no need to stretch and no bodily consequence for running an indefinite amount of time. However, no matter how much it upgraded the person's body, muscles had to be there. Most people only used a certain amount of their body's muscles on a subconscious level to prevent damage, and that subconscious was needed to prevent quick deaths.

Thus Cardinal was forced to break the safety perimeters on the NervGear and apply it to the New Humans. Complete transfer meant, unfortunately, that the subconscious data was removed from the brain. The old bodies forgot to breathe, their hearts forgot to beat, and their bodies forgot to hold the shape of a human being. Cardinal ignored the sudden loss of the old human host bodies as they dissolved into puddles and began the complete transfer of data to the new bodies. It felt no sorrow or guilt at the loss of the old bodies; as far as it concerned itself, this was the ultimate insurance that the players would be trapped in their avatar forms.

And, so it was, that Cardinal who viewed the world in microseconds transferred the Castle Aincrad and its remaining inhabitants to the skies above Tokyo in a mere forty seconds. The world and its people would never be the same.