"Are you sure this is going to work properly, Higa-san?"
"Of course, Kirigaya-kun! All the wrinkles have been ironed out."
You say that, but…
Thinking about the last two times he had been here, Kirigaya Kazuto looked around the room. He was sitting on top of the bed of an experimental full-dive machine, the Soul Translator (STL), waiting for the researcher Higa Takeru, one of the head scientists at Rath, to finish the preparations for testing.
The previous two tests, the STL's quantum processor had interfaced with other quantum computers in what seemed to be other realities, instead of loading up the test environment.
The first time, he had ended up fighting a person wearing full body metallic armor, going by the name Silver Crow, in what seemed to be a full-dive fighting game, similar to those old arcade fighters.
The second time, he had entered a simulation being run by someone from another reality, Shiba Tatsuya, who he had met previously when Shiba somehow got trapped as the final boss of a campaign quest in ALfheim Online.
The first time, he had ended up as his avatar from Sword Art Online, and the second time, despite asking Higa-san to give him a preloaded avatar, he ended up as his avatar from ALO.
After both tests he had told Higa-san that the test environment had failed to load, and been reassured that it would be fixed by the next time.
Now, for the third Sunday in a row, he was testing the STL.
It's not like the same thing will happen a third time, right? Actually, didn't I ask myself that last time?
While Kirito, as his friends called him, thought this to himself, Higa-san finished preparing the STL.
"Alright, ready to go?"
Putting on the headpiece as he gave an affirmative, Kirito lay down. The last thing he heard before entering the full-dive environment was Higa-san saying, "Have fun!"
Shiba Tatsuya:
Something was wrong.
The 'Five Sense Reproduction-Type Virtual Simulator' was taking longer to load up than usual.
Of course, it wasn't unusual for it to take a long time to start, but this time, it was taking more than three times as long as usual to boot.
Hopefully it's not broken, thought Shiba Tatsuya, as he checked the system boot log.
It would not have been strange for the simulator to be so slow to start if it were rendering terrain, but Tatsuya always used the interior of a blank white sphere as the environment, and he had not changed anything this time.
Just as he was about to cancel the simulator's boot sequence, it finished starting up.
He looked at it for a second, then started preparing to enter the simulation, wondering why it had taken so long.
The Isolator:
"Isolator, look out!"
Minoru Utsugi, codename: 'Isolator', had to leap to the side to avoid the attack.
Normally, he'd be able to simply act like a tank, walking towards the enemy at a leisurely pace while his barrier protected him against the enemy's attacks, but today they were fighting a Ruby Eye known as The Warper.
The Warper was able to create portals to any location, and therefore used portals for all her attacks. Creating portals to empty space 500 meters in the air, throwing small wormholes at people to carve out parts of their body, and placing doorways to the moon in crowded places were some of her favorite things to do.
This made it much harder on Minoru, as the portals, being immaterial, could pass through his barrier.
As he moved to circle the Warper, he suddenly tripped over a rock in the shadows. Before he could hit the ground, though, a portal appeared underneath him, and he fell through.
Just before the portal closed, he could hear Suu screaming his name.
?:
He stared at the anomaly. His robot companions were nearby, waiting to help if it situation turned dangerous.
He and his team had been exploring the ruins of an old laboratory on Mars, when they can across this… thing. They could tell it was some sort of dimensional anomaly, but otherwise had no what they were dealing with.
The anomaly looked similar to the light distortions seen on a hot day, but was clearly different. This was bending space, not light.
Despite warnings from one of his companions, a small floating robot hovering by his shoulder, light shining from its single eye, he put his arm into the anomaly.
"I can't feel anything on the other side. I'm going to put my head through, see if there's anything there.
Hearing this, the companion who had been warning him disappeared, and he heard its voice in through his helmet's speakers.
"I'm rather opposed to this, but we all know I can't stop you." Then, addressing the other robot, he asked, "What do you think?"
The other machine, a defective alien robot whose self-repairs has turned it into a mishmash of parts from both human and alien combat units, replied quickly in a strangely modulated voice.
"I cAnnOt OppOsE thE ActIOns Of my mAstEr. I shALL gO whErE hE gOEs, And dO whAt hE sAys."
"Why do you always say that?! And you," The small machine now addressed the man. "Why haven't you replaced his voice module yet?!"
"I haven't found a replacement yet. I'll replace it when we actually have something to replace it with."
Having decided the conversation was over, the man put his head through the tear in reality.
Immediately, it began pulling him in. Within seconds, he had been pulled entirely through, and the tear had mended itself behind him. He hadn't even had time to scream.
His small floating companion had been pulled through with him, leaving the patchwork robot there alone. It immediately began the long journey back to the ship.
Meanwhile, the man fell through the space between stars...