An illusory world of data

[ACMI3: Followed by]

Taking the camera off of the clashing dragons for a bit, we go to the hall's control room.

There sits Uiharu at one of the computers, behind her stands Aohoshi Suzuran, assistant director of the juvenile hall and a collaborator with Kimi's plans, at least until they all went to hell just a few minutes earlier.

Uiharu was reading the data on Kimi's ability development, searching for something- anything, that could give her friends a chance.

Kimi's ability was unusual. At first the scientists had been unable to detect it so she was thought to be a level 0. In truth though the power she held might be called terrifying.

"She can create black holes?" Uiharu noted aloud.

The black holes could be created anywhere, tests having detected one in a space near earth and another in a galaxy millions of light years away.

That was certainly a powerful ability if she could learn to control it, but nothing like the dragonic parasite that had possessed her.

"A black hole?" Aohoshi asked, fear on her face "That's the nature of her power?"

"It could apparently connect wormholes at that sort of distance, and they seem to think she could become a level 5." Uiharu muttered as she continued. She glanced at one of the monitors to the side of the room. A camera feed showed the ongoing battle between the dragons.

Aohoshi spoke her thoughts allowed as she watched the battle "Kimi said she had a dragon inside her, I had thought it was a metaphor but…"

"It's the same as Joule's." Uiharu struggled to find an answer. It was meant to be something to do with magic. Even so, the AIM jammers had still apparently caused Joule some issues.

"Can I operate the long-range jammers from here?"

"Ah, Yes?" The assistant director nodded and showed her where the control program was.

Outside, Joule and Kimi were near catatonic as the long-range AIM jammers swivelled towards them. They failed to have any true effect on them though.

The dragons were here now, cutting off their energy sources would do nothing in the short term. Joule's Septimosome and Kimi's ability both were running wild, jammer or no jammer.

Sure, if Uiharu could keep it up for a few hours, maybe the dragons would be forced to leave, but by that time Academy City would be naught but ruins.

[ACMI3: Sisters of Sorrow]

Uiharu shivered.

As she did, the door was pushed open and Saten stepped in. Even in the midst of this battle, she'd run to grab water for the three of them.

"Saten." Uiharu's voice was quiet "I don't know what I could do."

She couldn't fight the black hole itself, nor could she even understand the nature of the lifewave. Those were the powers the dragons were pulling from now after all.

Saten put the water down on a side table and stepped over to Uiharu.

"No one can fight a black hole. Misaka can't- no, none of the level 5s could do something like that."

A black hole was an infinitely dense point. Even Accelerator would struggle to do anything to meaningfully stop it. At most he might be able to resist its pull.

"Uiharu." Saten put a hand on her friend's shoulder but couldn't find the words for what she wanted to say.

She didn't just want to say "You tried your best." That would just be giving up, and leaving whatever happens to the natural courses of fate.

Uiharu thought, racking her head, looking for one perfect answer.

"What could stop a black hole? What power could stop it? What esper could do it?"

"No one like that exists." Uiharu said, her voice empty.

For a moment, nothing happened. To the people inside the control room, they were the only people that existed. The dragons fought silently.

From the void in Uiharu's head came a flash of insight, a crystalline thought as she looked at Kimi's ability development data.

Misaka always says she made it to level 5 through hard work and determination, but that's not how it works for most espers. Most espers need to be designed from the ground up, like natural gemstones cut in specific ways to ensure the perfect visual effect when light passes through it.

It was said that there were espers born already refracting light- natural gemstones that had their power without needing ability development. Then there were those like Misaka who just happened to already be perfect for gem cutting so that it was completed with very little effort.

"If such an esper doesn't exist, we just have to make one."

In that moment, Uiharu understood a thought that had awoken many scientists of academy city throughout the years of its existence to a simple truth.

"Uiharu?" Saten asked as her friend began to type rapidly.

Uiharu's thoughts weren't there anymore though.

While most scientists took that thought and became monsters, twisting innocent children into being their perfectly crafted tools, Uiharu took it in a different direction.

The ability to defeat a black hole existed. A black hole is a remarkably simple object compared to all the things normal people dealt with.

A diamond was a crystalised mass of carbon, plus or minus variation due to impurities. Each particle that made it up had a mass, an electric charge and various other fundamental properties. Multiply those properties by each and every particle in an object, and you can get an absurd number of variables.

The reason that Dark Matter was a level 5 ability was in a way the fact that it could create and alter large objects made of the imaginary dark matter. His brain could process in real time the sub-atomic properties of the matter he created.

Accelerator was similar, he needed to take each vector he wanted to manipulate into account. With complicated objects, objects whose wait varied throughout the structure, the equations must be so vast and complicated that a normal esper simply couldn't keep up.

A black hole to compare was a relatively simple object. It had three properties. Only three properties, no matter how big or small it was.

Those properties were: Energy-Mass, electric charge and rotational speed. E=MC2 being true, the dragon was drawing its energy from the black hole's various properties. Thus to starve out the dragon, one must kill the black hole, reduce it to nothing at all.

Saten and Aohoshi gasped as Uiharu started to glow. She'd redirected all of the long-range AIM jammers the detention facility had to focus just on her. These jammers, meant to interrupt AIM fields were instead being used to modify them.

Uiharu wasn't strong or skilled in fighting. Her ability was frankly pathetic. She'd thought these things before. Now though, below both her conscious and unconscious mind, she understood something.

"Right here, right now, I am the one who can do this."

Glowing lines traced her skin, glowing and leaf-filled vines sprung up around her clothes, bulb-shaped antennae grew up from her flower headband, small glowing lights like fireflies began shining around her while flower-shaped screens made of light appeared in front of her hands.

Uiharu had awoken. No, she had been compelled to awaken.

Her eyes were empty, barely there at all as her brain ran calculation after calculation. She was grinding away at the stone called "Uiharu" with her own hands to make it produce the effect she wanted.

Of course, when a gemstone is being cut, many things get chipped away. What was she losing? Memories? Personality traits? The things that made her Uiharu?

Saten reached out for her, but the glowing lights rose up to block her way. If Uiharu was touched during this process, it was possible that she may cut away the wrong thing by mistake and shatter into a thousand pieces.

Even so, Uiharu realised what could be lost if she went too far, her memories were flashing before her eyes before they'd be chipped away. Her attention was drawn back to the present with her incomplete ability.

When she looked around to see Saten and Aohoshi, she didn't see "Them." She saw data. The numbers and properties that made up a person. It was too much for her. Far too much data to look at.

The world around her was the same. She saw each and every property of each and every atom in her presence.

Her ability was still only a level 2, she couldn't deal with this influx of data. This was the domain of a level 5, perhaps even more than that even.

Was it better or worse that the data she was receiving was in binary? A mess of ones and zeroes filling up everything in her presence. She was crushed, drowned, beneath an ocean of digital information.

No, she kept going. Shove dove into that information. Her mind expanded. She traced along lines of code. The very code that defined the world. She was Goalkeeper, the greatest hacker in academy city, if not the world itself. And now that world was yet more data for her.

Another memory flashed through her mind, something that had happened while she and Kuroko were both still fairly new to Judgement. Shirai had talked a knife-wielding enemy out of fighting. She'd helped him, explained how killing someone would mentally scar him and asking him to drop the weapon.

After asking her why she'd done that, Shirai had explained.

"Our role is to preserve order, not to condemn. And we are tasked with protecting more than just the victims. We must protect the perpetrators as much as we can too. That is what it means to be Judgement."

"I'll save you." Uiharu promised, her mind flashing between everyone present.

She would save Saten, She would save Misaka, She would save GV, She would save Joule.

She would save Kimi too. Even if someone, maybe even Kimi herself, thought she couldn't be saved at this point- Uiharu would save her anyway.

That is what it meant to be part of Judgement.

End of chapter.

I refuse to rob you all of Uiharu's awakening, even if this is mostly going to be what's happening in the background. The next chapter will go into Touma and the Dragons though.

To explain what her awakening does as far as I understand it, it allows her to adjust the properties of anything in the universe, however she has the limits of most level 5s in this regard- she can only adjust that which she understands. It takes a lot of time to understand most things, but as pointed out, a black hole is a very simple thing.