How Terribly Sad It Is to Discard the Less Important Just to Remember What Matters
Through Noise's words, I felt the faint outline of a possibility I hadn't considered. So I told her everything that had happened while I was wandering the trash heap this time.
How I'd picked my way through a scrapyard of rusted metal by flashlight and fought a refrigerator mimic. How, after that, I'd kept walking until I found a staircase leading underground. How that staircase had ended at a door that opened onto an unknown subway station — and how, there, I'd watched one terrifying monster hunt and kill another.
It had been the kind of experience that, if anyone ever asked whether I'd like to live through it again, I would answer without hesitation that they were out of their mind. Dangerous. Bone-chilling.
Noise listened to every word. When I finished, she looked at me with the expression of someone whose hunch had just clicked into place.
"I see. The six-legged monster you saw was probably an Abyss Verka. A mantis-form… one of the Predator Species."
"Predator Species…?"
"In the Abyss, any dangerous being that has a physical body and actively hunts prey is commonly called a Predator Species. The opposite are the weak, the prey, the culls… there are a lot of names for them."
She spoke with the quiet, measured cadence of someone reading from a book — then suddenly stopped, as if she'd read something in my face.
Had I been that obvious about how curious I was? But if she was handing me the opening herself, there was no way I could leave it alone.
"Everything you know. Can I ask about it one piece at a time, in detail?"
"Yeah. I don't mind."
She answered with a faint smile, even though I was being completely serious about it.
This was the best chance I was going to get. A decisive opportunity to figure out exactly what this place was, and what secrets it was hiding.
I chose my words carefully, trying to make each question as easy for her to parse as possible, and asked about everything I was curious about. And she, for her part, answered each one as thoroughly as her own knowledge allowed.
After about an hour of that conversation, the conclusion I'd reached looked something like this:
"So this is the virtual world — the digital ark of data that was built in the twenty-first century to prepare for the future. And among all of it, this is the lowest layer… the Abyss, the zone where every kind of discarded data ends up. Right?"
"Yeah. And the subway station you went down to is… probably one of the servers that got abandoned the same way."
"It's not just data that gets thrown away?! Servers too?"
"Yeah. Probably only the ones that weren't completely destroyed."
Noise nodded as if I'd gotten it right, and a headache started blooming behind my eyes all on its own.
Wow. So that's how it is. This place really is the data trash heap of the virtual world. Servers get dumped here too…
At last I understood why there was a dark scrapyard of piled-up data right next to the house, and why going down a staircase from there had spat me out into a subway station of all places.
It was a place where people just flung their garbage and walked away. Of course there was no need for lights or any kind of maintenance. In a way, it was inevitable.
And the monsters I ran into were discarded AIs, virtual personalities, NPCs… that kind of thing.
What was even more astonishing was that, in an environment this extreme — a place where intact anything was almost impossible to find — there were still beings walking around with physical bodies.
Cases like mine, though, with both body and mind intact, were vanishingly rare. If you had a body, your mind was usually broken. If you had a mind, you usually didn't have a body. That was the rule more often than not.
I supposed it made sense. Just standing still in this place was enough for your data to start decaying. An environment that harsh would grind down body and mind alike.
"And you were… the latter?"
"Yeah. I don't remember well. But I think when I got thrown down from above, my body was too wrecked, so I discarded it. That's about as much as I can recall."
I see. Because she'd abandoned her body, she'd been able to keep her mind intact — and because she'd happened to meet me and gain a new one, she'd been able to stay stable like this.
Looked at that way, Noise had been extraordinarily lucky. In the Abyss, having a body seemed to be the better hand for survival than not having one.
If she hadn't run into me, she might have become someone else's meal before long.
More than that — "above." If what Noise said is true, then there are other places besides this dark corner I'm stuck in.
The thought surfaced out of nowhere.
I'd searched the internet hard for information on the virtual world before. But there hadn't been a single line about a zone called the Abyss, which had felt deeply wrong at the time. So this was the secret behind it.
If I get the chance, I'd like to go up there once. The virtual world the people outside actually connect to is probably that side, not this one.
But I was still getting lost in the data trash heap right in front of me. Finding a way up was realistically close to impossible right now.
So I'd keep that as a plan for later and deal with what was in front of me first.
Besides — as long as I had CP, my Creation ability was close to omnipotent. Sooner or later, I'd find a way.
"Then one last question. The monster I ran into — what was it? The one that killed the Abyss Verka you mentioned."
I pushed the worries I couldn't solve right now far to the side and put one final question to Noise.
It was about the absurdly powerful monster I'd encountered in the subway station. The terrifying thing that had torn apart a creature so strong I couldn't imagine resisting it — and done it without taking a single scratch, then eaten it.
If things like that were common in the Abyss… I'd have no choice but to give up wandering the data trash heap entirely.
But Noise didn't know everything either, it seemed. She looked a little troubled as she answered calmly.
"…I don't really know. All I know is that the Abyss Verka is one of the top-tier Predator Species in the Abyss. That's about it."
"So other than 'it's an absurd monster,' you don't know anything. …Well, thanks anyway. That helped a lot."
I said it and reached out to stroke Noise's head, wanting to convey my gratitude.
The hair on that small head was soft as silk. I almost worried I'd get lost in the simple act of petting her.
Haa…. The virtual world, the Abyss, Predator Species…. The list of things to worry about just keeps growing. I thought all I had to care about was streaming.
Even as I stroked Noise's head, my mind was full of concerns.
All I'd wanted was a simple cycle: stream, and when content ran dry, go down into the data trash heap, pick things up, and stream with those. Grow the channel that way and bring Nia's stream back to life. That was it. And now suddenly it was the virtual world, the Abyss, and monsters.
The thought that something capable of threatening my life was roaming around down there made the sighs come out of me in waves.
…No. Wait a second. If I think about it carefully — is this really only a bad thing?
An idea suddenly sparked to life in my head.
And my gaze drifted toward the luscious fruit and food scattered nearby.
Nine-tenths of what rolls around the trash heap is scrap. And of the remaining tenth, the amount I can actually use as stream content is vanishingly small.
But the fruit I'd gotten after taking down the refrigerator mimic — how sweet had that been?
Just turning on a camera and eating it until I couldn't anymore would make excellent content. That much was obvious.
Which meant…
If I take down something like a Predator Species, I can get data that's almost impossible to find in the trash heap — guaranteed, right?
Noise's explanation was the foundation of the idea.
Every being that lived in the Abyss felt hunger without exception, and the only way to ease it was to swallow other data.
Which meant that if you cut open a Predator Species's belly, there was a very high chance of finding data preserved far more intact than anything rolling around the scrapyard.
And beating a Predator Species isn't impossible either. I already split a mimic clean in half once, didn't I?
I let that grounded confidence settle inside me and carefully pulled the scissor blade out from under the bed.
"You said you don't know what this is, right?"
"Yeah. At least, nothing in what I remember has any information about a scissor blade this big."
"Hmm…. Is that so…."
A half-blade that looked like a beautiful jewel.
I still didn't fully understand the method, but this scissor blade clearly held the power to split a mimic open with almost no effort.
If I could properly grasp how it worked…. Beating a Predator Species wouldn't be a dream anymore.
Well, for now, just being able to protect myself is enough. And if I think about it, hiding inside and never going out is no guarantee that nothing will come to the house either.
Looked at again, I needed the power to stand against those Predator Species.
I couldn't be sure that just because I was tucked away inside this house, those monsters wouldn't come looking for a fight first.
I don't need to know what this scissor blade is. As long as I know how to use it, I can protect myself for a while.
I had to take responsibility. This wasn't just for me — it was necessary to protect Noise, too.
Of course, if a fight actually came, it would be terrifying. But I'd been reborn into Nia's body in a place like this. There was nothing to be done about it.
Having steeled myself that far, I carefully slid the scissor blade back under the bed.
Then I flopped backward onto the mattress and muttered into the empty air, half to myself.
"Then…. For now, maybe I should rest a little."
I'd forgotten while talking with Noise, but I was still exhausted in every way that mattered.
It had started with pouring out my stamina to create Noise's body, then streaming, then going outside, then fighting a monster.
All of those pieces had stacked up until my condition was nowhere near good — and once I'd gotten past one crisis, the drowsiness came crashing in all at once.
I just need to sleep… until the next stream….
Right before my consciousness sank under the weight of sleep, a question for Noise suddenly surfaced.
Ordinarily I wouldn't have put it into words. But maybe it was because I was on the edge of dropping off.
Half in a sleep-talking haze, I asked her.
"Hey, Noise."
"Yeah?"
"How did you remember things about the Abyss?"
Eyes half-closed, I put the question to Noise, who had sat down beside me and quietly started reading a book.
How had she, a girl who'd forgotten even her own name, managed to hold on to knowledge about the Abyss? I genuinely wanted to know.
And that question was answered in a single stroke by what she said next.
"…You can live without knowing your name. But if you don't know where you are, you can't survive?"
"Ah."
What she meant was painfully simple.
As a bodiless Virtual Mind drifting through the Abyss, even the resources spent on remembering herself had felt wasteful.
Better to empty that out and keep a little more of the knowledge needed to survive. That was how necessary it had been.
I shouldn't have asked. Just imagining how painful it must have been to erase her own memories was frightening enough — and I'd gone and poked at it without any delicacy at all.
But as if to soothe that worry, Noise rested a hand on top of my head and spoke in a small voice.
"It's fine. Because I did that, I got to meet Nia. I don't regret it."
"Noise…."
What a good kid. Truly.
In the consciousness that sleep was steadily devouring, I thought that dully — and then I nodded off for real.
It was the first sleep I'd had in the five days since I'd started streaming.