Today, Her Favorite Combination Pizza
When people talk about a fully realized cyberspace, they tend to share a handful of common images.
A bleak expanse of lifeless concrete. Absolute rule by AI. A false world built of nothing but ones and zeros… and so on.
Perhaps those tropes simply made for convenient contrast against the living, breathing reality of human existence. In fiction, cyberspace was almost always used as a metaphor for something artificial and untrue — a fantasy that might feel more satisfying than reality, yet remained, in the end, nothing more than an illusion. A hollow phantom.
“…This is pretty incredible.”
But if the world before me was trying to argue that all of that was just prejudice, it was making a very strong case. Something truly astonishing was unfolding right in front of my eyes — something that flatly contradicted every assumption I held.
In this barren, cold Data Trash Heap, a natural greenness I had never once seen here was spreading in every direction!
A bumper crop… of tomatoes.
That was right. Filling the space where I stood was nothing other than a plant of vivid red — tomatoes!
Whether they counted as fruit or vegetable had always been a fuzzy boundary, but either way, the tomato was a plant beloved by countless people. In the time it took me to blink, fist-sized tomatoes had ripened to a deep red on their vines. I plucked one free and brought it to my mouth without the slightest hesitation.
“Mmm… Oh, that’s good. So full and dense — you don’t even need sugar.”
Maybe European varieties really did have a richer flavor. Even without the blazing Mediterranean sun, the taste was outstanding enough to draw an involuntary sound of admiration from me.
I finished off the half-eaten tomato in a few more bites, then turned my gaze toward the surrounding landscape — still heavy with plump tomatoes dangling from every stem — and muttered blankly to myself.
“…Why are they growing so well? This is ridiculous.”
The situation was so absurd that a sigh escaped me without my meaning to. But my shock wasn’t unreasonable. I had never once imagined that plant cultivation could be possible in this cyberbrain world — a cyberspace built by human hands!
How does plant cultivation even work in a cyberbrain world? Wasn’t this place just an ark for preserving humanity’s data? What purpose could a function like this possibly serve…?
It was far too suggestive a phenomenon to shrug off with a casual huh, I guess that’s a thing. I clutched my head and racked my brain, trying to figure out how I was supposed to process any of this.
All right. Think it through. If this were an RPG, a plant-cultivation feature wouldn’t be strange at all. The developers would have put it in deliberately to give players more content to enjoy. Purpose and result would line up rationally — there would be a clear intention behind it, so its existence wouldn’t be a problem.
But the cyberbrain world wasn’t an RPG designed for entertainment. That was the issue.
Why… why on earth are they growing? Is there any need to implement a plant-growth mechanism in a virtual world? No — if you follow that question back to its root… why was a virtual world called the cyberbrain world created in the first place, just to preserve the data of the entire world…?
Unfortunately, the developers who had built the cyberbrain world were nowhere near me. So the unanswerable questions only carved a deeper headache into my skull, growing heavier by the second.
Maybe I had been squeezing my brain a little too hard. Crouched down with my arms raised over my head, I leaned forward without realizing it —
“W-wai— ugh!”
No matter how far my physical abilities and sense of balance surpassed the human norm, the person inside that body was still only human. I lost my balance completely, pitched forward, and planted my face straight into the dirt.
The soil was damp — someone must have watered it not long ago — so it didn’t hurt much. But… ugh. Dirt in my mouth.
“Pteh, ptoo! Ugh… Haa. Well. Maybe there’s no point in thinking this hard.”
Face-planting into wet earth had a clarifying effect. Suddenly all those tangled thoughts crowding my head just felt annoying. What good would fretting do? It would only give me new things to worry about.
So for now, I decided to leave it at this: I planted tomato seeds, and tomatoes grew. That was enough.
The secrets the cyberbrain world is hiding… sure, I’m curious. But not so curious that I need to force the answers out of it. If I keep living like this, I’ll figure it out eventually.
I had time. Whether this body even had a lifespan was still an open question — and as long as I didn’t go out of my way to pull aggro from a Predator Species and put my life on the line, I was already well on track. I could afford a little leisure.
I papered over the whole problem with that half-baked conclusion, then immediately used Creation to produce a handkerchief and wiped the dirt from my face. The mud on my clothes could be erased with a small expenditure of CP, so cleaning my face was all that really mattered.
But before I had finished wiping every last speck of dirt away, I felt a familiar presence approaching — drawn, no doubt, by the commotion over here.
“…!”
I slowly turned my gaze in that direction. What I saw was a mysterious sight: something no larger than the palm of my hand, floating gently through the air.
It was a cute little girl shaped like a fairy from a storybook, with round wings on her back that made her look almost like a tiny angel. The small fairy flapped those wings hard, clearly startled by the state I was in, and flew straight toward me. I smiled and greeted her as if nothing had happened.
“Ah, Polaris. Good morning.”
The winged fairy was none other than the Virtual Spirit I had rescued a month ago from the forest Delic — Polaris.
A very special child, with the ability to guide the way with glittering clusters of light. In more ways than one, I owed her my life, so I had poured everything I had into crafting a body that suited her. The memory was still vivid.
Three hundred thousand CP, was it? Compared to Noise, she must have gone through a lot of hardship in the Delic. Her residual data was so sparse that palm-sized was the best I could manage.
Her total data capacity was about half of what Noise had when we first met. But most of that remaining data was devoted to precise destination-seeking, which made salvaging the last thread of her consciousness extraordinarily difficult. Where Noise had abandoned everything except Abyss knowledge in order to survive here, Polaris had discarded her own data in a completely different direction.
Language functions, computational ability — all sorts of essential core data were gone. In the end, she simply didn’t have enough data left to fill a body the size of mine or Noise’s. So she had no choice but to become a palm-sized fairy.
“…!”
“Yeah. You’ve been taking good care of the garden, haven’t you? Thank you, Polaris.”
“…♪”
Just because we couldn’t speak the same language didn’t mean we couldn’t communicate. Unlike Noise, whose default expression was a blank face, Polaris could convey pure emotion as clearly as a transparent glass marble — and that made talking with her easy in an entirely different way.
Even now, when I thanked her in earnest, she was flapping her wings with a look of pure happiness, wasn’t she? Moments like this made me keenly aware of how important nonverbal expression really was between people.
Well — thinking back to how Noise used to converse so naturally with Polaris back when she was still a Virtual Spirit, it seemed she wasn’t completely incapable of speech. She was just… different.
My praise must have delighted her more than I expected. After circling around me for a while, Polaris suddenly made a face like a lightbulb had gone on over her head — as if she’d just remembered something she’d forgotten. She grabbed the fabric of my shoulder and tugged, gesturing urgently for me to follow.
“…! …!”
“Uh, hm? What? You want me to come with you?”
“…!”
Nod, nod.
Polaris bobbed her head up and down with an expression that said my guess was exactly right. I had a vague feeling I’d asked her to do something for me before, and without any resistance I started walking wherever she led.
The place she guided me to was surprisingly close — the control room of this tomato garden, which also doubled as Polaris’s private room for storing her personal things. And at that point, I couldn’t help but remember the one task I had asked of her.
“Ah. That thing I asked you for before — it’s finished?”
“…!”
Just calling it “that thing” was enough for the meaning to land. Polaris beamed and nodded vigorously, confirming it. For me, that was the best possible news. If what she was saying was true, then at last I could finish the work I’d been waiting for all this time.
“…♬”
“This is it?”
“…!”
“Thank you, Polaris. Tonight I’ll make your favorite pizza.”
“…!!”
Polaris flapped her wings so hard that afterimages trailed behind her, overjoyed by my words. But I doubted she realized I was every bit as happy as she was right now.
With this… I can do it.
In my hands was a nearly perfect map of the Delic!
Which meant one thing: from now on, I could explore Delics while reducing the danger of Predator Species as much as possible!
All right. Time to head out. To a Delic!
I gently stroked the head of Polaris, who had collapsed onto the desk, panting from exhaustion, and praised her. It looked like I would have to make her favorite combination pizza today after all.