Chapter Text
“Wow.” Colonel Jack O’Neill peered out the SUV’s windshield as he parked, trying to look suitably impressed at the massive multistory hospital tucked into an odd corner of the Cheyenne Mountain base. Barely a speck of a building compared to a ha’tak, it was about as close as you could get to the SGC and still be off the main roads. Less than a mile, he’d bet, as the crow flew; so long as the crow could fly through solid rock. “Call Walter Reed. They want their rehab back.”
Which might have been the wrong thing to say, given how Dr. Janet Fraiser had just thumped her head on the passenger-side dashboard. But hey, even a mini-Napoleon needed somebody to throw sarcasm at.
“I know no one’s managed to frog-march you into anywhere with ‘veteran’, ‘rehab’, or ‘physical therapy’ in the title before, Colonel,” Janet grumbled, “but given what we have pieced together about the SAO technology, you and your team are going to accompany me into the Project Bluebook Rehabilitation Center whether you like it or not. Just in case any of you have seen, or heard of, or even stumbled across a rumor that might let us pick our way into Kayaba’s black box.” The redhead gave him a wry look. “And we stole it from the NID, not Walter Reed. They still call the general every month to ask for it back.”
See? Sarcasm.
Wait, what?
“The NID? Built a rehab center?” Jack said skeptically. “What were they on, and when can we turn it loose on the Goa’uld?”
Behind him, Sam cleared her throat. “Given the usual casualty rate they accept in Jaffa training, I doubt the Goa’uld would have any interest in the potential therapeutic applications of virtual reality environments, sir.”
Bracing against Janet’s seat, Daniel nudged up his glasses and rested his face against the window, probably so cool glass could calm down a road-sick stomach. “Of course, that’s not what the NID was really interested in, either.”
Sitting stoically between their two armed geeks, hat pulled over his First Prime mark, Teal’c gave Jack a raised brow. “I believe you were otherwise occupied when we took the facility a year ago. On involuntary leave.”
Translation, stuck on Edora for three months, thinking the Stargate was sealed forever. And that was a whole can of worms in itself. The way Laira had stood when he’d left, all but shouting that she hoped he’d left her pregnant... yeah. He hadn’t been in the best headspace for a while.
“It is unfortunate you missed the opportunity,” Teal’c mused, dark eyes obviously letting the past be past. “We were able to properly secure the exits and command center swiftly, so we had few casualties, and no fatalities. The majority of the personnel were unaware of the rogue NID in their midst. They were outraged when we explained, and they have been most trustworthy allies since.” A slight smile. “Janet Fraiser declared the exercise... stress reduction.”
“And you think the critters are cute,” Janet put in, almost grinning.
“They are not unappealing. And the fact that their Tau’ri caretakers find some of those who are awake pleasant company is intriguing.”
“Critters?” Jack eyed them both. “Okay, Doc. Take it from the top. We’ve been kind of busy for a while, something about getting blasted into the next galaxy and blowing up a sun....”
Sam reddened.
“So lay it on us.”
Janet took a deep breath, and sighed. “Why not. We’ve got a clearer picture now of the timeline than we did when Kayaba first dropped his little bombshell, anyway.” She drummed her fingers on the dash, eyes shadowed as she collected her thoughts. “Colonel. You and the general both admit that the casualty ratio for the first Stargate missions was... high.”
Yeah. Ow.
“Janet, we end up on alien planets,” Daniel argued. “No one could have done any better.”
“Without a way to simulate being on an entirely different world,” Janet agreed. “Where the sun might not rise in the east. Where magnetic north isn’t. Where the saber-toothed tigers might be friendly, and that pretty green moss might kill you when you step on it. All the weird and crazy details that disorient everyone who goes through the ‘Gate. I know. That’s what Akihiko Kayaba’s FullDive technology was supposed to give us.”
“Kayaba.” Jack frowned. The name sounded familiar. “Videogame guy, right?”
“Massively multiplayer online games do use video, so technically, yes,” Daniel said judiciously.
“FullDive is a lot more, sir,” Sam stated. “Between its rendering technology and the NervGear, you have full sensory immersion. Not like the Gamekeeper’s pods,” she said hastily. “You can tell it’s not real, things look... a little too smooth. Like that Advent Children movie they did with motion-capture. But it’s very realistic. Stand in the sun and you feel warm. If the wind blows, you smell the leaves. And if you end up in a firefight scenario... it’s pretty convincing.”
“As I understand it from General Hammond,” Janet picked up the story, “Kayaba was working with some of the less classified SGC reports to create training scenarios. At the same time, he was a game designer. And our friendly local anthropologist had some thoughts.”
“I did.” From the way Daniel winced, he regretted ever having those thoughts. “It seemed like a good idea?”
“It was, indeed, a valid thought, Daniel Jackson,” Teal’c said firmly. “It is not your doing that Akihiko Kayaba is a dishonorable man.”
Oh boy. That didn’t sound good.
Daniel sighed. “Jack... one of these days, the Stargate isn’t going to be classified anymore. And then what? People are going to find out we’ve been dealing with aliens. That the planet’s almost been destroyed dozens of times. That humanity’s best friends can’t figure out this thing we call clothes....”
Jack tried to stifle a snicker. He liked Thor, but Daniel had the Asgard pegged.
“Anyway. I thought if a few things we’d run into showed up in online games, the ideas would at least be out in the culture,” Daniel went on. “To cushion the shock, for when it all goes public. Kayaba thought it was a great idea. One that fit right in with the next game he was putting together. Where players would be visiting different worlds on every level, and there wouldn’t be any magic. Players would have to rely on their wits, and their weapons.” The archaeologist took a deep breath. “Sword Art Online.”
Oh. Shit.
Now Jack remembered the name, and wished he hadn’t. International criminal Akihiko Kayaba, on the BOLO list of every country that had access to the Internet, and wanted by Japan and the U.S. in particular. Japan because it was their people he’d trapped in his little death game, and the U.S. because....
Well. Officially, horrible humanitarian disaster, can’t stand by while one of our staunchest allies, and so on, and so on. Unofficially, certain organizations in the United States, courtesy of tech provided by the SGC, had been experimenting with tech that would let part of the internet move even faster. He didn’t know all the geeky details, but the ‘Gate techs had been drooling enough to dumb it down for him: forget building servers in the Big Apple to make microsecond trades on Wall Street. With this tech, you could plant them in Antarctica, and nobody would notice.
Well, maybe the penguins.
Awesome stuff. Useful stuff. And just like vaccines, dynamite, and GPS, potentially dangerous stuff in the wrong hands. Like, say, a mass murderer who’d never lifted a finger to kill; take one of his booby-trapped NervGears off some poor schmuck’s head, and they died.
Normally Jack laughed at game ratings. But just this once, he was glad some parents treated them as gospel. SAO was supposed to be region-locked to Japan, and it’d been rated 15 and up on top of that. Cassie had been thirteen. But she’d watched enough anime to think she could fake it through the game, and she’d had an older, geekier classmate who thought he was hot stuff with computer overrides - and he’d been counting the weeks until he turned fifteen.
We got lucky. So lucky. “Wait. You mean it wasn’t just the super-speed relay stuff? We were backing that?”
“The NID was, with some input from us,” Janet said steadily. “He double-crossed them, too.”
Which was kind of impressive, just from the sheer chutzpah of it. “Bastard killed ten thousand people. Why hasn’t anybody filleted him yet?”
“First, because we can’t find him,” Janet answered, just as grim. “Second... if we do find him, we want him alive.” She pointed at the building ahead of them. “Because about six thousand people are still caught in his trap.”
Jack had to blink at that. “Alive? I heard....” Newscasts. About a year ago. Day of mourning, whole nine yards. He’d still been shaken up after Edora, and not paying attention to much of anything that happened outside the Mountain. “We lied to the press.”
“We didn’t,” Janet said sourly. “We don’t exist. Officially. And as much as I hate to say it, I’m not sure keeping their survival quiet is a bad thing. Even if they wake up tomorrow... we’re still trying to figure out what Kayaba’s doing to them.” She rubbed her forehead. “Nobody noticed during the first month. So many people were dying. But three months in? Six months? These people are in a coma, Colonel. But they’re not losing muscle tone. Some of them are even building it. That doesn’t happen.” She straightened. “So the hospitals started looking deeper. As much as they could, given you can’t unplug them for more than ten minutes without killing them, and you can’t take the NervGear off. Which means an MRI is out.” She took a deep breath. “They started finding aberrant proteins. Things that were close to human normal, but - not. Finally, about a year back, someone analyzed brain tissue from an autopsy that tripped an SGC flag. Because it matched genetic information we got from the NID’s... rogue operation.”
Makepeace’s little offworld wrecking crew. Oh. Great. “What, they took sperm samples before they went out to get themselves killed?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Janet smirked. “But these were apparently samples from a body - several bodies, if the X chromosomes are telling the truth - that a System Lord went to great lengths to preserve.”
And if the Goa’uld wanted it, Earth wanted to know why. “What kind of body?”
“That’s the odd part,” Janet allowed. “It has to be human. Because it turns out some of those genes weren’t quite as alien as we thought.” She shrugged. “There’s a doctor in Scotland, Carson Beckett, who’s done a lot of work on that particular odd genome. Some humans have it. Some don’t. He works with a lot of Japanese geneticists, that’s how this got flagged in the first place....” Dark eyes narrowed. “That day, Kayaba sent us a little message about being slow to catch on. It had some information. Enough for us to realize this little facility was a lot more than it looked like.”
“The basement has levels that weren’t in the official blueprints,” Carter said. “On the lowest level, we found the SAO servers.”
“Say what? How did he get those here from Japan-” Jack cut himself off, thumping knuckles against his forehead as the penny dropped. “Oh, let me guess. They were never in Japan.”
“Got it in one, sir.” Carter grimaced. “The servers the Japanese government kept trying to hack into were deliberate dead ends. The real computers SAO was running on have always been here.” She drew a breath. “But that’s not all. Sir, there were seven sub-basements we didn’t know about. And in those....” She spread her hands, and craned her head around the seat to glance at Teal’c.
“Confined on those levels are animals that are not of this planet.” The Jaffa lifted a hairless brow. “Many of those creatures are also in NervGear.”
Okay. Revise the day up to really bad. “Any ideas why?”
“According to one of the veterinarians, Kayaba claimed the creatures were test subjects,” Janet answered. “Both for long-term NervGear use, and experiments for gathering data on alien sensory modes.” She glanced down, eyes in shadow, obviously chewing over what she knew to give him the most mission-specific info. “Dr. Flint never found anything official to confirm it, but he thought Kayaba wanted to make alien encounter scenarios as realistic as possible. If the player made a noise the creatures could hear, he wanted them to react. If the species didn’t use vision, he wanted to know how they’d perceive the world, and what scenarios would let the players figure out they were dealing with something blind, so they could use that to their advantage. Or find out the hard way being blind didn’t matter.”
Heh. Jack had to admit, that would be useful. Plenty of new recruits couldn’t get their heads around the fact that a blind man could kill you just as dead as a sighted one. All he had to do was figure out where you were. “You trust an NID doctor?”
“I don’t have to trust him with you, no matter how tempting it might be.” Janet leaned back against her seat, relaxed and wry. “He’s a vet, Colonel. As in, animal doctor.” A minimal shrug. “Apparently they picked him up after he found something odd washed up on the Jersey Shore. Then they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
Daniel sat up straight. “They threatened his family?”
“Kind of.” Janet shook her head. “Move to Colorado Springs and take the job, or face an IRS audit.” She spread empty hands, and smirked. “Bad call for them. Flint documented everything. Believe me, Colonel. He was glad to see us take over.”
The IRS? Did the NID’s evil know no bounds? “So, we’ve got aliens in NervGear, and humans in the same stuff... any chance some kind of feedback is what’s got them all stuck?”
“Technical experts believe any interaction between two entities in the system would be mediated by their electronic connection to the servers supporting Kayaba’s programs.” Teal’c was not a happy camper. “It is possible players were intended to encounter these creatures. With no knowledge of alien behaviors, such encounters would be dangerous to both sides.”
Janet frowned.
Jack glanced between them, and put on a Yoda voice. “Some hostility I sense in you.”
That won a smile from both sides. “Just a difference of opinion,” Janet admitted. “With two experts from different areas of expertise looking at the same data, it happens.”
Uh-huh. And whenever it happened with Sam and Daniel, things usually got messy. Blowing up planets messy. “So, lay it out for me.”
“Death rate,” Janet said quietly. “Teal’c and I went over the SAO players’ records once everyone was transferred and stable here. The highest death rate was in the first month. After that it tapered off in a fairly steep curve. There are two ways to explain that. Disease death rate, and attrition.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. Glanced at Teal’c. Who inclined his head to the doctor, yielding her the first argument.
“If it’s a disease death rate,” Janet obliged, “then it’s probably caused by the alterations Kayaba’s inflicting on them. The first few weeks would have wiped out everyone who couldn’t handle the alterations at all. After that... my best guess is, we have three groups of people.” One finger went up. “Some people are highly resistant to what Kayaba’s doing. He can thump on their systems all day; it just won’t take.” A second finger. “People who are highly adaptive. For some reason, their systems just click with the alterations, and the modifications go full speed ahead.” She clenched her fist. “Then we’ve got a bunch in the middle who could go either way. That’s where we see most of the deaths.”
“Okay,” Jack said thoughtfully. If anything about this was okay. “So what’s the attrition explanation?”
“The rate of deaths is not unlike that the SGC suffered in its first years of operation,” Teal’c stated. “Nor is it unlike that of a new human colony, planted by the Goa’uld on an unfamiliar world.”
Jack gave him a focused look. “They’re right here.”
“Their bodies remain on Earth,” Teal’c agreed. “We do not know where their minds may have ventured. Fear can kill.” He cast a look at the hospital, an old general sizing up an enemy camp. “If a Goa’uld had taken a group of Tau’ri and dropped them on a newly-discovered world, I would expect such deaths. The first to die would be the weak, the fearful, the reckless. Once they had been culled, the survivors would be much harder to kill. Yet there would always be the chance of a danger unmet before, and even the strongest survivor may make a mistake.” Dark eyes were fathomless wells. “Kayaba claimed he would create SGC game scenarios. If unprepared humans were to find themselves in such a world, this survival rate is what I would expect of the formidable Tau’ri. Many of you would die. But many more would live.”
“I wouldn’t put that past Kayaba,” Janet allowed, a low snarl creeping into the words. “I definitely wouldn’t put it past the NID. But the tech guys swear up, down, and sideways that whatever Kayaba’s running on the servers, it can’t be an online game. Whatever programs are running are too complex. They should have crashed by now, at least once. They haven’t. The IT specialists think it’s got to be some kind of terraforming simulation, but they’re not even sure about that. Hacking the program has been fatal. Sometimes to the victims. Sometimes, to the hackers.” She gave Sam a hard look. “Do not pick up one of those helmets, Major. Putting one of those things on is a very bad idea, no matter how well you think you've hacked the programming.”
“Terraforming?” Jack scanned his team, checking for any sign of a practical joke. “The Goa’uld dump people onto livable planets. Mostly. We’ve got plenty to pick from. Why would Kayaba be running a program like that in people’s helmets?”
Janet spread frustrated hands. “Who knows? One of his last games was about colonizing Mars. Maybe he couldn’t resist. IT says the variables they can get a look at are things like weather patterns, crop estimates, a whole bunch of climate and terrain factors. Their best guess is terraforming.” She sighed. “So we don’t know what’s really going on. It could be the nanites killing the victims directly.”
“Nanites,” Jack echoed. Oh, the day just kept getting better.
“We think they’re maintaining the victims’ physical condition.” Janet’s words had the clinical tone of a doctor who’d seen the utterly unknown snatch too many lives from her hands. “We’re fairly certain they’re delivering... whatever Kayaba cooked up with the NID for genetic manipulation. And we know they kill the patients if you take the NervGear off. Something in the helmet, maybe part of the program delivered through the hidden servers, keeps the nanites working. Doing - whatever Kayaba’s nightmare made him do to these people. Take the helmet off, the nanites berserk, and....” Her voice failed her.
“That’s all she wrote,” Jack filled in. “Got it.” He chewed on a knuckle, thinking. “So we’ve definitely got genetic manipulation going on here. But it’s from some kind of human? Not some weird Goa’uld... thing?”
“That’s the problem, sir. We’re not sure.” Sam touched the back of his seat. “Kayaba’s samples came from the NID’s offworld teams. We think that’s where the creatures came from; worlds the NID visited, that we haven’t seen yet.” A mix of controlled anger and even more controlled scientific avarice played over her face. “A lot of them seem to have been Ancient-listed worlds.”
Places the Goa’uld had never visited. Worlds that might be treasure troves of tech, knowledge, or flat-out planet-threatening peril. Or all of the above. Yeah. Right. Now it made sense. “We disappeared these people, because you don’t know if they’re human anymore.”
“Jack,” Daniel started.
Janet held up a hand. Turned in her seat, so she could look the archaeologist in the eye. “He’s right. I hate it, Daniel - but he’s right. The families know the victims are alive, but they think we moved them here to protect them from Kayaba. They don’t know we’re protecting everyone else. We don’t know what Kayaba planned to do to these people. And we’re dealing with alien technology, which means it doesn’t matter what he planned. He may have done something entirely different.” She sighed, as if letting some of the weight of the world slip off her shoulders. “That said, Jaffa have a few odd genes in their makeup,” she glanced at Teal’c, “And I defy anyone to tell me you’re not human.”
A slight smile creased their alien buddy’s face. “Indeed, Janet Fraiser. I would be honored to defend the Tau’ri of Stargate Command as equal to any Jaffa of Chulak.”
“Zing,” Jack said wryly. “So. We’ve got six thousand-odd innocent people with alien tech stuck on their heads that’s doing who knows what to them.” Gee, and wasn’t that familiar? “You think we should call Thor to take a look?”
“General Hammond already did,” Janet grumbled.
He had? And Thor hadn’t mentioned it? Somebody needed to tell the little gray buddy humans weren’t telepathic.
“That’s not exactly what he asked Thor for, Janet,” Carter spoke up. “Thor did take a look at the NervGear as he transported people, but the general was very clear about the ten-minute window. You can’t disconnect the helmets from power for more than ten minutes,” she filled in at Jack’s raised brow. “And Thor’s ship doesn’t exactly run on AC.”
...Now he had Energizer-bunny-meets-UFO commercials running through his head. Wonder if Thor thinks they’re funny?
“What he did was major assistance by itself,” Carter went on. “It would have been a nightmare trying to get people here by conventional aircraft. Thor transported patients here as fast as Janet’s people could hook them up to life support. We knew there was some alien tech involved, so the general asked Thor not to do anything beyond surface scans.”
Good to know. Though there was one tiny little detail people were leaving out. “Thor transported six thousand people out of Japan? And nobody noticed?”
“Officially, they were all cremated,” Janet said grimly. “Unofficially, the Japanese government doesn’t know we organized emergency medical flights to move them.”
“Six thousand people?” Jack repeated, incredulous.
“We’re the United States, sir,” Carter said impishly. “Impossible is what we do before breakfast.”
Well, that was going to be a tough act to follow. “But that was last year,” Jack pointed out. “Thor’s probably had plenty of time to analyze his readings, check his equations, recalibrate his interocitors....”
Carter’s dirty look, he almost expected. Danny’s, not so much. “What?” Jack said innocently.
“If you start quoting the Adeptus Mechanicus at me, I’m going to point Sam toward the forums for ideas on making chainswords.”
Meep.
Teal’c looked downright interested. “I am unfamiliar with this weapon, Daniel Jackson.”
Teal’c with a Commissar’s chainsword. Jack blinked. That image was just so wrong.
“That’s because it’s in a game,” Daniel stated. “A British game.”
Okay, so he’d been stuck with some SAS guys once or twice and they had to do something besides sniping bad guys all day. Was that a crime? “Still. A year. Should we call Thor?”
“If it were just alien technology, I’d say yes in a heartbeat,” Janet said soberly. “But a lot of it isn’t alien. It’s Kayaba’s. Earth-native. And after that mess with the Replicators....”
“Nobody in the universe uses chemical propellants, except us,” Jack concluded. “We do stupid things that work. Got it. So, you want?”
“Like I said, the survivors pretty much fall into three different groups,” Janet said, looking into the distance. “About a third of them... very few modifications. It looks like just enough to maintain them in good shape. Most of the very young children are in that group.”
“Children,” Jack repeated, a sick feeling burning in his gut. “Thought this was supposed to be fifteen and up?”
“Obviously, some people didn’t listen,” Janet said grimly. “So. About two thousand with little to no modification. Then we have roughly thirty-five hundred more in the middle. Definite alterations, denser muscle mass, a bunch of other things, but... not nearly as much as the last tier. Which are about five hundred very, very modified people.” She paused. “The last time we had a bunch of deaths close together was August. In the months since, the fatalities have pretty much fallen into a pattern. One or two at a time. A few from the high-level group, a few low-level, but mostly in the middle-modified group. And never more than six at once.” She took a deep breath. “Yesterday, we lost ten of the more highly modified, all within about a minute.”
“Break in the pattern,” Daniel said quietly.
“And not in a good way,” Jack agreed.
“So... just take a look at it. All of it,” Janet said. “You’re our experts on dealing with the Asgard. See if you think it’d be safe to ask Thor to run some tests. Right now, I’m running out of good ideas.”
“Hey.” Daniel touched the shoulder of her seat. “You’re doing all you can, Janet. Everyone knows that.”
“I know.” Janet’s voice was barely above a whisper. But she squared her shoulders, and nodded toward the front door. “Come on. I’ll show you our sleeping beauties.”
Fourteen. Janet collapsed into a chair by the nurses’ station, heart numb. Fourteen more.
“Janet.” Daniel, resting a hand on her shoulder. Just there, after all the chaos of crash carts and hopeless measures; the killing grief of pronouncing, and arranging for the bodies to be moved to the morgue downstairs, for detailed autopsies later. People who’d hit this level of modification just usually didn’t die. This would be a rare chance to explore, and try to figure out just what Kayaba had set in motion.
Cruel comfort. She might even believe it, if she didn’t have the sinking feeling this was only the beginning.
“Fourteen,” Janet rasped out. “We haven’t had a death rate like that since... God. August. We were hoping that was over.” She braced her face against her hands. “There’s no way Kayaba could have known what he was doing to these people. He’s a computer programmer. What if there’s no way to get them out, they’re just going to hit tipping points where their bodies can’t take the nanites anymore, and....”
“Hey.” His fingers found her shoulders, dug in gently. “We’re here, Janet. We’ll think of something.”
Sam was scribbling notes on a partial NervGear schematic, brows knit together in intense concentration. Teal’c was standing not far away, arms crossed, black knit cap above a face carved from stone. And Jack....
The colonel hid it well, but Janet knew he’d looked into a slice of his own personal hell. Trapped in your own body, with no way to run or fight the thing that killed you. Death dealt abstractly, at a distance, by a geek who didn’t have the guts to look his victims in the eye as he killed them. A life wiped out at the push of Kayaba’s button.
Make a note: tell the General to get Jack out to the firing range. He needs to shoot things.
“I don’t care if it is an on-world problem,” Jack said grimly. “Thor’s a buddy. We’ll ask.”
“Can you do that, sir?” Red-eyed and shaken, Head Nurse Ellen Jordan looked up from the knot of subdued medical personnel checking off the paperwork that marked the end of human lives. “Can you talk to the Asgard, when it isn’t a threat to the planet?”
Jack rested a too-mild look on her.
The tall brunette reddened, but stood her ground. “I know we’re only cleared to know some details from under the Mountain because it affects SGC patients sent here, but - if there’s anything you can do...?”
“The trick is going to be getting our friends to take a look down here,” Jack said, almost kindly. “With a ten minute limit, transporting those kids into orbit again is not a good idea-”
Another heart monitor shrilled.
Oh no. Damn it.
Nurse Jordan almost tripped, getting in front of the main computer monitor. Her face paled, and crumpled. “No. Not him.”
“Ellen?” Janet asked; heart sinking, as the other nurses looked and flinched away. The deaths had hit the Center’s staff like so many jabs straight to the ribs. This one looked like it’d struck the heart.
“It’s Kirigaya,” Ellen managed, reaching out to touch the screen. Shaking hands brought up the file of a young, black-haired Japanese boy, with incredibly black eyes. “He’s the youngest of the high-mods. He turned sixteen last month... his little sister sends us mochi on the holidays, she learned English to write us thank-you notes... I can’t, Janet, I just can’t....”
Just a few months older than Cassie. God.
The dead were dead. She had to see to the living. Janet drew herself up, and nodded. “I’ll pronounce it.”
Shoulders straight, she headed toward the swinging doors into the nearby open ward. There wasn’t any point in hurrying. They’d tried everything on the last victims. Nothing worked.
SG-1 fell in behind her, quiet and angry.
Good, Janet thought darkly. Maybe they’d take that anger to Thor, and kick the so-called superior races into actually doing something benevolent. Or maybe they’d just figure out where Kayaba was and wring his psychotic little neck.
At least it’s just one this time. Damn it. Mrs. Kirigaya, we regret to inform you-
Beyond the doors, something heavy clattered.
What the - nobody should be in there!
Jack shoved ahead of her, hand diving into his fatigues to yank a zat out of hiding. That fast, SG-1 had closed a protective cordon around her, Jack and Teal’c exchanging a look before Jack slammed one door open-
Quiet. Everything looked just as it had before. The same long rows of quiet, still forms on white-sheeted hospital cots; some with toys or a small trunk of clothes sent by still-hopeful families, others with nothing except the steady beep of equipment, all with venomous blue-black NervGear clamped on their heads. The quiet was broken only by the shrill of a lone monitor, a rustle of paper gowns....
And the creak of a cot to her left, as two frail teenagers - one black-haired, one chestnut - clutched each other like the last hold before the abyss.
Bare-headed teenagers. One NervGear was shrouded in the sheet of an empty cot. The girl’s had clattered to the floor, forgotten.
They’re alive, Janet thought, stunned. Kirigaya pulled off the heart monitor. He’s alive!
Thin, and shaking. But definitely alive, heads buried in each other’s neck and shoulder, close enough to feel their partner breathe.
Janet grabbed Jack’s shoulder before he could saunter in to ask questions, shaking her head firmly no. “Combat shock,” she breathed, keeping her voice as low as she could.
Jack grimaced, but kept his voice down. “They’ve been in a coma, Doc.”
“I know what I’m seeing.” I’ve seen it on SG teams a hundred times. That’s ‘oh my god, why are we still alive,’ or I’m a purple unicorn. “Just wait. Everyone, wait.”
No words. No whimpers. Just thin fingers clutching paper hard enough to tear, and the hitch of breaths from kids trying desperately not to cry.
“You poor kids.” Steeling herself, Janet stepped toward a miracle-
Yards to her right, another cot erupted.
“Kayaba, you bastard!”
Hands shaking, Klein yanked the NervGear off his head, blinking away tears. “Damn you! And the dragon you rode in on, and your fucking God-Mod Stu, you son of a- ow....”
Worst. Head rush. Ever.
Groaning, the redhead cradled his forehead in his hands as the room seemed to spin around him. If it was a room. White, and steel, and lit by glowing bars of light on the ceiling; like nothing he’d ever seen on Aincrad, casting weird fuzzy glows around heads and hair....
No cursors. Nobody’s got a cursor, what the-
Black hair and chestnut, a few yards away. Pressed together like nothing else existed in the world.
No way. Klein rubbed his eyes, crumbling away tear-sand. Asuna and Kirito. When they’d... everyone had seen that bastard Kayaba.... “Am I dreaming?”
“If we’re dreaming,” a dark hand pulled off another NervGear, “then why am I looking at your ugly mug?”
Klein smirked at Agil. Those few sprouts of dark hair definitely didn’t suit him. “You’re just jealous of my-” His fingers felt his chin. His shaved chin. “My manly stubble! Augh!”
That drew laughs, if small and shaky ones, as other familiar faces started sitting up and pulling off the damn helmets.
Good, Klein thought, swinging his feet over to touch the floor. Bare feet. On tiles. Brrr. We need laughs. A lot of ‘em.
Though right now, he’d settle for just a touch. Fingers on real skin, to make sure this wasn’t some trick of a nightmare, that Kirito and Asuna were alive and real-
My HyperSense is tingling.
Intuition, Outside System Skill - call it what you wanted, Klein had caught too many things stalking him to doubt he had it. He knew when someone was watching with possible intent to maim.
This was that same weird prickling alertness. Multiplied by a hundred.
We’re out of the game. Now what?
“Okay.” The words were a little odd, like listening through water. “Anybody know what they’re saying? Daniel?”
“Um.” A very thoughtful um. “Huh. Some of the words sound Abydonian, but the grammar’s just wrong, and the way they’re putting the emphasis on syllables is... was that a verb? If it is, why did they end it that way....”
“...And we’ve lost Danny to linguistics heaven,” the first guy said wryly. “Carter? What have you got?”
A woman cleared her throat. “Outside of, they’re moving around without falling over after two years in a coma, sir?”
Sir? As in, military? Klein thought.
And she was right. They’d been out cold for two years. But... well, his arms looked a little skinny, maybe, but not the skin and bones he’d kind of expected. What the heck?
A deeper, thoughtful voice. “They do not seem hostile, O’Neill.”
“Thanks for small favors... they’re coma patients, Teal’c, what are they going to do? Wobble us to death?”
Okay, you I don’t like already, Klein decided, making his way to their two game-breakers without glancing toward the doorway. And making sure to wobble a little. If they didn’t understand him, maybe they thought he didn’t understand them, and he’d take any edge he could get. Military around them, all they had were skimpy paper dresses, and whoever had them was expecting people trapped in Kayaba’s game to be hostile-
...Which wasn’t wrong, exactly, Klein had to admit, reddening a little as he thought back on exactly what curses he’d laid on one psychotic computer programmer’s ancestors. If Kayaba suddenly appeared in the middle of this room there was going to be homicide. Straight up, no bones about it, probably dead before the guy had the chance to hit the ground. Which was a lot quicker than the man deserved.
Still. If these guys were worried about what SAO players were going to do to Kayaba, they were definitely not on the side of the angels.
And we’re not armed. I want my katana!
But Agil and the rest of Fuurinkazan were here, and even bare-handed, they could probably take on anything short of another Skull Reaper. And he was just a step away from a miracle-
Um. Better not startle them.
Frankly, Klein doubted he could startle Kirito. The Black Swordsman had better HyperSense than a cat. Asuna, though - she could be painful. “Asuna? Kirito?” he said hopefully. “We thought you guys were dead....”
Black eyes lifted just enough to meet his, full of dawning hope. “Klein?”
The redhead grinned fiercely. “Hey. Welcome back.” He pumped a fist in the air. “Dibs on hugs!”
“Klein, you - oof!” Asuna sputtered, caught in both their arms as he fell onto the bed. “What are you doing?”
“What’s it look like? We’re out! And after that mess? You two need a hug!” Still grinning, Klein pulled back enough for Agil to trade wrist grips with them both. Warm. Solid. Alive.
Day’s looking up already.
“Doc....”
“Colonel, as they say at NASA, keepen der cotton-picken hands in das pockets.” A second woman’s voice, annoyed and quietly worried. “You’ve dealt with people in shock before. Let them focus on us, or you’ll do them more harm than good. Give them a minute to sort themselves out before we start asking questions.”
Still holding onto Kirito, Asuna tensed.
“Yeah.” Klein kept his tone light. Issin and Kunimittz had pretty good poker faces. The rest of his guild, not so much - but they weren’t looking straight at the doorway. “We’ve got company. Military company.”
“Military?” Kirito repeated, bewildered. “But why?”
“Good question.” Agil frowned. “They’re speaking English.”
Holy cow. He’s right. “So what the hell are we speaking?” Klein blurted out.
And damn it, this was a stupid thing to freak out over. His family was proud to be Nikkei; he’d grown up speaking English and Japanese. Why should just adding another language be this scary?
Because it sounds like us. It sounds like Aincrad. We beat Kayaba, the game’s supposed to be over! What the hell did he do to us?
“You lagging?” Black eyes met Klein’s, and winked. “We’ll figure it out. Right, Lightning Flash-sama?”
Reluctantly, Asuna smiled. Buried her head against Kirito’s shoulder again, the lucky kid. “Okay. This is what we do....”
They’re all waking up. Janet swallowed the lump in her throat as she watched NervGears come off across the ward. They’re all alive.
Meaning they had six thousand people waking up to a world that had moved on without them. Oof.
About five hundred per ward, thirteen wards.... We’re going to need tents. Trailers. Something. This building could handle six thousand people in a coma. Up and walking? We’d have homicides just from the crowd stress. We need room for them to move around. And counselors. A lot of them. Janet didn’t try to hide a smile. Though those two look like they’re going to be just fine.
Kirigaya had his head on the girl’s right shoulder again, as if he could stay there all day. Janet couldn’t blame him. From what she could see over his shoulder, the girl was cute.
But he sighed, and shifted to rest his cheek against where the open neck of her gown bared goose-bumps, reluctantly opening dark eyes-
Looking directly at her, and SG-1.
That’s not an accident.
No confusion in that midnight gaze. No fear. Just a calm, weighing look, that shook Janet to her bones.
He knew where the door was. Where we were. Where his friends were.
Somehow, she wouldn’t have been surprised to find out he’d counted every weapon O’Neill was carrying. That look....
This is a high school student?
The girl lifted her head, following her friend’s gaze. For a moment, Janet could read her face like a book: I don’t know you, I don’t trust you, where is this place?
Then both teenagers huddled with the wild-haired redhead and the massive black man again, obviously intent on hashing something out fast.
“They’re plotting,” Jack sing-songed at her.
“With people they’ve never seen before?” Janet said skeptically. “Everyone in the game had computer avatars. Even if they had a chance to interact before Kayaba changed all the rules, they can’t have recognized each other that fast....”
Except Jack was right. People didn’t huddle in us against the world with strangers. Which meant they weren’t strangers to each other. How?
“Uh-huh,” the colonel said dryly. “So how come those guys,” he nodded toward about five young men who’d casually put themselves between the foursome and the rest of the room, “are acting like your staff when you and Carter plan a raid on Danny’s coffee- where the hell did he go?”
“Captain Fraiser!” Nurse Jordan skidded to a stop in the doorway behind them. “We’re getting reports that- oh....”
“We may have good news,” Janet admitted, still looking for black hair. Where the heck had Kirigaya gone? “At least, no one’s keeled over yet, so-”
Daniel cleared his throat. “Janet? She’s coming for us.”
The chestnut-haired girl had solved any modesty problems by whirling up her sheet over her shoulders like a white cloak. Now she hit the floor at a fast march. Janet could almost hear imaginary heels clicking, as the jubilant chaos parted before a seventeen-year-old Japanese schoolgirl stalking like Jack on a mission, heaven help anyone who got in her way.
Daniel’s right. She’s headed for us.
The girl stopped at what Janet had come to think of as good snarking distance, and swept them with another look. “I am Asuna, Vice-Commander of the Knights of the Blood Oath. Who are you, and where are we?”
English. Lightly accented, with what Janet wasn’t sure, but definitely English.
And she said we. Did those guys toss a teenage girl out as a figurehead? Idiots.
Except Asuna’s hard look didn’t belong on someone randomly shoved into the fray. This girl wanted answers.
“Dr. Janet Fraiser,” Janet answered, holding up a hand to hopefully keep Ellen or anyone else from sticking their two cents in. Teenager or not, anyone giving off that much angry-Jack-vibe needed to be treated with respect. It made exams much easier in the long run. “This is the Project Bluebook Rehabilitation Center. Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. We moved you all here once it became evident there would be complications in your recovery.” There. Blunt, to the point, and without too many details yet.
But everything I said is true. If she’s any good at reading people, that should buy us some goodwill.
“Bluebook?” the black man muttered, with a definite American accent. “Colorado Springs? We were in Japan.”
“Atsugi,” the redhead agreed, eyes a little wide as he twisted the laminated medical ID bracelet on his right wrist. “K’so, you’d have to fly us here, and if the NervGear was offline for ten minutes....”
They knew about the deadline. Oh, fun. “That’s why you’re on an Air Force base,” Janet said firmly. “We had the equipment. We’re very glad to see you awake-”
“What kind of complications?” Asuna cut her off.
“Complicated ones,” Jack said dryly.
Foot, Janet thought sourly. Step on.
Missed. Damn it.
Asuna gave him a searching glance, of what Janet recognized as the I know you are stalling me variety. Ouch. “We had forty-eight people in the last raid.” Her knuckles turned white on the edge of her sheet. “We... lost fourteen. Are they-?”
Fourteen. Janet couldn’t help but flinch. For Jack, that would have been answer enough. But how did she-?
Tears welled up in brown eyes. “They came so close.”
You poor kid. “I’m sorry,” Janet said softly, setting aside how for when the situation was a little less explosive. “You knew them?” Fourteen out of forty-eight, what the heck is a raid - oh god. She just lost a third of her friends. Damn it, kid, go ahead and cry.
Asuna swallowed, and jerked her head in a too-familiar nod.
“I had to know that, and you had to tell me.” That’s not a friend. That’s... it can’t be what it looks like. She’s too young to be commanding anyone!
“Most of the clearers know each other,” Asuna said, voice almost steady. She glanced at the redhead, and nodded.
He gave Asuna a sympathetic smile, then stuck fingers in his mouth for a chaos-piercing whistle. “Oi! Min’na-san! Find your party members, let’s get a headcount! Then check in with your guild. Make sure nobody’s still stuck.” He nodded toward the black man. “Merchants on Agil. Knights, your vice-commander’s deputized me for right now. Fuurinkazan... eh, what’m I saying, can’t lose you guys if I tried, we have got to get a pizza later-”
That drew grins from the five young men who’d held the perimeter. Interesting. Atsugi? Janet wondered. Does he mean Japan, or our base there? I think there were a couple Marines who got caught in the game... oh. I think we just found them.
Which made things even more bewildering, if they had. What was a Marine doing letting a girl take the lead?
“Everybody who wasn’t in the raid....” The redhead shrugged. “Eh, stuff happened, we’ll go over the details later.” He bounced a little in place. “And in case anybody missed that-”
“Japanese,” Daniel blurted out, as the redhead broke into a swift staccato of words. “That’s why it sounded so weird! The vocabulary’s Abydonian, I think... but the grammar’s Japanese.” He hesitated. “Sort of?”
“Stuff happened?” Sam exclaimed. “Fourteen people are dead. How can you say that?”
“We knew the raid was going to be dangerous. Thirty-eight hundred people have died, ma’am.” Agil crossed his arms with a grim finality. “It’s been a long two years.”
Asuna took a step forward, focused on their archaeologist. “What is Abydonian?”
“Better question,” Jack put in, relaxed as if he dealt with thousands of confused people every day. “Where’d your friend Kirigaya go?”
Blank looks. “Who?” the redhead asked, bewildered.
Brown eyes cleared. “He went to check on the mid-level players,” Asuna said, straightening. “He knows them better than most of the clearers.”
“Wha- Kirito?” The redhead glanced between Asuna and Agil. “His name’s Kirigaya? Huh!”
“You didn’t know?” Daniel frowned.
“Screen names,” the redhead shrugged. “I’m Klein.” He grinned at Asuna with a twinkle that had teasing older brother all over it. “So when did you two trade Otherworld names?”
Asuna’s cheeks reddened.
“Otherworld names?” Daniel pounced. “You mean the real world?”
“As in, where you can really get in trouble wandering around loose in secure areas,” Jack said pointedly. “Let’s put out an APB, Doc.” He gave the assembled patients a skeptical look. “What the heck were you thinking?”
“What were we thinking?” Agil gave the colonel just as skeptical a look back. “Kirito’s a solo.”
Even in the real world, bare feet still seemed to give you a Stealth bonus.
Kirito ducked into a stairwell, padding up and around a landing corner that would be behind the door if it opened. Suguha’s old gym bag was a featherweight on his shoulder, promise and uncertainty both wrapped in the faintest scent of bamboo and sweat.
I remember when this bag was new. It seems like yesterday.
Yesterday, and a lifetime away. From a time when he wasn’t looking for a threat cursor over every head. When he hadn’t expected every corner to reveal a new monster. When he didn’t think of clothes as a player purchase or a monster drop. And he was grateful to see clothes in Suguha’s bag, he really was; a set of black and gray sweats with a note in his mother’s handwriting that she hoped they had the right size....
But how do I unequip a hospital gown?
Head, meet palm. Repeat. Ow.
This is going to take more than a few menu clicks.
Which meant trying to get dressed in a stairwell was not the brightest idea he’d ever had. But right now he was alone, and this was as good a place as any to see if there was anything in Suguha’s bag besides clothes.
It’s not quest loot, Kirito reminded himself wryly, pushing past dark clothing to rubber-band-bound bundles of letters and a small coin-bag that jingled like it had enough yen for an emergency phone call. He’d grabbed the gym bag on instinct; if items dropped for you, you took them and sorted out if you could actually use them later. Because later often had to come after running a gauntlet of lizardmen, dire wolf packs, or orange-player bandits-
Where are the orange players?
Oh, now that was an unsettling thought-
Fingers met round, heavy metal. Small. Almost familiar.
Kirito took out a polished medal, and felt his eyes sting. Kirigaya Suguha. Kendo. National quarter-finalist.
I should have been there.
Suguha had pushed herself to excel at kendo, so he could hide from the world in programs and electrons. So he could hide from the fact that he didn’t know what to do, knowing the people he called mother, father, and sister were actually aunt, uncle, and cousin....
One file on the internet. One innocent bit of hacking. And everything solid in his life had turned to sand.
Grandfather said he was training us to follow in our father’s footsteps. But - Minnetaka isn’t my father-
Kirito grimaced, and shook the memories away, tucking the medal into one of the bag’s side pocket. This was why you didn’t think about the Otherworld in Aincrad. It could get you killed.
I need someplace to get changed, Kirito decided, keeping his head below the window to listen at the stairwell door. He could hear chaos, as people cheered about logging out and nurses rushed to try to contain the bedlam. But right now, there were no footsteps near where he was. I think I passed a bathroom on the last floor. If the floorplan is the same on this level... that way.
He slipped through the door, gauging the gaits and gazes of people in blue scrubs to fade through the corridor unnoticed. A few quick steps through the door he sought, and he ducked behind a stall and then a surprising curtain, as a disheveled man swore and dashed out into the hall, still dripping.
I have to bring Asuna up here, Kirito thought, almost grinning as he wiped wet drops off his face. They have a shower!
Whoof. Right now, he wished he could dive under hot water himself. He didn’t feel really dirty, but two years under a helmet had left his hair - well. Yuck.
I don’t think I have time to try and figure out a shower that doesn’t have a touch menu.
But the steamy air was nice, and the shower curtain had to be at least +10 concealment against passing encounters-
Not in Aincrad. Not. In. Aincrad.
The gown came off with some fumbling and a few tears. He glared at the laminated bar-code bracelet on his right forearm, but left it alone. It might be important. Sweatpants-
Well. It was a good thing there was a ledge to sit on by the shower. That was tricky.
The t-shirt and sweatshirt went on a lot easier, though they were much more loose than he thought his mother would be happy with. But they were clothes, and they were gray and black, and that was so much better than helpless white paper.
Straps back over his shoulder, he stepped down from the shower niche into the main bathroom-
Dark shadow in the fog.
Hands shot up to parry and block, as he faced the-
Mirror. Augh.
Kirito heaved a sigh, and wiped fading mist from polished glass. There just weren’t that many mirrors in Aincrad....
Oh.
Not his avatar. This was a thin, pale teenager in gray and black. A real face, with real limp black hair, and all the little imperfections of skin and veins that never made it into the rendering.
I’m not Kirito anymore. I’m Kirigaya Kazuto. Again.
Then why did it feel like typing in someone else’s screen name?
He touched damp glass, trying to peer through it for answers. That was definitely his face. He’d seen it before, if only rendered-
That’s it. I’ve only seen it rendered. The last time I saw myself as Kazuto... I was fourteen.
And Kazuto didn’t have long hair. He didn’t have lines of hard muscle from years of fighting monsters and bosses, alone or - too damn rarely, Klein would say - beside people who’d grit their teeth and work with a beater to win. Kazuto’s eyes didn’t cut even from reflections in glass, always searching for what might be lurking a breath away.
Kazuto was like the sweatshirt. He could wear it, but it didn’t fit. Not anymore.
He took a breath, and rolled his shoulders, consciously loosening tense muscles. Whoever he was or wasn’t, Kazuto didn’t have friends who’d stuck with him despite his best efforts to stay alone. Friends who needed Kirito right now.
Friends he had to find. Somehow.
Almost without thinking, he tried to draw open a menu. Right there should have been his friends’ links, with Argo, Klein, and Asuna leading the list. But - nothing. Just empty air.
“Might as well wish for a Scan,” Kirito muttered. “If we’re all in this building, it would be easy....”
In Aincrad. Right.
Damn, but he was going to miss that ability. Scan was hard to level up, and not nearly as useful for a group player as a solo, so most people didn’t put too much into it. Which was a shame, because past a certain level, you didn’t need words to activate it. The system recognized your focused attention. Scanning a building for enemies or tracking one player through a entire town, all Kirito had needed to do was concentrate, and... reach....
The world flared, razor-sharp and green.
His fingerprints on the glass. His bare footprints on the floor, leading around and down levels back to blazing warmth that separated into Asuna, Klein, Agil, Fuurinkazan....
Warm light had to be a player. Cooler spots, fewer and moving with purpose - something in that matched with recent shoeprints on the floor, left by the medic who’d dashed out. A roar of details, pressing on him from every side. So many people-
Pull back. One area at a time. Grid-search, you’ve done this before, focus!
Try to count a swarm of enemies individually, you’d get overwhelmed before you could make sense of it all. But if you pulled your Scan back to one bunch, counted, estimated from there....
Six thousand people. We could all be here!
On the one hand, good; the sooner they could get organized, the sooner they could deal with Kayaba. If he wasn’t already dead. On the other hand - Klein was sure these people were military. Why?
Find the midlevel and low-level, Kirito reminded himself, reaching out once more. Lisbeth, Silica... Sasha and the children....
There, and there, and there. Yes!
The low-levels are higher up? What kind of sense does that make?
He pulled back again, focusing on the area closer to him. Eventually someone else was going to come into this bathroom, and he’d rather have some warning-
Familiar warmth, a hall or two away. With a sense of mouse-sneakiness, and a cream-fed-cat’s level of smug.
Argo!
?!?
It... wasn’t quite like that itch you got when the system dropped a message in your box. More a tangle of feelings that he somehow knew weren’t his. Surprise, as if someone had tapped on Argo’s shoulder. Wariness, matched with insatiable curiosity.
Find a shadow, I’ll find you.... Damn. If he wasn’t getting words from her, she probably wasn’t getting them from him.
But at least Argo was out there. He could find her.
But how? What’s going on, how can I-
Green in the mirror, where it had mostly faded from the rest of his vision. Emerald and gold shimmering in black eyes; the telltale gleam that meant Night Vision, Tracking, or just general Scan.
Kirito gripped the edge of the sink, feeling as if he’d taken a kobold’s club to the ribs. We’re out of Aincrad. We logged out. There’s no menus... the details... I told Silica, power in Aincrad was just an illusion. This is the real world!
The real world. With real porcelain and steel shivering under his grip, creaking in a way that - in the game - was a warning that this wasn’t an Immortal Object, and even as a DEX-specced DPS instead of STR, 96th level meant enhanced strength, and an item’s Durability was about to-
Crack.
Kirito staggered back, grit powdering shaking hands. Took a deep breath, and pushed the white noise of fear back, locking it down under the same refusal to panic that had kept him alive in the middle of boss raids gone horribly wrong. Argo needs to know. Asuna, Klein, Agil - everyone needs to know. Fast.
They’d escaped Aincrad. But somehow....
Sword Art Online came with us.