Accel World - Volume 1 - Chapter Aft

AFTERWORD

I’m not sure when it started exactly, but whenever I’m faced with something, I always end up preparing for disappointment and discouragement.

Always expecting and preparing for the worst is not such a great thing as all that. The only thing is that if you give up right from the start, you at least can get away with using less energy when you do really end up failing.

When I started writing this story in October 2007, I was pretty sure I wasn’t actually going to finish it or anything. And when I did finish it, I was convinced I wouldn’t get all the deletions and revisions done to meet the guidelines of the Dengeki Prize. I continued to tell myself, as a matter of course, even after I sent my submission in, that there was no way I was going to make it through all the stages of judging.

Thus, on the occasion of winning the prize and being published, I was obviously not prepared to do things like write an afterword like this, and as of this moment, I am still at a total loss. I want to write something rich with brilliant insight and style, along with a wafting of sad pathos in the midst of vital humor, but since not one of these things is popping into my head, I’ll simply write down what I’m feeling at this point in time.

For me, it’s already a miracle that I managed to write this story.

Because as I write this afterword for the pocket book edition, an extension of the writing of the story, I can’t even guess at how minuscule the likelihood that it would have become a reality.

Haruyuki, the protagonist of Accel World, is also someone who tries not to hope for too much. But where he is decisively different from me is that Haruyuki will squeeze out every last drop of energy he has to keep running away. He’s incredibly dedicated to his pessimism.

This is just my thinking, but whatever trajectory it might take, as long as you at least have the energy, something is bound to happen at some point. Haruyuki’s dedication can’t be beat, but if there is a reason I won this prize other than miracles and luck, I think it might be the meager energy I stored up being pessimistic.

For my rough manuscript submission to become a proper book like this, I was honored to have the invaluable assistance of so many people.

Minoru Kawakami, not only for taking time out of his busy schedule to write the commentary, but also for his many suggestions for important parts of the action scenes. The Accel World: Kawakami Edition he wrote for this book is one of my most cherished treasures.

Hima, who drew so wonderfully my protagonist whose visualization I had expected to be fraught with difficulty. The other characters, too, are so vibrant that I almost think that this is how they always were; my own image of them has changed.

My supervising editor, Kazuma Miki, who always gave me guidance with such patience and careful kindness when I definitely could not be said to be obedient, despite the fact that I was a newbie who didn’t know left from right. If I can always have this fountain of editorial power with me, I will continue to tap away at these keys with everything I’ve got.

And the many people who have been supporting me these last seven years on the global net. It was precisely because of all of your support that I am here now.

Finally, my greatest gratitude to you for reading this far. Thank you so much.

November 28, 2008

Reki Kawahara

Notes:

Well, hello there, ladies and gentlemen! My name is Kawakami; I’m a second-year junior high school student with a duel avatar called “White Turnip.” I have an old-looking face, and there are times when I seem to be more than thirty, and a little girl who sat in front of me on the train uttered the terrible words, “Mama, it’s a murderer,” but I am, in fact, a junior high student.

Like all of you, I’m also just another Burst Linker, but I’m not anything close to a fight freak like you. Things like that, that’s the realm of children—Eep, sorry. I said too much. Let’s see, to go back to who I am; I’m a programmer working to create improvement mods for Burst Linking.

For the Brain Burst world, a programmer like me is only there to provide elements of abundance or of bad health. But as long as we don’t put together various types of the latter or as long as these combinations don’t leak if they are put together, programmers are basically protected from every faction as contributors to the Brain Burst world. Which is to say, we’re exempt from Duels and protected from unfair Duels. And if we’re taken in by a faction, we get the burst points of those punished, so we level up quickly.

I also work under the patronage of a certain faction, but I make programs that are shared by all Burst Linkers. With the programs I make, first of all, the faction I belong to buys it with burst points, and then the faction’s Blocker sells it to people in the Duel Gallery, in effect making the program a faction asset. There’s competition and the commotion of changing teams for programmers like myself, and life gets quite busy, even though we essentially have an indoor job.

And now I’m making—you could almost call it my specialty at this point—a forwarder to send information from meatspace to an avatar in the Burst Link world. This forwarder will tell you what meatspace you is sensing and feeling while you are in the Brain Burst world, compressed a thousandfold.

…You say we don’t really need something like that? That you’re sped up over a thousand times, so even if you don’t go back and check on your body, it’s less than two seconds anyway?

I wonder. One: Let me first talk about something only the guys will understand.

Okay?

It takes point-three seconds for your mother to open the door behind you and come into your room.

Get it?

If you’re watching porn videos or in the middle of playing an erotic game, and you end up wanting to Burst Link because that stuff is just not getting you hard enough and you need more, and this slight return time lag might leave a stain on the memory of your boyhood years…When you think of it like that, the alarm to warn you that your mother’s in the room (abbreviated to “mother room”) in the forwarder I’m making becomes an essential item.

Oh, I don’t know about women. Hmm, that’s one unknown set of unknowns to work out.

However, currently, we’ve moved past version seven, and we only take burst points at updates, but I suppose this, too, is the style of a long unbroken line of programmers. My grandfather was an erotic-game programmer from the eight-bit era; he apparently fired a barrage of empty dialogue into the empty sky even as he was dying. He really was a model man. Although it’s a mystery as to how he ever got married.

And then the grandson of this remarkable man, me, also developed a taste for the X-rated games at the age of thirteen, and now I spend my days in the real world earning small change by unlocking the hardware on my friends’ Neurolinkers and making them region free. Heh-heh-heh, you guys, the text in the erotic games you all are playing now is a remake of the hot text my grandpa came up with sixty years ago. But Grandpa had Beast attributes. Can’t fight your blood. Oh, but I do wonder what kind of impressions he would’ve had if Grandpa had managed to live to the present day and age. No, forget it. I mean, Grandpa was a 2-D kind of guy, a world where polygons are useless. The one time I brought it up, we got into a fight in the bath. You can’t push your values on a kid. You gotta leave it to genetics.

In any case, I’m now testing version eight of the current program, and I seem to be plunging into some incredible areas as I do. I’ve come to understand the Brain Burst system, and I’m finally able to not just raise an alarm with the information from meatspace, but to forward the actual experience itself.

It may be stretched out a thousand times, but you can bring your five senses from the real world over to this side. You probably think there’s no point in this. Because when you stretch out sound or whatever a thousand times, it simply gets stretched out, and that’s that.

But right now, the truth is, meatspace me is in the middle of dinner. And I’m testing version eight.

Do you get what I mean?

Exactly. In my meatspace mouth right now is curry on a spoon.

Right, you get it, don’t you?

My mouth is already closed, and the heat of the curry is pressed up against the roof of my mouth; the soft grains of rice are spilling over onto my tongue; the spicy sweetness slipping up my nose is the very essence of the Vermont curry. Medium-spicy for a junior high student…!

Because this is prolonged a thousand times, the heat of this spoonful of curry and rice will continue to sit in my mouth and on my teeth for thirty minutes. For the next thirty minutes, whatever I do, whether I go for a walk, look up at the sky, look down, sit in the Gallery, get in a Duel, go to sleep, the curry will be with me the whole time!

How about that?

Even if you were to lose a Duel, if you had curry the whole thirty minutes, don’t you think you’d be glad you leapt into this Burst world?!

However…when you return to meatspace, you eat the rest! That is the curry that is a thousand times plus one!

But! But it doesn’t stop there. Human beings have more darkness in them than that.

Yes. If you get the timing right in meatspace, you can make every pleasure continue a thousand times longer in the Burst world.

Whoa.

Get it? Taking things simply in the erotic direction is a junior high–level reaction, isn’t it? Oh, I’m a junior high student, so I already did that. No, i-it’s a test, okay? A test! A test!! Well, I did give a midterm exam to my erotic-game partner in my house, but apparently, after crying out sharply in a strange voice for about five minutes on the floor of the other world, there was some kind of feedback in my flesh-and-blood body and meatspace me had a heart attack and nearly died. On the Burst side, too, you are utterly defenseless faced with your male destiny because you are completely impotent at fighting.

But that was a close one. I’d be in serious trouble if I died and the parent who found me at the scene misunderstood. Father, Mother, your son is not the kind of man who would die playing older-sister-type erotic games. That is precisely because he is one thousand times faster. If it was the blond, big-tit type, I’d probably die at five times.

Which is why that time the “winged one” that everyone’s talking about who somehow managed to start up a Duel with me was apparently looking for me and loitering around outside, but he would never even dream I was in my house, tossing my head back, pounding away, happily crying out, “Eeeaaah! Kawakami sweat’s comiiiiiiing!” throwing away my life and my caste. I don’t want to think about it, either.

But the worst damage might be the problems of the life and future production plans for the prosperity of my descendants, but that’s the forward on the visual side. My luck being bad, leaving me staring at my face for thirty minutes in that instant, reflected in the window, scarred psychologically, and it really is regrettable. The next time I do it, I’ll close the curtains, but I’ll also do it when I’m fed up with everything and I die. It’s actually kind of a tough thing.

But all you young men thinking you can’t use this program. If that’s the case, please listen carefully. This thousand-times forward, there are other ways to use it than just for sex.

That’s right. Peeing.

The idea popped into my head the other day when I was standing there letting loose in the bathroom at school, and I went ahead and Burst Linked, but to be honest, I couldn’t handle thirty minutes of letting it go. Also, it would be amazing if you could use your senses and make the opening like an anti-warship beam! It’s like that thing, you know: how many pop bottles you can fill. Let’s see, to put it into words, it was something like E-everything in me is coming out…Unconsciously, I went pigeon-toed, and during the thirty minutes I spent shaking like a Burst coward, the “staker” everyone’s been talking about lately was apparently running around the halls looking for me, but he would never dream that my main battleground was the bathroom. I didn’t really want to dream it, either.

In any case, you might think that version eight, with its greater destructive power, would probably bring about a rapid reform in the Brain Burst world, but that won’t happen, since those guys who got wind of it early on kept complaining. I’ll look into it a little more, and let’s see, th-this is a test? A test, well, that’s what I’d like to do, but those guys targeting the top brass of my faction come along, trying to find fault, all You planning to sell to other factions? Honestly, all of them, every single one, are perverted junior high students, which is seriously problematic. These guys who Burst Link those times they find a porn magazine on the roadside and pretend to pass by while looking them over a thousand times faster noodle around and feint each other out in the Burst world—all I can think is You guys, okay. I feel sorry for them, so I decide to pick it up in meatspace and flip through every page at high speed to show these Bursted guys. I get a lot of thank-you mails for these godlike actions, with my consciousness in both worlds, but you know, you should do good deeds. Although when I folded the magazine up halfway through and took it home, the number of Duel request appointments was greater than four digits.

I’ve gotten a little off topic, but in any case, with this forward, my boss is targeting me, and it’s super annoying.

Like the other day, just when I was shooting off a huge one in my main battlefield, and I was testing the program with the thousandfold pleasure of getting it out into the world, that idiot comes riding along—No, I can’t call my boss an idiot, but he’s an idiot. However, this idiot—No, no, he’s my boss, so (omitted). In any case, that time, I prolonged a thousand times the information on “the sensation of the moment you stick your finger in your nose” that I had previously saved, and forwarded that to his ass, earning a trip to the hospital, but there’s a limit to how many times I’ll be able to pull through that. I’ve been thinking it’s getting to be about time I left the faction and struck out on my own, and today, I’m planning to go and take some temporary measures.

That’s why I’m going to sell this forward, and, well, I’m deciding where to sell it. At the very least, it probably wouldn’t be so great to let it be used for things like drawing out the pain of torture a thousand times or something.

I mean, Burst Linkers get hurt or sick in meatspace, too. Even if they can Burst Link in their hospital room, life in the hospital is pretty boring. However, if you have this program, you can stretch out the flavor of the snacks people bring you a thousand times. If you’re limited to taste and smell, you don’t just get the taste, you can also stop a flower or a moment in the season. Lately, there’s also a faction of Burst Linkers who are taking care of hospital-related stuff and watching over people, so I have no doubt they’d pay big money for this thing.

But I’m also a heartless man. Yeah, I’ll put this up for sale. As for payment, right. It’ll be the price I feel like at the time, and you get to shake in your boots about when I’ll come after you for some enormous sum after you’ve gotten your pleasure.

Now then, once I’ve eaten dinner, I guess I’ll go and see those guys who’ve gotten some kind of clue. Oh, but I have to go to the bathroom first. It’s nothing strange, gentlemen. It’s the term-end test.

So something like that, I guess. The truth is this short story is something I sort of sent in after I accepted the job writing the commentary and dashed it off once my ideas solidified while chatting with Miki, the editor, immediately after I read the book. However, we did agree that this would be used as a bit of help in understanding the text; it really took it out of me, this job. Anyway, at the very least, all of you having finished reading the book no doubt had the sense of looking at the world outside and feeling that someone over there was fighting at a thousand times the speed. I think it’s a novel that really has an appeal like a tool to stimulate the imaginations of a wide variety of readers…Oh, I didn’t mean stimulates like Kawakami sweat or anything like that. On a larger scale, like (omitted).

On the next few pages are drawings of the characters and their avatars like I see them in my head and miscellaneous impressions. The artist’s drawings are the official ones, so this is just me playing around, and I’d just be happy if they were a stimulation for you.