Kikuoka returned to his office.
It was a small room with the same layout as the patient wards elsewhere in the facility. A wooden desk stood where the bed would have been, and long cabinets replaced the medical equipment. Kikuoka rarely needed to remain on-site, so the office held almost nothing. It did not even have a computer.
At a glance, the place felt barren.
He left the lights off. Moving through the darkness, he reached the wall behind his desk and opened the blinds.
Clear moonlight spilled through the glass, washing the black room in a thin violet glow. Beyond the window, the city's streets stretched into the distance. Dusk had already settled. The sun and moon hung at opposite ends of the sky, their light meeting in the middle and fading into twilight.
The facility stood in the heart of the city, not in some remote mountain town or beside a coastal military base.
As the person in charge, Kikuoka enjoyed only one luxury: a window that looked out on the world. Every other view in the facility had been deliberately obstructed from both sides. Even the smoking area Shouichi Shinkawa frequented offered nothing beyond its tall windows but a solitary pagoda tree.
Flowers would have been too much to ask.
Kikuoka removed his plain-lens glasses and took in the city without them.
Lights had begun to bloom across the steel and concrete, painting the industrial landscape in soft, vivid colors. Farther out, buildings and streets dissolved until only neon remained, a seamless haze at the edge of his vision.
Those lights marked the roads, the arteries keeping the city alive. Closer to the facility, evening traffic flowed steadily home, one small glimpse of the metropolis's stubborn vitality.
Bathed in moonlight, Kikuoka drew a deep breath as he gazed at the city, as though he could pull all that life into his lungs.
He looked nothing like a man whose subordinate had just betrayed him and ruined an important experiment.
Kikuoka turned from the window, opened a drawer, and removed an elegant box. Inside lay a Cuban Cohiba, a farewell gift from an old teammate in Geneva. Cuba was where Europeans had first encountered tobacco, and it still produced some of the finest leaves and most famous cigars in the world.
Until 1982, Cohibas had been reserved as government gifts for heads of state and diplomats.
The leaves went through drying, fermentation, pressing, aging, and selection. More than eighty steps over roughly three years went into producing a cigar like this.
Kikuoka had never been able to bring himself to smoke it.
He lifted it to his nose. The rich aroma of the inner ligero leaves was the cigar's soul, responsible for half the flavor of a truly exceptional smoke.
He clipped the cap, held the cigar over the flame of his lighter, and rotated it slowly. Its fragrance filled the room before he had taken a single draw. He blew through it twice to clear the harshness from the lighting, then inhaled deeply.
Unlike most cigar smokers, Kikuoka drew the smoke straight into his lungs.
It was hardly healthy. A cigar contained several times the nicotine and tar of an ordinary cigarette.
Then again, it offered several times the pleasure.
Satisfaction crossed his face, followed by a sigh of regret. The facility had no wine worthy of the cigar, only a cheap, mass-produced bottle.
He poured a glass anyway and returned to the window.
Kikuoka raised it toward the countless lights below.
"To my friends, my enemies, and everything that is mine."
He drained the glass, then watched the night with a rare smile as smoke curled around him.
"Sitting in the dark, Mr. Kikuoka?"
Takeru Higa pushed open the door, which had been left slightly ajar, and peered into the dim office.
"Turning on the lights would ruin the mood."
Kikuoka turned with a smile.
"After what happened, I expected you to be angry. Instead, you look like you're enjoying yourself."
Higa sighed and joined him at the window.
"But I suppose none of it went beyond what you were prepared to accept."
Kikuoka only smiled.
"You designed the facility's security and surveillance yourself. No one could make a move in here without you knowing. You let them do it. That outburst downstairs was just a performance to keep up appearances."
Higa looked at him.
"What I don't understand is why you allowed all this trouble in the first place."
"I've always considered you something of a control freak. I could tell from the moment you spared Kayaba and used him as leverage against Rinko Koujiro."
"At the time, I wanted everything Kayaba had created, so I chose to be cautious."
Kikuoka gave a small shrug.
"I have a soft heart, you know. Otherwise, I would never have let Rinko leave safely for America. Once a deal is complete and everyone gets what they need, that should be enough."
He shook his head.
"Yuuki truly had nothing more to offer us. She was never suited to becoming a Fluctlight bearer. Even if we forced her, how far could she possibly go?"
"Because Rath has always wanted Satoru."
Higa frowned.
"Letting Shinkawa and Nagashima act was your way of establishing an indirect connection with him. Maybe that was why you brought Shinkawa into this facility in the first place. Because he could lead you to Satoru."
"If Satoru-kun and I sat down face-to-face, the conversation would collapse within minutes. I don't possess anything he truly wants, so a gradual approach is better."
Kikuoka's admiration was plain.
"He will eventually understand that Rath is his last remaining option. When he does, negotiations will be much easier. He knows how to read a situation."
"So everything is moving the way you wanted, and now you're celebrating alone?"
Higa glanced at the cigar and the bottle of wine.
"I'm pleased to see this phase of the plan come to an end," Kikuoka said. "But that isn't the only reason."
"What makes me happy is the choices they made."
Kikuoka released a quiet breath.
"Shinkawa still carried friendship and conviction in his heart. Nagashima had his stubbornness and his devotion to Yuuki. Those feelings drove them from one choice to the next."
"Shinkawa surrendered his freedom and endured the pain of the experiment. Nagashima spent his money, reputation, and position. Strictly speaking, every one of those choices was wrong. They gained nothing from them."
"And yet they made those choices gladly. Then they turned them into the strength to keep going."
"That complexity, that refusal to be predictable, and those brief flashes that make humanity worthy of admiration... There is nothing quite like them."
"They are imperfect and flawed, yet they can still smile while walking through the mud. Seeing that makes me happy. It truly does."
"Those are the things perfect intelligence can never possess."
He took another slow draw from the cigar.
"Give a superintelligence logic, philosophy, and nearly limitless intellectual power, and it becomes the endpoint of creation as humanity can imagine it. Its memory never fades. It learns at impossible speed. Its decisions are always correct, and with every mistake, it becomes less likely to make another."
"That is God."
"And when I imagine that kind of perfection, it frightens me," Kikuoka said. "Nothing I know, nothing I have experienced, would apply to it."
"We pursue perfection by instinct. Humanity has advanced by trying to improve itself for thousands, tens of thousands of years. We still chase the dream of an ideal utopia, even though we know a perfect one cannot exist."
"That impossibility is what gave us the journey. The struggle, the exploration, all the epics and songs that survived through history."
"We are born weak, so reaching forward is difficult, and that makes it magnificent. We are born incomplete, so the road lets us experience all the joy and suffering of being alive."
"That is what people are. That is what I am."
Kikuoka looked toward the city.
"So how am I supposed to imagine God?"
"It could absorb the whole of human history without effort, stand upon the brilliance of billions of lives, and open an age beyond anything we know. Doesn't that frighten you?"
"Can you picture that new age? Of course you can't. Imagination needs something to build from. What do any of us know that could serve as the foundation for imagining God?"
"That is what a true superintelligence would be. And yes, I am afraid. I am lost."
"Which is why you chose another path," Higa said. "If true superintelligence terrifies you, then you will choose people capable of approaching that same potential. Fluctlight bearers."
"A Fluctlight bearer can push human cognition to its limit. Acceleration is only a side effect. What truly changes is the brain, the most precious organ we possess."
Kikuoka spoke with quiet certainty.
"It can produce genuine genius. A human mind with processing power approaching a computer's, a near-perfect memory, and the ability to draw conclusions from a vast body of knowledge."
"Most importantly, that person still has a heart."
"Good or evil, they possess a heart. They are human."
"So that is why you call them The Seed," Higa said. "Not only because they have yet to hatch, but because the name reveals what you actually want."
"You don't want a Jehovah so vast and terrifying that humanity cannot comprehend it. You want a Jesus who can perform miracles and still feel compassion for the world. You don't want God. You want the Son of God, a lesser existence beneath true superintelligence."
"Kayaba truly was a genius."
Kikuoka sounded almost wistful.
"The world he created produced both a supreme artificial intelligence and Fluctlight bearers. Aincrad was nothing more than the stage for his childish dream, yet it became the most magnificent cradle imaginable."
"All of this tells me one thing, Mr. Kikuoka."
Higa studied him.
"You have no information about Sheeta at all, do you?"
"None."
Kikuoka did not bother denying it.
"I know she was the beginning of a superintelligence, but that living code vanished without a trace. Of course I'm worried. One day, she may simply decide to conquer the world and seize control of the networks that keep it alive."
"She would be the one trump card capable of bringing Satoru completely under control."
Higa shook his head.
"What does it matter? If Sheeta is the joker in this game, neither Satoru nor I have her. That leaves the cards still on the table."
Kikuoka's voice was calm.
"And I hold every ace. He has nowhere else to go."
Higa was silent for a moment.
"You're that certain Satoru can become The Seed?"
"A curious chain of fate surrounds him."
Kikuoka narrowed his eyes as he watched the cigar smoke drift.
"He fascinates me. He lives so much like an ordinary man. He can be petty and cowardly, then reckless and magnificent. He says little, yet he has known a love he would never regret."
Kikuoka paused. For an instant, he looked almost troubled.
"He is simply too exceptional to disappear into an ordinary life. His laziness, temper, whims, and utter unreliability can place him beneath almost anyone."
"But the talent and fire he cannot hide place him above nearly everyone."
"That is Satoru. On the road toward truth, he is ahead of us all."
"And when that road demands a martyr, he will be the first to fall."
Neither Kikuoka nor Higa spoke again.
Together, they gazed at the city beneath the night sky.