At least in Alice’s eyes, in the knowledge she had been taught, it was not like that.
Once life was free of worry, Alice thought of nothing all day but sticking close to me.
Toward angels, she had only a heart full of affection.
Some things, perhaps, were better forgotten.
At least Alice, living in this world, did not feel that being human meant she carried some grave crime.
And I would not look at her that way either.
Probably only because, for me, this had always been nothing more than “the history of another world.”
It felt as if I had not sat by the window looking out like this for several days, even though most of the seats in the car had long since been turned into soft beds.
Beyond the glass there was only the same reinforced-concrete tunnel as always.
The occasional screech of the train would travel a long, long way down that tunnel.
It looked as if the train were turning.
In nearly a week of living aboard, we had hardly gone outside at all.
Even I could judge the train’s heading now by watching the locomotive’s position and orientation through the window.
Only the earth ahead, lit amid burst after burst of electric light, seemed as if it would look like this forever.
The engineering vehicle’s work was in fact very heavy.
It was only that MKR4-003 never let us notice.
Through the Construction equipment in the locomotive, earth, stone, and other underground matter were converted into rails, tunnel walls, and the lighting fixtures and power batteries on those walls.
The train advanced like that, excavating and laying tunnel as it went.
At the same time it had to use the stratum-scan results to avoid groundwater, magma, and a whole series of obstacles a single engineering vehicle could not keep a tunnel safe against.
Being able to connect to Ipsis’s original old lines would naturally be the best possible outcome.
That was also why the engineering vehicle had set out from Eden.
Ipsis was the principal inhabited region for living things on the Daedalte structure.
Long ago, in the Ideal Ring era, the humans of this world had remade all seven planets in the stellar system, linked them to one another, and at last formed a stellar ring turning around their star.
On the foundation of that ring they built the Towers to Heaven that led directly to Eden, and a thermoelectric conversion apparatus that could absorb more than 42% of the star’s energy to supply the ring and Eden.
And in the end, in this corner of the universe, they created the Daedalte mega-structure.
In those days people’s lives were abundant and free of care.
Inexhaustible energy and Construction equipment that could convert any material into any other let the people of this world live like gods.
A considerable number of the miracle works they raised upon this world still remain on Ipsis even now, and are still in use.
Even if, in people’s history books, that stretch of history has long since become something as vague as myth.
I did not know how much time had passed.
These past few days, whenever I was idle I had been reading the historical materials in Lapis’s database as if they were stories, and I was bumped lightly by Alice, who had fallen asleep beside me again.
I turned to look at her.
She had already changed back into the white robe from when we first met.
It seemed that, though she was always saying how good it was inside the car, at heart she still could not hold down the excitement of finally seeing blue sky and white clouds.
It was true.
Ever since the day the strange fish had carried us through the underground river into Eden, we had not seen what blue sky and white clouds truly looked like.
Lapis’s former self had, after all, been a factory AI.
There were historical materials, but very few.
If one day we could return to Eden’s inner ring, perhaps many things — about me, and about this world — would become clear.
But we did not even know yet whether Eden’s inner ring was still out there in distant space.
All that could be said was that the Bapluntas were almost the only things still connected to Eden’s inner ring.
A rumble shook the entire car.
In that shaking, the rubble ahead formed an arch-like structure under the action of scattering current.
Then MKR4-003’s voice came through the car.
[“Miss Yulin, the engineering vehicle has entered the target artificial tunnel. Track structures are present in the tunnel —
[“Analysis of the track material composition shows a significant difference from Eden track. The composition formula is relatively ancient. It is inferred that this tunnel belongs to a branch of the Ipsis Ring-Star Railway, built more than two thousand years ago. Image recognition can no longer match it. The node server cannot be connected. Current position cannot be located.]
[“At present we have excavated 3,680 km. Straight-line distance from Eden [63] Station is 2,173 km. A map including stratum-survey information has been constructed and can be synced to you at any time.”]
“Ah… mm. All right.”
Were we finally out?
Ding—
Just as I thought that, a prompt sounded in my mind, and a map unfolded across my field of view.
Nn…
In short, it was a three-dimensional map with the tunnel as its main body.
Fan-shaped overlays on the barrel of the tunnel displayed stratum information and a portion of surface information.
In other words, the scan could pick up some of the state of the ground above at the same time, only very roughly — at most enough to tell there was a pit up there or something of the kind.
The tunnel’s average depth from the surface was 42 m.
Beyond that, all I could make out were these winding, twisting tunnel lines.
All right.
I gave up.
I would just wait quietly for the results.
At least it was confirmed that we had achieved our original goal: merging the new line into Ipsis’s Ring-Star Railway.
After the train entered this ancient surviving tunnel, its speed clearly increased a great deal.
Some of the flickering sparks even burst bright right outside the window, as if the tunnel were being repaired.
From here on, though, there was no lighting.
The engineering vehicle seemed only to be repairing facilities that already existed in the tunnel.
As marker after marker labeled [Node] lit up on the map, the train’s speed gradually slowed again.
“Are we almost there?”
I looked out the window, but beyond the glass there was only a darkness I had long since grown used to.
MKR4-003’s voice sounded afterward.
[“Yes, Miss Yulin. The deployed drone has found a location 37 km ahead that appears to be a station. At the current speed we will arrive at the drone’s position in twenty minutes.”]
We really were about to arrive.
When I turned and looked once more around everything we had arranged in the car, those six days felt as if they had only been a dream.
“Alice… Alice dear…”
I was actually very bad at calling people by name.
I did not know why.
Whenever I said someone’s name I always felt a little shy, a little as if the words were hard to get out.
I reached out and gave Alice, who was leaning on my shoulder, a push.
Her golden hair slid slowly off my shoulder.
Then her voice rose again in the quiet car.
“Ah… nn — Yulin-chan…”
“We’re arriving. We’ll be able to go out soon. About twenty minutes or so.”
Looking at Alice, who still seemed not quite awake, I felt a faint, settled ease all the same.
Alice then stretched long and slow.
After these days of close living — staying in the same car, lying in the same place — we had probably grown completely used to each other’s presence.
So after I woke her, Alice stood up from the seat and went straight to the corner of the car, dragging that white travel pack out from the corner.
Why did I feel the pack was even more stuffed than when we had come into the engineering vehicle?
What had Alice been quietly cramming into it?
Well, it did not really matter.
Perhaps we would not be returning to the engineering vehicle for a long time after we went out.
Packing extra had already become habit for Alice, I supposed.
While I was thinking that, Alice crouched on the floor and began organizing the backpack.
First she took everything out of it one item at a time and laid it neatly on the floor.
Then, tidying as she spoke, she said, “Yulin-chan, I can’t find your towel.”
……
Good grief.
Was this a mom getting ready to go on a trip?
“Tow… towel…”
For a moment I was actually at a loss for words.
But through that loss a warmth kept rising in my chest.
Thinking from the beginning, when I had been crying alone in the rain, to now — quite a long time had passed, hadn’t it.
“It’s probably in the bath. I didn’t take it out.”
“Okay~”
Saying that, Alice trotted out of the car.
What was the world outside like?
For me, everything was unknown.