“What do you mean?”
“I intend to take Merida Island,” she said succinctly. “It used to be our base, and it seems to be serving as theirs, now. They’ll want to keep me from it at any cost. So...”
“So they took over a nuclear missile base?” said Mao. “To try to make us go there instead?”
“Yes.”
“Tessa, I’m not sure I understand...” Mao admitted.
Tessa looked into the faces of her subordinates, most of whom looked highly confused. Why so desperate to protect Merida Island? What’s there? they seemed to ask.
Yes... why was Tessa so obsessed with taking back Merida Island? Before now, she’d kept her subordinates at arm’s length about the matter, but now they wanted to know the entire truth: the ultimate reason lurking behind her battle with Leonard.
She cast a glance at Sousuke. He was the one person there who already knew most of it.
Sousuke hesitated a moment before nodding, as if to say, There’s no more use hiding it. Lay it all on the table.
Why was Tessa so desperate to take back Merida Island? Why was the enemy so fixated on keeping it? The answer would divide opinion even among her most trusted subordinates.
“All right. Just let me finish, without any joking around...” Tessa took a deep breath, then explained everything. She told them about the Soviet experiment in telepathy eighteen years ago. She explained how it had gone wildly out of control and brought information about technology from the far future to the modern world; about the Whispered, who had received this ‘black technology’ and far increased the tech level of the world they lived in; about how this had likely caused a massive change in the course of their world’s history.
“People...” said Tessa, continuing to speak into the hushed briefing room. “People who might have lived are now dead, and people who might have died are alive. Leonard and those with him want to ‘fix’ that. He wants to build a new TAROS—an extremely powerful space-time transmitter—on Merida Island, and use Kaname-san’s power to set history right.”
Her subordinates—who had likely expected something unusual, but surely nothing quite this extreme—had nothing to say. Although dubious, they also knew that Tessa wouldn’t make something like this up, so they didn’t quite seem to know how to react.
Mao was the first to speak. “Tessa... I’m sure what you’re saying is the truth. But it’s a little hard to take in just like that.”
“I suppose it would be.”
“We’re soldiers, you know? We follow realistic plans. And now you’re throwing this fairy tale stuff at us... It’s hard to take,” Mao admitted.
“But it would certainly explain some things,” Lieutenant Colonel Mardukas, Tessa’s executive officer, was the next to whisper. He was also a realist, and a veteran—the one who seemed least likely to believe the story. “I’ve always thought it was strange,” he continued. “Arm slaves, lambda drivers... all of it. These Whispered I’ve been hearing about, too. Absurd as the story is, it makes an odd kind of sense.”
“Thank you,” said Tessa. “That’s why I—”
“However,” Mardukas interrupted, cutting her off. “It is also too much for the imagination of an old man like me to take. Even if history did change, as you’re suggesting, the life I’ve lived these past eighteen years is reality to me. What will happen if Leonard Testarossa uses this ‘Taros’ to ‘correct’ history? I’ve lost many comrades in my time, your father being one of them.”
Mao and the others looked surprised by his words. They’d never known that Carl, Tessa’s father, was one of Mardukas’s old war mates.
“Will Carl Testarossa, my old friend, appear before me again as if he were never gone?” Mardukas wanted to know.
“It won’t be quite like you’re imagining it,” Tessa said. “If the corrected timeline is a world in which Carl Testarossa never died, I would expect you to view that as the way things have always been. You would be who you are in that world, meeting and chatting with my father like you always have. The world itself will change the moment the TAROS sets history right, so you would live the rest of your life in that world as if it were where you’d always been.”
“Mithril would be gone as well?” he wanted to know.
“Most likely.”
“And I would lose the last three years I spent serving under you alongside all these brave men and women?”
“Most likely,” Tessa affirmed. “But the ‘you’ in that world wouldn’t realize that...because you never would have known them.”
“I will not forget them,” Mardukas said with rare intensity. “I don’t understand the methodology exactly, but I would never forget the comrades who died with me.”
The words were unexpected, yet Tessa found they suited him well. “I feel the same way,” she told him. “But you wouldn’t be able to care about them if you’d never met them, would you?”
“Ah... perhaps not.”
“This isn’t a matter of memory loss or brainwashing,” she said. “It’s a change in reality itself. The chemical reactions in your brain simply follow the pathways established as things happen around you; successes and failures, life and death. Your personal will never even factors into it.”
Mardukas fell silent after hearing this statement.
“I’m struggling with this too, Colonel,” Clouseau, who had thus far been silent, spoke up hesitantly. “I... er, I have a little understanding of science fiction myself. In books and movies, even when they use a time machine to interfere with the past... ah, it just creates a branching timeline. It doesn’t change the world they came from.”
“The multiple-worlds theory, you mean?” Tessa specified.
“Yes, also known as ‘parallel worlds.’ What if their use of that strange machine doesn’t actually change things for the rest of us?”
“I couldn’t say,” Tessa admitted honestly. “The parallel worlds theory you’re talking about is a recent hypothesis—the existence of the mental—physical theory that takes the omni-sphere into account neither confirms nor refutes it. Like the wave function of particles—No, I’ll keep it simple. It’s because the rest of you cannot perceive both worlds.”
“That’s all very ambiguous... Wait a minute,” said Clouseau. “You said, ‘The rest of you.’ What did you mean by that?”
“I mean that we can perceive them,” Tessa said with utmost calm. “The omni-sphere allows the Whispered to converse via mental waves across the barriers of space-time. If parallel worlds exist, we might be able to perceive them.”
“I’m getting confused.” Clouseau let out a sigh and ran his fingers over his close-cropped hair. “Can you boil it down for me?”
“I think that’s what Leonard is after,” Tessa speculated. “He wants to change history in a way that’s convenient for him, then transfer our memories and consciousnesses—our personalities in this world—to that ‘other side.’ Try to imagine it... What if tomorrow morning, you could remake the world however you wished it could be and actually enjoy your knowledge of the changes while no one else is any the wiser?”
“Like creating a new save file,” Clouseau murmured. “It’s appealing.”
“So, it’s all a fraud,” Sousuke said grumpily. “Leonard talked about ‘correcting the world’ back at Yamsk-11, restoring it to the way it should be. I had a feeling his lofty ideals weren’t on the up-and-up, and now I see why. He wants to take Kaname and go to a world where we can’t follow. A world where I can’t follow.”
“Precisely,” Tessa agreed. “That’s why I want to stop him.”
“Still, this is all pretty abstract...” Mao said with a groan. “And even if what you’re saying is true, it won’t affect most people, right? Whether there are parallel worlds or not, we won’t be able to experience the change.”
“Yes,” Tessa acknowledged.