“Innocent Onlooker: the power of premature disclosure,” Sagami said before launching into an extended exposition dump about the nature of his ability.
He’d only just awakened to it moments before, but he already had a perfect grasp of how it functioned...which wasn’t much of a surprise at all, really. I’d had an intuitive understanding of how Dark and Dark worked back when I’d awakened to it as well, even before I’d actually tried using it. The knowledge had sort of just manifested in my mind. It hadn’t been the deepest or most specific of information, but it had been enough to give me a general grasp of how my power functioned and what it was capable of.
“To put it simply, it’s the power of precognition. I can’t use it to see people’s futures, though—instead, Innocent Onlooker allows me to make other people have visions of their own future.”
So, it lets you give other people foresight?
“That’s right! Anyone except myself.”
Huuuh...
“Let me guess: You’re thinking that sounds pretty pointless, right? Ha ha ha... Yeah, I can relate. I was all ‘What kind of lame-ass power is that?’ at first...but when I took a moment to think about it, I realized that there are a surprising number of ways to make use of it,” Sagami continued. “Here’s an example for you, Andou: You know how whenever a precognitive character shows up in a supernatural battle manga or anime, their visions of the future usually turn out to be wrong in the end? It’d almost be more of a surprise if their predictions didn’t end up missing the mark, and everyone knows it from the moment they’re introduced. Sometimes it feels like they’re put in the story just for the sake of being wrong, doesn’t it?”
I mean, yeah, I guess.
I got what Sagami was trying to say. Characters with precognitive powers spurring the main character into action by predicting a hopeless future for them to avert was a very common trope. The character with foresight would predict that somebody was going to die or that some horrible cataclysm would occur, but in the end, the main characters would usually rally together and beat the odds to make sure that the terrible future they’d been warned about wouldn’t come to pass.
“So, precognitive characters are put into stories to make predictions that end up being wrong, and precognitive powers almost never give characters visions that are guaranteed to come true. My power falls into that category as well—it doesn’t have a hundred percent hit rate. I haven’t exactly tested it, so I don’t have any hard numbers to give you, but I can tell that it’s not perfect intuitively. In fact, it might be more accurate for me to describe it as a power of intentionally imperfect precognition.”
Intentionally imperfect? Meaning that your predictions being flawed is a feature?
“Right. It grants me the ability to give other people precognitive visions, and I don’t need their permission to do it. As long as they’re within my power’s range, I can force my visions on people. The catch is that the visions are imperfectly accurate, and not even I know precisely how likely it is that the futures people see will come to pass. They might come true, and they might not. Who knows?”
The idea of a precognitive power with an ambiguous degree of accuracy struck me as, well...pretty remarkably half-baked, if I’m being honest. It was like seeing a weather report predict a fifty percent chance of rain. It wasn’t stunningly unreliable, but it also wasn’t the sort of prediction that you could structure your plans around.
“If I wanted to explain it in a little more detail, I’d say that my power chooses a single future with a nonzero chance of coming to pass, which it then shows to the person I used it on, I suppose? It picks a single branch from the countless possible paths the timeline could take, showing my target only the future that exists on that one route. But anyway,” Sagami continued, “the real question is this: How would the people I use my power on feel about being shown such unreliable visions of their futures?”
A vision of a single future with a nonzero chance of coming to pass... A single branch from the endlessly expansive tree of possibilities that is the future... What effect would forcing someone to see that sort of fragmented information—and to see it as their future—have upon them?
“Let’s say I used it on someone who was facing some form of difficulty that, under normal circumstances, they’d have a high chance of overcoming if they worked up the nerve to tackle it head-on. If my power ended up showing them a future in which they failed, then there’s a chance that they wouldn’t even try standing up to their problem at all, right? And even if they didn’t give up entirely, would they be able to handle it with the same sort of spirit they could’ve mustered back before they’d seen that possible future of failure?”
The idea that seeing the future would, in and of itself, change the future is something that got discussed and debated pretty often. Assuming that the principles of the butterfly effect and chaos theory were valid—that is to say, the slightest changes to the present could have a massive impact on the future at large—then it certainly seemed plausible that someone seeing into the future could be all it took to change their future substantially. What if the future observed with precognition was a future that took that act of precognition into account, though? It could even take into account the fact that the observer would try to change the future that they foresaw, meaning that...
Actually, I’m gonna cut this train of thought off here. I’m just confusing myself for no reason at this point.
There was no point in overthinking any of that future stuff. After all, just fixating on the future—whether it was supposed to turn out well or poorly—had the potential to change it.
To give a simple example of that phenomenon: It’s like how future Trunks asked Goku to keep his identity secret, since he was worried that if his parents found out who he was, it could bother them enough that he’d never actually end up being born. Having a vision of a future in which you’re married to a particular person could make you fixate so intensely on them that you end up acting super awkwardly and drive them away instead. Or, on the opposite side of the spectrum, a premonition could lead you to take an interest in someone whom you’d otherwise pay no attention to whatsoever, ultimately leading you to fall for them.