Maybe, I reflected, that was a blessing in disguise. Maybe ignorance was bliss when it came to a truth this horrific. Running away from the truth wouldn’t change it, though. I steeled myself, preparing to impart upon them the desperate reality of our circumstances...
...and several very long and painful explanations later, they were no closer to understanding than they’d been in the beginning. They were just not getting it.
“Look, like I’ve said a bunch of times already, the long and short of it’s that Kiryuu is the one who made all of us. He wrote us as characters in a story. He established everything about us. Even us being childhood friends is just something that he made up out of nowhere.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. We met in kindergarten, didn’t we? Kiryuu would’ve still been in elementary school then. How could a little kid make stuff up like that?”
“No, see, that’s where the time manipulation comes in! I’m sure his power lets him ignore time paradoxes and stuff, or whatever. Probably.”
“Okay, so where did it start? Since when and up to when did Kiryuu set everything up? Since we were born? Did Kiryuu make up how our moms and dads got married too?”
“I mean... Okay, so I don’t know for sure, but he probably found a way to make it all work out.”
“How many ‘probablys’ does that make, Juu? Hmm... So then, how much of everything is real and how much of it’s fiction in the end?”
“Look, again, there’s no way of knowing that! That’s the point—we can’t know, so we end up worrying over it, and it drives us into despair...”
“Oh, come on! What does that even mean? I don’t understand this at all!” Hatoko pouted. No matter how carefully and clearly I tried to explain, I just couldn’t get through to her.
“I’m me. What else would I be?” Chifuyu asserted. Her attitude had remained completely steadfast throughout my whole explanation...which was kinda badass of her, if I’m being honest. You’d think it would’ve taken us a ton of conflict, debate, and turmoil before we ultimately reached that answer, but she jumped to it pretty much instantly.
I paused, at a loss for what to try next...
“Indeed...there are a number of elements of this scenario that strike me as inexplicable.”
...when Sayumi spoke up instead.
“Perhaps,” she continued, “Hatoko’s and Chifuyu’s responses really are the appropriate ones.”
“Huh...?”
“Andou, you understood Kiryuu’s explanation immediately and seemed to accept the so-called truth he presented to us as logical...but by any rational standard, his whole story was utterly absurd. The typical reaction to a speech like his wouldn’t be choosing to accept or reject it—it would be not understanding it at all. Or, rather... How to put this...? His story felt terribly contrived, I suppose.”
“Contrived...?”
“Andou, are you familiar with the simulation hypothesis?”
“Y-Yeah,” I replied.
To very roughly summarize the concept: The simulation hypothesis is the idea that the world humanity lives in is, in fact, a simulation that was constructed by some external entity. In other words, our world—our very reality and everything we experience within it—is nothing more than a form of virtual reality, with we, its inhabitants, remaining none the wiser to its artificial nature. Or, to frame the matter slightly differently: It’s the theory that the world we live in is a work of fiction.
So the world would be nothing more than a stage some third party made, and its inhabitants nothing more than virtual actors who play out their roles with no clue they were never real to begin with...is about as far as my train of thought managed to travel before it struck me how familiar all of this sounded. It was, in fact, strikingly similar to the situation we’d found ourselves in.
“Outrageous and outlandish though the simulation hypothesis may be, so long as we remain human, our inherent limitations prevent us from ever definitively disproving it,” said Sayumi. “It’s quite similar to the five-minute hypothesis and The Butterfly Dream, in that respect. Because it can’t be proven one way or the other, once it’s on the table, there’s little you can do to argue against it. In other words, whoever proposes it first controls the narrative.”
“They control the narrative...”
“Now then, Andou,” Sayumi said, seeming to shift conversational gears. “Returning to the subject of Kiryuu’s claims: I must now reveal that Kiryuu Hajime is, in fact, nothing more than a character I wrote. I personally devised and laid out every word he just spoke to us. This may come as a surprise, and I’d never intended to reveal it to you, but the truth is that I am the actual mastermind behind everything that has happened up to this point.”
Wh-Whaaat?! Are we seriously following one world-upending twist with another world-upending twist?! Having a member of the main cast turn out to have been the evil mastermind all along is a classic development in a sense, sure...but Sayumi? Really? I can’t believe she’s the true, secret final boss who was manipulating even Kiryuu from the shadows this whole time...
...is not what I thought. Give me some credit.
“So...you just made that up,” I said.
“Yes, I did,” Sayumi agreed with a nod. “And what Kiryuu did earlier was no different from what I did just now.”
It was like suddenly insisting, without any foreshadowing to back you up, that everything that had happened in the story so far was, in fact, all part of your master plan. Any plan can go off without a hitch, as long as you wait until after the fact to make it up and work the story’s actual events into it retroactively. As long as you make the claim before anything can contradict it, you control the narrative.