MASAMUNE DID NOT TURN up at all in January, but finally, early in February, he walked in.
His hair was neatly cut, and at first Kokoro thought it was some new kid.
He’d got in before anyone else, and sat in the Game Room, blithely playing video games.
‘Masamune.’
Kokoro stood frozen to the spot.
‘Hey,’ he said. His gaze was fixed on the TV screen as he played a racing car game. ‘Oh, no way … whoa!’ he said to himself.
Kokoro hovered in the doorway, unsure what to say. One by one, the rest of the group appeared.
‘Masamune, we’ve been dying to talk to you.’
‘Masamune, we didn’t break our promise!’
‘That’s right. Why didn’t you come over earlier? We all kept our word.’ Aki said this in an unsteady voice, and Masamune put down the game controller for the first time. His car crashed spectacularly on the screen. The ‘game over’ music played.
‘I know,’ Masamune said, and looked over at them. His short hair made his eyes seem more piercing than before. ‘I know that all of you came into school that day. The day I asked you to, the tenth of January.’
Everyone gasped.
‘I never thought you didn’t come. I knew there was no way you wouldn’t.’
Kokoro was so relieved she felt about to cry.
Masamune believed them all.
‘Then why didn’t you come to the castle?’ Fuka asked.
Masamune switched off the TV.
‘I needed some time to think. I knew you wouldn’t let me down, yet we still couldn’t meet up. I wanted to think why. I thought about it, over and over. And …’
Masamune took a short breath.
‘I came to a conclusion. I think we’re all living in parallel worlds.’
‘Parallel worlds?’
‘Yep.’
Kokoro’s eyes widened.
The term was unfamiliar, and she couldn’t quite grasp it. She looked around and saw them all gazing at Masamune with equally vacant expressions.
‘Each of us is attending a different Yukishina No. 5 Junior High. None of you are in my world, and I’m not in any of yours. The world’s divided into seven different branches, one for each of us.’
✦ ✦ ✦
THE WORLD’S DIVIDED.
Kokoro couldn’t grasp what this meant. They all looked at each other in puzzlement, and Masamune, in a slightly irritated tone, said, ‘You people hardly ever watch anime, or read science fiction, do you?
‘You need to read more,’ he went on. ‘In the world of science fiction, it’s a totally obvious concept, the idea of parallel worlds.’
‘I don’t exactly follow, but are you saying that something unreal’s happening, like in science fiction?’ asked Kokoro.
‘If you want to talk about what’s unreal, this whole castle is completely unreal. You lot really need to get used to the idea – that we’re already in a situation that’s supernatural, or if not fantasy then something we can’t explain.
‘Listen up,’ he said, facing them all. ‘The world we live in – the world beyond the seven mirrors in the foyer – seems the same for all of us, but it isn’t. Even if there’s a Yukishina No. 5 Junior High in Minami, in Tokyo City, Japan, in all our worlds, the people there and the details all deviate slightly from each other. All seven of us are living in our own individual worlds.’
‘So,’ Aki said, arms folded, head tilted, ‘what does that mean?’
‘It’s easier to understand if you think of it like a video game.’ Masamune looked over at the game controller he’d tossed aside.
‘Each of us is the hero in a game called Yukishina No. 5 Junior High in South Tokyo. And there are seven versions of the game. The data depends on the software of whoever’s playing, get it? Each character has their own saved data, and there can’t be two heroes simultaneously. My data is mine, Subaru’s data is his, Aki’s is hers.’
Masamune looked around at each of them in turn.
‘In the world where I’m playing, naturally I’m the hero, and nobody else is there, and in Aki and Subaru’s software I don’t appear. The same is true for everyone. There’s only one hero for each set of data. On the game screen it’s set up so you have to choose one from the seven of us.’
Masamune crossed his arms.
‘It’s the same software so it looks like the same world, but since the hero is different, it subtly adjusts events and small details. Even if the software we’re given is the same, it makes sense to think that there are separate routes designed to take us down different storylines.’
‘I still don’t get it.’ Fuka slowly shook her head. ‘But I have heard the term parallel worlds.’ They’d been using the English words, and now she gave the Japanese equivalent.
Kokoro repeated the Japanese characters to herself, and now she could picture it better.
She pictured the grand foyer of the castle. And parallel light radiating out from the seven mirrors side by side. The lights of each of the worlds beyond the mirrors never intersected.
Fuka said: ‘That idea was in a manga I read once. In the story there were as many parallel worlds as there were choices, and the main character had a kind of reunion of all his possible selves from those worlds. There were a lot of selves in all kinds of worlds, as many as the choices in his life – like what life would be like if he’d married his girlfriend, or if he’d stayed true to his dreams when he was young, and so on.’
‘Exactly! The number of choices is what I mean by the branches.’ Masamune nodded enthusiastically.
Fuka’s example made it a little easier for Kokoro to follow.
If only I’d done that, then reality would have turned out differently – that was something Kokoro thought about a lot. If only she hadn’t stayed away from school. If only she’d been in a different class from Miori Sanada. If only she hadn’t ever been a student at Yukishina No. 5 Junior High.
A hypothetical reality seemed preferable to present reality, and the more she fantasized about how great it would be if certain things could come true, the more reality that world seemed to take on.
‘And the branches of our parallel worlds are each of our stories. If you go by that example you gave, it’s as if I chose A, but if I’d chosen B it’d be a different world. In our worlds we each have a world where we exist, but each one’s slightly different.’
‘OK, but then – what about Ms Kitajima?’ Kokoro asked. ‘Aki said she’d never met her, but didn’t Masamune, Ureshino and I each meet Ms Kitajima? Doesn’t that mean Ms Kitajima exists in all our worlds?’
A doubt crept into her mind.
On that day, the only student Ms Kitajima had been told would be going into school was Kokoro. She didn’t seem to have been waiting for Masamune or Ureshino.
‘I guess the different worlds have some characters in common.’
Characters – the word made Kokoro bite her lip. Masamune was just continuing with the video game analogy, but the reality she was living started to feel to her as if it was all made up, like a miniature garden or something.
‘For instance, Aki and Subaru have never actually heard of the Free School, have they? So of course they’ve never met Ms Kitajima.’
‘Right.’
‘Yeah.’
Masamune waited for the two of them to agree. ‘So in their two worlds there is no Free School. It doesn’t exist. The possibility is that the person called Ms Kitajima herself doesn’t exist there. Or else she does but is somewhere else, doing a totally different job.’
Masamune had clearly been spending his time thinking deeply about this, trying to tie up his ideas. He had no doubt been digging around in books and other resources, researching the subject of parallel worlds.
‘And the geography around Yukishina No. 5 Junior High as we’ve talked about it seems a bit vague. Like … Kokoro. What’s the main shopping centre near your house?’
‘That would be … Careo.’
When she saw their reactions, she was shocked. Fuka’s eyes widened. ‘Don’t you go to Careo, Fuka?’ Kokoro asked.
‘We go to a shopping mall called Arco. Where they have a cinema.’
‘What?’
Arco? Kokoro had never heard of it.
Masamune nodded in agreement with Fuka. ‘Same as me, it’s called Arco. When you first mentioned Careo, Kokoro, I thought you’d made a mistake and meant Arco. But that’s not true, right?’
‘Yeah.’
Kokoro nodded vacantly. She couldn’t remember when she’d talked about Careo.
Aki’s face clouded over. ‘I don’t know either of them – Arco or Careo,’ she said. ‘Now that you mention it, you asked me where I went to elementary school and you said, Oh, that’s near Careo. I had no clue then what you were talking about.’
‘No way.’
‘And McDonald’s, too,’ Fuka said in a low voice. ‘I often go to McDonald’s inside Arco, but is there really one in front of the station? Didn’t you and Subaru say there was, Aki?’
‘Yeah, in front of the station.’