Chapter Two
1.
NAOMI TENTATIVELY touched the large, square bandage on his forehead.
“I can’t believe you got yourself hurt, Naomi,” said his mother, sounding genuinely mystified by this turn of events. Naomi had always spent most of his time safely indoors. He’d gotten through elementary and middle school without a single major injury to speak of.
Grimacing awkwardly, Naomi gave the bandage another careful rub. There was no telling how many years this thing had been sitting in their closet.
“I did give the city government a call about that drone, for what it’s worth…”
“Don’t worry about it, Mom,” said Naomi hurriedly. “It’s just a scratch. Thanks.”
Increasingly embarrassed by the entire situation, he quickly left the living room and opened the sliding door to his bedroom, which was located two paces down the hall.
Unsurprisingly, his new friend was waiting for him in there. He hadn’t expected anything else, but it was still unsettling.
Naomi slid the door shut behind him and sized up the man warily.
He was still wearing his pure white coat, even inside the house. He’d kept his hood down, though, so his face was now clearly visible. That three-legged bird, which seemed to be his companion, was perched on his shoulder.
This man had just claimed to be Naomi. Or a version of him from the future, anyway. At the moment, he was studying Naomi’s bookshelves.
Naomi took the opportunity to study his face from the side. There was a resemblance there, to be sure. Ten years from now, he might look something like this.
At the same time, he didn’t want to believe that it was true. It was hard to express why, but…he didn’t like adults like this guy. The man was always giving orders and bossing him around. He didn’t pay any attention to Naomi’s feelings and constantly ignored his questions. All he cared about was getting what he wanted.
His personality felt like the polar opposite of Naomi’s. It was really hard to believe he’d turn into someone like this.
“Ha, I remember buying this.”
Naomi started. The man was pointing at the book that lay open on his desk. It was the one he’d bought two days ago and had already filled with colorful sticky notes: How to Be Decisive: A Better You by Tomorrow!
There was a small smile on the man’s face, practically a self-mocking smirk.
Naomi approached the man cautiously. There was a significant height difference between them; in close quarters, he was forced to look up at him.
After a moment, he managed to piece together enough words to form a question. “Are you really me?”
“What, you wondering about my height?”
Naomi nodded nervously. That was exactly what he’d been wondering about. He wasn’t even 170 centimeters tall, but this man was well over 180.
“You’ll keep growing for a while,” the man replied simply. “That said, this is a just an avatar. I could change its appearance any way I wanted to.”
“What? Like how?”
The man lightly snapped his fingers. His hand instantly disappeared, replaced by a shiny, metallic arm.
Naomi stared at it, wide-eyed with shock. It was like a magic trick. The man’s hand had turned into a simple two-pronged claw, reminiscent of a toy you might see gathering dust on the shelves of a pawn shop. It clacked open and shut a few times, then abruptly returned to its original form.
“Huh,” Naomi said, for lack of any better thoughts. That transformation had been far too quick and realistic to be a sleight-of-hand trick. He couldn’t even imagine how that would work.
This was just...overwhelming. Naomi dropped down heavily onto his chair. He studied his own hands, trying to make sense of things.
Thinking back to what they’d talked about earlier, he lifted his right hand and snapped his fingers. They produced a sound, if not a particularly impressive one. Naturally, nothing else happened.
Still, he could feel his hand. He could feel his fingers. They sure as hell felt real to him.
“So this whole world, uh…” Naomi said, turning his head up to look at the man. “It’s really just made up of data? It’s some kind of simulation?”
“Yeah. Not that it really matters much. This world is a complete, perfect copy of reality, preserved inside the AllTale system.”
Once again, without prelude, the man snapped his fingers. Naomi jumped a little. But nothing changed this time.
“Now I’m back in reality.”
Again, the man snapped his fingers. Again, nothing happened.
“And now I’m in the simulation. I can hop freely between the two. But since this world is your reality, you can’t tell it’s simulated. You’ll never be able to perceive it as anything but real, so it’s pointless to even try.”
“Well, okay. I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“Huh. You sure took that well.”
“The whole thing kind of reminds me of Egan, I guess…” Naomi glanced at the small shelf next to his desk, where he kept books he was particularly fond of. Quite a few of these were “blue-back” science fiction paperbacks from Hayakawa Publishing. Writers like Greg Egan, H. G. Wells, Phillip K. Dick, and Arthur C. Clarke were all well represented. He was really fond of their work.
Naomi hadn’t intended to build an SF-heavy collection, but at some point he’d fallen in love with the genre. In the very beginning, he’d been a bit intimidated by the ominous-looking covers and the thickness of the novels, but now he actively looked for books like that every time he visited the store.
He’d read quite a lot of science fiction for a boy his age. In a way, he’d given himself a good foundation for coping with this hooded man’s strange claims.
As his eyes ran across the spines of the books on his shelf, Naomi thought back to the stories they contained. Permutation City by Greg Egan had a setup a lot like what this man was describing. And Incandescence, too.
Those books had both featured purely simulated worlds. The people living in them were simulations, too. Thinking about those stories helped him process the situation, at least a little bit. But it also led him to new questions.
Incandescence was a story set in the distant future, when almost all of humanity had been converted into digital transhumans. And in Permutation City, the simulated world was very different from reality.
But according to the hooded man, this simulation was a “record”—an exact copy of the real world as it used to be.
“If that’s all true,” said Naomi, looking up again, “why are you here? Why come visit a copy of the past?”
It was the first question that had popped into his mind. What was his future self even doing here?
“I think I already gave you an answer, but I don’t mind repeating myself.”
The man snapped his fingers again. This time, there was a visible effect. The bird leapt off his shoulder, flapping up to the top of a bookshelf.
With skillful movement of its three legs, it kicked down the cardboard box that was sitting there.
“Gah!”
The box hit the ground with a thump and fell over, spilling its contents onto the ground.
Naomi had packed it and put it up there—it was full of magazines. Gravure magazines, mostly. And a few that were slightly more explicit.
“Ah! Gaaaah!”
Yelping with embarrassment, Naomi dove onto the pile. Gathering the magazines in his arms, he pushed them under his bed. It was far too late, of course, but he couldn’t stop himself.
He could feel his face going red. Wasn’t this man his future self? Shouldn’t he be humiliated by this, too?
“I came here to help you with the painful dilemmas of your youth,” the man said, his voice as bold as ever. “In other words, I’m here to help you get a girlfriend.”
2.
EVERY CLASS in a school is surrounded by a strange barrier.
Anyone can enter or leave their own classroom freely. However, if you want to enter a different class, you’ve got to contend with an invisible wall. You might just be going to see a friend across the hall, but the moment you cross that threshold, the other thirty-nine students in the room will suddenly seem like enemies determined to drive you from their turf.