Chapter Three
1.
NAOMI STUFFED HIS BACKPACK with textbooks and a school uniform.
He was wearing a sweatsuit today. It wasn’t his typical outfit, so putting it on felt a bit exciting, almost like he was on his way to a class trip or something.
Leaving his bedroom, he slid the door shut quietly behind him, then snuck down the hallway toward the front door. As he started to turn its doorknob, he heard his mother stirring in her room.
“Naomi?” she called sleepily.
Naomi had thought up an excuse for his early-morning outing, but if he could leave without being forced to explain, that was definitely better.
“I’ll see you later!”
Hurriedly stepping outside, he closed and locked the door behind him, then rushed down the apartment building stairs. Making a beeline for the first-floor storage area, he grabbed his bike and hopped on.
Once he got moving, he realized it was chillier out than he’d expected. Although it was April now, it was still brisk outside at 6 a.m. Maybe he should have brought a jacket or something.
Naomi made his way across Nishioji Street, savoring its unusual emptiness.
His destination today was Narabigaoka, a well-known scenic spot a few blocks from Hanazono Station. It was a gently sloping hill, its surface lushly green and dotted with ancient tombs; it rose to a height of roughly fifty meters above the residential neighborhood that had grown up around it. It reminded Naomi of the hill behind the school in Doraemon.
There were maintained walking paths running through the mountain itself, popular with hikers seeking a little light exertion. Today, though, Naomi had ventured off the beaten path and wandered deep into the trees.
Eventually, he found himself standing with Sensei in a small clearing surrounded by dense foliage—a secluded corner of the forest, a place where no one ever went.
“Start by picturing the result you want.” Sensei was giving Naomi a lesson—living up to his name, he approached it almost like a lecture. “Make your mental image as vivid as possible. Start with something very familiar and very simple. Plastic, rubber, paper, whatever.”
Naomi closed his eyes and focused.
He was kneeling in the dirt with his right hand pressed against the ground. On that hand, he wore the glove that the odd crow had turned itself into.
Now that his eyes were shut, the image in his mind seemed to grow just a little clearer. At first he’d tried to imagine a sheet of paper, but that just made the image of a novel pop into his mind; he’d ended up switching to plastic instead.
He visualized a small plastic block—a plain, unremarkable lump of raw material.
Gradually, he felt the sensation of the dirt beneath his hand begin to change. It wasn’t a sudden, dramatic change; it felt like the area was being slowly drained of both warmth and coldness, somehow growing less defined. It wasn’t something he’d ever felt before.
“Now reach out your hand in your mind’s eye, and…” Sensei paused, as if waiting for the right moment.
“Grab it!”
At that forceful command, Naomi visualized his hand grasping the piece of plastic. His actual right hand moved as well, grabbing reflexively at the ground, and somehow, it actually took hold of something.
His hand, which had been pressed firmly against the dirt, reached down into it. It felt like the hard-packed earth had suddenly grown soft and pliable, allowing his fingers to sink right through it.
Startled, Naomi’s eyes snapped open.
His hand was still touching the ground, its fingers spread wide. Had that sensation been an illusion, then? It had felt so real. He lifted his hand off the ground and revealed a small object. A white lump of plastic in the shape of a hexagon.
It was exactly what he’d visualized.
“It worked! It actually worked!” Naomi cried. Snatching up the object, he poked at it gingerly with his naked left hand. It looked and felt exactly like a normal piece of plastic.
“Not bad for your first try,” said Sensei with a tone of mild satisfaction. He drew a little closer and pointed at the strange glove on Naomi’s hand. “That’s the God Hand.”
As he spoke, Sensei snapped his fingers.
In an instant, a glove appeared on his right hand, the exact same one that Naomi was currently wearing. This startled him for a moment, but then he realized it likely wasn’t real. Sensei had transformed his arm into that goofy metal claw the other day, after all—this was probably more of the same, just a copy of the glove on his avatar.
Sensei turned his hand so the palm faced upward.
“The God Hand works by directly accessing the data AllTale uses to generate this simulation. It can rewrite the fabric of this world.”
Suddenly, water started pouring out of Sensei’s hand. The flow grew faster and faster until it was gushing out in torrents.
“You can turn air into water.”
The water stopped coming, then disappeared entirely. Sensei squatted down and put his hand to the ground. When he opened it again, an enormous gem the size of Naomi’s fist had appeared inside it.
“Dirt into precious stones.”
With a wave of his hand, the gem disappeared too. Sensei got back to his feet. This time, he grabbed at the empty air.
His hand seemed to close around an invisible cylinder. In answer to the motion, a solid substance took shape in midair. A white metal rod grew down to the ground; after a moment, Naomi realized it was the pole of a traffic sign.
“Nothing into something.”
Sensei grabbed the sign he’d just created. The thing was solid metal and more than two meters in length, but he swung it around like a baton. In the blink of an eye, it had also disappeared.
“All that was just an illusion,” he continued. “I’m only an avatar, so my access rights within AllTale are strictly limited. I can’t interact with anything in this world, so showing you some magic tricks is the best I can do.”
Sensei’s eyes turned down to his illusionary glove.
“But the God Hand has the permissions necessary to change this world on a physical level. It can touch objects in this world and interfere with their reality. Once you learn how to use that thing, you’ll be able to do all the tricks I just showed you for real.”
Once again, Naomi looked at his hand. Did that mean—
“So, I can do anything, basically?”
“In theory, sure. But there are a number of important limitations.” Once again, Sensei squatted down.
“First of all,” he said as he touched the ground with his glove and pulled up a free-standing whiteboard out of the dirt, “the glove can only rewrite things it’s in direct physical contact with.”
He turned the palm of his hand toward Naomi. Naomi flinched, expecting something to pop out at him, but nothing happened.
“You can’t use the glove to create something at a distance.”
“O-okay...”
“Secondly...” Sensei snapped his fingers, and illustrations and writing appeared in marker across the surface of the whiteboard. Naomi hurried over and sat down on his knees in front of it. “The time it takes to execute your commands will depend on the amount of data being altered.”