THE FOREST WITHIN the Imperial Palace grounds sped by outside the window.
As instructed by the hooded man, Naomi had caught a city bus heading down Imadegawa Street. It was afternoon now, so things were relatively crowded. He held onto a strap with one hand and gripped his cell phone in the other.
At the moment, he was looking at the Pluura Maps app. A blue line showed the path to the destination the man had specified, marked with a pin and the word Demachiyanagi.
Naomi tapped the screen. The camera zoomed in, changing from a map to street-level photographs of the area. It was a fully rotatable 360-degree image, complete with pedestrians frozen in mid-stride.
“So Chronicle Kyoto is just a much more detailed version of this, right?” he asked.
The hooded man stood calmly at his side. He wasn’t bothering to hold on to anything, even for show.
“In a sense, yes. But there’s really no comparison,” he replied. “As a quantum storage device, AllTale has infinite capacity. We’re not talking about twice as much storage space, or even ten times as much. It can record billions or trillions of times more information than any conventional computer system.”
“Those numbers are so large, it’s kind of hard to actually grasp…”
“Ahem.”
Naomi looked over his shoulder. A middle-aged man in a suit was staring at him with an annoyed expression on his face. Naomi realized he’d been talking to “himself” fairly loudly.
The man in the hood snorted in amusement. Somehow, Naomi managed to hate him just a little bit more.
After a while, the bus pulled into the stop outside Demachiyanagi Station. As soon as they disembarked, the hooded man walked off quickly.
“Get a move on. We’re cutting it close.”
Totally bewildered, Naomi hurried after him. It was hard to keep up with his long-legged strides; Naomi had to jog along, in fact. It felt like the man was rubbing his height in his face or something.
Out of spite, Naomi picked up the pace until he was walking alongside the hooded man.
“You were looking at Map View mode earlier, right?” the man said.
“Huh? Oh. Yeah.”
“There were pedestrians in the images, weren’t there?”
“Sure.”
“Here’s a question for you,” the man said, his tone dropping lower than usual. “Do you think the people in those photos know they’re inside a photo?”
Naomi furrowed his brow at that. The question didn’t make much sense. Even after turning it over in his mind, it still seemed nonsensical.
As he hesitated over his reply, the two of them arrived at their destination. The hooded man hopped down off the sidewalk, then ran down the embankment leading to the river.
They’d come to the Kamo Delta, a triangular piece of land where the Kamo River meets the Takano. There were stepping stones leading from the top of the triangle to either side, so you could get from one side to the other on foot. It was a famous local spot that got featured in a lot of movies and TV shows.
Naomi and the hooded man were on the east side of the delta, on a paved section of the Takano riverbank. It was still early afternoon, and there were tourists nearby, lounging in the grass or hopping their way across the river.
In the sky above them, one of the mapping drones Naomi had just heard so much about was circling quietly. The faint humming of its propellers only accentuated the peacefulness of the moment.
That was the only thing of interest he could see.
Naomi blinked in confusion. “Uh, there’s nothing here…” They’d rushed over in a big hurry, but from what he could tell, there wasn’t anything special going on.
“Wrong. There’s something here, all right,” the hooded man said, turning back to face Naomi. The two of them stared at each other in silence for a long moment. Finally, the hooded man smirked.
“Specifically, a prerecorded event.”
Naomi frowned. What’s that supposed to mean?
In that same moment—he saw something moving out of the corner of his eye. Turning toward it reflexively, he realized it was a small shadow darting across the ground. He looked up to find the source.
Something up there was falling toward him.
“Gah!”
He had no chance to react in time. A blow to the head staggered him; the next thing he knew, he was down on the ground on all fours, staring at the concrete in a daze.
Two drops of blood dripped to the ground before his eyes.
After a long moment, his brain finally started functioning again. Something had just fallen from the sky and hit him. He’d seen a glimpse of a propeller.
Was that the drone?
“Let me take you back to the year 2020.” The hooded man said. “That was when the real Chronicle Kyoto project began, operating under the utmost secrecy.”
The hooded man walked up and paused in front of the fallen drone. The thing’s propeller was damaged; a small light flashed on its body to indicate potential danger. The man stared down at it for a moment.
“The plan was to use a huge network of surveillance and measurement machines to precisely monitor the entire city, recording all detectable phenomena in AllTale.”
“What?” Naomi asked, dazed. Pressing a hand to his forehead, he looked up. He could feel a trickle of liquid against his palm.
“All…what?”
“Jumping forward to April 17th, 2027,” the man continued, ignoring Naomi entirely as he listed today’s date, “Katagaki Naomi, attempting to read a book on the riverbank, was hit by a malfunctioning drone that fell from the sky. This left him with a nasty cut on his forehead.”
He paused for a moment to point at the drone.
“That’s the past, as recorded in AllTale.”
“The past?” Naomi parroted back numbly. It took a moment for the meaning of the word to work its way into his mind.
“Yes.” The hooded man didn’t seem inclined to give Naomi’s brain a chance to catch up. With a sweeping gesture of his arm, he indicated the city as a whole. “This is a record of Kyoto, as it existed in the past.” Next, he pointed down at Naomi where he crouched on the ground. “And you are a record of Katagaki Naomi as he existed in the past.”
“Uh, I…”
Slowly, Naomi began to make sense of this. The strange question the man had asked a few minutes earlier seemed much more relevant now.
Do you think the people in those photos know they’re inside a photo?
Those people in the Map View weren’t real. They were just images. Data.
Records of the past.
“I’m…a record?”
The man nodded firmly. “That’s correct. And as for me…” He reached up to the hood he always wore. Slowly, he began to pull it back.
Little by little, his face came into view. His cheeks looked a little thin, and there were bags under his eyes.
“I’m a man who’s accessing the AllTale system from the real world, in the year 2037.” Finally, he yanked the hood back completely. The man looked like he was in his twenties. He had a small scar on his forehead.
It was in the same spot that Naomi was currently holding his hand to.
Wait. Is he… Oh God. He has to be…
“I’m you, Katagaki Naomi. From ten years in the future.”
“You’re…what?” Naomi repeated numbly. “The future…?”
He fully understood, at last, what was going on.
Strangely, this made perfect sense to him. It filled in all the blanks and lined up perfectly with the events of these last two days. It all fit together.
There was just one problem.
Was something so absurd really possible?
In a science fiction novel, sure. In a movie, absolutely. It was the sort of story you saw all the time in comics and video games. But it wasn’t something that happened in real life.
But then again…this man was telling him that this world wasn’t real. He was claiming Naomi lived in a simulation of the past, and that he’d somehow broken into it from the future.
“Don’t be scared.”
Startled, Naomi looked up again. The man was staring down at him with a little smile on his face. His voice sounded almost gentle, in a way it never had before.
“Rest assured, you’ve got nothing to worry about. I know all about you. You’re me, after all.” The man’s voice was soothing and kind. Striding up to Naomi, he bent down on one knee to bring their faces closer together.
I have to say something, Naomi thought. But his bewilderment wasn’t going away. Finding the right words felt impossible.
“Don’t say anything,” the man said gently. “I understand.”
In that moment, Naomi felt reassured in a strange way he’d never experienced before. It felt a bit like…he was with an old friend who knew him intimately. Or a family member who he completely trusted.
This man was Naomi. He knew everything about him.
In that case, he had to know what Naomi was going through right now.
He knew about his frustration, his anguish, and his failed attempts to change.
“That’s right. That’s the reason I came here,” Naomi’s other self murmured quietly. “I know what you’re thinking…”
Naomi’s heart thudded loudly in his chest. He stared up at the older man with the expression of a trusting little brother.
The man continued, his eyes full of compassion.
“You want a girlfriend.”
“Uh, not really…”
The Takano River gurgled softly along, oblivious to the awkward silence between them.