Then you might have a single clue as to how we felt.
“So, this might be kind of a leap, but I think the power of Mari’s eyes might have to do with that, you know? We look like robots to her, right? So if we use the Copenhagen interpretation, it might be that what she observes undergoes wave function collapse to be robots. Alternatively, if we use the Many-worlds interpretation, it could be that her eyes are looking at us in another world where we are robots. Or, when you think about it, in the first place—maybe it’s not that qualia are generated from what we see, but that they’re just the determination of the form that what we see ought to have.”
“That’s…quite a leap, all right.”
“Yeah, I admit it, but what do you expect? I’m a teenager, not a scientist. But don’t you think it sounds plausible? We can’t confirm it with our own eyes, but then we can’t see quanta either. So maybe what Mari sees undergoes some sort of change on the micro level or something. Our bodies actually change that way, regardless of what they’re actually made of! With my qualia, I observe my body as flesh and blood, so my body is determined as human, and your left hand looks like a left hand and not a cell phone because you’re the one observing it, you know? Anyway, when you think about it that way, it could be that there’s nothing unnatural at all about Mari’s power. It could be we just don’t know much about it and, in fact, it’s not bizarre; it’s normal.”
In the past, Tenjou Nanami had an accident that almost killed her, and Yukari saved her; rather, Yukari fixed her using pieces of a broken jungle gym. According to Yukari, almost 40 percent of Tenjou Nanami’s body was repaired with metal bars, and they weren’t the usual materials that compose a human being, but jungle gym parts. I guess it was no wonder that Nanami, who was only a child then, ended up fearing and hating Yukari.
Nanami and I, in general, did not get along. When Yukari was between us, we argued obstinately all the time. But we did talk normally sometimes, like when it was just us and Yukari wasn’t around. When a nice breeze was blowing, and you looked up and the sky above was clear, and you were able to savor a moment of calm…at times like those, Nanami would seem to forget that I was her bitter rival and start going on about what she’d learned about science and letting her feelings out into the open. Sometimes, she said, she was still woken up by nightmares. Sometimes she’d look in the mirror and hallucinate that she wasn’t human. She’d worry that in the next moment, the metal beams in her body would rust and crumble and her true robotic self would be revealed.
The truth was that Nanami loved Yukari and valued her as a friend. She knew that Yukari saved her with the best of intentions. But to accept Yukari as she was would mean to accept herself as being almost half-made of jungle gym parts—otherwise she wouldn’t be alive right now. If Nanami truly believed that, could she really call herself human, or even the same person she was before? It would take more than a few words to express Nanami’s feelings for herself and Yukari, but Nanami was doing her best to accept this reality. Studying stuff like qualia and quantum mechanics—really, anything that seemed the least bit relevant, even if she was only a junior high schooler—was her way of trying to come to terms with it. Oh, and not to brag or anything, but I think I played a pretty major role too.
There was an incident in which I got attacked and dismembered by a serial killer. (Now that I think about it, that’s pretty messed up.) Yukari fixed me. There was no jungle gym involved, but I guess it’s still fair to say I was like Nanami. We’d both been through insane stuff and come out of it with “aftermarket parts”—in my case, my left hand had been fixed with an entire cell phone, and in Nanami’s case, she’d been repaired with the bulk of a jungle gym. Thus, as those with similar circumstances, we were able to share with each other what was in our hearts, though I wasn’t really as traumatized by it all as Nanami was.
Our connection went through Yukari, but at the same time, Nanami was starting to repair her relationship with Yukari by going through me. When I showed Nanami that I accepted myself the way Yukari fixed me, Nanami learned to accept what had happened to her. With a little more time, Nanami would probably have gotten over what happened in the past. She would have been friends with Yukari once again, getting along just like they used to.
If only Yukari hadn’t left, that is.
Yukari moved abroad the next school year, and after that, Nanami and I didn’t talk anymore. We were in the same class that year, but maybe out of a sense of guilt somewhere in our hearts, we avoided and ignored each other outright. The relationship between Nanami and me ended as if in synchronization with Yukari’s departure.
There was actually a world where Nanami and I met at a reunion after we grew up. That was eleven years after the present, when we were twenty-five years old. In this world, believe it or not, Nanami was an up-and-coming star actress while I was a freelance writer. So I never expected to see her in person, but she came to the reunion, and she greeted me all friendly. “Remember me?” she said.
I skipped the afterparty and asked Nanami if she wanted to come to my house. She said she had work in the morning (“Tenjou Nanamy” was her stage name, by the way), but she spent the night anyway.
Yukari and I had often slept at each other’s houses, but it was the first time Nanami had slept at mine. In the dark, lying beside each other, we talked about all sorts of things, as if to fill in all the time we hadn’t met. We started from recent events and gradually worked our way back to junior high.
“Hey, Tenjou, didn’t you date Kasoku in our third year?”
“Oh, no, you knew about that? I thought I kept it a secret from everyone!”
“Well, no, I’d say it was pretty obvious. Oops! Did I get in your way tonight then? You must have wanted to see him after all this time, huh? He was there, you know.”
Incidentally, I once dated Kasoku as well, at exactly the same time that Nanami did. It wasn’t cheating, of course. It was one-on-one and serious—as serious as you could be at that age.
“Well, I don’t know, how should I put it…” Nanami deflected bashfully.
Seeing my chance, I posed the question. “By the way, Tenjou…do you remember Marii-san?”
Nanami acted like she was thinking for a little bit, and then nodded. “Oh, yeah! I remember her, now that you mention it. Wow, Marii Yukari! She was a funny girl, huh? And she was so cute too…”
Hearing Nanami’s innocent prattle, it dawned on me: Nanami had forgotten Yukari, the girl she once called Mari. She’d written her off as someone in the distant past and forged her memories of her. That’s right: people alter their memories so easily. They remake the past, however it is convenient for them, all to protect themselves.
One could say that Nanami had re-observed the past. She’d reconstituted it as something she could accept by turning Yukari’s eyes and the repair by jungle gym into the jokes of a funny girl and not the truth. I was a little shocked but not really angry. I didn’t have the right to be, anyway. I was the last person who could criticize Nanami for turning her eyes from reality and remaking the past the way she wanted.
Then Nanami dropped casually, “Oh, yeah, she didn’t come, did she? Marii-san, I mean. That’s right… She moved away at the end of our second year, didn’t she? I wonder what she’s doing now.”
All I could reply was an empty “Yeah.”
“Hatou, we barely hung out once we ended up in the same class, did we? It’s funny how we didn’t talk back then, but now, here we are, talking the night away.”
“Yeah. No kidding…”
I agreed with her. We could have been close back then. If only Yukari hadn’t moved away.
If only Yukari had lived.
I wasn’t angry at Nanami for conveniently forgetting Yukari. I wasn’t jealous, either. I wasn’t remorseful. If anything, I was relieved.
That was fine, I thought. She was probably happier that way.
Nanami left early in the morning. Just before she left, she seemed to hesitate and then said, “You know, Hatou…would you mind if we kept in touch a little bit from now on? Like this, you know…”
“Sure. Of course.”
“Really? I’m so glad! The truth is, I don’t have anyone else I can talk to like this.”
In junior high school, I never would have imagined Nanami looking so sincere. I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself. “What are you talking about, you superstar, you? Sure, let’s keep in touch. Call me anytime. I mean…we’re friends, aren’t we?”
That’s right, friends—from back in the day through Yukari, but still. Call me anytime, okay?
But I am not going to forget Marii Yukari—not ever.
That’s why I have no need for this world.
I guess I got ahead of myself telling this story.
I’d better keep this in order to avoid unnecessary confusion. One year after I met Yukari, on summer vacation during my second year of junior high, I crossed paths with a criminal, suffered for it, and Yukari saved me (well, fixed me). Then I demonstrated my “multipurpose adaptability” as described by Yukari by taking it all in stride. I got closer to Yukari (and Nanami for good measure)—or so I thought.
Things changed after summer vacation. Nothing would be the same after the second term’s first day.
An exchange student had joined our class. She was like a little girl straight out of a storybook, with blonde hair and amber eyes, who called herself Alice Foyle.
And Alice, too, knew how things looked to Yukari.