Chapter 5:
The One on the Other End and My Talent
ONE OF THE THINGS that Alice used to sway Yukari was Jaunt’s school.
Alice bragged, “Yukari, if you come to Jaunt, you can receive the finest education. You don’t even have to share a uniform curriculum with nobodies. You can study what you need. Did you know that the great inventor Thomas Edison was a problem child in school? Or that even Einstein, who created the theory of relativity, dropped out of school? I don’t think you need me to tell you that both of them were true geniuses, like ourselves. It was the school that was at fault. Their schools were not capable of providing them an education that would meet their needs. But you have no need to worry about Jaunt’s school in that regard. You can learn about yourself in an ideal environment, along with fellow geniuses such as us. Someday, you may even be able to unravel the mystery of your eyes!”
“Oh! You…really think so?”
“Of course I do! The school is for geniuses, and it is a wide, wide world. Is there not a Japanese saying, ‘The frog in the well does not know of the sea and thinks that the well is the whole world’? Or was that a Chinese saying? Never mind, I have the perfect analogy for you, Yukari. The philosopher Frank Jackson devised a thought experiment called ‘Mary’s room.’ Have you heard of it?”
Alice explained the scenario as follows: Mary the brilliant scientist has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room. There are no windows, and the TV is black and white. She’s never seen any proper colors. Nonetheless, she is a genius, and her powerful brain knows all the scientific information there is to know about color. Her understanding of the physics that define color is perfect. There’s just one thing: she’s only ever experienced the black-and-white room and never actually seen colors for herself. Then, when she’s released from the black-and-white room and steps out into the outside world bursting with color, is there nothing left for her to learn, or if not, what is this new thing that she learns?
“The thrust of the thought experiment is, where does the new thing Mary learns come from? But in this case, you can ignore that. The important point that I am trying to make is that, regardless of what you learn, you will not know until you leave the room. Yukari, you are living in the black-and-white room. Outside there is a world full of color, and now you have been given a chance to step out. Do you understand, Yukari? When Mary leaves the black-and-white room, she must learn something she never could have when she was trapped in that black-and-white world, which is that there is a world that is larger and more beautiful.”
Alice interpreted it along the lines of “The frog in the well knows not the great sea,” but I took interest in a different angle. I thought it was a shame Nanami wasn’t here to hear this. (Nanami, sadly, had been repeatedly baited by Alice to say, “Mari’s no friend of mine!” and had been starting to avoid Alice outright.)
Nanami had told me before it could be that our bodies—no, everything in the world—was made of clouds of probabilities called quanta whose existence was only determined when observed. And it could be that the basis point that determined their existence was the qualia that came up in our heads. It could be that it was the qualia that determined Nanami’s body to be a human’s and not a metal frame. It could be that Yukari both saw our bodies as robots and was able to determine and repair them in terms of robot parts because she had different qualia.
But where did these qualia come from in the first place? Why was it that we saw the same things yet felt different qualia—not just between Yukari and us, but even between Nanami and me? After Yukari left, I started idly thinking about such things. Thinking about out-of-the-ordinary concepts like qualia made me feel as if I were still connected to Yukari somehow, and in fact, I was interested in the things that were going on in my body. So I started studying all kinds of things. By this time, Nanami and I weren’t close anymore, so I had to do it by myself, but I still had a very reliable partner.
At night, I grabbed a sweet drink—or maybe it was some candy?—and made a call with my left hand.
“Hello? Uh…I’ll just check, but this is the first time we’ve talked, isn’t it?”
“Well, it is and it isn’t. Man… Uh, hello, me?”
It was a call to the “me” in another world.
✦ ✦ ✦
I thought of calling myself because that mysterious phone call had been bugging me all this time. No matter how I thought about it, it seemed like the one who had called was “me.” But how could I call myself? It was beyond preposterous. So I figured it must have been a delusion, a hallucination, a figment of my imagination. Yet that voice wouldn’t get out of my head. I’d glance at my left hand and those words warning me of the danger to Yukari would come back so real.
For some time after she left, I kept in touch with Yukari by phone. But with the time difference and all, pretty soon we switched over to writing letters. (My left hand had an email feature, I guess, but I didn’t know how to use it.) The first letter I got after that change said indirectly that she wouldn’t be able to keep in touch as regularly from here on out. There were lots of things to do and she wouldn’t have time until things settled down.
It was good she was busy, I reassured myself. I missed her, but it was for her sake.
One night I was struggling with myself like that, looking at my left hand, when it hit me: What if I called myself? Wouldn’t I hear myself? That’s right—myself. It wasn’t as if I really thought I’d get whoever had called me that night. It was more just that I suddenly got the urge to hear my voice through my phone. If I went ahead and listened to my own voice, I’d realize the voice from back then wasn’t mine—that would be a relief. That would prove that that call was just me being confused or some kind of crossed-wire situation. I wanted to verify what had happened. Once I reasoned it like that, I couldn’t hold back anymore, and I gave it a try then and there. You’d think it would have occurred to me that if I called myself, I’d just get a busy signal, but at the time, such thoughts never crossed my mind. So I called my own number.
“Hello, Yuka… Huh? Wait, who are you? Me?”
“Whoa, no way… Huh? Me?!”
I was literally talking to myself.