Chapter 11:
The Answer and “I”
IT WAS EASY to stop being me.
If you want logic, I’ll come up with some. If you need a process, I’ll devise one.
First I tried being my mother. My mother was not technically me, but she had half my genes, so you could say she was half “me.” So if I could just believe that I could become “me,” that was enough. As long as I kept my thinking flexible, it was feasible for the infinite “mes” with infinite possibilities in infinite parallel worlds. “I” could do anything—apart from saving Yukari.
So I stopped being “me” and became my mother. I even tried being my father while I was at it. Once I’d done it once, the rest was simple. I tried being my grandfather. I tried being my grandmother. I tried being my great-grandfather. I tried being my great-grandmother. I followed the roots all the way up and then came back down. I became my teacher at school. It turned out we were distantly related.
Even Nanami and I shared an ancestor in the remote past. So I became Nanami too. Yes, the further I went back, the more people I could become—at the cost of losing my sense of time, of losing what you would call sanity. Still, I’d lived as so many different people. Of course, I might have lost things in the process, but if so, I wasn’t aware of it.
There were some problems. (You probably realize this by now, but I am by no means omnipotent.) Unfortunately, when I became my mother, my father, or someone else like Nanami—perhaps because it wasn’t totally me, but a “me” that had been divided in half, and then half again, and then half again—the sharing of knowledge and experience didn’t go as well.
How do I put it? All the memories I was left with were those of externally observable objective facts. I knew what my mother, my father, or Nanami did when, but I didn’t receive any information at all about what was going on inside them, like what was running through their heads. And I didn’t know why, but there were some people I should have been able to become but couldn’t.
Whatever—I didn’t dwell on those details. The important thing was not to totally become Nanami, nor to become every person in the world, but to deny “myself” and become someone other than “me.”
I tried protecting Yukari as Nanami. Yukari was still killed.
All right, time for some more trial and error.
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I tried being my teacher, I tried being my parents, I tried being a total stranger, and still I couldn’t save Yukari. I tried being the prime minister, I tried being the police, I tried being Kasoku with his drills, and still I couldn’t save Yukari. No matter who I became, I couldn’t save her. I was at my limits, yet it was never enough.
Do you know the Mother Goose rhyme that goes like this? “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.”
Not a single person could save Yukari.
As Nanami, I looked at “Hatou Manabu” from Nanami’s eyes. Not “me” at the other end of the phone, but the real, living, moving “Hatou Manabu.” The real “me” who was born from my parents but wasn’t me. It was funny—or maybe obvious—but even when I was someone else, Hatou Manabu went on existing. And “Hatou Manabu” and “I” couldn’t share our knowledge. We were completely separate entities. I was Nanami and “Hatou Manabu” was in front of me, talking happily to Yukari. But she didn’t know that you couldn’t put Humpty together again.
Suddenly thinking of it, I tried killing “Hatou Manabu” in one world.
It didn’t particularly change anything.
In another world I tried threatening “Hatou Manabu” so she’d stop being friends with Yukari. It still didn’t change anything. It seemed, in the end, “Hatou Manabu” wasn’t an important factor.
Oh, I also tried being Yukari’s mother.
When you got down to it, people were after Yukari because they knew about her purple eyes. It seemed to me that I should control things so that people didn’t know about them. It seemed like a great idea. I stuck like glue to Yukari, never having her brother or sister, not minding my husband, just focusing on Yukari. I warned her sternly not to let anyone catch on to the way she saw things, and I trained her in proper behavior so that her actions wouldn’t give it away.
I suppose to an outside observer, the way I did it might have seemed cruel, but Yukari’s life depended on it, so I steeled my heart and forced Yukari to keep the fact that living things looked like robots to her an absolute secret from everyone. I didn’t give in to crying or shouting. I didn’t overlook the slightest transgressions. I made her swear up and down not to repeat her mistakes. At the same time, I showed her plenty of love so that she wouldn’t mistake my intent. After I berated her sufficiently that she’d never forget it and made sure her body remembered too, I hugged her. When Yukari did well, I lavished her with praise. I constantly poured my whole heart and soul into conveying to her that I wasn’t doing this out of hatred, but out of love, out of a pure desire to protect her.
That’s right. I wasn’t like Alice’s mother. I wasn’t doing this out of narcissism, but out of genuine care for Marii Yukari.
My teaching was so effective that even Yukari’s father didn’t find out how things looked to her. The price was that Yukari didn’t become friends with Hatou Manabu or Nanami—or anyone at all, in fact, but that was all right with me. The important thing was to protect Yukari at all costs. I had to be sure that no one other than me found out about the way things seemed in her purple eyes. She didn’t need any friends who would put her life in danger—for now, at least—and anyway, she had to grin and bear it to get through her last year of junior high.
But Yukari never made it into her third year of junior high.
She never even made it into junior high. On the day of her entrance ceremony, she was hit by a car and died. According to witness testimony, Yukari had wobbled into the line of traffic as if she had intended to do so.
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Someone tell me: where did I go wrong?
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In the course of crossing countless worlds, sometimes as “me” and sometimes as “others,” it gradually dawned on me. I felt as if I’d grasped my error.
In the end, could it be that Yukari’s death was an entirely separate matter from Jaunt or me? Could it be that the world itself was Yukari’s—and was my—enemy? You could call it fate if you wanted. In any case, was there something in the world that willed Yukari’s death? The death of whom the world looked upon differently from the vast majority? Was it that something that was getting in my way?
I saw it. My fundamental mistake had been assuming that I was the sole person who could determine reality. Now that I thought about it, if I could, others should be able to too. At the beginning, at least, I was a normal human being—a nobody. If we went with the Copenhagen interpretation, no matter how much I might determine the results of the world in which Yukari lived, I wasn’t the only one observing it. Everyone living in the world had to be observing it, just as I was. If it was the consensus of the majority that determined the world, then no matter how limitless my possibilities might be, I was still the minority; And Yukari, who saw humans as robots, was a foreign object that normal people sought to eliminate, perhaps. The way they did certain geniuses, as described by Alice.
Was the consensus of the world recognizing Yukari as a foreign object and determining her elimination? Was that why my attempts to prevent it were futile?
Yes, I might open the box with the cat in it, but if I too was in a box, I’d just think I determined the life of the cat, whereas the one who imprisoned me could open my box and observe me, overturning the result I thought was determined. No matter what I did, someone else would redetermine it.
Was that the situation I was in?
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What I needed was knowledge—and perspective. I needed to know just what I had to observe. And just what was observing me.
I refused to believe in fate. If I was trapped in a box, I would escape.
Yes. Now I finally saw what the question was. And in that case, I only had to move like light toward the answer.
Watch me—I would win.