Interlude
AFTER I MET KAZUNE, my life slowly started to change. First of all, I began taking tests seriously again—all of them, even the pop quizzes. Kazune had been continually holding the top spot in our class, but I immediately dethroned her. Sometimes we tied at 100 points, but not once in my high school career did I let her outscore me after that.
She was the type of person who wanted to win by any means necessary, and believe it or not, she started asking me to tutor her. As soon as class ended, she’d come to me with questions, and whenever a teacher handed back a graded test, I’d have to spend my whole lunch break reviewing it with her. In exchange, I lost all my reading time, but I was catastrophically terrible at explaining things, so I needed the practice.
And besides, deep down, part of me was just happy Kazune and I were still talking. I was still in love with her, even though she turned me down.
But that was where things got interesting. Now that Kazune and I were holding study sessions between classes, our classmates naturally saw this as the school’s two highest academic performers working together to better themselves. It wasn’t long until their fragile intellectualist egos compelled them to ask to join us. Then, as our study group gradually expanded and the grade average of Class A shot through the roof, the last few stubborn holdouts in the class finally caved. The group got bigger, and our class’s grade average improved even more.
I say our class was “intellectualist,” but to be fair, we were all just teenagers. There was something magical about working on a project together, and before I knew it, the vibe of the class had completely relaxed. Soon we were going out to karaoke together, just like Kazune’s imagined “World 85,” and the number of people I counted as friends began to grow.
After that, well…we were teenagers! The topics of discussion were bound to shift away from schoolwork, eventually. Sure enough, some started to talk about pop culture and romance, and before long, someone finally asked the question. “What exactly is going on between you and Takigawa-san?”
At school, Kazune maintained her quiet, aloof “Takigawa-san” persona. She was always cautiously polite, even with peers, and she didn’t fraternize more than strictly necessary. But with me, she was a bit more relaxed. She was also the only person in class I referred to by their first name. It was only natural that people would suspect something.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to respond to that. I couldn’t exactly tell them about her big revenge plot… Well, to be totally honest, I didn’t want to tell them. I wanted it to stay a special memory that only she and I knew about. My only option was to admit that I asked her out and she turned me down. They were shocked to hear it.
Over the next two years and until my high school graduation, I would enlist the support of basically my entire first-year class (minus a few who ended up in separate programs) to re-confess my feelings for Kazune a total of five different times. They all ended in rejection. I was really hoping she’d go for it the fifth time, on graduation day even, but alas, all I got was a smile and her usual curt “no.”
And with that, Kazune and I went off to college.
✦ ✦ ✦
Kyushu University Faculty of Science, Department of Imaginary Science. The first university in the world to offer a formal degree in imaginary science.
The Kyushu region was generally considered to be at the forefront of imaginary science innovation. In fact, the woman who originally discovered and established the field, Satou Itoko, was a physics student at Kyushu U. From there, she transferred to a graduate school in Germany before coming back to Japan to become the country’s youngest professor. She then established the Imaginary Science Research Institute (ISRI) and set about proving her theory. My dad and Kazune’s dad were both friends with her in college, and they all went on to work at the ISRI together.
Their efforts would pay off approximately ten years later, right around the time I was ten years old. It was then that Professor Satou went back to Germany and announced she had proven the existence of parallel worlds at a scientific conference—sparking unprecedented levels of debate as scientific organizations across the globe came together to try to verify (or debunk) this lofty claim. And just three short years later, each and every international scientific authority confirmed the ISRI’s findings. Imaginary science was now an accepted field of study.
The following year, Kyushu University added a Department of Imaginary Science to its Faculty of Science. A handful of researchers that included Professor Satou were invited to teach there part-time, offering lessons on the latest discoveries in the field. In order to study imaginary science, Kazune and I both enrolled there. Our high school was all too eager to give us their letters of recommendation, and after we survived the interview stage, we left our hometown of Oita City, and both got our own apartments in Fukuoka.
Seeing as we were both moving to the same place, I thought I may as well ask her to live with me (love confession #6), but she turned me down again, explaining she wanted to see what it was like to live on her own. I was perhaps the only guy in the world who had been rejected by the same woman six separate times. However, at this point, I was starting to lean into it. I decided I’d keep asking her out until the day she found someone else.
But then, during the summer of our first year at college, she randomly showed up at my apartment one weekend and dropped a bombshell on me.
“Oh, that reminds me, Takasaki-kun. I had a favor I wanted to ask.”
“Hm? What’s up?” I figured she might need to borrow some money, but I couldn’t remember offhand how much I had in my wallet.
“Could you go out with me?”
All right, deep breaths now… We’re not gonna fall for it. She doesn’t mean it like that. She probably has an errand to run or something.
“Sure thing. Need an extra pair of hands to carry your shopping bags?” This statement was approximately 90 percent serious and 10 percent hoping to be wrong.
“No, that’s not what I meant. Could you be my boyfriend?”
All right, deep breaths now… We’re not gonna fall for it. She doesn’t mean it like that. She… She means the other kind of boyfriend… You know, uhhh… Wait, what the hell is she talking about?!
I was extremely confused. Who was she, and what had she done with my Kazune? Was she pranking me again? Instead of saying yes and jumping for joy, I just sat there and frowned suspiciously.
“Why?” I asked.
This was close to the worst possible response to a woman confessing her feelings. But could you blame me?
That being said, her answer was even harsher than mine.
“I’ve been getting a lot more male attention now that we’re in college. It’s annoying. I thought I should find myself a boyfriend and put an end to it, and… Eh, you’ll do.”
Or something to that effect. Can you imagine how I felt hearing that? The joy of her finally accepting my love, but also the fury of how she chose to phrase it. If only I could go back in time and see the look on my face…
Point being, I didn’t give her an answer right away. In fact, I even considered saying no. It’d be a hilarious plot twist after all that. But when I saw her sitting there, staring at the floor and avoiding my gaze with her noticeably red ears peeking through her hair… It was so unbearably adorable that I ended up letting it all slide.
And that was how I went from Takasaki-kun to Koyomi.
✦ ✦ ✦
I lived a mostly fulfilling college life, interspersed with time spent with Kazune. After four straight years of excellent grades, both Kazune and I were encouraged to consider grad school, but neither of us cared about getting a Master’s or a PhD. Instead of spending another two to five years studying and networking, we wanted to get into the field and start actually researching. As a result, after we graduated college—as class valedictorian and salutatorian, of course—we went home to Oita, where our passion and skill was rewarded with employment at the ISRI.
Meanwhile, society was starting to see parallel shifting as a normal part of life. The world was on the cusp of widespread IP band implementation, and tester versions had been made available to the public. I began wearing one myself back when I started college, and it was finally starting to sink in just how commonplace minor parallel shifts truly were. Whenever I couldn’t find something in its “usual” place, I’d check my IP band and, sure enough, I’d find that I was one to three worlds away from home.
Of course, there were still plenty of people who refused to accept the concept as anything more than fiction, but society was quickly leaving those people behind. As for the rest of us—those who had chosen to accept, or try to accept, the coming revolution—we were slowly but steadily transitioning to a brand-new world.
Now, then…this naturally led all of humanity to a single, major question.
Were our parallel selves still us?