Unfortunately, three days later, I wasn’t feeling well at all. But I concealed it from my family and left the house with just my wallet and my pills.
“Be back in a bit!”
“Yes, dear. Be careful.”
Considering how long we’d known each other, I sensed that my wife might have seen right through me—but if she did, she didn’t pry. This was another perk of a long marriage. And so, on August 17th at 9:30 a.m., I headed off to the Showa-dori intersection.
Walking was too difficult for me now, so I took my trusty old motorized wheelchair. That thing could go up to ten kilometers per hour if I really tried, but I was in no real rush. Instead, I chugged along at a buttery smooth four KPH, gazing out at the streets I once traveled on my own two feet.
For some reason, I was in the mood to wax nostalgic. That building wasn’t there before; what did they do with the sculpture? How hasn’t that store shut down by now? The ghosts of old memories sprang to life behind my eyes like two rolls of film played at once. After all, this was most likely my very last trip into town.
It was in that moment I realized I had dawdled a bit too long. I meant to arrive at the meetup spot ten minutes early, but when I checked the time, it was already nearly 10 a.m.
The Showa-dori intersection was our city’s largest, splitting into four quarters almost exactly at the center. Styled as a pedestrian scramble, it naturally got a lot of traffic. In the past, there used to be a big pedestrian overpass connecting each of the four corners, but people complained about the pillars impeding visibility for drivers, so the whole thing was torn down. The old photographs made it look so cool though! Whenever I came to the intersection, I’d often stop and imagine what it would have been like to walk across it.
But while this place certainly held some dear memories for me…I still couldn’t recall what this appointment was for.
Today, 10 a.m., at the Showa-dori intersection—a mysterious calendar entry I didn’t remember adding. I had hoped faintly that my so-called “senior moment” would clear away as soon as I got here, but evidently not.
On the southwest corner of the intersection, there was a patch of greenery too small to be called a park. There stood the Leotard Girl, a bronze statue of a curvy young woman shyly covering her chest with her arms. It had been there since before I was born, and I was used to seeing it, but I had no clue who the model was or why it was erected there.
This was supposedly our meetup spot, but other than the people waiting at the crosswalk, I didn’t see anyone standing there. I rolled to a stop and gazed up at the statue for a while. Soon after, I felt people staring at me and I hastily looked away.
The next thing I knew, the light had changed, and the crowd on the street corner was gone. A new crowd was approaching from the other side of the road to take their place. Granted, this sleepy little suburban intersection was nothing compared to the big ones I’d seen on TV, but nevertheless, I found myself watching people come and go. Long after they all made it safely across, the light held firm, affording plenty of extra time for pedestrians.
But just then…I spotted a girl standing all alone on the crosswalk. She was just a few steps from the curb, but she refused to finish crossing, nor did she turn back. Instead, she merely stood there.
Of course, the crossing light wouldn’t stay green forever. If she waited any longer, she’d be in danger. Rolling my wheelchair to the curb, I called out to her.
“Hello there, young lady! What are you doing there? It’s not safe, you know.”
At the sound of my voice, the girl looked over. Was she in junior high, perhaps? She was a pretty young girl with long, straight black hair cascading over her white dress.
The moment she laid eyes on me, she tilted her head. “Oh, did you come to get me?” she asked innocently.
A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but in a sense, I was indeed retrieving her from the road. Then the walk light started to flash, so I decided to go along with it. “Yes, I’ve come to get you! Come over here and let’s go.”
As I spoke, I extended a hand. In response, the girl beamed brightly…and vanished.
I froze with my hand outstretched.
The light then changed, and cars started whizzing past right in front of me, so I put my wheelchair in reverse and went all the way back to the statue. I looked back at the road from there, but still there was no sign of the girl.
This was not my first time seeing someone vanish right before my eyes, but it had been a while, so it really caught me off guard. There could be only one explanation: I had just parallel shifted to an alternate universe. Put simply, my consciousness had traded places with some other self in some other world.
The fact that I was still in the same location suggested that the other me had also come here, which would suggest this world was nearby. However, people didn’t vanish into thin air over a difference of two or three worlds, so I must have shifted about ten away. It had been quite some time since my last long-distance shift. Worst-case scenario, back in World Zero, that girl just got hit by a car.
Then, I remembered I hadn’t even bothered to check my IP. For all I knew, I could have woken up this morning in a parallel world and only just now returned. Speaking into my IP band, I pulled up the IEPP screen with its six-digit numerical display. If the first three were zero, that meant I was at home in World Zero.
But instead, the screen displayed one word:
ERROR
“It’s broken…?”
Oh dear. How was I supposed to know what world I was in now?
If I was currently in World Zero and that girl at the crosswalk was from some other parallel world, then there was nothing I could do—but if this was a parallel world and she was from my world, well, I had reason to be concerned. Would my parallel self manage to rescue her in my place?
I felt myself growing desperate for some way to check my current IP. I thought about asking a passerby, but then I remembered one snag—someone else’s IP wouldn’t help me. Alternatively, I could go and request a replacement, but that process would take hours.
As I mulled it over, it occurred to me that human beings had lived happily for thousands of years with no way of checking their IP at all. But then, a single scientist came along and proved the existence of parallel worlds, revealing that we all unconsciously shifted across them on a daily basis. Now, decades later, elementary school students were learning about it alongside their other subjects—something that was previously seen as nothing more than science fiction.
In essence, I had just gone back to the way life used to be.
I could still remember the day that the concept of parallel worlds came crashing into my life. Yes, the day I became aware of other worlds was right around my tenth birthday…