Interlude
THAT WAS MY FIRST EXPERIENCE with parallel worlds. Incidentally, Yuno surpassed my expectations by surviving another two years after that. She died peacefully in her sleep.
Looking back, it was around then that the world rapidly began to acknowledge the concept of parallel worlds as well. It was Japan’s own Imaginary Science Research Institute that first officially proved their existence. That’s right—the same place where Dad worked.
To summarize it:
Our world is linked to dozens of alternate worlds that we unconsciously visit on a regular basis. The physical form does not travel, but rather, the consciousness is transplanted into another version of the self that exists within the parallel world. The process happens instantaneously, with no time lag.
The closer the world is to our own, the smaller the differences between the two. Often, it’s something as trivial as what we had for breakfast that morning. Furthermore, the closer the parallel world is to ours, the more likely we will travel there without realizing it, and the shorter the visit will be. This is why we don’t notice when it happens. It is this phenomenon that results in “misremembered” times and dates for social gatherings, or “misplaced” belongings that turn up in unexpected places.
It is believed that on rare occasions, humans may travel to more distant worlds that are dramatically different from our own. In those cases, the individual will feel as though they walked into an alternate reality.
Henceforth, the act of traveling between parallel worlds will be referred to as “parallel shifting.”
As you might expect, the announcement was treated as a joke at first. But then Professor Satou Itoko, director of the Imaginary Science Research Institute, began to substantiate her claims with the data she’d amassed through her research. In doing so, she sparked unprecedented levels of debate. 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.
Then, right before I turned fifteen, they developed a device that could measure IP—short for Imaginary Elements Print, the signifier unique to each parallel world. Scholars from every field were given prototypes as part of a trial run. This function would come to be known as an IEPP counter.
From that point in time forward, children were affixed with IP bands right from birth—wearable devices with an IEPP counter installed. At the time of birth, the software registered the current world as World Zero, and by continually monitoring your IP against that initial value, you could determine which world you were in at any given time. With this innovation, society quickly accepted parallel worlds as a part of everyday life.
That being said, back when I was fifteen, there were a lot of skeptics who only saw parallel worlds as a fictional concept. Even long after it was recognized as a valid field of study, some people still treated it as a pseudoscience.
As for me, while the world was rapidly shifting to accommodate a new relationship with imaginary science, an earthshaking event would soon change my world. And it, too, involved parallel worlds.
That being said, it was a highly unusual case…