Chapter 3:
Adolescence, Part 2
“IMAGINARY KARYOMITOSIS.” The director read out the words she’d written, then rapped her knuckles against the whiteboard. “This is the tentative name I’ve given to my daughter’s condition.”
I listened attentively, unwilling to miss a single word.
My dad brought me to the lab with him this morning, and after we arrived, we holed up in a meeting room with the director, newly returned from Fukuoka.
A month had now passed since Shiori was confirmed brain-dead. In that time, the director had traveled back and forth between the ISRI and Kyushu University Hospital, and on some occasions, my dad went with her. I, too, was sometimes summoned to one of those two locations, and as a “sample” who had two different experiences parallel shifting to distant worlds, I was subjected to a lot of tests.
But…I wasn’t permitted to see Shiori, not even once.
Dad kept me updated on her condition, but it was always the same thing: There was no change to her current state. Every time. I was too stubborn to accept it, so I started doing some research on brain death. It only pushed me further into despair.
Unlike a vegetative state where the brain was functional enough to keep the body breathing on its own, brain death meant the brain had fully shut down—there was no regulatory function and virtually no chance of recovery. Most patients diagnosed with brain death would die within the week.
What if Shiori had actually died a long time ago? What if my dad and the director were just hiding it from me?
I was so frustrated that I wanted to just scream. Sometimes I did scream. I had no appetite, and whenever I wasn’t being overly combative for no reason, I was depressed to the point of contemplating suicide so I could be with Shiori again. But actually killing myself was too much effort—I simply wished I could stop breathing.
Naturally, given my current mental state, I didn’t go back to school when summer break ended. Instead, I spent my days at home, at the lab, or at the hospital in Fukuoka. The one silver lining was the kindness I was shown by everyone around me. That was the only thing keeping me sane. Other than that, I was living like a shut-in.
But then, just a few days ago, the director summoned me to the lab. She said she wanted to discuss something important with me. Only one topic could possibly fit the bill: Shiori. And so, scraping together the last dregs of my sanity, I came here today to listen to her speak.
“Firstly, Koyomi-kun, you should know that Shiori’s heart is still beating. The ventilator is preventing cardiac arrest.” The director had switched to her “professor” voice, as she always did when she was having a serious conversation.
“Is she still alive?” I asked.
“That’s a difficult question to answer. Her brainstem is alive, so she still has spinal reflexes, thermoregulation, fluid secretion, and so on. But her brain itself has lost all function—no voluntary movement, no senses, no thoughts, no memories, no emotions. And once a brain dies, it generally doesn’t come back. So whether or not we can say she’s alive is solely up to individual interpretation.”
In other words, her body was alive, but her soul was dead.
“But…they say most brain-dead patients die for real within a week…”
“Been studying, have you? In most cases, yes, that’s correct. But there are a handful of cases where the patient lived beyond that first week. One particular study showed that over the past thirty years, cases of ‘long-term’ brain death have numbered in the triple digits, and of those, seven survived for over six months. Some were kept on ventilators outside the hospital, and the one who survived the longest made it fourteen and a half years. In fact, at the time the study was written, that patient was still alive.”
“So you’re saying Shiori’s okay for right now?”
“I handpicked a team of competent medical professionals to keep her alive using state-of-the-art technology. They won’t let her die without a fight.”
This filled me with some sense of relief, not that we were by any means out of the woods yet.
“Getting back on topic… Patients with complete loss of brain function, like Shiori, are generally considered to have suffered ‘total brain failure,’ but I’ve decided to give her current state a different name.”
“Imaginary karyomitosis?”
“Correct. Brain death is normally the result of a car accident or severe illness that damages the brain beyond repair. But in this case, despite a thorough examination, we were unable to detect any injury to her brain. It simply stopped functioning.”
It made sense that her brain wasn’t injured. After all, she hadn’t been hit by a car in our world. Her physical body was safe in a pod the whole time.
“So why, then, did her brain stop functioning? I posit that it’s connected to parallel shifting,” she said.
At last, the director broached the main topic. The part that I was probably—no, definitely—partially responsible for.
“Twice now you’ve used the Cradle of Einzwach to parallel shift. One of those times was, of course, the most recent attempt with Shiori.”
“Einz-what now?”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s something I borrowed from one of my favorite old books.”
Come to think of it, Dad told me the director was a big fan of vintage manga, anime, novels, and video games. Supposedly, it helped inspire her thought process for imaginary science and parallel worlds.
“To my understanding, at the very least, that machine is still unfinished. And both times you used it, it wasn’t even powered on. So how did you succeed in shifting?”
I had no way of knowing. Instead, I remained silent, prompting her to continue.
“For the most part, parallel shifts occur naturally. We regularly shift to nearby worlds and back again without ever realizing. The slight differences between worlds cause us to ‘misremember’ those same details later on.”
So far, she hadn’t said anything that I, and by extension society at large, hadn’t already grasped.
“But the farther away a given world, the harder it is to shift to it naturally. During your first long-distance shift, you went to a world where your grandfather had passed away; the second time, you went to a world where Hidaka-kun and Takasaki-san were still married. Both must have been a considerable distance away, yet you succeeded in shifting there all the same. And not only that, but they were both worlds you consciously wanted to shift to. Voluntary parallel shifting is one of the very things I seek to research.”
At that point, I was starting to feel like some kind of superhuman freak. That had to be why they subjected me to all those confusing examinations this past month.
“This is still just a theory, but…I suspect parallel shifts are easier for some people,” she explained.
People like me, in other words?
“Koyomi-kun, do you understand why parallel shifts happen to begin with?”
“No…”
“I see. Hidaka-kun, you could have explained it to him, you know,” she remarked to my dad, who had thus far remained silent.
“I was going to, but then he stopped coming to the lab… Then again, I guess that’s my fault…” He was referring to the time he and the director questioned Shiori and me about the nature of our relationship.
“Right… I’m partially to blame for that as well. We need to do better, Hidaka-kun. We’ve spent so much time reading books that we’ve forgotten how to read people.”
“So it seems… I’m sorry, Koyomi,” my father said to me.
I didn’t know how to respond to their apologies. After all, I was most likely the root cause of what had happened to Shiori.
“In order to more easily explain the concepts of imaginary science, I devised the ‘Sea and Bubbles of Einzwach’ model. As you know, it’s an analogy that likens imaginary space to the ocean and our world of origin to a single bubble born on the ocean floor, with a vertical axis of time. The bubble rises toward the top of the Sea of Einzwach, growing and splitting off into infinite parallel worlds.”
This was the first concept of imaginary science that my dad had ever taught me, so I grasped it quickly.
“Fundamentally speaking, there are macro-bubbles and micro-bubbles. Put simply, macro-bubbles represent entire worlds, while micro-bubbles represent the individuals within them. Now, there’s a sort of intermolecular force between these bubbles, and the inertial force produced by the motion of a macro-bubble can knock other bubbles into each other, causing them to switch places. If the bubbles are close in proximity, they’ll revert quickly, but if the bubble is somehow sent flying a considerable distance, it’ll take time before they revert.”
In other words, this was the concept of parallel shifting, but with bubbles.
“Mind you, this theory is still incomplete, but…perhaps twin bubbles are tied to each other, making it easier for them to slip out of the macro-bubbles. Let’s say their imaginary density is high, or something. These bubbles have a powerful will to change. So when these individuals wish strongly to travel to another world, the imaginary elements react with a parallel shift.”
“And you’re saying I’m one of them?”
“In theory.”
If so, would I be able to help that pod—the Cradle of Einzwach—reach completion?
“Um, I have a question…” I started.