After that, I went to countless parallel worlds and picked out my surveillance candidates. Now, I hadn’t planned for this, but these worlds all actually had one other thing in common. Be it as a friend, a girlfriend, a wife, a mistress, an arch-rival, or something else—in every single one of them, Kazune was a part of my life.
In this world, she had already helped me so much. In the beginning she was fiercely competitive, always trying to one-up me, and in the end, instead of finding someone else, she had chosen to entertain my madness right to the bitter end. In this world, she was a colleague, a rival, and pretty much the only person I could call a friend. That said, I didn’t know her real reasons for helping me. For as smart as I believed myself to be, she was the one thing I felt I’d never truly comprehend.
I really hadn’t done it on purpose, but…maybe I’d subconsciously picked all the worlds where Kazune was there for me. If so, I intended to take this information to my grave rather than let her find out.
After that, I spent the next twenty-plus years monitoring the candidate worlds. My sole emotional support was the smile I received when I visited Shiori at the crosswalk, her appearance still unchanged from the day she died. Over the decades, I went there every single day to talk to her. I didn’t care what time of day it was—and I’d long since stopped caring about what the passersby thought of me.
And so the death march through the desert continued…until at last, at age seventy-three, one of my parallel selves was diagnosed with cancer and informed that he only had six months to live. Six months was still a long time though, so I decided to wait a little longer.
Then July rolled around. By my calculations, my other self now had just one month left. In the event that his physical body died, the imaginary elements that gave form to it would be lost as well, and at that point I’d be unable to shift there. I didn’t know if the same applied to time travel, but considering I couldn’t test it beforehand, I had to assume I’d lose my chance.
That said, doctors weren’t always 100 percent accurate about life expectancy. My other self might live six extra months, or he might keel over tomorrow. Looking at it that way, I couldn’t risk him dying of cancer and throwing a wrench into my plans, so I decided it was now or never. Tomorrow, the day that marked one month left, I would go back in time to save Shiori. It would be my first and last experience with time travel, and I would never come back to this world again.
In the other world, where Shiori and I had never met, she had a happy family. As for me…I married Kazune and had a happy family of my own. Part of me couldn’t believe I would ever marry someone other than Shiori, but…eh, Kazune was a special exception.
With the date of my leap now in place, I looked back at my life thus far.
I had lived for so long. Too long. And for what? I had no wife, no children… What even was my life’s purpose? Because of me, the one person I ever loved was wiped from the face of the earth.
But, well, at least it was almost over.
Bubbles can sink.
At last, the time had come to do away with this world once and for all. Because to me, a world without her in it was as good as worthless.