Interlude
THAT SAME YEAR, Director Satou went to Germany to announce the discovery of parallel worlds at a major international conference.
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.”
It was Director Satou who first named the study of parallel worlds “imaginary science.” In college, she spent years spreading awareness on the subject, and after she graduated, she established the Imaginary Science Research Institute (or ISRI) in Oita Prefecture where she was born and raised. As a result of all that painstaking research, for the first time in history, imaginary science was making headlines.
The announcement sparked unprecedented levels of debate among scholars. 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.
Over the years, the world around me evolved dramatically, in ways both large and small. For one thing, Shiori and I became the best of friends. Once we started spending nearly every day together, it completely changed our lives.
We went to the same elementary school, so after class let out, we’d meet up and walk to the ISRI building together. There, we’d speak to her mom, my dad, and all the other researchers to learn more about imaginary science. Suffice it to say, we knew more about it than anyone else at our school. But even then, we only understood it through simplified analogies.
Following the Yuno incident, we stopped trying to use the director’s machine without permission, so Shiori ultimately never got to take her turn. Likewise, I didn’t shift again after that—or if I did, I didn’t notice. The ISRI would eventually develop a device called an IP band that could detect those tiny, involuntary parallel shifts, but they wouldn’t conceive of it until years later.
Back then, imaginary science was still just a fairy tale to me. It wouldn’t become my irrefutable reality until the year I turned fourteen…
The year a ghost started to haunt the Showa-dori intersection.