Chapter 88

CONNECTION PROCESS Scientific supernatural ability development, a field spearheaded by Academy City, had been created based on quantum theory. Quantum theory is a field of science that attempts to figure out how the world worked on extremely small levels—a strange field in which Newtonian mechanics, which stipulate that letting go of an apple makes it fall to the earth, don’t apply. Matter exists. That much is certain. But when someone observes matter, it goes away somewhere. An object in a box can only be expressed with possibilities and probabilities. It’s not either inside it or not—one can only express its existence as a 70 percent chance. If you try to think about that in the bigger, utterly normal world of science, with its cans of juice and oranges, quantum theory sounds like a load of mumbo jumbo. But by expanding on its principles, by messing with the minds of those who observe the incredibly microscopic world—humans—one might be able to control the macroscopic world—the big one, visible to the naked eye. That was the basis of Academy City’s esper abilities. But there is another theory that stands alongside this microscopic quantum theory. Holism. A theory that starts from the largest perspective one can think from, holism treats the entire expanding universe as a single huge system or network. Long ago, it branched into other things like the Gaia hypothesis, which states that environments and biospheres were structured from an Earth-scaled point of view…but creatures on Earth are affected by solar winds and the moon’s gravity, too, and when it came to the conversation of a massive world including a time axis and other dimensions, the problem expands outside the scope one could use a single planet to explain. Partly as a return to square one, recent times have seen more and more people talking about the “whole” again as a scientific field. Gremlin had used supernatural ability development, which in turn used this theory of holism, to try and complete a fundamental theory using the massive experimental test site of Baggage City. The theory itself was simple. It was the opposite of the butterfly effect, where a butterfly might flap its wings and cause a storm. In other words, it said that if one created a major change on a world level, it would let them produce flames from their palm. Perhaps it’s difficult to understand how a change in something large could affect something small. But we ourselves are on the receiving end of changes in huge systems all the time. Take the theory of relativity. Setting the detailed definition aside, we’ll just look at the part that says that when an object is approaching the speed of light, the flow of time slows down. While the difference between someone driving a car and someone flying in a plane are so small as to be nearly impossible to measure, technically, the two people are still living in separate “times.” In that case, let’s expand the scale. What about the difference between someone on Earth and someone on the moon? Someone on the moon and someone on Mars? In these cases, too, the difference between the heavenly bodies’ revolutions and rotations on their axes would result in the two people having different speeds. These people, too, would be living in different “times.” Finally, let’s examine things on a scale more akin to holism. This universe, which was created by the big bang, is still expanding every single moment. Naturally, humankind exists within that universe; each of us is within that “speed” of expansion, thrown into that “relativistic time” created by the big bang. Now for a little thought experiment. The universe expands in all directions equally. But what if one could cause a localized change in the speed of expansion? The change in speed would cause a change in time. The idea of time would fluctuate, and it would travel down from that enormously huge phenomenon all the way to us tiny little humans. This is just an example. But if one could fold the whole universe, or roll it up, then they would also be able to use that force to affect incredibly microscopic phenomena that couldn’t be observed even with electron microscopes. Does that seem roundabout? If one had the power to mess with the universe’s rate of expansion, they could just use that power to destroy whole planets or galaxies. But holistic espers were aware only of producing a flame in the palm of their hand. Even if some galaxy far away had to be rolled up to let them do that, the esper wouldn’t be able to grasp that concept—just as someone driving a car on this Earth can’t be aware of living in a different time than other people. Therefore, these espers created from holistic theory, in Academy City conversions, may not get beyond Level Two or Level Three. Even if something crazy happens in reality, if nobody is around to notice it, then it’s as though it never happened at all. Although ironically, that’s none other than the concept of zero in quantum theory. Gremlin had accomplished the preliminary step to all that—before actually creating holistic espers. This was an experiment to see if they could distort the wider world to cause a smaller supernatural phenomenon. Yes. The martial arts tournament held in Baggage City, the clash between the Kiharas and Gremlin, the war between science and sorcery—each of those movements was no more than the work of seeing whether an enormously large-scale battle could create an anomaly on an incredibly microscopic level. To Gremline, even Academy City’s response was just another piece of the plan. Kagun Kihara—who was from Academy City and had been close to the center of its underworld—had secretly intercepted intel about the size of the force Academy City would dispatch, then made some final adjustments in order to deliver results that would benefit Gremlin. However, this scenario was kept a secret from the rest of Gremlin. Knowing the scenario beforehand would have skewed the results they were after. A supernatural ability development experiment that needed real battle to happen. If completed, it wouldn’t just create something all-powerful—it would create an entirely new system. The quality would likely be on par with what Number One had once been able to do. And if that was where he’d ended up after all his hard work, then no matter how much Kagun hated himself, perhaps he had never really escaped the curse of the science in Academy City’s underworld. (However, when he learned that Byouri Kihara would be an active participant in this operation, he seemed to have exploited fact that he hadn’t told anyone about the scenario, making major changes to the plan right before its implementation.) If he could confirm that a small phenomenon had been created by a larger distortion, then he would finally mess with the brains of those who seemed capable and begin working on holistic supernatural ability development in earnest. But how did it turn out? The answer was clear. If Touma Kamijou’s right hand had erased something, then something that needed to be erased must have existed. Assume that originally, the “present time” Kamijou and the others were supposed to be in was zero, and the “future” created by the holistic experiment’s results was one. Gremlin almost certainly would have been convinced that they were in control of the holistic experiment. And until partway through, at least, that would have been correct. It was true that when Gremlin’s members had gone through with their exaggerated preparations here in Baggage City, a distorted phenomenon that never should have existed—the result of an experiment connected to supernatural abilities—was in fact activated in the “one” time, the future. But as soon as that little distortion appeared, the holistic result that should have been in the future, too, began to exert force on Gremlin and Baggage City in the present. It was like scientists who had lost control of a black hole they’d created. Which was why the distortion had happened. If the present was zero and the future was one, then until Kamijou arrived, Baggage City should have been at zero. But time and space would have been distorting in the direction of the future, pulled along by one to values like 0.5 or 0.7. That was why the place where the Kiharas and Gremlin clashed was within Baggage City, but off somehow. The usual rules didn’t apply. They’d been bound by rules that, for some reason unbeknownst to them, made it easier to cause tragedies. At the same time, what did it mean that Kamijou’s right hand had destroyed that distortion? The answer was simple. The cold rules of the past no longer applied. The tragedies that had already occurred couldn’t be fixed, and those who had died wouldn’t come back. But from here on out, Touma Kamijou’s right hand would conquer everything before it.