Chapter 2 – The Girl With Red Eyes

1 – August 7th (Monday) – Three days ago

Asai Kei and Haruki Misora were sitting across from each other at a table. They were at a coffee shop, each halfway through with their iced coffees.

“August 7th, 11:49:32,” said Haruki.

At that point, several jumbled memories of the future were popping into Kei’s mind. The information was complicated and difficult to understand. It was hard for Kei to appreciate the full picture of everything he was suddenly learning.

“It would appear we’ve reset,” he said, taking a sip of his iced coffee. He suddenly felt like he had been drinking a lot of coffee lately. He drank bottled coffee the morning of August 10th, then canned coffee when he met Oka Eri in the afternoon, and now here he was.

Haruki peered into Kei’s eyes. “Did something happen?”

“A lot of things, actually. A little too much to explain all the details. I’ll summarize it for you.” Kei explained what he had learned in his meetings with Sasano Hiroyuki, the Bureau higher-up known as the Witch, and Oka Eri.

Haruki never once moved her gaze away from Kei. She did that every time, always looking at Kei. But Kei noticed that this time around, her eyes seemed to take on a new seriousness.

“Do you remember Oka Eri? You knew her as Fujikawa Eri.” Two years ago, her parents had divorced, so her name changed.

“I apologize. I do not have any memory of her.”

“Nothing for it. You guys didn’t have any kind of special relationship.” Kei began explaining the circumstances behind Oka Eri, the girl who was once known as Fujikawa Eri.

Back in junior high, she was Kei’s kouhai, a year younger than him. Two years ago, Asai Kei used Fujikawa Eri for his own benefit. At the time, she was a quiet girl, very timid, and she was often found looking down at the ground. She had not yet acquired a special ability, so Kei had no clue to what she might currently possess.

“Fujikawa Eri’s father was a member of the city council and had strong connections to the Bureau. I was investigating him, so I naturally turned to his daughter.” Her father often attended important Bureau meetings, so if Kei could get a lead on his schedule, it could get him one step closer to knowing the Bureau’s actions.

Haruki nodded. “I remember now. That girl was quite frightened of her father.”

“Yep.” It was somewhat more accurate to call her resigned. Her father was arrogant, violent, and antagonistic towards his family. Kei never learned all the details, but Fujikawa Eri and her mother were worn down, and wanted to live separately. But due to her father’s position in city council, he wanted to keep up appearances and refused to let them. For Kei at the time, that was all he needed to know, so he stopped looking into it from there.

“I pressed her for information about her father. I learned when he got home every day, and the basic comings and goings of everyone in the household. Pretty simple stuff.”

It was supposed to stop at that, initially. But as he kept running into her, and noticed how broken down she was, he eventually felt like lending her a hand.

“I used some underhanded techniques to help her out… if you could even call it help. I pretty much changed her life circumstances single-handedly.”

“What do you mean by underhanded”?

“I gave her the resources to blackmail her father. I told her it’d be enough to guarantee a divorce between her parents.”

Not long after that, she changed from Fujikawa Eri to Oka Eri.

It was an incredibly stupid move on his part. Kei was sure they could’ve found a more straightforward and honest solution. But, as far as the Kei of two years ago was concerned, that was the best way to handle it.

“So, all you did was provide her with the material?”

“Yeah… I did.”

“Was Oka Eri the one that utilized it?”

“Probably. I never pushed for any of the details, though.”

“Then the one who must take responsibility is Oka Eri. She made the decision herself, so no matter the consequences, she has no reason to hold anything against you.”

“That’s not true,” Kei retorted, shaking his head. “That girl was down for the count two years ago. She was in a lot of pain. Anything that anyone offered her would’ve worked. She wouldn’t have seen any other options.”

Not many people have the strength to take all the responsibility for all of their choices. There’s just no kindness in a world where people have that strength forced upon them. I want to live in a world with a little more grace, Kei thought.

“She told me that she hated me. Said it right to my face. It’s so obvious that I didn’t do right by her back then.”

Haruki continued staring at Kei like she always did. Her facial expression wasn’t too far off from what it usually was. Maybe she was blinking more because her eyes were dry. Maybe there was no special code behind why she was pursing her lips a tiny bit more. But maybe those tiny changes were the glimmer of an unusual anxiousness coming from her. Unless Kei was just imagining things.

“No matter the reason, I do not want to lose my ability to reset,” she asserted, with a rare show of passion resonating in the strength of her voice.

Kei nodded, “Right.” That was why he had reset, after all. All pretenses aside, he had instructed a reset to protect Haruki first and foremost. “For now, I’m gonna do a bit more research into Oka Eri.” Learning more about her would be tantamount to getting Sasano’s ability back.

Haruki nodded, “Understood. What shall we do from here?”

“Fortunately, we’re alma mater at her middle school. It shouldn’t be too hard to get information one way or another.” Nobody would take issue with a few students who had just graduated months ago visiting their old middle school.

“Should we take action immediately?”

“That was the plan.” Kei finished up his iced coffee before standing up. “You coming with?”

Once more, Haruki nodded. “But of course.”

Once they left the coffee shop, Kei made three calls in preparation for heading to their old middle school.

First, he stopped at a payphone in the shopping district. He used that to make a call to The Operator, relaying all the information he learned from him before the reset, and asking for him to continue looking into the MacGuffin.

His second call was to Murase Youka. He explained the basics of their situation and asked for her cooperation in the same manner he did the first time.

His third and final call was to Tsushima Shintarou. Kei informed him of their reset, as well as his meetings with Sasano, Oka Eri, and the Witch. Generally, Kei wanted to keep his meeting with the Witch private, but he trusted Tsushima to handle the information tacitly. Besides, since they reset just after meeting the Witch, it would be very easy to cast suspicion onto Kei without any extra context. It was best to cover all of his bases.

After finishing his phone calls, Kei and Haruki headed for their old school, Nanasaka Junior High. It took a roughly 15 minute bus ride from the shopping district. It was only about a five minute walk from the beachfront. He had spent a lot of time walking around the area in the past, but since there weren’t any stores or places of interest, he hadn’t visited since graduation.

From the school gate, Kei could easily see the four distinct school buildings in the distance. He had only been gone for about five months, but he was already feeling nostalgic. He glanced over to the school building on the southernmost end, seeing at the rooftop and the skyline beyond. Memories quickly and forcefully bubbled up within his head.

Two years ago, Kei had found a slender girl up there who was in all respects like a stray cat. The rooftop was the place where it seemed she belonged the most. And for a while, it was a place for Haruki and Kei, too. But that girl was long gone now.

In Kei’s memory, the girl was looking up from the rooftop into the southern sky and talking.

✽

“Y’know, every now and then, when I listen to my favorite music on a night I have all to myself, I think about what it means for us to refer to ‘the world.’”

It was back in their second year of middle school, a time when that girl would frequently ask Haruki and Kei to join her on the southern building’s rooftop, so she could talk with them. Although, in reality, she usually ended up talking only with Kei. Haruki just stood in the background, watching. On occasion, Kei and Haruki would find themselves in the opposite positions. It usually happened on days when Kei showed up later. Kei figured that with all the extra time to kill, she just started talking to Haruki.

On that day, Kei was in the background, watching Haruki and the girl talk. Haruki’s then-long hair was blowing in the wind. He stayed at a comfortable distance, not engaging but still listening.

The girl that was so much like a stray cat continued. “There could be people on a distant planet building their own worlds and cultures, and we wouldn’t include them in our sense of ‘the world.’ We could be discussing world peace, all the while not caring about the peace of their own people. How far do you think our scope of ‘the world’ reaches?”

It was a strange and thoroughly verbose allegory. She was probably trying to convey some deeper feeling with it, but Kei couldn’t wrap his head around what she meant. Perhaps her true intentions and desires were incapable of being conveyed with even the thickest of dictionaries. That must have been why she resorted to metaphors and hypotheses.

Haruki answered quietly, “It would include everything on the planet Earth, would it not?”

That stray cat of a girl shook her head. “I don’t think so. Before America was discovered, Europeans referred to ‘the world’ as something that didn’t include the Americas. In the same way, there could be other planets and people that we don’t recognize as ‘the world.’”

Haruki didn’t answer. She never was one to voluntarily speak up unless she was asked a direct question. Seemingly unfazed by that, the girl continued, “I guess what that means is that the world is ultimately only what we perceive it to be. It can only be as big as we can understand in our heads. So that means that the world is entirely within our heads.” She turned to the side, looking at Haruki.

Haruki responded, “But logic dictates that the world is outside of us in reality. We are standing on the rooftop of a school building, and there is a fence built around it.”

“It’s true that both your world and mine have this fence in it. But to people in a town far away, they aren’t aware of this fence, this school, or even us, and none of it exists in their world. We’re not included when they talk about ‘the world.’” The girl tilted her head with a look that said, “What do you think of that?”

“I suppose that you are correct,” Haruki answered, without nodding her head.

That stray cat of a girl asked, “Do you wish for world peace, Haruki?”

“I do not have any particular wish for it, but I do believe that peace is better than the alternative.”

“Then would you be interested in making your world a little bit bigger?”

“Are you asking me if I want to expand the scope of my awareness?”

“Precisely.”

“I am satisfied with the way I am now.”

“I see.” The girl nodded, before turning to face Kei. “What do you think, Kei?”

Kei couldn’t think of a good answer, so he lied. “Sorry, I wasn’t listening. What were you talking about?”

The girl smiled. “I was telling a story about how selfish I am.”

If there was a connection between what they had been discussing and her selfishness, Kei certainly couldn’t find it. He sighed. “Well, I must agree that you’re quite selfish.”

The girl nodded. “I think my world is very small. It’s probably no stretch of the imagination to say it only includes me. In that case, if I were wishing for world peace, all I would be wishing for is my own happiness. I think that’s more likely than not.”

Kei couldn’t tell if this was her opening her heart, or just another extension of her endless metaphors.

The girl stared straight into Kei. “There’s nobody else who shares the same world with me. Nobody at all.”

No matter how desperately the second-year middle schooler Kei wanted to understand what she meant, he simply couldn’t.

✽

The first-year high schooler Kei could imagine one possibility.

Standing next to him, Haruki asked, “What are you thinking about?”

Kei shared what had been on his mind since last night, or at least, since two days in the future. “I’m thinking about the Swampman.”

Haruki tilted her head. “What is a Swampman?”

“It’s a thought experiment. C’mon, we’ll walk and talk,” Kei said, heading into the school grounds.

Suppose lightning struck a dead tree in a swamp, and a man was standing nearby. The man’s body was destroyed, while entirely by coincidence the tree was turned into his physical replica. This replica, the Swampman, appeared to be like the dead man in every way, be it appearance, knowledge, personality, and anything else. Ignoring certain realities, and assuming it to be a coincidence or miracle, the thought experiment considers the existence of such a Swampman.

“The new being born from the swamp considers himself to be the dead man, and does not know that he was struck by lightning. What do you think the man born from the swamp will do?”

“He would simply follow the routines of the now dead man, would he not?”

“Yup. He would return to the dead man’s house, shave with his razor, sleep in his bed, and go to his workplace. His replacement would be so perfect that not a single person would ever recognize that the original man had died.”

Kei turned to look at Haruki. “Life would go on, all the same as if the original man had never died. Would you argue that the man was truly dead in this scenario, Haruki?”

She nodded, “Yes. The man is still well and truly dead.”

Such was the concept behind the thought experiment. What was the difference between the Swampman and the original man? What exactly gives someone identity?

Kei continued, asking, “In that case, would you call the birth of the Swampman the original man coming back to life?”

Haruki waited for an exceptionally long pause. It was unusual for her not to answer immediately when asked a question. Eventually, she gently shook her head. “I cannot understand. I do not know what it means for someone to come back to life.”

“That’s right. I don’t know, either.” If you could sprinkle a magic potion on a dead man’s ashes that made a perfect copy of the man rise back up, that could be argued as bringing someone back to life. But on the flipside, what if the potion were sprinkled on some unrelated mud nearby, and the man’s perfect copy came out of that? How was that any different? Did the being of that man lie within his ashes, even when the cells were all burned away?

Kei glanced towards the southern school building again, but by now they were so close that the rooftop was hidden from view.

She was mysterious and enigmatic. She was like a stray cat. And she was long gone.

But now, she was in a photograph left behind by Sasano, who had the ability to step into his photos.

Photographs were essentially a replica of the past. Sasano’s ability, then, was to step into a replica of the past. But that posed a critical problem. A question of authenticity. A question of identity.

If Kei used Sasano’s power to stand in front of her in a photograph, would he finally be able to meet the real her again? If they took her out of the photo, would that count as bringing her back to life? Was looking like the girl he knew enough, or would she just be a replica? Like her own form of a Swampman?

Two years ago, that stray cat of a girl was talking about a problem regarding her identity. It seemed almost too obvious to Kei now.

There’s nobody else who shares the same world with me. Nobody at all.

Did the girl who died and the girl in the photo share the same world?

I think my world only includes me.

Could the girl in the photo possibly fill the role that she herself had defined?

As Kei was lost in thought, he heard Haruki’s voice. “How would you feel if I died and was replaced by something that looked just like me?”

It was such an unfair question. “I’d feel sad. Indescribably sad. Why would you ask that?”

“Then would you prefer not to know? You could remain in willful ignorance, like all the people around the Swampman.”

Her question was surprisingly timely. That girl’s death was known by a great many people. Overturning that reality it wouldn’t be so simple.

Kei shook his head. “I think not knowing would be even worse.” It was hard to explain. But no matter how difficult, Kei just wanted the truth.

“I am incredibly grateful to hear that,” Haruki replied.

Kei looked at Haruki, unable to follow. “Why?”

Haruki responded with a beautiful smile. “No reason in particular. Your answer just made me happy.”

Kei was completely caught off guard. He smiled back. “That’s good, then.”

“I agree. It is good.”

Side by side, the two entered the building.