That’s why I’m just so hugely grateful to you for coming to me. Only one of us can wield power at any one time. So I’d like to have it. What would you do with it anyway? Just selfish stuff.
Anyway, it’s getting late. I think I’ll be on my way now. You can look after everything. Stay here as a puny demon and be a good husband, live a quiet life, raise a happy family, and all that. It suits you.
Kota’s monologue wound to a close. Saeko saw him stand up and brush down the back of his trousers. He turned his back to Saeko and now talked directly to the wall that separated him and her father.
So this is goodbye. Just make sure to do as we arranged.
Then he walked out of the light, disappearing into darkness.
Saeko could hear a gentle sobbing pierce the silence from the other side of the wall. The pathetic sound bled through the partition.
She pictured her father crying, hands over his mouth, defeated. Eventually, the sound died away. A silence enveloped the room as Saeko’s consciousness returned to the present.
The room was as it had been before. The lights were on, and the muted TV set continued to broadcast the now familiar images from around the world. Seiji sat at the other end of the living room table and was staring at her.
Saeko had heard her father talk about his greatest fear enough times. It was to have to continue living after experiencing the loss of his daughter. He had not had a choice, and traded his soul and 515 lives for her, made a pact with the Devil.
That was the meaning of Seiji’s words: it had all begun with her. Faced with releasing evil into the world or losing his daughter, her father had chosen the former. It had all been to save her, and that was why she was here now, alive.
She felt the weight of 515 lives on her shoulders.
She often found herself wondering, without knowing why, whether she somehow had something to do with her father’s disappearance. She had always known that he loved her more than anyone else on earth.
Her father had been living here all this time, up until a year ago. He had been living here as Kota Fujimura. Saeko struggled to hold back her tears as she looked around the room as though seeing it for the first time.
She had searched for a long eighteen years yet had found nothing, no clues as to what had happened. And all that time, her father had been living here in Takato, just a couple of hundred kilometers from Tokyo. He had raised a family; he and Haruko had had a son and a daughter together. They’d been living a normal life. Saeko recalled the strange sense of familiarity, something she hadn’t been able to put her finger on when she’d first come to this house and just now again when she’d looked through the family albums. That was explicable if indeed this family had been raised by her father.
She could guess why he had to replace Kota Fujimura. Their relationship was like that of matter and anti-matter, god and devil. Their encounter resembled their twin emergence.
If you added energy to empty space, matter popped out, leaving behind a mirror image of itself, anti-matter. Saeko had a simple analogy.
Considering the universe as an empty, two-dimensional space — a blank sheet of paper — this state represented the most basic form of symmetry, with no room for the development of matter. If you applied some energy to the space, say by taking a pair of scissors and cutting out the shape of a heart from the center, immediately the status quo of balance and symmetry shifted. In effect, the heart shape would exist outside of the originally prescribed number of dimensions. The spontaneous destruction of symmetry could be thought of as a phase transition.
The excised heart would leave an empty space in the paper with exactly the same proportions as the heart itself. The heart represented matter while the empty space represented anti-matter. At the beginning of the universe, the same quantities of matter and anti-matter existed, but now only the former was observed. Did its opposite slip into a place that transcended the dimension of time? In that case, the two would rarely meet. But if they did by happenstance, and the heart-shaped cutout returned to its original position, outwardly it would resemble the disappearance of both. The mutual destruction would release the massive amount of energy initially used to cut the shape out.
If the same logic applied, then after Kota’s disappearance, her father had to live here and cease to be Shinichiro Kuriyama.
Yet, in the end, she could not meet her father. He had vanished along with his new family, just January that year, the day of the abnormal sunspot activity. Why did they have to disappear? Saeko couldn’t think of the reason. Only Seiji would know the answer.
“Why? Why did the Fujimuras have to disappear?”
Saeko studied Seiji’s facial movements for any hint of what might have happened. She noticed that his face had changed somehow. The poisonous look had all but vanished, and his eyes looked calmer. It was as though she was looking at a different person.
“They knew of the coming catastrophe. By January, they predicted that the universe was not going to last the year. Luckily, they knew where to look for the opening of a wormhole. The plan was made; even if a phase transition was coming, they could travel back to a different past. The only problem was the arbitrary nature of the wormhole. Even if they managed to breach the opening and successfully travel back in time, they would have no way to control where or when it took them.
“At the moment of transition, it’s as if the air around begins to boil. There’s no time to make choices then. Chance decides whether you’re cast into a starving populace or into the middle of a warzone. They had the knowledge to escape the phase transition but no guarantee that the route wouldn’t be a shortcut to the mouth of hell, so they decided to try and make the trip in advance. They were aware that sunspot activity and magnetic fluctuations could allow them to formulate a rough estimate as to where and when a wormhole would take them. They gathered together, countless times, debating whether it was better to wait for the phase transition.”
That was it, then. That was why she’d had such a strange feeling about the family photo in the last page of that album, the morbidly commemorative nature of it. They had already made their decision to leave this world behind and were just biding their time for the right conditions. That day had come on January 22nd. Since their window was tight, they took what they could and rushed to where they expected the wormhole to open.
The mechanism by which the Fujimura family had disappeared from this world was finally clear. They had disappeared of their own volition before the advent.
Just then, something caught Saeko’s attention on the TV set in the corner of the room. She had been so deep in thought she had almost forgotten about the catastrophic phenomena tearing through the world. The screen showed California at early dawn. The tear in the ground seemed to be continuing to grow in length. The volume was still muted, but Saeko could more or less tell what the increasingly hysterical reporter on screen was saying. An invisible surgeon was taking a giant scalpel to the earth itself, slowly but surely lengthening the incision. If it reached San Fransisco, then it was just a matter of time until it extended into the Pacific. Would it continue to cut through and split the ocean in two? Or would the sea gush into the chasm and head inland? It was hard to guess how the rift would interact with water.