Edge

Chapter 6: Transition

Saeko parked the rental car at the bottom of the hill and began to walk up the gentle incline towards the Fujimura house. This was the third time she would set foot inside. The first time was back in July, when she’d spent an hour looking in the house for her own research. She’d been in the company of Seiji Fujimura. The second time was only a month ago, when she’d visited with Hashiba and the crew. They had filmed here for the whole afternoon.

Now she was here alone. The time was already after 8 p.m. and the neighborhood was submerged in darkness. It was the first time she had seen the place after dark; the atmosphere was completely different. The house stood halfway up a hill. Saeko reached the driveway and looked up at the building; perhaps it was just her imagination, but it looked slightly crooked.

The house was the last on the hill. Saeko looked down at the nearest house below, slightly off to the side. Slivers of light leaked through the curtains, forming faint white pools on the hillside, but there were no other visible signs of life. Still, she found that she could make her way without a flashlight. There was a strange quality to the darkness around the house, not like dawn or dusk — a faint light with a bluish tinge. Saeko craned her neck back to look up at the sky between a gap in the trees at the bottom of the driveway, trying to discern the source as she began making her way up to the house.

The glow seemed to be coming from two wispy bands in the sky, one white and reflecting off the clouds, the other greenish and coming from a different direction, crossing low in the sky. Unlike the aurora-like phenomenon at Atami, this green light was folded and flowed downwards in curtains. In the spaces between the clouds Saeko could make out a number of stars, and below them, the silhouettes of branches moving in the wind, hanging low enough to almost brush against her hair. Saeko could only see a narrow portion of the sky above, but she got the feeling that there were fewer stars than she remembered seeing in the past. She was sure the impression was not simply due to the bands of light in the sky. Somehow, it really looked as though there were fewer stars.

She looked back down the hill, towards Lake Miwa beyond. The twinned reflections of the aurora and the stars flowed together, creating an image of a whole new, separate universe. She looked back at the house looming dark before her. In the past, Seiji had come to air the place every now and again; now, having lost its caretaker, it was all but abandoned.

Saeko pulled out the key that Seiji had given her and opened the front door lock. She stepped across the threshold and ran her hand across the left-side wall, feeling for the light switch. She was relieved to find it quickly, and when she flicked it, a dry, brittle sound reverberated through the corridor as the lights came on. Saeko scrunched her nose up against the smell of the place. It was unpleasant but different from the pungent odor that had greeted her the last time she visited. She guessed that the dryness of the season had helped clear the musty smell. Any food left would have long decomposed, too. The smell was less intense, whatever it was.

She closed the door behind her and sat down to take her boots off before stepping up from the entryway. Her fingers felt oddly numb, making the process take longer than usual. The whole time, Saeko couldn’t shake the feeling that something was there with her. Her spine tingled at the feeling, her senses heightened by the fact that she had her back turned to whatever it was she felt, out of sight.

Something was wrong. The smell that had been so distinct when she came in had changed. It seemed as if it originated in a certain place, weakening as it spread through the rest of the house. It was as though she could trace its path to its origin.

The area immediately behind the door consisted of an open square of concrete in the traditional style, a place to take off your shoes before stepping up onto the flooring. A wooden shoebox lay to the side, under which sat a couple of pairs of identical sandals. Saeko had noticed that things tended to come in pairs in this house, although she wasn’t sure why that should be the case. She looked at the four sandals, lined up next to each other, and noticed another pair of sandals nestled up behind them, hidden away. It sat by itself, a couple of sizes larger than the rest. Saeko scrunched up her nose, realizing that it was the source of the smell that had been bothering her. The pungent smell hinted that they had been recently used. The smell of sweat was out of place in this house where all signs of life had dried up. It had been empty for almost a year now.

Saeko froze halfway through the process of taking her boots off. She felt her pores open, like sensors striving to search out any irregularities in the air.

When she was a kid, Saeko had loved staying over at her grandparents’ old house in Atami. The one thing she’d hated about it, though, was the toilet, an outhouse built separately from the main building. She remembered the fear she’d felt in the middle of the night when she’d had to go out there by herself. The toilet itself was the traditional kind, a porcelain fixture in the floor that you squatted over. As she crouched to do her business, Saeko’s imagination would take over, blowing her fears out of all proportion until she became sure that she was surrounded by a motley crew of spirits and ghosts waiting outside for her to come out. The wind would blow in through cracks in the wood, brushing against her skin, further stimulating her imagination. Her mind would forge images for each of the spirits. Eventually, she would pluck up enough courage to open the door and peek out, knowing that she couldn’t just stay in the outhouse all night. Of course, there were never any ghosts awaiting her.

Seated at the threshold, her back to the corridor behind her, she focused on the dark shape of her shadow thrown against the front door, illuminated by the light behind her. It was only her shadow. There were no other flickers of movement.

Saeko had finished taking her boots off but sat rooted to the spot. Her heart beat violently in her chest. She had to take control before her imagination took over like at the hospital and completely paralyzed her; that was the last thing she needed. She turned slowly to face the corridor and stepped up to the wooden floor, taking loud, deliberate steps, flipping on every light switch that she passed. Almost running now, she stumbled into the living room and switched the lights on as quickly as she could. What a contrast to when they had filmed Shigeko Torii entering the house — the cameras had followed her slowly, purposefully playing up the atmosphere of suspense. Saeko came to a standstill and tried to calm herself, taking deep breaths. She scanned the room. The open-style kitchen space, the dining table, all the kitchen utensils, and other household items were stacked neatly, functionally, on the series of shelves lined against the wall. The small aquarium sat on the sideboard. Above it, the red bandana pinned to a corkboard.

It was all as she remembered, there was no doubt about it. But Saeko was still unable to shake the feeling that something was out of place. She thought back to when she had been knocked unconscious when the earthquake had hit — a month ago now. She saw the scene unfold in slow motion, the images having been carved into her memory. One of the shelves had tipped sideways, spilling its contents down from above. It had all happened at once: the crack to her head, the crashing reverberations of sound as countless plates smashed against the floor.

The sound of crashing — that was it. Saeko remembered seeing the shattered remains of plates and cups on the floor, bits scattered everywhere. Looking around now, she saw no sign that it had ever happened. The shelves were all back in their original place, the crockery neatly stacked inside behind closed glass doors. She looked down at the floor. It was clean, probably cleaner than it had been before the earthquake.

Had Hashiba and crew cleaned up afterwards? Even if they had, everything looked just too neat, too perfect. Saeko picked up the TV remote control from the dining table and pushed the power button; she hardly realized what she was doing. She waited as the screen came on, rubbing her eyes. Her chest felt tight, her breathing labored.

Saeko stared at the images on the screen. Her eyes had gone blurry from the rubbing and the volume was too low to hear anything. It looked like something from a foreign drama — searchlights flashed up and down; a chase scene through the desert perhaps — but there didn’t seem to be any actors. She watched the searchlights drag across a barren-looking landscape. Then she saw the object of their focus: a black abyss, a huge rift in the ground. The chasm was so deep the searchlights were unable to penetrate its depths. Saeko turned up the volume on the old set and started to flick through the channels. Each and every channel was showing the same set of images. She held her breath; if all that was broadcast was news, something really huge had happened.

Saeko switched the TV back to the first channel. The viewpoint was bearing downwards, closer to the ground. The roaring of helicopter blades filled the room as the camera’s line of sight came level with the edge of the chasm. It continued to descend until it eventually stopped, hovering just above the top. The image below the edge was pure black.

A reporter was shouting commentary over the roar of the blades:

… reporting from the desert between Route 101 and the Interstate Highway Route 5 here in California. Here, you can see the spot where the state highway linking the two routes has been ripped apart. If anyone is listening to this in their cars, please exercise caution driving. Those driving down state highway routes 58, 46, 41, 198 … The roads are now considered dangerous … Repeat, it is extremely dangerous to be on those routes …

The camera panned across the landscape, following the descriptions of the female reporter. The screen traced the line of asphalt, up to where the road met the chasm’s edge. The edge looked unnaturally straight, as though it had been cut out of the land with a sharp knife. The reporter continued:

No one knows at this point what has caused the appearance of this gigantic rift in the ground. It has been reported that it appeared yesterday, sometime between early evening and the middle of the night. The exact time of its appearance is as yet unknown. No seismic disturbances were reported around this timeframe. It is highly unlikely that this is the result of seismic activity …

Using sonar-based measurements scientists have already ascertained the rift as being up to 2 kilometers deep. It is almost impossible to convey the scale via camera. What power is capable of creating such a vast rift through the earth? Is it something beyond the boundaries of human comprehension? All that’s left is this edge. The earth that was here has just vanished without a trace. Could this be the wrath of an angry god? There’s something eerie about the silence here.

Saeko immediately recognized it as the same phenomenon she had seen earlier back in Atami; there, a crater had just appeared out of nowhere. Now the same thing was happening in California, and the only differences were the scale and the shape — a crater-like hole in Atami compared to this canyon-like chasm in America. It was as though a second Grand Canyon had just appeared overnight. Saeko suspected that the chasm was actually larger than the Grand Canyon.

She gathered her thoughts. The mechanism and its significance were the same as for the crater in Atami. The reporter could only suggest that it was something beyond human understanding, and she sounded terrified. Saeko stood, surprised at the sense of calm she now felt as she watched the chaos unfold on the screen.

Despite having had a few drinks, Hashiba had yet to feel the effects of the alcohol. Someone had suggested having a drink and at that point everyone in the room seemed to suddenly realize just how thirsty they had become. Hosokawa had pulled a couple of bottles of beer from the fridge and poured them into glasses to hand around. Everyone downed their glass in a single draught, prompting Hosokawa to pull out another couple of bottles. The alcohol had been necessary to calm the tension in the room.

Eventually, Hashiba asked the question that hung on the minds of the rest of the film crew. “I guess you’d better let us know just what this ‘phase transition’ is.”

There was no way to decide what to do next without understanding the basics of the situation. Someone had muted the volume, but the images of the gigantic chasm continued to loom on the screen.

Isogai first translated the English phrase into Japanese for the rest of the crew. Only Hashiba and Kagayama seemed to recognize the term even in Japanese, but they too had scant idea what it meant.

“The best way to explain a phase transition is to take the example of water.” Isogai held up his glass to drink his beer but saw that it was almost empty. Instead of moving to refill it, he raised up the glass. “Let’s say this glass is full of water. Water, as we all know, is defined as being in a liquid state. If you heat it to 100 degrees centigrade, however, it boils and becomes gaseous. Conversely, if you cool it below 0 degrees, then it freezes and becomes solid. In other words, water is said to have three ‘phases’: a gaseous phase above 100 degrees, a solid phase below 0 degrees, and a liquid phase in between. That’s the basic meaning of the word. Phase transition is simply the transition from one of these phases to another.”

That was easy enough to follow. The properties of water, H₂O, changed between the three phases of solid, liquid, and gas depending on the temperature of its molecules. These states were known as phases. Isogai’s appeal to everyday experience allowed Hashiba to quickly grasp the fundamental concept.

“In the same way,” Isogai continued, “the universe itself also has a phase. Our perception of space is three dimensional, and time flows in a single direction. Our universe is founded on the balance of the four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces. A particular set of physical constants is required to support the balance and constitutes a phase.

“However — and this is key — if the phase changes, so do the laws of physics in play. Going back to the example of water, we know that the speed that sound waves travel through it differs depending on whether it’s in its gaseous, liquid, or solid phase. The same is true for light; the angle of refraction depends on the current phase of the matter it travels through. A phase transition means a change in physical constants and a shift in the mathematical structure underpinning our world.”

Hashiba felt his body grow increasingly tense as he listened to Isogai’s explanation, immediately taking in the implications of what he was saying. If true, then the shift in mathematics — the appearance of a pattern in the value of Pi, the collapse of the Riemann hypothesis — would no doubt express itself in ways that they’d seen.

Until this point Hashiba had been willing to dismiss the idea that a shift in numbers could have tangible, real-world implications. If the irregularities they had witnessed were some sort of prologue to a phase transition … He shuddered at the idea. Hashiba had conceived of the world he inhabited in terms of gas. Fish inhabited the world of water. Worms, the solid world of earth. If such an order were to be suddenly flipped on its head … It would be as though people were suddenly cast in concrete, or shackled and dropped out at sea, left to drown. Hashiba finally came to understand why Isogai and Chris had been so agitated. He understood the fear in their eyes.

“You don’t mean to say that a phase transition is actually about to happen?”

Isogai coughed awkwardly and brought his head up to meet Hashiba’s stare. He nodded briefly. “Unfortunately, that’s exactly what all this is pointing towards.”

“What’s gonna happen to us?” Kagayama and Hosokawa blurted out similar questions simultaneously, leaning forward.

“Right now there’s still a starry night out there. But even now, as we sit here talking, the stars are disappearing. So, what happens when the wave of this phase transition reaches our solar system? In a flash, we would become nothing. We will simply cease to be.”

Kagayama’s mouth hung open but no words came out. He crashed back into his chair and buried his face with his hands. Hosokawa’s expression was pained and twisted; he walked over to the window and stood looking up at the sky. Hashiba could tell from his expression that he wanted nothing more than to dismiss Isogai’s words as nonsense. It was plain that he couldn’t; the sky was already darker than before.

“Is there nothing we can do to escape the transition?” Hashiba asked, still unable to accept the truth that they faced.

“If it reaches us, then there is nothing we can do,” Isogai replied.

“Snow melts in the spring, doesn’t it? Won’t things just change back to normal?”

“Imagine being trapped in ice …”

“Can anything be worse than this?” Kato joined in, sounding disgusted.

“Listen, you’re probably all thinking of animals in water, right? Or little fish trapped in ice until the thaw comes, after which they become free again. Unfortunately, this is where the example of water no longer applies. The phase transition we’re looking at now is a completely different beast. We’re looking at the collapse of every single physical construct in the universe. Everything in the universe. Including us. In scientific terms, what will happen is the instantaneous scattering of all matter at a quantum level. All structure as we know it will be lost. The four fundamental forces of nature and all physical constants will be transformed at the quantum level. To an observer, it would be as if everything just vanished into thin air. Think of it in terms of erasing all the data on a computer …” Isogai stopped there. He scratched his chin with his hand, looking strangely pleased with himself.

“Meaning?” Everyone in the room continued to stare at Isogai, waiting for him to continue, unwilling to accept what he was saying.

“It fits with the change in the value of Pi right? Think about it, computers record information in binary terms — huge rows of zeros and ones. The deletion of all the information on the computer’s drive would mean that these rows would be reduced to only the number zero.”

“And that’s what happened to the value of Pi?”

“That’s right. The zeros in Pi are simply a precursor to full phase transition.”

The delete button was not designed to just erase everything without warning. The signs had been there for over a year, the disappearances of people around the tectonic plates, the links to high levels of sunspot activity. These were the first opus, and now the momentum of change was stepping up a gear. The numbers of those going missing had begun to increase rapidly, and irregularities had appeared in mathematics. And now, huge swaths of land had begun to disappear. Even the stars were going out. The increase in scale and frequency of such abnormal phenomena suggested that the time for the complete deletion of the universe was getting dangerously close. Sooner or later the final curtains would come down and cast the stage into darkness.

Hashiba felt faint. His legs felt weak, unable to support his body weight; even the floor beneath him had begun to feel uncertain, fragile. He was finally coming to understand the scale of the catastrophe that loomed before them. The reality of the situation was hitting him hard.

Everyone in the room wore similar expressions. Hosokawa slid down the wall he had been leaning against until he sat on the floor. Kato sat listlessly on the bed. Only Kagayama, who had sat hunched forward on one of the chairs, began to shout in Isogai’s direction.

“Come on, don’t mess around, hmm? There must be something we can do! The American President’s got a team to deal with this, right?” His tone was pleading.

“Of course. But I can guarantee you that right now they’re as aware of their inability to change the situation as we are. The old way is about to die out and give way to the creation of something new. What can we humans do to stop the regeneration of the universe? Absolutely nothing. Zero.”

“Well, why the hell have they been called to Washington? They’re all geniuses, right?” The fight was draining from Kagayama. His voice faltered, growing almost inaudible.

“All they can do now is strive to learn more about the situation. They’re probably attempting to work out exactly how much time is left. I bet that’s why NASA commandeered the James Webb Space Telescope. If they observe the disappearance of a number of stars they can easily estimate the speed at which the front line of the phase transition is heading towards us. All they need is the stars’ distance from earth and the time lag between disappearances. The phase transition is a form of information, and following the basic precepts of the General Theory of Relativity, the wave shouldn’t be able to travel faster than the speed of light. That’s why we’re still here even though stars out there are being extinguished. That being said, information travels at a speed close to that of light — maybe just a fraction slower in relative terms.”

“So when is it going to hit us?” Kagayama asked the question. They all wanted to know exactly how long they had left.

Isogai’s mouth curled up to one side, and he threw up both hands in submission. “All I know is that it’s not long now.” He turned to Chris, voice a whisper. “If you can hack into the amateur astronomy networks we may be able to find out the speed of this thing. They’re pretty good, so I’m pretty sure they’ve picked up on the stars disappearing. If some of them have guessed that it’s a phase transition, that some unknown form of information is making its way towards us, maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ve already calculated its speed.”

Chris seemed to have lost all of his former energy. He sat slumped in his chair in front of the computer, managing only a mumbled response, but pulled himself up and started to type away at the keyboard, trying to access the networks as Isogai suggested.

Hashiba watched passively as Chris performed this new task, then turned to Isogai and asked the next question on his mind. “It’s just hard to take it all in. I think I need a bit of time to get my head around it. I mean, why would something like this happen? What’s the cause?”

“We don’t yet understand what kind of mechanism can cause a phase transition like this. It happened once before, of course, during the creation of the universe. The universe as we know it was formed from nothing. Directly after its formation a phase transition occurred, the event we now know as the Big Bang. It’s conceivable that yet another phase transition followed later, ripping through the original symmetry, creating our universe and the molecular structures that allowed us to flourish. The odds of a further occurrence of phase transition at some point in the future were considered pretty high. Even so, the idea isn’t widely known.

“Well, it appears that Jeffrey Adams, at least, was trying to warn us. The summary in Physical Review Letters clearly states as much. He was certain of a reoccurrence of phase transition in the near future. With regards to the causes, there are a number of theories. The fusion of two separate black holes. A high-speed collision of cosmic radiation. Some have argued that the experiments at CERN would be enough. Jeffrey argues that a number of phase transitions have taken place already, not including the original transitions that caused the formation of our universe. We just haven’t noticed the signs.

“Anyway, we’re certainly not going to be able to work out the causes here tonight. Causes aside, we know that the wave itself is a form of information, and as such, according to the principles of General Relativity, it would be impossible for the wave to travel faster than the speed of light. Unfortunately, this clearly highlights something of a paradox for us. Can you see what it is?” Isogai stared directly at Hashiba, sure that if any of the laymen could work it out, it would be Hashiba.

To everyone’s surprise, it was Kagayama that answered. “If information can’t travel faster than the speed of light, then there wouldn’t be any warning.”

Isogai regarded Kagayama with a look of surprise. He held up a finger. “Exactly right. It’s therefore theoretically impossible for us to observe a phase transition happening before it actually hits us. Nonetheless, we seem to have had some warning.”

“So it must be something else then,” Hosokawa whispered, a flicker of hope crossing his face.

“There are known gaps in space-time. I think it’s more likely that some of the information from the phase transition managed to slip through one of these. Let’s say, for example, that we are going to boil some water. As the water nears boiling point, bubbles begin to rise to the surface. These bubbles are a sign of the water’s upcoming phase transition. In water, the bubbles rise directly upwards. But if you put anything in the way, they zigzag around it and continue to make their way up through the water. The same applies to the transmission of information in space; it doesn’t necessarily follow a straight path. The supposition that all space is uniform has already been disproven. You may have heard of the idea of a ‘wormhole’: a point that theoretically connects two disparate areas of space. The areas can be as far as thousands of millions of light-years apart. In other words, the universe is potentially full of shortcuts that we can’t see. If so, it’s equally possible that pockets of information from the phase transition traveled through these shortcuts, causing the disappearances of people and matter that we’ve been seeing. That fits with what we know so far.” Isogai turned to Hashiba. “The file you put together shows links between where people went missing and the presence of tectonic fault lines and localized geomagnetic disturbances. You also highlighted the link between the time of the events and increased sunspot activity. It could be that the combination of such factors, maybe overlapped with other physical factors we haven’t noticed, created the conditions necessary to allow an alternate path for the ‘bubbles’ of information coming our way.”

So the disappearances had been warnings of what was to come. Bubbles of information had somehow found their way to Earth through distortions in space-time, dissolving whatever happened to be in the way, as signs of the looming catastrophe. Isogai’s explanation was a logical summation of Hashiba’s gut feeling.

Hashiba thought back to the phenomena they’d witnessed. First, the human disappearances. Then, sometime later, huge swaths of land had just vanished. The same could happen over the Itoikawa-Shizuoka Line, and it could happen at any time. What would happen if that chasm in California were reproduced down the middle of Japan? Honshu would be ripped effectively in two, causing mass flooding and the formation of two separate islands.

Despite all that was going on, Hashiba still found that the journalist in him was thinking of the potential scoop he had on his hands. If they were the only group in the world that actually understood what was happening, it was the chance of a lifetime. The issue, of course, was how long they had left. If there were even just a few months until the catastrophe hit, then there would be time enough to enjoy the fruits of success. If it was just a few days, well, there was hardly time to announce the revelation, let alone gain any recognition for it.

“Does it look like any of the news agencies have worked this out?” Hashiba asked Isogai for his opinion.

“I’m not sure about the mass media. Maybe some other researchers or scientists have got this far. The researchers at CERN, almost certainly. Some of the observatories are probably getting close too. So, yes, it’s probably just a matter of time until this gets to the mass media. It’s a kind of irony, you know, but this could be a once-in-a-lifetime scoop for you.”

Hashiba looked away, annoyed that Isogai had read his thoughts. “That comes down to how much time we still have.” The first of the disappearances they knew of had taken place just over a year ago. Even if the phase transition’s arrival was now inevitable, Hashiba couldn’t help hoping that they still had time left.

Isogai continued, “Do you know of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein? One of his well-known lines reads, ‘It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.’ Unfortunately, I get the feeling that the time has come for that to be tested.” It was as though he wanted to deny Hashiba his one hope.

Isogai turned his attention back to the laptop screen and scanned the contents of the pages Chris had pulled up, eyes darting back and forth, digesting the data with computer-like speed. “Do you agree with this? It’s speeding up?”

“It’s conclusive,” Chris replied. “If it continues at this pace, then it won’t be long until the wave reaches the speed of light. It might even overtake it. The inflation directly after the Big Bang spread much faster than the speed of light, so it’s definitely possible. It just means that Einstein’s General Relativity is going to be the next model to collapse.”

Even without reading the screen it was obvious that events had taken an unsettling turn. Hashiba’s mind raced, his thoughts accelerated by the adrenalin running through his system. “If the wave overtakes the speed of light, what happens then?”

“Then it’s Wittgenstein’s time. We won’t live to see New Year’s, maybe not even sunrise.”

Hashiba’s throat had gone dry. He stood up and started pacing the room. Kato wore an odd smile; he sat scratching his head. Hosokawa was looking frantically around the room. Kagayama ran for the bathroom and threw up.

Isogai went on, paying no attention to the reactions. “If the phase transition breaches the speed of light, then it would become impossible to estimate the time of its arrival. The end would come suddenly, even while the light from the stars in the Milky Way shines in the sky. Complete meltdown with no warning.” He took a deep breath and looked around the room as though urging everyone to prepare themselves for the inevitable. “In other words, the world could end before I finish this sentence.” Isogai stopped short, looking both defiant and resigned.

The room was quiet as everyone almost forgot to breathe.

Hashiba could feel his heart thumping in his chest. It echoed in his head like the tolling of a bell, a countdown until … Hashiba shuddered at the thought. The world really could end at any moment. The entire planet and all life on it could just cease to be.

Isogai’s eyes were bloodshot and puffy. “Sorry, I don’t mean to frighten anyone …”

Hashiba tried to relax the tension in his body, reminding himself of his responsibilities as a member of the press. He could clearly guess the public reaction; it was clear just by the reactions of everyone in the room. If the mass media began a countdown to doomsday, there would be a descent into mass panic. Hashiba decided that if the end was coming, he wanted to face it quietly. The last thing he wanted was an unsightly, panicked end.

“So, it looks like we don’t have much time left. I suggest you should all deal with any business you have.” Isogai paused, looking around the blank faces in the room. No one reacted. He continued, his tone urging. “If you leave now you can probably make it home. It might be your last chance to see your families. For better or for worse I don’t have any family to go to. My only true friend is right here with me.”

Everyone was too caught up in their own thoughts to understand what Isogai was asking them. Finally exasperated by the fact that no one was moving, he clapped his hands and threw them up into the air.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to spend some time with Chris. Alone.”

Hashiba got up, dipping his head apologetically. He said to Hosokawa and Kato, “You guys go back to our room, I’ll bring Kagayama.” He was still in the bathroom with the door closed with no sign of coming out anytime soon.

“We’ll help with him,” Hosokawa offered his assistance.

“Thanks, but we’ll be fine. It’d be a great help if you both go back and start to pack up the equipment.”

The two of them nodded and shuffled out of the room. It was Hashiba’s responsibility to make the decision to give up on the filming. Other than that, he’d let the others decide what they wanted to do by themselves. They had two cars at their disposal, and if they rode them back towards Tokyo together, they might still be able to spend their last moments with their families.

Hashiba opened the door to the bathroom. An acrid smell of vomit wafted out of the room. Kagayama sat on the floor, hands over the open toilet. His shoulders rocked up and down as he sobbed. Hashiba put one hand over his nose and patted Kagayama’s back with the other. He turned the bathroom light on, but the extractor fan seemed to be broken. The sour smell hung, stagnant in the air.

“Come on, man, let’s get out of here.”

As he stood rubbing Kagayama’s back, Hashiba became aware of a sound that rang above Kagayama’s sobbing. The fan in the wall would be connected to the outside by some form of ducting. The pipes seemed to be picking up sounds from the parking lot outside, relaying them into the bathroom. An endless succession of horns mixed in cacophonous harmony with an a capella rendition of “Jingle Bells.” Hashiba could hear the voices of a couple talking happily. Mostly the words themselves blended into the background noise of engine sounds and Christmas songs, but a single sentence rose above the noise; a bright, female voice:

“Let’s kiss, here in front of everyone — it’s been a special day, after all …”

The girl’s voice seemed to be whispering directly into Hashiba’s ear, playful and sweet. As though urged on by the voice, he immediately thought of Saeko, and he pulled his phone out from his pocket and pushed her speed dial. The call went straight to her voice mail again.

She must still have the phone turned off.

Hashiba left a message, attempting to describe what they had found out. He talked for about half a minute before hanging up. He realized that if she left the same message for him, he’d suspect that she had gone crazy.

The master bedroom was the only Japanese-style room in the house, located directly across the main corridor from the living room. The first time Saeko had visited the house she had only had a brief glance in. At the time, the sun had been shining in through the south-facing veranda windows. Nonetheless she remembered the room looking dark and bland, probably because it was almost devoid of furniture; there were just a couple of closets and a black-lacquer Buddhist altar stuck in the middle. Her first impression of the room had been formed by the dark flash of the altar reflecting the sunlight.

The altar had been adorned with a single photo, an elderly man that Saeko guessed was Haruko’s father-in-law, Kota’s father. Hashiba had said that this was where he found her father’s notebook, directly under the image.

Saeko didn’t know the name of the man. She hadn’t thought to look up his information when researching the disappearance of the family. She didn’t know when he had passed away, and this was the only photo she had ever seen of him. Saeko realized that her knowledge of the family was still limited.

Even so, it was odd that Hashiba had come across her father’s notebook at the altar built to honor Haruko’s father-in-law. Perhaps if it was her father’s altar, that would still make sense. But the idea of depositing the personal item of a man you were having an affair with on the altar to your father-in-law was abnormal. Maybe Saeko had misinterpreted their relationship; maybe it wasn’t adulterous. Or … the thought struck her that the notebook could have been placed there by a third, unconnected, person. But if so, by whom, and when? Was it here from before the family went missing or planted here afterwards? Whichever the case, Saeko still couldn’t understand just why someone would place her father’s notebook here, on this altar. At least she had now decided where to start looking around the house — the master bedroom, the room of Haruko and her husband.

Saeko stood, making to leave the living room. As she did so an image on the TV set caught her eye, arresting her in mid-movement. She’d turned down the sound, but an unnatural-looking set of lights glowed on the screen. At first, Saeko thought she was seeing a reflection of the lights from the ceiling of the living room, but when she looked up she saw that there was only a single, rectangular-shaped fluorescent lamp. The light coming from the screen looked more like a number of round bulbs.

The broadcast seemed to have shifted away from the footage of the chasm in California. Had something new happened? A caption on the bottom of the screen said the location was Calcutta, and a digital clock on the screen gave the local time, just after 6 p.m., early evening. The camera panned across huge crowds of people gathered together. A red sun hung in the sky to the west, slowly charting its path through the horizon. But the crowd wasn’t looking at the horizon; they seemed to be staring upwards, somewhere between the darkening sky and the sunset.

The crowd looked awestruck, and many sat in prayer. It was quite a sight, tens of thousands of people all staring up at the sky, praying to something. The cameras panned upwards to show what they were looking at. High in the sky above hung five disks of light, saucers like UFOs arranged in a neat circle. The shapes were unmoving and emitted a uniform, pale light. The captions scrolling along the screen told Saeko that they were located tens of kilometers up in the sky. It was clear that this was not a man-made phenomenon. It looked like a set of five full moons hanging together, or glowing white flowers, rounded in a bunch. The next image that popped into her mind was the light in an operating room, shining down on a patient from all angles, designed to leave no shadows. Saeko had never had an operation, so she wondered why she thought of such an image. Once it had taken hold, she couldn’t shake the impression that the five lights in the sky were a set of halogen bulbs. She could picture them bolted into an invisible ceiling, suspended by a metallic arm stretching out behind.

The image she was seeing was doubtlessly being broadcast around the world, with hundreds of millions of people watching. Nonetheless, Saeko suspected she was probably the only person in the world imagining the lights as part of a gigantic operation room. Saeko began to feel that she was lying horizontal on a surgical table and looking up at the lights. She shook off the unnerving sensation and walked out of the living room. She opened the door to the bedroom across the hallway and flicked the switch for the lights. As they revealed the room to her, she remembered a set of words:

“If that’s what you want, go right ahead. I won’t stop you.”

The same words had come to her the last time she was here, when she had picked up her father’s notebook from the table. She stopped and looked around, checking that no one was in the room. She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself, guarding against her imagination’s tendency to get the better of her and create a chain reaction until she heard things that weren’t there. She was redoubling her efforts to stay objective.

The room looked bigger than she had remembered, no doubt the effect of there being hardly any furniture. The room was big enough for eight tatami mats. A low table sat in the middle of the room, and a single cushion lay on the floor next to it. Saeko imagined that come night the Fujimuras would lay their separate futon beds on the floor, sleeping apart as though the room were in two halves. The brown table would have demarcated the boundary line.

She walked over to one of the closets and slid the door open. The inside reeked of body odor. A set of mattresses and bottom sheets lay half-folded, uneven like a cross-section of the earth. The lower shelf carried a set of smallish drawers full of clothes. A wardrobe containing a sparse collection of jackets and coats stood to one side of the closet. Another set of drawers placed across from the altar contained neat, functional rows of everyday items. That was what had made the room appear so large; everything that hinted at habitation had been hidden away in various closets and wardrobes.

Saeko found some photo albums stacked across the far end on one of the shelves in the closet. Each had a date inscribed on its spine. Saeko pulled out the most recent album and began to turn through the pages.

The album contained neat, methodical arrangements of two years’ worth of family photographs, snapshots of daily life. Scattered among these were some photos that seemed to be from family trips and special events that marked the seasons through the year, helping to pepper the album with variety. Saeko felt increasingly sentimental as she paged through the photos; they seemed full of fond, familial affection.

The mother and the father, the siblings … Saeko found her attention being drawn to the photos of the mother of the family, Haruko. At the same time, the sound of helicopters carried through from the TV in the living room, bringing back mental flashes of the chasm in California. But something about the photos had her transfixed.

Saeko agreed with Kitazawa that Haruko was the most likely link between her father and the Fujimura family. They had been travelling together in Bolivia in August 1994, just before he went missing. It wasn’t clear whether they had planned to meet or their encounter had been by chance. Either way, they had entered into an adulterous relationship. Saeko was surprised to find the Haruko in the photos to be a woman of grace and apparent innocence who showed no trace of having a dark side.

Saeko paused at a photo of her. A note below dated it at about a year before the family went missing; it had been taken in the lobby of a hotel at the Arima hot springs. A woman stood next to her, someone called Tomoko. Haruko sat on a sofa, looking formal with her back straightened, hands together over her lap. The formality of the scene seemed oddly out of place if this was, indeed, a trip with a friend. Haruko looked healthy, with an air of politeness that suggested a proper upbringing. If the photo was taken a year before she went missing, then she would have been forty-four at the time. She looked as though she were in her early thirties.

Saeko tried to imagine what Haruko must have looked like at twenty-eight, when she would have met Saeko’s father. She was pretty — Saeko would have said cute rather than beautiful. Her eyes were full of character. Deep-set, they slanted inwards slightly, towards her nose.

The next page of the album had photos that looked altogether more recent, a set of family portraits. Saeko checked the date; it was marked November 22 last year, just a couple of months before the family went missing. There were four photos in total, each very similar, like they had all been taken at the same time. Saeko recognized the Fujimuras’ living room, which she had just been in. Each photo contained the entire family, the two parents and their children. It looked like they had set up a tripod and used a timer for the shots.

There was something about this particular set of photos that caught her interest. At the center of the photograph were Haruko and her husband, with their children lined up behind them. The composition was entirely orthodox, a typical style for a family portrait. Their smiles looked fixed, slightly forced.

Saeko flipped through a few more pages of the album as a thought began to form in her mind. All the other photos in the album were essentially snapshots, taken out and about, around Takato, out on holiday, school trips, sporting events … The formal portraits stood out as they were the only photos showing the family together in the surroundings of their own home.

She considered the framed photo adorning the altar.

Did they know that something was going to happen to them?

If the family had discovered something in advance, if they had somehow worked out that everything was about to change … Were these photos taken to forever preserve their images as they waited for a coming darkness? The pictures had been taken two months before they actually disappeared. They might have known something was coming, but not the exact timing of whatever catastrophe awaited them.

Saeko put the idea to the back of her mind and began to rummage through the remaining albums. She picked out a couple from around 1994. The first, marked 1993, contained a series of wedding photos, Haruko and Kota’s. The next album, dated 1995, contained pictures of the happy couple with their newborn daughter, Fumi. Haruko had met Saeko’s father in Bolivia during August in the year after her marriage, the year before Fumi was born. Saeko remembered that Haruko had given birth to Fumi on May 15th. Was it possible that Fumi had been conceived while Haruko had been with her father in Bolivia? The timing fitted perfectly. There was no conclusive evidence, but it felt close.

Saeko realized she didn’t have a clear enough image of what Fumi looked like. Immediately she began flipping through the pages until she found a couple of snapshots of her. Saeko stared at the photos, feverishly devouring details, searching for any resemblances to herself, any signs that she could be her father’s daughter — that they could be blood-sisters. They didn’t look dissimilar, Saeko had to admit. Fumi had the same slightly oval-shaped face with rounded cheeks, the kind of visage that most men found appealing. There was a basic resemblance.

Her father and Haruko had been lovers, and Fumi born as a result of the consummation of their relationship … Of course, there had been no reason to consider such a hypothesis when she had first visited the Fujimuras’ for her research. If Fumi’s father had been Shinichiro, and if that somehow related to the family’s disappearance, then Haruko would have known that she was the cause of the household’s downfall. Just as Saeko’s thoughts began to crystallize onto an idea, the phone in the living room began to ring, catching her off guard.

Her body went rigid as a bolt of fear sliced through her. She clasped the photo album to her chest and knelt down on the tatami, holding her breath. She curled forwards, momentarily unsure of how to react. There was no reason not to answer the phone; she placed the album down on the floor in front of her and started to get up. Just at that moment, the ringing abruptly ended, and a man’s voice said, “Hello?” The voice was followed by a dial tone.

It was over in a couple of seconds, but Saeko immediately realized that something was out of joint. A series of images rushed through her mind, adding visual feedback to the scene based on the sounds she had heard. She saw someone pick up the receiver of the ringing phone. The caller spoke through the receiver, managing just one word. Then, someone had pushed the phone’s cradle down, released it, and the dial tone had sounded. Then the receiver had been replaced. There was only one possible conclusion.

Someone’s there, in the living room …

Saeko felt her body respond to the sudden rush of fear; she quickly put her hands over her mouth, afraid she might scream. She moved slowly towards the door, cautious not to make any sound. She turned the lock shut and pulled her phone from her pocket. She had recognized the voice on the other side of the phone. It sounded agitated but there was no mistaking the voice. It was Hashiba.

She had completely forgotten that her phone was still off from the drive up. She held down the power button and the screen lit up, showing a number of missed calls. They were from Hashiba; he had left a couple of messages. She dialed the number for her voicemail and put the phone to her ear. The voice she heard sounded agitated and jittery:

“Saeko, don’t go near the Fujimura house, there’s someone — something, there. I’m one hundred percent serious. Call me as soon as you get this message. Please, Saeko.”

The machine clicked through to the next message. This time, Hashiba’s tone was almost mournful. He sounded completely crestfallen:

“Saeko, I don’t expect you to believe this. But please listen, and try to stay calm. Saeko, the universe — everything — is about to end. Isogai and Chris, they’ve worked out that something called a phase transition is happening. The thing originated somewhere in the galaxy and is heading towards our solar system, faster than the speed of light. It’s going to reach before dawn, and everything as we know it will just cease to exist. There won’t be any warnings. The things on the news now are the first signs.”

The first message was regarding her specific situation. The second was about the fate of not just Earth but the whole universe. Both messages told her that she was in immediate danger.

There’s something else in the house … A phase transition would strike Earth before dawn, destroying everything in an instant …

The information was too much to take in. Her thoughts spun, and for a brief moment Saeko couldn’t work out which of the two issues was the more urgent. Then she knew; there was no need to even consider the question. Anything that threatened her and her alone didn’t matter. Whatever problems anyone faced, whether they were floating alone on an iceberg, lay on their deathbed with terminal cancer, or had been kidnapped by a murderer, no longer mattered. They would all cease to be, together with the source of their problems.

A phase transition — Saeko knew the basics. It meant the replacement of the molecular structure of matter by a new form that obeyed different physical laws. It would happen in the blink of an eye. The old universe was getting ready to be replaced by a new one like a snake shedding its skin.

Did it mean that they’d gotten something wrong? That a fundamental error had eaten away at the validity of the relationship between DNA’s mathematical language and the universe? That the contradictions had finally accumulated to the point where the situation was beyond repair? That the universe was trying to reset itself?

Saeko wondered how it was that they could have gotten it so wrong. She knew that there was a contradiction between general relativity and quantum mechanics; maybe that had been the hint they’d needed. It was too late now, either way. Hashiba had said that the world was going to end before the night was through. She had no choice but to believe him. The evidence seemed to be there: the chasm in California, the crater in Atami, the moon-like circles of light in the sky. Everything pointed to an impending disaster.

Hashiba was alone in the room. Next door, Kato and Hosokawa were busying themselves packing away the equipment. Kagayama had been sitting on the edge of the bed, muttering to himself. They had agreed that there was probably no point in packing away the equipment if the world really was about to end. At the same time, they couldn’t break the habit. True professionals, they could only allow themselves to leave after packing everything into all the right places. Once they had checked out, they would reunite and take their two cars back to Tokyo.

Hashiba had thrown together everything he thought he needed and now sat on the bed, absentmindedly watching the TV, waiting for the others to let him know they had finished. The news coverage kept jumping back and forth between footage in California and a view of lights in the sky from Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The speed at which the images flicked around seemed to reflect the confused state of the news producers. Things were happening so quickly no one had any time to work out the causes, to add proper narrative. All they could do was chase phenomena around the world, filming whatever they could. Hashiba wondered how he would direct a program based on what he’d learned, and various ideas began to stir in his mind. He sat up straight, simultaneously excited and frustrated by the fact that he knew more than the various broadcasters of the world.

The images continued to cycle from place to place, empty of any meaningful narrative. The next image to come up was that of a clear night sky. This was new. The picture quality was good; it had to be somewhere that had a decent infrastructure in place. The reporter spoke in a matter-of-fact, dispassionate tone, linking the stars’ disappearance to the chasm that had appeared in California. Looking up was forcing him to talk in a halting manner, and he avoided sounding loquacious.

It was night in Japan. Hashiba got up and opened the window; he should be able to observe the same phenomenon himself. He leant out into the open air and arched his neck up, taking in the view of the dark sky above. He searched for the Milky Way. It was true, whereas previously the stars in that area had been dense and bright, it seemed to have become a dark hole in the sky. He was appalled to confirm the sight firsthand, but his shock morphed first into a sense of loneliness, then into an indescribable sorrow.

The Milky Way had always been such a romantic notion. Hashiba couldn’t count the number of times he had looked into the sky for inspiration. Once, during summer back in high school, he’d invited a girl he had a crush on to come out and watch for shooting stars. They had spent the whole night outdoors. He remembered how he’d wanted to kiss her but hadn’t been able to pluck up the courage to ask. Each time he tried, there had been a brief moment of awkwardness, and each time he had been saved by shooting stars crossing the Milky Way providing an easy change of subject. The stars had made sure his date didn’t become a disaster. Even though he hadn’t kissed the girl that night — he’d hardly held her hand — it had been the best time.

Now the stars were fading away into nothingness, and it felt as though memories were being erased along with them.

First the stars, then us.

Hashiba’s whole body ached with the force of the idea. It was too much to think that despite having come so far, despite 4 billion years of evolution, everything could just be swept away over the course of a single night. He now accepted that death was coming, but the feeling still lacked a visceral sense of reality. It was different from being told that he was in the final stages of terminal cancer and had only a few days to live; from departing as part of a death squad in some war and knowing that there was no return; from being a prisoner on death row. There would be no countdown. Humanity could only wait, passive and helpless, for a sudden but inevitable demise. More than anything Hashiba felt a burning sense of waste, overpowering any feelings of fear, coupled with a frustration born from knowing that nothing could be done about it.

He shook his head, at the same time surprised by his easy acceptance of an idea that was, after all, nothing more than a hypothesis cobbled together by two men. Why couldn’t he just laugh it off as a preposterous notion? The decision to believe a certain hypothesis, Hashiba knew, derived from subconscious desire. He recalled a friend from college, two years his senior, that he’d met through the ski club. The guy prided himself on his logical thinking and readily dismissed anything that reeked of the occult. His grades were first class, and he was a charismatic presence on campus. After graduation he secured a high-flying job at a prestigious trading company, and with his future almost guaranteed, he received a number of offers for well-placed marriages. Then, out of the blue, he married someone he met on a business trip to Hachinohe, a widow ten years older than him. He’d somehow become obsessed with the idea that she was the living reincarnation of his childhood sweetheart, who had died when they were still in junior high school.

Hashiba learned this while attending the wedding with some other friends, initially as a rumor. He thought it a joke, but it soon became clear that his friend truly believed it. Even now he could picture the dumbfounded look on everyone’s faces when his friend told them.

He had three reasons for believing that his bride was the reincarnation of his childhood sweetheart. When he’d visited his lost love during the final stages of her illness, she’d come to terms with her extinction and promised that they would meet again, on a bridge above a clear stream. The first reason, then, was that he met his wife on a bridge over the Mabechi River. The second was the fact that they looked physically similar, with a beauty spot in the same place, left of their lower lip, and the same wavy, brownish hair. The third reason clinched it: a common birthday.

These factors in no way provided evidence to support his conviction that the woman from Hachinohe was a reincarnation. The most glaringly obvious contradiction was that she was ten years older than his childhood sweetheart. Despite the obvious logical flaw, Hashiba’s friend had convinced himself that it was true. Hashiba came to understand then that no matter how much people prided themselves on their logic or intellect, if their desire to believe something was strong enough, their minds happily wove a fiction around those wishes until they became stubborn belief. The key was the underlying wish. His friend had created a fiction to support his need to believe that his relationship with his childhood sweetheart had been unique and predestined, and viewed events through a romantic mysticism.

Following that logic, Hashiba realized that some part of him actually desired to see the end of the world. He’d often thought that if the world were to end, he’d want to be there to see it. He had to admit that some part of him wanted to go out in a blaze of glory; if it was going to happen, then he wanted it to happen to his generation. That was why his subconscious had made the decision to believe that the phase transition was real. The idea that the end would swallow all, that the fate of humanity was somehow intertwined with that of the whole universe, seemed to alleviate some of the fear. He even thought he detected a perverse elation in his bosom. To die slowly and painfully, alone after losing a loved one — that was the type of death he dreaded the most. To live to the end of the universe — now, that was something different altogether.

Once, he sat with his colleagues discussing a “Last Supper” article someone had read in a magazine about what you’d eat on the world’s last day. His colleagues had joked around, giving easy answers like tuna, foie gras, sushi rolls. Everyone had enjoyed his own version of the end. Hashiba had thought seriously about the question, and when asked for his answer, he said it was more important who he ate with, not what. At that point Hashiba had already been married with a kid, but the person that came to mind was not his wife. He had always been known as a good guy, progressing steadily along with his career, settling down into a marriage that was stable and bland. He remembered deciding that if he was going to consider the idea then he might as well entertain his fantasies, and tried to imagine the perfect woman as his companion. As it went, no one in particular came to mind. Now, however, when the scenario was actually coming true, he realized that he had found the woman of his dreams. It was ironic, he guessed.

How should he actually spend the final hours that he had left? Should he play the good guy as he’d always done and sideline his desires? He asked himself whether he was really happy with the life that he’d led so far. He wasn’t sure; that was the honest answer. He was sure there was no afterlife waiting for him, so he wasn’t particularly worried about judgment after death. The voice of temptation beckoned him, inviting him to throw away all his morals. The memory of Saeko, half-naked on her bed as they groped in the darkness, came back to him. The image was so vivid he felt he could almost smell her skin as it brushed against his. It seemed natural and correct for a man to want to have sex with a beloved before his end came.

No, I can’t …

Hashiba repeated the thought out loud, trying to get a grip, but the temptation took hold like an eagle, wrapping a tight claw around his emotions. An untapped mass of nervous energy coursed through his body.

Until a few moments ago all he had wanted was to see out a quiet end. How easily that notion had fallen apart, giving in to this inner struggle. Regardless of what people might say, everything fell apart at the end. Facing such extreme circumstances, Hashiba doubted that anyone could resist the urge to spend their last moments with the one they loved. The desire for Saeko continued to grow in intensity, stronger than ever before. He wanted her body; he wanted her love.

It was probably all the worse for them having been stopped halfway into the act. The frustrated desire had been dormant, smoldering inside. He sat, tormented by his feelings, cradling his head in his hands.

Hashiba made his decision. He was going to use the time left to him to complete the only thing that left him unsatisfied. If he was going to do anything, he had to do it now. He would have to take one of the cars himself and get Kagayama, Kato and Hosokawa to use the other. The three would head for Tokyo, where his family was too, but he would drive straight to Takato. He couldn’t help noticing that Atami was almost exactly at the geographical mid-point between the two locations, as though to embody his dilemma. His heart felt as though it was being pulled in two, as opposing forces tore a fissure through him. He picked up his phone, his hand shaking. He dialed Saeko’s number again. He hadn’t heard anything from her since they parted outside the herb gardens earlier that afternoon.

The call went straight to her voicemail.

Hashiba hung up; her phone was still off. It was possible that she had forgotten to turn it back on after reaching the Fujimura house. It struck him that he’d received a call from there. The number would be in the call history of his phone, and Saeko would definitely have arrived by now. His throat was dry, and an acid feeling churned in his stomach.

Hashiba went through the phone’s menu system and opened the archive of received calls. He found the number and pressed the call button.

The phone started to ring. Someone actually picked up, catching him off guard. Hashiba coughed to clear his throat before speaking.

“Hello?” His voice was hoarse.

Instead of a reply he heard the sound of the phone being hung up and the line going dead. He was just about to ring back when Kato came flying into the room.

“Hashiba, you’ve got to come.”

Hashiba didn’t even turn round. “Can’t you see I’m busy? I’ve got stuff to do!” he shouted. His hand tightened around the phone.

“Isogai’s calling everyone back.” Kato’s admonishing tone suggested that he knew what it was Hashiba was busy with.

“Isogai? What’s he saying?”

“He’s getting excited about something. I don’t know, he’s acting strange.”

Without any particular reason Hashiba looked at his watch, tutting. “Is it important?”

“It definitely looks that way. They’re getting excited, hugging each other and shouting stuff back and forth in English …”

Hashiba knew that if he was to see Saeko again then time was of the essence. But if Isogai had discovered something new, then perhaps he should hear it. Hashiba nodded and followed Kato out into the hallway.

When they came to a stop outside Isogai’s room, the loud clamoring of voices sounded through the door. As Kato had said, they were definitely excited about something. It appeared as though they were in the middle of some sort of debate, but Hashiba couldn’t pick up on the content.

He opened the door and the two of them looked over. Isogai pitched across the room, almost tripping in his excitement.

“You were looking into cases of people going missing, right?”

“Certainly.” Hashiba felt disappointed. Why would he be asking about that now? Surely that was irrelevant at this point. That was why Isogai was here in the first place, to help them finish the program on mysterious disappearances after the death of Shigeko Torii, to eschew the paranormal for a more scientific approach.

“Could you show me the information you’ve collected so far?”

Hashiba saw something in Isogai’s eyes that spurred him to agree to his request. He saw a dim flicker of light mixed in among the despair, a sliver of hope. It had to be a good sign, maybe he’d thought of something to stop this after all …

Hashiba collected the file from his room and handed to Isogai a summary of all the information they had collated on the disappearances at Takato, Itoikawa, and Atami. It even had details on the Californian cases they had come across. Each case was mapped for its physical proximity to tectonic fault lines and linked to recordings of heightened sunspot activity with visual aids.

Isogai took the file from Hashiba and began to scan the contents without even taking the time to walk back into the room. He paged rapidly through, as though trying to confirm something, then started to explain something to Chris in rapid English before asking his opinion. Chris’ eyes darted back and forth as he replied, and he spoke so quickly that Hashiba could see tiny bubbles of spit forming on the side of his mouth. When the two seemed to reach a conclusion, Chris sat shaking his head, his eyes betraying a mix of hope and fear. Hashiba had heard them mention the name Jack Thorne a number of times.

“Just who is Jack Thorne?” he blurted, his frustration at not being able to fully understand the conversation beginning to boil over.

Isogai stopped mid-sentence, surprised at Hashiba’s outburst. He stared blankly for a moment, then, oddly, winked. The gesture was so unnatural that Hashiba didn’t immediately recognize it. Isogai’s nose twisted and his mouth hung half open as one side of his face wrinkled together with the movement. As he registered it as a wink, Hashiba began to wonder if Isogai had actually begun to lose it. When he spoke, however, his tone was calm and focused.

“As we know, scientific advisors to the U.S. President are currently gathering the world’s top minds in physics and mathematics and bringing them to Washington. One of them is Jack Thorne. When I first learned that he was included in the roundup, I was a little surprised to say the least. His field is almost classical — gravitational theory. The rest are all cutting-edge theorists in fields related to quantum mechanics. He stands out like a sore thumb, so we started to look into possible reasons for his inclusion. Then we saw exactly the words we were looking for. Turns out he specializes in the study of black holes and, more importantly, wormholes.”

Hashiba knew more about black holes than the latter. “And again, a wormhole is?”

“Essentially, it’s like a shortcut to another universe.” There was something jarring about the casualness with which Isogai said it. A shortcut to another universe? He glanced at his watch, purposely avoiding Hashiba’s gaze. “We’ve got no time to lose, we can’t waste anymore time explaining this.”

“I don’t care how much time we’ve got or haven’t got. Look, you guys know what’s going on, this is your thing. But I have no idea. I just want to know what the hell’s waiting for us.”

Isogai was taken aback by Hashiba’s uncharacteristic forcefulness. He pressed his left hand against his forehead, seemingly a habit when he felt flustered, and began to explain.

“A wormhole is as the name suggests. It’s like a hole through the ground. In terms of general relativity, it’s also known as an Einstein-Rosen Bridge — a fitting name since the concept of a bridge is more accurate than a hole. The idea is that the universe we know is not unique, that in fact there are countless numbers of universes, all existing on top of each other. That’s what Jack Thorne believes, anyhow. A wormhole links these separate universes together. Wormholes are like bridges, except that they only function in one direction. Once you cross the threshold, wherever you end up is your new home. There’s no coming back.”

“I see. Actually, I still have no idea what the hell you’re talking about, but I kind of see. Whatever. There’s multiple universes, and these wormholes link them. How does this relate to the phase transition?”

“If Washington has included Jack Thorne on their list it can only mean one thing. They’re looking for wormholes. His belief is that a side effect of a phase transition is the simultaneous emergence of wormholes in the fabric of space. Think of wormholes as bubbles that appear when a phase transition in water causes it to boil and turn to its gaseous state. Any organisms in the water will be carried upwards, taken with the water as it makes the transition. Don’t picture these wormholes as tunnels. They’re more like bubbles that resemble black holes.” Isogai raised his finger at the end.

“Okay, and?”

“Washington must have accepted that there’s nothing they can do to stop the phase transition. We’re essentially helpless to stop our universe from undergoing the change. The only course of action left, a last desperate attempt to do something, would be to try and escape. To abandon our universe in search of another.”

“You’re saying that they’re trying to find these wormholes?”

“Exactly. There’s no other way to survive this.”

Hashiba felt that he finally understood the glimmer of hope he had seen in the two men’s eyes when he had first entered the room. “Where will the wormholes open?”

“Only in a few locations. A few, very specific locations.”

“And you think that Washington knows these locations?”

“Washington?” Isogai laughed. “I’d say they have no idea.”

“And you know this and they don’t because …?”

“Because,” Isogai smiled, “they haven’t got an expert on mysterious cases of people gone missing.” He repeated the sentence in English to Chris, who laughed, weakly.

Hashiba and Kato exchanged glances, the humor lost on them. Hashiba felt a surge of blood rush to his head; he was finding it hard to concentrate. Isogai was waiting for a reaction but none came.

“Come on, don’t you see?” he exclaimed impatiently. “We’ve been standing right next to the pot of gold without even seeing it! Right now, we’re probably the only people in the whole world able to guess exactly where the wormholes will appear.”

Hashiba’s confusion began to clear away, replaced by the beginnings of understanding. He felt momentarily overwhelmed, unable to speak. He clasped his hands in a ball, and his knuckles whitened as his body began to release the nervous tension that had been building up inside him.

“You’ve been following these mysterious disappearances. And where did they go missing? Near tectonic plates, near local magnetic disturbances — all the factors you’ve racked up and linked together.” Isogai rolled up the papers and slapped them against the edge of the table.

“They were all sucked into wormholes? Is that what you’re saying?”

Isogai nodded excitedly. “Although not sucked into, to be precise. More like carried through, into another universe. It’s obvious now. When you tapped me to work as scientific advisor for your program, I read the information you provided and was pretty much in agreement about the combination of physical factors that had resulted in the disappearances. One thing didn’t gel, however. Why was it that only people vanished? The Fujimuras’ house, the convenience store, nothing vanished apart from humans, right? Everything else remained: the building itself, the stock …

“It’s as though something is targeting people and people alone, but even if that’s the case, it still doesn’t make sense. If whatever force at work does somehow only target people, then what happens to their clothing? Surely their clothes would be left behind? If you could differentiate between animate and inanimate objects, then surely it wouldn’t be difficult to work out the difference between person and clothing. So you would expect clothes, watches, anything the people had been wearing to be left behind. But that didn’t happen. Take the people that went missing here in Atami. As tourists they’d have had bags, and phones, but there’s no sign of them.”

“You’re right.” Hashiba had visited the site almost directly after the disappearances and had seen for himself that there were no traces of any personal items being left behind.

“At first I couldn’t get past the apparent contradiction. If some distortion in space had appeared, then why was it that nothing else disappeared along with the people and their belongings? It didn’t make any sense. However, if you postulate that the distortion was a wormhole, then the contradiction is resolved nicely. Why? Let’s say that a wormhole, a gateway to another universe, appeared in front of you. Perhaps whatever you saw on the other side was so appealing, so tempting, that you couldn’t help but want to cross the threshold of your own free will.”

Hashiba didn’t share the conviction. “A gateway to another world? Why on earth would something like that look appealing?”

“People who’ve gone through near-death experiences are almost unanimous in claiming that the world they saw was one of beauty — so much so, in fact, that it was hard to resist. These people must have been so enchanted by whatever it was they saw on the other side of the wormhole that they felt compelled to cross over. What other reason could they have for going through? They all chose to cross the event horizon. That’s the best way to think of this.”

If what Isogai said was true, it did seem to solve some of the mystery behind the disappearances. Hashiba thought of the geography of the herb gardens, of the many small paths that crisscrossed through the place to that single area in the middle of the park. No matter which route you took, you had to pass through that one point. That must have been where the wormhole appeared. Suddenly, the mystery of how so many people could vanish together seemed clearer. It wouldn’t have mattered if there’d been as many as a few hundred people walking down the paths that day; even a thousand would all have found the wormhole and walked through. Perhaps, if it was as Isogai suggested, there had even been a mad dash like ants leaping into a hole for the promise of honey.

Chris whispered something into Isogai’s ear.

“You’re sure?”

Chris kept nodding in reply to Isogai’s question.

“What’s happened?”

“It looks like we hit the bull’s eye. No question about it now. The President is on board Air Force One, heading to Bermuda as we speak.”

The Bermuda Triangle. Hashiba knew the area was famous for the many strange disappearances of planes and boats.

“So you understand what I mean when I say time is of the essence, Hashiba. We can’t waste any more time sitting here talking.”

“You want us to go back to the gardens?”

“Of course.”

“Hold on.” It was Kato. Until now he had just stood, listening in silence. “This wormhole thing is like a black hole, right? Is it safe to go through?”

Kato was thinking of what Isogai had said earlier about bubbles in boiling water. Hashiba understood his fear. Black holes were known for having immense gravitational pulls, the forces inside powerful enough to crush light itself. The idea of going into one was terrifying. Sucked into the darkness, what guarantee was there that they wouldn’t be crushed flat?

“I can’t guarantee anything. There’s no way of knowing what danger this poses for us. And we’re not exactly going to get a testimony from anyone that’s done this before.”

“But surely as a physicist, you could at least …”

Isogai cut Kato off mid-sentence by holding up a hand. “What I’ve told you so far is nothing more than a hypothesis that seems to hold up to the evidence at hand. There’s no such thing as perfect science. All I can say for sure is that if we continue to stand here and debate this, we’ll die. On the other hand, a chance for survival has presented itself. I’ll leave you to decide among yourselves. Chris and I have already chosen where to place our bets.”

Hashiba was torn about what to do. “If a wormhole is going to open here in the park, then one should also open at the house in Takato, right?”

“Takato? Yes, it would.”

Hashiba was in line with Isogai; they had to take whatever chances they had left. The problem was Saeko. She was at the Fujimuras’ in Takato, but a wormhole was likely to open there too. He could try to make it there by car but there was no guarantee that he would make it in time. Moreover, he could only allow himself to go to Saeko if he was sure that the world was really about to end. If there was any chance that they might survive, however slight, he knew he had to opt for his family, his wife and child, as a matter of course. He had to call them to Atami, so why was he even hesitating? He finally felt the force of desire that had built up within him begin to subside.

Would he be able to make his wife understand the situation? First thing, he’d call Saeko and tell her. Then he’d call his wife and explain everything he knew, taking as much time as necessary. Just as he was about to make the call, he thought of one more thing he wanted to check with Isogai.

“I don’t care if you make a blind guess at this point, I just need to know. What do you think this other universe will be like? Could it be a place where we could survive?”

Isogai answered without pause for thought, as though he had already considered the same question himself. “I think it’s likely to be sometime in the past. That’s my gut feeling.”

“You mean it could take us back in time?”

“Don’t picture the kind of situation from a sci-fi novel or movie where you travel into the past on a time machine. We’ve been saying ‘wormhole’ for the sake of convenience, but it’s not like going back to the past through a tube-shaped tunnel. How should I say … Yes, it’s like a journey beyond dimensions.”

“A journey beyond dimensions …”

“Putting aside the axis of time, we humans grasp space in three dimensions. Everyone knows by now that Earth is spherical, after it was gazed upon from our moon 380,000 kilometers away. But before the Age of Exploration, not one person was able to understand the fact experientially. For humans whose realm of activity was limited, the world could only be grasped as a circular, two-dimensional plane that was believed to have an end where the sea cascaded like a waterfall.

“We can’t get a clear view of the horizon due to the bumps and indentations on our planet, but let us say there exists a smooth sphere on which we are inhabitants.”

Isogai paused, and Hashiba exercised his imagination and pictured standing on such a sphere and looking around. The world was a slightly curved disc shaped by the horizon.

Seeing that Hashiba had a mental image, Isogai continued, “One day, you decide to measure how large your world is. Securing one end of an infinitely long rope on the ground, you take the other end and head off toward the horizon. What happens? The farther you advance, the farther the horizon seems to flee. As you try to measure the distance, the end of the world stays ahead of you and the rope keeps extending. If you were walking at first but are running now, then the horizon escapes you only that much faster.

“But note that if you keep going in the same direction, you’ll eventually make a trip around the globe and end up where you started. Standing there, you’ll feel that you’ve seen the place before and perhaps feel nostalgic. Now, let’s say someone had seen you off at your starting point. How would your actions have appeared to him? He gazed at your back as it grew smaller and smaller toward the horizon. You kept on walking and dropped off the horizon, disappearing for a while. From the viewer’s perspective, you vanished from the world. He was surprised, but not as much as when you approached from his back while he waited there for the missing person.

“For someone who mistakes a three-dimensional sphere for a two-dimensional plane, the world can proffer a phenomenon as strange as that. The same goes for the universe. Let’s say you wanted to measure how large the universe is and boarded a faster-than-light spaceship and headed for the end of the world. Can you picture what would happen?”

Hashiba had imagined himself taking such a journey. Beyond the end, outside of the universe, there was darkness, emptiness … Or was there even any boundary that separated an inside and an outside?

“The same thing happens,” Isogai instructed.

“The same thing?” Hashiba tried to picture himself returning to the same location after heading out to the end of the universe, but he found it difficult.

“Almost without a doubt, we exist on the surface of a multi-dimensional structure. We don’t know if there are five, or ten, but since we’re on the surface and our movement is limited, our spatial recognition is truncated at three. For someone who is affected by the structure without realizing it, the universe would seem to be expanding. If the observation speed and range increased, the rate of expansion at the margins would also appear to increase. The notion of dark energy is just an attempt to tie up loose ends; no such thing exists.

“If you went on a journey beyond dimensions to the end of the universe, just as that horizon would recede, all that would ever present itself is a world with a more than ten billion light-year radius. If you keep your bearing, then just like the traveler on the sphere you’ll return to the same point. If your constraints are somehow removed by passing through a gap in the multi-dimensional structure or a space-time bubble, your journey back to the starting point could be instantaneous. But in that case, there could be a shift. The addition of a temporal axis to the multi-dimensional structure gives it a limitless complexity that we can’t imagine in concrete terms. Time would probably shift.”

“That’s why we’d end up in the past?”

“Yes, the past. From the tip of time where we stand, the future is uncertain and undecided. The past can be described in words, not so with the future. The past, it is.”

“But traveling back into the past and affecting history would change the present …” Even Hashiba was aware of time-travel paradoxes.

“So what if it did? The sort of paradox where killing your grandfather fifty years ago leads to your extinction today is predicated on there being only one universe. When we go through the wormhole, we’ll probably go to a past world, but for that world, the future is unknown and not tied to a preceding historical path and can be cut out anew.”

What Isogai was saying seemed to draw on his own unique viewpoints and wasn’t persuasive on every point. Still, the idea of cutting out a new future made Hashiba feel like the courage to act was being bestowed upon him.

When Saeko finally managed to get through to Hashiba’s phone, he immediately began to explain that a wormhole could open just before the phase transition reached Earth. For a moment, it was enough to make Saeko completely forget about the noises she’d heard in the living room.

“I know it’s a lot to take in. Did I explain it well enough?” Hashiba asked uncertainly. He had gone into great detail about the mechanism of the phase transition and the wormhole.

“It makes sense. Yes, that would fit,” Saeko was quick to reassure him.

Wormholes weren’t such a new concept. She remembered the time when her father had explained the basics of spatial inflation theory and the possibility of their existence. It was at least logical that wormholes could open before a phase transition. The other universe might also be suitable for human life since physical laws were preserved in the face of manipulations of CPT — charge, parity, and time.

“Saeko? Hello? I think we’re losing the sig—”

The magnetic anomaly seemed to interfere with communication devices, and Hashiba’s voice faded into a background of static. The line went dead.

Saeko noticed an eerie silence and realized that there were no noises coming from the living room. Whether the TV had been turned off or the volume muted, it felt certain that someone was there.

The quiet and what Hashiba had told her deepened her sense of solitude. Even if a wormhole did open before the phase transition reached them, even if she could cross it to embark on a trans-dimensional journey, there would be nothing there for her. Just loneliness. Soon she would lose all of her friends, everyone she had ever cared for. She’d dealt with the devastating disappearance of her father when she was in high school, and the thought of even more loss was too much to bear. Was there even any point in living under such circumstances? Saeko pulled her jacket together, suddenly cold, as though her loneliness was causing the temperature of the room to drop.

Her thoughts returned to the room next door. Was it just her imagination? Was she being too jumpy? Just trying to think was making her head spin. She had already locked the door, but would that stop whoever it was from getting into the bedroom? Saeko looked at the thin door; if someone really tried, it wouldn’t be too hard to break in.

If Isogai was correct, a portal to another world could open somewhere in the house. Saeko felt that the living room would be the most likely place. According to the evidence — the half-empty glasses of tea, discarded banana skins, and such — that was where the family had disappeared. If it had opened upstairs, it was possible that only the children would have disappeared. No, it had happened when all four family members had been gathered together.

If she were to stand a chance of escaping the phase transition, she couldn’t stay cooped up in the bedroom. Though she knew she had to get back to the living room, her body wouldn’t play along. Saeko understood something then: you had to be brave in order to act. It took far more courage to make some move than to await salvation.

Her father had not wanted for her a passive life of drifting with the current. Why else had he taught her how to interpret the world? It was so she could overcome obstacles and face strange worlds. Without the courage to take a step into a new realm, life wasn’t worth living.

Saeko was pacing towards the door.

What remained was a matter of will. Should she go, knowing that her loneliness would only worsen? Was it better to step into the unknown and bet on survival?

Saeko turned the lock and crossed the threshold. The Fujimuras’ living room had no door and simply opened up from the hallway. Saeko sneaked to the edge and peeked in.

The TV set glowed under the fluorescent ceiling lights, and the flickering screen showed the sky in California, horizon faintly crimson as dawn approached. From the vantage point of the camera the chasm in the ground resembled a dark belt strapped to the land below and snaking towards San Francisco.

Saeko caught sight of the mirror hanging on the far wall. It reflected the full figure of a man. Somehow, she was able to keep her reaction to a minimum. A part of her had already expected someone to be there.

Conscious of her gaze, he caressed his expressionless face and shook his head in the mirror. He was seated, not deeply, on a sofa set against the wall, a pair of crutches too large for him arranged at his back in the shape of a cross. He lowered his right hand, with which he’d caressed his face, down to his chin, and turned out the palm of his left hand, which hung loosely to the side of his crotch. His calves appeared swollen; they were set in casts used to keep broken bones in place.

The figure reminded Saeko of the last passages in her father’s manuscript. Examining the image of Viracocha at the Gateway of the Sun, he had seen a half-bird, half-man creature lurking in the background. The creature’s wings were described as overlapping boomerangs on its back; there was mention of horn-like protrusions on its slick reptilian face.

Saeko only had her father’s description to go on since she’d never visited the site. She hadn’t even seen the Polaroid photos. Yet she was certain that the man she beheld was identical to the creature looking out from behind Viracocha. The crutches behind him looked like boomerangs, or wings.

Saeko knew him. The wrinkles had disappeared from his plum-shaped face, which now looked greasy. It was Kota Fujimura’s elder brother, Seiji.

He uttered, “You kept me waiting, you know.”

Saeko felt her legs almost give way at the sound of his voice, and “give way” was an apt turn of phrase. After a discomfiting itch assailed her around the waist, she had the sensation of her pelvis literally disappearing. But she couldn’t afford to collapse. She held out a desperate hand and tried to steady herself.

What he wanted, she immediately intuited, was for her to crumple. There was no way she could show any weakness in front of him; he wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage. Instinctively, she knew that now was the time to stand firm. It was clear that the thing before her was not on her side.

The images on the TV set had changed again, back to Calcutta and the five disks of light in the sky, which now seemed to shine even brighter. Saeko wondered if the lights had indeed grown brighter or the sky had simply become darker due to the planet’s rotation. Either way, it somehow gave her the courage to speak.

“What are you?” she asked, trying to hide the tremors in her voice.

“You know, I like the name ‘winged snake,’ but it’s more like the opposite: a snake with its wings clipped.”

The myth of the plumed serpent was often intertwined with legends of Viracocha in South America. The two were of a kind, benevolent beings both that brought enlightenment, culture, and order to those around them. Seiji was as alien to these concepts as anyone could be. The words that came to mind with him were: base, depraved. She remembered her evening with Hashiba when Seiji had crashed down on the ground before them.

“Are you the Devil?” she asked. The Devil, who brought fear and evil to society, was depicted throughout the ages in various guises, sometimes as a fallen angel.

“Aww, now even you call me a devil? Heh heh.”

The Devil conquered by working on fears and anxieties that arose in the other. Her instincts had been right; if she’d collapsed or shown any fear, he’d be on top of her licking her face with his serpent tongue.

Bracing herself, Saeko concentrated. Her only way out was through analyzing the situation. First she had to figure out his intent. What did the man want? A solution might present itself if that became clear. She had to keep him talking.

“What did you do with my father?”

Seiji said nothing, seeming to ignore the question. He twisted his upper body slightly and plunged a hand into one of his trouser pockets, scratching liberally at his groin, jangling a set of keys. He was taunting her, making fun of her. The metallic sound echoed down the empty hallway; he knew she hated the sound. Saeko wanted to cover her ears but knew that she couldn’t. She stared back at him, resolute.

While her question about her father had been instinctive, it wasn’t a shot in the dark. A passage from his notes had given rise to it. Her father didn’t know Seiji when he’d seen the half-bird, half-human relief carved behind Viracocha, so he wouldn’t have registered their similarities in appearance. But Saeko was sure that Haruko had been with him at the time. Seeing the bird-like image, Haruko would have seen the similarities to her brother-in-law. What if she had pointed this out to her father? It would have immediately piqued his interest; he was never one to treat such things as mere coincidence. If she had gone so far as to tell him that the carving was an almost exact likeness of her husband’s brother, then all the more so.

That was why he’d needed to visit Takato directly after getting back to Japan. He had felt compelled to meet Seiji.

Something happened here on that day her father disappeared — August 22, 1994. He vanished, leaving only his notebook, later found at the Buddhist altar in the bedroom. She realized now that it wasn’t Haruko who had placed it there, but Seiji. He’d done it to lure her back.

Seiji pulled the keys out from his pocket and placed them on the table in front of him, slowly, deliberately, hinting at some hidden meaning.

“What happened to your father? Hmm … Some things are better left unknown, toots.”

A burning rage began to spread through Saeko, overpowering her fear. She had been right; this man did have something to do with her father’s disappearance. She looked around for something, anything she could use as a weapon, but the kitchen was too far away and no suitable object caught her eye.

Seiji pulled an ivory toothpick from the key holder and began to pick away at the dirt underneath his fingernails. The whole time he kept his eyes trained on Saeko, as though reading her thoughts. The way he moved was animalistic, repugnant. Despite her desire to look away, Saeko made sure to hold his stare.

Finishing his demonstration, Seiji looked up, raising his chin.

“So, sweet stuff,” he said, poking at the tip of his forefinger with the toothpick, “want me to poke at that lump in your breast?”

Bracing even harder than before, Saeko fought a welling urge to vomit.

The six men walked up the pitch-black hillside of the herb gardens. Most were busy calling family and close friends, attempting to explain what was about to happen, what they needed to do. Only Isogai and Chris walked in silence.

Hashiba had just finished his call to his family. To his surprise, his wife had been quick to believe his explanation and had agreed to come directly to Atami. He felt a debt of gratitude to the mass media; the broadcasts of all the abnormal activity around the globe had helped to lend authenticity to his explanations of the impending phase transition. He had also been able to dissuade her from taking the train, which would have taken too long, as she’d wanted to ride via Chigasaki. She had agreed to take a taxi no matter how much it cost; it was by far the best hope for getting to the park on time. Faced with an overwhelming disaster, it was only natural for a person to want clear instructions. Fear and indecision made people ready to cling to anything that sounded decisive.

Even if the roads were clear, it would still take his family two hours to get here from his house in Kunitachi. When they arrived, he would go back down and meet them. All he could do now was pray that the wormhole didn’t open before then. He just finished another couple of calls to close friends when Isogai stopped him.

“That’s enough already.” His voice bubbled with frustration. All this time Isogai and Chris had been silent, listening to the others making calls to relatives and loved ones. Hashiba realized that the two of them only had each other.

“Okay. Just one more.”

Hashiba felt a duty to call Kitazawa and tell him the whole story since he’d been instrumental in helping them come this far. It had been thanks to him that they had been able to put together the important pieces of the puzzle and link the disappearances to tectonic activity in the first place.

Kitazawa listened quietly as Hashiba explained what was going to happen in the next few hours. Then he asked, “Is Saeko there?”

“She’s in Takato, at the Fujimura residence.”

“Takato …”

“Theoretically, a wormhole should appear there too.”

Kitazawa let out a sigh of relief. “Good. But she’s going to have to find her own way again, isn’t she?”

Hashiba urged Kitazawa to come and join them in Atami, but Kitazawa just laughed him off. He didn’t seem to care whether he survived or not.

“Don’t worry about me. It’s not for me, all that effort just to find a new place. I’m ready to move on. Time to be reunited with my parents and all that. It’s better that way, just going to let be whatever happens.”

“We’re indebted to you,” Hashiba entreated. “We’re all waiting here. If you jump in a taxi and use the highways …”

Kitazawa seemed to brighten a little. “Thanks, I’ll take your advice. My son, Toshiya, will be heading your way. Could you look after him when he gets there?”

“Of course, but you should come together.”

“Ha ha. No, really, I’m okay — trust me.”

“Get off your phones already!” Isogai shouted.

Jolted, Hashiba put a hand around the phone’s mouthpiece. “Just make sure you get here, okay?” he insisted, ending the call.

“What the hell’s gotten into you? Have you all gone mad?”

Hashiba had a hunch as to why the four of them making so many calls vexed Isogai. He hurried forward to catch up with the scientist to find out for sure.

“How many people can get through the wormhole?” Hashiba asked, suddenly worried.

“That depends on how long the wormhole remains open. I don’t know — that’s the answer. It could be a few minutes. It could be just a few seconds. It’s impossible to know. But it won’t be open for long. It could be just an instant.”

“Ninety-one people went missing here, we know that.”

“Only God knows whether the next wormhole can carry the same amount.”

So that was the reason for Isogai’s anger. There was simply no way to gauge how long the wormhole would be open. The more people here, the more likely a mad rush. Out of fear that their last moments on earth could end in blind panic, Isogai wanted everyone to stop calling. It made sense, at least until they had a better idea of how long the wormhole would stay open.

“That’s why I told you to just call your family!” he screamed.

Kagayama, Kato, and Hosokawa lowered their voices and made, one by one, to finish their calls.

Hashiba was unsure how to handle the dilemma. They held the info needed to survive this. Was it unfair of them to use that advantage to save only the people they loved? No, there was no such thing as fairness in this situation, no correct answer. Surrendering such a decision to the authorities would not alter that. Maybe if it were up to divine will the most deserving would be chosen, but humans couldn’t be so objective, all they could do was surrender to emotion. It was inevitable that they would choose their loved ones over everyone else.

The six men came to the hub where the garden’s paths converged. They’d come up the hill at such a pace everyone was close to gasping, and everyone paused to catch their breath. It made sense that this was the spot where everyone had gone missing, and the crater was almost directly above. If the wormhole was going to appear in either of the two places, they should wait somewhere in between to maximize their chances of getting to it.

Each of them found somewhere to wait. Hashiba sat on a bench next to Isogai and Chris, who were holding hands and staring out at the gradual shifts in texture of the darkening night sky. They had a gentle wistfulness on their features. There was something noble in the way they looked now that Hashiba hadn’t seen before. He didn’t want to interrupt their moment together, but there were still so many enigmas.

“Er, sorry, do you mind if I ask a question?” he began.

“About God?” Isogai responded with a question of his own without missing a beat.

For a moment, Hashiba forgot what he had wanted to ask, then remembered. Isogai was right, the question would have eventually led to that topic. “All of us here, will we all go to the same world?”

“I believe so. All of us here should go to the same place. I don’t think that a single wormhole would send us off in different directions.”

“And that world would be somewhere in the past?”

“That’s right.”

“What makes you believe that, would you mind telling me? What makes you sure that the wormhole won’t send us to the future or a completely different world?”

“The progress of civilization hasn’t always taken a straight road. There have been spurts of development and periods of regression. It’s been an uneven, hesitant progression. It just doesn’t look like human civilization developed in an orderly, step-by-step way. Every now and then we see the emergence of a particularly advanced civilization. But instead of continuing to progress, as you’d expect with the march of time, they start to backslide and their sites are abandoned. It’s a pattern that keeps repeating itself.

“Take Stonehenge, which was built around five thousand years ago based on accurate observations of the stars that shouldn’t have been possible at the time. Or the Ancient Sumerians, their knowledge of medicine and mathematics way beyond their time, who described their gods as ‘people who descended from the heavens.’ There are maps that show the landmass of Antarctica long before it was discovered. Some Mayan reliefs contain depictions of what appear to be spaceships. There are so many examples like this, so many advanced civilizations that have just withered and died, and all without any discernible reason. So many legends from Africa and South America that describe peoples arriving from overseas, teaching law and order, moving on when their work was complete. Isn’t it beginning to look like we’re not the first people to be facing this eventuality? That it has, in fact, happened many times before?”

Messengers from the future were sent by wormholes into our own historical past, too … They tried to seed their advanced knowledge but were unable to train successors and saw decline …

Hashiba remembered reading a bestseller that said much the same. One theory was that the purveyors of knowledge were survivors from Atlantis or Mu, nations lost to the bottom of the sea after some cataclysm, and another was that an alien race had arrived in spaceships.

“That’s exactly why we need to be ready for this.”

“Like gods …”

“Exactly. That’s what we will be to the people of the world we’re heading to.”

“But how can we possibly prepare for that?”

“Our knowledge of the world will be far superior to theirs. All we can do is try to use that knowledge to bring happiness to as many people as possible. We have to be careful. If our scientific knowledge is shared with the wrong people, it would give them the power to rule their world. Knowledge equals power. It’s down to us whether we become gods or devils. And you can be sure that temptation will come.”

Such a question had never seemed relevant to Hashiba until this point. He had never considered himself as a bad person, though he had often sensed a potential within himself to stray that way. To be a god or a devil — everything they did would define their very essence. In a new world it was inevitable that one force would claim victory, a person’s true nature taking over. If they were not vigilant at all times, a single slip could end up staining the course of history.

“One last question. The wormhole at the Fujimura residence … Will that lead to a different past?” He felt he already knew the answer, but had to ask nonetheless.

“Same world would be unlikely. You know, if you define life as a collection of information, there’s a chance that crossing a wormhole could simply cause a system reset.”

“A system reset?”

“In other words, there’s even a chance that we could be reborn as different people.”

Isogai’s words washed over him. He would never be able to see Saeko again. They would never have the chance to work together, to travel together. They would never again be able to relate stories to each other. Even if they both survived, they would be in different worlds. They would, in all respects, be dead to each other. A few silent tears ran down his cheeks.

After an hour or so of waiting, people began to filter in to the park. The flow began to accelerate as groups of people started to come up the paths. Each time a new one appeared, the number of people that no one knew seemed to increase. Kagayama, Kato, and Hosokawa had already stopped rushing to greet the new arrivals and looked bewildered. After two hours, Hashiba’s wife arrived with his son, Yusuke. The new arrivals continued, and at this rate they would have over a hundred people. Isogai was becoming increasingly frustrated and voiced accusations freely.

Hashiba felt unable to account for what was happening and sat cradling his head in his hands. He had clearly told Kagayama and the rest only to call their immediate family, and now even they didn’t know half of the people that had turned up. Maybe he hadn’t been clear enough and should have given instructions for the families not to call anyone else. It was increasingly evident that the people they had called had called others and that the circle had spiraled outwards. The question was whether or not the flow of new arrivals would reach an endpoint. All Hashiba could do now was to ask the people already there not to call anyone else, then just sit back and hope.

The more people arrived, the more Hashiba felt a dilution of his sense of responsibility towards the past. During his conversation with Isogai, he realized that they would have to prepare themselves to shoulder god-like responsibilities. Now it felt like the simple purity of that purpose was being soiled. He stood helpless, looking around at the faces of those gathered. Then it struck him:

These people don’t actually believe that the world is going to end.

Their features held none of the despair, the pathos, the fear that he would have expected to see. Most of the crowd looked, in fact, like they were just out to have some fun, tourists at some spectacle, relaxed and carefree. There had been so many false calls of the end of the world throughout the course of history, and it had been no different at the end of the twentieth century. Of course the doomsday talk had all been unfounded, and everything had just continued as normal. These people had heard the same stories many times, and each time nothing had happened. For them this was just a party, “prophecy tourism.” That was what the atmosphere in the park was changing into, a big mock end-of-the-world party. Hashiba couldn’t stand the flippancy.

Isogai exploded again. “Shut the hell up! Can’t someone do something about this racket?!” He kicked at the ground in frustration and turned to look away. He was trembling, but it looked to Hashiba that it was out of fear, not anger.

“What is it, Isogai?” Hashiba asked.

Isogai answered without turning around. “I just have this really bad feeling. That all this is just tempting fate. We’re going to be punished. A terrible punishment …”

He looked helpless, passive. Suddenly he called to Chris, walking over to where he sat, taking his hand in his own. His fear was not of the phase transition itself, but of something else. He didn’t seem willing to share his thoughts.

“Are you worried that there are too many people to get through the wormhole? That something terrible is going to happen because of that?”

Isogai just shook his head, noncommittal. “I don’t know …”

“If you don’t know, why are you trembling like that?”

“Something we can’t predict is going to happen. Do you think that this … ruckus will lead to any good?”

Hashiba had to admit that he had a point. Most of these people were here to have fun — it was clear on their faces. They were not ready to play a role as gods in a new world. They looked more like members of a cult following some nonsensical creed.

He saw Isogai’s attention turn to a mixed group of people sitting on a bed of white rosemary plants. They were drinking beer and eating convenience-store sushi. Isogai’s face went blank, his emotion indiscernible. Then he ran over to where the group sat and kicked up their food.

“Stop it.” Hashiba ran over and grabbed his arms, locking them behind his back, just managing to keep the situation from turning violent. He slapped his hand against Isogai’s back to calm him down. He was breathing heavily. “You’ve got to control yourself. Acting like this will only make things worse.”

“Shut up! It’s over for us, this is the end …”

Hashiba called Chris over to help calm him down. After a while, the flow of people seemed to slow; the acceleration was well over its peak, and gradually the crowd grew quieter. A more serious mood seemed to have descended over the area. As the trickle of people came to a stop, Hashiba thought of the stars disappearing one by one in the night sky. By this time, Isogai seemed to have regained his sense of calm.

“So that’s the last of them, then.”

“Seems that way.”

The two surveyed the scene around them.

“How many people do you think there are?”

“Well …” Hashiba made a quick estimate in his head — probably about two hundred people.

“Have you noticed that it’s mostly women?”

It was true, there were clearly many more women than men gathered. He called Kato and Hosokawa and asked them to try and count the number of people; it would be important to know exactly how many of them there were. He wanted a name list if they had the time.

As Kato and Hosokawa were finishing up the headcount, Hashiba saw a single, overweight-looking man making his way up the hill. Even from a distance Hashiba recognized him as Kitazawa’s son, Toshiya. They had met before at Kitazawa’s office.

“Hashiba!” Toshiya called out, out of breath from the effort of climbing the hill. He crouched on the ground looking exhausted, and explained that he had heard everything from his father.

“You’re the last then, the 173rd,” Kato told him from where he sat. He stretched, tired from the effort of counting.

“The 173rd …”

“The number of people here.”

“One hundred seventy-three people, including me?”

Hashiba saw something cloud his features. He couldn’t be sure what it was. “Something wrong with that?”

Toshiya was still gasping for breath, and now his eyes darted this way and that. He was acting as though he had seen some sort of significance in the number, but he remained hesitant. Toshiya began to shake his head as though to say that whatever it was, it had nothing to do with him.

Saeko remembered how Seiji had looked her up and down, openly staring at her chest and her legs that first time they had met here. She had felt defenseless and disgusted as he had sized her up with those eyes; she had regretted wearing a skirt.

“Do you mind if I sit?”

She pulled out a chair from under the table and sat without waiting for his reply. The real reason she wanted to sit was that she felt completely drained both emotionally and physically. She positioned herself on the end of the chair and tried to think about how the situation was likely to unfold. If a wormhole appeared in the room here, they would both be transported to the same place. According to what Hashiba had said, that was likely to be sometime in the past. She couldn’t bear to think about living in a world without anyone she cared for, where the only person she knew was Seiji … The hairs on her arms prickled at the idea. It would be worse than being cast into a stinking pit full of squirming insects.

She forced herself to think clearly. Seiji had no right to follow her into this other world. Was there a way to get through the wormhole without him? She was conscious of time passing but forced herself to slow down; she wouldn’t be able to think properly if she gave herself to panic. She had to examine all the available information and find the thread that would lead her out of this safely.

Somewhere, there was a link between her father’s disappearance in 1994 and that of the Fujimura family. There was some causal relationship. What was it? Then Saeko realized: there had always been someone in the background pulling strings. That someone was Seiji Fujimura.

The carving of the bird-like creature leering out from behind Viracocha had caught her father’s attention back at the Tiwanaku site in Bolivia. Haruko had seen it and pointed out its resemblance to Seiji. She must have said something else. Her father wouldn’t have come all the way to Takato because of a chance resemblance, no matter how much the image looked like Seiji. No, there had to have been something else. Greek and Roman carvings were known to be realistic, but ancient carvings tended towards the abstract. Her father had discovered something else that compelled him to cancel his trip to Takamatsu and head directly for Takato on coming back to Japan. What could have had that effect on him?

The relief was just the beginning, then, the initial clue. Haruko would have looked at it and seen a resemblance to her brother-in-law, Seiji. But she had told her father something else about Seiji … Was it something about his background, his personality, something physical? Maybe Haruko had said that their faces looked similar down to the bumps on his forehead. Bumps on the forehead — horns. The symbol of the Devil.

But that wasn’t it. Saeko was looking directly at Seiji, and there were no traces of anything like horns on his forehead. It was smooth all the way up towards his receding hairline. So it wasn’t the horns. Saeko struggled to think; she was sure that it must have been some physical characteristic that had made Haruko broach the subject in the first place. It would have been something that stood out, something obvious. Her father had no time for vague ideas.

Saeko thought of her father. Was there anything about him that stood out, anything unique? Then she remembered:

He had a third nipple.

She had completely forgotten about it. When she was a kid, her father would bathe with her, and one day he had taken her hand and guided it to a bump on his chest.

“Sae, do you know what this is?”

The bump, she remembered, had felt like a wart, slightly rubbery under her small finger.

“A mole? Or is it a wart?”

Her father laughed, then began to explain:

“It’s called an accessory mamma. It’s proof that we are descended from mammals. Dogs, cows, and horses have lots of them, right?”

After getting out of the bath that night, Saeko had gone straight to look up the term in an illustrated encyclopedia entitled The History of Atavism. She had learned that many mammalian fetuses have four sets of breasts and that, for human ones, the rudimentary structures for five sets of mammary glands could be observed.

True to the dictum that phenotype repeated genotype, in its development the human fetus charted the course of evolution from aquatic life to reptilian life to mammalian life before being born as a baby. Sometimes during this process remnants of that evolution remained, and the accessory mamma was one such mark.

The accessory nipple was a remnant of earlier mammalian stages; on humans they were found somewhere along the line down from either armpit to the groin. Saeko read that up to 1.5 percent of Japanese males had this physical trait, so it wasn’t that rare in itself. Her father’s case, however, was considerably more so because he had only one extra nipple, below his right armpit. Usually they appeared in pairs, one on either side.

That night in the bath together was the only time they had discussed her father’s third nipple. Now, remembering the fact for the first time in years, she thought again of the lump on her breast, discovered only a month ago. She had never thought to link the two together.

Maybe the lump is an accessory mamma, like my father’s, just appearing on one side?

Saeko wanted to put her hand to the lump and check the location, but she didn’t want to stimulate Seiji’s perversion in any way whatsoever.

What if that was the link? What if Seiji had the same mark, just on one side? What would that have meant?

As soon as the hypothesis formed in her head, her mind recalled some words and linked the two together. The answer came first, and her thinking struggled to catch up, lurching.

At the hospital in Ina, someone had been there with her, run fingers over her left breast, and said something.

Keep this up, and you’ll be one of us soon enough.

And what had he just said?

Want me to poke at that lump in your breast?

The connection had been made in a mere dozen seconds, but Saeko was positive. Her thoughts were clear now, and the logic held.

If Seiji had a third nipple, like her father, could that be what Haruko had pointed out at Tiwanaku? No, it wouldn’t have been in Bolivia. It would have been after they got back to Japan, at the hotel they stayed in Narita. It was clear from her father’s notebook that he had still planned to go to Takamatsu, and he had said so over the phone to her. Haruko hadn’t told him until after that call. But when he learned that Seiji had a third nipple, he concluded that it was something that required urgent attention and changed his plans at the last moment to make for the Fujimuras’ in Takato. He had discovered something that he simply could not ignore. So far, the logic seemed to fit. But something jarred, something wasn’t right. Saeko tried to work out what it was that was bugging her about the idea, but it wouldn’t come to her.

She changed her line of thought.

Her mind drifted back to her apartment, the night with Hashiba. Just as they had been about to make love, his hand had drifted towards her breasts, then stopped dead. She remembered feeling the pressure of his fingers against the lump. Then she remembered the feeling when Seiji had felt the same place. Something didn’t fit.

As though he could read her thoughts, Seiji’s mouth curled up in an unsightly smile. He rubbed the front of his hands along his lips.

“That reminds me, babe, I never did tell you what I thought of that article you wrote.” Seiji rolled his eyes upwards and began to pick at his nose hair.

Saeko wondered if she should perhaps admire his ability to be so naturally, effortlessly repugnant. She sat up straight, her will galvanized for the fight. Somehow his very existence offended her. “I’d love to hear, especially from someone so obviously related to it.”

“Related to it?” he snorted. “Ha, you didn’t write a single word about me. I might as well not have existed.”

Seiji was exactly right. Saeko’s opinion of him had been so poor that Hashiba had actually burst out laughing when she had first mentioned him.

“At least I didn’t try to pin the thing on you though, right?” she goaded. Just treating him as suspicious would have posed a libel risk since the article flagged a potential crime. She had wanted nothing to do with him, and it had been an easy decision to avoid bringing him up.

“Tell me honestly, do you think I’m harmless?”

Saeko wondered which answer he was fishing for. Did he want her to think of him as harmless, or the opposite? From his tone, she had to conclude that he wanted to think of himself as the latter. In that case, he’d be disappointed that she hadn’t given him the attention he thought he deserved. She had immediately sensed that he was dangerous, there was no question of that, but she hadn’t found anything to legitimately back up her suspicions. The only reasons she had managed to come up with were purely subjective. He had given her the creeps, but was that enough to label him as dangerous? She decided to proceed carefully. She got the feeling that the entire direction of events to come hinged on this one answer.

Seiji leant forwards, seizing on Saeko’s indecision. “You want to know the truth? I killed them.”

He had caught her off guard. Raising a hand over her mouth, she demanded, “What did you just say?”

“I killed every last one of them. Disposed of the bodies.” This time he spoke purposefully, pronouncing each word with sickening clarity.

Saeko’s mind lost focus, as though a fog had descended. The words reverberated around her skull as the world faded under the veil of white. This was not a simple confession. If Seiji had murdered them, then Saeko’s situation had just taken a turn for the worse. As the weight of the implications of what he’d said began to sink in, Saeko felt her body begin to tremble.

“What did you do with the bodies?” she managed. Her voice was hoarse with the effort.

Was it a bluff? The idea had crossed her mind a number of times when she was writing up the article. He would have been able to leverage his position as a family member to call everyone outside. It had just been an idea, of course, quickly dismissed. In the first place, she hadn’t really believed that Seiji had it in him to carry off such a feat; she had seen no evidence that suggested otherwise. But now, those initial convictions began to sway. There was something inhuman about him, something dark. Perhaps the incompetence she had perceived had just been an act designed to mask his true nature. It would be dangerous to underestimate him now.

“Why don’t you open the window, take a look outside.”

His meaning was clear. Leading down from the house, halfway down the hill, was a dam. Behind the dam lay the expanse of Lake Miwa.

“You threw them in the lake?”

“Exactly. And I made sure they wouldn’t come floating back.”

Saeko knew from articles she’d written that the swelling of gasses inside the intestines could cause bodies to float to the surface even with heavy stones strapped to them. Seiji was boasting that he did something to ensure this wouldn’t happen. Was there any way to check whether he was telling the truth?

She shuddered at the possibility that he was. If he had killed the family and disposed of the bodies, then there had never been a wormhole here in the first place.

But what about the other observations they had made? Takato was located on an active fault line. There had been abnormal levels of sunspot activity on the day the family went missing. Was it just a coincidence? Was this case unrelated to the others involving disturbances in the magnetic field? Had they simply stumbled across a completely unrelated crime? No, the facts said otherwise.

The trembling of her body refused to subside. She had been determined to gain the upper hand, but Seiji’s manipulations kept shifting the ground, keeping her struggling to catch up, always a step behind. If she didn’t manage to make some headway, the phase transition would be upon them and everything would just cease to be. Maybe that was the best-case scenario. Of course, it was possible that Seiji would try to kill her before that even happened.

“Why would you do such a thing?”

“Come on,” Seiji said, ignoring her. “You still haven’t answered my question. Do you think I’m dangerous? I want to know, seriously.”

“I can’t answer that until I know why you killed them.”

“Such a pretty girl … You won’t be able to work it out no matter how hard you try.”

“That’s why I’m asking.”

“I fucking love the way you talk to me, mmm.” Seiji’s tongue darted out, snaking around his lips.

“Was it the money? You got yourself in so much debt you couldn’t even see the light of day.”

“Such a disappointing, run-of-the-mill answer.”

Saeko felt herself getting angry. There was no time for this ridiculous exchange. She slammed a fist down on the table and yelled, “That’s enough!”

She sat, bracing herself for whatever was to come. She was afraid he would say something she had once known but forgotten since — words that would establish some old link between them.

“It all began with you, dear. It all began with you.” Seiji burped loudly, but his expression remained the same. A moment later he raised his rear end and let out a loud fart. He looked oddly pleased with himself.

By some point before the beginning of the sixteenth century, the inhabitants of the mountain city of Machu Picchu had disappeared. Some four hundred years later, an excavation unearthed what turned out to be a mass grave that contained 173 bodies, including those of children. The discovery’s significance remained murky, but one archeological theory held that the fleeing inhabitants had slaughtered those that would slow them down …

When Toshiya related this fact, Kato looked disturbed. “Just because the number’s the same, does that mean anything? It’s just a damn coincidence.” His voice was rising. “Who’s to say more people aren’t going to turn up anyway?”

This apparent match of numbers had got everyone frightened. Hashiba joined Kato and Hosokawa in looking back down the hill. Up until a short while ago there had been a steady procession of people winding their way up the paths, but now these were deathly quiet. There was nothing to suggest that anyone else would turn up. The number stood as it was.

And here they were, all on a forested hill, isolated by the darkness. The idea of being trapped in the mountains of Peru was all too easy to imagine.

“It’s just coincidence. There’s nothing to it.” Kato was adamant.

“Have you forgotten?” Isogai reminded, holding up a finger. “Everything we’ve seen so far in terms of numbers has meant something. The coincidences all had significance.”

Toshiya looked around nervously, conscious that he’d been the last one to come, and also the one to bring up the subject of Machu Picchu and the grave. “There’s a lot of women here. Do you know how many?” he asked.

“Why the hell would that matter?” Kato retorted, quite worried.

“It’s just that … Well, with the bodies in Machu Picchu, 150 were female.”

A nervous silence fell among the gathered men. They had already worked out the split. Including children, the number of females totaled exactly the same — one hundred and fifty.

“Well, that’s that then,” Hashiba broke the silence, attempting to lighten the atmosphere. “At least we know where and when we’re going — to Machu Picchu, sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.”

He looked around, but no one seemed sure how to react. Their faces told different stories, but all were combinations of unease, fear, and doubt.

Hashiba considered what this new information meant. If they were actually headed for Machu Picchu, then at least it was guaranteed that everyone would get through the wormhole. He had prepared himself for the possibility that the wormhole would take them further than just a few years back into Japan’s past and to a completely different place and time. Besides, Machu Picchu was a place he’d always wanted to visit … If he was going to travel back in time it might as well be to somewhere interesting. Hashiba tried his best to look on this in a positive light.

But the issue of the number of bodies found in the grave kept pulling, and he couldn’t shake the nasty feeling it gave him. The numbers were exactly the same.

“Their … their … their …” Toshiya started to say something. Each time he stopped short, taking a step backwards. His face had gone pale.

“Toshiya, are you okay?” Hashiba asked, trying to calm him down. “What is it?”

“Th-Their …” he stuttered. “Their arms, their legs — they were all severed. The bodies had their limbs severed …”

Hashiba and the crew stood absolutely still as the shock took hold. A dry wind rustled the branches overhead; it sounded like it was mocking them somehow, laughing at their misfortune. The image seeded itself in his mind before he could do anything to stop it: hacked-off limbs strewn around empty mountain slopes like a gruesome collection of broken branches.

The image leeched away at the courage he had built up, and he felt his reserves of hope drain away. He tried to pull himself together and looked at the others, trying to work out who had been within earshot. Just Isogai, Kato, and Hosokawa. That made just five of them, including himself and Toshiya. Kagayama was talking to his mother and sister in the distance. Chris was standing with Isogai but had switched off as everyone had been talking in rapid Japanese. Isogai, for his part, didn’t look inclined to share the horrifying information with his lover.

“They would have found the bodies hundreds of years after we died. Maybe the bones had just turned to dust …” Hosokawa’s voice trembled. He stood, arms crossed, hugging himself.

Toshiya shook his head. “No, the limbs had been severed while the people were still alive.” He had decided that any attempt to hide or embellish the facts would just make things worse.

So that was their destiny? To have their limbs torn off, to be tossed into a mass grave?

“I told you,” Isogai screamed out, staring at Hashiba, Kato, and Hosokawa in turn. He started to stamp at the ground, losing his temper completely. “This is because of you! We’re all going to be punished because of this, this parody.”

“And this coming from a scientist!” Hosokawa sneered back. “How very unscientific, to bring up the wrath of God!”

“Listen, fuckwit. Shall I explain to you what’s going to happen to us?” Rather than explode, Isogai just grinned. “We’re going to be sacrificed. We will go back to the Machu Picchu of five hundred years ago. There, our own foolishness will bring about a calamity. We’ll be unable to fulfill our roles as gods. We will reap only the anger of the people. One by one, we will be taken up to an altar and have our limbs torn off. We will be cast into a mass grave. The people will then abandon their city. That is our history.”

Isogai’s prediction sounded logical enough, but it was just an interpretation. Hashiba had come up with his own interpretation of what lay before them. They could arrive after Machu Picchu had been deserted and find nothing but the empty remains of the place. They would all pitch together and succeed in forging a new life, but something would happen. Perhaps an attack by a nearby tribe; they would be captured and then killed.

Hashiba looked over to Toshiya and asked, “Did they find signs of a battle?”

“None,” he answered simply.

Even if there were no signs of a battle, that didn’t necessarily negate his theory. Faced with overwhelming force, they would likely surrender. Perhaps attacked by the Spanish, or maybe a force that wasn’t even human, an unknown beast, a demon, the devil … Hashiba’s thoughts grew increasingly dark, and he pictured ancient and grotesque objects of fear.

Still, whether as an offering to the gods, the result of a foreign attack, or the acts of a malign entity, one thing was painfully clear. All 173 of them would be captured and dismembered, probably sooner rather than later. That much could be deduced from the fact that the number of people was exactly the same.

Hashiba recalled Buddhist, Christian, and other religious paintings. People fled from a dark shadow that plucked them one by one from the muck, suspended them upside down, and tore off their limbs. In the underground gloom, patches of fire lit up the victims’ agony. Depictions of hell were found all across the world.

The vivid rush of images proved too much for Hashiba. He collapsed to his knees, and a cracked noise escaped from his throat. It struck him that he had subconsciously taken the pose for prayer.

He didn’t know how much time they had left; it might be a matter of minutes, or perhaps hours. But the end was near. He had to make a decision, and he had to make it now. He could just get up and leave and not go through the wormhole. But it was precisely this need to choose on the spot, rather than his fear of the unknown, that was enervating him.

If he did leave and only 172 people remained, would that be enough to change their destiny? Leaving meant exposing himself to the phase transition. It was hell either way. Even so, he knew that he had to force a decision. One path meant a slow, tortured death; the other, the possibility of a painless and sudden end. He didn’t know what waited for him through the wormhole; he could only see ambiguity and chaos. Faced with an impossible decision, Hashiba gave up all his efforts to think rationally and craned his neck upwards. Stars continued to blink out one by one, each one seeming to accentuate the relentless passage of time. His nerves were on fire.

Hashiba closed his eyes and clasped his hands together in prayer.

It all began with you …

Saeko replayed Seiji’s words in her head. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t work out what he meant. The only option was to ask him directly. Seiji’s mouth hung half open, and his brow was furrowed. Saeko had never seen a snake about to deliver its venomous charge, but that was the image that came to mind looking at him now.

“You still don’t know how the world works, do you, little girl?”

Saeko sat bolt upright. How the world works. That was a phrase her father had used countless times. “And you suppose that you do?”

“Well, you know, it’s like a bundle of threads rolled together. Each end has its own idea, the exact opposite of the other end.”

“And?” she pushed for more.

“You can’t think of these ideas as isolated things, separated by the length of the thread. Each helps the other. Each complements the other. The thread joins them. You know of how the Devil came to be, right? The Devil is a fallen angel.” He let out a vulgar, croaking laugh.

Again, Saeko felt afraid of something she couldn’t quite place. Her father had once explained to her that the universe was composed of opposing ideas. “God and the Devil complementing each other?”

“Every little thing that happens is related to something else.” Seiji brushed his fingers along the table next to him. “It’s like a spider’s web, an amazingly intricate tapestry of threads. The world is built on the shoulders of these relationships. The passage of time is simply an expression of the development and change in these relationships.”

Saeko glanced at her wristwatch. Why was she sitting here listening to him talk at her? If it were her father, she would probably be impatient for more, but the words of this grotesque man … All she could see was a feeble attempt to hide his disgusting nature. She wanted to get out of this situation as soon as she got the chance, and every moment was precious.

She glanced at the plaster casts on his legs. If she made a run down the corridor it was unlikely he would be able to give chase, but she had to be sure about the wormhole. Would it open in this room or not? Besides, she had to know what he meant when he said that it had all begun with her. She had to know what happened to her father. She had to get him to talk.

“Let’s get back to the point. Enough rambling.”

“Not exactly the attitude you’d expect when someone’s asking a favor, now, is it? So, you want to know what happened, yes?”

Saeko began to nod but stopped herself in mid-movement. She glared at the man before her, her heart thumping wildly. All she could do was wait.

“All right, then. Humans are only aware of a tiny, infinitesimal part of the world. It’s like an iceberg, most of it hidden below the sea. What most people see is just the visible bit, but some people see more. They can discern the tangle of relationships hidden beneath the surface. Those with a third nipple — in other words, us. That old bag Shigeko was one too. Some of her better predictions were right on the mark.

“Life is full of traps, catastrophe is never far away. The contract between God and the Devil has always been in force, but cleverly kept secret. That’s why people put things down to luck, whether good or bad, unable to see the truth. It’s easy to wrap inevitability in the guise of coincidence.”

Seiji pulled the crutches around from behind him and placed them on his lap. He rested his elbows on his knees and bent forward, cradling his head in his hands. The movement was designed to arrest her attention, but Saeko caught a glimpse of something like fatigue. The threatening, challenging look that had been there when she first entered the room seemed to be fading away.

Saeko seized the opportunity. “You said just now that you killed the family. That was a lie, wasn’t it?”

Seiji raised his brows and opened his eyes wide. He scratched at his throat as though it ached under the skin. With what vigor he had left he let out, “What makes you say that?”

“You wouldn’t dirty your own hands. It’s clear, listening to you talk.”

“Well, you’re entitled to your opinion I guess.”

“Just answer me one thing,” Saeko was pleading now, holding her anger in reserve. “What happened to my father?” If nothing else, she at least wanted to know that.

“You sure you want to know?”

“Please, just tell me …”

“You already know what happened.”

“Don’t jerk me around.”

“Think about what happened here, those eighteen years ago. You work it out yourself now. Think about the order of events.”

Saeko’s eyes darted around.

Work it out yourself. Grasp the logic …

It was her father’s teaching. Only when she was completely stuck, he’d provide an image in the way of a hint. Visualization was indispensable; reasoning that wasn’t accompanied by any tended to be bankrupt.

She decided to take Seiji up on the challenge. In order to replay her father’s movements on that August day eighteen years ago, she tried to picture details as vividly as she could.

For some reason, after 8 p.m., at a hotel in Narita, he had suddenly changed his plans and decided to head for Takato. At that time of day it would have been impossible to get there by train; the only possible mode of transport would have been a cab. Kitazawa had confirmed that her father hadn’t rented a car for the trip.

Saeko didn’t have much to work with to guess what his companion, Haruko, might have been thinking. Traveling in Bolivia, perhaps she’d fallen in love with Saeko’s father, but just how serious was their relationship? Had Haruko resolved to throw away everything? Or had she just been out to play around a bit? What were her feelings for her husband?

Saeko stopped there. Why had she never considered Haruko’s husband in the equation? If her father had fallen in love with Haruko, then it was her husband, Kota, that he needed to confront. It just hadn’t crossed her mind to think of him. She tried to visualize Haruko and her father leaving the airport hand in hand. And then, waiting at their destination, Haruko’s husband: Kota Fujimura.

And now she saw something else too, realizing her error as soon as she pictured her father and Haruko in an embrace. Both image and logic indicated that it wasn’t Seiji who had the third nipple, but Kota.

Considering the scene between her father and Haruko all of eighteen years ago in conjunction with her own experience, her hunch became conviction. They had met in Bolivia and decided to travel together, but they hadn’t consummated their relationship. Perhaps mindful of Haruko’s marriage, her father had managed to hold back his passion and not cross that line. In other words, he loved Haruko deeply enough to respect her situation.

There was no other way to explain the timing of her father’s sudden change of plans. The two of them had come back to Japan and booked a hotel room for their last night together. Haruko had been planning to return to her husband the next day. Maybe the impending sadness of parting had pushed them to cross the line. After he called Saeko, something happened and they moved to consummate the relationship. Caught up in the moment, they tore each other’s clothes off, but something stopped them — just like with her and Hashiba.

The fragmented images ran across her mind like a cinematic flashback. She saw two bodies, tangled together in a passionate embrace, fumble their way to bed. Haruko’s hands traced her father’s chest and came to a halt. Discovering his third nipple, her thoughts immediately returned to her husband, the tactile sensation dissipating her lust, as with Hashiba when he found the lump on her breast.

Seiji was right. Saeko was surprised at how easy it was to see the links between each event. Haruko would have explained why she’d stopped, whispering into her father’s ear, “My husband also …”

What if the locations of the third nipple were a mirror image? If Kota’s was on the right side, while Saeko’s father’s was on the left, what would he have made of the reverse symmetry? Matter and anti-matter — those were the words that came to Saeko’s mind, and she was sure her father had thought the same.

Despite having the same mass and spin, matter and anti-matter had opposing electrical charges. If her father and Kota were somehow mirror images of each other too, then the analogy was nagging. The revelation must have astounded her father, who interpreted alignments of numbers and phenomena not as mere coincidence but as signs of a higher force.

By falling for the same woman, he’d discovered the existence of his mirror image. He would have been convinced that this fact concealed an important secret that could wreak havoc if ignored. The key to finding out its meaning was Kota himself. That was why her father acted right away.

So that was it. Her father’s purpose in coming to Takato on that August day eighteen years ago had never been to confront Seiji. It had been Kota all along.

“It’s something to do with Kota Fujimura.”

On the mention of the name Seiji broke out into a coughing fit. His convulsions jangled the crutches balanced on his lap. “Atta-girl. You’re getting warm now.”

He still wanted her to get to the answer herself. Saeko tried to imagine what might have happened next.

It would have been sometime after two in the morning when they finally arrived at the Fujimura house. What happened then? Did her father get in a fight with Kota over the love triangle with Haruko? A horrifying image crossed her mind and she shuddered. Crimes of passion, of a jealous husband killing his wife’s lover, weren’t uncommon. Could Kota have killed her father that night? Was her father murdered and tossed into the lake? She could hardly bear the thought of it, let alone put it into words, but the only way forward was to ask.

“Was … Did Kota kill my father?”

“What a mundane answer,” Seiji’s grin was full of scorn. He shook his head.

Saeko’s instincts told her that he was telling the truth. So Kota hadn’t killed her father.

What else could have happened? If there had been no violence, perhaps the two of them had been able to talk. In fact, Saeko already had something to help her work out the contents of their discussion.

She clearly remembered the words that had come to her during the filming, when she’d placed her hand on her father’s notebook on the table in front of her.

If that’s what you want, go right ahead. I won’t stop you.

She hadn’t known the voice at the time. Now she finally had an idea whose it might be. She’d been thorough in her research into the Fujimura family, but since they’d gone missing, she’d never heard their voices.

At the time, she’d assumed that the words referred to the notebook. But now that she was able to picture the scene between her father and Kota, their point became clear.

Perhaps because she had connected the voice’s timber to its speaker, the sequence of events flowed like a dam had broken. Eighteen years ago, her father had faced Kota in this room. The cabinet, the table, the chairs, and everything else in it stimulated her imagination now, and a conversation began to play out in her mind.

It was late, two or three in the morning. Perhaps having gone to bed, Haruko wasn’t with them. Kota was in the living room, her father in the dining room.

Kota was doing all the talking; her father listened in silence. Kota sat on the floor, legs outstretched, his back against the living room wall. Her father was half obscured in the shadows, but she imagined him leaning against the wall, too. They were back to back but in different rooms with a thin partition between them.

A single light shone from above in the darkened living room, a spotlight illuminating Kota from above. Saeko’s image was three-dimensional, like a hologram, but the light was weak and hazy, the outlines blurred. She couldn’t discern Kota’s expression. The tone of his speech flitted randomly between the formal and informal; its content, too, seemed full of contradiction, courtesy and insult and resignation and excitement intertwining. One moment, his tone would be loud and mocking. The next he would speak almost too quietly to make out the words, suddenly more serious, even solemn. The random fluctuations were enough to instill a deep sense of unease in Saeko.

The night was quiet, and the low rasp of Kota’s monologue filled it:

You should be grateful. I mean, if you don’t want to, then just turn me down. Although I don’t think you’ve got that in you …

I’ve got to say, though, I feel pretty damned lucky. Meeting you like this. It was worth putting out the bait. I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life in this place, this dull place, accomplishing nothing as a serpent stripped of its wings. But here you are, and now I can finally take flight. I can take back my wings, fly as high as I wish. It’s not all bad for you, either. If you hadn’t met me, you’d have been informed of a loved one’s death. We both stand to gain.

You know what I’m talking about. If you choose to do nothing, your pretty, sweet little daughter is going to die tomorrow morning. She’ll set out for the library, then out of nowhere — a speeding truck. She’ll be dragged, half-alive, a hundred meters under the wheels of the thing. What a pitiful sight, torn to pieces like that. There’s only one way to alter that fate.

Just swat down United Airlines Flight 323 that took off from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.

Don’t look so surprised. Your daughter’s life and UA323 are tied together with an invisible string and are related, taking one means losing the other. You know very well how the world’s structured — the relationships that obtain behind it all.

All we have to do is make an agreement. A contract, if you will. You give me your powers. It will save your daughter. And you get a nice little prize called Haruko in the bargain.

If that’s what you want, go right ahead. I won’t stop you.

Saeko’s heart felt like it would burst, and she stroked her chest. Was it true? She had indeed seen an article that UA323 had crashed; it had said that all 515 people on board were presumed dead. But she’d had no way of knowing that she was fated to die if the 515 had not. If her father had called her the evening before — at eight o’clock, as he never failed to — then she would indeed have gone to the library the next day. He hadn’t called, she’d worried, and her schedule had changed as a result.

Saeko often found herself asking what would have happened if she’d made a different decision. What if Hashiba hadn’t discovered the lump? They would have made love, and that would have seriously altered her subsequent path. It was the same with her father. If he hadn’t embraced Haruko that night in Narita, he would never have obtained the information about Kota’s third nipple. He would not have traveled to Takato and would have had his daughter’s death on his hands.

The sound of rasping laughter filled her ears. Again she heard Kota’s voice fill the room:

The number of people? Why get hung up on that at this point? Have you got it all wrong? What the invisible string connects isn’t one life and another, but phenomena — a traffic accident and a plane crash. There just happens to be a disparate number of victims.

Now, don’t get so huffy. It’s not like you to fret over the imbalance. You can’t possibly not know that it’s not about the head count. Are you feeling a little confused? Are you telling me that if the price of your daughter living were just one stranger’s life, then you’d take the deal without batting an eye? In that case, what if the number was ten? Or a hundred, or a thousand? Where do you draw the line? The number of people sacrificed doesn’t change the choice.

This is business as usual behind the stage, just unknown. Accidents, illnesses, disasters, terrorism, you name it. A lot of people die every so often. Ever wondered why it should have been them and not you? Well, it doesn’t matter who. Death rains down arbitrarily. It just happened to be them and not you. If what’s going on behind the stage became known, I bet humans wouldn’t be able to take it. Life, in the first place, rests on the sacrifice of others. Knowing the sacrifices’ names and faces, though, would easily unhinge people. It’d be hard not to picture the sorrow of the bereaved. Not knowing allows people to go about their lives not caring.

As I’m sure you know, you can choose to strip me of my power. But doing so will bring about the death — the appalling, tragic death — of your beloved daughter. There’s only one way to save her. You give me your power, and the man that is Shinichiro Kuriyama disappears from the face of this planet, for good. Sure, to make phenomenal ends meet, a plane will have to crash too, but I couldn’t care less.

Please don’t just die, though. In any case, you couldn’t even if you wanted to. You’ll just have to keep falling.

Shinichiro Kuriyama ends here. From now on, you live as Kota Fujimura. You’ll get Haruko for yourself. You have to become my successor for this to work smoothly. My departure will leave a gaping hole. It’s your job to stay and fill that hole. You’re the only one that can, after all, since you understand how this works. All that studying you’ve done, all that physics. Hell, I’m just preaching to the choir here, right? Clear as day to you, I’d imagine.

It’s just so exciting! All the possibilities, all the things I can do. In the world I alight upon as a god, I’ll be able to conduct all sorts of nifty experiments.

Say, I could jump back 50,000 years to the point where language is about to emerge and insert a self-referential contradiction in the system. How do you like the idea of tampering with calculus to inject the tricks of zero and infinity? The more humans wield language and describe nature, the more contradictory it would all become. Each little step on the path of development would effectively tighten the noose around humanity’s neck. Eventually, the contradiction would grow so extensive it would reach the point of no return. What happens to the universe then? I bet the fireworks will be spectacular. Gets me hard just thinking about it.

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.

The scene shifted suddenly to Calcutta, now dusk. The same five discs of light hung in the sky and seemed to be even brighter yet, appearing mystical, even divine.

The light from the TV set cast shadows across Seiji’s face. He was looking sideways, off towards the distance.

But why is Seiji here?

The question was so obvious she was surprised she hadn’t addressed it. Her father had made a pact with Kota. Where was Seiji in this? How did the vagabond who orbited the family like a plague have the capacity to get involved in all of this? Kota was the one with the third nipple, not Seiji, whose very existence seemed moot.

“Who are you?”

“No such man exists,” Seiji responded as though the statement concerned somebody else.

“You … don’t exist?”

During her preliminary research into the Fujimura family, Saeko had made sure to look up the family register. His name had been there, clear as mud. Seiji, the elder brother, born six years before Kota. At the time Saeko had noticed that the names were strange considering the order of birth; the “ji” in Seiji meant second, suggesting that he was the younger brother. But the register had shown it to be the other way around.

“What do you mean, you never existed?” she asked again, more forcefully.

“That punk had been a waster, always running from something. Never did anything of use. One time, thirty years ago, he ran away and never came back. The little punk’s been dead for over a quarter century. Died a dog’s death, alone and starving. Guess no one ever identified the body, probably sorted away as an unidentifiable, a John Doe.”

From what she knew of Seiji the description seemed at least to fit. But he was right here, in front of her. How was she supposed to parse that? Was she talking to a ghost?

“So tell me, what are you then?”

Saeko didn’t notice that her voice was shaking. No longer distracted by the TV set broadcasting the end of the world, she stared directly at the thing in front of her, eyes steady and focused. Seiji held up a hand as if to forestall her line of thought.

“Let’s see. So you think that the family made for a wormhole, that they made their escape, right? Well, that’s not exactly the case. One of them couldn’t go through the wormhole. Like a snake whose wings had been clipped, his power had been taken away. That’s right, the one who had made a pact with the Devil. That’s why he’d worked so hard at getting ready, so hard and for so long. He built a shitty little hut near the house here and made it look like that was where Seiji lived. He even piled up debts using the punk’s name. After he saw off the rest of the family, you see, he needed someone that he could become. Think about it: if he’d been the only one to stay behind, what do you think would have happened? The police would have dragged him through the dirt. The questions would hammer down like black rain. What did you do to your wife, your kids? He’d have no way to explain it. His only choice was to make it seem like the whole family vanished, him included. To do that, he had to assume the personality of another, a fiction that he’d fashioned. He lived as Seiji from that day forward.”

Seiji stopped suddenly and broke eye contact, giving Saeko some time to absorb the information.

Saeko’s mind was close to short-circuiting with a nasty zap. Sometimes the brain just went numb when faced with a fact that couldn’t be processed. She didn’t notice that she wasn’t breathing. A moment longer and her heart might have stopped as well.

She replayed Seiji’s words in her mind, again and again. Each time, she came to the same conclusion. “Please, no. Not you … You can’t be Dad,” she squeezed out.

Seiji’s eyes hung heavy, deflated in the middle of his wrinkled face. He blinked a couple of times, as though struggling to see out. His face, his body, the atmosphere around him, was the complete opposite of all her father was. Merely trying to overlap their faces in her mind threatened to shatter her precious memories of her father. Yet, everything was pointing to a single conclusion.

Her father had once told her:

Sae. When we look at something, we apply our own biases to the object observed. We influence the object itself. The moon is as the moon is because that is how we perceive the moon. Nothing exists in absolute isolation; nothing exists free from human perception.

Saeko’s first impressions of Seiji had been almost abnormally bad; she hadn’t been able to think of a single good thing to say about him. Everything about him had grated at her nerves, like nails on a chalkboard: his grimy clothes, the dirt-covered gloves wrapped around his neck, the look of open perversion in his eyes, the way he drank in her body lines with his stare, those horrible noises he made. Even the sound of his voice grated like it was designed to offend. The coarse and lewd way he spoke to her — just coming within thirty feet of the man was enough to set her on edge. If he tried to touch her she would instinctively pull away.

Her judgment had been clouded from the very beginning.

Saeko tried to clear her mind of all prejudice, all the preconceived ideas she had of the man. She had to look at him with her heart. She worked to steady her racing pulse.

There was an Escher drawing where a picture of a vase became one of two faces depending on the viewer’s focus. Saeko opened her eyes and experienced such a revelation.

In that moment, everything she saw turned on its head. Seiji’s wrinkled face became full and healthy, and hair flowed back over his balding head. His once-dead eyes brightened with a new intensity, his arched back straightened. The characteristics that defined Seiji were replaced by the warm familiarity of those of her father. Before her sat the same man that had once taken her on a day out to the cycling theme park in Izu and used the bikes to analyze the characteristics of the products of human artifice; the same man that had sat with her on the living room sofa and taught her about the structure of matter, about the fundamental physical structures of the world; the same man that had taken her fishing on summer days and brought her on trips around the world, excursions he had branded “research trips.”

Shinichiro’s eyes were brimming with merciful love. Slackening one side of his mouth as was his habit, he said, “Sae, it’s been a while. How have you been?”

Saeko broke into tears, collapsed forward onto the table before her, and sobbed openly. Every happy moment she had ever spent with her father rushed before her eyes, finally allowing her emotions a release. She cried until the tears finally ran out. Then, praying that the image she had just seen of her father was back for good, she looked up.

But the face that looked back was Seiji’s. No matter how she tried to focus, the image of her father did not return. Yet, a look of calm had descended over the face that Saeko had found so revolting.

Her father hadn’t just endured separation with Saeko. In January, he forever parted with his wife and children, his family of eighteen years. Two times he had been torn away from those he loved.

Saeko stood and walked slowly over to where Seiji sat. This was what was left of her father after he’d fallen all the way. He’d been punished for his decision to choose the future of one life over the future of all life. But now, Saeko could see clearly that no matter how he had changed, her father was still her father. There was no way she could abandon him when the world was about to end.

Taking care not to knock the crutches from his lap, Saeko leant forward, putting her arms around him. She hardly registered the terrible smell, the roughness of his skin.

“Dad, let’s go together,” Saeko whispered into his ear, ignoring the clumps of hair that sprouted out.

“Go by yourself. The wormhole opens ten or so kilometers south of here. There’s no time.”

Saeko already knew that there was a place just south of the Fujimura residence that exhibited strange physical conditions. Twelve kilometers south down the Akiha Road — Route 152—there was a mountain pass where the magnetic field was zero. It was well-known nationwide, and two of the cases of disappearances they had looked into for the program had occurred there.

Sae, remember that numbers don’t form a straight line with no gaps. The number line has holes everywhere, it’s full of them. The holes are made of the irrational numbers — the noisy, boisterous ones. The ones that continue in endless lines of random decimals. Then there’s zero. Zero is the abyss, an endless black hole.

“Where the magnetic field drops to zero …”

Seiji nodded slowly. The wormhole would open there. Seiji clicked his tongue and pressed his knee against Saeko’s waist.

“Get the hell out of here. I’ve finished talking. Go and clear up the shit I’ve left behind.”

Saeko translated the coarse words into her father’s message:

Sae, you’ve got no time, you’ve got to go now. Apply your mind, you can get through this. Having lived in the place of 515 people, that’s your mission.

Saeko put her arms under Seiji’s shoulders and tried to pull him up from the chair. Seiji clenched his face and groaned in pain, clutching at his legs.

“Stop it! What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m not going to leave you here. Come with me.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Please, don’t leave me again.” Saeko gave up trying to lift him and started to pull on the chair itself.

“Wake up for god’s sake, and get out of here. I’m not your damned father, I’m Seiji.”

Saeko pulled on the chair, tipping it so she could drag it along the floor. The legs shrieked as they scraped along the wooden floorboards, but it was no use. He was too heavy and the chair collapsed backwards, sending him tumbling across the floor. His legs impacted on the hard boards, making him writhe on the floor, convulsing like an agonized caterpillar. His nails scratched at the floor and his features contorted from the killing pain.

“I can’t go through. Even if I did, I’d only assume some half-ass fallen form. I’ve already tried a few times. I wouldn’t even be born as a human.

“Take a good look at me. I’m not what I used to be. I sold my soul to the Devil, and this is all that’s left. If you take me through that wormhole, I might come out the other end as some disgusting wriggling insect. I’m not ready for that. That’s nothing but pain. That’s all that would be waiting for me, a never-ending cycle of degradation.

“Please, babe, let me end this. Let me go. Go now, by yourself.”

Saeko looked down at the man that had been her father and become Seiji. He looked almost at peace. It had been within his grasp to deprive Kota of power, to bring good into this world, but his attachment for her had stalled him. He must be feeling relieved that soon he would be freed of his punishment for allowing the world to collapse. He wanted to transcend the cycle of life and death, the suffering of successive falls. His attachments extinguished, he would enter nirvana. He welcomed the phase transition and all that it meant.

“Dammit, go already. The whole point of …” His words trailed off into silence.

“Dad …” Unable to decide, she stood looking helplessly down at the crumpled form before her.

“Hurry up and go. You’ll find somewhere where you can thrive, I’m sure of it. Just do the best you have in you to do.”

Strength coursed through Saeko’s body.

Just do the best you have in you to do.

Again, her father’s words. She had heard them so many times.

“All right. I’m going.”

She kneeled down and reached to help him up from the floor, but he lashed out, knocking her hand away. “Hurry and go.”

He lay still as though he might be sleeping. For the briefest of moments, his serpentine face reminded Saeko of a statue of an enlightened bodhisattva.

Saeko stood up awkwardly and started to walk away, dragging her feet heavily. When she reached the hallway, she turned around.

“Goodbye, Daddy.”

She’d barely finished saying this as she sprinted to the threshold and exited the house. Almost all signs of starlight had vanished from the sky, and it was noticeably blacker than before.

Saeko searched for her car under the looming darkness. The utter silence froze the air and rubbed the cold into her skin. Worse than the chill, the quietude was suffocating.

She fumbled for the car keys in her bag and pushed the unlock button. The orange lights of the car’s indicators flashed once, twice, beckoning from just thirty feet ahead.

Just when she took a final look back up at the Fujimuras’ the lights in the living room went off, and the whole edifice was swallowed into the surrounding darkness. Saeko stepped into the car and turned the key in the ignition.

She leant back in the seat and took in a deep breath. Then, shaking off all hesitation, she started down the hill.

In thirty minutes it would be midnight. The Akiha Road saw hardly any traffic even during the middle of the day, and she hadn’t seen a single car since she left. The driving time to the pass was only ten minutes.

The Bungui Pass was located in the middle of deeply forested mountains, directly west of Senjogatake, the center of Japan’s Southern Alps. Tall mountainsides loomed on either side of the road, blending with the night sky, but it wasn’t pitch dark. Even without the headlamps the parking area was bathed in light and visible up ahead. Wherever they came from, five bands of light rose from behind the mountain like halos. Rather than thin and piercing, they were soft and comforting.

Saeko flicked off the headlights and cut the engine. She looked ahead and waited for her eyes to grow accustomed to the ethereal twilight.

A sign propped up towards the side of the clearing indicated a narrow footpath leading towards the zero magnetic field, just twenty meters onwards. The physical properties of the location were widely believed to have healing powers, and on fine days there would be lines of people with untreatable afflictions. They would stand for hour after hour, hoping somehow to reap the benefits of the unique properties of the zero magnetic field.

Saeko was here with a more defined purpose. Whatever happened now, she had to cross into a new world. Tasks no doubt awaited her in the land, and she would do the best she had in her to do. Having survived at such a high cost, it was a mission, and the only way to do good by her father.

Saeko stepped out of the rental car and began to tread through the undergrowth towards her destination. A small area opened up on the hillside a short way down the path. Of course, at this time of night there were no other people to be seen. The space contained a few simple plankwood benches. Saeko sat on one and found her eyes naturally following the lines of the deep valley that stretched out below.

At the bottom of a landscape topped by ridges, Saeko could make out the lights of Takato. Today was Christmas, and lots of people would still be up. But this year, Christmas would be the last thing on their minds. Instead they would be glued to their television sets, following every development regarding the news of the strange occurrences. They understood that stars were disappearing and the Earth was tearing in an unprecedented manner but not that the world had only a few hours left.

Saeko waited alone in the silent clearing, buffeted by the frozen mountain air around her. Trees were sparse in the zero magnetic field area, so Saeko could look up to count the stars — literally, since their numbers had diminished.

She had learned to cope with being alone after losing her father at seventeen, but somehow the empty space in the mountains brought a new depth to her loneliness. She wouldn’t be able to cope for more than an hour.

Just then, the ring of her cellphone broke through the silence. She looked at the display to check the name — Hashiba. She took the call with a certain desperation.

The voice was Hashiba’s all right, but his voice sounded different, almost clingy. Every now and again he let out a sob, making it impossible to make out what he was saying. She managed to pick up a few words: Machu Picchu, devil.

“Where are you? What’s going on?”

He sounded so beaten down that she forgot her own situation and felt she had to save him from whatever it was that had affected him so. She remembered how grateful she was for his visit when she was in the hospital at Ina, how much courage it had given her.

“Aaah … What should I do? I just …”

His weakened voice finally began to clear slightly. Saeko could make out sounds of a crowd in the background. He was probably shielding the phone with his hand but was unable to block out the noise completely. She heard female voices and what sounded like children. Immediately, Saeko realized what must be going on: Hashiba and the crew were at the herb gardens, and they had called their family and loved ones to join them. They had chosen whom to take with them, and Hashiba must have done the same; he had probably stolen away from the side of his wife and child to call her.

“Okay, try to calm down,” she said. “Can you tell me again what’s going on? I’m not sure the phone will work for too long here.” The signal was already being affected by the strange magnetic properties of the area. They had to use their time well.

In a steadier manner, Hashiba explained about the old grave at Machu Picchu and the numbers of the dead tallying exactly to the number of people in the park. He feared they were walking into a massacre. By the time he finished, he had regained himself enough to care about someone other than himself. “And you, are you okay?” he asked.

Saeko wasn’t confident she should even try to explain the circumstances under which she had been reunited with her father. Besides, she wouldn’t be able to go over everything in the time they had. She simply informed him that she was at the zero magnetic point at Bungui Pass, where a wormhole was supposed to open.

“You’re sure that’s the right place?” Hashiba pressed.

“Certain.”

“Where will it take you?”

“That, only God knows. You’re the one we’ve got to worry about here.”

“What do you think I should do?”

“You should go through.”

“Even if a harsh fate awaits?”

“If you die, it’s all over. You won’t even have the chance to grapple with a harsh fate.”

“But it’ll be less painful.”

“Whether you suffer or not isn’t the point. If there’s a path open to you, you have to go down it. It’s the law of life.”

“You could say so, but …”

“Isn’t that all life has done since the first organisms were formed? What do you think it was like for the creatures that first crawled out from the seas onto land? Those that first took to the skies? They all had to fight for survival in a harsh, unforgiving environment. It’s the same for us. We’ve scaled the highest mountains and lived on the Arctic. Anywhere there’s space, we’ve spread there. We can’t get stuck or languish. We’re destined to step forth.”

The words were meant for Hashiba, but Saeko increasingly got the feeling that they were for her own benefit. Even now she knew that it was thanks to her father’s upbringing that she could muster the courage to talk like this. He had taught her, and now she was passing on his teachings. The thought helped to build up her own courage.

“Life’s mission is all well and good, but—”

There was no time to waste on Hashiba’s moping, and she cut him off mid-sentence. “Listen. We’re not stuck in a single history. You may think so, but you’re wrong. There could be countless distinct universes just a millimeter away. In this world it may be that 173 people were killed at Machu Picchu 500 years ago. It may be that their limbs were severed from their bodies. But where you’re going, you have the power to change your future. Because you’ll be there, it will branch into a different world. Think about it. You know what’s going to happen, so you have the advantage. You’ll be able to prepare and find a way out. Come up with one, now that you know the grisly fact. Work together, find the gap and wedge it open with all your strength, and the world will change. If you’re just afraid and cringe, it won’t. So go, and be brave.”

Her words were followed by silence. She could hear Hashiba trying to control his breathing on the other side of the line. Eventually, he answered, his voice pained. “You’re right. I’ll do it, I’ll go. I have to. Can I ask one thing? Just where do you get your strength from, Saeko? What’s the secret?”

I’m not strong, I’m scared too, she thought, but I just want to know how things work and my curiosity keeps me going.

As she opened her mouth to speak, the call burst into a fuzz of static. Saeko tried to call back, but it was no use.

They hadn’t even had the chance to say goodbye. Saeko felt that terrible sense of isolation return even stronger than before. It colluded with the cold air, numbing her senses to the outside world. Gradually she stopped feeling the cold. Her sense of hunger faded too, and she began to feel oddly light.

Her skin began to prickle, and she scratched at her arms, suddenly itchy. The wind mimicked her movements, blowing waves across the grass. She felt as though innumerable eyes were trained on her hidden among the dense surroundings of the clearing. When enough of the beasts groaned, it became a tremor to sunder the ground, and in the cracked earth, she could see the writhing of serpentine forms.

She was hallucinating. It was that knowledge that allowed Saeko to remain calm.

One of the trees next to the bench had split open, the bark peeling down and exposing a surface that looked like a Buddhist stupa. The whitewood tomb, with a smattering of wild flowers at the base, began to resemble a decomposing human face as she looked on.

Her father’s voice echoed in her mind. It came from the face in the tree. A transparent sheet of glass floated between her and the face in the trunk. In it, Saeko could make out her own reflection.

Perhaps her father’s voice, which she’d been able to recall at any time to gain courage, reflected nothing more than her own thinking.

She couldn’t tell if the source of the voice was inside or outside of her. The frame of reference shifted rapidly, and one moment the voice originated within her, the next, from without.

The wind streaming up from the valley began to take on a pleasant warmth that spread through her body and the bench she sat on. The chill flowed away, down from her waist through her legs, finally to be absorbed into the ground. With it went the overwhelming sense of isolation and loneliness.

Saeko bathed in a sense of wellbeing. A sweet, citrus smell impregnated the air. She felt an expansive calm, a ticklish warmth and completeness, that she had not felt since her father had vanished.

The lights she had seen at the bottom of the valley began to shift, describing a circular trajectory until they stopped directly below from Saeko. The five bands of light that hung in the sky behind her became a vast searchlight; they, too, traced a line through the sky until they came to a stop before her and focused on a single point.

Saeko felt no suspicion as she observed the impossible movement of the lights below and in the sky. It was easy to just accept the experience.

These were no fireflies. The particles of light that cascaded from behind were stars. Dislodging from the horizon, they traced arcs above and around her to convene at a point ahead. It was a surprise that so many were still out there. She’d thought they were gone, but now they welled forth and sped past her to form a dense band of light.

Guided by a buoyance, she rose from the bench and took a small step forward. The band began to absorb all light from its surroundings until nothing but total darkness existed outside of it. Saeko felt an odd sensation below her waist, and when she reached down she noticed that the bench was no longer there. It hadn’t just gotten dark. Everything around her had ceased to be.

She floated alone, an isolated body in empty space. She glanced at her wristwatch and confirmed that the dials had stopped moving though it had been functioning until a moment ago. Her mind confirmed what she already suspected; somehow, without even realizing it, she had entered the mouth of the wormhole.

The congregated light was now a circle about the size of a coin. Saeko watched as it began to transform into a slender cylinder that stretched towards her, closer and closer. As it approached, its diameter expanded, flexing and relaxing in warped space. Connecting her to the luminosity, an arch of strings released particles of light. Saeko could only stare at the beautiful sight. The glowing cylindrical band was lined with blue and purple twinkles amidst a misty shower of tinier particles. It was a rainbow of light spanning the darkness, but its sacred glow didn’t seem to light up the surroundings. The rainbow continued towards her, and Saeko wasn’t sure if she was moving at the speed of light or if the rainbow was heading towards her at that speed. Its tip opened like the mouth of an enormous snake and slowly swallowed her. A sure feeling of repose of a connection to something greater than herself flooded her.

Everything went black. Saeko found herself inside a thin skin as the border of the world around her began to take on a curved appearance. The inside was dark, but there was a hint of light coming from the outside. She realized that she was in a sphere of some sort.

Something sharp cut into the skin and sliced a fissure nearly as long as herself. A subterranean creature might witness a similar sight if it peered through a crack in the ground. Through this edge she glimpsed a world alien to the one she’d known.

She tried to take a step into the new world but was unable to move. She hugged her knees to her chest, curved like a grub. She tried to call out in joy but no sound formed on her lips. Her face was covered with a thick and sticky mucus.

The sundering of symmetry that popped out of the timeless, spaceless struggle between nothingness and being 14 billion years ago immediately expanded and gave birth to the universe.

After a period of rapid expansion, the pace slowed down. During the cooling process, particles combined to form protons and neutrons, which in turn assembled into elements such as hydrogen and helium.

All the time, the universe continued expanding and cooling. Three hundred thousand years in, electrons began to be drawn in by the nuclei of atoms, clearing the path for the progression of light. Until then, hampered by their bustling activity, light had been unable to travel straight, but now it flooded through the universe, dispelling the clouded darkness.

A further 2 billion years later galaxies and stars began to take shape. It was not for a further 8 billion years that the cradle of our existence — our solar system — was formed at last. Here, gravity exerted its force on cooled gases, bringing about a nuclear fusion reaction that transformed hydrogen atoms into helium, and the brilliance of our sun was born. Following the Sun came the creation of the planets such as Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter.

The original Earth was only one-tenth of the size it is today. It grew through colliding with micro-planets and began to store heat in its interior, eventually creating an atmosphere and baking oceans of magma. Over time, the atmosphere began to cool, forming the Earth’s crust and plentiful oceans of water. The oceans of magma hardened where deepest, forming the Earth’s core.

The development of the Earth’s atmosphere, the appearance of vast oceans, and the hardening of the crust all came together to pave the way, over the course of 500 million years, for the development of life.

The genesis of life was an almost miraculous convergence of various factors, foremost amongst them a system of cycling energy. Without the balance of absorbing it from the Sun in the form of light and then releasing it back into space, life probably would not have been born in defiance of entropy.

Life is the name of all things that have shells separating them from the outside, the ability to sustain and reproduce themselves, and the capacity to evolve.

It took a long time for the first prokaryotic organisms to evolve into eukaryotic life, but the Cambrian Explosion resulted in the sudden appearance of hugely diverse forms of life. Creatures of all forms emerged from the sea, took to the skies, and wandered the four corners of the earth.

After the reign of the dinosaurs, it was the era of mammals. Gestating in the uterus allowed the fetus to grow within the amniotic fluid, providing a crucial chance for greater development of the brain. They traced a path through many levels of evolution, from primates to anthropods, near-man, primitive man, archaic humans, and eventually modern man. Eventually, this led to the development of language, a system enabling modern man to describe his world.

It was 100,000 years ago when they first journeyed across the narrow passageway of the Sinai Peninsula, leaving its heretofore home of Africa for a wider world. The ones that made their way into Europe roughly 35,000 years ago are called Cro-Magnon man. Caucasoid branched off from Negroid, and those that traveled north of India became Mongoloid. Some of these would cross the Bering Strait and eventually arrive at the southern tip of America.

From then on, the history of humankind was recorded in various languages.

Yet, the 4.5 billion years of history from the birth of the solar system to the birth of mankind has also been recorded — by the light of the Sun. Even now, 4.5 billion light-years away, the light from our sun carries the images of giant molecular clouds beginning to contract together. Four billion light-years away are images of the development of the first life forms, the primordial soup of the Earth’s oceans. And a mere 43 light-years away are images of a craft, piloted by humans, landing on the Moon for the first time.

It was the first time mankind had seen their home planet in all its magnificent splendor. Blue overall with streaks of white, the view of the whole was quite stately, fresh, and elegant, all the more so due to the vast, mystical darkness that was nothing like the night sky seen from the planet itself. Viewed directly the Sun was vile, but in Earth’s shadow, it asserted its presence by turning the latter’s atmosphere a shimmering orange.

The Milky Way: a galaxy at the edge of an infinite universe. The solar system: a star and a collection of planets located far from the center of that galaxy. And the third planet from the Sun: Earth and the life that emerged upon it, some evolving, some perishing, but always thriving as a whole.

Twenty-two minutes and thirteen seconds past midnight on December 26, 2012, immediately after Saeko, Hashiba, and several hundred others were transported to another world, all of this ceased to exist — just one universe among infinitely many, and yet our one and only.