DAY 6
DIMENSION: 6
"Observer access granted."
The moment those words disappeared,
the floor vanished beneath my feet.
I thought I was going to fall.
But my body didn't move.
What spread out before me
was neither space nor a city.
Countless glowing spheres
floated in the darkness.
Inside every sphere,
a world existed.
A world where I married Misaki.
A world where I never met her.
A world where I died three years ago.
A world where I lived to old age.
Every life I had seen
in the fifth dimension
existed here at the same time.
But this was different.
I wasn't inside those worlds anymore.
I was looking at all of them
from the outside.
My phone vibrated.
"OBSERVATION TARGETS:
1,048,576 WORLDS"
Below the number,
a new option appeared.
"DISPLAY COMMON ORIGIN?"
Common origin.
I pressed it without hesitation.
More than a million lights
connected at once
into a single line.
At the end of that line
was one tiny light.
"Is that the original?"
An answer appeared on the screen.
"NO."
More words followed.
"OBSERVATION RECORD
FROM BEFORE WORLD GENERATION."
I reached toward the light.
The instant I touched it,
the scene changed.
A pure white room.
One man stood in the center.
It was me.
No.
He was different even from the man
I had met in the fifth dimension.
Dark circles surrounded his eyes,
as if he hadn't slept in days.
A massive machine
stood in front of him.
On its monitor
was a woman.
Misaki.
She was lying asleep in a bed,
surrounded by medical equipment.
The man whispered,
"Just one more time."
I held my breath.
"Find me a world
where Misaki can be saved."
The machine activated.
Numbers appeared on the screen.
WORLDS GENERATED
1
2
4
8
16
The number kept rising.
"Wait..."
I finally understood.
There hadn't always been
more than a million worlds.
They had been created.
Created to search
for a possibility
where Misaki survived.
The man entered a command.
"DUPLICATE OBSERVATION SUBJECT."
A human figure appeared
on the screen.
It was me.
"PLACE ONE DUPLICATE
IN EACH WORLD."
More and more versions of me
were created.
One for every world.
Each one would make
different choices
and live a different life.
Then the results
would be observed.
"We were..."
Created for an experiment.
Was that what we were?
The man in the recording
suddenly turned toward me.
Again.
Even though this was
a record of the past,
he was looking directly at me.
"If you can see this much,
you already understand."
"Are you the first me?"
The man thought for a moment,
then shook his head.
"That question
has no meaning."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm being observed too."
A chill ran down my spine.
The man pointed toward the ceiling.
"Even I,
the one who created this world,
have lives I didn't choose."
"And to observe those lives,
another version of me
has to exist."
I couldn't speak.
Even the man
who created these worlds
might have been created
by someone else.
Then where did it begin?
"Who is the original?!"
The man answered quietly.
"No one."
"The idea of an original
was wrong from the beginning."
The recording vanished.
Once again,
I stood outside
more than a million worlds.
A message appeared on my phone.
"OBSERVER ACCESS
LEVEL TWO UNLOCKED."
New functions appeared.
"DELETE WORLD"
"MERGE WORLDS"
"END OBSERVATION"
My finger froze.
I could delete a world?
I selected one as a test.
Inside it,
I was living with Misaki
and our child.
The three of us
sat around a table,
laughing together.
The screen asked,
"DELETE THIS WORLD?"
I couldn't press it.
Even if that world
had been created for an experiment,
to the people living inside it,
it was reality.
They laughed.
They cried.
They lived.
How were they
any different from me?
Then,
among more than a million worlds,
one began glowing red.
"ANOMALY DETECTED."
I enlarged it.
I recognized the room.
My room
from the first day.
I was lying on the bed.
Someone stood beside me.
It was the other me
I had seen in Chapter 4.
But now I could clearly see
what he was doing.
He was sending something
to my phone.
"TRANSFER INITIATED."
And then I was sent
into the first world.
"Was he the one
who started all this?"
My phone answered.
"NO."
"THE SUBJECT WAS ONLY
FOLLOWING ORDERS
FROM THE OBSERVATION DEVICE."
"Then who gave the order?"
For a while,
nothing appeared.
Eventually,
a single line emerged.
"YOU DID."
My heart pounded.
"Me?"
"I never gave
an order like that."
"NOT THE CURRENT YOU."
More than a million worlds
went dark at once.
Only one light remained.
It wasn't the world
I was in now.
It wasn't the world
where I lived with Misaki.
It didn't even have a number.
"UNREGISTERED WORLD"
At its center
stood another me.
The man looked up at me.
Then he smiled.
"Do you finally remember?"
His voice entered
directly into my mind.
"Come to the seventh."
"I'll give it all back to you there."
"Give what back?"
The man's smile disappeared.
"The real memories
you threw away."
Suddenly,
every world vanished.
A warning appeared
on my phone.
"OBSERVER ACCESS
FORCIBLY TERMINATED."
Then the familiar display appeared.
DAY 7
DIMENSION: 7
But this time,
there was another line beneath it.
"FINAL OBSERVATION"
And finally,
a message appeared.
"The world
you believed was reality
was never reality
even once."