Strange Memories With You, My Dear

Chapter 03.05

Fate or Probability

Translated by KuroNeko
Edited by Omkar

I wandered home that day and didn’t get to sleep until late at night. When I thought about Yuuko in her hospital bed, I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I spent the whole night like that, ultimately falling asleep near daybreak, and when I woke up, it was practically noon.

In the washroom, I noticed my face was pallid and devoid of strength. In fact, Yuuko’s sleeping face, which was sleeping in her hospital room the day before, was much healthier. Of course, my mother was already at work, and the home was silent. I showered, changed my clothes, and went to the lab.

I was worried about Yuuko, but Yuuko’s mother assured me that she would stay with her and would contact me if anything went wrong. I spent the rest of the day in the lab working on my thesis until the evening, and on my way home from university, I went by the hospital. Yuuko was still sleeping soundly. They did another brain scan today and examined the EEG and brain activity data acquired over the previous day, but they still don’t know what’s causing the problem.

However, collecting and analyzing brain activity resulted in two discoveries.

Yuuko’s mother was being informed by the doctor near Yuuko’s bed, and I could hear it too because I was nearby. Doctors say the brain is active even while sleeping, but in Yuuko’s case, the length of REM sleep is fairly long, and activity in the hippocampus and temporal lobe at that period is more active than in normal people. Another factor is that the duration spent in deepest sleep, known as slow-wave sleep, is protracted, and while this time generally shortens as one approaches consciousness, this is not the case at this moment. These might be indicators of anything, so he’ll see a sleep specialist soon.

The doctor also stated that there has been no change in her health thus far, but he is unsure what would happen if she does not wake up for a long period of time. She was worried, and I wasn’t too worried, but it was difficult to imagine Yuuko, who was sleeping so colorfully and peacefully, being in danger, at least some of the time. I wished I could stay at her side forever, but I only had a month before I had to submit my thesis, and I was in the thick of final preparations. If I were to take time off, it would be a problem for my two co-researchers.

I told myself it would be okay, and I went about my daily routine.

On that particular day, I had to simulate the quantum mechanical behavior induced by the materials we were experimenting with in a range of methods. Kobayashi-san and Asano were busy with other things, so I was working alone, connected to the university’s D-F quantum computer. Toward the end, my computer’s email application notified me that I had received one new email.

After completing my tasks, I disconnected from the D-F quantum computer and opened my email application.

From:[email protected]

Subject:About our world and what is happening to Fukuhara Yuuko

When I saw the email, I couldn’t believe my eyes for a second.

The sender’s address, [email protected], was unmistakably the email address I had received from the university. The account is the name of the student, tiast in the domain part stands for the name of the university, Tokyo Institute of Advanced Science and Technology, and phys is an abbreviation for the Department of Physics.

There was a lot of text in the email, and there were a bunch of files attached. I couldn’t keep up with what was going on, so I started reading the email anyhow.

And from that first sentence, I was taken aback.

“I am Yukinari Nakayama, who exists in a parallel world that is extremely close to yours.”

I could not believe it.

It was so ridiculous that I wasn’t even upset. “Huh?” I murmured, my voice wobbling. However, as I read the contents of that email, I felt a great sense of uncertainty and an extreme feeling of uneasiness, almost like fear, from deep beneath my body. The more I read, the stronger it grew, and the more I remembered the reasoning contained therein, as well as the “The phenomena of sharing unknown memories” that had been happening to Yuuko and me for a long time, the less I suspected it was a prank. After making sure that all of the senior graduate students in the lab were far away from me, I read the rest of that long email.

“This information may be useful if Yuuko in your world is also suffering from consciousness disorders. It is with that motive that I send this email to you.” The body of the e-mail, which began with the statement like First and foremost, Yuuko has collapsed and is suffering from consciousness disorder in the world of the sender of this email, and a hypothetical explanation of the cause of the collapse were written. I was bewildered, but I kept reading the email. To summarize the email’s contents, it reads as follows.

It has long been theorized by physicists that there are minute organs in the human brain that are capable of quantum phenomena of some kind. In the universe with human beings who have identical biological conditions, especially in the “Married  World” where they are compatible with each other. The theory was that there could theoretically be a case of very strong information interference between those same people, and that perhaps this phenomenon could have caused Yuuko’s disorientation.

It also summarized the gist of the logic behind the fact that emails could be sent from parallel worlds.

Typically, the countless worlds envisioned in the many-worlds interpretation do not influence one another, but instead produce their own coherent history. In the “Married World,” however, when certain circumstances are satisfied, quantum-level interference can occur, and it appears that the environment inside a D-F quantum computer is amenable to such interference. In summary, when a quantum containing information interferes with a quantum in a paired relationship in a “Married World” through a D-F quantum computer at the appropriate frequency and under the right conditions, the information is transmitted to the other world.

I opened the attachment after downloading it. There were numerous papers and documents labeled in Japanese and English, but the first one that drew my attention was a schematic of two lines, swirling and loosely interconnecting, which drew my attention immediately.

DOCUMENT 1 “An overview of the world of the marginalized and this information and communication.”

Created By: Yukinari Nakayama.

“These two worlds are interconnected in such a manner that if any of them undergoes a significant shift in direction, the other world will follow suit. Please see it as a metaphor for the fact that forces in the other world are also moving in that way. It’s hard to tell how similar our realities are since that’s unprovable at this juncture, but the physical constants and other physical circumstances should be in perfect concordance. Although macro events and history, which is the accumulation of such events, are not synonymous, they tend to evolve in a similar manner. 

This is not a precise representation or description, but it is a general approximation of your and my worlds as they are perceived in our world. The two lines (worlds) that make up this spiral move closer and further apart, and as the lines move closer together, there is a tremendous amount of information interference. 

About ten years ago, our worlds began to interfere with each other quite strongly, and the peak of this interference was in the fall of 2030. Shohei Fukuhara-sensei estimates that direct communication, such as sending emails, will not be possible for another three months at the most using a D-F quantum computer. After that, the distance between our worlds will widen again, making information interference between worlds weaker and information interchange between our worlds impossible. Please reference Fukuhara-sensei’s work on pages 12 through 25 in Reference 23 for more background on this viewpoint. The predicted duration of the interval before returning to a strong interference status is undetermined.  According to the professor, this is one of the most contentious issues among physicists working in this domain, with a wide variety of viewpoints among different hypotheses spanning hundreds to thousands of years, or perhaps 100 million years. And the controversy over which of them is legitimate has yet to be determined.

Moreover, even in the current situation where the world is moving closer together, information communication using a D-F quantum computer will not always be successful. I am going to send this email to you many times because Sensei says that many conditions must be perfectly aligned at exactly the right time for the communication to be successful in its entirety without any information being lost at all. I hope you have received this warning/information at least once.”

In his paper, Fukuhara-sensei recently mentioned something similar regarding this theory. He briefly conveyed it to me at a session last fall, when I had just joined the lab. After stating that there is no way to objectively validate the existence of such a framework, he drew two spirals on the whiteboard and wrote “Coupled world” next to them, saying, “If we think in this hypothetical model, many of the possibilities that Fujisawa and I have been making make sense.”

Sensei spoke about two worlds that develop as they move apart, come closer together, and interweave with one other, and even among the myriad universes, they are quite similar, each with a separate history, but they come closer and further apart, as if there are forces at work pulling them together.

I could understand most of what I wrote in the other world. However, after skimming through the other accompanying documents, I realized that neither the volume nor the level of the information was very legible for me, a fourth-year undergraduate who had just recently begun training to read academic journal articles in English.

I thought that I might be losing my mind due to the troubles I was going through with Yuuko, but the smell of the slightly dusty laboratory, the documents Nakajima-senpai left out, the cactus on Kobayashi-san’s desk, the voices of the senior graduate students, and various other things conveyed to me a vast amount of information about this world that I could neither dream nor recreate in my dreams, told me that this was not a dream or illusion, but a raw, sane reality. For lunch, I ate fried bread that I bought at the purchase store. I should have that receipt in my wallet. This is the most recent time in this world with a consistent history that has continued since the beginning of this universe.

This is reality.

After calming myself down, I got up from my seat and made an extension call to Fukuhara-sensei’s office on the phone installed in the laboratory.

◇

I grabbed my laptop and dashed to Fukuhara-sensei after confirming on the extension line that the Sensei was there.

Fukuhara-sensei looked over the e-mail and attachments I showed him and said, “I can’t believe it…”

“But, it wouldn’t be a prank. It’s absurd to create such a large amount of specialized data for a prank…”

“I, too, believe that this communication of information from the Married World is a real thing that happened.”

Sensei turned to me and I continued my story.

“Sensei, did you ever ask Yuuko how she met me?”

“No… Never heard of it, come to think of it…”

“We had a common, unremembered memory.”

“Eh? What did you say?”

Sensei asked back with a suspicious look on his face.

I told him that we had memories that I and Yuuko were not supposed to know, that I met her, and that the subsequent “collecting fragments of memories” confirmed that we shared “unknown memories.” Sensei’s demeanor became solemn as the story progressed. Although I had a hunch when I read this email, the “usual memory” that Yuuko and I had in common was probably the result of quantum interference within the micro-intracerebral in her brain, which mixed up her memories of herself in the “Married World.”

This reasoning is analogous to the logic of information transmission between parallel worlds by a D-F quantum computer, which I described on the other side of the world. Perhaps a behavior comparable to what the D-F method quantum computer is accomplishing is occurring within the brain’s micro-intracerebral domain. I pointed to the content and informed the teacher as well. Sensei then read the section of my laptop screen where I recounted what would have occurred to Yuuko in the other world, put his hand over his mouth, and stared carefully.

“But if that’s the case, why is only Yuuko disoriented…?”

“Um, it’s just an idea I had…”

“Talk to me.”

Sensei turned to me and said, I spoke my hypothesis slowly, clearing my head.

“If those micro-intracerebral cells in the brain are like receivers that pick up information from parallel worlds, Yuuko must be very sensitive to them. Even when we met a long time ago and were discussing the ‘unknown memories,’ she recalled far more than I did. So, at some point in the recent past, when the ‘Married World’ was considerably closer, she was probably more influenced than other humans. It was as though too much information poured in at once and her brain froze…”

“Hmm…”

Sensei pondered for a while, then scratched his head in frustration and said, “Can I get all the data and papers in this email?”

“Yes, of course.”

“This could be a hint to wake up Yuuko.”

Then Sensei took a breath once, looked me in the eye and said.

“Nakayama-kun, please keep this matter confidential for the time being. At least until Yuuko recovers.”

“Yes.” I nodded.

I was too concerned to think about it before, but now that I think about it, this is more than just an odd occurrence; it’s a “historical event.” The world would be in uproar if a distinguished researcher like Fukuhara-sensei publicly announced that he had received an email from another world. People’s attention may also be directed to Yuuko, who is hospitalized. I considered forwarding the email to Sensei’s address, but then chose to give the data offline to avoid any information leakage. I then copied the data to Sensei’s PC from a little memory device I use for research.

“From Coupledworld 1” was the folder name for all of the data. As I worked on it, a shiver ran down my spine. The sensation that I was now a witness to a historical event was intensifying, and I was getting an incomprehensible sense of unease. Fukuhara-sensei stood up and patted my shoulder. Once I finished the work, I took out the memory card, and placed it firmly in my pocket so I wouldn’t lose it.

“You want a cup of coffee?”

I wonder if I looked very impatient. Then Sensei said to me, “Don’t worry, we’ll manage. Even Yuuko is not in any danger at the moment.” The coffee maker made a coping, soft sound. 

“Sit down.”

I sat on the couch, as Sensei signaled with his gaze. Soon after, he offered me a mug of coffee and said, “Here you go.” My palm felt warm as it touched the cup, and it smelled amazing. Then I noticed my fingertips had turned ice cold. Sensei also moved the data I’d saved on his computer to his own tablet device and sat down on the couch across from me with it. Sensei sipped two sips of coffee, murmured, “Well,” and started using the tablet, crossing his legs and running his gaze over the screen.

“The D-F quantum computers of that world, they are quite a bit more advanced than what we’ve been building…  There’s a little bit of tinkering that needs to be done to send information from here to there…”

Sensei studied the information attentively, nodding his head, tilting his head, and murmured to himself in a tiny voice. It was Sensei’s ordinary look, which I saw frequently in the laboratory. Nothing compares to when he’s reading a paper and a senior graduate student asks for his opinion.

I was so scared to be involved in this “historic event” yet the figure in front of me tried his very best to fight this, and the sight of him was so, so encouraging. I squeezed my cold hands. It’s Yuuko, not me, who is in danger. I figured I’d do what I could to help her as she collapsed in the midst of all this insanity.