Test: Human Nature in the Face of Life and Death

I neither agreed nor disagreed with his proposal.

But he was right about one thing: if that really happened, we would all have to unite and find someone to lead us out of this predicament. We could not become a disorganized rabble, much less turn on each other.

What we faced were not our duplicates, nor were they mechanical people. They were truly ourselves, only from different points in time.

Turning against oneself was taboo.

Besides, we had no idea whether doing so would alter the predetermined course of many events. Whether the past killed the future or the present killed the past, I imagined that at least my own history would undergo enormous changes.

For example, if I killed the me standing before me, would the present me still exist? He belonged to the past. If I killed my past self, then I could never have made it to the present.

That was logic.

Unless none of this followed any logic at all.

I was someone who valued logic, so I tended to overthink things.

This time, we did not go upstairs to rest. The number of people had changed, so even the room assignments had to be rearranged. But there was no rush, because we all believed more people would come—more "us" would continue arriving here.

Sure enough, we had not guessed wrong. A little over an hour later, we welcomed the third group of ourselves.

As soon as the third group entered the house and saw us inside, the me among them was startled when he saw two versions of himself sitting there. He froze on the spot.

But he quickly understood what was going on.

We invited them to sit down, then roughly explained the situation.

The other me said, "I have no objections. I don't