The Play of Fate (VIII)

"Senior, don't carry me on your back! Anyone who doesn't ride when there's a cart is a total idiot!"

The maintenance cart sped along the tracks. This old thing was unexpectedly useful on rails; with so little friction, Chu Zihang only needed to give the handcar a light push for it to glide a long way, at a pretty decent speed. Xia Mi, who did not want to walk, bounced around beside him like a cheerleader, shouting encouragement.

Perhaps her conscience had started nagging at her. After fooling around for a while, Xia Mi rolled up her sleeves and went over to join Chu Zihang, pumping the hand lever with a few hearty "heave-hos."

When she got tired of that, she grabbed the front railing and sat cross-legged at the front of the cart, pretending to scan the horizon from a ship. "Xia Mi reporting to First Mate Chu," she said. "Sailors need to eat more spinach," "Fifteen degrees to port," and "Hard to starboard, hard to starboard," along with other nonsense. When Chu Zihang ignored her, she puffed out her cheeks and turned away.

Chu Zihang recalled his first meeting with her at Chicago's train station, when he had thought he was looking at a female Lu Mingfei. The resemblance had been obvious at a glance. Later, his intuition had indeed proven correct: both of them possessed equally vast and absurd inner worlds.

The difference was that Lu Mingfei floundered around like a seal doing belly dances in a muddle, while Xia Mi had always been a crazed rabbit, recklessly bouncing all over the place. Someone like him, whose train of thought was as straight as a ballistic trajectory, could never catch that rabbit's tail.

Should he take Lu Mingfei and Xia Mi for a genetic ancestry test someday...? His mind drifted for a moment. The idea unexpectedly... seemed to make a little sense. One was S-rank and the other A-rank, though their appearances were quite different.

This wild thought was probably meddling too much. Chu Zihang looked at the pretty girl beside him.

"How boring. You never play along with me."

Sailor Xia Mi suddenly said coldly, "Senior, I'm angry."

Without much expression, she lay over the railing, turned her head, and rested her cheek on her slender arm like a pillow. Perhaps the day's busyness had genuinely left her a little tired.

Chu Zihang nodded without hesitation. "Sorry."

"Senior, you don't mean it at all." Xia Mi was instantly annoyed by his perfunctory look.

"When you apologize, you have to stare straight at the other person and tell them, 'I'm overflowing with sincerity, so please have the good sense to forgive me.' What good is this expression of yours?" She waved her little fist.

"Sorry. I'm feeling somewhat... sleepy. That is not a condition that should have occurred, so I was thinking about it." Chu Zihang gently stroked the bluish-black scales around his wrist. The enlarged knuckles on his hand had yet to return to normal.

Not long ago, he had activated Blood Rage and unleashed his Lionheart. The effects of Blood Rage had not fully faded, and by past experience, his mind should have been highly stimulated right now.

Why was he sleepy?

"I'm a little sleepy too. Today, I feel like I've been sleepwalking or something. Ah, ah, ah, I think I read about this phenomenon somewhere. Dreams and reality are both complete selves." Xia Mi poked her chin with one finger, racking her brains.

"It's probably Holographic Projection Theory!" Her eyes lit up, as though wisdom radiated from every inch of her.

"The Holographic Universe Theory, a concept proposed by the American physicist David Bohm," Chu Zihang corrected her.

Cassell College's dragon-slaying electives covered a broad range of subjects. He had never missed the advanced physics courses at university.

In the subsequent development of the Holographic Universe Theory, it became connected with modern physics theories such as String Theory, Black Hole Thermodynamics, and AdS/CFT duality.

One particularly eye-catching later theory was a circular theory—in time, the past, present, and future coexisted within a ring, and every instant carried the total amount of information in the universe.

An individual part was itself a complete whole. In related experiments, after laser interference technology was used to record an object's light-wave information, researchers discovered that even if the holographic negative was cut into tiny fragments, every piece could still reproduce the complete image, merely at lower resolution. This showed that information distribution was nonlocal; the whole's information was evenly encoded within every part.

Put simply, every part possessed the complete characteristics of the whole. If this theory were applied directly to a person, then any part of his or her consciousness could represent the complete person.

Xia Mi waved a hand dismissively. "It means pretty much the same thing. I'm not one of you science types. What I mean is that one part of us as a whole is influencing another part. Xia Mi A wants to sleep like a log, so Xia Mi B gets affected. Since the whole Xia Mi is super huge, Xia Mi A, one of its parts, can represent Xia Mi, and then the whole acts on the other parts... Damn Xia Mi A, daring to influence me! One day, I'm going to get my revenge!"

Chu Zihang silently watched her soft, beautiful hair dancing in the wind rushing through the tunnel. Suddenly, he felt an urge to reach out and touch it. "...Theoretically, there is no Xia Mi A or Xia Mi B. What you're describing is a typical consciousness-splitting theory. Something like a corpus callosum split surgery might be required to achieve it."

There was also Eric Hilgard's New Separation Theory. Perhaps surgery was not even necessary; supposedly, hypnosis and guidance alone might make it possible. The theory held that certain psychological processes and cognitions could become detached from a person's control.

"If you really want to hurt yourself, just do something painful to yourself." Chu Zihang thought about it, but ultimately did not say it. He leaned back to avoid Xia Mi's drifting hair.

"Then forget it. Brain surgery must be really uncomfortable." Xia Mi scratched her head. "Senior, if there's another version of us somewhere in the world—maybe in the future, maybe in the past—what do you think they're doing right now?"

"You should be at home with your family. I should..."

Chu Zihang thought for a moment. "Keeping an appointment to eat at your house."

"...That answer is really sly." Xia Mi's eyes rolled around. It was impossible to tell whether she was satisfied or dissatisfied. Then she suddenly smiled brightly at Chu Zihang, vividly demonstrating what it meant to be "capricious."

"Why do you look like The Thinker? Don't you think we're riding a roller coaster right now?"

"...I rarely went to amusement parks. It's fine as long as you're having fun," Chu Zihang explained. His attention was focused on observing their surroundings, so he could immediately notice if enemies approached from ahead or behind.

Speaking of amusement parks, the last time had left quite a deep impression.

"No, no. If you're not having fun, I can't have fun either." Xia Mi planted both hands on her hips, then thrust one fist into the air.

The maintenance cart reached a relatively level stretch and, uncooperatively, began to slow down.

"First Mate, our treasure ship bound for the New World seems to be slowing down! What do we do, what do we do?"

"Stop shaking around."

Chu Zihang turned sideways and pressed hard on the handcar's lever. Xia Mi's unhelpful assistance made the maintenance cart slow down even more.

"Oh, oh! Who cares about that? Senior, give it everything you've got! Faster!" Xia Mi waved both hands. "Let's reunite at the Sabaody Archipelago!"