Fate Play (8)

"Senior Brother, stop carrying me on your back. Anyone who won't ride when there's a cart is a big idiot!"

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

Perhaps her conscience started nagging her. After fooling around for a while, Xia Mi rolled up her sleeves and went over to pump the hand lever alongside Chu Zihang, chanting "Heave-ho, heave-ho" as she worked.

When she decided that was no fun either, she grabbed the front railing and sat cross-legged at the front of the cart. Pretending to scan the horizon from a ship, she said things like, "Xia Mi reporting to First Mate Chu," "Sailors need to eat plenty of spinach," "Fifteen degrees to port," and "Hard to port, hard to port." When Chu Zihang ignored her nonsense, she puffed out her cheeks and turned away.

Chu Zihang was reminded of the first time he had met her at the Chicago 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 proven correct: the inner worlds of the two were equally vast and equally absurd.

The difference was that Lu Mingfei muddled through life like a seal flapping about with a belly dance, while Xia Mi had always behaved like a crazed rabbit, recklessly hopping all over the place. Someone whose train of thought ran as straight as a ballistic trajectory like him would never catch that rabbit by the tail.

Should he take Lu Mingfei and Xia Mi for a genetic kinship test someday...? His mind wandered for a moment. The idea unexpectedly... seemed to make some sense. One had an S-Rank bloodline and the other an A-Rank bloodline, though their appearances differed quite a bit.

This whimsical notion was probably none of his business. Chu Zihang looked at the beautiful girl beside him.

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

Sailor Xia Mi suddenly said in an icy voice, "Senior Brother, I'm angry."

With little expression on her face, she lay over the railing, turned her head, and rested her cheek against her slender arm like a pillow. Perhaps the day's nonstop activity had truly tired her out a little.

Chu Zihang nodded without hesitation. "Sorry."

"Senior Brother, you don't mean it at all." Xia Mi grew irritated at his perfunctory manner.

"When you apologize, you have to stare straight at the other person and tell them, 'I'm completely sincere, so please have the good sense to forgive me.' What good is that look on your face?" She waved her little fist.

"My apologies. I'm slightly... sleepy. This is not a condition that should be occurring, so I'm thinking about it." Chu Zihang gently stroked the dark bluish-black scales around his wrist. The enlarged joints in his hand had yet to return to normal.

Not long ago, he had activated Blood Rage and unleashed his Lionheart. By all previous experience, the effects of Blood Rage should not have fully faded yet, and his mind ought to have been highly stimulated.

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 heard about this phenomenon in some book. What was it called again? Dreams and reality are both complete selves." Xia Mi poked her chin with one finger, deep in thought.

"It's probably Holographic Projection Theory!" Her eyes lit up, as if wisdom were radiating from every inch of her body.

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

Cassell College's dragon-slaying electives covered a broad range of subjects, and he had never missed his advanced physics courses at university.

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

One especially eye-catching subsequent idea was a cyclical theory: in time, the past, present, and future coexisted within a loop, with every instant containing the total amount of information in the universe.

An individual part was itself a complete whole. In related experiments, after laser interference techniques were used to record an object's light-wave information, researchers found that even if the holographic negative was cut into tiny fragments, every fragment could still reproduce the full image, only at lower resolution. This showed that information was distributed nonlocally, with the whole's information encoded evenly within every part.

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

Xia Mi waved her hand dismissively. "It means more or less the same thing. I'm not one of you science nerds. What I mean is that one part of us as a whole is influencing another part. Xia Mi A wants to sleep her head off, so Xia Mi B gets affected. Since the whole Xia Mi is super huge, Xia Mi A, one part of Xia Mi, can represent her, and the whole then affects the other parts... Damn Xia Mi A, daring to influence me! One day, I'm going to get revenge on her properly!"

Chu Zihang silently watched her soft, beautiful hair dance in the tunnel wind. Suddenly, he had the 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 theory of divided consciousness. It might only be possible through something like corpus callosotomy."

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

"If you really want revenge on yourself, just give yourself a painful hit." Chu Zihang thought better of saying it aloud. He leaned backward, avoiding the strands of Xia Mi's hair that drifted toward him.

"Then forget it. Brain surgery must feel awful." Xia Mi scratched her head. "Senior Brother, if there's another us somewhere in the world, maybe in the future or maybe in the past, what do you think they're doing right now?"

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

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

"...That answer is really sly." Xia Mi's eyes rolled as she seemed unable to decide whether she was satisfied or dissatisfied. Then she suddenly smiled brightly at Chu Zihang, vividly demonstrating what it meant to be fickle.

"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. As long as you're having fun." Chu Zihang explained that his attention was focused on observation, so he could quickly detect an enemy approaching from ahead or behind.

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

"No, no. If you aren't happy, I can't be happy either." Xia Mi put both hands on her hips, then raised one fist overhead.

The handcar reached a relatively level stretch and, rather uncooperatively, began to slow down.

"First Mate, our treasure ship heading for the New World seems to have slowed down. What do we do, what do we do?"

"Stop shaking it around."

Chu Zihang turned his head and pressed hard on the handcar's lever. Xia Mi's unhelpful meddling made the cart slow down even more.

"Oh my, oh my! Who cares about that? Go, Senior Brother, go! Faster!" Xia Mi waved both hands. "Let's reunite at the Sabaody Archipelago!"