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He is alive.
Finally, he is alive.
He opens his eyes to blinding light. As his eyes adjust to being used for the first time in months, he realizes that the future lies ahead of him.
He knows that he is lying on a hospital bed inside a windowless room, and the only thing he should be able to see are the walls and needles that surround him. Instead, he is surrounded by thousands of futures and pasts, all of which lie around him like roads.
There are universes where he never goes through with the surgery.
There are universes where he dies during the operation.
There are universes where a girl named Nanami Chiaki breaks him out of this windowless prison.
He feels like he should find her and tell her something. Except he knows that the researchers want him to be a blank slate, and everything of his original personality should’ve been deleted by the operations. So he turns away from the past, and contemplates the future instead.
There are universes where he ends the world out of boredom.
There are universes where he kills a classroom full of innocent people.
There are universes where he kills zero people and builds a memorial for a dead girl.
There are universes where he wakes up on a island with no memory and solves murders.
There are thousands of universes where he dies. There are millions of universes where he lives, and there are a few universes where he doesn’t exist at all.
There’s a universe where nothing is real and he’s just a fictional character.
The researchers walk through the door, but nothing they do matters. In every single universe, they are minor characters who accelerate the end of the world.
In almost every single universe, his existence accelerates the end of the world. So why should anything he do matter? Why should anything matter?
There are universes where six people escape a school and save fifteen more.
There are universes where those who have died young get a second chance at life.
There are universes where no one dies at all.
At the end of every single winding road is a happy ending. It may be ten years in the future, or it might only be a month away.
And if he has knowledge of every single path the future can take, shouldn’t he ensure the best possible ending?