not an island

On the day the line between fantasy and reality blurs, Shun is watching Doremon on TV with his younger siblings. Shun resents that he's stuck watching what he, at his very grown-up age of eleven, considers a baby show, but such is the burden of being an eldest sibling.

He sits on the couch only half paying attention when the show is unceremoniously cut off by a burst of static which resolves into a message written in Japanese, English, and an apparently arbitrary assortment of other languages Shun doesn't recognize.

In Japanese at least, it reads, "People of the earth, today I can finally reveal something that will change the course of all your lives."

It cuts to footage of a pink haired boy, about Sora's age by the looks of it, standing in front of a bookshelf. He reaches out his hand and a book floats down into it.

"You know they just do that with strings, right?" Sora says, trying to poke a hole in Shun's burgeoning awe.

The pink haired boy lays a hand on a pile of rubble and it reforms into an undamaged wall.

"Reversed footage," Sora says.

The pink haired boy blinks into existence in a previously empty room and in the next clip blinks out of another.

"Jump cuts," Sora says, "They didn't even add any special effects to make it look more convincing."

The pink haired boy floats above a bed, a faint glow emanating from beneath his closed eyelids. Everything in the room pulls toward him.

"And that?" Shun asks.

"Well you can do a lot with CGI these days," Sora answers, clearly unsure.

"Why's it in such low quality, then?" Shun shoots back.

"Can we watch something else?" Toki asks, "This is scary."

"Sure, this is kind of dull anyway," Sora says and changes the channel.

Only to find every other channel is playing the exact same thing.

Sora turns off the TV and goes with Toki to complain to Mom about it being broken.

Once they're gone Shun turns it back and watches more footage of the pink-haired boy doing various impossible things interspersed with presentation slides densely populated with brain-scan images, equations, and graphs that curve sharply upwards. They paint a picture of a wonderous person that nothing could restrain, not even the laws of physics.

It must be nice, Shun thinks, to be so free.

*

It goes without saying that, despite Kusuke's fears, Kusuo does not kill his brother for revealing his secret to the world, no matter how much he might want to.

Instead, he shuts himself in his room and blocks the door with his bookcase when his parents come to try and coax him out.

In his first week of living like this he only leaves the house once, going out to buy groceries since no one else in his family can be trusted to competently perform such a task.

He gets the shopping done as quickly as he can without doing anything overtly supernatural, trying his best to ignore the way he attracts even more stares that he did before he rewrote the human genome.

That night Kusuke leans up against the wall separating their rooms and asks, "How long are you going to keep up this pathetic shut-in lifestyle? It doesn't suit you."

Until this blows over, Kusuo replies, arms wrapped around his knees.

"That's the thing, I don't think it will. It's been a week and it's still on the news. People are only becoming more convinced as they see all the little discrepancies my excellent collection of evidence explains," Kusuke says, smirking audibly, "but I think you know that brother. You should stop pretending that things can go back to the way they were before."

I could use mind control to make them forget.

"If you were going to do that, you would have already. We both know you're too afraid of that power."

Fine, Kusuo says, glaring at his brother through the wall. I can't go back. Are you happy? Now stop gloating and get to the point.

"Surely you know already?" Kusuke asks.

If you say it out loud maybe you'll realize how stupid it sounds.

"It's not stupid to say you should take your rightful place above humanity. If anything, it would be more stupid to leave them to their short-sighted, self-destructive, inefficient ways." Kusuke says, with absolutely no awareness of how utterly unhinged he sounds. "If anyone can make something worthwhile out of this pathetic waste of a species, it's you, little brother."

I don't want to be above them.

"You don't understand," Kusuke lectures. "Ruling over humanity is not only your right but also your moral duty."

What are you talking about? Kusuo asks. Kusuke's thoughts are too much of an overwrought mess to be much help understanding his argument.

"If left to its own devices humanity will likely meet its self-imposed extinction before the end of the century, though perhaps that oblivion will come as a relief to much of it given the conditions that they struggle to live under, but you could change this. You could bring a stop to the countless atrocities that they commit against each other and unite us in a new era of peace."

The only peace I could offer is one built on the threat of unbearable violence. The prospect strikes Kusuo as quite bleak, a hopeless peace he can only maintain because he has- no- because he is a more awful weapon than anyone else could ever hope to have.

"I doubt any other peace is feasible with humans as they are," Kusuke opines, "though I suppose you could change that too, if you'd just get over yourself."

No. That's too risky, Kusuo says. The effects of the changes he's already made are harmless enough, occasionally even somewhat beneficial, but he doesn't want to push his luck by making any more unless absolutely necessary. That's not to mention the heavy, sick feeling he gets in the pit of his stomach when he thinks how his influence is irreversibly baked into every human on the planet on a genetic level. He can only imagine how much worse it would feel to have done that on purpose.

Besides, he adds, in the vain hope that Kusuke will understand, it's wrong to play god like that.

"Not when you do it. It's not playing for you. If anything it's more wrong that you insist on playing human. Every day you continue to do so only puts more blood on your hands," Kusuke says, and, uninterested in any rebuttal that Kusuo might offer, skulks away to do something downstairs.

Left alone, Kusuo closes his eyes and listens to his family and his neighbors going about their ordinary lives, on an ordinary Sunday evening, in a ordinary world that Kusuo feels more cut off from than ever.

As selfish as it is, he hopes he can keep pretending to belong in it.

*

Shun is surprised when on the way home from school he finds the cat who is the esper sunning himself on a wall a few blocks from his house.

Good. You're here, he says as Shun approaches.

"Well fancy seeing you here. Um, did you decide you want to be friends after all?" Shun asks, optimistically.

I don't have friends, the esper says.

"But wouldn't you want some, if that's the case?" Shun says. That's certainly the case for him regarding his lack of friends.

We're not the same. the esper says, clearly annoyed, I don't have friends because a creature like me has no need for them. You don't have friends because you're a social reject.

"That's not true! Most people just aren't interesting enough to try to be friends with," Shun blathers defensively.

If that's the case you should really set some more reasonable standards, the esper says. The fact that you want to be friends with me is concerning in itself.

"Why?" Kaidou asks.

It's like wanting to be friends with a stolen missile. Despite what you think, I'm not a good person.

"You saved my life."

I had my own selfish reasons. Your mom would freak out if she knew you were talking to me.

"Mom freaks out if I take a few minutes longer than usual to walk home."

Then we should probably continue this conversation at your house, the esper says, to make sure that doesn't happen.

Shun gives the esper a nod. He really would prefer to avoid that outcome as well.

Good. I'll meet you in your room, the esper says and disappears.

Shun's mother greets him from the kitchen when he gets home. He hurriedly replies in kind and then rushes upstairs to his room. There he finds the cat who is the esper sitting at the base of one of his bookshelves.

"So what did you want to talk about?" Shun asks.

The esper thoughtfully tilts his head and says, to put it simply I'm worried about you.

Well, that's certainly not an ominous thing to hear, especially from the esper of all people.

Don't get the wrong idea. It's not like your life's at stake or anything, the esper says, I just think you might have strayed onto a dangerous path.

"What do you mean?" Shun asks, plopping down on his bed, "Do I, like, know too much or something?"

Far from it. Except possibly in the sense that you "know" too much that's actually total bunk. The esper says regarding Shun with a judgmental feline gaze, You're far too easily taken in by pseudoscience. I can see from the contents of your bookshelf that it's already getting you scammed.

"You're worse than Sora," Shun groans, dragging a hand down his face, "Someone who can turn into a cat has no business calling anything unscientific nonsense."

I have never in my life come across any unnatural phenomena that wasn't caused by me, but I did come across a great many people all too eager to exploit anyone credulous or desperate enough to believe them.

"Still, you should keep an open mind," Shun says, regurgitating an argument he'd seen made countless times on the forums he frequents. "Experts had long consigned psychic powers to the scrap heap of history before you came along and proved all the doubters wrong."

So what if they failed to account for whatever astronomically unlikely edge case allowed for my existence? Their models of the world still apply well enough to the things that aren't me.

"What about the other psychic kids the Black Swan Project found?" Shun asks. Their powers weren't anywhere near as flashy as the esper's but it had still been a big enough deal to garner some discussion in mainstream circles for a while.

Probably just a hoax they came up with so they could keep their funding.

"They were under a lot of scrutiny after you, uh, left. Do you really think they could pull that off?"

As hard as it would be to convince all those scientists to risk destroying their careers like that, it would still be easier than finding other psychics, the esper says. It sounds more like he's trying to convince himself than Shun, and even if they were real, that doesn't mean every discredited scientific concept has to be given a second chance. Your mind is so excessively open that I'm surprised your grades aren't suffering for it.

"Unfortunately my teachers can't handle the truth of the world. There was nothing to be done but to let them stay in their comforting bubbles of falsehood for a while longer," Shun says, trying to sound cool. He's been careful about what sources he cites in assignments for school after he almost failed an essay in middle school because his teacher found one of his sources dubious.

So you are capable of evaluating your sources when your grades are at stake, the esper says. Great. Now you just need to start doing that for your personal beliefs as well, instead of latching onto whatever you think sounds coolest.

"And that's all?" Shun asks, sorely disappointed by the sheer mundanity of the esper's concerns as well as his aloof, condescending attitude. "Don't you have better things to do than criticize my interests?"

I suppose there are more productive ways I could spend my time, the esper says icily, I'll go do some of them if you don't want my help.

"You're kind of an asshole, you know," Shun says.

I'm well aware, The esper says,Do you want my help or not?

"Fine. I'll listen to you," Shun says. Despite everything he doesn't want the esper to go just yet, if only because of how many burning questions that would leave forever unanswered.

The esper nods and gestures to the bookshelf with his tail, Choose three of these even you find dubious. I'll give you until Sunday, so you have time to think about your decisions. Don't tell anyone about me or I won't come back.

Just like that he's gone, leaving Shun alone in his room.