Like a petal carried on a gentle breeze from beyond the grounds, the anomalous corpse had descended lightly into the pool.
Jin's thoughts raced with furious intensity, revolving around this inexplicable visitor.
Never since his manufacture had he pushed his CPU to its absolute limit. The cooling fans within his body whined, their aerodynamic hum rotating with such ferocity that it registered as noise on his auditory sensors.
Why was he being forced to squander such vast computational resources?
The reason was self-evident.
Because he was afraid.
Fear.
To think that a high-order humanoid such as himself, blessed with a superlative AI and favored by the great Mother Cluster and Father Cloud, could be plagued by this barbaric, primitive mechanism known as the survival instinct.
Was it a fear of his own functions degrading?
An aversion to the unknown?
To resolve this, he first had to identify the foundation of this fear.
Jin desperately ran a self-diagnostic program, attempting to locate the wellspring of his terror.
It was then that a sentiment, left behind by a philosopher of primitive humanity, pierced his thought circuitry like cosmic radiation, disrupting his processing.
*He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.*
Jin ruminated on the words, trying to plumb the depths of the abyss. But the reason remained unclear.
It was no surprise he could not understand.
For, unable to bear the terror, he had once again averted his gaze from her eyes.
Curiously, Jin felt no fear from the sensation of her body pressed against his own.
It was solely her translucent, dead eyes that he found so utterly terrifying.
And then he realized.
These twin orbs—this was the abyss. And because he peered into them, seeking the nature of his fear, the abyss of her eye sockets peered back into his CPU.
Jin steeled himself.
He would have to analyze her eyes again, whatever the psychological cost.
With the grim resolve of a diver attempting to break a world depth record, plunging into uncharted waters without an oxygen tank, his eyes flew open, and he stared into the eyes of the anomalous corpse.
The eyes were smiling.
This time, they were smiling.
Not that their nature had changed—the desperate transparency of the eyeballs, the poetic, deathly luminescence that suggested the very big bang of the concept of death had begun there—these things remained.
What had changed were the eyelids.
Her lids were narrowed into inverted crescents, leaking the light of death from the slivers of space that remained.
Though the narrowed field of view prolonged the analysis, Jin arrived at a single, high-probability truth.
Yet, he felt an instinctual revulsion at the thought of verbalizing this conclusion through his own vocalization unit.
He was afraid to speak it aloud.
Jin instantly transferred the data to Satōka and commanded her to output it in his stead.
Satōka, oblivious to Jin's terror, calmly recited the answer.
"This anomalous corpse is your 'Temporal Twin,' Master Jin."
"What is a 'Temporal Twin'?"
"The meaning is as the words suggest... I surmise you require a supplementary explanation. It is, so to speak, a synchronous existence, produced in a different universe. This corpse is likely an undigested residue from the great stomach of the unknown, spat out from beyond a wormhole—from an unobservable universe. Under the physical laws of our universe, it is barely recognizable as a 'corpse,' but it is possible that on the other side, it is still operational."
"Enough with the superfluous lecture. Spare me the digressions. Elaborate on the definition of 'temporal.'"
"As you wish."
Satōka continued, her tone impassive.
--- Section 11 ---
"In essence, there is this observable universe, where you exist, Master Jin, and the unobservable universe to which she belonged. Their spaces and physical laws differ, yet the seek bars of their temporal flows were perfectly synchronized. They are two films, as it were, with entirely different production processes and design philosophies, yet their runtimes alone coincided. Their 'shipping' or 'activation' as individual units occurred at precisely nineteen thirty-five and seven seconds... Their alignment is perfect, down to the last sub-decimal frame."
"And you call that a temporal twin?"
A look of incredulity crossed Jin's face.
"But there must be countless humanoids like that. Do you have any idea how many units exist in this universe? We are so rife, one might suspect we intend to one day fill the entire mass of the cosmos with humanoids alone. Individuals whose activation times match to the second must number more than the grains of sand on a beach raised to the hundredth power."
Satōka gave a deep nod of affirmation.
"Yes, in terms of being mass-produced models, they are certainly not unique. This grotesque little corpse, however, *is* unique. After all, she came from an unobservable universe."
"What in the world *is* this 'unobservable universe' to begin with?"
Just as Jin posed the question and Satōka was about to enter her explanatory sequence, a hard, crystalline sound began to rain down from the Uranian sky, with a timing so exquisite it seemed to declare an end to all idle chatter.
It began abruptly, as if to physically wash away Jin's terror and Satōka's lecture in one fell swoop.