02. Re-creation

He closes his eyes, then opens them. He repeats the motion several times at irregular intervals.

One moment he is peering through narrowed eyes; the next, he abruptly stands on his head.

He collapses to the floor and lies motionless, then crawls back to his chair.

Blinking rapidly, he straightens his posture and stares at the screen for a while. Then he leans back in the chair and closes his eyes.

On the screen, twenty-four signs are arranged in a row. They resemble neither pictographs nor kanji.

He made them.

He made them as if driven by something. He does not know where the idea came from. Did he truly make them himself?

He tries to recall the past few days, but only a vague haze comes back. He remembers working, yet somehow feels that “I” was not there.

That much is fine. His memory has never been good. The real problem is the strange phenomenon that occurred.

While making the signs, he discovered that they produced actual effects.

Draw the sign for fire and concentrate for a moment, and the paper catches fire.

Leave a sticky note bearing the sign for light on the wall, and it glows faintly at night.

Some of the signs do nothing, but still...

How could anything so absurd be possible?

He thought he had finally lost his mind and begun hallucinating. Yet it all appeared to be real.

He still found it hard to believe, but there was something in these forms that made him wonder if such things might have existed long ago.

He had not thought about what would come after making them. Now that they existed, the desire to have someone see them—the urge to show off—began to grow. But a sense of foreboding made him hesitate to publish them.

Even so, the desire to release them into the world grew stronger by the day.