A, B and C are travelling through the Sahara Desert. One night they pitched their tents. A hated C and decided to murder him by putting the poison in C's only water supply. B, without knowing A's intentions or actions, also decided to murder C. He drilled a tiny hole into C's water supply so the water would slowly leak out. As a result, C died several days later from thirst. So who was the murderer: B because C never did drink the poison put in by A and so would have died even if the poison had not been put in, or A as once A had poisoned the water C would have died even if B had not drilled that hole?
A baby is not born with perfect vision. It is mostly blurred and it is incredibly difficult for them to make a distinction between two objects. In order to focus on anything it must be within 8 to 10 inches of their face.
Luckily, a newly born infant does not know that his/her vision is particularly bad, nor is mentally capable of forming a proper opinion on anything and is therefore unaffected by this.
Unfortunately, I knew the difference between good eyesight and bad eyesight and was also perfectly capable of forming an opinion on most things, therefore being affected horribly by my sudden bout of near blindness.
My initial reaction was not to scream or cry, it being instead to stay deathly silent and freeze up completely. I was so terrified by the lack of vision that I was beyond the point of screaming in fear and could only try and stay as still as possible as my body was being carried by something I couldn't see.
What I didn't know was that my lack of movement or noise made people come to the conclusion that something was wrong with me and caused panic to ensue. I had no idea what was happening to me within my first couple of hours of being a newly born infant as my body was whisked this way and that, having tubes forced into me and then being taken out, needles being thrust into my arm and all sorts of things being done that I didn't understand.
After a while I began to cry silently in frustration and fear, these cries getting louder almost against my will as I gave in to the instincts of my body. Eventually, I must have been deemed perfectly healthy as I was put down in one place and not moved again. In a way, I wish I was as something huge finally came into the small area where my vision would focus and, upon realizing it was a gigantic face, I screamed even louder.
This may sound comical but, rest assured, it most definitely was not. I was practically blind, scared half to death and, despite all my screams, I couldn't see anyone coming to help me. Instead all I got in response to my shrieks were huge faces coming up close to me and sounds coming out of their mouths that made no sense to me.
It was like a horrific nightmare except I was fully aware that I was awake and what was around me was real.
I kept on screaming for about a week, fighting my body's want to sleep a lot and staying up for as long as I could. When I finally gave up shrieking in the face of all those who approached me, knowing that my cries of distress were not being fully acknowledged by these giants, I resigned myself to sleeping as much as possible. For, whilst these dreams were often the usual mess of randomness that dreams were meant to be like, every now and then I dreamt of the normal life I wanted back. Going to school with my friends, tutoring a couple of them every week, drawing in my room, eating dinner with my family, everything I was used to.
After three months of this, one of the giants set me down somewhere and, in front of me, I saw a baby. My vision had been steadily improving and now, whilst everything still seemed somewhat 2D to me, I could make out the main characteristics of this infant. Wisps of dark hair, practically black were on their head, big brown eyes staring ahead of them and chubby, short fingers reaching forwards towards me, much like this alien hand attached to my body I still had trouble recognizing as my own was-
I started screaming again.
Before the end of the week I finally managed to get my head around the situation I was in. I had become a baby again, although I hadn't simply had my mind go back in time and restarted my life. This was clear to me for two reasons:
When I was born, touch screen tablets definitely did not exist, nor were holograms used in everyday life.
I was brought up in England and my parents spoke English as their first language. This place was definitely not England and the giants around me spoke what I was guessing to be Japanese.
I had bright green eyes before.
The only conclusion I could draw then from these series of events was that, if I had not somehow implanted my memories into my younger self, I must have been reincarnated or something along those lines. And, if I had indeed been reincarnated, then I probably had died.
This revelation was the most shocking as, you see, I have no recollection of dying. If I had I would have figured this all out quicker but the last thing I remembered was accidentally falling asleep as I tried to finish off my latest painting. It had been close to three in the morning but I'd wanted so desperately to finish in order to show my friends it before I went off on holiday. I never had finished it because I was so tired but that was my last memory.
After the shock had died off I had been confused and angry. I couldn't have just simply died in my sleep! I had been a fairly healthy eighteen year old girl and was careful not to let harm come to me so how on earth had I died?! Had I fallen off my chair whilst sleeping and hit my head? Had I been one of those hugely unlucky people who one day just shut down for no reason? Had I been murdered?
What made me most angry was that I'd never know. How exactly could I ever know? Its not like you can somehow reverse reincarnation. You can't make yourself un-dead. I had to resign myself to the knowledge that if I was dead then the circumstances of my death would never be disclosed to me. Neither would why I remembered my previous life.
On the other hand, if I hadn't died and this was some weird other sort of event that had occurred then I still wouldn't know what had happened unless I woke up again in my previous body. So I might as well assume the worst case scenario until proven wrong. And the worst case scenario was that I had died and was stuck here indefinitely.
At six and a half months of age my vision had improved vastly yet again. My vocal chords also developed enough so that I could start to try and copy how people spoke. My parents seemed delighted by how I had advanced from first screaming to not making much noise at all and now to making the typical baby garble they clearly found adorable. I did feel slight guilt for having made the first six a a bit months of my life with them so stressful as I had come to care for them.
It was hard to be distant from people of whom you relied so desperately on to survive and so, as a sort of apology, I made certain to 'learn' to say 'mama' and 'papa' fairly quickly.
But, if I were brutally honest, I was closest to my older brother Arata. He was only older than me by a year and a bit and so was too young himself to treat me like an infant. It was incredibly frustrating to have all these adults treat me as my physical age when I was anything but so I found it incredibly relieving to be around him. He would not pull those stupid faces or put on a ridiculous voice to try and amuse me, instead more often than not wanting me to play with him in some way.
Arata was also useful in the sense that I could gauge how much intelligence I should show. Whilst being labelled as a child genius wasn't exactly considered a bad thing in my books, I really didn't know enough about what this world was like. I knew the year was 2090 and that was almost 80 years after I had died.
And a lot can happen in that time.
What if there were laws I didn't know about? Social rules that had changed drastically? Even in my last life I had struggled a little with social situations if I didn't have anyone I got along with around. It had even been debated as to whether I had a mild case social anxiety. So, if I did display a high level of intelligence that was unnatural for my age, would I be able to even cope with being thrown into such a society which had rules I was unaware of?
No. Of course I wouldn't.
I would do better to at least wait until I knew as much about this new society as I could before diving in and becoming a source of attention. In order to achieve this, all I had to do was make sure I was always one step behind Arata. If he figured something new out then I had to 'figure it out' at the very least a few days later, at the most a few months.
By following this rule, I portrayed myself as a quick learner but by no means a child genius.
Learning Japanese (I had been right all along about this being Japan) and being able to speak, read and write it were the only things I didn't have to pretend to take time to do. In my previous life I hadn't been the worst at learning new languages, in fact, I had learnt German up to an almost fluent stage and a little bit of French. But Japanese was a whole new kettle of fish.
For starters, there are no words in Japanese equivalent to the articles 'a', 'an', and 'the'. The meaning has to be derived from context. There are also no plural forms in Japanese either, which was incredibly confusing for me to get a grasp of. Possessive forms of nouns or pronouns do not exist too and so whose item is it has to be deduced yet again from the context. Future tense adds to the list of things that are non-existent, making context even more important. It was also extremely frustrating at the start to try and translate what people were saying into English as they were speaking as the verbs come to the end of the sentence (although admittedly I became accustomed to this as German often did the same).
Then comes the fact that whilst there is only one English alphabet, the Japanese use three: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. The English language then has only 26 letters whilst an average Japanese adult has to remember at least 2000 Japanese characters of the 8000 or so in regular use, making learning to read so agonizingly slow.
I put off learning to write for a very long time as a result.
Even by constantly using the touch screen tablet that belonged to my brother, which had various learning aids meant for him, I only learnt to speak fluently (although not letting others catch on to this fact) at the age of two and a half. After this, I tried to speak more often to my parents, attempting to glean so information about this world off them. Reading was still a big struggle for me and so I couldn't just go and search up things on the internet-not that I would be able to anyway as whenever I tried to go on the internet I was locked out of it and my parents informed of what I was trying to do. I'd always get told off afterwards because I have to be supervised by a responsible adult when using the internet.
I didn't ever go very far outside my house either so there wasn't much information I could get from outside too. My parents were alas the only sources of information about the world I had left.
"Mama," I began one time, watching as my mother put down this strange tablet that both her and my father had but Arata and I were forbidden from ever touching. "What's the world like?"
I often started my conversations that I intended to get information from with a question that's answer wouldn't really mean much. It made it seem like I was just being a curious little toddler asking random questions that had no point to them. By then building from there, I could eventually get to the questions I wanted to ask without it seeming like I was thinking too hard about anything, it just being a natural progression of the conversation. "Oh, Natsuyo," she smiled a little at me, picking me up as so to place me in her lap. "The world is exactly like you think it is! You live in this world, don't you? Or are you off in fairyland?" She teased.
I leaned back against her arm. "Well...is the world big?" I made exaggerated hand movements as I peered up at her with curiosity I didn't need to fake.
"The world is very, very big." She informed me, an arm around my waist squeezing me gently.
"Does that mean that there are lots and lots and lots of people?"
"Yes, there are lots and lots and lots of people." She nodded.
"Where do they all live then?"
"Well, there are lots of countries in the world," my mother spoke incredibly slowly, pronouncing everything clearly so I heard every single word. "You know how we live in Japan and Japan is very big?"
I nodded, trying to keep up the facade of a child who couldn't comprehend the hugeness of everything.
"Japan is one of these many countries and there are over one hundred of these countries, some even bigger than Japan!"
"Woooow!" I dragged out my exclamation of surprise and wonder. "But if they're all countries then why is Japan called Japan? Shouldn't it just be country?"
"Every country has a name like every person has a name." She smiled a little at my silly question.
"So is there a country called Natsuyo then?"
"I don't think so sweetie," she chuckled a little.
"Then what are they called?"
"Things like America, China, France and England."
I hummed thoughtfully. "I wanna go to another country!"
There was a slight pause before my mother spoke again. "Why, what's wrong with good old Japan?" Her tone was teasing but a little strained.
"Bleh, I see Japan everyday!" I ignored how silly I sounded because of course I saw Japan everyday, I lived there. "I wanna see America!"
Another brief pause. "Maybe one day, sweetheart. Now Mama has to go talk to Papa so be a good girl and go play with your brother, okay?"
"Fine," I huffed, half to keep up the act of a toddler, half in real frustration. I had wanted to ask more questions but been cut off before I'd had the chance. Hopping down from her lap, I watched as she picked up her tablet again with a strained smile on her face.
Later, after my mother had talked with my father, any chat about foreign countries was strictly forbidden.
When I was three and Arata was almost five we had been playing games together as per usual. Unlike normal siblings, we did not quarrel and as a result stayed incredibly close to each other. Also, unlike what I had expected, Arata was not to start school until he was five. This something I found marginally surprising considering how in the Japan of my time you started kindergarten at the age of three.
So we both spent most of our days with only each other for real company-our parents only really overlooked our games and we still didn't go out very often.
This time we were playing this game which involved a cube that displayed questions on it. If you answered correctly you'd be rewarded with a sweet. If you answered incorrectly then you'd be given some sort of silly command you had to follow like 'spin on the spot whilst barking like a dog'.
Of course, I was exceptionally good at the game mostly because they were such easy questions for me but Arata tended to struggle sometimes. To be fair, Arata was actually incredibly intelligent for his age and was only caught out by riddles. But riddles that involved logic were what I excelled at and so I easily got them right. This naturally frustrated Arata a little as, whilst he thought he beat me at everything else in our lives, this game was the one thing I decided I didn't want to lose at-partly because the logical puzzles it harder the more you got right and I did so love them.
So Arata got jealous.
It was a perfectly normal reaction from him. I hadn't really expected anything less as he really wasn't mature enough to simply acknowledge that I was simply better than him at these things. As a result, I got used to his mini temper tantrums and sulks where he refused to talk to anyone (this only lasting for a few minutes before he got bored of interacting with no one). I also didn't get angry when this particular time he displayed his frustration by snatching the candy I had won by answering correctly and eating it himself.
I'd planned on telling him he shouldn't do that but I was pipped to the post by my mother who grabbed his wrist, clutching it so tightly that I could see her knuckles going white and Arata shaking. "What are you thinking?!" She half screamed at him, eyes wide open in horror. "Don't you ever steal! Don't you ever even think about it! Thoughts like that aren't allowed, Arata!"
"But-" Arata was cut off straight away by our mother.
"Don't think up excuses! You know stealing is wrong!"
I moved towards Arata, my own eyes wide in shock. What the heck, he just stole a stupid sweet so why are you so angry? "Mama, stop-"
"Don't do it ever again! Don't think about it ever again! Forget that stealing is even an option to you! Forget it!"
"I-I'm sorry…" Arata shook a little more, face twisted so that he looked as though he were about to cry.
I expected it to end there with another warning but it didn't."I don't care about that! Forget about stealing! Promise me you'll forget about stealing!"
My brother opened his mouth, most likely to say that he would when our father entered the room, one of the forbidden tablets in his hands. "What's going on? What's all this shouting about?"
She turned to him with horror still on her face. "He stole from his sister." She half whispered the word 'stole' as if it repulsed her to even say it to another adult.
Again, I expected it to end there with my father calming down my hysterical mother but instead I watched his face gain an expression much like hers and drop the tablet in his hands. "Arata!"
"I-I'm sorry! I s-said I was sorry!" My brother burst into tears but neither of my parents consoled him.
"Don't steal!"
"Don't think about stealing!"
"How could you do such a thing?!"
"We've been protecting you this entire time but you still thought about and did something like that?!"
It was surreal, watching two grown adults scream at a crying child.
I wanted to tell them to stop, to yell right back at them for doing such a thing to a toddler, especially my own brother, but my eyes instead became drawn to the tablet lying on the carpet where my father had dropped it.
And everything then clicked into place.
We aren't allowed to talk about foreign countries.
We aren't allowed to go on the internet without supervision.
We aren't allowed to go outside much.
We aren't allowed to even think about stealing.
We aren't allowed to touch those tablets our parents always carry around no matter what.
PSYCHO PASS
Name: Kawabata Natsuyo
Mental Colour: Light Grey-Blue
Pass Level: 17.3
Oh god.
Oh god please no.
Without a second thought, I began to cry alongside my brother.
.
.
.
.
.
.
There is no correct answer to this riddle. All that is certain that C would have died at one of their hands no matter what.
I adore Psycho Pass.
And what happens when you adore something?
Fanfiction. Fanfiction happens.
(Or maybe that's just me…)
I'm not sure if anyone has really done am OC-insert for Psycho Pass. I will therefore do one. Hopefully this doesn't crash and burn horribly, haha.
Depending on whether anyone shows any interest in this, it might be quite a long fic or I'll make it a short thing. I'm leaning towards the latter anyway since I already have fics up and running I really should be focusing on =_=*
