"You're sure you don't know anything about this!?" said Conan.
"Sorry, Kudo-kun," said Ai, "but I was never given clearance to know information like that when I was part of the Organization. You're starting to sound ridiculous."
"Nothing about time? ...Or anything like that?"
Ai nonchalantly left the room.
"Oi...what a bother."
"What sort of clues led you into thinking that, Shinichi-kun?" said Agasa.
"I encountered one of their dying members last night."
"What!? How come you never tell us about these sort of situations?"
"Did they have a codename, Kudo-kun?" asked Ai, who had returned to the room because she was interested again.
"It was Vermouth," said Conan. "Gin shot her and she told me all this information. Then she died."
"She's putting you on a false trail," said Ai. "The tasks that the Organization had me undergo didn't serve that sort of purpose."
"I think what she presented is logical," said Conan. "Our minds are only tricking us into believing that standard time is passing, like a sensory cage."
"So you trust a member of the Organization who was previously tasked with killing me and has probably lied to you before?"
"Perhaps."
"Now, Shinichi," said Agasa, "Ai has a point. Vermouth may have spared your life before, but she probably still had loyalty to the Organization."
"It just doesn't make sense," said Conan. "I have to go now, Ran is expecting me. Thanks for the snack, Professor." He left the laboratory and skateboarded off into the distance.
"I don't believe Vermouth is dead," said Ai.
"Why do you think that?"
"She definitely wouldn't do anything to threaten her position in the organization, or her life."
It was a slow Sunday morning in the Mouri Detective Agency's office. Ran was out hanging with Sonoko and Mouri was still asleep with a serious hangover. Conan had just returned from his trip to Agasa's. Wielding a wooden stool, he took a binder of photos out of a bookshelf in the office and opened it up. He flipped through the pages. There were far too many photos from trips and events they had all been in to only take up half a year. He looked up from the album and back at the bookshelf. This was only the first photo album in a large series of binders.
Conan took out more volumes. There were far too many photos to only take up ten years. Conan counted the photos. There was nearly twice ten years' amount. Twenty years. That was normal to everybody, right?
He took out some of the pictures, flipped them over, and looked at the dates written on the back in Ran's handwriting. May 1994. October 1994. Then it wrapped back to January 1994. It felt ridiculous, but it was real. Several 1994s had passed since he first took the drug. Why did whatever happened to cause this anomaly coincide so closely with the date of his fateful encounter with Gin and Vodka?
And then on his second run-through, he pinpointed when Haibara began to show up in the pictures with the Detective Boys included. It was around four years. It had only felt like less than a month that Conan had been alone in his suffering.
There was absolutely no probable answer other than the one that Vermouth had provided him with, unless he had started to go insane or was dreaming again. Regardless, by the law of Holmes, it had to be the truth. The Organization had the power to kill time, and they did it so subtly that no one noticed for over a decade. Wouldn't he be much older by now? He compounded some figures in his head - he would be physically 26 and Shinichi would be 36 if time worked correctly. That made absolutely no sense at all. Conan had been 6 longer than he had been Shinichi Kudo. He hadn't changed much since it first happened, not even mentally.
Conan then had a flash of realization. What if APTX4869 halted aging? Of course, if time wasn't passing, he would have noticed whether this was true. Would he have still been 6 for 20 years if everything in the world worked right? What if he was immortal?
He stopped there. That was heading into speculation and impossibility by his standards. He still needed to ask Ai about the nature of the drug, though.
"Hello? Mom?" Conan leaned against the wall of the public phone booth.
"Shinichi! So glad to hear from you! How are you doing?"
"I'm all right. It's how it is as usual." "No new leads?"
"Well, actually..."
"You found something out?"
"Yeah, Vermouth told me something interesting. However, she died. She told me to tell you that she..."
Yukiko was quietly sobbing on the phone.
"Are you okay, Mom?"
"What did she want to tell me?"
"She...regretted that you had to be her enemy."
Yukiko sniffed. "I see."
"Why are you crying over Vermouth? She wanted to kill Haibara and everyone working with her."
"She was still one of my actor friends."
"Sorry, Mom."
"Friendship is a lot more powerful than what you may think, Shinichi."
"I know."
Ayumi and the rest left Agasa's lab, but Conan made an excuse and walked back through the doorway.
"Haibara-san, I have something important to ask."
"What is it?"
"You know the mechanisms behind how the apotoxin works, right?"
"I designed it. What are you suggesting?"
"Does it halt aging in addition to reducing it?"
"That's a good question, Kudo-kun. I haven't ever seen any long-term effects of it, apart from our own. The laboratory rat that experienced its side effects didn't live for very long afterwards."
"But you would know, wouldn't you? How it works? You are a chemist."
"Is this about the nonsense you heard from Vermouth?"
"It's related."
"APTX most definitely stops aging."
Conan looked stricken.
"Just kidding. If everything works correctly, we should grow up normally."
"You monster," said Conan. "I shouldn't trust you as much as I do."