NOA soon realized that living in the Kaiba Mansion meant eating healthy food. Unlike the pizza and cheeseburgers and chicken strips that he'd been allowed to partake of, albeit sparingly, while in the hospital, Seto didn't allow greasy, fattening foods in his home. Not most of the time, anyway. Seto was lenient every once in a long while, on Mokuba's birthday or when Mokuba received a good report card, but for the most part…
Noa wasn't even sure what it was that he ate that day for lunch, but he thought there might have been chicken in it…boneless, skinless chicken if it was there at all. He remembered what the cook had called the dish but couldn't pronounce it. It was some French thing…maybe.
Still, he had to admit, the food wasn't horrible. Not the best he had ever had, but not nearly the worst, either.
After lunch was over, Noa and Mokuba went upstairs into the main parlor, and Seto, in what Noa figured to be his version of "quality time," brought his laptop computer out of his study and set up a work station there, complete with endless supplies of black coffee, as Noa figured Seto would drink, and enough paper to construct a forest.
Mokuba turned on the huge plasma TV and flipped through the various channels. Eventually giving up, he turned on a videogame. He offered Noa the second controller but Noa declined.
"I haven't played a console videogame in next to forever," he said, "and I'd most likely be horrible at it. I'll just watch for now."
Shrugging, Mokuba looked back at the screen and soon became lost. Lost as in mesmerized. After only a few minutes of watching, Noa got the impression that his ebony-haired brother never lost his way in a videogame. He made the game look so effortlessly easy that Noa actually entertained the thought of playing himself but soon figured out that the ease with which Mokuba breezed through the game wasn't from any lack of difficulty…Mokuba was just that good. It was frightening, actually.
"I got an assignment yesterday," Mokuba said, not looking at either of his brothers. "It's not fair. My friends don't get homework on the weekends, how come I do?"
"You're in a program for gifted children, Mokuba," Seto said, looking at his computer. "Being more intelligent means receiving more work. Otherwise, how will you be challenged? If you were to do the same work as average children, your mind would be wasted."
Mokuba waved off this notion. "My teacher's just mean…and weird. I don't even get what the assignment has to do with anything…it looks like something they'd give somebody in college."
"What was it?" Noa asked, curious.
"Some article some guy wrote. It was about how…uh…what did he say? Oh, yeah, it was this long, boring speech on how reality is subjective and can't be concrete, 'cuz of all the different ways people see the world. He used weird words that don't evensound like English, but that's the gist of it, anyway. Mr. Dominic says we're supposed to take the article home, discuss it with our families, and write a page on it. About our own opinion on whether or not he's right."
Noa raised an eyebrow incredulously. "Okay…not only am I surprised he'd give an assignment like that to a class so young, even if you guys are gifted, but I can't comprehend anyone actually believing that's true."
Mokuba glanced at Noa. "What do you mean? It kind of makes sense."
"No, no, it doesn't," Noa replied. "Reality is subjective? Can't be concrete? Reality is the most concrete thing that exists! Everything in existence is built on reality. It can't be subjective!"
"Well, what about the fact that people see things differently?"
"That's their perception of reality. That's the subjective part. That's the part that can be different depending on who the person is. A person's perception of reality can be changed; reality itself can't."
Noa didn't realize it, as he was looking at Mokuba, but Seto had ceased typing on his laptop and was now watching the boy with more than a little interest.
Mokuba saw this, but said nothing. He, too, was interested in what Noa was saying.
"How's that?" Mokuba asked, not because he didn't believe his stepbrother, but because he was interested in what he would say.
"Think about it. Your hair is black. That's not reality. Our collective perspective of reality says that the color of your hair is black. But if someone decided to say your hair was red, and convinced enough people that your hair was red, then it would become the truth. Later generations would learn that the color we see as black is called red, and eventually that perception would become as widespread as our current perception of the color as black. The color hasn't changed. Your hair would still be the same color it's always been. But our perception changed."
Seto raised an eyebrow, just as surprised as Mokuba by the green-haired Kaiba's words. Mokuba chuckled slightly and scratched his head. "Wow…" he said, "I forget that you're really a whole lot older than you look."
Noa shrugged. "I lived in a virtual reality for over a decade. I've had plenty of time to think about reality. The world I lived in after I died wasn't reality. It was a code. A program. A façade. That's my perception. But if I lived there long enough, it's probable that I'd forget about my past life in the real world. Then my perception would change. The virtual world would have become the real world for me. Not to everyone else. They would still perceive my environment as code. But that doesn't mean the code itself had changed at all. My perception would have.
"And what if my father had done what he wanted, had succeeded, and had brought everyone in the world into the same world I was trapped in like those creepy Matrix movies everyone seems to like so much?"
Mokuba, who had seen the Matrix movies too many times to count, had never made that connection. Thinking about those films in conjunction with Noa's past made him shiver. It was so close it was eerie.
"Then, like in those movies, the entire world's perspective would change, making the virtual world the real world. That's not the reality of it. But would we know that? No. We would only know our own perception. That's the variable in the equation, not reality."
"Wow…" Mokuba murmured. "I'd better not write that. My teacher would never believe it was me who thought that up…still…when you think of it like that, the guy who wrote that article really sounds stupid, huh?"
"I'd like to see that article, actually," Noa said, "just to see how far down the stupid hole this world has gone."
Throughout the discussion, Noa hadn't bothered to look back at Seto. If he had, he would have seen for the third time in six weeks
something that, before he'd come along, only Mokuba had ever seen.
Seto was smiling.
Sorry! The story's starting to slow down for me in the creative sense...but it's still going. I feel horrible for have waited so long to update, but I do hope you will forgive me.
