Chapter 1: Sleeper

I had no memory.

I had no past.

A sleeper. In other words, a one-way time traveler who arrived from the past to the present via cold sleep. That’s who I was.

Eighty percent of sleepers suffer from memory loss. I was part of the majority.

That’s why I had no memory and no past.

So when I first woke up, I didn’t even have a name. Even when they told me that this was five hundred years after the era I’d lived in, I couldn’t really feel anything about it.

Well, that’s just how it is. No memory, no past. Without a past, I didn’t exist at any point before now. Whether “now” was a year later or five hundred years later didn’t really make much difference.

Touji.

That’s my name now. It was given to me by my supervisor, Yuri.

A beautiful predator—that’s the kind of phrase that suited her perfectly. In this era, she’s my parent and my teacher. Since she’s my supervisor, of course her military branch is infantry. She’s nineteen years old—five hundred years younger than me. In other words, she’s lived the same number of years as I have. I guess you could say Mom’s a classmate. What the hell. Sounds like the kind of setup that would make thin books get thick.

The fact that I can still remember this kind of phrasing, despite forgetting even my own name, should tell you something about the kind of person I am.

Anyway. Setting myself aside for a moment—

According to Yuri, it’s not Touji with a long “o,” but Touji, pronounced To-u-ji. That’s an important distinction, apparently.

Honestly, I don’t really get it. I don’t get it, but… when I carelessly said “I see,” her mood skyrocketed so much that I couldn’t take it back, and now I couldn’t exactly ask for clarification either. I thought about praying that I’d figure it out someday, but I had no idea which god I should pray to, so I gave up.

At times like this, I think people who believe in a single god probably don’t have this problem. Being the typical Japanese person I am, I’ve always been pretty lax about that stuff.

Japanese.

That’s right—I was Japanese. At least, five hundred years ago, I’d lived in Japan. That’s why I can write kanji.

On my day off last week, I killed time by writing my name in a notebook. I wondered: was my name written as 藤次? Or maybe 東司? Or, just to throw me off, maybe it’s 冬至¹? Thinking about it like that was surprisingly fun.

Training is, well, reasonably tough. Taking a breather is important.

And so, here I am, living in the present five hundred years after my time.

I’ll just go ahead and report to the parents whose faces I can’t even remember:

I’m doing okay. Life’s kind of fun.