Simulation Theory

<11/02/2025>

At first, it felt like a twisted déjà vu, or maybe a nightmare I couldn't wake from. Then, it hit me—this day was repeating. Today, at the same spot, I see her shadow standing in the dim light, just to save me from the accident. How many times has she done this? How many times have I died? She must have failed in some loops too, right? Just as I realized I was in a loop, I wondered - does she remember each time the day resets? I can only find out by talking to her. I have only a few minutes before the truck arrives. I sprint toward the pole where she stands. She hesitates, taking a step back, tense and guarded.

"Don’t worry. I know you're here to save me... again."

"..."

She doesn’t respond.

"I just realized we’re in a loop, and I’m pretty sure you know too...otherwise, why would you be here every day, just to save me? I’m… sorry It was probably a bad dream."

She nods slightly, as if my words confirm what she already knows. "Kisahara Shiou," she says, her voice low. "I've saved you 461 times. I haven’t failed once… but I can’t break this loop. I’m sorry… I’m sorry… I’m so sorry...I couldn't find what triggers to break this loop" Her voice wavers, and she repeats her regret, barely above a whisper. "No matter where you stand or where I go, the truck will just appear in front of us."

"What the hell... 461 times? That’s insane. Why would you go that far?" I mutter, staring at her in disbelief. After every 24 hours, the day resets. So… 461 times… I pull out my phone, open the calculator, and feel a chill as I punch in the numbers. One year and three months trapped in this endless loop, and I just got the conscious today.

"H...haha, you're crazy. Breaking a loop by saving me? So, what, you're afraid of me dying? You’re not some hero."

"No," she replies, unshaken, meeting my gaze without flinching. "You wouldn't understand."

It sounds harsh, but… do I even want to be stuck here, saved by her, forever? I get that she fears death, but maybe it’s guilt driving her to save me every time, to keep reliving this day. My breathing grows heavy as I struggle to process it, my thoughts spinning. This shouldn’t be happening. This is something far beyond normal.

"Rather people just ignore things like this… thinking it’s impossible," I blurt without thinking twice, it's like voice slipping.

She looks at me, frowning slightly but with a calm, confident smile. "Don’t worry. I’ll save you again. And maybe there’s a way to break this loop without you having to die"

I bite my lip, feeling despair but not for myself, but for this fragile, determined girl who somehow believes she can be my hero by sacrificing herself. With that weak body, she’s tried saving me every single loop, while I… I’m just some useless person who keeps putting her through this. I swallow hard, the weight of it sinking in. If I died, maybe only my family would mourn me. She’s lucky it’s not the other way around. If she had to die to end this loop… she’d leave behind a family, friends who’d miss her.

I’ve found my answer. I’ll break this loop not just for myself, but to end her misfortune, once and for all.

I am going to die, 3 minutes until I die, time flows so fast and it drags us with it, what a god damn future structure where I can't even have my good future.

 "Kisahara Shiou, don't worry leave everything to me, I will figure it out myself, just a little more time." she smiles but I am sure that's just a smile for show.

 A little more time my ass! That’s nonsense!

The countdown inches closer to her death by another attempt to save me. There’s no doubt she’ll manage it as this is the 462nd loop. She knows the day’s twisted structure better than I do, having only just realized after school that we were even trapped in this loop. Up until now, I’ve been blindly reliving the same day, repeating the same routine, completely oblivious until memories started flooding back mid-walk on this street. There were no houses here, complete silent and lousy atmosphere as if no one is there in this world.

Then I hear it—the rusty motor of the truck rumbling toward us, sending chills down my spine. But I know it won’t harm me. She’ll save me. She always does.

“I… I’m scared,” I whisper, my voice trembling. She turns, her eyes catching the fear in mine.
"Don’t worry. It’s my job." She says it with a flat, almost robotic tone, like someone who’s done this a thousand times because she has done it professionally. Just like a machine programmed only to save me. I can see it now, the loop has worn her down, fractured her mind. In talking to her, I learned she regains her memories right here, on this road. Something about this place triggers the memories of the loops. Just after I fed the cat today, a fragment of memory came flooding back to me, a faint hint of the 461 times she’s saved me. I don’t remember each one or whatever, but a rough idea settles over me that we’re in a loop, and somehow, my mind accepts this impossible truth that tingles my spine.

Time feels agonizingly slow as the truck nears us. She moves, leaping toward me, tackling me with precision, as if every move is practiced, inevitable.

“Too bad… I won.”

"Wha—" Her voice breaks as she registers my actions.

Exactly. This time, I’m saving you. That faint memory, that spark of understanding—it made me realize. I was supposed to die, not her. This loop exists because of me. I don’t know why or how it began, but it’s clear now that her freedom lies in my hands. Before she can react, I grab her wrist and pull her aside, then twist, kicking her firmly toward the roadside. She stumbles out of harm’s way, the impact pushing her to safety. In that moment, with crystal-clear certainty, I know that I’ll die here, and that she’ll be free. She could have left me, let me die and broken the loop long ago, but she didn’t. She stayed, fighting fate for my life, over and over. If she can die countless time for a random person like me, then I can die at least once for her.

"I think I stayed at the club a little too long..."

On my way home, I encountered the same cat and paused to pet it, feeding it the onigiri from my bento. It crossed my mind briefly, would onigiri upset a cat’s stomach? Shrugging it off, I kept walking, heading home with the faint hope that the loop had finally ended. But as I took each step, a gnawing dread crept in. I was still alive. The loop hadn’t ended.

As I walked, a sudden, sharp pain tore through my head heaven and hell apart, blurring my vision, and a relentless ringing filled my ears. A sense of doom flooded over me, a feeling that something was horribly, inexplicably wrong. Then, I saw her, the shadowed figure. No… it was the girl who saves me every time. I’d already tried to end the loop by sacrificing myself. I remember it clearly about the feeling of my head splitting apart from my body, my body couldn't be felt, and the horror painted on her face seeing my accident. And, as bizarre as it was, I even remembered the absurd details, her despair, the flash of crimson red, blood splattering everywhere. I touched my neck, almost unable to believe it, feeling the phantom pain of death.

With trembling hands pressed to my temples, I walked toward her. Her expression mirrored my own, hollow, shocked, full of despair as she came to the conclusion that even my death didn't break the loop. The loop hadn’t ended. Even after my death, the loop hadn’t ended. It was a complete failure.

"So… it was all pointless. Every time you tried to save me, it was just pointless… hahaha..." A laugh escaped me, bitter and hollow. I bit down hard on my lip, tasting my drippingblood, frustration spilling out of me as I realized we were still trapped, bound by a fate neither of us could escape. 

"Impossible to escape death huh?" I squeak in grief.

"It wasn’t pointless, dumbass. It was my decision," the girl says, her voice steady, showing no hint of frustration or resignation. Her words hit me like a punch to the gut, and for a moment, I struggled to grasp what she was trying to say.

I looked at her then, really looked at her, as if trying to memorize her face illustrated with brown hair, plain features, jet-black eyes. Just another high schooler, normal on the outside, but carrying a burden I could never fully understand. 

"Is it the world that’s in a loop, or is it just us stuck in some… different space and time, a loop of our own?" 

"Huh? What the hell are you talking about?" The sudden confusion touched me by her words.

"There are these theories I’ve been coming up with in the loops," she explained, her voice quiet but intense. "It’s possible the entire world is stuck in this loop, or maybe it’s just us, trapped here. There could be other people, other places experiencing the same thing. But either way, it’s going to be impossible to break the loop. I gave up on saving you, because it was your choice to die, and that… that’s on me. My loss."

"Your loss… don’t say—" I started, but she cut me off, continuing without missing a beat.

"What if it’s not us who need to die, but someone else? What if we’re in a completely different dimension, experiencing this loop? The truck driver has died 157 times in the accident, but every other time, he’s unscathed. He doesn’t seem to recall any of the loops he could’ve stopped at any point. It’s safe to say that the truck driver isn’t the key to ending this and he doesn't get any recollection like us. I’m probably thinking this all wrong, I know it sounds like sci-fi bullshit, but… time particles don’t exist. They shouldn’t even be able to interfere like this."

"So, you’re saying there’s a chance that someone else, like us, has consciousness in this loop? But in all these loops, did we both die at the same time, or did we get saved at the same time?" I asked, my voice tinged with curiosity, though my mind was racing to keep up.

"Well, for me, the memories of the loops are fragmented. They come back to me in waves, just after I hit this road. I think it’s the same for you, right? Otherwise, you wouldn’t go to school knowing the accident is going to happen, trying different ways to stop it, like finding the truck driver. But I wonder… would that even break the loop? Maybe no one of us would die, but it feels inevitable. If we had the memories from the start of the day, maybe things would be different but sadly we only get it that we are in loop as soon as we step on this road." She explained, her voice steady but laced with uncertainty.

"You are correct but half wrong about bizarre recollection of memories you getting its just different for me... it’s not exactly memories. It’s more like déjà vu, a bad feeling that my body reacts to. It’s like a faint, daydream-like structure, a vague prediction of what’s going to happen. I somehow know the accident’s coming, and that you’ll save me. It’s like I’m seeing the future... or maybe it’s just a feeling. But it leads me to believe I can stop it somehow." I confessed, the weight of my own words sinking in.

"..." She remained silent, her gaze unreadable. Her understanding seemed far out of reach, like this was beyond anything she could grasp. The world is already complex and innovation of quantum theories is just already out of this world.

This conversation felt different, like we were speaking in fragments of truth but still trapped in an endless cycle of confusion. I felt the chain around us, invisible but unbreakable. It’s strange that this terrible sense that we’re so close to the answer yet so far from breaking the loop. The thought that the entire world might be stuck in this loop while only we two know the truth is terrifying and I hope that is not actually the case.

Come to think of it, I don’t even know her name even though we are from same class...does it matter? It’s irrelevant in the grand scheme. All I care about is escaping this damn day. I recall her theory, the one she told me earlier makes me think about this forsaken world being fake, about us being stuck in some kind of alternate dimension. Her words hang in the air, chilling me to the bone.

"Say, what if we both are the reason, a trigger of this loop." I hinted which made her go with "Ah I never tried doing that" face.

I grabbed her by the shoulder, my grip tight, but she pulled me into a hug. The warmth of her arms around me for a fleeting moment made me think she was still... sane. But the truth was, no matter how many times we die, we’re never immune to the pain while facing death, never free from the crushing weight of our own fate. A normal person would definitely try to escape death and pain. Both of us dying together might break this loop, if we break the loop will we both be alive or dead we never thought of that. This insane risky trigger is what I could come up with.

The dim light above flickered, casting a yellowish glow directly on her, just like the spotlight on a ballet dancer. Then, with a crash, it all ends. Their performance, our performance, over in an instant.

A new day begins.

But it’s the same damn day.

And yet again… another failure to break the loop, unable to escape 11/02/2025.