In a World Where Only Three Is Lost
I, too, have met a genie who claimed he could grant me three wishes. He boasted that he could grant any wish except for 'increasing the number of wishes,' and I felt a sudden urge to give him a hard time.
'Then, make the number three disappear from this world.'
The genie looked stunned, but he granted it immediately. 'Did you think I couldn't?' I felt as though his cat-like, vertically slit pupils gleamed with a hint of pride.
Ever since then, I have been living in a world where three no longer exists.
Even with three gone, the world remained as it had been. Room 2 was now next to Room 4, and the runner-up after second place became fourth place, but there was no particular confusion.
In situations requiring more precise quantities, everyone simply referred to it as 'the one after two' or 'the one before four.' Most people didn't question the fact that the number was missing there. On very rare occasions, some scholars or math geeks would talk about the 'mystery of the non-existent number between two and four,' but it was left as a profound, otherworldly question that the average person couldn't comprehend.
By the way, even though the number three had vanished, the genie still had two wishes left to grant. I miraculouslyfinished the credits I was missing, and miraculouslygot a job at my first-choice company.
My ordinary days as an ordinary adult began. I gradually stopped caring that three had disappeared from this world. No one else remembered the existence of three, and I, too, stopped thinking about it much.
It happened during a web conference one day. With one eye on the screen, which was experiencing a slight lag, I was working on a side project on my sub-display. I felt as though the audio had cut out for a strange interval, but it was a full twenty seconds later before I sensed something was wrong and looked back at the main display.
The meeting had ended before I knew it. In the center of the pitch-black screen, a man with cat-like, vertically slit pupils was reflected.
[To be continued]
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