Editing City Series:Volume7 Layer 4 (section)

===Record 39: To My Image===
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'''11/01/1997

'''7:43

I was eating lunch with the science club in the joint cafeteria when the Professor walked up to me.

“We’re about to go help set up for the school festival. Care to join us?”

I didn’t have anything better to do, so it was off to the general school building in the center of campus.

I could see the science club and the movie club doing something in front of the northern school building. The sunlight put that building’s wall in shadow, so they were hanging up a white screen and setting up a stupid long rail in the middle of the schoolyard.

The rail passed through the schoolyard and across the road outside the back entrance. The rail carried a Caddy they had probably gotten from the car club and a projector was mounted on the center of the chassis.

“Why would you mount a projector on a car?”

“This will display the past. You know how traveling faster than light causes time to flow in reverse, right?”

“No, I don’t know that.”

“Fine, I’ll explain this like I’m talking to an idiot. Which I am. Ready? We place a screen on the wall, we have the audience in the schoolyard, and we shine the projector’s light on the screen. Do you get that much? I’ll be mad with you if you don’t.” He pointed at the projector mounted on the car. “The car club is going to really put their back into it, so that projector will be super-accelerated from about 12km away. There are tons of exciting dramas, right? And just as many painful goodbyes, right? But none of that matters to us. Anything emitted from a speeding car will-”

“Will gain the car’s inertial speed.”

“Exactly! So the light emitted by the projector on the accelerated car will add the car’s acceleration on top of the ordinary speed of light and project the audience’s shadows on the screen. Those shadows will then move back in time to show us some incredible images.”

I pictured it for a moment, but got fed up with it pretty quick.

Then I heard a girl’s voice from behind us.

“I have one comment on this.”

I looked back to see Snowy for the first time in a while. She must have just gotten up because she was dressed casually.

“And what is your comment?” The Professor pushed up his glasses. “Hopefully not some shocking revelation that you have secretly been a girl all this time.”

“I will execute you later. I was wondering how you planned to stop this ‘super-accelerated’ car.”

Everyone in the schoolyard froze and Snowy turned to look at us all.

“This fist-obsessed idiot and I will not be assisting you. The Chancellor’s Officers have a duty to preserve the secrecy of personal information, so we cannot search out information from the past like this.”

Yeah, I guess she’s right. I stepped up next to her and whispered so only she could hear.

“That’s especially true with you, isn’t it?”

“Do not worry about me. What happened at the Mountain was only a reaction to the unexpected hit. I am fine.”

She crossed her arms with her usual unsociable look, so I scratched my head and nodded silently.

We watched as the Professor pulled a small device from his lab coat pocket and performed a conduction test with a tester. He kept fiddling with the device for a while and then turned to us with a cheerful voice.

“Nothing to worry about here. I secretly equipped the car with a self-destruct device last night. Casualties will be kept to a minimum.”

To keep the casualties to an even smaller minimum, I punched him out.

'''Author Comment:

An experiment in projecting the past. When writing things like this, I sometimes realize I don’t know how any of this works in real life. But I also think shadows really are an image of the past, just the very recent past thanks to the speed of light.

It’s strange to think that something so close to you doesn’t exist in the same time as you.