The Odyssey

Naoki Sato was a brilliant physicist and Nobel laureate who taught at Todai in the nation of Japan. His most popular course explored multiverse theories. It was so well-received that more than a few independent broadcasting companies had recorded his lectures to make them available to the general public. Naturally, everything was in English. The official language of Japan was British English, due to the lingering effects of the Empire occupation that never really had withdrawn. Only those living in provincial areas kept Japanese as their day-to-day language. Professor Sato found himself in high demand all around the world, but more often than not, he could be found in the depths of his underground lab, coding, running programmes, and testing different algorithms and formulas to open a portal to one of the parallel universes. He was dealing with dangerous and tiny particles that potentially could destroy the entire world and all alternate universes within it with a big bang, so he never let anyone, even his most trustworthy graduate students, know about his activities after they all had gone home.

If even he just could create an artificial portal, linking his computer to WiFi on the other side, gaining access to that universe’s media, he conclusively would prove the existence and accessibility of the multiverse. He was close. He could feel it.

It was upon the twilight of a beautiful spring day in April that Professor Sato found himself once more on his way to his lab. Dressed as usual in his brown tweed jacket and gold-rimmed spectacles, he thumped along, leaning upon his black walking stick that bore a faux ivory lion’s head. An unnecessary accessory, really, but nonetheless picturesque. He ambled his way through Rikugien Garden, and beheld the massive weeping cherry tree, now in full bloom. The luminescent lights filtered through the pink blossoms, creating a burst of purple and pink straight out of a fairy tale. The fresh breeze gently brushed through the cherry trees. They seductively shed their petals, which cascaded lazily to the earth like the flowing hair of a beautiful kodoma.* Sato stopped and harkened back to the traditional folk tales he had read as a youth in Komatsu, before he had become swept up in modernity and reality of the big city. He wondered if the ancients didn’t have some sort of grasp on the true being of the universe when they saw deities and kami** throughout the natural world.

A small, wry smile curled at his lips as he observed the teenagers and tourists laughing and squealing in delight as they ran about beneath the breathtaking arboreal beauty, taking photos with their phones, comparing pretty shots, and enjoying one another’s companionship. It was a peaceful, cozy scene.

He went on. The physics department building was dark. Everyone already had gone home for the weekend. His keys jingled coldly as he opened the door to his underground lab. The bright lights turned on automatically, and the generator booted up like the awakening of a great-bellied monster.

Tossing his keys down onto the black laminate of the table top, he sank into his chair and took out his notes from that week. If all went well, that evening he would officially debug his latest and most accurate programme to date, and perhaps create the first observable proto-portal to a parallel universe. But he was being optimistic. He had to get precisely the correct number of subatomic particles to cooperate, the precise amount of energy, and the power of the magnet had to be exact.

After several hours of typing and tinkering with the programme, as well as measuring and weighing the distance of the tunnel through which the neutrons would be hurled, he clicked the ‘Run Programme’ button and waited.

An almighty roar sounded from the nuclear reactor as it shot out billions of neutrons through the fifty-foot tunnel and into the opposite wall, beaming right through the magnet. The lights dimmed, but did not go out. And as soon as it had started, it was over.

Professor Sato readjusted his spectacles and went to investigate. The suspense mounted with each step he took. The lights at last returned to their typical brightness. When he reached the end of the tunnel, he cursed. Propping a hand on his hip and running a hand through his dishevelled hair, he sighed in disappointment. Nothing had happened.

‘Well, that’s that,’ he muttered, turning away. But just as he did, he thought he saw the flash of a reflection, like the reciprocal movement that one senses in the periphery of one’s eye when one walks past a mirror. He turned around and looked more closely at the wall. Stepping forward, he crouched down and studied it intently. Against his better judgement - he had always been rather impatient - he lifted his hand to the smooth wall. He pressed --

An all-consuming, bright white light erupted from where he touched the wall, and he found himself falling through the portal from the force of his push. He let out a small cry. But it was not painful or long-lasting. In fact, it was as if he had just fallen into the adjacent room. He sat up and looked around. He was back in his office. Scrambling to his feet, he dusted down his trousers before turning around to look at the wall.

How strange. Had he imagined it? He touched the wall again. It was solid as ever. Perhaps he needed to sleep. He began to walk away, but froze. His nuclear reactor was gone. His office instead looked to be a regular physics students’ laboratory. Everything else was the same. He sprinted to his desk, a horrifying feeling settling into his stomach. His keys were gone. He lifted a trembling hand to his mouth and surveyed the room. It couldn’t be…

Dashing to the door of his office, he looked for the placard that displayed the professor’s name. Sato Naoki was displayed there in Roman letters, but beneath it were the Japanese characters as well: 佐藤直樹.

His mind whirling, he ran out into the corridor. Some students milled about. It was still daylight outside.

‘ああ, 佐藤教授、こんにちは !’ one of the girls called out merrily. Other students hailed him as well.

Sato greeted them gruffly, terrified of being drawn into a conversation. His Japanese was rusty. He looked down awkwardly and bolted up the stairs and out of the building, emerging into the fresh air. He gasped, panting. For the first time in his life, he was utterly, devastatingly alone.

He had to get out of there before the real Sato Naoki got wind that he was being impersonated in his very own office. Sato shook his head in bewilderment. Real Sato Naoki, indeed. The discovery of an alternate universe and the people who lived there should have been the pinnacle of his career, his crowning achievement, and yet here he was, friendless and without an identity in a strange country that used to be his own. Not only that, but a country that clearly had not been subject to British imperial rule, and still had retained much of its own national character, including the language. He found his way once more to Rikugien Garden, where he watched the same cozy scene that he had observed only several hours prior unfold.

He still had his wallet which enclosed several ten thousand yen notes. It would last him at least a couple weeks if he was careful, but the credit and debit cards surely would be useless. It was then that reality well and truly set in for Professor Sato as he watched once more the cascading pink petals, so peaceful and tranquil. He had no money and no lab. He had no identity card. How could he possibly hope to survive without the most crucial of all documents? His fingerprints might even be the same as those of this universe’s counterpart. That would raise some uncomfortable questions. There simply was no trace of him in this world besides the DNA of the professor who went by his name. And how could he hope ever to return to Japan - as he knew it - if he was barred all access from society and earning money without an identity? All he had on him from his own world were his clothes, his wallet, and the small notebook that had his notes. That, to his slight relief, was reassuring. Without that notebook, he would have had no hope.

Sato spent the remainder of that day meandering around Tokyo, familiarising himself with the plan of the city, and investigating what was new and different. For one thing, the subway was much more modern and expansive. The technology in the loos was both mind-bendingly brilliant and bizarre. He almost felt he had stepped into a futuristic utopia. The streets were sparkling clean. There were more shrines and temples, and they were dazzling and well kept. But it was more crowded, and he often could not understand the native language, especially signs that used complex kanji. Things were more expensive, too. One of the first things he purchased was a hat the rim of which would cover the top half of his face when he looked down. It had cost five thousand yen, which even to him, was quite a fortune for a piece of cloth.

As evening blanketed the city, Sato found himself once more in Bunkyo, his old stomping grounds. He quietly watched the cherry blossoms some more, smoking a cigarette as he pondered what to do next. He had quite a lot of life left in him, perhaps enough to restart and rebuild his reputation. Once he became wealthy and well-known enough, he wouldn’t even need an identity card. He would be able to buy up laboratories and nuclear reactors and avoid probing questions. It wasn’t a dream. It was a necessity.

But for now, he had to figure out how to survive. Then he could devote his time to figuring out how to make a massive sum of money as a non-entity.

At that moment, a weight sank down onto the bench beside him. He glanced sideways from under his hat and flicked away his cigarette stub.

‘You should put that in the ashtray stand. It’s literally right next to this bench for a reason,’ the young woman said politely.

Sato had understood her, but he still replied, ‘I don’t speak Japanese.’

She looked at him in puzzlement, but switched to perfect English and repeated what she had said. He leaned down, picked up the stub, and tossed it into the ashtray.

‘You’re all so pristinely clean here,’ he commented.

‘We want our world to be beautiful,’ she replied. ‘Why would anyone want to live in a dirty and polluted world?’

‘I was just pleasantly surprised, is all,’ he responded, focussing once more on the cherry trees. He thought the conversation was over, but apparently she did not.

‘Where are you from, anyway? You look and act Japanese, but you claim to not speak it.’

Sato, still staring straight ahead, answered, ‘I am from a place that is very similar to Japan.’

‘How mysterious,’ the girl remarked wryly, snorting. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Satoshi Nakamoto,’ he responded automatically, the words tumbling from his mouth before he could think. He clenched his fist, wondering if she could see through his lie.

‘What do you do?’

He let out a sigh. ‘I’m a scientist. A physicist, to be exact.’

She harrumphed. ‘You must not be a very good one, then.’

He chucked ironically. ‘And how would you know that?’

‘I know how real physicists behave,’ she responded loftily.

And his identity was stripped once more.

Maybe it was her wide-eyed youth, or that he would eventually have to ask her to leave so he could sleep on the bench where they currently were sat, or perhaps it was simply that she was the first person - who didn’t think he was someone else - to take an interest in speaking with him since he stepped into this world, that made Sato decide to say it.

‘I’m homeless,’ he said, without fanfare, without emotion.

She reeled back, judging his clothing, his clean nails, his polished shoes. ‘You don’t look homeless.’

He looked down at his watch. ‘On the contrary. I’ve been homeless for exactly ten hours.’

‘What happened?’ she asked sceptically.

What happened, indeed. He took out a lighter and lit another cigarette, puffing out the smoke to his side before responding. ‘The hubris of a foolish professor with too much money on his hands.’

‘Do you always speak in riddles?’ she huffed, rolling her eyes.

‘If only it were a riddle with a mundane answer,’ he remarked.

A few minutes of silence passed, as Sato smoked his cigarette, and the girl beside him pondered his response. He wondered if the conversation was over. In a way that surprised himself, he hoped it wasn’t.

It wasn’t. She finally asked, ‘How can you get back your home?’

At least it was a question he could answer. ‘I need a place to build a lab. A laptop, to start. Internet. Then maybe I could discover a way home.’

She looked at him for several moments, eyes shimmering. Something was bursting at her lips but she was hesitant. ‘I think I know a place.’

He put his second cigarette into the ashtray and followed her. She led him through the twisting streets of nighttime Tokyo. The city bustled with life and kaleidoscopic lights. The smell of shabu shabu wafted from the izakayas and street vendors tempted tourists with fried sweet treats like taiyaki and dango. He could feel his mouth watering. He could hear laughter floating out from the curtained bars and restaurants. The nightlife murmur was comforting and at the same time wistful and nostalgic, as though it were a home he never really had known. At long last, they reached Shibuya, where she surprised him by descending into the subway station.

But she did not board any of the trains. Instead, they continued to descend, lower and lower, until they reached the very bottom platform. Then, to his shock, she led him behind a pillar, where a door was situated that blended into the wall. It was padlocked. She pulled a pin out of her hair and picked it easily.

‘I discovered this place years ago,’ she said by way of explanation as they entered into the pitch black beyond, and continued to descend into the underbelly of Tokyo. ‘No one ever comes down here. I don’t know why they made it, honestly.’

Their footsteps echoed off the walls and Sato could hear the trickling of water in the distance. She picked up a large torch from where she had presumably left it on the stair the last time she had been there and flicked it on. The cavern continued downward at least two stories, before it branched out into a large cavernous hall. Above, they could hear the rumble of the trains as they swept by, bearing every day tens of thousands of passengers who had not an inkling of the vast hall below their feet. At the end of the hall there was a low hut. She opened the door and flicked on a lightbulb. Inside there was a sofa, a broken TV, several shelves of books, and a table.

‘It isn’t much,’ she admitted. ‘But at least we know it worked for whoever lived here before.’

~Three weeks later~

The girl was called Sakura***. The professor laughed at the universe’s strange sense of humour. She brought him food every day, usually spending quite a while chatting with him. Occasionally, he would help her with her physics homework. She always asked questions. Eventually, she knew his entire story. Meanwhile, Sato worked on recording as much as possible that he remembered about his successful portal, and the mathematical steps and programme code it had taken to create it.

One day, several weeks later, Sakura brought him another ray of hope. Her father was a computer engineer, and had recently updated his laptop.

‘He won’t notice it’s gone,’ she explained. ‘He has the newest version of the Macbook and has already transferred all his data.’

Sato felt his eyes becoming slightly misty as he accepted it. He choked out a thank you - in her native language. She smiled and went on.

‘There’s even WiFi down here, from the subways. It might be a little weaker, but it should do,’ she said, glancing at the bars on her phone.

He shook his head in bewildered gratitude. ‘Why are you helping me?’

She shrugged. ‘You seemed like you needed help. It isn’t that often I can help someone. And you help me with my homework. It seems like a pretty equal exchange.’

Sato chuckled and booted up the computer.

‘You might just need to go up to the world of daylight to charge it,’ she continued, unravelling the charger from her bag. ‘What are you going to do?’

Sato thought for a little while. Over the past couple weeks, he had formed a plan. He was not confident it would work, but he had to be willing to try. It was necessary. ‘Work with what I have, which isn’t much,’ he responded.

‘What do you have?’

‘The correct question, I believe, Sakura-san, is what don’t I have?’ he responded. ‘I don’t have a laboratory. I don’t have an identity. I don’t have government documents proving my existence. Therefore, I have no job or way of making money. So what can I do that doesn’t require any of those things?’

The girl stared, perplexed.

‘It is a long shot, but here goes. Money works because a government is behind it. A government that recognises and legitimises the money's value. The people have trust in the government, and therefore have trust in its currency. Thus we have a global economy where money across national boundaries is trusted and exchanged. But what if I created, from this desolate, underground hole, a currency that was decentralised from any government?’

She blinked, deep in thought, then she nodded. She was following his train of thought.

‘It would primarily be anonymous, so no one would need an identity to access it. Like gold, it can be mined by people with the proper technical skills and machinery to do so,’ he continued, growing more excited as the desktop screen appeared on the monitor.

He went on, speaking more and more quickly. ‘If it can become a global currency competitor, its stocks will rise in value, higher and higher until one unit could be the equivalent of thousands of dollars.’

‘Cool,’ she exclaimed, fascinated. ‘Can I invest in some now?’

Sato chuckled quietly and nodded his assent. ‘You’ll be the first investor,’ he promised.

‘Then you’ll eventually be able to build a replica of your old lab!’ she said excitedly, beaming.

He sighed. ‘That’s the hope.’ His smile faded and he repeated, ‘That’s the hope.’

It was August before Sato was able to register bitcoin.org as a domain. Two months later, he published a paper explaining the working concept to a mailing list devoted to cryptography. He received interested responses, including a big investor, who was keenly interested, given that Nakamoto Satoshi was able to pull through. With Sakura’s help, along with her father, who had been drawn into the conspiracy at last, they created the open-source code to implement Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency.

Now, he was living in the basement of Sakura’s house, but he continued to split his time between there and the underground cave, where he worked and hoped eventually to build his laboratory. Her father had been cordial, but sceptical about Sato’s origin story. It was only when Sakura convinced him to attend a lecture by the ‘real’ Sato Naoki at Todai that Shibata Kyosuke’s misgivings began to fade. And anyway, Sakura’s physics grades had improved exponentially since Sato - or as he insisted on being called, Nakamoto - had started tutoring her.

The ‘family’ of three gathered for lunch in early January to begin mining the first block of bitcoin. The suspense was palpable. If indeed this endeavour was successful, Sato could soon return home. They listened to Bach as they worked. The music’s rhythm was methodical, mechanical, predictable - just as coding should be.

About a week later, Shibata and Sato released the bitcoin software to the general public. They paced around for hours, wringing their hands and biting their nails. Even Sakura seemed distracted enough to decline an invitation to the movies with her friends.

Every time they heard the ding of an incoming email or message, Shibata-san rushed to the computer, only to be disappointed. It was much later in the evening, but only early morning in California, that their anxiety paid off.

‘Ah!’ Shibata exclaimed, speed reading through the email. ‘The first purchase, Hal Finney from America. He’s requested ten bitcoins.’

‘Score!’ Sakura shouted, punching her fist into the air.

Sato’s heart leapt into his throat. Perhaps home was not so far away, after all.

~Two Years Later~

It was not until 2010 that Sato’s wealth had accumulated enough to start building his laboratory. Sakura was now at university, and Shibata had quit his job to mine bitcoin, which was finally taking off. They were wealthy beyond measure, but still anonymous. Sato did not want any questions regarding his identity ever out in the public, and Shibata, a private man, completely agreed. The entire enterprise was still conducted in English, which was a tactic to retain their privacy. But now that Bitcoin was becoming more and more well known in the international community, it was imperative that they throw trackers off their trail.

‘We have to hand over control to an outside party,’ Sato said one day, pacing around the small garden outside the Shibata home. By now he spoke fluent Japanese. ‘We are too out in the open, too easily traceable. If there is a scandal, then boom. It’s over.’ He illustrated an explosion by rapidly throwing his arms outward.

Shibata sighed, stirring his coffee from his seat on an old wicker chair. ‘I see your point.’ He rubbed his chin in thought and surveyed the man who had become one of his closest and most respected friends. ‘There’s an American I know, a software developer. I’ll talk to him later today about our options going forward. Nakamoto Satoshi can disappear.’

Sato smiled gratefully. He knew he would never be able to fully express his gratitude to the Shibata family who supported him so unconditionally. He could have been a criminal, and yet they still chose to trust him on his word. At first, Sakura, and later Shibata, were his intermediaries, the reason Bitcoin was able to kick off. Without Shibata Kyosuke, Sato would still be stuck in the cave beneath Shibuya station, perhaps dead by now. He didn’t know how many years he had remaining in this universe to accumulate the funds needed to rebuild his lab, but they wouldn’t be nearly as lonely and lost with the Shibata family.

~Ten Years Later~

Sato dusted his hands off and admiringly looked at the massive nuclear reactor assembled beneath Shibuya station. After plenty of bribing and moving under cover of darkness, his lab had been reborn. His existence by now was basically an open secret among the highest echelons of the scientific world and the Japanese government. To his shock, they chose to assist him at all costs.

And now, it was ready. Sakura and Kyosuke stood nearby, smiling through their tears. Sakura was now an assistant professor of physics at Todai. She had helped him in the final few months of the project, if just to be near him.

He finally gave them a close-lipped smile, before looking down. The time for the bitter inevitable had arrived.

‘Do you have to go back?’ Sakura asked, tears leaking from her eyes as she struggled to smile.

Sato wiped her tears with his thumb and held her cheeks in his palms. ‘I have to use the wisdom you taught me somewhere,’ he said tenderly, responding in Japanese. She sobbed and flung her arms around him.

‘I'll miss you, Oji-san,*’ she whispered, her tears dampening his shirt. Kyosuke put a hand on his daughter’s shoulder, but he also was struggling to hold back his tears. At last, she pulled away.

The two men surveyed each other fondly, before they embraced tightly. Pulling away, they faced each other as they firmly held one another’s upper arms.

‘Be well, my brother,’ Kyosuke said.

Sato nodded, his throat tight. He couldn’t form words.

He clicked ‘Run programme’. The mighty blast echoed through the hall once more. Without looking back, he walked straight through the portal and into his old lab.

‘Well, I’m back,’ he said, and the portal faded behind him.

Later that day, he sat at a bench in Rikugien Garden. It was April. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom.



*tree spirit

**the spirits that comprise nature and natural energies as venerated in the religion of Shinto

***cherry blossom

*uncle