by Kōji Suzuki
“Not long after the inception of the Loop project, another team of researchers began to construct a piece of equipment known as the Neutron Scanning Capture System, NSCS for short. This would allow us to instantaneously capture an organism’s molecular structure. Needless to say, their project too had a huge budget. I myself had no direct connection with the NSCS project, although of course I offered whatever advice I could.”
Eliot paused there.
“How about some tea? You’ll need some time to digest this information.”
Kaoru obediently raised his teacup to his mouth. The tea was cold. Kaoru had heard a fair amount concerning neutrinos in his lifetime, but this was the first he’d heard of the NSCS.
“I’m sorry if this has been confusing to you. It’s time now to bring the discussion around to the MHC virus, which threatens us all.”
“Finally, we’re getting to the point.”
The news came as a relief to Kaoru. He was starting to be afraid that this, too, would lead nowhere.
“What do you know about the Human Metastatic Cancer Virus?” Eliot asked.
“I know that its genome has been sequenced. I’ve seen the results myself.”
“And yet there’s still no treatment for it, no progress on a vaccine to prevent it.”
“Why is that?”
“It can take a long time to figure out where a virus came from. In the case of the MHC virus, an extremely long time.”
By now, Kaoru felt he could guess where the virus had come from.
“The Loop, right?”
Eliot opened his eyes wide and stared at Kaoru. “How did you figure it out?”
Kaoru enjoyed the look of sincere amazement on Eliot’s face. He felt like delaying his answer to prolong this pleasure, but he hadn’t the patience. “The MHC virus isn’t very large. It’s only got nine genes, each of which ranges from several thousand to several hundred thousand bases in length. But the total number of bases in each gene comes out to equal 2n x 3. That can’t be a coincidence.”
Eliot groaned. “Nice catch.”
“Not to brag, but I have something of a sixth sense when it comes to numbers. It didn’t take much to figure it out.”
“And from that you were able to guess where the virus had come from?”
“Well, why did they equal 2n x 3? That was the question. The times-three part was fairly easy to understand, since three bases together make one codon specifying a single amino acid. But what about the other part of the formula, the 2? No doubt I never would have gotten the idea had I not known about the Loop project. The 2 had to come from the binary code used by computers. The virus must have leaked out of the Loop somehow. That was its birthplace.”
“Exactly.” Eliot gave a weak smile and clapped his hands. Whether or not the applause was sincere, it sounded like mockery to Kaoru.
Kaoru lowered his voice in an attempt to sound calm. “So we know where it came from. Does that help us find a cure?” A cure for the virus—that was the main thing.
Eliot ignored the question. “When did you figure this out?”
“Huh?”
“When did you figure out the origin of the virus?”
“About a month ago.”
“I see. For me it was about six months ago.” He didn’t seem to be trying to brag. He was counting on his fingers like a child, a look of unguarded remorse on his face.
“I want to know what you think about it,” Kaoru said, pressing him.
Eliot’s response was dilatory, as he started making excuses.
“It’s too bad that it had to be cancer—such a common disease. Had it been something more distinctive, maybe we could have done something at an early stage. But it was able to blend in with normal cancer as it laid its groundwork. It was like the wanted man realizing the best place to hide is in the big city. Precisely because cancer is such a common illness, the virus was able to use it as camouflage. Think about it. Who would raise a fuss just because a researcher on the Loop project died of cancer? Whereas, if one of us had died from an unknown illness, we would have been quite active in looking for the virus that caused it. But with cancer … we mourned the loss of another colleague, but didn’t suspect anything. It was able to sneak in and do away with us one by one.”
Kaoru could sympathize. It had been a mere seven years since this cancer was definitely proven to be viral in origin, and therefore different from normal cancer. And it had only been a year since scientists had first successfully isolated the virus. And all that time, the virus had been laying the groundwork for an explosive spread.
Kaoru imagined that Eliot had lost people close to him to the virus. His gaze, one of hostility and regret, was focused on the past.
This was Kaoru’s chance to find out more about Eliot as a person, but instead Kaoru brought the conversation back on track.
“Have you been able to figure out precisely how the virus escaped from the Loop?”
“Eh? Oh, yes. Of course.”
“Will you tell me?”
“We froze the Loop twenty years ago. Time has stopped inside the Loop. All of its inhabitants are frozen in place. Do you know why we put an end to the project?”
“You’re going to tell me you ran out of funding.”
He didn’t mean it as a joke, but Eliot, after a moment’s shock, laughed heartily.
“That’s absolutely right. We used up our budget. We’d gotten scholarly feedback from all directions, about as much as we were going to get, and the results had been quite good, at least valuable enough to justify the expenditure. But a project like that can’t go on forever. Do you have any idea how many massively parallel supercomputers we buried in the New Mexico desert? Six hundred and forty thousand. And we put another six hundred and forty thousand in the ground underneath Tokyo. We needed our own power plants just to keep them running. They ate up a staggering amount of electricity, and it took massive amounts of money to keep them running. It couldn’t go on forever. And then the Loop started turning cancerous.”
Kaoru felt he knew all he needed to about how that had come about. Back at Wayne’s Rock he’d witnessed for himself, with his own eyes and ears, the key scenes in that chain of events. He informed Eliot of this, and Eliot nodded twice.
“So you’ve seen it. Or, I should say, you’ve experienced it. But you don’t know why it began to turn cancerous. Let me say right up front that I don’t know, either. The making of that odd videotape, the spread of that new virus—these are things that the individuals within the Loop couldn’t help but find impossible to explain. You’re thinking that even if they couldn’t explain it, I should be able to, as the one who made the Loop. But I have to be honest with you: I can’t explain it. Not all phenomena in the world can be explained. We’ve always got problems that need solving; the world is always coming apart at the seams. There’s no world anywhere without its internal contradictions. Maybe the real world’s internal contradictions infected the Loop; alternatively, it’s not inconceivable that it was the work of a computer virus. Our security was supposed to be perfect, but as long as the Loop was connected to the outside world, there was at least the possibility of it being breached. If it was a piece of mischief, it was an extremely well-wrought one. But what interested me most was one of the individuals within the Loop: Ryuji Takayama.”
Eliot stopped there and turned on Kaoru a gaze that seemed to be searching for agreement. Kaoru obliged.
“Yeah, he’s a pretty interesting guy, alright.”
“He’s unique.”
“He must hold the key to the MHC virus.”
Now Eliot’s eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to peer into Kaoru’s brain. As if it wouldn’t do to take his eyes off Kaoru for a second now.
Slowly, with suspicion, Eliot said, “Did you not see Takayama on the monitor?”
“I spent most of my time seeing things from his perspective, actually.” Kaoru answered carefully, each word given special weight, in imitation of Eliot; at the same time he was
checking his own memory to make sure he wasn’t making any mistakes. No, that was how he remembered it: he’d made full use of Takayama’s senses as he reexperienced the event.
Eliot made an awkward sort of cry and blinked rapidly several times. “Oh-ho. That explains it.” Uneasy, Kaoru watched Eliot’s eyes as they darted around.
“Explains what?”
“Eh? Oh, nothing. It’s just that the conversation begins to move in an interesting direction. Anyway. So that means that you heard Takayama’s scream just before he died as if it were your own voice.”
“That’s right.”
He could recall it all clearly, everything he’d seen and heard through Takayama’s eyes and ears. On the brink of death, Takayama had found an interface with the real world, and he’d called it. Kaoru could hear Takayama’s voice echoing within his body.
“What did Takayama say to you?”
Kaoru repeated the phrase, in as close as he could come to Takayama’s intonation.
“‘Bring me to your world.’”
“What do you think it means?”
“I think he deduced the existence of the Loop’s maker, a god from his perspective, and he wanted that god to bring him back to life in that god’s world—in other words, in the real world where you and I live. At least, that’s what I took it to mean.”
And Kaoru could sympathize with that request. How many times had he confronted his father with a desire to understand how the world worked? But it turned out that this world’s working was a little too complicated to be fully comprehended. Every time he thought he’d chased down the answers, they receded a little farther into the distance, like an endless game of cat and mouse. He felt like he was chasing his own shadow, something he’d never ever be able to catch. If it turned out that the world had a maker, then going to that maker’s own world would answer all his desires. It would surely tell him how his own world worked.
Eliot spoke calmly. “I understood Takayama’s feelings completely. His request came not out of fear of death. What moved him was an insatiable thirst for knowledge. His curiosity about the world exploded in that instant, and it brought about what was to him a miracle.”
“A miracle?”
“That’s what it was to him. On the brink of death, his greatest desire was to cross over into this world. If the NSCS plans hadn’t been in my head, I doubt the idea would ever have occurred to me. In fact, I’m sure it wouldn’t have. But as I say, things are connected, organically. I believed I could see twenty, thirty years into the future, and based on what I saw, I made up my mind to grant Takayama’s wish.”
Kaoru cried out in surprise.
Grant Takayama’s wish?
It was just as he’d suspected. Somebody had been rash enough to bring an entity over from the virtual world into the real one. Kaoru was speechless.
Eliot, though, was calm as he began to explain how he’d gone about bringing Ryuji Takayama into the real world.
It was impossible to bring him over as an adult, possessed of his current state of consciousness and all the memories it held. The only thing Eliot could do was extract genetic information from one of Takayama’s cells, and based on it, use a genome synthesizer and the genome fragment alignment method to create DNA that would be valid in the real world. Once he’d analyzed Takayama’s DNA sequence, it was essentially a matter of chemically synthesizing it.
The next step was to prepare a fertilized human egg, extract its nucleus, and insert the manmade Takayama nucleus in its place. Then all he had to do was return the egg to the mother’s body and wait for Takayama to be born. The process wasn’t all that different from the cloning procedures that had been developed in the last century. Nor was it all that difficult.
In short, the only way to bring Takayama into the real world was to allow him to be born here as a baby, a new human carrying all the genetic information of the virtual Ryuji Takayama.
“This was a grand experiment, to say the least. We were all quite excited at the prospect of bringing something from the virtual world into the real one. But we had to act in the utmost secrecy. I’m sure you can see why. If the media had gotten wind of it, they would have had a field day, saying we were playing God, ignoring the sanctity of life, that sort of thing. We’d seen the furor that had surrounded the first successful human cloning at the turn of the century, and we wanted no part of that. I doubt you can imagine what things were like then … Anyway, the plan was kept secret even from most of the scientists involved with the Loop.”
“Not even my father knew about it?”
Eliot nodded once. “That’s right. He didn’t know. It was more convenient that way.”
“So he was left out in the cold, is that it?”
“It wasn’t like that, exactly … But, well, I guess you could say that …”
Eliot seemed at a loss for words. But Kaoru thought he could guess what came next. “So anyway, you mean …?”
“Yes, it’s just what you’re thinking. We collected Takayama’s genetic data from a point just before he died. A point at which he was already infected with the ring virus. When we brought Takayama into the real world, we brought the ring virus right along with him.”
“In other words, the ring virus that took over the Loop world was the basis for the MHC virus that’s taking over our world?”
“That’s what we think. Careful comparisons of the genetic sequences of both viruses reveal too many similarities to be explained away as mere coincidence. The ring virus seized on our plan to resurrect Takayama in this world as a chance to escape. We think the virus’s RNA must have invaded an intestinal bacterium, as luck would have it, and thus made it into the outside. And then it mutated with frightening speed, as viruses are wont to do. The result was the MHC virus.”
The sequence was essentially what Kaoru had guessed. What to do about it, though, remained a problem.
He leaned close to Eliot’s face and said, “Let’s clear something up right now. Have you or have you not figured out a way to conquer the MHC virus?”
“You said it yourself: Takayama holds the key.”
“So Takayama is alive. Where is he now?”
Eliot rested his chin on his hand and gazed into Kaoru’s eyes for a while. Then he snapped his fingers. “The eyes play tricks on one, don’t they? What we think we know can affect our judgment.”
Shaking his head, Kaoru leaned back on his couch. Eliot always evaded the important questions. He began to be suspicious of the old man again—what was he up to?
Eliot, meanwhile, was punching buttons on the remote control, ignoring Kaoru’s nonplussed gaze. From one wall appeared a large computer monitor.
“You saw it all. You even put on the helmet display. But you failed to notice it. I suppose that’s liable to happen. Your preconceptions got in the way, I suspect.”
Kaoru thought Eliot was talking to himself; he was speaking as one might speak to a bird that’s landed in one’s yard. So Kaoru swallowed his annoyance and waited for Eliot to play his next card.
Eliot had called up on the screen the last moments of Takayama’s life. He’d probably prepared this ahead of time—he had the scene up and ready to play with only a few commands.
“Let’s go through it like you did, locked into Takayama’s perceptions.”
And they began to go through the same sequence of events that Kaoru had lived through already amid the ruins of Wayne’s Rock. It was a week after Takayama watched the video, and he began to see signs of his impending death. Spurred by his final wish, he put the tape into the VCR and pressed play. Those mysterious, fragmented images danced across the TV screen. Dice rolling around inside a lead case. In the middle of a phone call, Takayama noticed the ever-changing dots on the dice and made a sound like a scream.
Just then it happened. A reflection appeared in a mirror at the edge of the monitor. A man with a telephone receiver held to his ear and a look of utter shock on his face. It was Takayama. While on the phone, Takayama’s glance had mome
ntarily settled on his reflection in the mirror.
Eliot paused the playback there and zoomed in on Takayama’s reflection.
“You were locked into Takayama’s perceptions, but your own preconceptions clouded your vision. Your mind’s reaction was that you couldn’t be seeing what you were seeing, and so it simply wouldn’t let you see it. It happens. Take another look. Don’t you recognize that face?”
The face in the mirror was slightly blurred. Eliot sharpened the image.
Kaoru sat face to face with Takayama’s reflection. His jaw dropped. His nerves were buzzing, as if they didn’t want to recognize the face.
Takayama’s features were distorted by his expression of astonishment. On top of that, the imminence of death seemed to have abruptly aged him. But even so, there was no mistaking the outlines of his face, the muscular line of his jaw. Kaoru did indeed know that face. He’d known it all his life.
“This man holds the key to the MHC virus.” Eliot poked Kaoru in the chest with a huge finger. “Kaoru, you’re Ryuji Takayama.”
Kaoru tried to block the words from reaching his brain, but their truth seeped into his body anyway. He felt the world collapse around him. His body, the flesh that he’d always thought of as his, had betrayed him.
“It can’t be.” Kaoru turned his face toward the ceiling, eyes shut tight.
“We need your help. You must cooperate with us.”
Kaoru saw nothing. Eliot’s words entered his ears, but he couldn’t grasp their meaning. All he knew was that the world was falling apart.
5
Kaoru sat on a boulder hugging his knees. From the flat edge of the ridge he could see a deep valley carved over the course of billions of years. Here and there he saw whitish mottled places on the rust-colored earth. Strangely shaped rocks stood out against the horizon, looking like creations not of nature, but of man. But man had not touched the landscape that stretched before him.