by Kōji Suzuki
Kaoru knew he bore no responsibility for that. But as a fact it was undeniable, and it weighed on his mind.
However, this was no time to be caught up in resentment, hatred, or the pricks of conscience. It was time for him to steel himself and pay the price. It was time to look to the future. Always to the future.
Kaoru turned around and strode purposefully away from the cliff.
6
It took another ten days to make everything ready. Kaoru spent the time going through the record of Takayama’s life in the Loop, experiencing it until he knew it all, up to the moment of his death. He made it all his own, from the man’s relationships with parents and friends to his scholarly learning, his habits of thought, the way he spoke.
By the time Kaoru got so that he could understand the language they spoke in the Loop without a mechanical translator, he’d essentially finished committing the man’s life to memory. Perhaps because they shared the same genes, Kaoru found it felt rather natural to become the man in this way. In fact, the more he found out the less he considered Takayama a separate person. At certain moments Takayama’s life seemed to overlap with his own.
On the morning of the big day, Eliot accompanied Kaoru down in the elevator. As they descended three thousand feet below the surface, all of Kaoru’s misgivings melted away. He was about to cross over to that distant shore, but strangely he felt no fear. The special atmosphere of the place actually lent his mood a touch of solemnity, of grandeur.
The elevator doors opened. He could see a section of the NSCS control center. Surrounded by thick security walls, the computers’ lights were flashing. But they weren’t inside the NSCS yet. Kaoru would go in there alone.
Eliot kept pace with Kaoru. He refused to use a motorized wheelchair, telling Kaoru that he preferred to propel one himself, to keep his muscles in shape. The old-fashioned wheelchair looked out of place here, surrounded by the latest technology.
Panting faintly, Eliot said, “I need to ask you something before we begin, so that we have no misunderstandings. You don’t think I let loose the MHC virus on purpose, do you?”
The thought had crossed Kaoru’s mind, but all his doubts on that score had been settled.
“Why would you do that?”
Kaoru went behind Eliot’s wheelchair and tried to push for him, but the older man waved him away as he would a fly. “Don’t interfere,” he said, but kindly, renewing his grip on the wheels. “Why would I do it, you ask? Isn’t that obvious? To ensure funding for the Loop.”
True enough, if Eliot could make the case that restarting the Loop was a necessary step toward defeating the MHC virus, then he’d get a massive amount of funding. A cure for the virus was the top priority worldwide—if one were developed, it would bring huge profits all around. The return on investment would be phenomenal, to say nothing of what it would contribute to society. And with that funding, Eliot would be able to achieve his dream of reactivating the Loop, a dream that had been on ice for twenty years.
“You wouldn’t do something like that.”
“And why wouldn’t I?”
“Because there’d be no way you could foresee how the virus would behave. That, and I have a hard time believing your hatred of the virus is feigned.”
Eliot swallowed and made a queer sound in the back of his throat. He, too, had lost several intimates to the disease: it was obvious what fueled his animosity toward it.
“I’m glad you understand. The virus’s getting loose was an accident, pure and simple. Had I known the virus was this wily, this nefarious, I would have been much, much more cautious …” His words of frustration carried the weight of truth.
“I know. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be down here.”
Eliot stopped his wheelchair and gazed vacantly up at Kaoru. His wide eyes were wet with tears.
“So you don’t … hold a grudge?”
“For what?”
“For taking it upon myself to bring you to this world, and then saying, ‘Time’s up, back you go.’”
“But I wouldn’t be here, as a human being, if it weren’t for you. The last twenty years haven’t been bad at all. In fact, you’ve given me a lot of great memories. I don’t have any grudge against you.”
Kaoru was trying to view things philosophically. He felt that if he failed to affirm the present world completely, then all that would be left to him would be fear of the world to come. Unhappiness had dogged him. He’d seen his father, his mother, and his lover infected with the MHC virus; he’d witnessed Ryoji’s suicide. But he could still state unequivocally that this life had been a good one. It was the only thing that allowed him to remain composed as he walked down that hallway.
“Stop and talk with me for a moment.” As ever, spittle hung at the corner of Eliot’s mouth.
“Alright.”
So the two of them stopped to shoot the breeze there in the middle of the long hallway leading to the neutrino scanner. Kaoru leaned back against the wall, and Eliot propped his head against the back of his wheelchair. They each laughed at the other’s casualness.
“I’m sure I’ve already told you this, but we wouldn’t have arranged for your birth here had there not already been plans for the NSCS. Everything’s organically interconnected. If just one element had been missing, things would have turned out entirely different.”
“So it’s a mere accumulation of coincidence?”
“Certainly it’s coincidence that’s led us to restart the Loop—to be forced to restart it. But the Loop and the real world correspond to each other on some level.”
Kaoru had begun to notice that himself. It was almost as if the virtual world, cancer-ridden and frozen in time, was reaching out to move the real world, to use it.
Eliot changed to a new metaphor as he continued his explanation. “There comes a point when a child—even one not particularly precocious in science—notices that the structure of the atom resembles the structure of the solar system. The child sees the atom and its component particles as constituting their own universe, and wonders if life exists on those miniature ‘planets’ just as it does on ours. That’s the circle of life. That’s why I named it the Loop.”
“I think I said something like that to my father when I was in elementary school.” And to Kaoru it seemed that it wasn’t just the microscopic realm that might work like that. Maybe the solar system was but an atom, and the Milky Way an aggregation of atoms, a molecule. The surrounding universe was a cell, and all of existence a huge organism. A being that held within it a smaller being, which held within it a smaller being—like a series of nested boxes. Certain ancient religions took such a view, just as they saw life cycling through a series of existences, past, present, and future.
“What do you think happens if the circle is broken? The microscopic and the macroscopic are connected, interlocking—if part of the cycle is arrested, it’s going to affect the rest of it.”
“If the circle gets broken … well, it just has to be reconnected.”
“That’s right. But not simply by going back to the beginning and doing it over. We have to overcome the calamity that has befallen the Loop, and then reconnect it.”
“So what happens to the Loop’s historical trajectory? Its cancer?”
“The same thing that happens to any species that runs into an evolutionary dead-end: it goes extinct. Records will remain in the Loop’s memory banks, but the events will be surgically removed from the real world’s history, just like we’d cut out cancer cells. The history of the Loop will be shunted onto a side road. It will start again from a new page.”
It reminded Kaoru of a river carving out a land scape. Water follows the shape of the land as it flows ever downward, but sometimes it finds itself trapped, and then it swells into a pool. Even then, the water is always searching for an escape, probing weak places in the ground until it succeeds in making itself a new path. It’s easy to tell where a river ran into dead ends on its way to the sea: the tale is told by a river
’s oddly acute angles, its occasional islands.
The Loop was like a river in that respect. Right now it was stalled, its way blocked. But left as it was to stagnate, it was bound to find a way to overspill its containment and exert a negative influence on the real world. The real world corresponded to it, after all. While it was necessary to find real-world ways of dealing with the cancer virus, it was just as necessary to change the trajectory of the Loop, its history of cancer. Until that was done, there would be no fundamental solution.
It was Kaoru’s job to overcome the blockage in the Loop, to make a new way for it to flow.
Eliot spoke again. “Sometimes the world needs divine intervention. So God is born of a virgin. And reborn. All the arrangements have been made.”
Kaoru realized what he was being told: he was to become a god. It didn’t feel real to him. He felt too vividly the sense of being pushed along this path.
He started down the hall again, and as he walked, he thought. That Indian’s life I was shown at Wayne’s Rock: what was the meaning of that?
Eliot had prepared that experience for him, of course. Kaoru had yet to ask why. Kaoru’s own interpretation was that it had been a dress rehearsal for death. But another possible meaning had just occurred to him.
The Indian had seen his wife and child die before his very eyes. The cruelty, the loss, and his own inability to do anything about it had been much harder to bear than thoughts of his own death. Right up until the veil of darkness closed around him, his thoughts had been ones of pity, rage, fear at having been unable to save them. Those negative images had swirled around in the blackness of Kaoru’s helmet display, and after taking it off he was determined not to ever have to feel that way again, in the virtual world or the real one. The Indian’s story was not one of a man who had sacrificed his life for those of his wife and daughter. It was incomparably worse than that. It was the story of a man who’d been forced to look on helplessly while they perished.
Why was it necessary for me to see that—to experience it?
In view of subsequent events, the experience’s effect on him seemed to accord with Eliot’s plan. Kaoru’s desire to never go through that again motivated his decision to sacrifice himself to save his loved ones. But now what planted itself in Kaoru was the idea that he’d been manipulated, trapped, into doing just what Eliot wanted him to.
He strode down the corridor with profoundly mixed emotions. Eliot chased him in his wheelchair.
“Don’t you wish to make a phone call?”
Kaoru stopped. “A phone call?”
“Yes. Is there no one you wish to speak to?”
He’d already spoken to his father, not long before. He would have liked to hear his mother’s voice, but he didn’t know what he’d say to her. How was he supposed to explain what he was about to do? She’d lose it for sure.
Reiko. There was nobody else he could talk to.
Eliot showed Kaoru into a small room off the hallway and handed him a telephone receiver.
Kaoru dialed, praying she’d be in. Eliot gestured wordlessly to a monitor, as if to ask, Would you like video? Kaoru refused the offer. There was no need to make it a video-phone call. He had the feeling that hearing her voice alone, with no extraneous information, would better allow him to hold on to the memory.
A connection. “Hello?”
First contact with Reiko’s soft voice had the unexpected effect of reducing Kaoru to tears. Waves of emotion buffeted him. Memories overcame him, aural and visual. It was an explosion, triggered by her voice. He couldn’t control himself.
“Hello? Hello?”
Kaoru realized he never should have called her.
7
The hallway ended at a black door. This was where Kaoru said goodbye to Eliot.
Eliot held out a gargantuan hand for Kaoru to shake. Kaoru returned his grasp, although not very strongly. The last words he’d exchanged with Reiko still occupied his brain—his heart had been shattered into a thousand pieces—his gaze was elsewhere.
“I seem to have lived too long.”
Kaoru snapped back to reality. He looked down at Eliot and saw a man who had, indeed, grown too old for his own good. A man who had a precise grasp of how much longer he had to live.
I’ll be following you eventually, he seemed to want to say, but in fact they were headed to different places altogether. Eliot would never go where Kaoru was about to.
“Don’t forget your promise,” Kaoru said. He’d extracted another pledge from Eliot, in addition to his promise to use the data from Kaoru’s body to help his parents and Reiko first of all.
“I won’t. Trust me.”
Kaoru listened carefully for Eliot’s response, then turned and opened the door. Only he could go beyond that point. He slipped in, and the door shut behind him automatically.
An odd smell. Ions, perhaps. From this point, he’d receive instructions via loudspeaker. The metallic voice coming through the speakers was the only sound that came in from the outside. Kaoru was utterly cut off from the external world.
Following instructions, Kaoru took off the gown he was wearing, and then his sandals and his underwear. He went into the next room naked. According to what Eliot had told him, he was to pass through several clean rooms.
He had a pretty clear idea what was going to happen. He was going to be suspended in the center of the huge sphere that was the neutrino scanning capture system, where he would be bombarded with neutrinos from all directions. But there was a procedure he had to follow first.
In the next room he saw a stretcher. A voice instructed him to lie down on it. He lay down face up, and the stretcher began silently moving down a narrow, dark hallway. It took Kaoru through an air shower, and then a shower of purified water. Together these cleansed the surface of his body of all contaminants.
As he passed each station on the line, he could see a digital meter with a reading flashing in red, numbers approaching closer to one hundred with each stage. 99.99 … 99.999 … 99.9999 … The gauges showed the degree to which the rooms, and thus their occupant, were free of impurities.
The stretcher conveyed Kaoru into a clear oblong container. Purified water, slightly warmer than body temperature, began to engulf him. The container was shaped not so much like a bathtub as like a slightly oversized coffin.
Kaoru was fixed firmly in place, floating in water. Next he was transported into the neutrino scanning capture system.
The water had a calming effect on him. Gradually he became unable to tell where his body left off and the water began, as his ego began to dissolve into tiny bubbles and joined the water.
Reiko’s last words came back to him again, in what might have been his ego’s last attempt at resistance.
I felt the baby move this morning.
She’d sounded so happy to be able to report on the baby’s growth. The thought of the fetus in the embrace of her amniotic fluid allowed Kaoru to see his own situation as a bystander might. Come to think of it, he was in the same state as that baby, right down to its will to be born.
This place was a universe unto itself, ruled by utter darkness. Gravity had disappeared: his body felt weightless. He knew he was inside a sphere six hundred feet in diameter. His eyes should have been able to see its inner surface. But in the darkness the space surrounding him felt infinite.
As a child, he’d often gone out onto the balcony of his family’s high-rise apartment to stare up into the night sky. Seeing the stars and the moon always strengthened his desire to fathom the universe.
What a different situation he was in now. Back then he’d stood on a height overlooking the ocean; now he was in a three-thousand-feet deep hole in the desert. Back then the air had been filled with the scent of the sea; this space was filled with the artificial smell of ions.
He thought he saw a blue light flash for an instant in the emptiness above him. Had the neutrino bombardment begun? The flash reminded him of a star twinkling.
Any moment now he would b
e bombarded with neutrinos from points on every part of the inner surface of the sphere. Each would penetrate his body and reach the point on the sphere wall opposite its point of origin. Molecular information about him would accumulate gradually, until Eliot would begin to get a three-dimensional digital image of his body’s minutest structures. The more neutrino radiation he received, the sharper that image would become. He’d been told that the first rounds would simply pass through his body—he wouldn’t feel much if anything. But that level of irradiation wouldn’t provide enough information for their purposes. They would need to expose him to so much neutrino penetration as to actually break down his cells. Kaoru tried not to think about what would happen to him then.
There were more blue lights now, and they flashed more quickly, blinking energetically in the darkness. They was beautiful. They tore through space like shooting stars, glittering, leaving white trails behind.
Kaoru stared peacefully into the night sky. He felt like a child again …
He wondered if this was what astronauts felt like. They said that seeing the Earth from space brought one closer to the territory of the divine. If so, then it was a little different from Kaoru’s situation after all. What he was aiming at was godhood itself.
Something was pressing rhythmically on his eardrums—strange, as he should be cut off from all sound in here. Someone or something was speaking loudly into his ear. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be human. Maybe a digital signal from the virtual world?
Suddenly, an image was inserted into his mind. It was as if a Chagall painting had been forcefully placed inside his head. He wasn’t seeing it with his eyes—it was like a cord from a video deck had been connected directly to his brain. Brightly colored, impressionistic images flashed through his mind, disappearing as abruptly as they had appeared.
The bluish-white lights connected into tangled threadwork now, an infinite number of bands intersecting in the middle distance. The lines of light now filled the darkness. He could hear the sounds of their collisions, sounds he shouldn’t have been able to hear … Digital signals whirled around him, caressing his earlobes.