by Kōji Suzuki
The idea behind the Loop project, a joint Japan -U.S. undertaking, had been to create life within the virtual space of the computers, pass on DNA from generation to generation, and incorporate the mechanisms of mutation, parasitism, and immunity, thereby to create an original biosphere to simulate the evolution of life on earth. In short, to create another world exactly like the real one, on computers.
At this point, Amano paused the videotape and turned to Kaoru.
"Do you have any questions thus far?"
"Well," Kaoru spoke up. "What field, exactly, was this research supposed to be useful to?" This had been nagging at him for some time. Where did the funding come from? What kind of practical application would this research have had?
Judging by what he'd seen, the budget was probably big enough to require government support. Solving the riddles of life on earth, the mechanism of evolution, would be sure to satisfy academic curiosity, but he doubted it'd make money for anybody.
"We were taking the long view. We knew that at first it would be of only limited use. But once we opened up the field, there was no telling what kind of developments would pop up later. The number of possible applications was literally infinite. Fields like medicine and physiology for starters, but also microbiology, physics, meteorology… And not just science: we expected it to have implications for everything from understanding movements in stock prices to figuring out social-science problems such as population increases."
Amano paused and laughed.
In fact, the fruits of the Loop research had proven useful on a wide variety of fronts. It became possible to know the point at which earth's environmental and ecological balance would be destroyed, allowing for the development of management strategies; there were epochal advances in the study of at what point in the brain's development consciousness appeared. The contribution to medicine was huge, as treatments for several serious illnesses came to light.
The rest of the video was spent mostly on methodology. Hideyuki used diagrams to explain how through the application of chaos theory, nonlinearity, L-systems, genetic algorithms, and the like, the program was able to learn and evolve.
As an example, fragmentary images of cellular division were interspersed into the narrative. A shot of a cell dividing and redividing until it grew into an organism pulsated its way across the screen as if on fast-forward. The network developed dynamically, rather like a cancer cell growing capillaries. Even though Kaoru knew it was a mechanical simulation, it looked remarkably alive.
Having concluded its explanation of the methodology and thus its introduction to the project, the video ended with an invitation to the viewer to follow the real-life progress of the experiment.
Kaoru found it a pretty convincing promo.
Creating a computer simulation of the beginning and evolution of life wasn't a particularly unusual thing: it had been done several times in several different places. What amazed Kaoru was the scale of this project: the minute level of detail, the innumerable parameters that had been fed into the program. He figured it had to be the first time anything like it had been attempted.
What the experiment did was to take the some four billion years since life had begun and compress them into an accessible digital time frame. Billions of years had been abbreviated on the computers into ten or so years of real time, while still perfectly recreating in the virtual space the complexity of the real world.
Kaoru was curious about the subsequent progress of the research.
"How far did the Loop go?" he asked Amano, who was rewinding the tape.
"Didn't Futami-sensei tell you?"
"He told me that the pattern turned cancerous, that's all."
Amano looked troubled. "Well, that's about the size of it."
"I'd like to know more about the sequence of events, though."
"I'm sure you realize that even if you had the time to look at it, your life would end long before you finished."
Kaoru sighed intentionally.
"Okay, why don't we move to a different room and talk over coffee? I'd like to hear more about your father's condition, actually."
Amano led Kaoru into a larger but drearier room that looked like it was used for meetings or training sessions. It contained steel desks and folding chairs, and instead of modern art the walls held a map of the world; all in all it was an unremarkable room, sort of like a school classroom in miniature.
They sat at a table facing each other, and from nowhere appeared the receptionist to place cups of coffee in front of each of them.
It looked hot, at least: steam rose from the disposable cups. Amano wrapped both hands around his cup and brought it to his mouth. This room was windowless, too, and the air conditioning was turned up too high. Up to now Kaoru had been so wrapped up in what he was hearing that he'd been oblivious to the cold inside the centre. As he watched Amano take advantage of the warmth of the coffee Kaoru finally noticed that his own arms had goose-bumps from the cold.
In between sips, Amano began to relate the history of the virtual world.
He spoke like an old man telling him storybook stories: relating the simulation in the form of a story was probably the most primal, direct way to go about it. In any case, it didn't strike Kaoru as inappropriate. Simulation it may have been, but it was also life, and it was natural for its history to contain story like elements.
Perhaps that was why Kaoru was able to become comfortably absorbed in Amano's tale. It was fun to re-experience the history of the world. But only until just before the end.
12
"… But even after we implanted RNA, which meant the ability to self-replicate, for a while it remained a normal, chaotic world. It put some of the staff in a bad mood-they were afraid it would change nothing at all.
"But there were a few who had a more upbeat outlook. After all, real life had developed along much the same lines. Primitive life began, single-celled organisms, and then just stayed like that for three billion years with very little change, no signs of evolving.
"One day, just as we'd expected, complex life forms began to appear-just as the Cambrian Explosion came along in real life. We have no logical explanation for why varied life forms appeared at just that moment. Extremely simple life forms, similar to single-celled organisms, begat many-celled organisms, through a mechanism that was identical to how it happened on earth, they say.
"The life that emerged then became the prototype for the natural world that would later develop. Some life retained the same form and became naturally extinct, while some life began to evolve into more complex forms. The family tree branched out, the phenomena of parasitism and symbiosis appeared, life emerged that moved in fascinating ways. Things that moved like worms burrowing their way through the earth. Things that moved swiftly through the seas. Things that soared through the air like birds. And things that stagnated, giving up on evolution and remaining single cells forever. These can probably be likened to bacteria and viruses. There were things whose pictorial representation was large but which didn't move: these took forms like those of trees on earth.
"Of course each living thing had information that corresponded to genes, and every time they reproduced, a certain percentage of errors crept in, mutations that resulted in evolution in a positive direction, stagnation, or extinction. We'd done a good job of incorporating natural selection, the competition to survive.
"Observing this process, we were astonished to see something emerge that could only be gender. In the natural world, too, it's considered a mystery why species branched into male and female. In our world, too, a bifurcation occurred that clearly couldn't be explained except through reference to male and female.
"Some simple life forms were still able to reproduce without coupling with another of their species, but complex life forms now had to mate within their species in order to self-replicate. Just as we'd predicted, once the gender distinction arose, genetic information came to be combined in more dynamic ways as it was passed down to the next genera
tion: this made for diversity, and evolution picked up speed.
"Please don't misunderstand. I didn't actually witness this myself-I heard some older colleagues talking about it. But it's pretty exciting, don't you think? The idea of artificial life forms inside a computer having sex is pretty interesting, is it not?
"With the Cambrian Explosion as a jumping-off point, life changed into complicated patterns with wondrous speed. One minute huge life forms that resembled dinosaurs appeared, and the next minute they were extinct.
"What came next was life forms that incubated the next generation's information inside the parent generation until it had achieved a certain degree of maturity, and only then divided. I'm sure you recognize what I'm talking about: mammals.
"Things went on like this for some time, until the appearance of what seemed to be the ancestors of the human race. I've pulled that scene up and watched it myself. Imagine it, if you can. At first they moved like orangutans. Then, through a long period of trial and error, their walking became smooth, free of the awkwardness it displayed at first.
"At this point the amount of genetic information was extraordinary, and soon thereafter there emerged a life form that we guessed must be humanity. It was obvious that this life form was aware of itself, that it possessed intelligence. Obvious, because these life forms were actually observed making what seemed to be signals to one another.
"By exchanging digital signals, zeros and ones, these life forms were able to manipulate more and more information. As a result, their survival rate went up. It was unmistakable: they'd acquired language.
"By analyzing the clusters of zeros and ones they exchanged, we were able to translate their exchanges of information as language. Of course, the beings within the Loop didn't consider themselves to be interacting in binary code. As far as their awareness went, they were utilizing complex language the same as you and me.
"Once we'd analyzed their language so that we could interpret it using machine translation, it became a much more interesting world, they say. You could call up any scene on the display as a three-dimensional image, and it was just like you were a character in a movie.
"These artificial life forms began making their own history. Similar individuals came together in groups, states fought wars and engaged in political machinations. They advanced their civilization and designed their own world as if it was their own. It's said that watching it was like watching human history itself.
"The price was that as their history advanced the level of information being generated rose, and time began to move more slowly. The computers had a limit to their processing ability.
"The first three billion years from the creation of the earth had only taken a half a year on the computer. But the speed began to slow as life began to emerge, and especially after it evolved into intelligent forms on a level with human beings. At the end it took the computers two or three years to advance the Loop a few centuries.
"The Loop, as a virtual world, was recognizable and knowable to the staff of the research centre. But it was utterly impossible for the sentient beings within the Loop to know us, their creators. To them, I imagine we were God Himself. As long as they were within the Loop, they were unable to comprehend how their world worked. The only thing that would have enabled comprehension was for them to get outside of their world.
"The progress of their civilization was marvellous. Their cities contained entertainment districts with flashing neon signs; they overflowed with sound and colour. All manner of media sprang up, dramatically broadening the reach of information, and people lived lives filled with the pleasures of the musical and verbal arts. Their lives were no different from ours by this point. They had artists just like Mozart or da Vinci, who played the same historical role as in reality, adding vibrancy to their culture. Their world was beautiful, but at the same time it began to have an air of decadence. Some of our staff members were enraptured, while others began to whisper forebodings of doom. There were signs all over the place that something unpredicted was about to happen.
"And the premonitions were right on target. The Loop, the entire living world, began to turn cancerous…"
Amano paused there for a breath, and to bring his coffee cup to his lips. It was empty and he knew it; the gesture was simply something to do with his hands. Had he been a smoker, he would have lit a cigarette at this point.
"What do you mean, turned cancerous?"
Amano shrugged slightly and lifted his hands in a pose of surrender. "The Loop biosphere came to be monopolized by identical genes. It lost diversity and began moving toward extinction."
Kaoru looked at the ceiling, as was his habit. He tried to make sense of what Amano had told him.
They had created a three-dimensional virtual space inside an ultrafast supercomputer system, a world that didn't exist in reality, and they'd named this space the Loop. The space itself was large enough that from the point of view of the life forms within it, it might as well be considered an infinite universe. The experimenters had established conditions of soil, topography, and physics so that the world would be just like the primeval earth. Mathematically speaking, it was a world supported by the same formulas and theories as the real world. Not only the speed of gravitational acceleration and the boiling temperature of water, but the very landscape was identical to that of earth.
Carbon, hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, sodium, oxygen, magnesium, calcium, iron, and the rest of the 111 elements had been deposited, each according to its properties. Rules were laid down so that they would act exactly as they did in the universe enveloping the earth: two hydrogen atoms (H(2)) and one oxygen atom (O) when combined would form a water molecule (H(2)O), and this would react with a nitrogen molecule (N(2)) to form ammonia (NH(3)).
Fundamentally, no reason exists in the world to explain why two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, when combined, have to form water: the rules are simply set up that way. And who made the rules? If you had to give it a name, it would be God.
The fact that evolution in the Loop proceeded exactly as it had in the real world was suspected to be due to the first primitive RNA life form that had been caused to be born. Or, rather, since the physical conditions of the Loop had been precisely modelled on those of the real world, evolution there probably couldn't help but follow the path it had already followed in the real world.
One of the purposes of the Loop was to enable researchers to trace the actual process of evolution. If evolution in the Loop followed the same path as it did in reality, then the results of the Loop's evolution would predict the future of the real world.
Suddenly chills ran along Kaoru's spine. The Loop predicted the future of life on earth. All life would turn cancerous.
What in the world? That's exactly what's happening now.
Cancer cells reproduced with no respect for persons, they were sexless, and they were immortal to boot. At the moment there were only a few million victims worldwide, but there was always the chance that the numbers would shoot up due to some mutation or population explosion in the MHC virus. It would be the same as what had happened in the Loop. Was it just a coincidence? Or was the Loop in fact an accurate prediction of the future?
As he sat before Kaoru, Amano was not about to assert a scientific connection between the results of the Loop and reality. And it was no wonder. How many people would believe such a ridiculous story?
Kaoru struggled to mask his shock with rationality as he asked, "What was the cause? Why did the Loop's life forms turn cancerous?"
Amano answered him in clipped tones. "That's easy. It was the appearance of the ring virus. But that emerged in a way we simply don't understand, as if by magic."
"You're saying that a single virus managed to influence all of the patterns in the Loop?"
"Yes. It shouldn't be that hard to believe. Not when a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world can affect the weather on the other."
The butterfly effect. Kaoru guessed it wasn't all that strange th
at the ring virus could change the fate of the Loop world. What he didn't understand was why it had appeared.
"Are there any theories as to the emergence of the ring virus?"
"Theories?"
"You know, like maybe one of the staff members introduced it into the program."
"Security was perfect."
"Well, maybe it was a computer virus."
"That's not impossible. In fact, they say most people took that view."
Something appeared to be bothering Amano; he seemed to sink into thought.
"Excuse me, but is there anybody from the original staff I can contact?"
Amano smiled wanly. "I'm the only survivor," he said, then hurriedly put a hand over his mouth. Hideyuki Futami wasn't dead yet. Kaoru didn't let it bother him, but laughed bitterly.
Amano quickly added, "My participation in the project was limited to the very final stage, just before it was shut down. You'd be better off consulting the father of the whole project, Cristoph Eliot, but he's hidden himself away…" Amano fixed Kaoru with a meaningful gaze and then continued. "Oh, I do know of one person who was fairly close to the centre of the project. An American researcher. Supposedly an odd duck-he had problems with teamwork."
"Do you know his name?"
"Wait a moment," Amano said, and stepped out of the room. When he returned, several minutes later, it was with a file under his arm. He flipped through it. "Ah, there it is," he muttered, glancing up at Kaoru without raising his head. "Kenneth Rothman."
Kaoru repeated the name. He was an old friend of his father's. He'd visited five years ago: there were photographs of Rothman and members of the family standing on their balcony overlooking Tokyo Bay. Rothman had been in Japan to speak at a conference, and Kaoru's father had put him up for several days.
Those days were deeply etched in Kaoru's memory. Rothman's appearance left quite an impression, from his thin goateed face to the gold chains that flashed around his neck and wrists; his manner, too, was impressive, from the cynical smile he'd flash during scientific discussions to the cutting logic with which he'd announce his pessimistic analyses of the future.