Loop

by Kōji Suzuki

  "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.

  He hardly remembered the scenery from his hike along the ridge-the storm and what came after felt like events in a dream. When he'd huddled alone in the dark, had he been here, in the midst of this vastness? He gazed on it now as if for the first time, following with his eyes every wrinkle and furrow in the land. They reminded him, quite naturally, of the furrows on the surface of a brain. Kaoru's own brain was engraved with many memories, but its history was still comparatively short, only twenty years. Its origins, however, were utterly out of the ordinary. It had been born not of biological reproduction, but digital recomposition.

  In the distance he could see a yellowish river flowing in a near loop. A strange sight. A manifestation of the synchronicity between the real world and the virtual?

  He turned around, but there was no one there. Only the building housing the elevator that connected the underground laboratories to the surface, and next to that the heliport. A helicopter, painted gun-metal black, rested motionless on the heliport. This was the jet copter that had carried Kaoru's helpless body here after the storm.

  Midway between the elevator building and the heliport was a dark hole, the entrance to a huge limestone cave stretching deep into the earth. In the cavern was a vast bowl-shaped depression filled with clear water.

  Eliot had been telling the truth. Pointing to the ceiling and the floor, he'd spoken of a great layer of water above them and a great space beneath them. Both turned out to be actual.

  They'd dug down into the earth to a depth of three thousand feet, and there they'd found this spherical hollow space, six hundred feet in diameter, floating there like a bubble. The layer of clear water was like a shield, keeping external radiation from getting into the hollow space. The natural landscape had been put to good use in installing the Neutrino Scanning Capture System in its underground shrine.

  Kaoru still hadn't seen the apparatus, that machine that would decide his fate, be it the electric chair or… what?

  He'd spent nearly a week in those labs underground. Now, finally, he was getting his first look at the place from the outside. His wish to go to the surface had finally been granted. Evidently Eliot had been kind enough to admit that he wasn't about to run away or hide.

  The weather was calm. Kaoru was soaking up the afternoon rays after a week without sunlight. As long as he was in the sun, he was warm enough in just a T-shirt. He shifted his arms, still folded in front of him, rubbed his upper arms, and tried to pull his thoughts together, but it was no use. He couldn't even decide what there might be for him to decide. What was he to think of his life up to this point? There were no precedents to guide him. He was deeply troubled.

  It was easy enough to doubt Eliot. That might even be the simplest solution: just deny everything he said. After all, who would believe he'd been created from genetic information taken from a virtual reality program anyway? That was like denying his very existence. Maybe Eliot was simply making up a story because he wanted to experiment with the NSCS. Kaoru should deny him that: he ought to leave this mountain of his own free will, after cursing Eliot with curses the likes of which the world had never known. And then… then what? Kaoru didn't know. Certainly nothing pleasant remained for him. He was going to lose the ones he loved. All he'd have left would be regrets.

  He kept going back to the starting point. Monozygotic twins share the same genes and look virtually identical. If Kaoru and Takayama shared the same genes it would certainly explain their faces looking alike. Then there was the curious sensation Kaoru had experienced the first time he'd heard Takayama's voice directly, the same queer feeling he felt when he heard his own voice on a recording. So face and voice matched. But that alone was not sufficient proof. Those could be easily manipulated by computer.

  Kaoru had pointed this out to Eliot. As if he'd anticipated Kaoru's doubts, Eliot merely held out a satellite phone.

  "It's your father. I think you should talk to him."

  Kaoru took the receiver and heard his father's voice from where he lay in his hospital bed. And once he'd heard what his father had to say, Eliot's story began to seem credible at last.

  The most convenient way to raise Takayama's clone, it was decided, would be to choose one of the participants in the Loop project and have him raise the clone as his own child.

  At the time, Hideyuki and Machiko Futami had been married for four years. They had no children. In fact, a gynecologist had recently confirmed Machiko's infertility.

  But still they wanted a child. Eliot and his colleagues got wind of this, and through several intermediaries they approached Hideyuki about the possibility of adoption. Both Hideyuki and Machiko were receptive to the idea of bringing a newborn infant into their home and raising it as their own child.

  Events progressed swiftly, and soon Eliot, through a devious route, delivered to Hideyuki and Machiko the newborn Kaoru. They were told nothing about the child's birth or lineage, under the pretence of avoiding future trouble. There was no telling if they would have been willing to accept the child had they known he came from within the Loop.

  And so they brought Kaoru up lovingly as their own child, never telling him he was adopted.

  As they spoke, linked by the satellite phone, Kaoru could picture Hideyuki lying in bed, weakly grasping the receiver.

  "Kaoru?"

  It was a joy to hear his father's voice, though it was weaker than he remembered it.

  Kaoru and Hideyuki reported to each other on their recent doings. On hearing that his son was well, Hideyuki seemed happy. "I seem to be doing better myself lately," he said, although Kaoru had no way of knowing if it was true or not. Judging from his voice, it had to be a lie. He felt that his father's time was fast approaching.

  Then, calmly, off-handedly, Kaoru asked his father about his origins. Hideyuki was sincerely surprised at first that Kaoru had discovered he was adopted, but then he seemed to decide that the boy was bound to find out sooner or later, and proceeded to tell him honestly how things had been twenty years before.

  As he listened to his father's explanation, Kaoru had his eyes closed and said something like a prayer in his heart. Who had approached Hideyuki-where had he gotten Kaoru from?

  Kaoru's prayer was in vain. His father's explanation matched Eliot's in every detail.

  "Weren't you at all hesitant, Dad, to raise a child who wasn't carrying on your genes?" Kaoru asked quietly. Even if his mother was infertile, it wouldn't have been difficult at all to create a child who inherited their genes.

  "Whether or not you had our genes wasn't what mattered. Parent-child bonds come from being together, from how they act toward each other. Think about our relationship over the past twenty years. You're my son, Kaoru."

  These words etched themselves into Kaoru's cells.

  Kaoru said goodbye and broke the connection, feeling that he'd never speak to his father again.

  He watched Takayama's life over and over on the computer. As he went through episodes in the man's childhood when he displayed his rare tale
nt for science in general and math and physics in particular, Kaoru couldn't help but feel that they were the same person. Even his gestures when absorbed in a book or deep in thought were identical to Kaoru's.

  It was a strange experience to watch Takayama onscreen. Here was an individual with the same genetic makeup as Kaoru himself, growing up in a different environment-a different universe, no less. A man with a different personality from Kaoru, a different consciousness, but exactly the same features. An identical twin.

  Kaoru got to his feet and strolled toward the end of the ridge. A downward glance showed him the edge of a sheer cliff, at the bottom of which could be seen a stream in its snakelike course. Its surface was green, either from a trick of the light or from the composition of the dirt dissolved in its water. Even now, the river continued to carve out its canyon, bit by tiny bit.

  He realized he'd have to accept the facts. He was in this world because somebody had constructed him based on Ryuji Takayama's genetic information. It fit, and he'd better deal with it. He could deny it all he wanted, but he couldn't escape his fate.

  Kaoru was destined to return to the Loop.

  The wind had picked up. He took a step back from the edge of the cliff. It wouldn't do to be blown off the cliff and dashed on the floor of the canyon. That would mean the loss of valuable information-the end of two worlds.

  Eliot's plan was a devilish one. He had indeed seen twenty years into the future, just as he'd averred.

  Why exactly had Eliot felt the compulsion, twenty years ago, to grant Takayama's wish and bring his clone into the real world? Perhaps he'd seen it as an experiment in cloning, but more than that, it had to be because Eliot already had a clear vision of the NSCS. He'd already gotten the idea for a complete digitalization of a human being's molecular structure using the as-yet-unconstructed apparatus. Indeed, he'd already settled on a trial subject.

  Nobody could be expected to volunteer for neutrino scanning, but without a volunteer, the machine couldn't be tested. The days when test subjects could be drafted against their will were long gone. Without a young, healthy, willing volunteer, this elaborate apparatus would simply go to waste.

  Eliot put it best himself. "If we plucked somebody out of the Loop and kept him around long enough, then we'd have a legitimate reason for using the NSCS on him: to send him back. If he wanted to go home, we'd be in a position to send him there. Cloning is the only way to bring someone from the Loop into the real world, but things are different when it comes to sending someone from the real world into the Loop. Using the NSCS, we can reconstitute you inside the Loop as you are this very minute-your consciousness, your thoughts, your memories."

  If he wanted to go home.

  That was the condition, but that was also the rub. Why would he want that? He'd never see his father, his mother, or Reiko again. And his child… Kaoru had already planted his chromosomes inside Reiko's womb-he had a child on the way, via old-fashioned biological reproduction, and if he went into the Loop he'd never see the child's face.

  If that was the only factor, he'd never play along with Eliot's scientific game. Not a chance. His genes may have come from the virtual world, but at the moment he was very much alive in this one. Home? This was his home now. No matter what he'd been before, since his birth here he'd lived his own life, chosen his own course. He liked it here.

  But luck was conspiring against him. Kaoru was in a no-win situation.

  During the process of reconstituting Takayama, the ring virus had escaped, eventually mutating into the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus. That was a fact. The ring virus had been embedded in Takayama's genes, and sometime during the operation of the genome synthesizer, something had gone wrong: a fragment had become embedded in an intestinal bacterium. Which was not to say that the ring virus had been cleanly extracted from Takayama's genes, returning his DNA to its pristine, uninfected state. No, it was likely that the ring virus was still there, a part of him.

  As soon as Eliot told him this, Kaoru started to wonder. If this virus is embedded in my genes, why haven't I come down with MHC myself

  Not only had he never come down with the cancer, but every test he'd ever undergone for the virus came out negative.

  Eliot had an explanation for that. "Somewhere in the RNA-DNA transcription process, a mutation must have occurred, inserting a stop code. It didn't show up in tests. You see, the MHC virus causes a mutation in gene P53 of the infected cell. The virus itself has a telomerase sequence. It inserts the sequence TTAGGG into the DNA of the infected cell. This makes the cell immortal, but cancerous.

  "As soon as we realized that the MHC virus came from Takayama, we obtained a sample of your cells and started analyzing them. I hope you don't mind. You may remember an unexplained blood test a while back… In any case. We were surprised to find that the telomere sequence in your cells was not TTAGGG. It seems that in your case, although the MHC virus produces a telomerase and attaches the TTAGGG sequence to DNA ends, it's unstable and soon breaks down. Your cells' lifespan doesn't increase, but your cells don't turn cancerous. You may be a new type of human being, one with true immunity to the MHC virus."

  Eliot's explanation made a certain amount of sense to Kaoru. His immunity probably came from a slight discrepancy between Loop genes and real-world ones. All things considered, maybe that was only to be expected.

  As Eliot's words flashed through his brain, Kaoru thought he could see the course of his past life stretched out in the canyon below him, trailing a tail of light. The course that light would travel in the future seemed to have been foreordained.

  Kaoru wondered when the suggestion that he come here had first been implanted in his mind. He was ten when the gravitational anomaly map had made its way onto his computer screen, despite the fact that the information it contained was nowhere in the database he'd been using. Of course Eliot had sent it. No doubt he'd seen to it somehow that Kaoru come across the information on longevity zones, too. Eliot needed to keep Kaoru perpetually intrigued by this spot in the desert, but he couldn't be open about it. He had to continually feed Kaoru hints to keep his curiosity aroused. Eliot had allowed Kaoru to think that everything was his own discovery, one coincidence on top of another, while at the same time he'd carefully emphasized the mysterious possibility of salvation that this point in the desert seemed to offer them all.

  Kaoru was sure that Eliot had been behind his mother's stumbling across the right Indian legends, and the article about the man who'd miraculously recovered from cancer. Such stories had been on the increase over the last six months or so-no doubt Eliot had sent out a lot more clues than the few that Kaoru and his mother had picked up on. But even those had been enough: Kaoru was here now.

  He'd come here on his own, of his own free will, out of a sense of mission. That had been Eliot's ultimate requirement. The procedure wouldn't work if he'd captured Kaoru and brought him here by force. The NSCS would reproduce his exact mental state at the moment of scanning. If he'd been forced here, his mind would have been filled with fear and hostility, and those emotions would have gone with him. He'd need to go willingly, with a goal clearly in mind and a calm acceptance of his fate.

  "It's not my style to use force," Eliot had said, but Kaoru knew what that really meant. The project would fail if the participant was unwilling.

  Willingness and a sense of mission: Kaoru had showed up with exactly what Eliot required of him. And the carrot Eliot held out to him was quite enough to satisfy that sense of mission.

  "The key to conquering the MHC virus is within you. Unless we can analyze your genome in three dimensions, your mitochondria, your metabolic cycle, your secretion factors, we're not going to be able to solve this. Simply analyzing your DNA sequence isn't enough. We need to digitize your entire body. We think that a special gene insertion method might prove to be a powerful treatment, but in order to understand the full effects of insertion, we need to run detailed simulations, and we need data on you for that. Do you understand what this means? Th
e things we learn from you will have immediate application. Your father, your mother, your lover will be the first ones to benefit. It's only proper that you be rewarded for laying your life on the line."

  Eliot's expression was earnest as he offered this promise.

  The longevity zone Kaoru had imagined he'd find out here in the desert had proved to be a mirage. Its only vestige was this decrepit old scientist, Kaoru reflected bitterly. But what Kaoru had hoped to find in his longevity zone- a cure for MHC, something to save the lives of his loved ones, something to prevent the entire spectrum of life on earth from falling victim to this cancer-that was about to be granted him, in a most unexpected way. As long as he was willing to trade his body for it…

  His body supposedly contained something that completely blocked the effects of the virus, and the best way to instantaneously and exactly lay bare that mechanism was to neutrino scan him. The things they learned would have immediate application. The terror of the cancer virus would disappear: life on earth would learn to coexist with the virus.

  Kaoru understood the logic behind it. There was no time to pursue this knowledge by traditional methods. Long before they arrived at a cure, time would have run out-at least for his father. His mother would probably lose her mind, while Reiko might kill herself and the baby inside her.

  He may have come from the virtual world, but he felt that this life had value, and was worth living. He'd been alive these twenty years-the hunger he'd satisfied with Reiko was proof of that. If it hadn't been for her, he might not have ever felt so alive.

  I exist, right here, right now.

  Beaming with confidence, he stood at the end of the ridge like one of those peculiar rocks visible on the horizon. He gathered all his courage and expressed it in a shout, as loud a yawp as he could make.