Loop

by Kōji Suzuki

  The bluish white lights connected into tangled thread work 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.

  His body was cast into the gravity-less universe. He felt as if he were floating up out of the tank of water and into the vortex of light. His mind wandered from his body, becoming clearer all the time.

  Kaoru was entering the final stage now. Every second brought him closer to the end of this journey which had begun as a trip toward a point in the desert and had become a pilgrimage to death and rebirth.

  The images were slipped into his brain, images composed of rough particles. Mosaic-like images, with indistinct edges. Try as he might he could no longer summon smooth, natural images as before. There wasn't enough information to analyze properly.

  The neutrino bombardment intensified. His molecular structure began to take digital shape. As its resolution increased, the mosaic filter was removed from the images in his brain. Now they were reproduced before his mind's eye as perfectly natural images.

  Vision was back to normal now. He thought he glimpsed, at the far end of a corridor of light, a Hades indistinguishable from the here-and-now.

  His journey ended. His body disappeared from the real world and was reborn into the Loop.

  The procedure had concluded. The tank in which Kaoru had been floating now contained no human form. Instead it held the liquefied remains of his destroyed cells. As his ego had melted into the water, so too had his body broken down into its smallest components, dissolving into the purified water. The water was no longer pure. Thanks to the bluish white light it didn't look bloody, but it was a noticeably thicker liquid than before.

  His body was defunct. But Kaoru's consciousness still existed. Neutrinos had captured the state of his brain on the brink of death, the positions of his synapses and neurons, chemical reactions in mid-reaction, and had recreated them all digitally.

  He was not to be reconstructed directly from this final blueprint. Rather, he would be reborn according to the information captured by the NSCS. The growth process would be carefully controlled, and after approximately a week of Loop time, the infant would grow to the physical state the subject had been in when he'd entered the NSCS. He should regain his original consciousness, as well.

  Kaoru had a pretty good idea where he was now. Inside a womb. A real one, not a metaphorical one. He was inside a virgin womb, bathed in amniotic fluid.

  He could hear his mother's heartbeat as if over a great distance. The sound echoed in the dark, sealed sphere, getting louder and louder.

  Kaoru did not know whose womb he was in, but he knew he was about to be born.

  He stretched out his body, filled with a desire to get out into the world.

  The light was too bright: it hurt his eyes. But this wasn't the bluish flickering anymore. The light was steady and white, artificial. It seemed to come from overhead fluorescent light fixtures, the kind you find in hospitals.

  In the light, he could see his umbilical cord, the grotesque thread that alone connected him to the mother. He reached out a hand and tried to sever it himself, and let forth a loud cry. A cry just like any normal baby's.

  "Wah! Wah!"

  It was the beginning of a new journey.

  PART V - ADVENT

  1

  The day was so clear it was hard to believe it was the rainy season. Walking along on the embankment that separated the beach from the road, he set his sights on the horizon: the other side of the bay was obscured in haze. A sea wall extended out from the beach; several anglers stood on it, lazily casting their lines into the sea. It was still early in the summer, so there were no bathers yet, but a couple of families had spread sheets on the sand and were picnicking.

  Gazing at this peaceful seaside scene he could forget that this was only a virtual reality. Six months had elapsed since his rebirth into the Loop. He'd adapted to this world completely, body and mind.

  The previous October, Ryuji Takayama had died, once. His death had been confirmed, and an autopsy had been performed by a friend of his from medical school, Mitsuo Ando. Notwithstanding that, in January of this year Takayama had awoken from his three-month sleep, due to the combined efforts of Ando, his pathologist colleague Miyashita, and others. He had crawled out of the womb of a maiden named Sadako Yamamura, had torn the umbilical cord with his own hands, and in just a week's time he'd grown into the body Kaoru had possessed when he'd entered the neutrino scanner. Ando and Miyashita, unaware that the Loop had been created by a higher power, could not be expected to understand the true mechanism behind Takayama's resurrection. The three months Takayama had been dead corresponded to the twenty years of Kaoru's lifetime. And now the consciousness that had once been Kaoru had taken on Takayama's flesh in order to live in the Loop.

  His living conditions were rather inconvenient-a dead man couldn't very well walk around in public-but he was in a perfect environment for research. Takayama had spent most of half a year in a laboratory lent him by Miyashita, researching the virus. This meant unravelling one by one the clues hidden within his own cells. It had taken half a year to finish the greater part of the research and to perfect a vaccine for the ring virus.

  This was his first time out in a long while. He could feel the gentle wind cleansing his heart as it played over his skin. In his days as Kaoru he'd enjoyed the night-time breeze on the balcony of their apartment; evidently his tastes hadn't changed.

  He could see the small form of a boy beyond the picnickers, standing where the waves petered out. The boy would creep hesitantly up to the water, and then dash back so as not to get his feet wet. Then he crouched and started digging a hole and making a sand pile. His body was bare from the waist up, and below the waist he wore a swimsuit, making his aversion to the water all the more conspicuous. His movements were quite careful. The boy wore a tight bikini-type swim-suit, and no swim cap.

  The watcher thought about the first time he'd seen Reiko, at the pool. He remembered the queer impression her son Ryoji had made with his plaid shorts, not meant for swimming, and his swim cap from which not one strand of hair poked out. The touch of Reiko's skin, the last words they'd exchanged-these images and sounds remained clear in his memory. What was she doing now?

  He was walking along the narrow embankment with a plastic bag full of canned drinks, carefully balancing so as not to fall onto the sand or the road. Unlike the ridge he'd walked in the desert, the embankment was only a couple of feet wide. As he walked he felt as though he were traversing the thin, fragile boundary between this world and the next.

  The boy ran away from the waves toward the embankment-he was heading toward a man seated on the embankment about a hundred yards ahead. The seated man was the boy's father, the man he himself had come to talk to.

  The man had eyes only for his son, and so was utterly unprepared for the visitor. Thinking it best not to startle him, Ryuji Takayama called out his name.

  "Hey, Ando!"

  Hearing his name called, the man looked up and all around. Then he caught sight of Takayama walking toward him, and his expression became one of dumb amazement.

  "Hey, long time no see."

  Takayama hadn't had any contact with Ando these six months. After assisting in Takayama's rebirth, Ando had left the university. He'd disappeared.

  Takayama sat down next to Ando and leaned closer so that their shoulders touched. But Ando quite openly avoided meeting his eyes, instead returning his gaze to his son, still running across the beach toward him.

  Nonplussed, Takayama took a beverage out of the bag he carried and quickly drank it down. Then he took another can out and offered it to Ando. "Thirsty?"

  Ando accepted the can silently and popped the pull ring, still not looking at Takayama.

  "How did you know I was here?" Ando asked calmly.

  Takaya
ma simply said, "Miyashita told me." Knowing that today was the anniversary of Ando's son's death, Miyashita had guessed that this was where he'd be, and he'd told Takayama.

  A curious thing it was, though, that anniversary. Two years ago today, at this very spot, Ando's son had drowned, and yet now here the boy was. Forgetting his own situation for a moment, Takayama could not help but smile.

  "What do you want?" Ando asked, in a voice thick with tension. He didn't seem very happy to see Takayama. Takayama had made a considerable effort to get here-he'd had to sneak out of the lab, then take a train and a bus. He felt he deserved a bit warmer a welcome. There seemed to be a misunderstanding of some kind.

  Eliot had told him that everything was arranged for his rebirth. In any world, the idea of a dead man coming back to life would be pretty hard to accept. The stage would have to be set.

  And set it Eliot had. He'd singled out Ando as someone who could be of use and sent him hints in code, all so he could arrange in as plausible a way as possible for Takayama's rebirth. Bringing Ando's dead son back to life was bait to get him to assist in bringing Takayama back.

  In the case of Ando's son, an inhabitant of the Loop, there was no need to go through a neutrino scan. It was an intra-Loop transfer, a simple matter of reconstituting the boy's genetic information.

  The Loop had been reset, six months ago, to the point where its cancerization had been triggered, and then restarted. Takayama's advent had been timed with the utmost care so as to enable him to conquer the calamity whose seeds had been sown. If he were to do nothing, the Loop would proceed along the same path, turning cancerous. He needed to construct for it a new history, make a new channel for its dammed-up waters. If he succeeded, the world he'd lived in before, too, would retain its genetic diversity.

  "Listen, I'm grateful to you, I really am. You worked out just as I expected."

  Takayama was indeed grateful to Ando. Just before coming to the Loop, he'd committed Takayama's life to memory. He knew of his school days with Ando, and he knew of Ando's brilliance. Without the help of such a friend, he doubted he ever would have been able to make his entrance in such a reasonable way as via virgin birth.

  But Ando, it seemed, simply felt used. Or worse-maybe he suspected Takayama of being in league with Sadako Yamamura, of coming back in order to destroy the world.

  If that was what Ando thought, then Takayama had no way to defend himself. The one thing he couldn't do was reveal his true identity. Sometimes it depressed Takayama to think of the lonely life that awaited him. The only thing that kept him going was the desire that he kept hidden in his breast.

  Down by the water's edge again, the boy stood up and waved at Ando. Ando returned his signal, and the boy came closer, kicking sand as he came.

  "Daddy, I'm thirsty!" Ando offered his son the beverage that Takayama had given him. The boy took it and drank it down.

  Takayama watched the boy's pale throat. He could almost see the cool liquid coursing down the little throat. Living, moving flesh and blood, brought back to life by only slightly different methods. A product of the same womb-a brother, almost.

  "Want another one?" Takayama said, fishing around in his bag.

  "Nope," the boy said to Takayama, then turned to his father, raising the half-finished can as high as his head. "Can I have the rest?"

  "Sure, drink up." The boy went back to the water's edge, swilling the can. Takayama figured the boy wanted to play with the can after it was empty, maybe fill it with sand. Ando yelled after him. "Takanori!"

  The boy stopped and turned around. "What, Daddy?"

  "Don't go in the water yet, okay?"

  The boy grinned in acknowledgement, and turned his back to him again.

  The child was still afraid of the sea-he remembered drowning. He'd have to overcome that fear before he could get on with his long life.

  "Cute kid," Takayama said. He was thinking of his own child, still growing, no doubt, inside of Reiko.

  Ando ignored his comment, instead saying, "Tell me something. What's going to happen to the world now?" He glared at Takayama as if to say, You ought to know.

  And he did know. Or at least, he had a better idea of it than Ando did. But he could never tell him.

  "What do you think's going to happen to it?"

  Ando answered by sketching out a future that closely resembled the final cancerization of the Loop. The ring virus would spread throughout the world. The videotape would transform itself into various forms of media, and would itself spread worldwide. Women who came into contact with it while ovulating would give birth to children with the same genetic makeup as Sadako Yamamura; everyone else would be eliminated. The same would happen with men: a very few on whom the new media depended would survive, while the rest would be destroyed. You didn't have to be a doctor to predict the results of this. All life would be assimilated to a single genetic pattern: Sadako.

  "And you're okay with all that?"

  Ando's gaze was brimming with animosity. He definitely misunderstood Takayama.

  Without changing his expression, Takayama reached into his pocket and pulled out an ampoule. He handed it to Ando. "I want you to have this."

  "What's this?"

  "A vaccine."

  "A vaccine?" Ando accepted the tiny glass vial and examined it carefully.

  After six months of research, Takayama had succeeded in developing a vaccine for the ring virus, based on hints found within his own cells. He'd only just perfected it. Animal trials showed it to be effective.

  "Take that and it'll take care of the virus. Your worrying days are over."

  "Did you come all the way here just to give me this?"

  "What, can't a guy go to the beach once in a while?" Takayama gave an embarrassed laugh. Ando's expression seemed to soften a little.

  As he put the vial in his breast pocket, Ando repeated his earlier question, but more calmly this time. "Can't you tell me what's going to happen?"

  "I don't know." Takayama's reply was blunt.

  "Don't give me that. Together you and Sadako are going to redesign the world and everything that lives in it-aren't you?"

  At that, Takayama had to laugh. There was no point in staying here any longer. He got to his feet, muttering, "Well, I guess I'll be off now."

  "Are you leaving?" Ando looked up at him from where he sat on the embankment.

  "It's about time I took off. What are you going to do now?"

  "What can I do? I'll find a deserted island someplace out of the media's reach, and raise my son there."

  "That sounds like you. Me, though, I've got to see things through to the end. Once it's gone as far as it can go, who knows, maybe a will beyond human wisdom will exercise its power on us. Wouldn't want to miss that." Takayama was speaking vaguely on purpose, trying to say something without saying it. Relax. The world's not going to turn out like you think it will. It already did end like that, once, but this time it won't. I came back to see that it doesn’t.

  He started walking away along the embankment.

  "Bye, Ryuji. Say hi to Miyashita for me."

  Takayama stopped at the sound of Ando's voice.

  "Before I go, I want you to remember something. No matter what disaster strikes, we've got to meet it head on and overcome it. Only by accumulating that kind of experience can we change the world, you see. So… yeah, it'll be alright."

  Takayama waved and walked away. He was sure Ando hadn't understood. But that was okay. Someday he would.

  He glanced behind him from time to time as he heard Ando's voice and his son's.

  "Daddy, you promised, right?"

  "Yes, I did." Ando again told the boy what would happen once he overcame his fear of the water. "I'll take you to meet Mommy."

  Ando and his wife had separated over the boy's death.

  "Mommy's going to be so surprised."

  Listening to these scraps of conversation, Takayama imagined the Ando family's happy reunion.

  He was jealous. That was
something he'd never have.

  2

  He reviewed the longitude in his head, although he had no trouble remembering it exactly. The time, too. There was no way he could forget the appointment he'd made with Eliot.

  From the seaside town where he'd met Ando, Takayama headed due south, arriving at the appointed place slightly ahead of schedule. It was on a hillside with a nice view across the water to a cape. The gentle pine-covered slope continued right down to the water's edge.

  Takayama sat down on the grass and waited.

  June 27, 1991, 2:00 pm exactly, Loop time. That was what Eliot had told him. There was still a half hour to go.

  Six months had passed for Takayama since the Loop had been restarted, but time moved somewhat slower in Eliot's world. The Loop would be moving even faster if they'd been able to mobilize the same number of supercomputers as before, but they hadn't. As a result, the Loop would only move five or six years for every year the computers ran. Six months to Takayama would correspond to about a month where Eliot was.

  He'd made contact with his father and with Reiko just before going into the scanner. A month had elapsed for them since then. He'd made his crossing to this world without being able to explain things to them. They probably thought Kaoru was lost somewhere in the desert, when in fact, he'd disappeared completely.

  At the very least, there were things he still wanted to tell them. And how else could he fully explain his actions but with his own mouth, his own body?

  It was easy to call Takayama up on the computer monitors over there, a simple matter of specifying time and place. So he'd made Eliot promise to show his parents and Reiko that he was safe and sound.

  Takayama looked at his watch. Almost time.