Mother's Rosary

by Reki Kawahara

  “Medi…cuboid?” Asuna asked, turning the unfamiliar term over in her head. She opened the scrap of paper.

  Inside, it read: Yokohama Kohoku General Hospital, along with an address.

  Asuna passed through the pristinely clean double set of automatic doors and into the amply lit entrance, where she was greeted by the familiar scent of disinfectant.

  She passed through the lobby full of mothers with small children and elderly patients in electric wheelchairs on her way to the reception desk.

  On the form next to the window, she entered her name and address, but stopped at the spot asking for the name of the patient she wanted to visit. All Asuna knew was the name “Yuuki,” and she didn’t even know if that was the girl’s real name. Kazuto had said that even if she was there, there was no guarantee Asuna could confirm that or be able to see her. But after coming this far, she couldn’t possibly give up. She steeled her courage and took the sheet to the counter.

  A nurse in a white uniform was on her computer terminal on the other side of the desk. She looked up as Asuna approached. “Are you here for a visit?” she asked, smiling.

  Asuna nodded awkwardly. She handed over the form, still incomplete, and said, “Um…I want to meet someone, but I don’t know her name.”

  “Pardon?” the nurse asked, her eyebrows drawn together in suspicion.

  “I think it’s a girl around age fifteen, and her first name might be ‘Yuuki,’ but it also might not.”

  “We have very many inpatients here, so I’m afraid that’s not enough to narrow it down.”

  “Um…I believe she might be here undergoing a Medicuboid test.”

  “Patient privacy rights means that we can’t…”

  Further back behind the counter, an older nurse looked up and stared at Asuna. She leaned over and whispered something into the ear of the nurse who was providing reception.

  The original blinked in surprise and turned back to Asuna. In a more formal tone, she awkwardly asked, “Pardon me, but what is your name?”

  “Uh, er, my name is Asuna Yuuki.”

  She slid the form over the desk. The nurse took the sheet, glanced at it, and handed it to her coworker.

  “May I see some form of identification?”

  “O-of course.”

  She pulled her wallet out of her coat pocket and extracted her student ID. The nurse closely compared the photo on the card to Asuna’s face, then nodded with satisfaction and asked her to wait while she picked up the nearby phone.

  After a few short comments on the internal line, she told Asuna, “Dr. Kurahashi will see you in Internal Medicine Two. Go to the fourth floor in the front elevator, then proceed to the right and give this to the receptionist there.”

  The tray she held out contained Asuna’s ID and a silver pass card. Asuna picked them up and bowed.

  She ended up waiting at the fourth-floor reception bench for nearly ten minutes before she noticed someone in white rushing over to her.

  “Hi! I’m sorry, forgive me. My apologies for the wait,” said the small, plump doctor, who looked to be in his early thirties. His hair was parted to the side over his gleaming forehead, and he wore thick-rimmed glasses.

  Asuna quickly got to her feet and bowed deeply. “N-not at all! I’m sorry to just show up out of the blue like this. I can wait as long as you need me to.”

  “No, it’s perfectly all right. I’m off duty this afternoon. So you are, um, Asuna Yuuki, yes?” he said, his drooping eyes narrowing slightly as he smiled.

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Well, my name is Kurahashi. I’m Miss Konno’s physician. I’m glad you’ve come to visit.”

  “Miss…Konno?”

  “Ah. Her full name is Yuuki Konno. ‘Yuuki’ is written with the characters for ‘cotton’ and ‘season.’ I usually just call her Yuuki…She’s been talking all about you every day, Miss Asuna. Oh, forgive me for being forward. I’m just used to hearing your name.”

  “No, Asuna is fine,” she reassured him, beaming.

  Dr. Kurahashi smiled shyly and pointed toward the elevator. “Why don’t we go visit the lounge up above, rather than stand around here?”

  They ended up sitting across from each other in the back of a wide-open waiting room. There was a nice view of the spacious hospital lot and the verdant area surrounding it through the large glass window. There were few people around, so the only disturbance to the room’s air was the gentle humming of the air-conditioning.

  Asuna wasn’t sure which of the many questions she ought to ask first. Instead, it was Dr. Kurahashi who broke the silence.

  “I understand you met Yuuki in a VR world, Asuna? Did she tell you about this hospital?”

  “Er, no…She didn’t, actually…”

  “Ahh. I’m surprised you found us, then. In fact, Yuuki said that someone named Asuna Yuuki might be coming to visit her and to let the front desk know, so we were surprised to learn that she hadn’t told you. I figured you wouldn’t be able to find the place, so when they just called from downstairs a few minutes ago, it was quite a shock to me.”

  “Um…did Yuuki tell you much about me?” Asuna asked, to which the doctor nodded eagerly.

  “Oh, indeed. The last few days, she hasn’t spoken about anything else during my visits. However, every time she spoke to me about you, she always cried at the end. She’s never been the type to cry about her own issues.”

  “But…wh-why…?”

  “She wanted to be better friends, but she couldn’t; she wanted to see you, but she couldn’t. I’ll admit, I can understand that feeling…”

  For the first time, Dr. Kurahashi’s face was pained. Asuna took a deep breath and summoned her courage to ask, “Yuuki and her friends said the same thing to me in the VR world before we broke apart. Why is that? Why can’t she see me?”

  She leaned forward, trying to avoid thinking about the steadily growing suspicion inside of her ever since she saw the word hospital on the note. Dr. Kurahashi looked down at his hands atop the table. Eventually, he said quietly, “To explain that, I need to start with the Medicuboid first. You are an AmuSphere user, I assume?”

  “Er…yes, that’s right.”

  The young doctor nodded and looked up. To her surprise, he said, “While it might not be fair to say this to you, it pains me to no end that full-dive technology was developed solely for entertainment purposes.”

  “Huh…?”

  “The government ought to have put in the money and developed that tech for medical research. We would be a full year or two ahead of where we are now.”

  This direction of the conversation took Asuna by surprise. The doctor held up a finger and continued. “Just think about it. Imagine how useful the AmuSphere could be in a medical context. To people who are sight- or hearing-impaired, that machine is a gift from God. Unfortunately, those with hereditary brain damage are excluded, but consider anyone with nerve damage between the eyes and the nervous system. With the AmuSphere, that information goes straight to the processing center instead. The same applies to hearing. People who have lived their lives without the concept of light or sound can now experience the world the way it should be experienced, just by using that machine.”

  Asuna nodded at Dr. Kurahashi’s impassioned explanation. The use of the AmuSphere in this field wasn’t a recent development. Once the headgear was made even smaller and had its own special lenses, the blind and deaf would be able to function exactly as everyone else in society.

  “And it’s not just signal reception that it can help with. The AmuSphere can also cancel bodily signals,” he said, tapping the base of his neck. “By sending an electric pulse here, you can temporarily paralyze the nerves, producing the same effect as full-body anesthesia. So using an AmuSphere during an operation can also remove the remote chance of something going wrong with the anesthetic.”

  Asuna was surprised to find herself engrossed in the doctor’s stories. But something occurred to her. Careful to mind her words around
the medical expert, she timidly said, “But…isn’t that impossible? The AmuSphere’s interrupting signals are intentionally limited. I don’t think an AmuSphere—or even the original NerveGear—could block out the pain of a doctor’s scalpel…And even if you canceled out the spinal column signals, the nerves are still alive, so they’d react, right…?”

  “Y-yes…that’s true,” Dr. Kurahashi said, startled at her knowledge. He recovered quickly and nodded several times. “No, that’s absolutely true. The AmuSphere has low pulse output and a power-saving CPU, so there’s a sharp limit on its processing power. It’s fine for making a full dive into a Virtual Reality space, but the specs aren’t up to the level necessary to provide Augmented Reality with the combination of a lens and the physical world. So for the moment, the biggest rush in government development is for the Medicuboid: the world’s first medical-use full-dive device.”

  “Medi…cuboid,” Asuna said, rolling the word on her tongue. She recognized that it had to be a combination of medical and cuboid.

  The doctor grinned and continued. “It’s still just a codename. Essentially, it boosts the AmuSphere’s output, multiplies the density of the pulse-generating nodes, and increases processing speed. This is embedded into the bed so that it can cover the entire spine and not just the brain. It looks just like a white box…but if they can be built practically and put into use at hospitals all over, it will have a dramatic effect on medicine. Anesthesia will be unnecessary in nearly all operations, and we might even be able to communicate with patients suffering from locked-in syndrome.”

  “Locked-in…?”

  “It’s also known as a pseudocoma. The conscious, thinking parts of the brain are intact and functioning, but there’s something wrong with the parts that control the body, so they cannot express their own will. The Medicuboid can connect to the deepest parts of the brain, so even someone in a state of paralysis might be able to rejoin society through the use of VR.”

  “I see…so this really is a ‘machine of dreams’ in the truest sense…even more than the AmuSphere built for playing games,” Asuna murmured. But although Dr. Kurahashi had just been speaking of lofty dreams, this comment seemed to bring him back to reality. He looked downcast, removed his glasses, and sighed heavily.

  With a little shake of his head, he smiled sadly. “Yes, that’s it. A machine of dreams. But…machines have a limit, of course. One of the areas in which the Medicuboid is most highly anticipated is…terminal care.”

  “Terminal care…” Asuna repeated, unfamiliar with the English term.

  “It’s also known as hospice care,” the doctor explained softly. Asuna felt as though she’d been doused with freezing water. She gaped, her eyes wide. Dr. Kurahashi put his glasses back on with a kindly smile. “Later on, you might wish that you had stopped listening here. No one will criticize you for making that choice now. Yuuki and her friends really are thinking of you when they said this.”

  But Asuna didn’t hesitate. She was ready to face whatever reality had in store, and she felt she had a duty to do it. She looked up and said, “No…please continue. This is why I came here.”

  “I see,” Dr. Kurahashi said, smiling again and nodding. “Yuuki told me that if you desired to know, I could tell you everything about her. Her hospital room is on the top floor of the center ward. It’s a long hike, so we can talk as we go.”

  As she walked after the doctor, out of the lounge and toward the elevator, Asuna felt the same term repeating over and over in her head.

  Terminal care. She felt that she had a very clear and simple idea of what that meant, but she didn’t want to think that they would have such a direct term to refer to that “final” stage of life.

  The only thing she knew for certain was that she needed to face and accept the truth that would be revealed to her soon. Yuuki allowed her to come into contact with her reality because she believed that Asuna could handle it.

  In the lobby of the center ward building, there were three elevators. The rightmost said STAFF ONLY. The doctor ran the card he hung around his neck over the panel, and the door binged open at once.

  They entered the box full of white glow, and the elevator began to ascend with almost no sound or sense of acceleration.

  “Have you ever heard of the term window period?” Dr. Kurahashi suddenly asked. Asuna blinked and consulted her memory index.

  “I believe…I learned that one in health class. Does it have something to do with virus…infections?”

  “That’s right. When a person is suspected of contracting a viral infection, you usually run a blood test. There’s an antibody test, where you test the blood with antibodies that will react to the virus, and there’s a more sensitive option called a NAT test that amplifies the virus’s DNA and RNA. Even with the more powerful NAT test, it cannot detect a virus within the first ten days of infection. That time span is called the window period.”

  Dr. Kurahashi paused. They felt a very slight slowdown, and the door binged open again. The twelfth (and top) floor was prohibited to general visitors, and there was an imposing gateway right outside the elevator. The doctor ran his card over another sensor, then placed his palm on a panel for a biometric reading. The panel beeped, and the metal barricade bar sank out of the way. He motioned Asuna through the gate.

  Unlike the lower floors, there were no windows in sight. It was just a long hallway with white panels and a left-right intersection up ahead.

  Dr. Kurahashi took the lead again and turned down the left branch. The inorganic hallway, lit by soft white lights, continued on endlessly. They passed a few nurses dressed in white, but there was otherwise no hint of sound from the outside world.

  “The existence of this window period inevitably gives rise to a certain phenomenon,” the doctor said abruptly, continuing his earlier explanation, “and that is, the contamination of the transfusion liquid we collect through blood drives. Of course, the likelihood is very small. The probability of catching a virus from a single transfusion has to be one in hundreds of thousands. But modern medical science is unable to reduce that chance to zero.”

  He sighed faintly. Asuna felt a hint of helplessness in his mannerism.

  “Yuuki was born in May of 2011. It was a difficult birth, and she had to be delivered by C-section. During the operation…it was unlabeled in the records, but there was some kind of accident that resulted in significant blood loss, requiring an emergency transfusion. And sadly, the blood that was used turned out to be contaminated with a virus.”

  “…!”

  Asuna held her breath. The doctor glanced at her for an instant, then turned away and continued. “We don’t know for certain at this point, but Yuuki was infected either at birth or shortly thereafter. Her father was infected within the month. The infection wasn’t detected until September, via a post-transfusion blood test her mother received. At that point…it was too late for the entire family…”

  He sighed heavily and came to a halt. There was a sliding door on the right wall, with a metal panel built into the wall next to it. The plate inserted there carried the imposing title of First Special Instrument Room.

  The doctor slid his card through the slit below the panel. The machine binged and the door slid open with a hiss.

  Asuna followed Dr. Kurahashi through the door, grappling with a pain like her chest was being wrung by a giant set of hands. The room was oddly long and narrow. On the far wall ahead was another door like the one they’d just passed through, and the right wall was lined with a number of consoles and monitors. The left wall was covered with an enormous horizontal window, but the glass was black, the space beyond invisible to her.

  “The room on the other side of the glass is sterilized by air control systems, so I’m afraid you can’t go in there,” he said, approaching the black window and activating the control panel below it. The window hummed a bit, the dark color rapidly draining away until it was transparent enough to reveal the other side.

  It was a small room. Actua
lly, in terms of measurements, it was large. It only looked small because the space was crammed full of various machines. Some were tall, some were short, some were simple boxes, and some were rather complex. So it took her a little time before she noticed the gel bed at the center of the room.

  Asuna got as close to the glass as she could, squinting at the bed. There was a small figure half sunken in to the blue gel. It was covered by a white sheet up to the chest, but the bare shoulders poking out above it were painfully thin. A number of tubes ran to the figure’s throat and arms, connecting them to the array of machinery.

  She couldn’t see the face of the person on the bed directly. It was covered by a white cube, built into the bed, that swallowed almost her entire head inside of it. All she could see were thin, colorless lips and a pointed chin. There was a side monitor on the cube pointing toward them, shifting with a number of colored readouts. Above the monitor was a simple logo reading Medicuboid.

  “…Yuuki…?” Asuna rasped. At last, she had found Yuuki in real life. But now that she was almost there, the last several feet were separated by a thick glass wall that could never be breached.

  Without turning to him, Asuna timidly, hesitantly asked, “Doctor…what does Yuuki have…?”

  His answer was short, but unbearably heavy.

  “Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome…She has AIDS.”

  9

  From the moment she saw the enormous hospital, Asuna was expecting something like this, the possibility that Yuuki was suffering from some terrible condition. But she couldn’t prevent herself from gasping when she heard the name from the doctor’s mouth. She stared through the glass at the prone Yuuki, feeling her body freeze solid.

  This was the reality of it all? Both her reason and emotions refused to accept that the perpetually lively, powerful Yuuki was an isolated existence surrounded by imposing medical machinery.

  I was a fool who didn’t know anything and never tried to, a voice screamed inside of her. Now she knew the meaning of the tears Yuuki shed just before she vanished. They meant…