Birthday

by Kōji Suzuki

  "Well, I thought about it, but..."

  Hideyuki couldn't know that her son had killed himself there. She hesitated to voice such inauspicious memories right now, so she was left floundering for a reason.

  "You ought to have it here." Hideyuki was virtually pleading with her. He plainly wanted to see his grand-child as soon as he possibly could. He might have escaped a once-certain death, but he wouldn't be checking out of the hospital for quite some time yet. If she had the baby in the hospital, he could see it right away, and much more frequently after that.

  Reiko understood all this, and it shook her. A mere thirty minutes of conversation had told her all she needed to know about Hideyuki. Even if he hadn't been Kaoru's father, she would have liked the man.

  "I'll consider it."

  In reply Hideyuki stretched out his hands to clasp hers. His hands felt like Kaoru's.

  "Come back and visit again sometime. I'll be waiting."

  Reiko had a feeling of déjà vu. Everything from the way he greeted her to the passionate grip of his hands was the way it had been with Kaoru. Only, now, the roles of visitor and visited were reversed.

  As she closed the door behind her, she thought,

  Maybe I should have the baby here after all.

  5

  A month before she was due, Reiko began to slip back into melancholy. At night, alone in her room, her anxiety spiraled out of control, and she began to fear she was going mad. Winter was almost over. It was March now, nearly six months since Kaoru's departure.

  Her condo was too big for someone living alone.

  With its huge living room and three bedrooms, it had been almost too much even when she'd lived there with her husband and son. Now its vastness oppressed her. It symbolized emptiness itself; she couldn't bear it. Having lost her loved ones one after the other, she was now alone—not strictly speaking, but close enough—in her fight. The enemy was no longer the MHC virus, but an overwhelming solitude.

  The living room was crammed with luxurious fur-nishings, each one the product of her late entrepreneur husband's financial clout. They were without value now.

  Reiko sank down onto the couch, pulled her knees up, and buried her face in them, sobbing. She couldn't figure out what to do to make up for the desolation she felt inside, a desolation so powerful it made her tremble. Her life was a bleak landscape stretching out before her. Though she told herself to live, despair was always with her.

  I just want someone to talk to.

  That was her sincerest wish. She was sure Hideyuki would play that role for her splendidly, if she wanted him to. They shared the same emotional wounds, and for that reason, among others, he was sure to be a good conversation partner. She'd already done the paperwork to specify the university hospital as the place where she was going to have the baby. But Hideyuki alone wouldn't be able to stave off her sudden attacks of loneliness—to help her master the enemy that occupied these rooms.

  Reiko closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind of the spaciousness of the apartment. As she did so, a com-pact, edited version of her life played in her mind. A landscape made up of memorable events from her younger days—grade school, middle school, high school, college—floated before her mind's eye. An objectified view.

  She knew exactly why she was seeing these third-party visions of her past. The other day, organizing her closets, she'd found, quite by accident, a floppy disc full of digital images.

  They'd been assembled twelve years ago for display at her wedding. A rush of nostalgia came over her and she ended up looking through them again and again on the monitor. She'd provided the digital images herself, but her friends had edited them together into a light-hearted, even humorous version of her life. It had been ages since she'd looked at some of those pictures, and so, seeing what her friends had put together, she'd laughed out loud.

  The sequence had been displayed on a huge screen in the wedding hall. It began with scenes of her as a baby and ended with a shot of her at twenty-two standing side-by-side with her future husband. It was hardly a complete picture, just a simple sketch of her life from ages zero to twenty-two.

  Reiko paused on the last scene. It had been shot with a still camera, not a videocam; she and her future husband were standing with the ocean at their backs.

  Reiko wasn't facing the camera. Instead she was twisted to one side, sticking her belly out toward her husband.

  Why had she assumed such an awkward pose?

  Reiko recalled the conversation they'd been having when the photo was taken. They weren't married yet, but already she was carrying her husband's child. She had wanted to make it clear in the photo that the child was being born because he was wanted, that he would enter life welcomed. That was why she'd stuck her belly out and placed her hand on it for the camera. She'd made no effort to hide her pregnancy from the wedding guests, either. The master of ceremonies had paused on the image and announced to the crowd that twenty-two-year-old Reiko was carrying the groom's child, and the two of them had been bathed in cheers.

  When she closed her eyes she could hear the applause. She'd had everything back then. Her parents were still alive, the man who was to be her husband was at her side, and his child was growing within her. Ryoji.

  She hung her head, helpless in the flood of memories. Reflecting on the past never assuaged her desolation but only made it worse. It wasn't good for her to be alone. As long as she was, her mind would always be under the sway of images from the past.

  "That's it."

  She got up from the sofa and went into the room with her AV equipment in it.

  The room held a computer with a huge display.

  Amano had arranged it so that she could access and view the Loop from home.

  She could access it: this didn't mean she could communicate with entities living within it. Simply watching them unilaterally could end up aggravating her frustration, but she decided not to let Amano's gesture go to waste. She followed his instructions and tried to call up an image from the Loop.

  Amano must have preset it to focus on "Ryuji Takayama," because suddenly the monitor was filled with a close-up of Kaoru's face. Reiko cried out, remembering again how much she missed him.

  Without any context, she didn't know where he was. Kaoru was lying on a couch, asleep. The couch looked like it might have been in the corner of a laboratory, but when she backed up her perspective-point, she realized it was actually a hospital waiting room.

  In the Loop it was 1994. Three years had elapsed in it since the project's resumption. Having sacrificed himself and thereby contributed mightily to defeating the MHC virus in the real world, Kaoru had been reborn in the Loop as Ryuji Takayama to reverse cancerization there as well. He was thirty-seven now.

  The youth of twenty Reiko had loved had now, in the space of six months, become a strong man three years older than her. The added years showed in his face, but they had given him a charm appropriate for his age.

  She could see that even when he was asleep. But he was in a hospital, waiting for his name to be called. She wondered if there was something wrong with him physically.

  His name was called, and "Takayama" opened his eyes. He seemed to have momentarily forgotten where he was; it always happened when he dozed off. He glanced around him, and for a moment Reiko imagined that their gazes had met. Her chest tightened with joy.

  Unable to speak with him, she found herself interpreting each of his movements as they might relate to her, assigning some significance to everything.

  Takayama went into an exam room and undressed to the waist, exposing his muscular body. Looking at him from behind, she could see a ten-centimeter scar running across his back. That hadn't been there when they were together. Had he gotten into an accident during his frantic activity in the Loop? The way the skin weltered up at the scar told her how serious the injury had been. Reiko got a funny feeling at the base of her spine from imagining him losing a lot of blood.

  The examination took ten minutes. Takayama
got dressed and went out to the reception desk where he waited for a prescription to be issued. Behind him Reiko could see a dozen or so patients on the couches waiting for their appointments. One of them caught her eye, and she gasped. It was a young woman with delicately balanced features, sitting with her legs crossed. Everything about her face—from her prominent forehead to her straight eyebrows, from the undeviating line of her nose to the slightly cruel, thin lips—was perfect. But it wasn't her beauty that had made Reiko gasp. She'd seen that face before.

  Reiko paused the image and zoomed in on the woman's face. It took her only a dozen or so seconds to recall the name.

  Sadako Yamamura.

  This was the woman who'd turned the Loop cancerous. She'd had the ability to record sounds on a tape reel without using a recorder, and she'd honed the ability to the point of making a lethal videotape. Her videotape had mutated, branching out into all sorts of media.

  When a woman who was ovulating came into contact with the images, she became pregnant with an entity that shared Sadako's DNA. Reiko vividly recalled watching Sadako crawl out of the womb of that woman who'd fallen into the rooftop exhaust shaft—the newborn, gnawing through the umbilical cord with toothless gums. Pregnant herself, Reiko had been unable to see it as merely virtual, as something totally unrelated to her.

  Though it had taken place in an entirely different space, in the Loop, just watching it she'd shivered with horror.

  That was how the Loop world had been unmoored in a flood of mutated media, all reproducing a single DNA pattern with astonishing speed.

  And now the culprit, Sadako Yamamura herself, was sitting right behind Takayama, waiting for her exam with a look of total innocence on her face. Once he'd received his prescription, Takayama seemed to notice her, but his expression didn't change. He walked out of the hospital. It looked to be just an ordinary, everyday event.

  In the hospital lobby Takayama passed another Sadako Yamamura. They both just kept walking, in opposite directions, hardly noticing each other. Takayama went into the parking lot outside the hospital entrance and opened the door to his car, while Sadako got onto an elevator inside the hospital and went up to a higher floor.

  Takayama started his car. Reiko didn't know where he was heading, but he drove onto a trunk road and then stepped on the accelerator. Scenery started rushing past at high speed...

  Reiko lost track of time as she watched. No longer was she able to see this as a television show, unrelated to her. She was watching a person's life. The images con-veyed the uninvented truth about an irreplaceable man.

  6

  Every day for the next month, at a predetermined time, Reiko accessed the Loop and peeked in on Takayama's life. It could be said without exaggeration that this was the only joy she was getting out of life.

  Since time in the Loop moved at six times the rate it did in the real world, when she accessed it at the appointed time every day, she was watching images six days newer than the previous day's. She was only getting fragments, a few hours out of every six days, but it was more man-ageable that way. It would have been a waste of time to follow a life in its entirety. Better to take fragments and fill in the gaps with her imagination.

  And by doing so she was able to understand the general unfolding of events. She watched sequences having to do with halting the cancerization of the Loop and recovering its biodiversity—events in which Takayama played a big part. Watching them gave her so much joy that she wanted to shout out loud.

  She became more and more engrossed in watching the progress of the Loop world. As the Loop recovered, the loneliness weighing on Reiko started to disperse: the two processes began to resonate with each other, settling into a common rhythm. Takayama's actions were directly lifting Reiko's heart.

  The Loop had literally begun to die, once. Once the denizens of the Loop had learned about the killer videotape and the mutated manifestations of it in other media, panic had set in, a panic that had the ironic effect of accelerating the spread of the virus. People didn't wait for the end of their week's grace period, and they weren't satisfied with showing the tape to just one other person.

  Some individuals showed it to a host of other people.

  Reiko was able to experience several variations on the process: people killing each other because of the tape, love affairs falling apart, people scheming to save loved ones. It was like watching a detailed picture of hell, with egotism on full display in all its forms. It was like watching the real world.

  The world looked like it was going to end, but that wasn't how things went, thanks to the coming of Takayama to the Loop world.

  Takayama did two things to prevent the cancerization of the Loop world. Three months ago, when Reiko had met him in Amano's laboratory, he had already succeeded in synthesizing a vaccine. That was no doubt one reason he could say "It's going to be alright" with such confidence. Since then, the vaccine had begun to prove itself effective.

  Individuals who had come into contact with the mutated manifestations of the tape were programmed to die in a week or to become impregnated with the ring virus. It was simply a question of how to disable that program. Takayama approached the problem that way, according to the hypothesis formulated in the world in which he'd existed as Kaoru, and succeeded in developing the necessary technology. It wasn't all that difficult a task for him because he thoroughly knew how the world worked. The vaccine did two things for those inoculated with it: it disabled the program, and it gave people resistance to the program being installed again.

  As the vaccine came to be manufactured in quantity and more and more people were inoculated, the mutated forms of the tape came to pose less of a threat. Instead of a deadly weapon they were now simply junk. They were allowed to fulfill their purpose as entertainment, but that was all anyone saw them as.

  People used to call this the Killer Video. Are you brave enough to watch it?

  It was becoming a relic of the past.

  But there was another problem: what to do about all the Sadako Yamamuras who had flooded the world. The Sadakos were hermaphroditic, and they could reproduce on their own, so it was still possible for them to multiply with viral speed. The media terror may have died out, but if the Sadakos continued to occupy a larger and larger percentage of the human population, the Loop ecology was still in danger. Otherwise the Sadakos were harm-less, and public opinion wasn't hysteric enough, or the public will wasn't firm enough, to eliminate them. Some said this was the logical stance, but it was probably more accurate to say that everyone recoiled from the question of who was going to hunt down the Sadakos and dispose of them, and how.

  However, a new virus was unleashed that resolved things perfectly. It was unclear whether it had existed in the Loop world all along and had simply mutated into a state of efficacy or if it had been intentionally designed, but either way, it inflicted decisive damage on the Sadakos and no one else. Left to its natural course, it effectively destroyed the source of all the problems. And in the process, the events left a warning for society as a whole, an eloquent testament to the risks of losing diversity and allowing all life to become assimilated to one pattern.

  An organic community's resilience is directly tied to the presence of individual differences within it. Some live in the mountains, some live by the sea. Some live in a world of ice, some under equatorial conditions. Some have white skin, some black. The greater the range of individual differences, the greater the chances of surviving a catastrophic blow. A virus can harm individual beings that live in hot places while having no effect on ones that live in cold places. If it attacked both, the former would die while the latter would survive. As long as there are survivors, there can always be a new start—a chance to form a world with sufficient diversity. But if the entire world shares the same DNA, everyone in it runs the risk of succumbing to the same viral attack.

  The virus that overcame the Sadakos served as proof of that. It seemed to work upon some physical peculiar-ity of the Sadakos, which caused them
to die a natural death.

  The Sadakos were not born through sexual reproduction, and they shared the characteristic of growing to maturity in a week's time. Once they contracted the virus, however, they grew old at the same advanced rate until they died of natural causes. The Loop world began to overflow with aging, dying Sadakos.

  Reiko found herself curiously moved by the sight of Sadakos dying in the streets. She knew how much the original Sadako had dreaded getting old in her days as an actress—as a woman, Reiko couldn't bear to see her succumbing helplessly to the hideousness of age. The fact that it wasn't just one Sadako but myriads who were fighting and losing the battle only made it sadder.

  The Loop world seemed to believe that the virus that was killing the Sadakos had arisen naturally. Reiko suspected that it was man-made, and she thought she knew by whom. Ryuji Takayama—Kaoru. She believed that he had taken his knowledge of the unique telomerase sequence in his own DNA and applied it to creating a virus that hastened cellular division. Amano had told her about the correlation between aging and the number of times a cell divided, and how the latter was limited by the length of the telomeres.

  So, in the end, Takayama had created two products: a vaccine to disable the program that brought death or impregnation, and a virus to increase the rate of the clones' cellular division. Together these allowed the Loop world to recover its biodiversity.

  Reiko moved her perspective-point back to widen her field of vision. In hundred meter increments, she gradually rose to a vantage point of several kilometers over the surface of the Loop world. Finally leaving the atmosphere, she noticed that the ball known as the Loop had changed color ever so slightly. It was beautiful now, hardly different from Earth.

  Until a short time ago it had been covered here and there with dirty splotches, but now, with its biodiversity restored, the Loop world was returning to its original color. This was a mixture of many different hues, reflected in delicate shades, darkness and brightness added according to the light.