Loop

by Kōji Suzuki

  In effect, Kaoru was now able to confirm through the medium of writing the information he'd gained through Asakawa's sensory organs. The contents of the videotape had been transformed into the document called Ring.

  At this point, Ando received a message that had been encoded in a DNA sequence.

  Mutation.

  This hint sent Ando's reasoning off in another direction. The videotape left in Takano's room had been erased. The other two copies had been destroyed one way or another. The video itself no longer existed. However, the first copy had been partially erased at the end by the four kids who found it. In DNA terms, part of the genetic material had been damaged.

  It occurred to Ando to think of the videotape, in the way it made use of a third party's assistance to copy itself, as similar to a virus. Having suffered damage to its genetic material, he hypothesized, the video had undergone a mutation. It had been reborn as a new species. The old species, the videotape, had served its purpose. It didn't matter to the new species if the old one became extinct.

  There were two essential questions at this point.

  If the video has evolved, what has it evolved into?

  And:

  Why is Asakawa still alive?

  Then another clue presented itself. Mai Takano's body was discovered at last.

  She was discovered in an exhaust shaft on the roof of a rundown office building. It couldn't be determined if she'd died of hunger or of exposure. The autopsy turned up no signs of a heart attack: her death, then, was different in nature from the other seven. She'd simply wasted away. If she hadn't fallen into the exhaust shaft, she would still be alive.

  Even more puzzling were the signs that she'd given birth immediately after falling into the shaft. This was proven by scars resulting from the placenta being torn out, as well as by fragments of umbilical cord found at the scene.

  This all gave rise to a new question.

  What did Mai Takano give birth to?

  Ando, who had known her, was bothered. She simply hadn't looked pregnant the last time he'd seen her.

  They attacked the problem from a variety of angles. The toll of the dead who had had some connection to that video was now eleven-a figure that now included Asakawa, who had died in his hospital bed without ever regaining consciousness.

  Ando and his colleague determined that watching the videotape had caused the virus to appear in the victims' bloodstreams. They also discovered that the virus had some notable characteristics. There were two strains: one shaped like a ring, and one shaped like a thread, or a broken ring.

  The thread type was more prevalent in the bodies of Asakawa and Takano, who had not died of heart attacks. In the other nine bodies, only the ring type was found. This, then, seemed to be the factor that determined whether or not the virus would kill a person. If the ring was broken the infected person would live, while if the ring was unbroken, death would follow in a week's time.

  Ando was desperate to find a logical explanation. It was then that he discovered another odd coincidence.

  The thread like strain moves like spermatozoa.

  There were signs that Takano had given birth. What if she'd been ovulating when she watched the video? What if the newly-created virus had headed for her egg instead of her coronary artery?

  It seemed she'd been impregnated, and had then given birth to something.

  But what?

  Whatever it was, he'd encountered it in her apartment.

  Ando applied the same logic to Asakawa. As a man, Asakawa couldn 't bear a child. What did he produce instead?

  That question would be answered for Ando very soon.

  He received a visit from a woman who said she was Takano's older sister. He'd met her already, in the building where Mai had died. This time they became intimate.

  She was in the shower, and Ando was flipping through a publisher's brochure, looking at the list of new books, when his eyes alit on a title of a book about to come out: Ring. To his surprise, Asakawa's report had been turned into a book, and was about to circulate in large numbers.

  Ring: that was what Asakawa had given birth to. The videotape had evolved into a book, and was about to propagate on a massive scale. By writing it, Asakawa had played a crucial role in that propagation.

  Just then, Ando received a photograph of Sadako Yamamura. One look sent him into shock. She looked identical to the woman who'd just stepped out of his shower, the woman who said she was Mai Takano's sister. What had Mai given birth to? Sadako.

  Sadako, who was supposed to have rotted away at the bottom of a well in the mountains twenty-some years ago, had borrowed Mai's womb to effect her resurrection. But before that fact could sink in, Ando fainted.

  When he regained consciousness, Yamamura asked for his cooperation. She confirmed that the videotape had evolved into the book, and was now on the verge of mass reproduction, and she didn't want him to interfere.

  Ring would use its readers to change into all sorts of new forms. Ovulating women who came into contact with those forms would become pregnant and bear more Sadakos; the only other people to survive would be those who helped her to reproduce herself.

  Ring would be a book, then a movie, a video game, an internet site-it would saturate the world through every branch of the media.

  Ando's imagination couldn't fully grasp the disastrous consequences of this. In simplest terms, he guessed that the male-female compound that was Sadako Yamamura would go on being reborn with its singular genetic code, while the ring virus, constantly mutating, would eventually be left behind.

  Variety is truly the spice of life: only genetic diversity allows a biological individual to derive any enjoyment from its existence. If all of that diversity contracted to a single genetic blueprint, life would lose its dynamism. Sadako may have achieved eternal life, or its equivalent, but every other life form would be chased into any corner it could hide in, and eventually be hounded into extinction.

  Ando had to make a choice. He could either cooperate with Sadako, or be buried by her.

  The reward for cooperating was simply too big.

  The resurrection of my son.

  The grief that dwelt in Ando's breast turned out to stem from the death of his young son two years previously.

  Between the skills of Ando and his colleagues at the hospital and the unique womb of Sadako Yamamura, it was possible to effect the rebirth of Ando's son. At the moment the boy had disappeared into the ocean, several strands of his hair had come off. Ando still had them. His son's genetic information was well preserved.

  He really had no choice. Life as the world presently knew it was going to end with or without his help. In which case, Ando would much rather it end with him reunited with his son-he'd prayed so hard for it.

  Kaoru wasn't inclined to blame him. He could feel how badly Ando wanted to bring his son back to life. Kaoru wasn't at all sure he wouldn't do the same thing if he were in the same situation.

  Ando's team removed one of Sadako's fertilized eggs and exchanged its nucleus for a nucleus from one of Ando's dead son's cells. A week later, his son was reborn from Sadako's belly.

  Ando had sold Sadako the world in exchange for a life that had been lost two years ago.

  Ring was published. Soon nearly twenty thousand of its female readers were pregnant. They all gave birth to Sadako. Collaborators helped Ring to move through form after form, infecting ever more people, allowing it to reproduce even more explosively. With the speed of a prairie fire, the world's genetic makeup became consolidated into a single pattern.

  The ring virus was able to affect non-intelligent life forms as well, robbing the entire biosphere of its genetic diversity. The tree of life, formerly a giant with myriad branches and luxurious foliage, became a tall straight trunk. Its seeds all carried the same genes, and those seeds rapidly decreased in number. It was as if life was moving backwards, crawling back down the tree of life toward its primeval state.

  What life gained in exchange for its diversity
was immortality: driven to the brink of chaos, it achieved absolute stability. For life to progress means for it to scale steep peaks with a delicate sense of balance. Once those peaks had been eliminated, once Shangri-La had been discovered on the valley floor and claimed as a permanent home, evolution couldn't get a leg up.

  The denizens of the Loop thenceforth lived repetitive, unchanging, boring lives. They stopped evolving. They had become cancer.

  Kaoru typed the command that would unlock him from Ando. He was looking down from above now, as it were, on more and more territory, rather as if he were rising to heaven. He wanted to survey the Loop's squirming life forms. Individually they were tiny, wiggling about in a pack. The pattern they made was too monotonous to be beautiful. He'd seen this somewhere before, though. He'd looked at a Petri dish full of his father's cancer cells under a microscope in the pathology department at the university hospital. He remembered how the cancer cells made ugly mottled clumps as they reproduced in their disorderly fashion. That was exactly how the Loop looked to him now, seen from on high.

  Kaoru took off the helmet display and muttered to himself.

  The Loop became cancerous.

  He felt he finally understood what that meant, and how it had happened.

  9

  His sense of time was benumbed. He had no idea how many hours he'd spent sitting in front of the computer with the helmet display on his head and the data gloves on his hands. Time in the Loop moved differently from real time, of course, but then there was the fact that he'd been sitting in a basement where the sun couldn't penetrate. There was nothing to remind him of the passage of time.

  When he stood up he was unsteady on his feet. He felt like he'd gone days without eating or drinking. His fatigue was extreme, his thirst was monstrous, and his hunger knew no bounds.

  He looked at his watch to find that morning was drawing near. He climbed the stairs out of the basement. There was mineral water strapped to the luggage rack of his bike. His first priority had to be to rehydrate himself.

  Dawn in the desert. The air was chill. Kaoru found the bottle of mineral water, cleared his throat, and drank half of it down in one swig. What this gained him was the realization that he was actually alive. Peering into the Loop world for so long, he'd begun to imagine that the outlines of the real world were becoming fuzzy. The land on which he lived no longer felt firm under his feet. Reality and virtuality disengaged and re-engaged with alarming shakiness.

  Kaoru leaned back against the seat of the motorcycle and drained the rest of the bottle. It brought his thirst under control. His body reacted honestly and straightforwardly. With no need to worry about anybody else, he unzipped his fly and urinated where he stood. Replenishing his body's water and then eliminating some had revived him somewhat. But it provided no proof that he truly existed in the flesh.

  Still clutching the empty plastic bottle, he went back to the stairs leading to the basement and sat on a step halfway down. He'd just seen with his own eyes how the Loop had turned to cancer. But something about it didn't sit right with him. It felt like fiction. The images he'd seen were indistinguishable from reality, but still there was something faintly preposterous about the whole thing.

  A videotape that killed its viewers in a week's time? Such a thing would be simple enough to concoct in an electronic environment. It would also be easy to rig it so that anybody who copied the tape would be spared. It was just a matter of setting the right parameters to produce a programmed death that would be disabled if the right action was taken within a specified period of time.

  The problem was, all of this was beyond what the individuals living inside the Loop could accomplish relying solely on their own intrinsic abilities. In other words, the tape could neither be made nor neutralized without help from the real world.

  Most of the deaths he'd experienced within the Loop had come as a result of watching the tape.

  He felt he needed to confirm that, though. In spite of the heaviness he felt he forced himself to get up and sit in front of the computer again.

  If the act of watching the video had functioned, within the Loop, as a trigger for those deaths, then it was worth taking a fine-toothed comb to the moments when future victims were actually engaged in watching it.

  Kaoru began his search. One by one he called up scenes of Loop beings watching the video. He decided to observe them objectively, without locking onto an individual.

  First to appear was a set of four young people, boys and girls, eyes glued in mingled terror and derision to a TV screen in the living room of what looked to be a mountain retreat.

  One of the young people was stifling his fear, turning his adversarial laughter on his companions to get them to fall in line. It couldn't be more obvious that his high spirits were forced.

  As the video ended, one of the females was deathly pale. "Eww," she said, before falling silent. The male who was trying to keep his spirits up was evidently worried that her single outburst would cast a pall of terror over all of them. He spoke up.

  "C'mon, it's got to be a fake."

  He kicked at the screen.

  "Pretty scary threat at the end, though," said the other girl. Her expression betrayed no trace of fear. With a face like a mask, she puffed away on her cigarette as she rewound the tape. Then, as if it were the obvious course, while the other three watched she erased the bit at the end where the formula for avoiding death was written.

  "Let's take it back and scare our friends," she said. But the other three held back. They didn't want to have anything to do with the creepy thing after tonight, no matter how much the girl dared them. Why should they take it back with them, inviting who knew what curse along for the ride? They said as much to her.

  At that moment the phone rang. The other three gasped in surprise, while the expressionless girl picked up the receiver.

  "Hello?"

  Her reaction suggested that there was no answer on the other end of the line.

  "Hello? Hello!" She sounded irritated, but a faint trembling could be detected in her voice. She swallowed once, then slammed the receiver onto the hook. She stood up and shouted, "What the hell's going on?"

  To Kaoru, the space around the telephone, which had rung for no reason, seemed somehow warped.

  The next to watch the video was Asakawa, followed by Takayama. Since Kaoru had already watched them watching, he skipped ahead to the next instance.

  This was Asakawa's wife and daughter.

  The tape had been left just lying around, and his wife had noticed it. She put it into the VCR, not even intending to watch it all the way through. Then it began.

  She sat the child on a chair beside her and started doing her ironing. Then she glanced at the screen. Suddenly she couldn't tear her gaze away. It was the same with her daughter: she sat there unmoving, facing the TV.

  As soon as it was over, the telephone in the living room rang. The video still running, Mrs Asakawa ran to the living room and picked up the receiver.

  "Asakawa residence."

  No response.

  "Hello?"

  For a few moments she stood there clutching the receiver. Just as before, the space around the telephone seemed to Kaoru to bend out of shape. Objects appeared ever-so-slightly doubled, straight lines wavered. The warping was barely noticeable unless you knew what to look for. Something was wrong here.

  Kaoru figured that the next to watch the video would have been Mrs Asakawa's parents. But he was wrong.

  The next scene was set in Ryuji Takayama's apartment. Checking the date and time, Kaoru realized he'd dropped in just before Takayama's death.

  Takayama had been watching the video when he died.

  Kaoru backed the scene up a bit. This time he could watch closely, with no distracting fear of death.

  Takayama was seated at his desk, concentrating on a piece of writing. His head drooped, and it looked like he might be dozing off, when suddenly his shoulders shook and he jumped up. His neck muscles were taut and his ha
ir stood on end. Seen from behind, he actually looked a bit comical.

  Kaoru debated about which way he should orient the display. Should he keep it focused on Takayama's back, or should he synchronize it with Takayama's perceptions?

  After wandering around behind Takayama for a little while, he decided to lock onto him. Kaoru's perceptions melded with Takayama's.

  Takayama was gasping for breath. He knew intuitively that something was happening to his body. He was actually able to remain fairly calm in the face of his impending death, but he was trying to wrap his mind around a lot of things in a hurry. Questions raced through his head.

  Did I not solve the riddle of the video after all?

  Then why is Asakawa still alive?

  Takayama glanced over at the VCR in the corner. The tape was still inside. He crawled over to the VCR. His heart was pounding. Moving caused him immense pain.

  Kaoru knew exactly what was happening to Takayama's body. A sarcoma had developed in his coronary artery, and it was blocking the flow of blood. What he was experiencing were symptoms of the heart attack that was shortly to kill him.

  Takayama removed the tape from the VCR and examined it from every angle.

  Kaoru didn't know what he was thinking.

  Takayama grasped the tape in a trembling hand, looked at the top, looked at the bottom, read the title written on the spine.

  Thinking Kaoru knew not what, he quickly ran his gaze over the ceiling, out the window, over the wall, to the bookshelf. He seemed to be searching for something.

  Finally, Takayama's gaze came to rest again on the videotape he was holding.

  He was clearly excited-not from the pain in his chest, though. The trembling in his hands was from an excitement that had made him forget himself.

  Takayama inserted the tape back into the deck and pressed play.

  He's about to die. Why's he watching the tape?

  The now-familiar images began to appear before Kaoru's eyes.