by Kōji Suzuki
He heard breathing, so faint it sounded like it would cease any moment. Labored, rhythmic breathing, in synch with what he heard coming from the display.
Kaoru couldn’t believe his ears. What he heard next was a man’s voice, its quality altered by passing through an automatic translation device.
“Are you there? Hey! Are you listening? I want you to do something for me. Bring me to where you are. I want to go to your world. I won’t let you get away with this any longer.”
Kaoru was confused. In the display he was looking at a close-up of Takayama’s left hand, holding the telephone. It was definitely Takayama making the call. And it was Kaoru himself, in the here and now, who was on the receiving end of that call.
Of course he was confused. He felt like he was calling himself.
You can’t call reality from the Loop!
Kaoru couldn’t find his voice. And before he could rouse himself from his fugue, the line went dead. He could still hear Takayama’s voice, though.
Bring me to where you are.
It was several minutes before the meaning of those words sank in.
10
Kaoru went over his chain of reasoning again and again. But finally, he knew there was only one way to test his theory.
The first thing he’d need to do would be to contact Amano with instructions: analyze the DNA of the ring virus and compare it to the genetic sequence of the MHC virus. It was a simple task, since the MHC virus had been sequenced. Kaoru had a copy of the results of that analysis. Once the ring virus was analyzed, comparing them would be easy.
He expected that somehow the ring virus’s genetic sequence had been converted from binary code to the ATGC base code. A computer should be able to figure it out in a snap.
He decided to take a nap while awaiting a response from Amano. He took his pack from the back of the motorcycle, got out his sleeping bag, and spread it on the basement floor next to the desk. He rehydrated himself, took some sustenance into his belly, and then curled up in his sleeping bag like a shrimp.
In no time at all he was fast asleep. Unaffected by the stress of the day, Kaoru’s youthful resilience pulled his consciousness down into slumber.
Two hours later, the computer came to life. The display flickered and the speakers emitted a signal.
Kaoru slipped out of his bedroll and sat down at the desk. Only two hours of sleep, but his body felt perfectly restored. He could face Amano’s response with a clear head.
The display lit up with a comparison of the ring virus to the MHC virus. Commonalities between the two sequences were marked. The similarity was considerable—too much to be ignored. With this much overlap, they had to be considered essentially the same virus, or perhaps more exactly viruses that were originally the same but had mutated into somewhat varying strains. Kaoru felt safe in concluding that the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus had originated from the ring virus.
Having arrived at that confirmation, Kaoru stepped back from the computer with its display full of data.
Part of him thought it was an idiotic theory, even though it was his own. It militated against all common sense. The chain of reasoning was sound and allowed for no other interpretation, but still something nagged at him.
Be rational about this, he berated himself. Now was a time for flexibility, not for rigid adherence to fixed ideas.
Kaoru tried to put himself in Takayama’s shoes and think about what had happened to him as a natural course of events. He’d been face to face with death. There’s not a person alive who doesn’t want to escape dying. What he was dealing with was a primal desire.
A bold analogy was starting to take shape in Kaoru’s mind.
Takayama came to understand it intuitively, just before he died, didn’t he?
That was the jumping-off point. The “it” that Takayama had come to understand included all manner of things. That was the key point.
Takayama, an individual within the Loop, understood everything.
He’d proceed on that assumption.
Takayama would have been wondering: why am I on the point of death while Asakawa is still alive? What did he do unknowingly this week that I didn’t. At which point Takayama would have realized that copying the videotape was the key to evading death. Asakawa had made him a copy of the tape.
But that wasn’t the only thing Takayama came to understand. Now he had a theory: watching the videotape set one to die in a week, like one might set a VCR, while copying the videotape cleared the schedule. He wanted to advance his theory to the next level: he concentrated on a new question. What made the whole thing possible?
“The world is an imaginary space.”
It was a conclusion influenced by his customary mode of thinking—that was pretty much how he thought of the world he lived in to begin with.
If the world was imaginary, a virtual reality, then it was perfectly possible to set someone to die a nonsensical death, and just as possible to clear the setting. So who was doing the setting? Whatever higher principle created the virtual world.
God.
Maybe that word had flashed through Takayama’s brain; maybe it hadn’t. But to create the world and set it in motion was the work of a god. From the perspective of the inhabitants of the Loop, their creator was God Himself.
So Takayama, just before he died, had attempted to hold congress with God. To that end, he’d needed to find an interface between reality as he knew it and God’s world. He’d searched desperately for that interface.
Which was why his gaze had wandered about the room, over its ceiling, its walls—he’d been looking for the tiny thread that connected his world to God’s.
No doubt the videotape was the only possibility he could imagine. If putting the tape in a VCR and playing it had been enough to set him to die, then maybe that was the interface, or at least maybe it could lead him to it. He should be able to see a slight warping of space in the portal. If that wasn’t the interface, then he was too late.
Takayama had decided to bet everything on the videotape.
He pressed play, started screening the images. His heart quavered—he wasn’t sure if he had enough time to escape death even if he had figured it out. He called Takano. But all the while his eyes were glued to the screen. The television was showing him dice rolling around in a lead container. Numbers between one and six kept presenting themselves to his view.
Takayama emitted a cry, but it wasn’t his death scream. He’d realized that the dice were repeating the same numbers.
… 33254136245163423425413624516343 432541362451634133254136245163423425 …
If he took out the numbers 133, 234, and 343, he realized, the dice were persistently repeating a string of thirteen digits: 2541362451634. Takayama, with his knowledge of genetic sequencing, had realized that those three numbers were stop codes.
He hung up on Takano and immediately started dialing the digits.
The call connected, the circuit was completed. It was possible to access reality from within the Loop.
As soon as he was sure he’d accessed the higher concept, Takayama blurted out his wish.
Bring me to your world.
It was a bold request, but one any scientist would have made. Not to escape death so much as to gain something greater. To move from within the world into the great outside from which it was created—to understand the workings of the universe.
That was Kaoru’s own dream from of old.
Takayama’s dream would come true if he was able to move from the Loop into Kaoru’s world. He’d learn everything about the principles on which the Loop ran. He’d learn what lay beyond what was to the Loop beings the edge of the universe. He’d learn what time and space were like before the creation of the universe. He’d learn, in short, the answers to all questions.
Bring me to your world.
At first glance it might seem like a rather childish desire, but Kaoru could well understand it. In fact, he shared it. If there was a God who had designed the world,
he’d love to go to His world and ask Him personally about a few things.
Now, then. In the Loop world, Takayama had died immediately after the phone call. It had been observed on the monitor. One of the Loop’s operators must have heard Takayama’s request much as Kaoru had.
What had the hearer done, then? Had he or she granted Takayama’s wish? Takayama’s powers of intuition were amazing, to have not only figured out the riddle of the video but to have realized that his reality was only virtual. Maybe someone had taken an interest in those powers.
Kaoru began ransacking his medical knowledge for a way to allow Takayama to be reborn into the real world.
It would be impossible to recreate him based merely on an analysis of the molecular information that made up his body in the Loop. But since his genetic information was contained in the program’s memory, it might be possible to use that to give him birth in the real world.
It was possible to manufacture sets of up to two thousand megabases. The genome synthesizers that allowed reproduction of their chromatin structures had been developed at the beginning of the century. This had been followed shortly by a technique known as GFAM (genome fragment alignment method), which enabled these fragments to be connected. As a result, it was possible to reconstruct all of a human being’s chromosomes.
The first step would be to prepare a fertilized human egg. Then they’d have to remove its nucleus and replace it with chromosomes they’d fabricated based on Takayama’s genetic information. They’d replace the egg in its host mother. Nine months later, Ryuji Takayama would be born into the world. Of course it would be as an infant. But genetically, that child would be Takayama.
This could have been done. But then it would have involved a miscalculation. If someone had indeed recreated Takayama, then he or she had forgotten one key thing along the way.
Takayama carried the ring virus. When the genome synthesizer recreated his molecules, the virus would have been passed on, too. It was the only thing that could account for the resemblance between the ring virus and the MHC virus.
Looked at from another angle, that resemblance was itself evidence that Ryuji Takayama had been reborn into the real world. Yes, that was the most persuasive interpretation: in the process of rebirthing him, someone had loosed the ring virus in a subtly altered form.
So who summoned Takayama forth?
That he didn’t know. Nor did he know what whoever had done it had hoped to accomplish by it. What was to be gained by bringing a virtual being to life in the real world?
Kaoru had played video games as a child. Not that he’d been hooked—he’d tended to tire of them rather quickly, as a matter of fact. He remembered the appearance of the princes and princesses in the games, rendered in supposedly 3-D computer graphics, with their somewhat clumsy planes. They were unmistakably different from real people, but nonetheless there had been a few female characters he’d considered beautiful. This was like bringing one of them to life. And unleashing whatever computer virus she carried into the world as a real, biological virus.
It was absurd, when he thought about it that way. But the Loop was the most sophisticated computer simulation the world had ever seen: given that, he couldn’t rule it out. On the level of theory, at least, it was quite possible.
So where’s Takayama now, and what is he doing?
He felt he was closing in on the truth now. He remembered Kenneth Rothman’s last communiqué. I’ve figured out the source of the MHC virus. Takayama holds the key.
Kaoru was starting to believe it himself now.
11
As he climbed the stairs to the surface, Kaoru felt he’d spent years in front of that computer. The sun was directly overhead, its rays searing the earth. In terms of space and light, there was all the difference in the world between the basement and here.
He felt like his body had changed, perhaps because he’d lived so many more lives. But in reality he’d only spent forty-two hours at the computer. What he’d experienced was time concentrated.
The motorcycle’s gas tank was coated with fine sand blown by the wind that whipped down the ravine and through the spaces between the abandoned houses. Dust was everywhere—the fact that the layer on the tank was still relatively thin showed how little time he’d actually spent in the basement.
Kaoru straddled the bike and started the engine.
He had a clear image of where he needed to go now. He’d follow the gorge due west, then pass over a hill with a spring, and then cross two tall peaks.
Kaoru knew that at the moment it was important for him to rely on a greater power and do as he was directed. Clearly, someone or something was intervening.
When had it started, this intervention? Maybe he’d known it would turn out like this for ten years, ever since the family had gotten the idea for this trip. Maybe all he was doing now was carrying out a long-prepared plan.
Let’s go.
He grabbed the handlebars, made a U-turn, and went back the way he had come.
His plan was to head back to the main road and check into a motel where he could rest and replenish his gas and supplies. Then he’d start his traversing of the desert, on his road that wasn’t a road.
Two days after leaving Wayne’s Rock, Kaoru finally turned off the highway into the desert. He rode ten miles over flat country until a middling-sized mountain appeared, then he rode up its side.
The higher he went the stronger he felt the hush. The stream narrowed, and he could hear the sighing of the trees. There were as yet no traces of the MHC virus to be seen here. The vegetation was still healthy, the sight of it refreshing.
He could feel the plants’ exhalations gently on his skin. He pressed on, higher, deeper into the stillness.
He’d never expected to find this much greenery in the middle of the desert.
When the valley had come into view, he’d been unable to accurately guess at its scale. But now that he’d ridden right up to it, it was no mere stand of trees, but a true forest, all contained within a huge ravine.
The trees only grew on the inner slopes of the declivity; the rest of the landscape was an unrelieved brown wasteland. Hidden in a valley this deep, he doubted the forest would be visible even from the air.
Jagged boulders pierced the sky and trees filled the spaces between them. Even with an off-road bike, he could ride no farther. The rocky outcroppings came together to shelter a creek which shrank the farther up along its flow he went. He’d have to dismount here.
He lay the bike down gently in the brush amidst some trees. He took what he needed from the back of the bike and slung his pack over his shoulders. He exchanged his riding boots for sneakers and then looked around, trying to memorize the spot so he could find it again.
He’d have to rely on his legs to carry him the rest of the way.
From time to time he would stop and gaze up at the vast gorge that the little stream had carved into the land. That stream alone marked his road now. How long had it taken to make this canyon, thousands of yards deep? Contemplating the time and energy required made him dizzy.
Endless years and ceaseless repetition. The high-rise in which Kaoru made his home in Tokyo would easily fit into this valley. It had taken three years to build. But the valley—it’d taken hundreds of millions of years, and the water was still working on it, bit by bit.
The sun was sinking in the west now. The rays that found their way into the valley were climbing up its side, licking the sides of the valley as if it were some huge organism.
He paused in his leaping from rock to rock to plunge both hands into the stream for a drink. The water was cold. He could feel its chill spreading from his esophagus to his stomach. It was a boon to have the stream alongside: he wouldn’t suffer thirst. He scooped up more water, then sat down on a rock for a breather.
A hushed air hung over the secluded land. He stumbled across a memory. He’d once before breathed air that was otherworldly like this. It put him in mind not of the deep recesses of Mother
Nature, but of a place with a much higher concentration of civilization. An intensive care unit.
His father went into the ICU every time he had to have more cancer removed. In that sealed-off space, where the only sound was the rhythm of the respirator, the patients’ flesh became so enveloped in stillness that it was hard to tell if they were alive or dead. Every time he visited his father there, Kaoru came away with the impression that it was only the machines that were really alive in that place—the people had sunk to a level below the inorganic.
He got chills as he remembered the tubes sprouting from his father’s face and head, the pain he must have been in—the greater the number of tubes the more they seemed to speak of the ebbing of his father’s life. There was something in the silence of this valley that reminded him of the ICU.
I wonder how Dad’s doing.
Now that his thoughts had arrived at memories of his father’s condition, he felt he couldn’t rest any longer. His father just had to hold out until Kaoru returned—otherwise, he would have come all the way here for nothing.
He worried about his mother, too. Was she still obsessed with Native American legends, praying for a miracle to save his father? Kaoru wished she could deal with things a little more realistically.
And what about Reiko?
He felt his chest tighten at the thought of her. He took the two photos of her from his breast pocket. One had been taken in the cafeteria at the hospital. In the photo, Kaoru was holding his head up high, while Reiko rested her head on his shoulder. Ryoji had taken the picture. What had gone through his mind as he’d captured this image? His mother’s affection for Kaoru was revealed in her pose. She had more of a womanly aura in this photo than a motherly one. Ryoji couldn’t have enjoyed seeing her like this. What he saw through the viewfinder had to have bothered him.
Every time Kaoru thought about Reiko he took out this photo and looked at it, but the sad memories of Ryoji it brought back were always stronger than any recollections of Reiko that it held.
