Spiral

by Kōji Suzuki

  Above: between #535 and #576, and again between #815 and #856, one can observe the repetition of the 42 bases ATGGAAGAA-GAATATCGTTATATTCCTCCTCCTCAACAACAA.

  Base triplets (codons) are translated into amino acids according to the principles outlined in the chart above. For example, TCT is serine (Ser), AAT is asparagine (Asn), GAA is glutamic acid (Glu). "Stop" signifies the end of a gene; the beginning code is ATG.

  Below are the abbreviated and full names of the twenty amino acids:

  Ando shifted his gaze from the printout to Nemoto's face.

  "No matter where we slice it, we always find this identical sequence."

  "How many of these are there?"

  "Bases, you mean?"

  "Yeah."

  "Forty-two."

  "Forty-two. So, fourteen codons, right? That's not very many."

  "We think it means something," Nemoto said, shaking his head. "But, Dr Ando, the strange thing is…"

  Miyashita interrupted. "This meaningless repetition was only found in the virus collected from Ryuji Takayama's blood, and not from the other two victims." He threw up his hands in a gesture of perplexity.

  In other words.. . Ando tried to find a suitable analogy. Suppose three people, one being Ryuji, had copies of Shakespeare's King Lear. Then suppose that Ryuji's copy, and only his copy, had meaningless strings of letters sandwiched in between the lines. There were forty-two bases, and they worked in sets of three, each set corresponding to one amino acid. If you assigned each of these sets a letter, you'd have a series of fourteen letters. And these fourteen repeating letters were found on every page of the play, inserted at random. If you knew from the beginning that the play was King Lear, of course, it would be possible to go back and find the meaningless parts that had been interpolated and highlight them.

  "So what do you think?" Miyashita looked to be sincerely interested in Ando's opinion. A true scientist, he was always most excited when confronted with the inexplicable.

  "What do I think? I'd have to know more before I could say anything."

  The three of them fell silent, glancing at one another's faces. Ando felt awkward, still holding the printout.

  Something was tugging at his consciousness. In order to figure out what it was, he needed time to sit down and study the meaningless string of bases. He had an unmistakable premonition that there was something here. The question was, what? And if this meaningless base sequence had indeed been interpolated, when had it happened? Was the virus that had invaded Ryuji's body just different? Or had it mutated in Ryuji's body, with the fourteen-codon string appearing here and there as a result of that mutation? Was that even possible? And if it was, what did it mean?

  An oppressive silence fell over the three men. No amount of speculation at this point could tell them how to interpret these findings.

  It was Miyashita who broke the silence. "By the way, did you come here for a reason?"

  Ando had been so intrigued by the discovery that his original errand had slipped his mind. "Right, I almost forgot." He opened up his briefcase, took out his planner, and showed Miyashita and Nemoto a slip of paper.

  "I was wondering if anyone here had a word processor of this model."

  Miyashita and Nemoto looked at the model name written on the paper. It was a fairly common machine.

  "Does it have to be exactly the same model?"

  "As long as it's the same brand, the model probably isn't important. Basically, it's a question of compatibility for a floppy disk."

  " Compatibility? "

  "Yes." Ando took a floppy disk from his briefcase.

  "I need to make a hard copy and a soft copy of the files on this disk."

  "It's not saved in MS-DOS, I take it?"

  "I don't think so."

  Nemoto clapped his hands, as if he'd just remembered something. "Hey, one of the staff members in my department-Ueda, I think-has this very model."

  "Do you suppose he'd let me borrow it?" Ando hesitated. He'd never met this Ueda.

  "I don't imagine there'd be a problem. He's fresh out of school." Nemoto spoke with the confidence of a senior staff member who knew that a new resident would do anything he asked.

  "Thanks."

  "No problem at all. Why don't we go over right now? I think he's there."

  This was music to Ando's ears. He couldn't wait to print out whatever was on this disk.

  "Great. Let's go." Ando dropped the disk back into his jacket pocket. Then, waving to Miyashita, he followed Nemoto out of the Pathology Department.

  8

  Ando and Nemoto walked side by side down the med school's dim hallway. Ando wore his lab coat unfastened in front, its tails swept back behind him, with his hands in the pockets of his jacket clutching the disk. Neither Miyashita nor Nemoto had asked about it. Ando wasn't trying to keep it a secret. Had Miyashita asked, he'd intended to give him an honest answer. If they'd known it might hold the key to this whole mystery, no doubt both men would have been at his heels right now.

  Of course, Ando hadn't seen what was on the disk yet. There was always the possibility that it held something else entirely. He simply wouldn't know until he managed to bring it up on a monitor. Still, it felt right in his hand: the disk was warm from being in his pocket. It was near body temperature. Its touch seemed to tell him that it held living words.

  Nemoto opened the door to the biochemistry lab. Ando took the disk out of his pocket, switched it to his left hand, and held the door open with his right.

  "Hey, Ueda." Nemoto beckoned to a skinny young man seated in a corner of the room.

  "Yes?"

  Ueda swiveled in his chair to face Nemoto, but didn't stand up. Nemoto approached him, smiling, and put his hand on Ueda's shoulder. "Are you using your word processor right now?"

  "No, not really."

  "Great. Would you mind if Dr Ando here borrowed it for a while?"

  Ueda looked up at Ando and then bowed. "Hello."

  "Sorry about this. I've got a disk I need to access and it's not compatible with my machine." Ando moved to Nemoto's side, holding up the disk.

  "Go right ahead," said Ueda, picking up the word processor from where it sat on the floor at his feet and laying it sideways on the desktop.

  "Do you mind if I check it right here just to make sure?"

  "Not at all."

  He opened the word processor's lid and turned it on. Soon the initial menu appeared on the screen. From among the options displayed, Ando chose DOCUMENTS, then inserted the disk. The next screen gave him two options: NEW DOCUMENT and OPEN DOCUMENT. Ando moved the cursor to the second option and hit return. With a whir, the machine started to read the disk. Finally, the names of the files stored on the disk appeared on the screen.

  Ando read the file names aloud in a delirium. "Ring, ring, ring, ring…"

  Ring!

  What the hell? The same word that I got from solving the code that popped out of Ryuji's belly.

  "Are you alright?" Nemoto sounded worried. He was peering at Ando's suddenly dazed expression. Ando could barely manage to nod.

  There was no way this could be a coincidence. Asakawa had composed a report detailing this whole strange train of events, saved it in nine parts, and entitled it Ring. And then that title had extruded from Ryuji's belly.

  How to explain this? There is no way.

  Ando was in a state of complete denial. Ryuji's body was completely empty; he was like a tin man. Am I saying he slipped me a message from his abdominal cavity? That he was trying to tell me of the existence of these files?

  Ando recalled the way Ryuji's face had looked right after the autopsy. His square-jawed face had been smiling. Ando had expected that any minute he'd start laughing at him, stark naked on the table, jowls shaking.

  Deep down, Ando could feel Yoshino's outlandish story starting to take on the feel of reality. Maybe it was all true. Maybe there really was a videotape that killed you seven days after you watched it.

  9

  The word p
rocessor buzzed ceaselessly as it printed out page after page. Ando tore each page from the printer as it emerged and read through it quickly.

  Each page was single-spaced, but still Ando was able to read faster than the printer could spit them out. Wanting a hard copy, he'd decided to print it all out instead of reading it on the screen. Now he found himself getting frustrated by the two or three minutes it took each page to be printed.

  He'd ended up borrowing Ueda's machine and bringing it home with him. A quick check had revealed that the total report was close to a hundred pages, more than he could reasonably print out there in the lab. He had no choice but to stay up late at home.

  Now he was at the end of page twenty-one of the manuscript, alternating between reading it and taking bites of the dinner he'd picked up at the convenience store on the way home. What he'd read so far followed faithfully the outline Yoshino had given him the week before. But it differed from what Yoshino had told him after lunch at the cafe in that it contained specific times and places. As a result it was a good deal more persuasive. The reporterly style-no frills-also made it harder to disbelieve.

  While investigating the simultaneous deaths by heart attack of four young people in Tokyo and Kanagawa prefecture on the evening of September 5 th, Asakawa had come up with the idea that the culprit was some kind of virus. Scientifically speaking, it was the obvious conclusion. And since autopsies on the four bodies had indeed revealed a virus that closely resembled smallpox, it turned out that Asakawa's hunch had been right. It had been Asakawa's guess that since the four had died at the same moment, they must have picked up the same virus together at the same place. He'd figured that the key to the whole case must lie in figuring out where they were exposed to the virus, that is, in determining the route of transmission. Asakawa had succeeded in finding out when and where the four had been together: August 29th, exactly a week before their deaths, at South Hakone Pacific Land, in a rented cabin, Villa Log Cabin No. B-4.

  The next page, page twenty-two, started with Kazuyuki Asakawa himself heading toward the cabin in question. He took the bullet train to Atami, then rented a car and took the Atami-Kannami highway to the highland resort. Rain and darkness limited the visibility, and the mountain road was awful. He'd made reservations for cabin B-4 at noon, but it was past eight at night when he finally checked in. So this was where those four kids had spent the night: the thought gave Asakawa a jolt of fear. Exactly a week after they'd stayed in this cabin, they were dead. He knew it was possible that the same spectral hand would touch him, too. But he couldn't overcome his reporterly curiosity and ended up searching B-4 from top to bottom.

  From something the kids had written in a notebook on the property, Asakawa determined that they had watched a videotape that night, so he went to the manager's office to search for that tape. He'd found an unlabelled, unboxed tape lying on the bottom shelf. Was this what he was looking for? With the manager's permission, he took the tape back to cabin B-4, and, with no way of knowing what it contained, he inserted it into the VCR in the living room and watched it all the way through.

  At first, everything was dark. Asakawa described the opening scene like this:

  In the middle of the black screen a pinpoint of light began to flicker. It gradually expanded, jumping around to the left and right, before finally coming to rest on the left-hand side. Then it branched out, becoming a frayed bundle of lights, crawling around like worms…

  Ando looked up from the page. Based on what he was reading, he was able to get a reasonably clear image of what had been on the screen. Reading Asakawa's description of the opening, an image popped into his head that he felt he'd seen somewhere before. A firefly flitting around on a dark screen, growing gradually larger… then the point of light splays out like the fibers of a paintbrush. It was a short scene, but one that he could remember seeing, and recently at that.

  It didn't take long for the memory to come to him. It was when he'd gone to Mai's apartment to try and track her down. He'd found a videotape still in her VCR, and he'd pressed the play button. The one with Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, etc., written on the label in a man's hand. The first few seconds of that tape had fit this description perfectly.

  But on the tape in Mai's apartment, this scene had only lasted a few seconds, before the screen suddenly became a lot brighter. In what had evidently been an attempt to erase whatever was on the tape, Mai had recorded morning variety shows, samurai melodrama reruns, whatever, until the tape ran out. Ando immediately figured out what this meant. Somehow, probably through Ryuji, Mai had acquired the problem tape and watched it in her apartment. Then, when she'd finished, she'd eradicated it, whatever it was, from the tape. She must have had her reasons. But she hadn't been able to erase the very beginning of the tape, so those first few seconds had remained there, lurking. Did it mean that the tape Asakawa had found in Villa Log Cabin had somehow made its way into Mai's hands?

  Ando tried to organize his thoughts. No, that can't be it. The tape Asakawa found and the tape Mai had were clearly two different things. According to the report, the one in the cabin was unlabelled. But the one in Mai's VCR had a title written on it in black marker. Which meant it must have been a copy.

  The one in the cabin was the original, and the one in Mai's place a copy. So that tape had been copied, erased, disguised, transported-a dizzying series of changes. In Ando's mind, the tape, occupying a point between the animate and the inanimate, began to resemble a virus.

  So, was Mai's disappearance a result of her having watched that tape? The possibility worried him. She hadn't been back to her room since then. She hadn't been showing up at school, and she hadn't even called her mother. On the other hand, he hadn't heard anything about a young woman found dead from unexplained causes.

  Ando let his mind wander for a while, considering all the things that could have befallen her. Maybe she'd died alone someplace unbeknownst to anybody. The thought pained him-she was only twenty-two. The fact that he could feel the first twinges of a crush on her only made it harder to bear.

  The printer finally came to the end of another page, with a noise that snapped Ando out of his reverie. In any case, now was no time to be borrowing trouble. At the moment, he'd be better off finding out what was on that tape first.

  10

  The next few pages contained a thorough description of the contents of the videotape. As he read, Ando could see a TV screen in his mind, filled with shifting images.

  Something red and viscous spurted across the screen. This was followed by a view of a mountain that he could tell at a glance was an active volcano. Lava flowed from its mouth; the earth rumbled. The eruption lit up the night sky. Then this scene was suddenly cut off, replaced by a white background, in front of which the character for "mountain", written in black, faded in and out of view. Then a scene of two dice bouncing around on the bottom of a bowl.

  Finally a human figure appeared onscreen. A wrinkled old woman sat on a tatami mat. She was facing the camera and saying something. She spoke in a nearly incomprehensible dialect, but he could tell, more or less from the sound of her words, that she was predicting somebody's future, warning him or her.

  Next, a newborn baby, wailing. There was no discernible link between scenes. One followed another with all the abruptness and randomness of someone flipping over cards.

  The infant disappeared, replaced by hundreds of faces, filling the screen and multiplying as if by cellular division, all against the background of a multitude of voices intoning accusations: Liar! Fraud! Then an old television set, displaying the character sada.

  Then a man's face appeared. He was gasping for breath and dripping with sweat. Behind him could be seen a lush thicket of trees. His eyes were red and full of bloodlust; his mouth was contorted with screams and drool. His bare shoulder was deeply gouged, and blood flowed from the wound. Then came again, from nowhere in particular, the cry of a baby. In the center of the screen was a full moon, from which fell fist-sized stones, landing with d
ull thuds.

  Finally, more words appeared on the screen.

  Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now. If you do not wish to die, you must follow these instructions exactly…

  And then the scene changed entirely. Instead of the prescribed method for avoiding certain death, the screen now showed a common television commercial for mosquito coils. The ad ended and the previous eerieness returned, or rather, the memory of it.

  At the end of this series of bizarre visions, Asakawa had managed to understand exactly two things. First, whoever watched this tape was doomed to die in exactly a week. And, second, there was a way to avoid this fate, but it had been deliberately recorded over. The four kids who'd watched the video first had erased it in a fit of malice or mischief. It was all Asakawa could do to slip the tape into his bag and flee cabin B-4.

  Ando took a deep breath and lay the manuscript aside.

  Holy shit.

  In his report Asakawa had given a painstakingly elaborate account of the strange twenty minutes of images on the tape. He'd made every effort to recreate, using only words, what the video conveyed directly through sound and visuals, and he'd largely succeeded. The scenes still swirled around in Ando's mind, as vividly as if he'd seen and heard them himself. He sighed again, suddenly exhausted. Or maybe it wasn't fatigue. Perhaps it was that he now felt Asakawa's fear as his own, and wanted somehow to push it away.

  But even a moment's pause only whetted his desire to know more. Taking a sip of tea, he picked up the next page of the report, and started reading ahead, even faster than before.

  The first thing Asakawa did upon returning to Tokyo was to call Ryuji Takayama and tell him what had happened. Asakawa had neither the time nor the courage to solve this thing alone. He needed a reliable partner, and so naturally his thoughts turned to Ryuji, whom he'd known since high school. He also approached Yoshino, but Yoshino refused to watch the video. Regardless of whether or not he actually believed in it, if there was even a slim chance that calamity would befall him as a result of watching the video, he wanted to avoid doing so.