Spiral by Koji Suzuki.

[midnight_birth]

Title: Spiral.
Author: Koji Suzuki.
Genre: Fiction, fantasy, horror.
Country: Japan.
Language: Japanese.
Publication Date: 1995 (2005 in English).
Summary: Dr. Ando, who has yet to recover from his son's drowning death at sea, conducts an autopsy on an old friend, the cynical philosophy professor, Ryuji Takayama, who has died under unusual circumstances. The corpse has something to tell him. Something that introduces Ando to strange and supernatural events surrounding a video tape and a virus, and a young woman who is about to redefine the concept of medicine, genetic mutations, and paranormal science all at once.

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♥ Maybe it was the wonderful weather rubbing him the wrong way, but tears welled up in his eyes. He blew his nose. He was alone in his studio apartment. He collapsed back onto bed. He thought he'd managed to fight back the tears, but now theyt came streaming out of the corners of his eyes.

Soon he was sobbing, hugging his pillow and calling his son's name. He hated himself for falling apart like that. Grief's visits weren't regular; it waited until something set it off, and then it kept on coming. He hadn't wept for his son for a couple of weeks. Although the hiatus between his crying spells was getting longer, when the sadness did come, it was just as deep as ever. How long was this going to continue? He could hardly bear to wonder.

♥ He raised his jaw and looked at his pale neck outstretched in the mirror. He shifted his grip on the razor and brought the back of it to the base of his throat, then slowly lowered it from his neck to his chest and then down to his midriff, finally resting it near his navel. A white line ran along the surface of his flesh, between his nipples and down his belly. Imagining his razor was a scalpel, he pictured dissecting his own body. Ando spent his days cutting corpses open, so he knew perfectly well what he'd find inside his chest. His fist-size heart sat cradled between his two pink lungs and was beating firmly. If he concentrated, he could almost hear it. But that persistent pain in his chest-where in his innards did sorrow lodge? Was it in the heart? He wanted, with his bare hands, to scoop out the clump of remorse.

♥ Only when he was conducting an autopsy could he forget the death of his beloved son. Ironically, playing with dead bodies released him from the death that had touched him.

♥ Ando wondered if proximity to death brought out a woman's beauty.

♥ Besides, one look at the shape she was in dispelled any such suspicions. One had to be quite obtuse to the subtleties of relations between the sexes not to see at a glance how deeply Mai Takano had respected her professor. The moistness that welled up in her eyes now and then was not due to guilt about having driven her lover to rake his own life; it came from profound sorrow at the thought of never being able to touch his body again. For Ando, it was like looking in a mirror; he confronted his own grief-stricken face every morning. That kind of devastation couldn't be faked.

♥ Back in those days, Ando had felt something akin to envy toward Ryuji. Several times he'd felt his self-confidence crumble under the burden of knowing that he'd never dominate Ryuji, that he'd always be under Ryuji's sway.

And now Ando was staring at that brain that had been so remarkable. It was only slightly heavier than average, and looked no different from any normal person's brain. What had Ryuji been using these cells to think about when he was alive? Ando could imagine the process that had led Ryuji deeper and deeper into pure mathematics until eventually he'd abandoned numbers altogether and arrived at logic. If he'd lived another ten years, he'd surely have contributed something major to the field. Ando admired, and hated, Ryuji's rare gifts. His brain's cerebral fissure looked deep, and the frontal lobe looked like an unconquerable ridge.

But it was all over now. These cells had ceased functioning. The heart had stopped due to a myocardial infarction, and the brain had died, too. In effect, physically at least, Ryuji was now under Ando's dominion.

♥ The only comfort Ando had been afforded during the gut-wrenching days after his son died and his wife left him had come from a present Miyashita had given him. Miyashita hadn't told him to "cheer up" or anything meaningless of that sort; instead he'd given Ando a novel, saying, "Read this." It was the first Ando had heard of his friend's interest in literature; he also discovered for the first time that books could genuinely give strength.

♥ The day before his boy had drowned, Ando had dreamed of the ocean. Looking back now, he knew the dream had come true. He'd known his son's fate ahead of time, and he still hadn't beenb able to do anything about it. Regret had made him a more cautious man since.

♥ He'd lived in the country, in a little town surrounded by farmers' fields. Once, on his way home from school-Ando remembered it as a peaceful spring afternoon-he'd seen a snake on a concrete wall that flanked a ditch fulled with water. At first the threadlike gray snake had looked to him like just a crack in the wall, but as he got closer he could see the roundness of its body emerge from the surface. As soon as he saw it was a snake, he scooped up a rock the size of his fist. He tossed the rock in his palm a few times, gauging its size and weight, and then went into a pitcher's windup. It was several yards from where he stood to the wall on the other side of the ditch. He really didn't think he'd hit the bull's-eye. But the rock arced high in the air and came down from above directly onto the snake's head, crushing it. Ando recoiled with a cry. He was standing more than a dozen feet away, but it felt like he'd smashed the snake's head with his own clenched fist. He wiped his palm over and over on his trousers. The snake had fallen into the ditch like a suction cup peeling off a stainless steel surface. Ando took a couple of steps into the tangle of grass on the bank of the ditch and leaned forward, trying to catch the snake's last moments. He got there in time to see its corpse float away. At that mmoment, he'd felt the same gaze yupon him thgat he did now. IUt hadn't been the dead snake's gaze, but rather that on a bigger snake that lay in the grass watching him. Its smooth face betrayed no expression as it entangled him in its insistent, unwavering stare. Ando had been shaken by the malevolence of that gaze. If the little snake he'd killed had been the big snake's child, some catastrophe would befall him for sure. The big snake was laying a curse on him: that was the purpose of the insistent stare. His grandmother had told him many times that if he killed snakes something terrible would happen to him. Repentant, Asakawa pleaded silently with the snake, hoping it'd understand that he hadn't meant to kill.

That was more than twenty years ago. But now, Ando recalled the incident with startling clarity. Snake curses were nothing but superstition, he knew. He doubted reptiles even had the ability to recognize their own offspring. Yet... the alarm kept on ringing. Enough! Stop thinking! Ando cried voicelessly. But still the image of a baby snake, white belly upturned, floating away in the ditch, parent snake swimming along behind, continued to pester him like threads that wouldn't come untangled.

I was cursed.

He was losing control of his thoughts. Against his will, he could see the chain of karmic cause and effect looming before him. He couldn't shake off a vision of the murdered baby snake getting caught in the tangled vegetation lining the sides of the ditch, of the parent snake catching up with it and entwining itself around it, the two of them floating there... The image reminded him of DNA. The DNA within a cell's nucleus, he realized, looked like two snakes coiling around each other and flying up into the sky. DNA, by which biological information is transmitted endlessly from generation to generation. Perhaps a pair of snakes perpetually ensnared humanity.

Takanori!

His silent call to his son was filled with misery. He was afraid he wouldn't be able to hold himself together for much longer. Ando lifted his head and looked out the window. He had to distract himself, to interrupt this chain of associations at once. Through the windshield he could see the bright red Keihin Express train go by, slowly. With Shinagawa Station right ahead, it was moving no faster than a slithering snake. Snakes again. There was no way out. He closed his eyes and tried again to think of something else. The tiny hand grabbed at Ando's calf as it slipped away into the sea. He could feel the touch again. It was the snake's curse, it had to be. He was about to let out a sob. The situations were too similar. The baby snake, its head crushed, carried away by the flow. Two decades later, its parent's curse had manifested itself. Takanori was close by, but Ando couldn't save him. The beach in June, before the season had officially opened. He and his son, paddling out to sea, holding onto a rectangular float. He could hear his wife, back on the shore, call:

Taka! That's far enough. Come back!

But the boy was too busy bobbing up and down and splashing about. Her voice didn't reach him.

Honey, come back, okay?

Hysteria was beginning to tinge her voice.

The waves were getting taller, and Ando, too, thought that it was time to turn back. he tried to turn the float around. Just at that moment, a whitecap rose in front of them, and in an instant overturned the float and thrown both him and the boy into the sea. His head went under, and it was then that he first realized they were so far out that even his own feet didn't touch bottom. He started to panic. When his head broke above the surface again, his son was nowhere to be seen. Treading water, he turned around until he could see his wife running into the sea toward him, still fully clothed. At the same time, a hand grasped at his leg. His son's hand. Ando tried hastily to turn around towards the boy to draw him up, but that had been the wrong move. Taka's hand slipped away from his calf, and all Ando's hand managed to do was graze his son's hair.

His wife's half-crazed cries shot over the early-summer sea as she rushed through the water. I know he's close, but I can't reach him! He dived under the surface and moved blindly about but couldn't manage to make contact with that small hand again. His son had disappeared-for good. His body never surfaced again. Where has it drifted to? All that remained were the few strands of hair that had tangled in Ando's wedding ring.

♥ Suddenly she saw Ando's face in her mind. She'd made a dinner date with him for the coming Friday, but now, she wondered if it'd been careless of her to accept. She was starting to regret it. To her, Ando was a friend of Ryuji's, someone with whom she could share memories of him. If she could get Ando to tell her stories about Ryuji's college days, maybe she'd understand Ryuji's impenetrable ideas better. In other words, she had to admit that some calculation had gone into her decision to go out with Ando. But if Ando startled entertaining the sort of thoughts a man can have about a woman, things could turn unpleasant. Since entering college, Mai had learned the hard way that men and women wanted vastly different things. What Mai wanted was to keep the relationship on a level where she and the man could provide each other with intellectual stimulation; her boyfriends' interests, however, always tended to gravitate toward her nether parts. She was forced to turn them down as gently as possible. The trauma her rejections caused them was always more than she could take. They'd send her long apologetic letters which only rubbed salt in her wounds, or they'd call and the first thing out of their mouths would be, "Listen, I'm really sorry about what happened last time." She didn't want them to apologize. She wanted them to learn and grow from the experience. She wanted to see a man turn embarrassment into energy and engage in a genuine struggle toward maturity. If the man did that, she'd resume the friendship any time. But she could never be friends with a guy whose psyche remained forever, and unabashedly, that of a child who refused to grow up.

♥ Mai was still under the away of the words of a man who'd been dead for two weeks. If Ryuji hadn't mentioned Ando to her, she probably never would have been able to call the M.E.'s office to ask about the cause of death; she never would have ended up seeing Ando again on campus. She certainly never would have made plans to have dinner with him. One chance word from Ryuji had subtly bond her.

♥ Suddenly it struck her. She opened her eyes. You're not getting anywhere because you're trying to add something.

All her suffering came from the fact that she was trying to fill in the blank towards the end of the book with her own words. But it was only to be expected that she'd find it impossible to guess where Ryuji's line of thought would have gone. It tended to skip and jump at the best of times. It followed, then, that the best she could hope to do was to delete passages before and after the blank and smooth things over.

Mai got up and fixed the backrest so that it was nearly vertical. She'd been a fool. Taking words out was a lot easier than putting any in. Ryuji himself would undoubtedly have preferred it that way, even if it meant leaving some of his thoughts unexpressed. That would be far better than seeing them twisted beyond recognition.

♥ His circle of friends had narrowed considerably in the time since he'd lost his son to the sea. He bore not a smidgen of a grudge toward those who'd distanced themselves from him, though. He knew that the fault lay with him. Right after it had happened, everybody had crowded around him to offer help and comfort, but Ando hadn't been able to respond appropriately. Instead, he'd just dragged his misery around interminably, acting morose with his friends. "Cheer up," they'd say, but how could he? Gradually, one by one, they'd deserted him. Before he knew it, Miyashita was the only one left. Myyashita always had a joke ready, no matter how melancholy Ando's expression. Miyashita knew how to find something to laugh about in misfortune no matter whose. The only times Ando could forget his sadness was when he was with Miyashita. By now, Ando could put his finger on what it was that set Miyashita apart from his other friends: while everyone else came to him to cheer him up, Miyashita had come to actually have fun. There was no more meaningless phrase in all of language than "Cheer up!" The only way to get someone to cheer up was to help them forget, and saying "cheer up" had quite the opposite effect, only reminding the person why he or she was depressed in the first place.

♥ "Would it be possible for you to come up to Tokyo tomorrow?" As he made the request, Ando bowed even though he was talking to her over the phone.

"I'm not sure I can get away on such short notice," she sighed. Then she was silent. Ando supposed he couldn't expect her to feel a proper sense of urgency when he hadn't given her the facts of the situation. All the same, though, she seemed a little too unconcerned about the whole thing. Ando wanted to tell her just how easy it was to lose someone you loved. How you could hear her voice, turn around, and find her gone.

♥ 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. 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.

♥ Ando's hand, clutching the printout, trembled as he felt himself being driven into the same blind alley as Asakawa. But there was no way he could refuse Miyashita's outright request. The idea that it might be a code had occurred to Ando, too, the first time he'd seen the sequence, but he'd buried the thought in the depths of his brain. He was afraid that if he didn't, the scientific framework on which he'd hiug his life would be bent further out of shape. Things were threatening to go beyond his ability to absorb them.

♥ "So you just accept it?"

"Well, it's not as if I don't have reservations. But, you know, when you really think about it, modern science hasn't managed to come up with answers to any of the most basic questions. How did life first appear on earth? How does evolution work? Is it a series of random events, or does it have a set teleological direction? There are all kinds of theories, but we haven't been able to prove one of them. The structure of the atom is not a miniature of the solar system, it's something much more difficult to grasp, full of what you might call latent power. And we try to observe the subatomic world, we find that the mind of the observer comes into play in subtle ways. The mind, my friend! The very same mind which, ever since Descartes, proponents of the mechanistic view of the universe considered subordinate to the body machine. And now we find that the mind influences observed results. So I give up. Nothing surprises me. I'm prepared to accept anything that happens in this world. I actually kind of envy people who can still believe in the omnipotence of modern science."

♥ It didn't take him long to guess that the virus's code had to be of the substitution variety. What he had to work with was a group of four letters, ATGC, corresponding to the four bases, so it was most likely that the code consisted of assigning a particular character to a predetermined grouping of letters. That was most code-like.

Code-like. When the thought occurred to him, it made him sit up and think. The essential purpose of a code is to convey information from one party to another without any third party being able to figure it out. As students, codes had been nothing but a game to them, brain-teasers. But in, say, times of war, when a code's susceptibility to deciphering could sway the tide of a conflict, a "code-like" code would mean one which was, in effect, too dangerous to use. In other words, one way to keep the enemy from breaking your codes was to make sure they didn't look like codes at first glance. If you caught an enemy spy and found he was carrying a notebook filled with suspicious-looking strings of numbers, it would be a safe bet that it was top-secret information, encrypted. Even allowing fro the possibility of decoys, when a code is identified as such, the chances of it being broken rise significantly.

Ando tried to think logically. If the purpose of a code is to keep information from the hands of a third party, then a code should only seem "code-like" to the person for whom the information is intended. Staring at the forty-two letters interpolated into the base sequence of the virus, Ando found them extremely code-like. That had been his impression from the very first time he'd looked at the chart.

Now why would that be?

He tried to analyze the source of that impression. Why did it seem code-like to him? It wasn't as if there had never been puzzling repetitions found in the course of DNA sequencing. But in spite of that, this particular repetition seemed meaningful. It popped up everywhere they looked in the sequence, no matter where they sliced it. It was as if it was trying to call attention to itself, saying, I'm a code, dummy. The sequence of letters seemed particularly code-like to Ando in light of his experience with the numbers that had popped out of Ryuji's belly. In other words, maybe there had been two purposes to the word "ring" squeezing its way out just then: not only was it meant to alert Ando to the existence of the Ring report, but it was also a form of warning. It was as if Ryuji were telling him, I may use codes again as the situation warrants, so keep your eyes peeled and don't miss them. And maybe he'd used the simplest kind of substitution cipher as a hint, too.

Given that the mysterious string of bases had only been found in the virus drawn from Ryuji, it was safe to assume that he was the one sending the code. It was an undeniable fact, of course, that Ryuji had died and his body been reduced to ashes, but a sample of his tissue still remained in the lab. A countless number of instances of his DNA, the blueprint for the individual entity that was Ryuji, still remained in the cells in that tissue sample. What if that DNA had inherited Ryuji's will, and was trying to express something in words?

It was a nonsensical theory completely unworthy of an anatomist like Ando. But if he did succeed in making the string of letters yield words by means of substitution, then that wold trump all other readings of the situation. Theoretically, it was possible to take DNA from Ryuji's blood sample and use it to make an individual exactly like Ryuji-a clone. This assemblage of DNA sharing the same will had exerted an influence over the virus that had entered its bloodstream, inserting a word or words. Ando could suddenly sense Ryuji's cunning and sheer genius behind this. Why had the inserted the message only into the virus, an invader, and not into his red blood cells? Because, with his medical background, Ryuji knew that there was no chance that DNA from the other cells would be sequenced. He'd known that he could only count on the virus responsible fro the cluster of deaths being run through a sequencer, and so he'd concentrated his efforts on the virus's DNA. So that the words he sent would be received.

All of which finally led Ando to one conclusion. Since this code looked to him like a code, it was no longer functioning, in essence, as a code should. Rather, it was just that Ryuji's DNA had no other way to communicate with the outside.

♥ Who are you?

An odd smell, different from the scent of perfume, touched his nose, and he made a face and held his breath. What could it be? It smelled like it contained iron, like blood. The woman's hair reached down to the middle of her back, and her hand on the wall was so white it was almost transparent. A closer look revealed that the nail on her index finger was split. Her sleeveless dress was much too light for the season. She had to be freezing. On her legs she wore no stockings, and on her feet just a pair of pumps. He could see purplish bruises on her legs. This shocked him, but he didn't know why. As hard as he tried, he couldn't stifle the trembling that welled up from deep within him.

..Who was she?

..But there was something in the indescribable aura that the woman had exuded that negated such an easy answer. Riding in the same elevator with her hand shaken Ando to the depths of his soul. She didn't seem to be of this world, and yet, she didn't look like a ghost, either. She'd definitely been there with him in the flesh. But Ando thought he would have had an easier time accepting her if she had been a ghost.

♥ Ando let the pen come to rest. "Hold on a second. We're not talking about a living thing here."

Miyashita didn't miss a beat. It was as if he'd prepared his responsive ahead of time.

"If someone asked you to define life, what's your answer?"

Life, in Ando's view, basically boiled down to two things: the ability of an entity to reproduce itself, and its possession of a physical form. Taking a single cell as an example, it had DNA to oversee its self-reproduction, while it had protein to give it external shape. But a videotape? To be sure, it had a physical form-its plastic shell, usually black and rectangular. But it couldn't be said to have the ability to reproduce itself.

"A video doesn't have the ability to reproduce on its own."

"So?" Miyashita sounded impatient now.

"So you're saying it's just like a virus..."

Ando felt like groaning. Viruses are a strange form of life: they lack the power to reproduce on their own. On that score, they actually fall somewhere between the animate and the inanimate. What a virus can do is burrow into the cells of another living creature and use them to help it reproduce. Just as the videotape in question had held its watchers in thrall by means of its threat to destroy them unless they copied it. The tape had used people in its reproductive process.

"But..." Ando felt compelled to object at this point. He wasn't even sure what he wanted to deny. He just felt that if he didn't, something catastrophic would happen.

"But all copies of the video have been neutralized."

There shouldn't be any more danger, in other words. Even if the videotape had been alive in the limited way a virus is, it was extinct now. All four specimens that had been introduced into the world had now been removed from it.

"You're right. The videotape is extinct. But that's the old strain." The beads of sweat on Miyashita's face grew larger with every swallow of beer he took.

"What do you mean, old?" asked Ando.

"The video mutated. Through copying, it evolved until a new strain emerged. It's still lurking out there somewhere. And it's taken a completely different form. That's what I think, anyway."

.."If the videotape did mutate and evolve into a new form during the process of multiple copying, then it wouldn't matter at all to the new species if the old one died out. Think about it. Ryuji went to all the trouble of manipulating a DNA sequence so he could talk to us from the world of the dead. I can't think of any other explanation for why he'd send us the word "mutation." Can you?"

Of course Ando couldn't. How could he? He brought the liquor to his lips time and again, but intoxication seemed still a long way off. His head was distressingly clear.

It might be true. Ando found himself gradually leaning toward Miyashita's viewpoint. Ryuji probably meant the word "mutation" as a warning. Ando could almost see Ryuji's face as he sneered, You think you're safe. You think it's extinct. But you won't get off that easy. It's mutated, and a new version is rearing its head.

Ando was reminded of the AIDS virus. It was thought that several hundred years ago some preexisting virus mutated and became what is now known as the AIDS virus. The previous virus didn't infect humans, and may well have been harmless. But trough mutation, it took on the power to wreak havoc with the human immune system. What if the same thing happened with this videotape? Ando could only pray that the opposite happened, that a harmful thing was no innocuous. But the facts suggested otherwise. Far from becoming harmless, the mutated videotape had turned into something that killed anybody who watched it regardless of whether or not they made a copy of it. If that was any indication, the thing was getting even nastier.

♥ Ando imagined the scene at their house: the phone ringing, her mother picking up the receiver, an ostentatious voice on the other end identifying itself as Officer So-and-so from the police department, then, Your daughter is dead... Ando shuddered. He felt sorry for her mother, about to experience that moment. She wouldn't collapse, she wouldn't break down crying. The world around her would simply recede.

He couldn't stand to be in the autopsy room a moment longer. When the scalpel entered Mai's body, the air would be filled with an odor much worse than what greeted them now. And when the organ wall was cut so that the contents of her stomach and intestines could be examined, the stench would be positively horrific. Ando knew how surprisingly long olfactory memories could last, and he didn't want this one. He knew very well that it was the fate of all living beings, no matter how pure and beautiful, to finally leave an unbearable stench. But just this once, he felt like giving in to sentimentality. He wanted to keep his memories of Mai from being sullied by that smell.

♥ Now he stood directly in front of her, facing her, and he couldn't move a muscle. He was confused. His mind couldn't process what he was seeing and his body escaped his command.

Why. Is. She. Here? Ando flailed about for a reason, which he was doomed not to find. The absence of any conceivable reason was what truly frightened him. As long as an explanation could be come up with, terror could be dispelled.

.."Are you Mai's sister?"

That was what he wanted her to be. If that was who she was, it made sense: her emerging from Mai's room, her coming to this building with a bouquet. Everything would stand to be explained.

The woman made a slight, indecipherable movement with her head. It wasn't quite a nod, nor quite a shake. It could have been affirmation or denial, but Ando decided she'd intended yes.

She's Mai's older sister, come to leave flowers on the roof of the building where her sister died. It was most natural, quite fitting. People only believe what they can understand.

♥ In the cab, he thought about the last words she'd said.

I'll call on you soon with a request.

What was her request? Where did she mean to "call on" him? Was that supposed to be some sport of social pleasantry?

He'd rushed out of the building and into a taxi as if pursued by her gaze. He regretted not asking her for her name and number at least. Why hadn't he? He ought to have waited for her to come down from the roof. But he hadn't. Or rather, he couldn't. It was as though his every movement had been controlled by that woman. He had acted against his will.

♥ There they were... swarms of them!

The strands writhed around in the dying cells like so many snakes, biting and clinging to the surface of the chromatin.

A chill ran down Ando's spine. This was a new virus, the likes of which had never been seen before. He'd never seen the smallpox virus through an electron microscope, yet he did know it from medical textbooks. The difference between that and this were obvious at a glance.

"Oh my God."

Miyashita sat there sighing, his mouth hanging open.

Ando understood the workings of the virus: how it was carried along inside the blood vessels to the coronary artery, where it affixed itself to the inner wall of the anterior descending branch and caused mutations in the cells of that area until they formed a tumor. What he couldn't understand was how this virus he was looking at now could have been created via the victim's consciousness. This virus didn't invade the body from outside. Rather, it was born within the body as a result of watching a videotape; it was a function of the mind. That went beyond mysterious and Ando was dumbfounded. It represented a leap from nothingness to being, from concept to matter. In all earth's history such a thing happened only once, when life first came to be.

Does it mean, then, that life emerged due to the workings of some consciousness?

♥ It fell to Ando and Miyashita, who discovered it, to name this strange new virus, and Miyashita's comment was by way of a suggestion. The ring virus.

"How about it?"

Miyashita wanted Ando's opinion. The name was perfect, but Ando felt uneasy for precisely that reason. It was too perfect and made him wonder if a God-like being were making itself felt. How did all this begin? Ando had no trouble remembering: it was with the numbers on the newspaper that had been sticking out of Ryuji's sutures. 178, 136. They'd given him the English word "ring." Then he'd found that astonishing report, and it was entitled Ring. And now, this, which he beheld-a virus shaped like a ring. It was as if some will, changing form with each rebirth as it strove to grow into something ever larger, had chosen this shape as a symbol.

The microscopic universe contained kinds of beauty that came from cyclic repetition, but what Ando saw now was an ugliness that mirrored such beauty. And it wasn't just the abstract knowledge that this virus brought evil to humanity that made it appear ugly to Ando. What he felt was closer to an instinctive hatred of serpentine creatures. Any human being shown the image, with absolutely no prior knowledge, would probably react with revulsion.

♥ "It's just that I have a bad feeling about this."

Ando looked again at the photos of the ring virus. Vast numbers of them, piled up on one another. When several specimens overlapped, they looked like unspooled, tangled-up videotape. The psychic Sadako Yamamura, on the brink of death, had converted information into images, leaving some sort of energy at the bottom of that well. The video had been born as a result of the detonation of that energy. It wasn't matter that was spreading, but information, as recorded on videotape and DNA.

He couldn't shake the suspicion that some terrible mutation was taking place somewhere he wasn't aware of. Ando had visited Mai's apartment, and he'd also been to the rooftop exhaust shaft into which she'd fallen. He'd sensed the strangeness of her room and had felt the weirdness of that roof underfoot. Maybe that was why he sensed danger bearing down on him more than Miyashita seemed to. he could almost hear the writhing, of something, accelerate under the earth.

♥ "Recall the Spanish influenza virus, the one that swept the world in 1918. They found the same virus in America in 1977, but nobody died then. The first time around it slaughtered between twenty to forty million people worldwide, and sixty years later, it was basically harmless."

"I guess a virus can weaken through mutation."

♥ He returned his gaze to the photos on the wall. Her looked at a x100000 shot of the virus in thread form. He tried to remember his first impression upon seeing it at the university.

Hadn't it reminded him of something, with its oval-shaped head and wiggling flagellum? Swarms of them had been swimming around in Mai's veins, but they hadn't attacked her coronary artery.

What did they attack?

His head felt hot. A tiny hole slowly opened, letting in light. It was one of those moments when something previously hidden suddenly begins to heave into view. Ando looked at his planner again, at the date on which he supposed Mai had watched the videotape. The evening of November 1st. The twelfth or thirteenth day after her period.

He took one step closer to the wall, and then another. Toward the ring viruses lashing their flagella.

That's it. They look exactly like sperm swimming toward the cervix.

"Sperm?" he said aloud.

She'd have been ovulating that day.

A woman usually ovulates roughly two weeks after her period, and the egg only stays in the oviduct a maximum of twenty-four hours. If Mai had had an egg in her oviduct the night she watched the video...

The ring virus must have abruptly found another outlet and switched its target from her coronary artery to her egg. Gasping for breath, Ando sat down on the edge of the bed. He no longer needed to look at his planner or the photos. It was just possible that Mai had been ovulating when she watched the videotape. It had been her luck-misfortune, rather-to watch it on the one day of the month. And that was why she was the exception. Of all the females who had watched the tape, she'd been the only one ovulating.

And...

When he tried to deduce what must have happened, Ando's spine froze. But he couldn't hinder himself from arriving at the obvious conclusion.

Countless particles of the ring virus would have invaded Mai's eggs and been incorporated into its DNA.

They fertilized her egg.?

Although it had evolved, the ring virus's basic nature had not changed. In exactly a week, the fertilized egg would have reached its full growth and been expelled from Mai's body. That had to be why the autopsy found evidence that Mai had just given birth.

But what did she give birth to?

♥ Ando had no desire to crawl in there and peer into the well, just as he'd had no desire to look into the exhaust shaft where Mai's corpse had been discovered. He had come close but in the end hadn't found the courage to look in. A young woman called Sadako had been thrown into the well, to end her life staring at a small circle of sky. Mai had breathed her last at the bottom of a rectangular prism made of concrete. One died in an old well at the edge of a mountainside sanatorium, and the other on the roof of a waterfront office building. One died deep in hushed woods, where branches hemming in from all sides nearly obstructed the view of the sky, and the other by a harbor road where the sea smelled strong, with nothing at all between her and the sky. One died in a barrel-shaped coffin sunk deep in the earth, and the other in a box-shaped coffin that floated high. The peculiar contrasts between the places Sadako and Mai had died only served to highlight their essential similarity.

♥ He went through the ticket gate and into the station and sat down on a bench on the platform. The cold back of the bench against his spine, Ando wondered if that was what lying on the autopsy table felt like. If that was what it felt like to be dead. Sometimes it was worse to be in the dark, imagining terrors. He figured that in some ways, it was much more grueling to suspect you had cancer than to be told straight out that you did. The uncertainty was what made it so hard. Directly faced with a trial it was possible to endure it with some measure of equanimity. Something in man made being left hanging the worst. So was he infected, or wasn't he? For Ando, there was only one way to overcome the misery of the moment, and it was to persuade himself that his life was spent anyway. Regret at having let his son die could help him overcome his own attachment to life...

♥ Only, now that he thought about it, he realized that everything that had happened in bed last night took place in complete darkness. It didn't matter how pretty Masako was, or how provocative she may have looked; Ando hadbn't feasted on her with his eyes. Not only had she turned off the lights, but she'd covered the clock on the bedside table with a towel. She'd made the room truly dark, unwilling even to tolerate the faint trace of light coming from behind the face of the clock. Every one of her movements had betrayed an intense attachment to darkness.

♥ "It mustn't go to press!" Ando cried out loud. At the very least, he had to get Junichiro to delay publication until it could be established that Ring was physically harmless. It was his duty as a medical professional. Tomorrow, he and Miyashita would have their blood tested. It would take several days for the results to come back. If they were positive, if he and Miyashita turned out to be carriers of the ring virus, then publication of that book could have catastrophic consequences. The original videotape could only spread at the rate of one copy at a time. Publication involved numbers of an entirely different scale, ten thousand copies at least. In a worst-case scenario, hundreds of thousands, even millions, of copies would be disseminated throughout the country.

♥ A few seconds later, the fax machine whirred to life and began printing. Ando stood motionless over the black machine, staring at the sheet slowly emerging from it. He felt someone sneak up behind him and turned to look. It was Masako, wearing only panties. She'd draped the towel over her shoulders and was standing directly behind him. Her face was flushed, and her eyes had a new gleam, so lustrous as to make him want to hold her and kiss her eyelids then and there. She wore a strangely resolute expression.

The fax machine beeped to say it was done printing. Ando tore off the fax, sat down on the bed, and had a look. The transmission consisted of two photos, side by side. The printout wasn't quite photo quality, but it was clear enough for him to make out Sadako Yamamura's face and body.

He screamed. The woman in the photos was indeed different from what he'd imagined. But that wasn't why he'd screamed. The photos on the fax were of the woman standing in front of him now.

♥ "The basic question is, where did Sadako come from? ..Mai Takano gave birth to her. ..Think back to when we ran the ring virus through the genetic sequencer. We discovered that it contained smallpox genes and human genes mixed together in a fixed ratio."

.."So the human genes were..."

"Sadako's. Split into hundreds of thousands of parts.

"Hundreds of thousands of ring virus specimens, each carrying a tiny segment of Sadako's DNA?"

"Despite its being Sadako's DNA virus, the ring virus has reverse transcription enzymes. So it ought to be able to insert those fragments into the nucleus of the cell."

A single virus specimen would be incapable of carrying the entirety of a person's genetic information. It simply wasn't big enough. But things would be otherwise if a person's DNA could be split into hundreds of thousands of segments, and each segment parceled out to a different piece of virus. In the photos taken by the electron microscope, they'd seen what looked like countless numbers of ring viruses, mobs of them. It turned out that each one of them had been carrying a part of Sadako Yamamura's genetic code, and together they'd ganged up on Mai's eggs.

.."But Sadako died twenty-five years ago. Her genetic information shouldn't be able to manifest itself anymore."

"Let's think about that. Now, why do you think Sadako projected those images on a tape?"

What had she been obsessed with at the bottom of that well, on the brink of death? The idea of packing all her hatred for the masses into images that would bring terror to anyone who saw them? Practically speaking, what would she get out of that? There had to be some deeper purpose. But Ando couldn't comprehend what Miyashita was trying to say.

.."She was only nineteen."

"So?"

"So she didn't want to die."

"She was too young to die."

"Isn't it conceivable that she transformed her genetic information into a code and left it behind in the form of energy?"

..Ando finally countered with, "Impossible. The human genome is too large."

Miyashita spread his arms to point at the corners of the room. "Take this room, for example. Let's say we were to express the totality of this room in words."

The study was about eight mats large. A desk stood next to the bed. There was a computer on the desk, and next to that a pile of dictionaries. Most problematic were the bookshelves that took up one wall. They were crammed with what had to be a few thousand books ranging from works of literature to specialist works on medicine. It could easily take a day just to list all the titles and authors.

"That's a lot of information."

"But what if..." Miyashita mimed holding a camera. Click. "...you took a picture. You've got it all in an instant. With just one photo you can store most of the information that makes up the sight of this room. And think, continuous images would increase the capacity that much more. It wouldn't be impossible to encode Sadako's complete genetic information that way."

..Just before here death, Sadako had contracted the virus from Jotaro Nagao. It seemed that she'd somehow blended with it there at the bottom of the well, over a long period of time, until the mixture had achieved full ripeness. Two beings hounded to untimely extinction had exacerbated each other's potency in their mutual desire to come back to life someday.

"Now, is it true that Junichiro Asakawa is going to publish Ring?"

"Yup. Shotoku already has it listed in a brochure of upcoming releases."

"Okay. Sadako and the smallpox virus. Those two threads were twisted into one in the form of that killer videotape. Now they're coming apart, evolving back into two separate strands. One is Sadako herself, and the other is Ring."

Ando didn't object. A virus was something that inhabited the gray area between life and non-life anyway, something that amounted to little more than information, whose very nature it was to effect dramatic changes in itself in response to its environment. That it should switch from the form of a video to the form of a book didn't come as much of a shock.

"So that's why Kazuyuki Asakawa survived so long."

Finally, that riddle was solved. In other words, there had been two exits. One was Sadako, and the other was the Ring report. And that was why both Mai and Kazuyuki had been spared death by arterial blockage. As long as they had the ability to give birth, so to speak, their lives weren't to be claimed so easily. It made sense. Just as the ring virus that had invaded Mai's body had headed for her womb, in Kazuyuki's body the virus had headed for the brain. It wasn't really Kazuyuki Asakawa who wrote Ring; he had been forced to write it. Sadako's DNA entered his brain and made him do it. And that was how he was able to describe things with such video camera-like accuracy. Only his depiction of Sadako, the main subject, was lacking in verisimilitude, according to the logic that dictated that the person looking through the viewfinder won't appear on film.

Ando and Miyashita fell silent, trying to anticipate what was to come.

♥ Ando did understand. It was obvious that something had to happen to him because he'd read Ring. But he didn't care anymore. He wasn't afraid of death, not particularly. He'd been quite afraid of death while his son was alive and his wife had loved him, but not now.

♥ A week later I had grown to the age I had been at my death. Mysteriously, I retained all my memories from my previous life. My birth in Sashikiji on Izu Oshima Island, my transient life with my mother as she was subjected to parapsychological experiments, my aged father's time in the sanatorium.... I remembered it all. Why is that, I wonder. Perhaps memories are not engraved upon the folds of the brain, but stored in the genes.

♥ But Miyashita was thinking about something else. "'A complete hermaphrodite.' Suppose she-it, maybe?-can have a child without procreative sex? Imagine the consequences."

There are many lower organisms that can reproduce without male female union. Worms, for example, have male and female parts in one body, and can lay fertilized eggs. Reproduction among single-sexed organisms by cellular division also falls under the heading of asexual reproduction. A child born without input from a male and a female would have the same genes as its single parent. In other words, Sadako would give birth to another Sadako. If such a thing were possible.

"If that's true, then..." Ando's gaze wandered uneasily off into space. "Then Sadako isn't human anymore. She's a new species. New species arise due to mutations. This is evolution happening before our eyes!"

Ando tried to pursue the train of logic. The question was how Sadako meant to establish herself as a new species. When a new species arises as a result of mutation, it can find only unmutated individuals to mate with.

For example, suppose a single black sheep is born into a flock of thousands of white sheep. That black sheep must mutate with a white sheep. Assuming the result of this mating to be a white or gray sheep. It's easy to see how the trait of blackness must become weaker and weaker until it gradually disappears. Unless there are at least two black sheep, one of each sex, the trait will not be passed on down the generations.

But in Sadako's case, the problem was already solved. If she could reproduce asexually, there was no need for her to choose a breeding partner. If she could reproduce herself, all alone, then all the traits that made her Sadako would be transmitted to the next generation.

However, with one Sadako giving birth to another Sadako, one at a time, the species's rate of increase would be extremely slow, no faster than the videotape's propagation, one copy at a time. And while the species dallied, the human race might corner it and annihilate it. Just as the killer videotape itself had been made extinct. In order to thrive, the new species needed to reproduce itself rapidly and en masse. Sadako needed to secure room to survive, perhaps by usurping human habitats, perhaps by flooding in through the cracks. Perhaps she already had a plan...

♥ No sooner did Ando read what was written there than he dropped the notebook. In an instant he'd been robbed of the power to think; all strength had been sapped from his body. He'd never dreamed she would offer such a thing. Miyashita must have guessed how he was feeling, and he made no comment.

Ando's eyes were shut. Sadako, he felt, was whispering sweetly to him that he should destroy the human race. That he should take the side of the new species, become its ally, and work on its behalf. Sadako understood that without collaborators among humans, her species could never survive. Junichiro Asakawa, through his efforts to publish Ring, was already acting on Sadako's behalf. He probably didn't yet realize it himself, but there was no question Sadako was manipulating him.

But the compensation Ando was being offered in exchange for his soul was more than enticing. How many times had he prayed for that dream to come true? Never thinking that it actually could.

Is such a thing possible? he asked himself. He opened his eyes and looked at the bookshelf. There it was, in an envelope sandwiched between two books. Medically, it wasn't possible. And with Sadako's help, it might actually happen. Still...

He raised his voice in a cry of anguish. If Sadako wasn't stopped now, there was no telling what suffering she'd bring to the human race. As a member of that race, Ando couldn't betray it. In the end the only way to stop Sadako was to destroy her. But if her body was obliterated, his dream would be, too. The only way to make his dream come true was to keep Sadako safe and healthy.

..Ando realized he was cornered, snared. Decades from now, he would be in the history books, and not as a hero. He'd be remembered as the traitor thanks to whom the human race was driven to the brink of extinction. That was, of course, if there was still a human race to remember him. If the species ended, so did its history.

♥ "Ryuji," he muttered. Miyashita have him a worried look. Ando paid no attention, though, as he pursued this new line of reasoning. He was beginning to think he saw a will at work behind all the events he'd accepted as random. Had Ryuji really sent him the words "ring" and "mutation" in code out of pure goodwill? Just to tell Ando to pay attention? Ando began to doubt that. He began to see those hints as course corrections, delivered at moments when Ando seemed about to get off track. Why had Ryuji done such a thing?

There was something else, too. Just why had Mai ended up watching the killer video anyway? If it hadn't been for the coincidence of her watching it on the very day she was ovulating, Sadako would never have been reborn. Where had Mai gotten the tape?

At Ryuji's place.

Why had she gone there?

Ryuji's article was missing a page.

But was it really missing a page?

Only Ryuji knows.

Everything came back to Ryuji.

Ryuji, Ryuji, Ryuji.

He and Mai had been intimate. It wasn't strange if he knew her menstrual cycle. She'd been guided by him on that very day.

Oh Lord...

Ando looked at Miyashita's face, at his eyes narrowed with concern, and whispered, "It's Ryuji."

Miyashita's eyes narrowed even further: he didn't understand.

"Don't you see? It's Ryuji. He's been the one pulling the strings all along. He's behind Sadako."

As Ando repeated the name, he felt his suspicions harden into certainty. Ryuji had been playing all of them. He'd written the script.

Outside the window the sounds of the city at night eddied and swirled. A car passed by on the Metropolitan Expressway with a grating noise as if it were dragging something heavy behind it. Like fingernails on glass it sounded at first, then turned into loud male laughter, an eerie shriek coming from someplace far away. Ando thought it was Ryuji's voice.

He called out to empty space, "Ryuji, are you there?"

Naturally there was no reply. But Ando could sense him. Ryuji was present. The man who had joined forces with Sadako to hunt humanity for sport was in his room, watching how things went, laughing derisively at Ando for noticing too late to do anything about it.

A light came on in Ando's head as he surmised what Ryuji wanted. Something he was unable to obtain without Ando's cooperation. Ryuji's occult notices were finally clear, but it didn't do Ando any good. It was too late, the course of events was beyond his influence. The only thing left for Ando to do was to join his voice with Ryuji's, with the chuckling in the dark.

♥ "Cute kid."

Ando didn't need Ryuji to tell him. Of course Takanori was cute. He was a jewel, an irreplaceable treasure that he'd lost again. A treasure that he'd betrayed the human race to recover. Ando still wasn't sure if he'd done the right thing.

♥ "Ring's sold over a million copies."

"A million-seller, huh?" Ando already knew this. He'd seen it in newspapers. The book had already been through several reprints, a fact that was trumpeted in its marketing. But every time Ando saw the word "reprint" it made him think "replication." Ring had been able to effect a near-instantaneous mass reproduction of itself. There were now more than a million people carrying the virus.

"They're even making it into a movie."

"A movie? Ring?"

"Mm-hmm. They cast the part of Sadako through an open casting call."

"An open casting call?" Ando found himself reduced to repeating after Ryuji.

The resurrected man broke into laughter. "That's right, an open casting call. And who do you think nailed the part of Sadako?"

Ando didn't keep up on show-business news. "Tell me," he said. How was he to know who'd passed the audition?

Ryuji was almost doubled over with laughter. "Don't be such a dullard. You know her quite well."

"Sadako... herself?"

It was only as he said the name that he realized the import of this development. Sadako had always wanted to be an actress. She'd joined a professional theater troupe right out of high school. She was no amateur, she had the training. It wasn't surprising that she'd auditioned, and with her powers, she must have easily captured the casting director's heart. Besides, it was an irresistible role. Sadako would be playing herself. Ando thought he could guess why. She wanted to project her thoughts into the film, so that when the movie showed the killer videotape, it carried her genetic information again. The extinct tape itself was now to be resurrected, and on a grand scale.

And what would be the result? Ando had no idea how big a hit it would be, but it was certain that a fair number of women would go to the theater to see it; those who happened to be ovulating would be visited by the same tragedy that had destroyed Mai. A week later, they would all give birth to Sadako, their own bodies cast aside as used cocoons, abandoned to decay.

And then the movie would hit the video rental shops, and then it'd be broadcast on TV. The images would spread far more quickly than they ever could have thorough one-copy-at-a-time dubbing. This would be reproduction at an explosive rate. And these new Sadakos would all be able to have children of their own, by themselves. Sadako had managed to work out a method by which she'd have the whole world wrapped instantly around her finger.

"Sadako's going to breed with the media," Ryuji said, finally done laughing and looking up.

"They'll figure it out soon enough, and the movie will be suppressed." Not just the movie, but the book, too. All circulating copies would be rounded up and burned. Ando wanted to believe that humanity would rally.

"Nope. Just think how huge the media industry is, and how many people in it have already been on contact with the virus. Even if Ring itself is destroyed, the media is going to be transformed by people who have contracted the ring virus. Just as that videotape mutated into a book, it's going to get into every stream: music, video games, computer networks. New media will cross-breed with Sadako and produce more new media, and every ovulating woman who comes in contact with them will give birth to Sadako."

Ando touched his breast pocket and felt the vial of vaccine. It would be effective only against the ring virus. It would be powerless against mutated media. Without knowing what type of media the virus would mutate into, it was impossible to concoct a vaccine that would be effective against them. Humanity would forever lag behind. Sadako, the new species, would gradually crowd out the human race until finally she'd driven it to the edge of extinction.

"And you're okay with all that?"

Ando himself couldn't peacefully sit back and watch as people died and Sadako took their places. But never mind him. Ryuji was taking an active role in the whole thing, helping it along. Ando simply couldn't understand that.

"You're looking at it from a human standpoint. I'm not. The way I see it, one person dies, one Sadako is born. Add one here, take one there, the total's still the same. Where's the problem?"

"That's totally beyond my comprehension."

Ryuji brought his sweaty face right up close to Ando's. "Now's no time for you to be bitching. You're on our side now."

"To do what?"

"You'll get to intervene in evolution, for one thing. A pretty rare opportunity, if you ask me."

"Evolution? Is that what you call this?"

All the diversity of human DNA would converge with the single DNA pattern that was Sadako. Was that evolution? It seemed rather a point of weakness to Ando. It's precisely because of genetic diversity that some plague victims die while others survive. Even if another ice age comes, thought Ando, the Inuit would be able to live through it, and this would be thanks to diversity, in this case of populations within the human species. If this diversity vanished, then the slightest mischance could lead to the downfall of the whole species. If, say, the original Sadako Yamamura had some defect in her immune system, the defect would be present in every subsequent Sadako. A simple cold could come as a mighty blow to a species.

♥ "Do you know why living things evolve?"

Ando shook his head. He doubted there was anyone who could answer that question with perfect confidence.

But Ryuji's voice had that confidence as he continued. "Take the eye. I know I don't have to explain this an anatomist like yourself, Dr. Ando, but the human eye is an amazingly complex mechanism. It's next to impossible to imagine that a piece of skin evolved into a cornea, a pupil, and eyeball, an optical nerve connecting it to the brain, all in such a way to make it actually see. It's hard to believe it all happened by chance. It wasn't that we started to look at things because there was now a mechanism by which to see them. There first had to be a will to see, buried somewhere inside living things. Without it, the mechanism would never have taken shape. It wasn't chance that led sea creatures to first crawl onto the land, or reptiles to learn how to fly. They had the will to do so. Now, try and say this and most experts will just laugh. They'll call it mystical teleology, an execrable excuse for philosophy.

"Can you imagine what the world is like for a creature that can't see? To the worms crawling around in the earth, the world is only what touches their bodies there in the darkness. For starfish or sea anemones waving around on the ocean floor, the whole world is the texture of the rock they're stuck to and the feel of the water as it flows by. Do you think such a creature can even conceptualize seeing? It beggars the imagination. It's one of those things you can't contemplate, like the edge of the universe. But somehow, at a certain point in its evolution, life on earth acquired the concept of "seeing." We crawled up onto the land, we flew into the skies, and in the end we grasped culture. A chimp can comprehend a banana. But it'll never be able to comprehend the concept of culture. It can't comprehend it, but somehow it gets the will to obtain it. Where that impulse comes from, I have no idea."

"Oh, so there's something even you don't know?" Ando said with all the sarcasm he could muster.

"Pay attention. If the human race goes extinct and Sadako Yamamura's DNA takes its place, in the end its' because the human race willed it."

"Does any species desire its own extinction?"

"Subconsciously, isn't that what humanity desired? If all DNA were united into one pattern, there would be no more individual difference. Everyone would be the same, with no distinctions in ability, or beauty. There'd be no more attachment to loved ones. And forget about war, there wouldn't even be any more arguments. We're talking a world of absolute peace and equality that transcends even life and death. Death would no longer be something to fear, you see. Now, be honest, isn't that what you humans wanted all along?"

♥ "What are you going to do now?"

"What can I do? I'll find a deserted island someplace out of the media's reach, and raise my son there."

"That sounds like you. Me, I'm going to watch the end of the human race. Once it's gone as far as it can go, who knows, maybe a will beyond human wisdom will come raining its wrath down on us. I'd hate to miss that. .. Maybe I ought to teach you one more thing before I go. Why do you think human culture progressed? People can endure almost anything, but there's one thing they just can't survive. Man is an animal that can't stand boredom. And that's what set the whole thing off. In order to escape boredom, humanity had to progress. I imagine it'll be pretty boring to be controlled by a single strand of DNA. Think about it in those terms, and it seems like you'd want to have as much individual variation as possible. But hey, what can we do? People just don't want that variation. Oh, and one last thing-I think you're going to be pretty bored on that desert island."

♥ A particularly big wave came along and started to raise the boy's body off the sand. The boy gave a little shriek and clung tightly to Ando's waist. Ando held his son tightly to his side and waded out into the sea. He could feel his son's heartbeat. That rhythm was the only sure thing in a world facing destruction. It proved they were alive.