Loop by Koji Suzuki (translated by Glynne Walley).
Title: Loop.
Author: Koji Suzuki (translated by Glynne Walley).
Genre: Literature, fiction, technology, pandemics, medicine.
Country: Japan.
Language: Japanese.
Publication Date: 1998.
Summary: In the conclusion to the original Ring trilogy, the killer virus mimics both AIDS and cancer in a deadly new guise. Kaoru Futami, a youth mature beyond his years, must hope to find answers in the deserts of New Mexico and the Loop project, a virtual matrix created by scientists. The fate of more than just his loved ones depends on Kaoru's success.
My rating: 8.5/10.
My review:
♥ Now he was the sole possessor of this sliver of space jutting into the sky a hundred yards above the ground. He turned around and looked through the glass door into the apartment. He couldn't see his mother directly. But he could read her presence in the milky band of fluorescent light that shone from the kitchen onto the sofa in the living room. As she stood in front of the sink, cleaning up after the meal, her movements caused slight disturbances in the rays of light.
Kaoru returned his gaze to the darkness and thought the same thoughts he always did. He dreamed of being able to elucidate, somehow, the workings of the world that surrounded and contained him. It wasn't that he hoped to solve a mystery or two on the cutting edge of a particular field. What he desired was to discover a unifying theory, something to explain all phenomena in the natural world. His father, an information-engineering researcher, had basically the same dream.
♥ Kaoru never got tired of looking down from on high, and then when night came, he'd pull the stars down close, using them to bolster his imagination concerning the world whose ways he couldn't yet fully grasp.
♥ "By the way, Mom, what do you think the odds were of life arising on earth naturally?"
"Like winning the lottery."
Kaoru laughed out loud. "Come on! Way smaller. You can't even compare the two. We're talking a miracle."
"But someone always wins the lottery."
"You're talking about a lottery with, like, a hundred tickets and one winner, where a hundred people buy tickets. I'm talking about rolling dice a hundred times and having them come up sixes every time. What would you think if that happened?"
"I'd think the game was rigged."
"Rigged?"
"Sure. If someone rolled the same number a hundred times in a row, it'd have to mean the dice were loaded, wouldn't it?" As she said this, she poked a finger into Kaoru's forehead affectionately, as if to say, Silly.
"Loaded, huh?"
Kaoru thought for a while, mouth hanging open. "Of course. Loaded dice. It had to be rigged. It doesn't make sense otherwise."
"Right?"
"And humanity just hasn't noticed that it's rigged. But, Mom-what if dice that aren't loaded come up with the same number a hundred times in a row?"
"Well, then we're talking about God, right? He's the only one who could do something like that."
Kaoru couldn't tell if his mother really believed that or not.
He decided to move on. "By the way, do you remember what happened on TV yesterday?" Kaoru was referring to his favorite afternoon soap opera. He loved the soaps so much that he even had his mother tape them for him sometimes.
"I forgot to watch."
"Well, remember how Sayuri and Daizo met again on the Cape?"
Kaoru proceeded to recount the plot of yesterday's episode almost as if it involved people he knew personally. Sayuri and Daizo were a young couple in their first year of marriage, and a series of misunderstandings had brought them to the brink of divorce. They were still in love, but coincidence had pulled on coincidence until they were hopelessly tangled in the cords that bind men and women: now they were in a morass they couldn't find their way out of. So they'd separated. And then, one day, by pure chance, they'd run into each other on a certain point of land in the Japan Sea coast. The place was special to them-it was where they'd first met. And as they began to remember all the wonderful times they'd had together there, their old feelings for each other had been reawakened. They cleared up their misunderstandings one by one, until they were sure of each other's love again.
Of course, a heartwarming twist lay behind this trite tale. Both of them were under the impression that it was purely by chance that they'd run into each other on this sentimental promontory, but they were wrong. They had friends who were desperate to see them make up, and those friends had colluded, taking it upon themselves to arrange it so that each would be there at that moment.
"Get it, Mom? What are the chances of a separated couple running into each other like that-being in the same place at the same time on the same day? Not exactly zero. Coincidental meetings do happen. But in some cases, when the chances of something happening are really small, and then it actually happens, you tend to think that there's somebody in the shadows pulling strings. In this case, it was Sayuri and Daizo's nosy friends."
"I think I see where you're going with this. You're trying to say that even though there was almost zero chance of it happening, life actually did arise. After all, we exist. In which case, there must be something somewhere pulling the strings. Right?"
Kaoru felt that way constantly. There were times when the idea that he was being watched, manipulated, insinuated itself into his brain for no apparent reason. Whether this was a phenomenon unique to himself, or whether it was in fact universal, was something he hadn't yet figured out.
♥ In short, the probability was infinitesimal. Essentially impossible. In spite of which, life had arisen. Therefore, the game had to have been rigged. Kaoru wanted to know just how the wall of improbability had been surmounted. His uttermost desire was to understand the natures of that dice-loading-without resorting to the concept of God.
On the other hand, sometimes there arose the suspicion that maybe everything was an illusion. There was no way to actually confirm that his body existed as a body. His cognitive abilities may have convinced him that it did, but there was always the possibility that reality was empty.
♥ These sperm, born of meiosis inside his father, held, as did his mother's eggs, half the number of chromosomes contained within the cells of his body. Together they made a fertilized egg, only then supplying the total number of chromosomes necessary for a cell. But it didn't follow that a sperm was merely half a person. Depending on how you looked at it, the sperm and the egg were the body's basic structural units. Only reproductive cells could be said to have continued uninterrupted since the inception of life-it wasn't too much of a stretch to say they possessed a kind of immortality.
♥ "By the way, Machi, have you ever thought about why superstitions arise? ..Ask yourself: what is a superstition? It's an oral tradition that if you see something or experience something, a certain thing will happen. With a jinx it's something bad, but of course a superstition can involve something good, or even something that can't necessarily be categorized as good or bad. To cut to the chase, a superstition is something that connects one phenomenon with an other phenomenon. Sometimes science can explain the connection. For example, the superstition that when clouds move from east to west it means it'll rain can be explained very easily by modern meteorology. There are others that you can understand intuitively, like the one that says being photographed takes years off your life. Or ones about breaking chopsticks or sandal thongs, or seeing black cats or snakes-those aren't too hard to understand. Those things are just eerie somehow. There's something about black cats and snakes that makes people the world over uneasy.
"The problem is superstitions that aren't reasonable. The ones that strike you as totally arbitrary, like, 'Why in the world do people believe that?' The jinx Machi told us about is a good example. What could having a chair back toward the window when you leave the house possibly have to do with dropping your wallet?"
.."Maybe it's based on experience."
"No doubt it is. Maybe people found out through experience that the chances of dropping your wallet are greater if a chair's back is to the window when you leave your house."
"But there's no statistical necessity that it has to be that way."
"We're not talking strict accuracy here. Let's say when you drop your wallet, it just so happens that the chair's back is to the window. And let's say that the next time you drop your wallet, the chair's back is toward the window again. So you tell someone about it, suggesting that the two phenomena are related somehow. Now the important thing is whether or not the person you tell about it has had a similar experience-whether or not they can nod and say, 'yeah, you're right.' If the idea is dismissed by a third party, then chances are it won't be handed down. But once it becomes established as a jinx, then by the mere fact of people's being aware of it, it can influence their actions, and so it stands a good chance of surviving. Once the relationship is established between the two things, the fact that people are aware of the relationship strengthens the bond even more, see. Reality and imagination begin to correspond to one another."
"So you're saying that the phenomenon of a chair having its back to the window when you leave the room and the phenomenon of dropping your wallet exert some kind of invisible influence on each other?"
"You can't rule out the possibility that they're connected on some level, deep down."
♥ The probability of which is, of course, the same as the monkey at the typewriter, banging keys at random, coming up with a passage from Shakespeare.
A probability so low that even with trillions of monkeys banging away for trillions of years, it was still virtually nil. And if a passage from Shakespeare should appear anyway? Would people still call it a coincidence? Of course not-they'd suspect some kind of fix. A man in a monkey suit sitting at one of the typewriters, or an intelligent monkey...
♥ But the fetus immersed in amniotic fluid thinks his conception was by chance-he can't make his imagination comprehend the mechanism behind it. And that's because he doesn't know about the world outside.
Only when he crawls out of the birth canal after roughly thirty-six weeks in the womb does he for the first time see the outside of the mother who bore him. Only after growing and increasing in knowledge yet further does he come to understand with exactness why and how he was conceived and born. As long as we're inside the womb, inside the universe-we can't understand the way it works. Our powers of apprehension are blacked out on that point. They have to be.
♥ In other words, equipped for a fetus though it may be, the womb is usually unoccupied.
Kaoru decided to take a step back and think about the universe again. Given that we are actually existing within it, it seemed reasonable to say that the universe is equipped with what is necessary to sustain life. In which case, life arose out of necessity, right? But, no, remember the womb: it may be capable of sustaining the life of a fetus, but it's usually without one. So life arose by chance, then? The universe is not constantly filled with life-indeed, a universe that does not beget life may indeed be more natural.
♥ Dawn was breaking and September was ending, but still the sun as it climbed was brighter than at midsummer. A few stars still shone evanescently in the western sky, looking now as if they would disappear at any moment. There was no line dividing light from dark-Kaoru couldn't say just where night ended and morning began. He loved with all his heart this moment when the passage of time manifested itself in changing colors.
Kaoru remained standing by the window after his parents disappeared into the bedroom.
The city was starting to move, its vibrations reverberating in the reclaimed land like a fetus kicking in the womb. Before his gaze a huge flock of birds was circling over Tokyo Bay. Their cries, like the mewling of newborns, asserted their vitality under the dying stars.
At times like this, staring at the blackness of the sea and the subtly changing colors of the sky, Kaoru's desire to understand the workings of the world once increased. Taking in scenery from on high stimulated the imagination.
The sun rose above the eastern horizon, pushing the night aside..
♥ At around this time, a type of cancer with the same progression as Hideyuki's began to be identified, first in Japan, then worldwide. At first the true cause of this new strain could not be identified, as if it lay wrapped under a veil. A few medical professionals supported a theory that it was the work of a new virus that turned cells cancerous, but they couldn't explain how this cancer virus differed from others, and besides, there had been no reports of such a virus being successfully isolated. But the vague suspicion spread.
It can take several years after a new disease has been identified to pinpoint the virus that causes it. The lag was especially understandable in the case of the cancer that had afflicted Hideyuki and millions of others, because at first it looked just like any other cancer: nobody realized they were dealing with a new disease. But gradually the world came to be gripped by fear that a terrible new virus had been unleashed.
♥ No doubt Ryoji didn't have a friend in the world. Kaoru could understand, because he'd been the same. He'd been just a little of a social outcast at school. But in his case, he'd had a good relationship with his parents that had saved him from feeling lonely. Crazy as his father could be, he'd been the best possible conversation partner for Kaoru. With his father and mother around, Kaoru hadn't been inclined to wonder why he'd been born into this world. He'd never had doubts about his identity.
♥ "I think the first life on earth was something like a seed. That seed contained the right information so that it could sprout, grow, and eventually become the tree which is life as we know it, including humankind."
"Are there no variations?"
"Yes and no. The biggest tree grows from the tiniest seed. The size of the trunk, the color of the leaves, the type of fruit-all that information is already contained within the seed. But of course the tree is also influenced by the natural environment. If it doesn't get sunlight it'll wither, if it doesn't get enough nutrients the trunk'll be thin. Maybe it'll be struck by lightning and split in two, maybe its branches will break in a gale. But no amount of unpredictable influence of that kind can change the basic nature of the tree as contained in the seed. Come rain or snow, a ginkgo tree will never bear apples."
Kaoru licked his lips. He didn't mean to contradict Ryoji. He basically agreed with him, in fact.
"So you're saying that if sea creatures learn to walk on land, if giraffes develop long necks, it's all because they were programmed that way from the start?"
"Well, yeah."
"In that case, we should assume that there was some kind of will at work before life began."
Ryoji responded innocently. "Whose will? God's?"
But Kaoru wasn't thinking about God per se, just an invisible will at work both before life began and during the process of evolution.
He found himself imagining a school of fish fighting with each other to get to land. There was an overwhelming power in the thought of all those fish, enough of them to dye the sea black, jumping around as they sought dry land.
Of course it was possible that sea life had never intended to go on land, but had simply succeeded in adapting to it after organic processes had begun to dry up the water. That was how the mainstream evolutionary thinker would explain it.
But the image that came to Kaoru's mind was of those hollow-eyed fish, yearning day in and day out for the land, dying at the water's edge and making mountains of their corpses. Mainstream evolution had it that a certain fraction of them had simply been lucky enough to adapt. Kaoru simply couldn't believe that. The transition from a marine to a land-based living environment involved changes in internal organs. Their insides had to be remade to allow for the transition from gill breathing to lung breathing. What kind of bodily trial and error had resulted in those changes? One kind of organ had been reborn as another. It was pretty major, when you thought about it.
♥ With normal cells, growth stops when the growth factor in the blood serum is used up. And within a Petri dish, they won't multiply beyond a single layer no natter how much growth factor is added, due to what is called contact inhibition. Cancer cells not only lack contact inhibition, but they have an extremely low dependence on the blood serum. Simply put, they are able to grow and reproduce, layer upon layer, in a tiny space with virtually no food supply.
Normal cells in a Petri dish will only form one layer, whereas cancer cells will form layer upon layer. Normal cells reproduce in a flat, orderly fashion, while cancer cells multiply in a three-dimensional, disorderly manner. Normal cells have a natural limit to the number of times they can divide, while cancer cells can go on dividing forever.
Immortality.
Kaoru was fully aware of the irony in the fact that immorality, the object of man's deepest yearnings from time immemorial, was in the possession of this primeval horror, this killer of men.
♥ That image came to me intuitively. Was it for a reason?
That was the first question to consider. His father had taught him to pay attention to his intuition.
It often happened that Kaoru would be reading a book or walking down the street and suddenly a completely unrelated scene would present himself to his mind's eye. Usually he didn't inquire into the reason. Say he was walking down the street and saw a movie star on a poster: he might suddenly remember an acquaintance who resembled the movie star. If he didn't register having seen the poster, which was entirely possible, it would seem as if the image of his acquaintance had come to him out of nowhere.
♥ "Yeah, but everybody dies." Ryoji turned his hollow gaze toward the ceiling. Kaoru no longer felt like arguing with him.
Death filled everything, everywhere. There in front of him was that bald little head. It was a solemn fact.
Nobody who hasn't experienced it can understand the misery of chemotherapy. Overcome with violent nausea, you lose your appetite, and anything you do manage to eat, you bring up again soon enough; you can't get any sleep. That was Ryoji's life, and that was how his life was going to end in the not-too-distant future. Kaoru knew it. What could he possibly say in the face of that?
♥ "It was not just coincidence that led me that night into associating gravitational anomalies with longevity. I had a flash of intuition. Most scientific discoveries are the result of intuition. Inspiration comes first, then reason."
♥ Reiko looked at the faucet, and tried to free one hand to turn it off. But Kaoru only gripped her hand tighter, pulling her toward him with great force.
At first she made as if to resist, a complex series of emotions clouding her features. Conflicting feelings raged within her-Kaoru knew this by the touch of her skin. Her obligations as a mother, and her desires as a woman.
Still holding her to him, he shifted positions and tried to lay her down on the bed. But she resisted slightly, so that she ended up sitting on the floor with her back pushed up against the edge of the bed.
Pinned against a sickbed missing its owner, hunched over with death a burden on her shoulders, Reiko tried to confront the sexual impulses pressing in on her. The specter of death was assaulting her from everywhere, except the direction from which lust came, boiling up as if to prove that she was still alive. Then she thought of how her son at this very moment was undergoing cruel tests, and the knowledge enervated her desire. Her maternal instincts began to crowd out her sexual needs.
But not Kaoru. He was beyond reining in now, as his mind and body came together in pursuit of a single goal.
He didn't care that Reiko was infected with MHC. He was aware of the data showing that the virus spread even more easily through genital contact than oral, but for the moment that knowledge was clean gone from him.
He sat down next to her, intertwined with her, on the floor of the sickroom.
♥ In between sips, Amano began to relate the history of the virtual world.
He spoke like an old man telling his storybook stories: relating the simulation in the form of a story was probably the most primal, direct way to go about it. In any case, it didn't strike Kaoru as inappropriate. Simulation it may have been, but it was also life, and it was natural for its history to contain storylike elements.
Perhaps that was why Kaoru was able to become comfortably absorbed in Amano's life. It was fun to reexperience the history of the world. But only until just before the end.
♥ "...But even after we implanted RNA, which meant the ability to self-replicate, for a while it remained a normal, chaotic world. It put some of the staff in a bad mood-they were afraid it would change nothing at all.
"But there were a few who had a more upbeat outlook. After all, real life had developed along much the same lines. Primitive life began, single-celled organisms, and then just stayed like that for three billion years with very little change, no sings of evolving.
"One day, just as we'd expected, complex life forms began to appear-just as the Cambrian Explosion came along in real life. We have no logical explanation for why varied life forms appeared at just that moment. Extremely simple life forms, similar to single-celled organisms, begat many-celled organisms, through a mechanism that was identical to how it happened on earth, they say.
"The life that emerged then became the prototype for the natural world that would later develop. Some life retained the same form and became naturally extinct, while some life began to evolve into more complex forms. The family tree branched out, the phenomena of parasitism and symbiosis appeared, life emerged that moved in fascinating ways. Things that moved like worms burrowing their way through the earth. Things that moved swiftly through the seas. Things that soared through the air like birds. And things that stagnated, giving up on evolution and remaining single cells forever. These can probably be likened to bacteria and viruses. There were things whose pictorial representation was large but which didn't move: these took forms like those of trees on earth.
"Of course each living thing had information that corresponded to genes, and every time they reproduced, a certain percentage or errors crept in, mutations that resulted in evolution in a positive direction, stagnation, or extinction. We'd done a good job or incorporating natural selection, the competition to survive.
"Observing this process, we were astonished to see something emerge that could only be gender. In the natural world, too, it's considered a mystery why species branched into male and female. In our world, too, a bifurcation occurred that clearly couldn't be explained except through reference to male and female.
"Some simple life forms were still able to reproduce without coupling with another of their species, but complex life forms now had to mate within their species in order to self-replicate. Just as we'd predicted, once the gender distinction arose, genetic information came to be combined in more dynamic ways as it was passed down to the next generation: this made for diversity, and evolution picked up speed.
"Please don't misunderstand. I didn't actually witness this myself-I heard some older colleagues talking about it. But it's pretty exciting, don't you think? The idea of artificial life forms inside a computer having sex is pretty interesting, is it not?
"With the Cambrian Explosion as a jumping-off point, life changed into complicated patterns with wondrous speed. One minute huge life forms that resembled dinosaurs appeared, and the next minute they were extinct.
"What came next was life forms that incubated the next generation's information inside the parent generation until it had achieved a certain degree of maturity, and only then divided. I'm sure you recognize what I'm talking about: mammals.
"Things went on like this for some time, until the appearance of what seemed to be the ancestors of the human race. I've pulled that scene up and watched it myself. Imagine it, if you can. At first they moved like orangutans. Then, through a long period of trial and error, their walking became smooth, free of the awkwardness it displayed at first.
"At this point the amount of genetic information was extraordinary, and soon thereafter there emerged a life form that we guessed must be humanity. It was obvious that this life form was aware of itself, that it possessed intelligence. Obvious, because these life forms were actually observed making what seemed to be signals to one another.
"By analyzing the clusters of zeros and ones they exchanged, we were able to translate their exchanges of information as language. Of course, the beings within the Loop didn't consider themselves to be interacting in binary code. And far as their awareness went, they were utilizing complex language the same as you and me.
"Once we'd analyzed their language so that we could interpret it using machine translation, it became a much more interesting world, they say. You could call up any scene on the display as a three-dimensional image, and it was just like you were a character in a movie.
"These artificial life forms began making their own history. Similar individuals came together in groups, states fought wars and engaged in political machinations. They advanced their civilization and designed their own world as if it was their own. It's said that watching it was like watching human history itself.
"The price was that as their history advanced the level of information being generated rose, and time began to move more slowly. The computers had a limit to their processing ability.
"The first three billion years from the creation of the earth had only taken a half a year on the computer. But the speed began to slow as life began to emerge, and especially after it evolved into intelligent forms on a level with human beings. At the end it took the computers two or three years to advance the Loop a few centuries.
"The Loop, as a virtual world, was recognizable and knowable to the staff of the research center. But it was utterly impossible for the sentient beings within the Loop to know us, their creators. To them, I imagine we were God Himself. As long as they were within the Loop, they were unable to comprehend how their world worked. The only thing that would have enabled comprehension was for them to get outside of their world.
"The progress of their civilization was marvelous. Their cities contained entertainment districts with flashing neon signs; they overflowed with sound and color. All manner of media sprang up, dramatically broadening the reach of information, and people lived lives filled with the pleasures of the musical and verbal arts. Their lives were no different from ours by this point. They had artists just like Mozart or da Vinci, who played the same historical role as in reality, adding vibrancy to their culture. Their world was beautiful, but at the same time it began to have an air of decadence. Some of our staff members were enraptured, while others began to whisper forebodings of doom. There were signs all over the place that something unpredictable was about to happen.
"And the premonitions were right on target. The Loop, the entire living world, began to turn cancerous... ..The Loop biosphere came to be monopolized by identical genes. It lost diversity and began moving toward extinction."
..They had created a three-dimensional virtual space inside an ultrafast supercomputer system, a world that didn't exist in reality, and they'd named this space the Loop. The space itself was large enough that from the point of view of the life forms within it, it might as well be considered an infinite universe. The experimenters had established conditions of soil, topography, and physics so that the world would be just like the primeval earth. Mathematically speaking, it was a world supported by the same formulas and theories as the real world. Not only the speed of gravitational acceleration and the boiling temperature of water, but the very landscape was identical to that of earth.
Carbon, hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, sodium, oxygen, magnesium, calcium, iron, and the rest of the 111 elements had been deposited, each according to its properties. Rules were laid down so that they would act exactly as they did in the universe enveloping the earth: two hydrogen atoms (H2) and one oxygen atom (O) when combined would form a water molecule (H2O), and this would react with a nitrogen molecule (N2), and this would react with a nitrogen molecule (N2) to form ammonia (NH3).
Fundamentally, no reason exists in the world to explain why two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, when combined, have to form water: the rules are simply set up that way. And who made the rules? If you had to give it a name, it would be God.
The fact that evolution in the Loop proceeded exactly as it had in the real world was suspected to be due to the first primitive RNA life form that had been caused to be born. Or, rather, since the physical conditions of the Loop had been precisely modeled on those of the real world, evolution there probably couldn't help but follow the path it had already followed in the real world.
One of the purposes of the Loop was to enable researchers to trace the actual process of evolution. If evolution in the Loop followed the same path as it did in reality, then the results of the Loop's evolution would predict the future if the real world.
Suddenly chills ran along Kaoru's spine. The Loop predicted the future of life on earth. All life would turn cancerous.
What in the world? That's exactly what's happening now.
Cancer cells reproduced with no respect for person, they were sexless, and they were immortal to boot. At the moment there were only a few million victims worldwide, but there was always the chance that the numbers would shoot up due to some mutation or population explosion in the MHC virus. It would be the same as what had happened in the Loop. Was it just a coincidence? Or was the Loop in fact an accurate prediction of the future?
As he sat before Kaoru, Amano was not about to assert a scientific connection between the results of the Loop and reality. And it was no wonder. How many people would believe such a ridiculous story?
Kaoru struggled to mask his shock with rationality as he asked, "What was the cause? Why did the Loop's life forms turn cancerous?"
Amano answered him in clipped tones. "That's easy. It was the appearance of the ring virus. But that emerged in a way we simply don't understand, as if by magic."
"You're saying that a single virus managed to influence all of the patterns in the Loop?"
"Yes. It shouldn't be that hard to believe. Not when a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world can affect the weather on the other. ..The cancerization of the Loop came about through the emergence of an unknown virus and a series of events liked to it. At the center of those events were three artificial life forms: one called Takayama, one called Asakawa, and one called Yamamura. It's been determined that these three life forms played important roles in the cancerization of the Loop."
♥ As a child, so full of the desire to understand the universe, he'd stared at the littering stars with a passion born of the feeling that if he just looked long enough he'd understand.
What's at the end of the universe? That was the kind of naïve question that had presented itself to him. Staring at the cosmos now, it was utterly beyond his imagination what might lie outside the universe.
Kaoru tried to imagine himself as a denizen of the Loop. Assuming he were a being aware of time and space, how would he interpret that universe? It would most likely appear to be expanding. The Loop had gradually grown with the changing passage of time. Before the program had been started, there had been nothing there at all. A mountain of silicon chips, yes, but no time, no space. But from the moment the staff had started the program, space had grown at an explosive rate. The Big Bang.
The Loop space did not exist within the massively parallel supercomputers enshrined beneath the ground, just as a nature scene on a movie screen was not actually contained within that screen. That space existed neither inside nor outside the computers. It was only experienced as space by beings able to recognize it as such. As life forms evolved and their awareness grew, that space must have expanded, as if fleeing before the eyes that sought to recognize it.
Kaoru turned his eyes to the actual sky. The universe he was looking at was expanding, but he wondered suddenly if it wasn't simply trying to get far away from earthly DNA and its powers of recognition. He couldn't discard the possibility that the real universe was a hypothetical space just like the Loop. Would that interpretation cause any inconvenient problems?
No, it wouldn't. In fact, he felt that regarding the real world as a hypothetical space was getting closer to the truth. Maybe the ancient ways of thinking-the Buddhist idea that form is emptiness, or the Platonic notion of the ideal world-did a better job of capturing the reality of things.
And if one assumed the universe was a virtual space, then there was the possibility that it was being observed through an open window in space, just as humans had been able to peek into the Loop world. Make the right time and space adjustments, and images of a particular moment in a particular place would unfold on the monitor in 3D.
Kaoru placed one had on his other arm, then moved it to his chest, his belly, and below.
Do I just think I have a body, when really there's nothing at all?
♥ With the MHC virus ravaging his body, Ryoji had chosen death. Kaoru could understand his feelings-could understand them painfully well. This was something that touched him-a catastrophe that would befall him in the not-too-distant future. This was an enemy Kaoru himself would have to fight. He understood Ryoji's act. But that didn't mean he wanted to end up the same way.
You've got to concentrate all your intelligence on confronting this enemy that wants to destroy your body, your youth.
Those were his father's words. If he wanted to escape death, he'd have to fight, and he'd have to fight to win. And he had only one weapon, just like his father had told him: his intelligence.
Kaoru sank deeper into the bathtub. Now the water was yup to his earlobes. Do I have that kind of strength?
♥ When you know somebody's going to die, love is letting that person see that you're willing to fight right by his side.
♥ So she didn't mean to abort the child; still, that didn't necessarily mean she was determined to have it.
Kaoru searched as much of her soul as he could perceive from her eyes, and he thought he caught a glimpse of a decision. She wouldn't abort it, but neither would she give birth to it. Which must mean... was she on the verge of choosing suicide?
Kaoru had one wish now. He wanted Reiko to go on living. In order to ensure that, he had to somehow prove to her that the world was worth living in, both for her and her unborn child. And not just for them, either: he had to learn the value of life for himself. How could he convince anybody else that life was worth living if he himself was willing to abandon the world to cancerization, to loss of genetic diversity, to doom?
I've got to prove it to her so that she can't possibly deny it.
There was only one way: he had to change the course of the world.
♥ It has to exist. I know it.
The world's outlines were fragile: one poke and it would all crumble into nothingness. But in the face of that fragility Kaoru found assurance. If he'd been able to call up the same information he'd found ten years ago, perhaps he wouldn't have felt this way-perhaps he wouldn't have been able to make up his mind.
He saw a bow-shaped hillock, and rivers swallowed up by the gentle rise of the land. In his imagination he could command the perspective of hawks circling overhead. The deep-carved valleys, the cool green of the trees cradled within them. Maybe the Ancient One still kept watch over the world, flanked by springs that fed into the Pacific and the Atlantic, water that circulated throughout the world like blood or lymph through the body. Incurable illness and ageless immortality; the rising and falling of the tides caused by fluctuations of gravity, life and death. All the contradictions fused into one and rose out of the desert sands. Everything suggested it. Everything whispered to him that he should go there.
♥ Darkness filled his rear-view mirror. The eastern horizon was gradually brightening, but night still ruled the sky as a whole. At the moment, Kaoru was nothing but a figure making its way through darkness toward the dawn. The few clues he'd found had led him to this mission, this burden, to search out a way to combat the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus. All around was blackness, and he had to chase the faintest hint of light.
♥ I'll stop at the next town and have some breakfast, he told himself. He knew if he didn't force himself to stop he'd ride his father's bike until it was out of gas. It frustrated him to have to stop. Watching the change from night to day had proved to Kaoru that the world was revolving on its own; he felt that if he stopped it would go on revolving without him, and he'd be left behind.
♥ Plants that reproduce asexually can go on living essentially forever, in the right environment. In the Mojave desert there are confirmed instances of such plants that have survived for over ten thousand years. Just like cancer cells in a Petri dish.
What Kaoru was witnessing now, though, was the opposite: only the tree which had gained the ability to reproduce sexually had escaped the cancer. And of course, before too long, this tree with its blossoms would follow the natural order of things and die.
A programmed death accompanied the pleasure of blooming, while a life form which had turned into cancer would go on living forever, unaging, but never producing flowers. It looked like a clear-cut choice between two alternatives. Which would Kaoru choose? A bright, shining mortality, or a dull life that went on forever? It didn't take him long to know the answer: he'd choose the life that bloomed.
Kaoru climbed the hill toward the flowers.
♥ The marriage was her second. Her first husband had been killed far upriver. And not just killed. A band of white soldiers and ruffians had tortured him and then left him to die on the rocks.
The woman still nursed resentment over the way her first husband had been treated. The mechanism by which resentment goaded people to war was laid bare to his consciousness.
♥ Variety is truly the spice of life: only genetic diversity allows a biological individual to derive any enjoyment from its existence. If all of that diversity contracted to a single genetic blueprint, life would lose its dynamism. Sadako may have achieved eternal life, or its equivalent, but every other life form would be chased into any corner it could hide in, and eventually be hounded into extinction.
Ando had to make a choice. He could either cooperate with Sadako, or be buried by her.
The reward for cooperating was simply too big.
The resurrection of my son.
The grief that dwelt in Ando's breast turned out to stem from the death of his young son two years previously.
Between the skills of Ando and his colleagues at the hospital and the unique womb of Sadako Yamamura, it was possible to effect the rebirth of Ando's son. At the moment the boy had disappeared into the ocean, several strands of his hair had come off. Ando still had them. His son's genetic information was well preserved.
He really had no choice. Life as the world presently knew it was going to end with or without his help. In which case, Ando wold much rather it end with him reunited with his son-he'd prayed so hard for it.
Kaoru wasn't inclined to blame him. He could feel how badly Ando wanted to bring his son back to life. Kaoru wasn't at all sure he wouldn't do the same thing if he were in the same situation.
Ando's team removed one of Sadako's fertilized eggs and exchanged its nucleus for a nucleus from one of Ando's dead son's cells. A week later, his son was reborn from Sadako's belly.
Ando had sold Sadako the world in exchange for a life that had been lost two years ago.
Ring was published. Soon nearly twenty thousand of its female readers were pregnant. They all gave birth to Sadako. Collaborators helped Ring to move through form after form, infecting ever more people, allowing it to reproduce even more explosively. With the speed of a prairie fire, the world's genetic makeup became consolidated into a single pattern.
The ring virus was able to affect non-intelligent life forms as well, robbing the entire biosphere of its genetic diversity. The tree of life, formerly a giant with myriad branches and luxurious foliage, became a tall straight trunk. Its seeds all carried the same genes, and those seeds rapidly decreased in number. It was as if life was moving backwards, crawling back down the tree of life toward its primeval state.
What life gained in exchange for its diversity was immortality: driven to the brink of chaos, it achieved absolute stability. For life to progress means for it to scale steep peaks with a delicate sense of balance. Once those peaks had been eliminated, once Shangri-La had been discovered on the valley floor and claimed as a permanent home, evolution couldn't get a leg up.
The denizens of the Loop thenceforth lived repetitive, unchanging, boring lives. They stopped evolving. They had become cancer.
♥ 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 under 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 in 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.
...33254136245163423425413624516343432541362451634133254136245163423425...
If he took the number 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 creating 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.
♥ 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.
♥ Every step on the road thus far had further awakened Kaoru's senses. With no rhyme or reason, sensation after sensation had flooded his consciousness. He felt terror, jealousy, exultation, with no grounds for feeling them-they just came over him, stimulating his senses. He suspected that if he persisted in tracing their source back into the past, he'd eventually arrive at the moment of his own birth.
♥ His breathing gradually came under control. As he regained his calm, he lay down again on the earth and looked up at the sky, head pillowed on his hands. Through a gap in one rim of the valley the full moon had appeared. Men had stood on the moon once, decades ago. As a result, the actual existence of the moon was something that was now within the realm of human knowledge. Most likely the sun, too, was really there, at the center of the solar system.
But the Loop's sun and moon were real to its denizens, too, while Kaoru and others knew that they weren't, not in a spatial sense. Beings in the Loop were merely programmed to perceive time and space.
This train of thought reminded Kaoru of something his father had repeated to him once, a remark of one of the astronauts who'd landed on the moon.
It was just like in the simulation, the man had said when pressed for a comment.
That had stuck in Kaoru's memory. Before going to the moon, of course, the astronauts had been through any number of detailed simulations of the moon's gravity and other physical conditions, many of which had taken place in the deserts of America. Only after they'd experienced the moon walk virtually a number of times did they experience it as reality. What this astronaut was saying was that the reality was exactly like the virtual reality. No matter how fine the calculations, though, there should have been some differences.
Kaoru remembered the Bible's words about God creating the world in His own image. What exactly did it mean that the Loop had ended up looking just like the real world? In the Loop's primeval state life had not arisen naturally. Then the researchers had introduced DNA life forms. And these had become the seeds of all life in the Loop-they'd developed into a tree of life just like the real world's. Given that the Loop and the real world shared the same physics, it wasn't, perhaps, all that surprising that life should have taken the same form. But, to take a hint from the astronaut, shouldn't there have been at least a few differences?
Is this an epiphany?
He couldn't shake the thought that the real world itself was only a virtual world. Logically, the idea couldn't be disproved.
A god. A higher principle. There was nothing to stop Kaoru from accepting life as the creation of such a being. If this was simply a virtual world, then it was after all possible for the Holy Mother, as a virgin, to give birth to the son of God. Or for the son of God, having once died, to rise from the dead in a week's time...
With humanity on the brink of extinction, now would be a good time for God to come. If things went on like this, the whole world would turn cancerous. God had to be watching somewhere, invisibly.
Kaoru stared unseeing at the starry sky, pondering the advent of God.
♥ "Incidentally, do you know what makes the world go round?"
"The real world, or the Loop?"
It was easy to see what made the Loop go round: electricity. But the real world, that was a different story.
Eliot laughed at Kaoru's question.
"In this case, they're a lot alike. They move according to the same principle. The thing that makes the world go round-both worlds-is funding."
Eliot waited a few moments for the import of his words to sink in, then continued. "If the gargantuan project that was the Loop hadn't been funded, then that world would never have come into being. Neither this world nor that one will move without money."
..If only there had been funding, we might all be aboard space stations now. Eliot was right. Science, Kaoru knew, did not progress along a straight line in a vacuum sealed off from social conditions. Instead, it changed direction from time to time in response to the situation. Budgets were controlled by the opinions of societies and governments-priorities were determined according to what people wanted most at a given time. Seventy years ago, outer space was the canvas on which the future was expected to be drawn. Everybody imagined that humanity would make colonies of the moon and Mars, that shuttles would make regularly scheduled trips between the planets. It was the stuff of novels and movies.
But by Kaoru's day, not only had man not been to Mars, he hadn't even returned to the moon. In the end, man's presence on Earth's satellite had been limited to that one brief, shining moment. Since then plans for space exploration had moved along at a snail's pace, if at all. And for one simple reason. No funding.
In hindsight, it seemed odd that nobody had been able to predict that grinding halt.
♥ "We'd expected that with physical conditions the same as on Earth, we'd get roughly the same sorts of life forms. We didn't dream that they'd be exactly identical. In those days everybody thought that the course of evolution was guided by chance. it couldn't happen the same way twice."
That was indeed one of the things that had surprised Kaoru. The course of evolution in the Loop had been exactly the same as on Earth, down to the last detail, and it certainly mystified him.
"So what did you conclude from that?" he asked.
"We didn't see life naturally emerging in the Loop at the very beginning. So we introduced it. We introduced RNA, thought to be the earliest form of life. Sowing seeds-that was the metaphor we used, but it was no metaphor. That RNA was in all reality a seed, destined to grow into a certain, specific tree of life. ..The Loop matched up perfectly with reality. Life didn't emerge naturally in the Loop-that's why we sowed the seeds. Don't you realize what that means?"
It hit Kaoru. He remembered what Eliot had asked him at the beginning of their long conversation. Do you believe in God? That gave Kaoru the answer.
"That reality is only a virtual world, too, right?"
"Indeed. Life didn't emerge of its own accord on Earth, either. So why are we here? Because somebody sowed the seeds of life here. Who? The being we call God. God caused there to be life on Earth, and He made us in His image. The Bible was right."
Kaoru wasn't particularly shocked by this. He'd had the same thought many times on his journey to this point, but he hadn't been able to prove or disprove it. This was mere reasoning by analogy. It had no bearing on reality. It could not be verified. In the end, it would be, as it always had been, a question of belief or unbelief.
♥ "So you've seen it. Or, I should say, you've experienced it. But you don't know why it began to turn cancerous. Let me say right up front that I don't know, either. The making of that odd videotape, the spread of that new virus-these are things that the individuals within the Loop couldn't help but find impossible to explain. You're thinking that even if they couldn't explain it, I should be able to, as the one who made the Loop. But I have to be honest with you: I can't explain it. Not all phenomena in the world can be explained. We've always got problems that need solving; the world is always coming apart at the seams. There's no world anywhere without its internal contradictions. Maybe the real world's internal contradictions infected the Loop; alternatively, it's not inconceivable that it was the work of a computer virus. Our security was supposed to be perfect, but as long as the Loop was connected to the outside world, there was at least the possibility of it being breached. If it was a piece of mischief, it was an extremely well-wrought one."
♥ The face in the mirror was slightly blurred. Eliot sharpened the image.
Kaoru sat face to face with Takayama's reflection. His jaw dropped. His nerves were buzzing, as if they didn't want to recognize the face.
Takayama's features were distorted by his expression of astonishment. On top of that, the imminence of death seemed to have abruptly aged him. But even so, there was no mistaking the outlines of his face, the muscular line of his jaw. Kaoru did indeed know that face. He'd known it all his life.
"This man holds the key to the MHC virus." Eliot poked Kaoru in the chest with a huge finger. "Kaoru, you're Ryuji Takayama."
Kaoru tried to block the words from reaching his brain, but their truth seeped into his body anyway. He felt the world collapse around him. His body, the flesh that he'd always thought of as his, had betrayed him.
♥ Kaoru knew he bore no responsibility for that. But as a fact it was undeniable, and it weighed on his mind.
However, this was no time to be caught up in resentment, hatred, or the pricks of conscience. It was time for him to steel himself and pay the price. It was time to look to the future. Always to the future.
♥ "There comes a point when a child-even one not particularly precocious in science-notices that the structure of the atom resembles the structure of the solar system. The child sees the atom and its omnipotent particles as constituting their own universe, and wonders if life exists on those miniature 'planets' just as it does on ours. That's the circle of life. That's why I named it the Loop."
"I think I said something like that to my father when I was in elementary school." And to Kaoru it seemed that it wasn't just the microscopic realm that might work like that. Maybe the solar system was but an atom, and the Milky Way an aggregation of atoms, a molecule. The surrounding universe was a cell, and all of existence a huge organism. A being that held within it a smaller being, which held within it a smaller being-like a series of nested boxes. Certain ancient religions took such a view, just as they saw life cycling through a series of existences, past, present, and future.
"What do you think happens if the circle is broken? The microscopic and the macroscopic are connected, interlocking-if part of the cycle is arrested, it's going to affect the rest of it."
"If the circle gets broken... well, it just has to be reconnected."
"That's right. But not simply by going back to the beginning and doing it over. We have to overcome the calamity that has befallen the Loop, and then reconnect it."
"So what happens to the Loop's historical trajectory? It's cancer?"
The same thing that happens to any species that runs into an evolutionary dead-end: it goes extinct. Records will remain in the Loop's memory banks, but the events will be surgically removed from the real world's history, just like we'd cut out cancer cells. The history of the Loop will be shunted onto a side road. It will start again from a new page."
It reminded Kaoru of a river carving out a landscape. Water follows the shape of the land as it flows ever downward, but sometimes it finds itself trapped, and then it swells into a pool. Even then, the water is always searching for an escape, probing weak places in the ground until it succeeds in making itself a new path. It's easy to tell where a river ran into dead ends on its way to the sea: the tale is told by a river's oddly acute anglers, its occasional islands.
The Loop was like a river in that respect. Right now it was stalled, its way blocked. But left as it was to stagnate, it was bound to find a way to overspill its containment and exert a negative influence on the real world. The real world corresponded to it, after all. While it was necessary to find real-world ways of dealing with the cancer virus, it was just as necessary to change the trajectory of the Loop, its history of cancer. Until that was done, there would be no fundamental solution.
It was Kaoru's job to overcome the blockage in the Loop, to make a new way for it to flow.
♥ Takayama looked at his watch. Almost time.
Then, as if to proclaim the arrival of the appointed moment, the clouds parted in front of him and sunlight shone on the surface of the ocean. It was as if a window had opened in the sky, an interface. Takayama wouldn't be able to see anybody through it-no faces, no expressions-but they would be able to see him.
Two o'clock on the button. He should be in view for them now. Takayama raised his head slightly and smiled at the people who would be watching him.
He called them each by name, speaking to them, telling him about what he was up to.
There were so many things he wanted to ask them, but he knew he couldn't. Had they been able to use the digital information they'd gained from his body to combat the MHC virus? He wanted to think they had: he wanted to think that his father's life was saved. His child with Reiko would be farther along now than when he'd spoken to Reiko on the phone. Had Reiko found the hope to go on living in her world? Takayama hoped that seeing him like this, she'd make up her mind once and for all to live.
He had every intention of dealing with the ring virus and the mutated-video media that carried it in this world. If coming in contact with those media programmed one to die in a week's time, it should be simple enough to devise a deprogramming system. He had absolute confidence. He'd come all the way to this world from the other one determined to overcome. When it came down to it, he was godlike. He knew how this world worked. What cared he for viruses or mutant media?
As he spoke these thoughts to the sky, he tried to imagine that other world recovering as the course of Loop history normalized.
Hew remembered the hideous desert trees, disfigured by cancer. He remembered the dead rats he'd seen in Wayne's Rock, swollen bellies upturned.
He remembered the single pink blossom on the hillside, the one tree that had escaped the caner. Takayama concentrated on that tree, allowing it to expand in his imagination.
He wished with all his heart for the moment when those trees would cast off their tumors and reassume their fresh greenness. He imagined those withered limbs heavy with beautiful blossoms. Of the Loop recovered its biodiversity, those scenes would be reality.
A breeze widened the gap in the clouds. The observers' faces flickered in and out of view.
Takayama nodded. "It's going to be alright," he said.
That hope was likely to be heard.