Birthday (15 page)

Then he did it after all.

She rejoiced in his accomplishment, although she had no idea whether isolating the source of the virus helped treat it. She was simply glad for him.

"Does that mean you've found a cure?"

Amano didn't answer her question. Instead, he launched into another long explanation.

"The two scenes you just witnessed represent, if you will, the beginnings. As you saw, the individual known as Sadako Yamamura has the ability to record her voice onto an audiotape solely by willing it. It shouldn't be possible, according to the scientific laws of the Loop world. At the risk of repeating myself, our world and the virtual space of the Loop world are ruled by exactly the same physical principles. You also saw that this Sadako Yamamura dies once, only to effect her own rebirth twenty-four years later through Mai Takano's womb.

This too is a phenomenon that common sense tells us is impossible. Some say it's the result of a computer virus, but the truth is we don't know the actual cause yet, and knowing it might not help us solve the problem anyway.

And the problem is: how do we deal with the virus that was thus produced, regardless of how it came to be?"

Reiko was confused. By that logic, isolating the origin of the MHC virus didn't mean they had learned how to vanquish it. It meant Kaoru's discovery had been in vain; she didn't want to think it.

Reiko confronted Amano with her doubts. He gave her an earnest answer.

"It's like asking why we exist. We do exist, you and I, here and now as human beings. Why do humans exist at all? That question and its answer are of a different order from the question of how to manage society and improve it. Why do humans take the form they do, why are they ruled by desires? Knowing the answers won't necessarily help us learn how to live better. We simply have to accept what's here and manage things as they are.

"Please don't misunderstand me, though. Kaoru's discovery was truly significant. It allowed us to describe the virus's evolutionary process.

"Are you with me? Let's go back to the beginning.

There were warning signs. Sadako Yamamura, being the unique character she is, produces a videotape that kills anybody who watches it in a week's time. The only way to evade death is to make a copy of the videotape and to show it to someone who hasn't yet seen it. Pursued to its conclusion, this means the videotape's numbers should increase exponentially. Along the line, as a result of some mischief, the tape mutates, evolves, metamor-phoses into other media. It spreads like wildfire—or like a virus infecting its victims. In fact, a kind of virus appears in the bodies of those who watch the videotape. In the Loop world they call it the ring virus. Women who contract the virus while ovulating become pregnant without insemination and give birth to Sadako Yamamura.

"You see now. The first scene you witnessed was just that: Mai Takano, infected with the ring virus, giving birth to Sadako."

Reiko felt relief. She couldn't help but think that whatever calamity might have befallen the Loop, it had nothing to do with her. As she listened, only half believing, to Amano's story, she tried to imagine a videotape that killed you a week after you watched it, such a videotape spreading through the world, creating a virus, attacking a woman's womb and implanting a new life form. If that ever happened in reality, people would panic—no telling what they'd do. Rumors feeding on rumors, things would deteriorate at an accelerating rate.

"So what happened?" She was ready for this to end.

"The Loop world lost its diversity. Everything was assimilated to the Sadako Yamamura genotype, became cancerous, and died. Without biodiversity, extinction is only a matter of time. Just as the Loop was dying out, however, the project was frozen for budgetary reasons.

That was twenty years ago."

The words "cancerous" and "extinction" piqued Reiko's curiosity. The conversation finally seemed to be arriving at reality.

She hugged herself, rubbing her upper arms with her palms. "Sounds just like the real world. Kind of frighten-ing."

"Exactly. Reality and the virtual space reflect each other. They correspond to each other."

"Do you mean they're influencing each other?"

"You could put it that way."

"Like—like a mother and a fetus?"

"That's quite an apt comparison." Amano sounded impressed.

Reiko was just trying to apply the far-fetched tale to herself, to find some way to wrap her mind around it. It had occurred to her that Loop was somewhat similar to the womb. It was a world of its own, a space housing a life created by parents. A mother's state of health affected her fetus. The reverse was also possible. And it wasn't just a question of physical condition, either. A mother had an emotional and mental influence over her fetus that wasn't always reducible to explanations via matter. If the mother was happy and at peace, the fetus breathed peacefully; if the mother was frustrated or angry, the fetus's heart rate increased. An illness in one could cause grave damage in the other.

That was Reiko's thinking as she asked her next question. "Did Loop's extinction affect the real world?

Is that what happened?"

"Yes. It exerted an invisible influence. But apart from that, there's another factor at work, which we've been able to study. It seems that the Loop world's virus invaded the real world, where it evolved into the MHC

virus."

Tabling for the moment the mechanism by which a virus from the virtual world could function in the real one, Amano began to tell her why the ring virus had crossed over into the real world. What Reiko heard next floored her.

"Among those in the Loop world infected with the ring virus was an individual named Ryuji Takayama.

He's the only being ever to cross from the virtual world into ours.

"This Takayama dies in the Loop world. But Professor Eliot—Chris Eliot, the father of the Loop project—

decided to bring him back to life in the real world by refabricating his genetic information. It wasn't possible to take him apart on a molecular level and recreate him, so the only option was to embed his genetic information in a fertilized egg and to arrange for him to be born into this world as an infant. Unfortunately, he carried the ring virus. At present the thinking is that there must have been an accident during the DNA breakdown-re-constitution phase at which point it escaped from an in-testinal bacterium. The hypothesis, and it's well-founded, is that the ring virus mutated into the MHC

virus. A comparison of the DNA base sequences of the two viruses reveals a shocking degree of similarity."

Amano stopped talking and fixed Reiko with a gaze.

Reiko noticed the change and braced herself.

"Ryuji Takayama was reborn into the real world twenty years ago."

Amano seemed to place special emphasis on
twenty 
years,
and Reiko wondered why. That was Kaoru's age, she noted.

"I think it would be quicker if you had a look at this." Amano called up a third scene on the monitor.

"Please don't be shocked. That is—I'm sorry... No matter what I say, I know it'll be a shock, and in your condition... But I don't know what to say."

He seemed not to relish the responsibility that had become his. But Amano's expression cleared and he continued:

"Now, watch. This is Ryuji Takayama, of the Loop world."

He pressed some buttons on the keyboard and enlarged the scope.

It was a rear view of Takayama as he sat in an office at the university studying logic. The vantage point gradually rotated until they were seeing him from the front.

Still seated at his desk, Takayama raised his head and looked up at the ceiling. Amano zoomed in on his face.

Reiko looked at the image on the screen and uttered a name, and it was not "Takayama." But her face expressed none of the shock Amano had expected. She simply reacted as anyone facing the image of a loved one onscreen might: she'd called his name out of habit. She did not, could not, comprehend, not at once, that Ryuji Takayama and Kaoru Futami were the same person.

It didn't matter where Kaoru's DNA came from.

Reiko didn't care. Life emerged from nothingness.

The child inside her—before the sperm fertilized the egg, it hadn't existed.

The only things that mattered, Reiko felt, were acts.

Like those passionate moments with Kaoru, stolen while her son Ryoji was off getting tested for chemotherapy, when they could use his room like a hotel—the im-pulse had been a pure one, a loving one. They hadn't acted on physical instinct alone unaccompanied by feeling. Their acts had been driven by love, and the result was that she carried new life within her womb.

But still.

It wasn't that she didn't understand the concept.

Given that the Loop life forms had DNA, she was prepared to accept that science could reconstruct them. But still...it was like being told all of a sudden that Kaoru was a cyborg or something.

She'd had intercourse with Kaoru a number of times in that hospital room, with the curtains open and the brilliant afternoon sunlight shining in. There in the bright light they had examined each other's organs, lapped each other's fluids, felt each other's pulses against their mucous membranes. She'd taken his semen into her mouth. She could remember its bitter taste, the feel of it on her tongue. It tasted like something secreted from a living body; it tasted like life.

Reiko had only a general grasp of the mechanics of one of his sperm reaching her egg and fertilizing it. If she did understand every detail, it wouldn't have changed what surfaced in her memory now, which was the act, and a recollection of the emotions of which it had been the manifestation. The new life had been created out of thoughts, out of will.

I love you.

That didn't change upon learning Kaoru's prove-nance.

Amano, meanwhile, had no way of knowing that Reiko was occupied with confirming her love for Kaoru.

As a scientist, all that was on his mind was whether she understood the process.

"I get it," she said. "Kaoru's birth did not result from the sexual union of his parents."

Her response reassured Amano somewhat. If she got that much, he would be spared the barrage of questions.

They'd just saved a lot of time. "I'm glad you do," he said.

What Reiko wanted to know was not the "why" of the beginnings of his existence, but the current progress of it. In short, where was he and what was he doing?

"Where is Kaoru now?" she asked Amano.

He gave a little sigh and shook his head. He looked at his wristwatch, assumed a thoughtful pose, then slowly stood up and ordered two cups of coffee over an intercom. Reiko thought his actions affected. She had a bad feeling about what was coming next.

At length a young woman appeared with the coffee.

Amano distractedly brought his to his lips and said, without meeting Reiko's eyes, "Please, have some coffee."

Then, haltingly, he began to tell her, not where Kaoru was, but about a scientific device called the Neutrino Scanning Capture System, NSCS or Neucap for short. It used phase shifts caused by neutrino vibrations to make a digital record of a living creature in three dimensions, down to the last detail, including the state of its proteins and electrical fields. Through neutrino irradiation, the machine also made a record of brain activity—thoughts, emotions, memories—capturing literally every piece of information and storing it as data.

Reiko was only half listening, but when Amano mentioned that the NSCS was located in North America, deep underground at the Four Corners, where the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado meet, she looked up with a start. That was where Kaoru had been headed on his quest to find out about the MHC

virus.

"That's where Kaoru is, isn't it?" She clung to the idea.

Amano merely looked uncomfortable. He dithered, unwilling to confirm or deny her guess. Reiko watched him wordlessly, commanding herself to be calm no matter what he said next.

"It was discovered that the telomerase sequence in Kaoru's DNA was not TTAGGG. What this means is that while the MHC virus produced the TTAGGG

telomerase sequence and attached it to the end of his DNA like it does to all its victims, in Kaoru's case it was unstable, breaking down almost immediately. In short, he had perfect resistance to the MHC virus."

"You mean, Kaoru won't come down with MHC?"

"That's correct. The virus doesn't cancerize his cells."

"That's wonderful..."

But the pounding in Reiko's chest would not subside. Instead, that "Neucap" had taken root in her imagination, where it was now glowing, pale and ghostly.

"I'm not sure how else to put it. It was what the whole world had been waiting for. The key to defeating the MHC virus was found in Kaoru's own body."

Reiko thought back over things Kaoru had said and done. He must have sensed, intuitively, that he was going to make a huge contribution to discovering the origin of the MHC virus, and a cure to it. He'd carried that destiny around with him since birth—he'd been on a kind of mission.

"So he's going to be able to help find a treatment."

"Absolutely. That's putting it mildly. His complete biodata has been analyzed, and we're quite close to perfecting a breakthrough treatment. It's all thanks to Kaoru."

Complete biodata.

The words caught her ear. From the course of the conversation, it wasn't hard to imagine that Kaoru had submitted himself to the NSCS. But the direction Amano was taking the discussion worried her. He hadn't volunteered any information as to what had happened to Kaoru's body in the process of providing his complete biodata. The professor was being evasive on that point.

"Did you use this NSCS on Kaoru?"

"Yes." Amano nodded.

"What happens to someone's body when the NSCS

is used on it?"

"Kaoru's body was completely sterilized and he was placed in a tank of purified water, where he floated in the center of a dome two hundred meters in diameter.

Neutrinos were shot at him from every point along the sphere's surface. They passed through his body and reached the opposite point on the sphere, in the process accumulating information about his molecular structure."