Parasite Eve (23 page)

    But after the girl was
buried, her grudge became insatiable. Wanting nothing more than to take back
what was rightfully hers, she resurrected herself from the grave.

    After that, Mariko remembered
only that at the end of the story, the zombie girl tracked down the recipient
and gouged out her heart.

    The girl was drawn with
horrifying features and the image had always stayed in the back of Mariko’s
mind. When she’d first heard about the kidney donation, the comic was the first
thing that had come to her mind.

    She still had no idea what
kind of person her donor had been. Though she asked the nurse about it
repeatedly, she was always given the same indirect answer.

    Maybe her donor actually wasn’t
dead. Maybe she was still conscious like the girl in the comic and wanted
somehow to let Mariko know she was alive. Doctor Yoshizumi had gone ahead with
the operation in spite of her terrible helplessness, and had taken the kidney,
leaving the donor no choice but to wander in search of vengeance.

    The footsteps in her dream
could belong to no one else. Sooner or later, the zombie would come to seize
its kidney from Mariko’s body. It would tear open a hole in her side and run
away with the prize in its hands and malicious words upon its lips. Someday,
the door would open.

    Then she would die a
horrible, bloody death on that very bed.

13

    The hot days pressed on, but
Toshiaki continued to work without pause. The ventilation system in his office
left something to be desired, while the air conditioning in the cultivation and
machinery rooms gave him new reason to be conducting experiments. It certainly
beat out lazing away in his sauna-like apartment.

    Eve l’s replication had gone
on uninhibited. Since adding clofibrate, a peroxisome proliferator, the speed
of division had risen.

    Eve 1 had clearly taken well
to the induction. Even so, Toshiaki’s curiosity was far from satisfied.
Clofibrate was just one peroxisome proliferator, and other variants could yield
an even higher rate of division.

    Toshiaki took out all the
available peroxisome proliferators from the refrigerator and added a sample of
Eve 1 to each. He also tried adding retinoic acid and various other growth
factors. An article had linked the induction of beta enzymes in mitochondria by
peroxisome to the fact that peroxisome attached to retinoid receptors, a
DNA-binding protein that also perhaps coded enzymes.

    Toshiaki gauged the intake of
tritium-labelled thymidine to measure any potential increase in Eve 1’s
propagative capacity.

    The results surpassed his
expectations. Multiplication was exponentially higher with a simultaneous
medication of retinoic acid and peroxisome. The printout showed figures beyond
anything Toshiaki had ever seen before.

    “Urn, doctor...” came a voice
unexpectedly from behind him. He looked up from the data on his desk to see
Asakura standing there.

    “What is it?” he answered, at
last remembering she was still there.

    Asakura hid her face a
little, seemingly at a loss for words. She was not her usual confident self.
After being urged a few times, she finally got to the point.

    “I thought I might work on
preparing for my speech.”

    “Oh... of course.”

    “And so I was thinking I’d
like to take a break from Eve 1, for a little while at least, and resume with
the experiments I was working on before...”

    Toshiaki was so engrossed in
Eve 1 that he had forgotten all about her presentation.

    The Japanese Biochemical
Society met once every year. It was a large-scale event that allowed Japan’s
biochemists and molecular biologists to gather under one roof and share the
fruits of their research. This time it was being held in September near the
university. It was customary for a few people from their seminar course to make
an appearance every year and talk about biofunctional pharmaceuticals. One
objective of the program was to have every master’s student give a speech at
least once while still enrolled. Doctoral students had ample opportunity to
write articles and present at conferences, but the only chance for
undergraduate and master’s students to give any sort of scholarly presentation
in front of a crowd was for graduation. An academic conference was the perfect
opportunity to give them such experience. In addition, it trained them to form
logical ideas and to learn how to convey them to others. It undoubtedly felt
good for the students to share the knowledge they had worked so hard to attain,
but it was also a stressful event that they were often never completely primed
for.

    This was to be Asakura’s
first conference and she wanted to be ready, yet she still did not know which
slides to use or how to structure her presentation. Toshiaki should have been
more attentive, but he’d neglected her for his own obsessions.

    “Yes...of course. I’m sorry,
let’s interrupt the Eve 1 analysis for a while.”

    At those words, an expression
of relief came to Asakura’s face.

    Toshiaki checked to see that
her slide data were all in order. She would need to include blotting graphs, so
he arranged to teach her the following day how to use the scanner.

    That night, just before he
was about to leave for home, Toshiaki checked on Eve 1. Asakura was conducting
an absorbency test in the mechanical room.

    Though he told her he would
stop analyzing Eve 1, Toshiaki secretly decided to continue with it on his own.
For the time being, he wanted to see what exactly he had accomplished by adding
peroxisome proliferators and retinoic acids.

    He plucked a culture flask
from the incubator and placed it under the microscope. As he adjusted the
lenses and peered through, the shapes of lively cells came into focus.

    For the time being, the
miracle shown in Eve 1 was far more important to him than anything being
announced at any academic gathering. Toshiaki was also on the bill, but the
data he was presenting was already six months old, a far cry from his Eve 1
findings. Generally, the application deadline to participate in the meeting was
about half a year before the day it was held. The theme of one’s speech needed
to be sent along with the form, and no matter how much viable data arose
afterwards, one was not allowed to include them in the presentation unless they
had a direct bearing on the submitted theme. A last-minute change was out of
the question. However, Toshiaki was now driven by a strong impulse to report
this year on Eve 1. If he were to reveal the information he had gathered over
the past weeks, there was no telling how dramatic the response would be.

    This was first-rate material.
It would be a blast of a wake-up call to all mitochondrial researchers.
Research institutes from all around the world would request that samples of Eve
1 be provided to them. Kiyomi’s cells would live on everywhere. Just the
thought of it made him ecstatic.

    At the base of the flask, Eve
1 had formed numerous colonies. This despite the fact that he had taken care to
leave only a thin layer the night before. His eyes widened at the unbelievable
rate of propagation. He had to put the proliferation regimen at that of cancer
cells or even lower, or else Eve 1 would fill a flask in just a day.
Thankfully, he’d started out with a small sample and there had been no adverse
effects, unless this was just another sign of the cells’ strength. Toshiaki
looked at the colony in the center.

    At that moment, he heard a
sound.

    At first, he thought it was a
fly buzzing around. It sounded like it was coming from overhead, but he also
felt it from the floor.

    Before long, it increased in
volume. Surprised, Toshiaki removed his eyes from the microscope and looked
around him. The drone grew even louder, and he knew it was coming from
somewhere nearby. There was a definite power in it. It rose, then softened,
inscribing waves into the air. His body began to resonate. It was as it the
very electrons inside of him were being stimulated.

    He gazed at the flask on the
microscope stage. The cultivation liquid was rippling inside the flask. Where
the microscope’s light illuminated it, orange-colored rings welled up, spread
out, then diffused. Toshiaki gulped. The noise became louder still. Ripples hit
the walls of the flask and formed complex crest patterns, one after another.

   
It’s Eve 1
, he shouted
in his heart,
Eve 1 is breathing!

    He put his eyes back to the
lenses.

    The colony was pulsating.

    With a
thump
, its
surface rose and fell. It was swelling and contracting, like a heart.

    It was as though the colony
had become a collective life form. Even in the short while he’d taken his eyes
off, it had grown, the cells multiplying and spreading out so that the entire
lens field was now filled by the colony. With every writhing thump, the field
vibrated. It was a little while before Toshiaki could accept the fact that the
cells were causing the waves in the cultivation field and were also responsible
for the sound.

    He was enchanted by the
display. He had never seen anything like it before. It was like looking at a
new life form.

    But that wasn’t the end of
it.

    Toshiaki gulped down his
breath. The colony was rising up in the center like a mountain. Two rounded
areas began to cave in on either side a little above this peak. Further down, a
single horizontal crack appeared. The cells on the upper end of the colony
started changing form rapidly, becoming thin like fibroblasts.
[30]
They started lining up in one direction.

    “Holy...”Toshiaki moaned.

    What was appearing there was
a human face.

    The entire colony was working
together to form a face. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and then hair were
rendered. The cells were not done yet. They continued to divide and multiply,
and the face progressed from a roughhewn image to one with a mannequin-like
delicacy. There was no mistaking it, a human face that Toshiaki had seen before
was emerging in fine relief.

    “What the...”

    Kiyomi.

    It was Kiyomi’s face. And it
was looking directly at him. The cells had revived every detail, down to her
pupils and fleshy lips, nothing changed from when she was alive.

    The cells ceased, leaving a
perfect replica of her face at the bottom of the flask. Toshiaki gazed fixedly
upon it. His throat was dry.

    The mouth moved.

    Kiyomi’s lips and tongue
moved to form four distinct syllables in succession.

    A much different sound echoed
from the flask. No. Toshiaki was unsure if he had actually heard it or not.
Perhaps it had resonated inside of him. Either way, he understood.

    That was what it had said.

    “Kiyomi!” he yelled out.

    He was not insane. This was
Kiyomi. She had come back to him. He called out to her in desperation.

    “Kiyomi! It’s me! I can hear
you Kiyomi! Can you hear my voice?!”

    He heard a sound at the
Cultivation Room door. Toshiaki looked up quickly to glimpse a shadow in the
frosted glass.

    Someone was watching him.

    Had his voice been heard?

    He sprang to the door and
looked into the hallway, but no one was there. Whoever it was had run away.

    Asakura? Perhaps, but he didn’t
go out into the hallway to check.

    He returned to the
microscope, but now all he could see were the small colonies from before. No
matter how much he strained his eyes, he could see nothing even resembling
Kiyomi’s face. Silence returned. All evidence of what had just transpired was
gone.

    Toshiaki stood there for a
long while in amazement.

14

    “Are you okay?” came Toshiaki’s
voice, prompting Kiyomi back to her senses.

    She awoke to find herself
lying on a couch. There was a blackboard above her and a large bookshelf
against the opposite wall lined neatly with hardcover volumes with English
titles. It looked like a classroom at the university, but when she saw there
was no equipment of any kind, figured it was a faculty lounge.

    Kiyomi gave an affirmatory
nod and stood up. She then remembered what happened and immediately placed a
hand on her chest. She remained in this position for a while, checking her
heartbeat, and felt its usual, quiet, regular activity. Feeling relieved, she
composed herself and sat down on the couch. Soon, a young man stood up next to
her and peered worriedly into her face.

    “Are you sure you’re okay?”

    “Yes, um...I’m fine. I’m so
sorry to trouble you,” she said, bowing her head lightly.

    “Well, I’d still take it easy
for a while, just to be safe.” He scratched his head a little. “This is our
seminar room. It’s Sunday, so no one will bother us here. Can I get you some
water or anything?”