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.
2
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."
She didn't care about the mechanism. Her voice rose in frustration.
"What happened to his body?"
"In order to get his complete biodata, it was necessary to expose him to radiation intense enough to break down his cells, and as a result..."
Reiko's hair flew about as she leaned abruptly forward.
"That is, what happened was..."
Reiko nearly screamed.
Amano seemed to be trying to impress upon her that he bore no responsibility in the matter—his voice grew angry, although his anger had no particular object.
"Listen to me. As a result, his body was liquefied. It was destroyed."
"Liquefied? Destroyed?" In a daze she repeated the words. She tried and failed to imagine that happening to a body. What happened to his life? She knew the answer to that, but she couldn't accept it.
She started to speak, but bit back the words. Her mouth opened and closed helplessly; she looked like she was about to hyperventilate. Amano took pity on her and pronounced.
"Kaoru is dead to this world."
Reiko and Amano stared at each other for a long time. Amano couldn't avert his gaze from her big eyes, turned slightly down at the corners. He'd have to take her emotional explosion head-on.
Reiko was the first to look away. Tears welled up in her eyes; the next moment she'd collapsed face down on the table, heedless as some of her hair landed in the coffee.
Her voice was muffled as she moaned, "I can't believe it..."
She didn't know what to say. Two years ago she'd lost her husband to MHC; two months ago her son, af-flicted with the same disease, had killed himself. And now—or rather, a month ago—her lover, the father of the child she was carrying, had also departed this world, and in a manner she couldn't even begin to describe. What a catastrophe—she could feel her will to live withering away.
I can't take it anymore.
She'd already been sick of life before coming to the research center. Now that Amano had informed her of Kaoru's death, she could feel her helplessness metamor-phosing into a distinct death wish. She had to staunch this sadness at its root, and the only way to do that was to destroy the body from which her emotions sprang.
It didn't matter that Kaoru's biodata could cure her own condition. She could take no more. She might overcome her cancer and live several decades more, but her sorrow would stay with her forever. She didn't want to live in such a state. This she could say with perfect certainty.
No more.
She stood up. As she did, she knocked over her cup and spilled coffee on her lap, but she didn't seem to care as she whirled around and headed for the door.
"Where are you going?"
Amano pursued her, grabbing her by the wrist.
"That's enough."
"No, it's not. I have more to tell you."
"I know all I need to know."
"You don't know anything yet."
Reiko reached for the doorknob, ignoring him. But Amano held her arm. In pain, she yelled, "Leave me alone!" Anger was unusual for her.
Amano couldn't back down. Kaoru had had his mission; Amano now had his. He had promises to keep—to Dr. Eliot, but more importantly to Kaoru.
"Won't you please calm down and listen? I promised Kaoru I'd do this."
Reiko held still. She stopped resisting and waited for Amano's next words. The line about promising Kaoru seemed to have worked.
"A promise..."
"Yes. It's my task to bring you and Kaoru face to face. Before he left on his journey, Kaoru made me and Dr. Eliot promise. I have a duty to follow his instructions. It's my way of repaying him for what he's done—
save humanity, no less. What I'm going to do is call up the appropriate moment and bring you and Kaoru face to face."
"Face to face? You mean...I can meet him?"
"Yes, yes, of course. He's alive and well on the other side."
Reiko half turned around, coffee dripping from her hair. She looked pale, haggard.
"Please, sit down." Amano indicated the sofa.
It took a little while for Reiko to suppress her emotions and return to normal. She paused for a moment, slowly fixing her hair and face, then followed Amano's suggestion and sank onto the sofa.
Amano kept looking at his watch. It bothered Reiko.
"Are we alright for time?" she asked.
"What? Oh, it's just that we've got an appointment in ten minutes."
"Who's your appointment with?"
"Kaoru."
Reiko started to feel confused again. What validity was there to an appointment with someone who'd been dead for a month?
Amano tried, gently, to clear up any misunderstand-ings.
"First of all, I'd like you to know that Kaoru freely chose to undergo NSCS."
"Did he know it would kill him?"
"He did. The NSCS digitizes the emotions of the subject at the precise moment of scanning. It wouldn't work if we tied someone up and forced them to undergo neutrino irradiation. When someone is full of fear and hatred, or denial, the body stiffens and we can't get a reading of their natural biodata. So I must ask you to fully accept the fact that Kaoru went in of his own free will. He welcomed death with a serene heart and an un-ruffled state of mind so that we could get an accurate scan of his biodata. He had the most exalted of motiva-tions. He was sacrificing himself to save the human race.
And let me be more specific. Kaoru particularly wanted to save you, and the child you carry, and his parents."
Amano's words weighed on her. If Kaoru had died for her and her child, suddenly her life became a much more important thing. She felt more valuable in her own eyes.
Amano continued:
"Kaoru's death meant two thi
ngs. First, as I keep re-iterating, it enabled us to utilize his biodata to find a cure for MHC. Second, digitizing his molecular information allowed us to bring him back to life within the Loop world.
"The cancerization of the Loop world and the cancerization of the real world relate to each other in subtle, intimate ways that you expressed through the metaphor of the mother and the fetus. Restoring biodiversity is the only real solution to the problems of both biospheres.
Kaoru died in this world and left us his biodata, and we'll make the fullest use of it. We needed him to come back to life in the Loop and to bear the burden of returning that world, too, to its normal state of biodiversity. In short, he needed to carry out the duties of a god. His death was simultaneously a departure into the Loop world. When he arrived, the Loop project—which had been frozen for twenty years—was reactivated. It got a new start, from a point just this side of extinction."
"Can't you bring him back to life in this world, then?"
"We can't restore him just as he was. It's possible to create a new life with Kaoru's DNA using cloning technology, which developed at the end of the last century.
I'm sure I don't have to explain to you that while such a being would have Kaoru's DNA, he would have different life experiences—he'd be a different person. However, the Kaoru that was brought back to life within the Loop is exactly the same as the Kaoru who lived here—the same thought patterns, the same emotions, and the same memories."
"So you're saying he remembers me."
"Of course he does."
It finally sank in that Kaoru was alive in the other world. But that still didn't change the fact that he'd died.
As long as he was in the virtual world, they couldn't in-teract physically. They couldn't communicate—or at least, she couldn't see how. All she'd be able to do was watch him on a screen, as though he were some character in a television show. Wasn't it worse to have her loved one so close at hand and be unable to touch him?
"Can the Loop beings see us?"
It was the next logical question. She knew, because she had experienced it twice now, that she could observe the Loop world. But even as a layperson she could surmise that the reverse might not be so easily accomplished.