There they were … swarms of them!
The strands writhed around in the dying cells like so many snakes, biting and clinging to the surface of the chromatin.
A chill ran down Ando’s spine. This was a new virus, the likes of which had never been seen before. He’d never seen the smallpox virus through an electron microscope, yet he did know it from medical textbooks. The differences between that and this were obvious at a glance.
“Oh my God.”
Miyashita sat there sighing, his mouth hanging open.
Ando understood the workings of the virus: how it was carried along inside the blood vessels to the coronary artery, where it affixed itself to the inner wall of the anterior descending branch and caused mutations in the cells of that area until they formed a tumor. What he couldn’t understand was how this virus he was looking at now could have been created via the victim’s consciousness. This virus didn’t invade the body from outside. Rather, it was born within the body as a result of watching a videotape; it was a function of the mind. That went beyond mysterious and Ando was dumbfounded. It represented a leap from nothingness to being, from concept to matter. In all earth’s history such a thing happened only once, when life first came to be.
Does it mean, then, that life emerged due to the workings of some consciousness?
Ando’s thoughts were veering off track. Miyashita brought him back with his next comment.
“‘Ring’, anyone?”
The ring virus (21000x)
Ando returned his gaze to the electron microscope screen. It didn’t take long to figure out Miyashita’s remark; he was angling for something with which to compare the shape of the virus. Some specimens were twisted and some were u-shaped, but most of them looked like a slightly distorted ring, the kind one wears on a finger. “Ring” hit the nail on the head. There was even a protrusion at one point that resembled nothing so much as a stone on a setting. The screen looked like a view of a floor across which tangled-up rings and snakes and rubber bands had been strewn indiscriminately.
It fell to Ando and Miyashita, who discovered it, to name this strange new virus, and Miyashita’s comment was by way of a suggestion. The ring virus.
“How about it?”
Miyashita wanted Ando’s opinion. The name was perfect, but Ando felt uneasy for precisely that reason. It was too perfect and made him wonder if a God-like being were making itself felt. How did all this begin? Ando had no trouble remembering: it was with the numbers on the newspaper that had been sticking out of Ryuji’s sutures. 178, 136. They’d given him the English word “ring”. Then he’d found that astonishing report, and it was entitled Ring. And now, this, which he beheld—a virus shaped like a ring. It was as if some will, changing form with each rebirth as it strove to grow into something ever larger, had chosen this shape as its symbol.
The microscopic universe contained kinds of beauty that came from cyclic repetition, but what Ando saw now was an ugliness that mirrored such beauty. And it wasn’t just the abstract knowledge that this virus brought evil to humanity that made it appear ugly to Ando. What he felt was closer to an instinctive hatred of serpentine creatures. Any human being shown the image, with absolutely no prior knowledge, would probably react with revulsion.
As if to prove this, Nemoto, who had little idea of the origin of the virus, was visibly shaken. His hands on the controls trembled. Only the machine remained unaffected, emotionlessly spitting out negatives. Once he’d taken seven photographs, Nemoto gathered them up and went to the darkroom. While he waited for them to develop, he set the ultrathin section from Mai’s blood cells in the holder. Then he resumed his place in front of the console and flipped the switch without ado.
“Next we’ll be looking at Takano’s.”
They gradually increased the magnification, just as they’d done with Ryuji’s sample. They had no trouble finding what they were looking for. Without question, it was the same virus. They were writhing just like the other ones.
“Identical,” Ando and Miyashita stated at the same time. Neither of them could see anything to prevent them from reaching that conclusion. But Nemoto, the electron microscopy expert, was more sensitive to minor inconsistencies.
“That’s strange.”
Miyashita watched him tilt his head and stroke his chin, then asked, “What is?”
“I’d rather not say anything until I get a chance to compare the photographs.”
Ever cautious in all things, Nemoto hesitated to draw a conclusion based solely on his impressions of Ryuji’s virus. Science was about proof, not impressions, was his motto. That aside, Nemoto could swear he saw a quantitative difference. It wasn’t a variation in the overall number of specimens of the virus present in each sample. What struck him was that, in Mai’s sample, there were more broken rings. In Ryuji’s sample, too, of course, some of the virus specimens had come undone, making u-shapes, or snake coils, but most of them were whole and looked like rings. In Mai’s case, more of the rings were broken, and stretched out like threads.
Broken ring virus (100000x)
In order to confirm his suspicions, Nemoto homed in on a likely-looking specimen and adjusted the focus until the specimen filled the screen. If the normal virus looked like a ring, then this specimen looked like a ring which had broken just on one side of the stone. The “stone” and its “setting” now looked like a head with a flagellum wiggling behind it.
The result was a shape that Ando, Miyashita, and Nemoto were quite familiar with. All three men were reminded of the same thing at the same time, but none dared say it.
6
Nemoto’s first impression was borne out when he compared the photos he’d taken of the ring virus. In any given area of Mai’s sample, there were more virus specimens that looked like broken rings or threads than in a comparable area of Ryuji’s sample. Statistically speaking, roughly one in ten of Ryuji’s viruses were broken, while in Mai’s case, the distribution was around fifty percent. Such a manifest difference was unlikely to occur without a reason. Ando requested that samples from all the videotape’s victims be put under the electron microscope.
It wasn’t until the Friday after the New Year’s holiday that all the results were in.
Glancing out the window in the lab, he could see that some of the previous night’s snowfall still lingered among the dead trees of the Outer Gardens of Meiji Shrine. When he grew tired of analyzing the photos, Ando went to the windowsill to feast his eyes on the scene outside the window. Miyashita never rested though, carefully comparing the photos spread out on the desktop.
Including Asakawa and Mai, eleven people had died after coming into contact with the video. The same virus had been found in each victim’s blood, and there was no more doubt the virus had been the cause of death. But regarding broken rings, the victims fell into two groups. In Mai’s case and Asakawa’s, broken rings made up fully half of what was found in their blood, while in everybody else’s samples, only one specimen in ten was broken. It was not a particularly surprising result. It seemed that the fate of the infected person hinged on the degree of presence of the broken-ring virus.
The statistics indicated that once the broken-ring specimens exceeded a certain percentage, the host was spared death by cardiac arrest, though it wasn’t clear yet exactly what that percentage was.
Mai and Asakawa had watched the video. The ring virus had appeared in their bodies. Up to that point, they were no different from the nine other victims. But something had caused some of the viruses to come apart into a thread shape, and the broken particles had surpassed a certain level. And that was why, even though they had watched the video, neither Mai nor Asakawa had died of a heart attack. The question was, what had caused the viruses in their bloodstreams to come apart? What set them apart from the other nine?
“Some form of immunity?” Ando wondered aloud.
“That’s a possibility,” Miyashita said, cocking his head.
“Or maybe …” Ando trailed off.
“Maybe what?”
“Is it something about the virus itself?”
“I lean more in that direction personally,” said Miyashita, propping his feet on the chair in front of him and sticking out his great belly. “Thanks to the mischief of the four kids who watched it first, the video was doomed to extinction in the not-too-distant future. To find a way out, the virus had to mutate. All of this is just as Ryuji told us in his message. Now, then: how exactly did it mutate, and what did it evolve into? The answer to that, I believe, lies in the ring virus that Mai Takano and Kazuyuki Asakawa carried. In its irregular shape, to be precise.”
“A virus borrows its host’s cells in order to reproduce itself, by definition.”
“Right.”
“And sometimes that reproduction takes place at an explosive rate.”
This, too, was common knowledge. One only had to think of the Black Death that ran rampant in the Middle Ages, or the Spanish influenza of modern times, to find examples of a virus proliferating wildly.
“So?” Miyashita urged Ando to continue.
“So think about it. The video tells people, ‘Make a copy within a week or you die.’ Even if the viewer did so, that’s just one tape turning into two. That’s a pretty slow growth rate. Assuming the subsequent viewers repeat the process, that’s still only four tapes after a month.”
“You’ve got a point, I guess.”
“That’s nothing to be scared of.”
“It’s not very virus-like, you mean. Right?”
“If it doesn’t increase at a geometric rate, then it’s hardly spreading at all.”
Miyashita fixed Ando with a glare. “What exactly is it you’re trying to get at?”
“It’s just that …”
Ando wasn’t sure himself what he wanted to say. Was he trying to put a worse spin on things? Certainly there were cases when a single virus spread virtually overnight to thousands, tens of thousands of victims. That was the raison d’être of a virus, to replicate itself simultaneously in large numbers. Having copies made of a videotape, one at a time, was simply too inefficient. The results said as much; only three months after its birth, the tape was now extinct. Unless it had been reborn through mutation …
“It’s just that I have a bad feeling about this.”
Ando looked again at the photos of the ring virus. Vast numbers of them, piled up on one another. When several specimens overlapped, they looked like unspooled, tangled-up videotape. The psychic Sadako Yamamura, on the brink of death, had converted information into images, leaving some sort of energy at the bottom of that well. The video had been born as a result of the detonation of that energy. It wasn’t matter that was spreading, but information, as recorded on videotape and DNA.
He couldn’t shake the suspicion that some terrible mutation was taking place somewhere he wasn’t aware of. Ando had visited Mai’s apartment, and he’d also been to the rooftop exhaust shaft into which she’d fallen. He’d sensed the strangeness of her room and had felt the weirdness of that roof underfoot. Maybe that was why he sensed danger bearing down on him more than Miyashita seemed to. He could almost hear the writhing, of something, accelerate under the earth.
“Do you sense some catastrophe?” Miyashita still sounded pretty relaxed.
“It’s just that it’s all so grotesque.”
Ever since Ryuji’s autopsy, Ando had been plunged into the world of the bizarre. Concrete felt soft and clingy under his footsteps, the scent of life pervaded an uninhabited room. One inexplicable phenomenon after another. And then there was the thing Mai had given birth to; the very thought made him shudder. Mai had been dead for a month and a half, and they still had no clue concerning whatever it was she had delivered. Ando doubted that what she’d had was just a cute little baby.
“Don’t be so gloomy. Even if it did manage to mutate, there’s no guarantee that it succeeded in adapting to the environment.”
“So you think the mutated virus might be extinct, too?”
“We can’t rule out the possibility.”
“Ever the optimist.”
“Recall the Spanish influenza virus, the one that swept the world in 1918. They found the same virus in America in 1977, but nobody died then. The first time around it slaughtered between twenty to forty million people worldwide, and sixty years later, it was basically harmless.”
“I guess a virus can weaken through mutation.”
It was true that since the discovery of Mai’s body, no more suspicious deaths had come to light. He’d kept a close watch on the papers and worked his contacts in the police department, but so far the net had come up empty. It was possible that Miyashita was right and that the newly reborn, mutated virus had failed to adapt to its environment in the short period it had to do so, and had lost its ability to spread. Maybe it was extinct.
“Any idea what we should do next?” asked Miyashita, kicking the floor and twirling in his chair.
“Well, there’s one thing I’ve let slip.”
“What’s that?”
“When and where did Mai get her hands on the videotape?”
“Does it matter?”
“It bothers me. I want to nail down the date.”
Ando felt he should have checked on this. He’d been too busy analyzing the virus and forgotten. Now, it looked to be the only thing left to do. He was virtually certain that the tape Mai had watched was Ryuji’s copy, but he didn’t know how or when it had passed into her possession.
7
Finding out proved surprisingly easy.
Assuming that Ryuji’s effects, including the tape, had been shipped to his parents’ house within two or three days after his demise, Mai could only have obtained it there. So Ando called Ryuji’s family.
When Ryuji’s mother heard that Ando was an old college friend of her son’s, she suddenly became very friendly. Ando asked whether or not a woman named Mai Takano had called on her.
“Yes,” the woman replied. She was even able to ascertain the date by looking at a receipt in her household-finance ledger. She’d bought a shortcake to offer Mai. November 1, 1990. Ando jotted down the date.
“By the way, why exactly did Mai visit you?”
Ryuji’s mother explained that Mai had been helping Ryuji with a work he’d been serializing by making clean copies of each installment, and that a page had been found missing.
“So she visited your house to look for the missing page, is that it?”
Ando jotted down the name and publisher of the magazine that had been running the series.
And then he hung up. He didn’t want to be asked how Mai was doing these days. If he told Ryuji’s mother that Mai was dead, he’d be sure to face a barrage of questions, and he simply didn’t have the kind of answers that would satisfy her.
Ando sat there with his hand on the receiver long after he’d broken the connection.
On November 1st, Mai visited Ryuji’s family home. While searching for the missing manuscript page, she found the videotape. She took it home with her. She probably watched it that very day.
He started to put together a hypothesis based on a November 1st starting point. It took a week for the virus to have its full effect. So something should have happened to her on November 8th. Ando’s date with her had been for the ninth. He’d called her several times that day, with no answer. It made sense. She’d either been in her room and unable to pick up the phone or already in the exhaust shaft.
He started to calculate backwards. The autopsy had been able to tell them how long she’d been alive in the shaft, and how long she’d been dead before she was discovered. She had died, according to the evidence, on or about the 20th of November, and she had fallen into the shaft about ten days before. It was perfectly in line with these projections to posit that the virus had worked its changes on her on the eighth or ninth, leading to her fall into the shaft. Thus it was probably accurate to assume that she’d watched the video on November 1st.
The next thing Ando did wa
s to head to the periodicals section of the library to look for the magazine that contained Ryuji’s articles. He found it. And in the issue dated November 20th, he found the last installment of Ryuji’s work, a piece entitled The Structure of Knowledge. This told Ando something.
Mai managed to transcribe Ryuji’s article and get it to his editor.
This meant that in the time between her watching the video and her death, there was at least one person she’d definitely had contact with.
He put in a call to the editorial office of the monthly that had run the article and made an appointment with the editor in charge of Ryuji’s work. Ando decided he needed to visit the publisher himself; something made him want to actually meet the guy, rather than just talk to him over the phone.
He took a JR train to Suidobashi. From there he walked for about five minutes, looking for the address, before he spotted the eleven-story building that housed the offices of Shotoku, Ryuji’s publisher. At the reception desk he asked for Kimura, an editor with the monthly Currents. Ando looked idly around the lobby as he waited. Kimura sent word that he’d meet him in the reception area right away. Ando was relieved that the editor had readily agreed to receive a total stranger. On the phone he’d sounded like a man in his twenties, but on the ball. Ando found himself imagining a handsome young man in wire-rims.
Instead, he saw a tubby man in check pants and suspenders, whose bald head glistened with sweat in spite of the season. In every way he failed to match Ando’s image of an editor at a major publishing house, especially one who worked for a magazine that chronicled the latest developments in contemporary thought.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.” The man grinned broadly and offered Ando his business card. Satoshi Kimura, Executive Editor. He looked much older than he sounded. He was probably pushing forty.
Ando produced his own card and said, “Thanks for seeing me. Can I buy you a cup of coffee somewhere?” He meant to leave the building.