Kaoru had a seat and waited for Amano to show up. While he waited he surveyed the place, taking in the fact that this was where his father had worked before Kaoru was born. Had he walked past this very reception desk every morning on his way to his lab?
“Sorry to keep you waiting.”
The voice came from a completely unexpected direction. Kaoru had been expecting Amano to appear from the main section of the floor, behind the receptionist, but instead he approached Kaoru from the elevator landing. Kaoru stood and bowed slightly.
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Kaoru Futami. My father’s always saying how much in your debt he is.”
“Not at all, not at all. I’m in his debt, actually.”
Amano took a business card from his card case and handed it to Kaoru. As a mere medical student, Kaoru of course didn’t carry business cards, so he had to take Amano’s without offering one in return.
Beneath the name of the research center was the man’s title, Professor of Medicine, and his name: Toru Amano.
Kaoru was puzzled to find a medical professor in what seemed to be a computer research center. But come to think of it, his own father had a medical background. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising after all.
“What’s your specialty, if I might ask?”
Amano smiled, showing the dimples in his cheeks. “Microbiology.”
He was a small, slender man. He’d been junior to Kaoru’s father by two years, so he had to be in his late forties, but he certainly didn’t look that old. He could easily have passed for mid-thirties.
“Well, I know you must be busy, so …”
“It’s nothing. Why don’t I show you around?”
Amano guided Kaoru to the elevator and pushed the UP button.
The upper floor had a similar reception area; Amano led Kaoru past it without stopping.
He brought him to a large private room. Two walls were filled entirely with books, and several computers sat on the desk.
Amano sank into his chair, motioning Kaoru toward the chair for guests.
“I’m told you’d like a detailed explanation of Dr Hideyuki Futami’s research.”
“That’s correct.”
“How is he, by the way? How’s his health holding up?” It didn’t appear that Amano was just asking to be polite: he seemed sincerely worried. If it was proven that the cancer had spread to Hideyuki’s lungs, the situation would be essentially hopeless, but Kaoru glossed over that.
“About as well as can be expected.”
“He taught me quite a lot, you know.” Amano got a look of nostalgia on his face and continued. “Things have changed these last few years. It’s gotten … quiet.”
Kaoru assumed he meant the research center. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t seen anybody here besides the receptionist and Amano. He suspected the reason had something to do with the virus.
“My father told me that many of you who participated in the Loop research have died of cancer.”
“Very many indeed.”
“Is there a specific reason?”
“Well, I don’t believe there’s been any statement to that effect.”
Kaoru couldn’t believe it was a mere coincidence, though, and if some kind of cause-and-effect relationship could be established, it would be epochal. It might lead to the discovery of a new way of treating viral cancer.
“Do you know where the first victim was discovered?” As a microbiologist, Amano should know a lot about that sort of thing.
“It’s been hard to get exact data, because it’s hard to distinguish it from previous varieties of cancer, but the MHC virus was first discovered in an American patient.”
Kaoru had heard rumors to that effect, that America had been the birthplace of the disease.
“Where in America?”
“The victim was a computer technician living in Albuquerque, New Mexico.”
Amano frowned, as if he’d just noticed the curious commonality. The MHC virus had been first discovered in the body of a computer technician. The infection rate among researchers at this facility, a computer-research center, was much higher than average. Of course, it wasn’t totally beyond the realm of coincidence, but …
Amano’s frown only lasted an instant. The coincidence struck him, but he immediately decided it wasn’t worth assigning a special explanation to, and so he erased the frown.
And then he stood up quickly, as if in confirmation of what Kaoru guessed to be his thought process.
“Oh, yes. There’s an old, old videotape you might like to take a look at.”
“A videotape?” Kaoru felt himself tense up; he didn’t know why.
“It’s something Futami-sensei’s staff put together. A sort of introduction to their research aims and methods. Part of their job was to elicit budgetary contributions from various sources. The video was just a promotional tool, but it’s the best and quickest explanation of the purpose behind the Loop.”
Amano went through the door first, urging Kaoru to follow. “This way, please.”
The hallway snaked through several turns as it led through the complex of laboratories. Finally, Amano showed Kaoru into what looked like a reception room. It had a table and sofas.
There were no windows; the room had to be in the middle of the building. The furnishings put Kaoru in mind of an art gallery—framed pictures adorned the walls.
What was strange was that there was exactly one picture on each wall, at exactly the same height, at exactly the same distance from the corners, in exactly the same size frame—as if they were icons hung to keep away evil spirits or something. Each frame contained a modernist painting incorporating photography.
Kaoru’s eyes were riveted to the pictures. They seemed to have captured in photographs some rectangular piece of modern art from four sides and then distorted it; as he looked around the room he got the feeling that he was inside some kind of angular construction. Modern art objets usually gave a cold, hard impression. And what about the aesthetic sense that had placed, not the object itself, but pictures of it at the same point on all four walls? It was as if the fact that they were pictures was emphasizing a certain obsessiveness.
Kaoru looked closely at one of the pictures to see if he could make out the name of the artist. There was a signature, a foreign name, but it was hard to make out. A “C …” and an “Eliot …” “Please. Have a seat.”
At the sound of Amano’s voice behind him, Kaoru remembered where he was. He sat on the couch to which Amano was pointing, and noticed a 32-inch television facing him. Amano must have pulled it out of the cabinet while he wasn’t looking.
Amano opened another cabinet and took out a videotape. The tape had a label on its spine, and the label had a title written on it in large characters.
LOOP
There was no way he could miss it.
11
The video began by explaining the concept of artificial life. The program was aimed at a general audience, and its makers had assumed they needed to nail down the basics first.
Amano glanced at Kaoru and laughed. “Shall we skip this part?”
He felt it was safe to assume that any son of Hideyuki Futami would have a precise grasp of what artificial life was. Kaoru nodded, and Amano fast-forwarded.
The screen displayed a succession of geometrical patterns, appearing, changing, flickering, and disappearing.
Artificial life did not mean a biotech lab with people cutting and pasting DNA to create man-made monsters. Nor did it involve cloning technology. It was a computer simulation: man-made life forms appearing and disappearing on computer monitors.
It was fair to say that the idea behind artificial life had come from the Life Game, a computer game in general circulation toward the end of the last century.
In its earliest forms, it was rather like playing on a chess board. The computer screen was filled with intersecting lines in two dimensions, like a chess board, only with a far greater number of squares. Each square was known a
s a cell. A cell could be either alive or dead: a “living” cell was black, while a “dead” cell had no color. A glance at the board showed only the “living” cells, colored black. Each cell bordered eight other cells on the top, bottom, left, right, top right, bottom right, top left, and bottom left. Rules were determined for the cells. For example, it might be decided for a “living” cell that if it bordered on two or three “living” cells, and neither more nor less, it would survive to the next generation; if it bordered on no “living” cells, only one, or four or more, it would “die”.
At the beginning of play, living and dead cells were randomly determined, and play proceeded from one generation to the next, time advancing digitally, with cells living or dying in each generation. If a cell had two or three cells adjacent to it, it would be sustained by these neighbors and live on, while if it had one or no cells nearby, it would die of loneliness, and likewise, if it had four or more neighbors, it would die of overcrowding.
Since the living cells were represented by black squares, with each passing generation the monochromatic pattern on the display changed.
The principle behind the game was quite simple, but in actual play a wide variety of patterns was possible, with highly suggestive results. One pattern found squares spreading slantwise after a certain number of generations. Another pattern saw what looked like repeated tremors. Some patterns were stable, with no change at all. Some patterns negotiated with each other, changing shape on the board like living beings. These changes continued until all the cells had died out, or the patterns all became fixed, with no further movement.
As they developed the concept of the Life Game, researchers started to detect what seemed like signs of life within their computers. The first element of the definition of life is that it can reproduce itself. As soon as self-propagating patterns were discovered in the Life Game, researchers from many disciplines began to lend their expertise, in the hopes that keys to the beginning and evolution of life on earth might there be found.
It was this chain of events which led to Hideyuki Futami, with his background in medicine, to work with computers on the artificial life project. No doubt Amano the microbiologist had similar reasons for joining the center. Science had progressed to a point where it could go no further without breaking down the walls between disciplines and enabling a more dynamic exchange of ideas.
Amano stopped fast-forwarding at an appropriate place and pressed PLAY.
“There. Now it gets into the aims of the Loop research.”
Hideyuki’s face was onscreen now. Kaoru felt a tightening in his chest as he saw his father’s youthful countenance—this had been filmed not long after his marriage. His hair was still thick, his whole being suffused with passion and confidence. The firmness of his muscles was evident even through his clothing.
Come to think of it, this was the first time Kaoru had seen video of his father from before Kaoru’s birth. He hadn’t been expecting it—it was surprise as much as anything that shook him.
The image changed to a vast desert in America, to a superconducting super accelerator some thirty miles in diameter, part of a project long since abandoned. Aerial shots showed the exterior, and then the scene cut to the interior. The huge ring-shaped research facility, once a useless hulk, was now filled, the video revealed, with a huge number of massively parallel supercomputers. The numbers were incredible. Six hundred and forty thousand computers buried beneath the desert sand: a truly overwhelming sight.
Then the scene made another abrupt shift, this time to the skyscrapers of Tokyo. The camera went underground again, into a maze of abandoned subway tunnels branching out like a spider’s web. Here, too, were installed 640,000 massively parallel supercomputers. Underground, where the humidity was low and the temperature was relatively constant year-round, was the ideal place for the computers.
This joint Japanese-American collection of massively parallel supercomputers—a staggering 1.28 million in all—was there to sustain the Loop.
Hideyuki reappeared onscreen. Having shown off the hardware that drove the Loop, it was time to explain the software.
Hideyuki pointed to a computer screen and narrated in precise, well-chosen words while the process of cellular division was demonstrated through symbols. The Hideyuki Kaoru knew was inclined to speak quickly and animatedly, but the Hideyuki on the video averted his eyes from the camera and spoke somewhat shyly, although not without confidence.
Kaoru already understood what Hideyuki was explaining now. Although it had been research in progress then, from a standpoint twenty years on, it was fairly easy to comprehend. But what was their methodology? These were the first detailed images Kaoru had seen of the project, and his interest was captured.
The monitor Hideyuki was pointing at showed the development of the cell of some organism, and next to it the same process recreated artificially and represented symbolically. A natural cell and a man-made one, side by side. Over time, they both took roughly the same shape. The process by which the real organism formed was translated into symbols and manifested in the computer simulation. Upon the incorporation of various algorithms, the shape of an organism appeared on the monitor.
The idea behind the Loop project, a joint Japan-U.S. undertaking, had been to create life within the virtual space of the computers, pass on DNA from generation to generation, and incorporate the mechanisms of mutation, parasitism, and immunity, thereby to create an original biosphere to simulate the evolution of life on earth. In short, to create another world exactly like the real one, on computers.
At this point, Amano paused the videotape and turned to Kaoru.
“Do you have any questions thus far?”
“Well,” Kaoru spoke up. “What field, exactly, was this research supposed to be useful to?” This had been nagging at him for some time. Where did the funding come from? What kind of practical application would this research have had? Judging by what he’d seen, the budget was probably big enough to require government support. Solving the riddles of life on earth, the mechanism of evolution, would be sure to satisfy academic curiosity, but he doubted it’d make money for anybody.
“We were taking the long view. We knew that at first it would be of only limited use. But once we opened up the field, there was no telling what kind of developments would pop up later. The number of possible applications was literally infinite. Fields like medicine and physiology for starters, but also microbiology, physics, meteorology … And not just science: we expected it to have implications for everything from understanding movements in stock prices to figuring out social-science problems such as population increases.”
Amano paused and laughed.
In fact, the fruits of the Loop research had proven useful on a wide variety of fronts. It became possible to know the point at which earth’s environmental and ecological balance would be destroyed, allowing for the development of management strategies; there were epochal advances in the study of at what point in the brain’s development consciousness appeared. The contribution to medicine was huge, as treatments for several serious illnesses came to light.
The rest of the video was spent mostly on methodology. Hideyuki used diagrams to explain how through the application of chaos theory, nonlinearity, L-systems, genetic algorithms, and the like, the program was able to learn and evolve.
As an example, fragmentary images of cellular division were interspersed into the narrative. A shot of a cell dividing and redividing until it grew into an organism pulsated its way across the screen as if on fast-forward. The network developed dynamically, rather like a cancer cell growing capillaries. Even though Kaoru knew it was a mechanical simulation, it looked remarkably alive.
Having concluded its explanation of the methodology and thus its introduction to the project, the video ended with an invitation to the viewer to follow the real-life progress of the experiment.
Kaoru found it a pretty convincing promo.
Creating a computer simulation of the beginning and
evolution of life wasn’t a particularly unusual thing: it had been done several times in several different places. What amazed Kaoru was the scale of this project: the minute level of detail, the innumerable parameters that had been fed into the program. He figured it had to be the first time anything like it had been attempted.
What the experiment did was to take the some four billion years since life had begun and compress them into an accessible digital time frame. Billions of years had been abbreviated on the computers into ten or so years of real time, while still perfectly recreating in the virtual space the complexity of the real world.
Kaoru was curious about the subsequent progress of the research.
“How far did the Loop go?” he asked Amano, who was rewinding the tape.
“Didn’t Futami-sensei tell you?”
“He told me that the pattern turned cancerous, that’s all.”
Amano looked troubled. “Well, that’s about the size of it.”
“I’d like to know more about the sequence of events, though.”
“I’m sure you realize that even if you had the time to look at it, your life would end long before you finished.”
Kaoru sighed intentionally.
“Okay, why don’t we move to a different room and talk over coffee? I’d like to hear more about your father’s condition, actually.”
Amano led Kaoru into a larger but drearier room that looked like it was used for meetings or training sessions. It contained steel desks and folding chairs, and instead of modern art the walls held a map of the world; all in all it was an unremarkable room, sort of like a school classroom in miniature.
They sat at a table facing each other, and from nowhere appeared the receptionist to place cups of coffee in front of each of them.
It looked hot, at least: steam rose from the disposable cups. Amano wrapped both hands around his cup and brought it to his mouth. This room was windowless, too, and the air conditioning was turned up too high. Up to now Kaoru had been so wrapped up in what he was hearing that he’d been oblivious to the cold inside the center. As he watched Amano take advantage of the warmth of the coffee Kaoru finally noticed that his own arms had goose-bumps from the cold.