Birthday (14 page)

Sadako opened her mouth and began to speak.

What? What are you trying to say?

But whatever she was about to say stopped at her throat, and never reached Toyama's consciousness. In the end, maybe the Girl in Black hadn't been trying to say anything at all.

Play button, on.

He moved his forefinger, then gently squeezed the umbilical cord. There was no longer any doubt in his mind whose it was.

Sadako's been reborn.

A moment later the lights went out, signaling that the curtain was about to fall for Toyama.

He heard applause, somewhere. And the many gazes that had been turned on him all simultaneously...

The images stopped. Reiko Sugiura sat there trying to bring her heartbeat under control, muttering to herself,
It's like watching a play or something.

It was a perfectly understandable reaction.

Instead of donning the instrument-studded head-mounted display and data gloves to watch what she'd just watched, she'd simply gazed at a flat-panel monitor as the scenes unfolded within it. Reiko was pregnant, and any potentially disturbing stimulus was out of the question. Living someone else's life, dying someone else's death—the shock would be far too great. The experience of simulated death had been known to cause real psychological damage. That couldn't be good for the baby. Amano had recommended that Reiko use the monitor instead.

Prior to her viewing, Reiko had been given a lecture about the Loop project by Professor Toru Amano, a spe-cialist in it. She'd thought she understood, but there was still a part of her that couldn't quite believe it. It was easy to get confused—she had to keep telling herself that the people on the monitor were not playing roles, but living out their lives.
They weren't acting...

Still, now that it was over, it felt like she'd been watching a TV show.

Why is that,
she wondered. If she'd been shown a video of someone's everyday life, she probably wouldn't have found it stagy. That would depend, of course, but she'd probably feel like she was stealing a look at someone's life. Perhaps not—if it wasn't a mundane scene but instead some unusual incident that she saw, perhaps she'd feel like she was watching a movie or a play. Speaking of unusual, what she'd just seen certainly was that.

First, a woman fell into an exhaust shaft on the roof of a building and there gave birth to a baby. The baby gnawed through its own umbilical cord, then climbed a rope up the side of the shaft, all by itself. There was no way it could have happened in real life. It was too strange. Then came the man's story. The baby grew into an adult woman in the space of a week, and the man died cradled on her knees. She'd once been his lover. Maybe it was precisely because Reiko understood his feelings so well and empathized with his story so much that she'd found it theatrical.

Amano turned off the monitor and waited for what she'd just seen to sink in. Then he asked, gently, "What do you think?"

Reiko repeated the words she'd muttered to herself.

"It's like I was watching a play or something."

Amano smiled and nodded. "The first time I viewed something in the Loop I had the same reaction."

His tone was generous. Judging by the stage he was at in his research career, he had to be in his late forties, but he looked much younger. His pale, plump face, with its silver-rimmed glasses, showed no trace of ill will.

Reiko found herself relaxing in his presence.

He had a way of calming people down. She'd felt it in his voice when he'd telephoned her three days ago.

Not much else could have brought her there, no matter how many times they'd asked.

When Amano, whom she'd never met, had called her, Reiko's depression had been at its worst. She'd lost, she could say without exaggeration, her reason for living. The embryo growing within her only symbolized her mount-ing anxiety. Her attachment to life was weakening.

She had a choice to make—to have the baby or not—but had no strength of will left to choose one option or the other. She simply passed the days carried forward by inertia. Suicide was an evident solution, but even it had retreated into the distance. Instead she lived on, watching indifferently, as through the eyes of another. Eventually she'd be ravaged by the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus,- certain death awaited her and she lacked any means to resist it.

The only thing that gave her any hope was Kaoru Futami, the father of the child she was carrying. At least, he should have given her hope. Two months ago, he'd left on a journey into the American desert, determined to find a way to eradicate the cancer virus that had brought the human race to the edge of extinction. A month later, over the phone, he suggested that he'd found, or was about to find, something, and then disappeared. He was presumably still wandering through the wilderness on his motorcycle. She had no way of contacting him. A month of that was too long.

When he'd left, they'd made a promise. She could still remember how his voice had sounded as he'd said the words: 

Let's meet again two months from now. Until 
then, you have to keep living, no matter what.

The two months had passed. The fetus, three months along at the time of the promise, was now at five months. She'd had no word from Kaoru. How was she supposed to muster the hope to go on living, to have the child?

Reiko would turn thirty-four within the year. Perhaps this was her last chance to have a baby. She'd had her firstborn, a boy, at twenty-two, and she'd lost him in the worst possible way—suicide. This new life had been vouchsafed her around the very same time. Considering the timing, it was easy to imagine her first child being reborn as this one—all the more reason to take good care of it. But Reiko carried the MHC virus, and the child was sure to be born infected. What was the point of forcing it to live a life of suffering? Its father Kaoru had taken it upon himself to find a reason.

Then three days ago she'd gotten a call from a Mr. Amano at the Life Science Research Center who had something he wanted to talk to her about regarding Kaoru. She'd been doubtful. Amano had asked her to come to his lab, but she couldn't rouse herself to do it. It was probably her instinct for self-preservation kicking in; she couldn't handle any more bad news. Though Amano's voice was soft, it could be the sympathy and hesitation the bringer of bad news must always feel.

Reiko's guard was up. The man might have something awful to tell her about Kaoru.

Amano would neither confirm nor deny her suspi-cions. He told her that it was something he couldn't hope to explain over the phone and implored her to come to the center. Finally, she'd allowed herself to be persuaded, and here she was.

In the reception area that Reiko was shown into, she received a brief explanation of a massive project known as the Loop. When she heard that Kaoru had sat in the same room to hear the same lecture from Amano, she began to feel a kind of intimacy with her surroundings.

The Loop, she learned, was a global project to create an entire world with the aid of over a million massively parallel supercomputers. A world, it was called, but it didn't exist anywhere in space, just as images projected onto a screen didn't possess any extension of their own.

It was cyberspace. The scientists discovered that life did not occur within it naturally, but when they trans-planted RNA into it—RNA, the basis of life in the real world—life forms began to evolve of their own accord.

Perhaps because the source was the same, the biosphere came to be nearly identical to the real one.

Amano broke the Loop project down into bite-size chunks of information as he explained it to her. This wasn't a presentation to an academic gathering; all Reiko needed to get was the gist of it. Amano geared the explanation to her level of understanding, avoiding technical language as much as possible, and finally decided that she'd pick it up quicker if he showed it to her rather than just told her about it. He called up two scenes integral to the cancerization of the Loop world and had Reiko watch them. One concerned a young woman known as Mai Takano, pregnant though a virgin; she fell into an exhaust shaft on the roof of a building and there, in that constricted rectangular space, gave birth. The baby seemed to be in full possession of a will of its own from the very beginning. Tearing its umbilical cord with its gums, it crawled up into the outside world using a lifeline it had arranged for beforehand.

Reiko, pregnant herself, found the scene quite disturbing.

The next scene took her twenty-four years into the cyberworld's past and to an entirely different setting. But it had one character in common with the other scene: the baby that had crawled out of Mai Takano's womb.

Sadako Yamamura.

The second sequence seemed like a coming-of-age story set among a troupe of actors. It had more of a plot than the first but still had its unrealistic elements. A woman's voice was recorded onto a reel of audiotape without the intervention of a recording device; everyone who heard the tape developed heart problems and died.

That was the premise. Having heard a woman's voice and a baby's cry on a tape, the main character was confronted with death. But he was able to greet it just as he'd always hoped to, in the lap of Sadako Yamamura, the woman he'd been in love with twenty-four years earlier.

A soap opera.

Having shown Reiko these two fragments and asked for her reaction, Amano added a bit of explanation.

"They look like television programs, but they're not. Those people really lived and died."

Reiko tried to think this through with an analogy of her own. Since the end of the last century there had been virtual reality games, some of them rather skillfully done; as a child she'd played a few of them. With the years the characters got smoother and more consistent in their details, evolving into something quite like people. They were characters in games, made by humans, so it wasn't accurate to say they were alive. The life forms in the Loop, though, had evolved on their own.

They were life.

She spoke her thoughts. "So I should think of them as characters in a game come to life?"

Amano nodded.

"You can think of it like that if you want. The life forms in the Loop all have DNA. They're alive. As you've seen for yourself, they look just like humans.

They're separated into male and female, they fall in love, they reproduce sexually."

Based on what she'd seen on the monitor, Amano seemed to be telling the truth. The second video had shown a man and a woman falling in love and engaging in a sexual act. There was jealousy, also—in that, too, they were just like humans.

The Loop functioned on the same principles and laws as the Earth, Reiko was told, and there was no room for doubt that she could find. The Loop consisted of patterns based on the properties of carbon, nitrogen, he-lium, and the rest of the 111 elements that made up the universe, Amano said. Although Reiko couldn't imagine what that actually meant in terms of a computer system, she felt she more or less understood in her own way.

The scientific questions didn't interest Reiko. Loop beings lived in the Loop system, and that was enough for her. What interested her was Kaoru, the father of her child. Amano knew Kaoru. Why was he going on and on about this Loop thing?

Reiko remembered something Kaoru had once said to her.

Reality might just be a kind of virtual space, you know.

No, that wasn't precisely it—he'd actually said, in no uncertain terms, that reality
was
virtual.

Prior to the birth of the universe time and space did not exist. It was impossible to imagine such a situation—no time or space. Presented with the relationship between Loop and the real world, however, the idea became easier to envision. Thinking of the universe as a virtual reality removed the contradiction. Of course, that didn't mean that reality was just a computer simula-tion—it was something completely different, far beyond humanity's comprehension, operated by an unknown power. But with that caveat, there was no reason not to think of reality as a virtual space, no valid argument against it.

She recalled Kaoru saying something along those lines.

She tried to change the subject. "But..."

"I know." Amano raised his hands as if to stop her, and his expression said that he wanted her to indulge him just a little while longer. He did seem to make a greater effort to get to the core of the problem and spoke of the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus.

"The Loop world is not unrelated to the MHC virus that's destroying our world."

Reiko's body stiffened and she let out a little cry.

It was the MHC virus that had visited such unhappiness on her family. The virus had the demonic ability to turn cells cancerous and to cause them to metastasize and permeate the whole body. There was no end to the hatred she bore this enemy. Cancer had devoured her husband two years ago; two months ago, her son Ryoji had thrown himself from the window of the hospital where he was undergoing chemotherapy and hating it.

Reiko had fallen in love with Kaoru, her son's tutor, and together they'd conceived the child now in her womb.

Reiko herself was a carrier of the virus, and inevitably that meant Kaoru had become infected as well. More-over, Kaoru's father was in the final stages of his own cancer, undergoing treatment at the same hospital; Kaoru's mother was another carrier. On every direction Reiko was surrounded by misery, the MHC virus the cause of it all. Worldwide, the infected—concentrated in Japan and America—numbered in the millions. It was spread through blood and lymph, but scientists were discovering other routes as well. The disease was starting to affect animals and plants, and people were starting to whisper that this was going to be the end of all life on Earth.

"It's become clear to us that the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus originated in the Loop. It was Kaoru who figured it out."

It was the first time Amano had spoken Kaoru's name since she'd arrived. Reiko's body reacted to that first—she could feel veins twitch deep within her body.