Loop (16 page)

It wasn't yet clear whether this was the result of a mutation in the virus, or whether its ability to infect non-humans was simply something that had been overlooked up until now. What was important was the threat of animals in close contact with humans, dogs or cats or even smaller animals, becoming carriers of the virus. If this happened, it was to be expected that the virus would spread even more explosively than it already had. Events in the real world were taking on an even crueller resemblance to the end stages of the Loop. There, the cancerization had affected all life-form patterns. If the analogy held up, the MHC virus wouldn't cease its attack until all life on earth became cancerous.

Even if Kaoru hadn't gotten the virus from Reiko, it would invade his body somehow, by some route or another. It was inevitable. At least, that was how he tried to rationalize his relations with her, even as he closed himself off to imagining the doom that awaited him.

His father's voice reached him as if over a great distance.

"Huh?"

"Hey, are you listening to me?"

"Sorry."

"You spoke to Amano, right? Tell me your impressions."

It was a vague enough question.

"Well, a few things bother me about what he said."

Hideyuki nodded. "I'll bet."

"Dad, was it really only recently that people started to notice that reality was starting to look like the way the Loop wound up?"

"The Loop project started thirty-seven years ago and lasted for seventeen years. The program was shut down five years after I joined. That was twenty years ago. That world had disappeared from my memory. It's really only in the last few days that I've started worrying about the way the Loop ended."

Kaoru found this statement of his father's totally unbelievable.

Ten years ago, when Hideyuki had steered the conversation away from the Loop, refusing to tell Kaoru how the project had turned out, it had to have been because he was bothered by the way it had ended. All life forms within the virtual space losing diversity, turning cancerous, and going extinct-it wasn't the kind of story to tell a ten-year-old kid. No doubt Hideyuki hadn't wanted his son to project that story onto the real world and thereby fall into an unhealthy obsession with the end of all things.

Because he'd felt that a child's view of the future of mankind should be sunny, Hideyuki had distanced his son from the Loop. Which meant that in at least a corner of his mind Hideyuki had been worried all along about the conclusion of the Loop experiment.

"Dad, about the reason that the Loop turned cancerous…"

"It was the appearance of the ring virus."

"Could somebody have introduced it into the program?"

Hideyuki was silent for a while, as if pondering the idea.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because nobody could explain how the virus came to be. It couldn't have emerged naturally. So if it couldn't have been born on the inside, isn't it most natural to think it was brought in from the outside?"

"Hmmph."

"Isn't it?"

"If people could just start introducing things once the program had already started to evolve, it would have nullified the whole experiment. Security was flawless."

At this point, Kaoru mentioned a name. "You know Kenneth Rothman, right?"

Still face up on the bed, Hideyuki turned his eyes toward Kaoru.

"Did something happen to him?" he finally managed to choke out. He was bracing himself to receive another death notice.

"Do you know where he is?"

"I heard he was in New Mexico, still researching artificial life, but…"

"Yeah, supposedly he moved to the laboratories in Los Alamos. But nobody knows where he is now. And just before he went missing he mentioned something that sounded pretty important. He said he'd figured out the MHC virus, and that Takayama held the key."

"Takayama…"

"Dad, did you watch the scenes in the Loop involving Takayama?"

Kaoru's question sent Hideyuki deep into his thoughts again. His eyes darted around desperately as, with his weakened vitality, he tried to recall something.

He was clearly shaken. It was only natural that his memory should become somewhat opaque after several major surgeries and his long battle with cancer. But still it was setting Hideyuki's nerves on edge that he could find no answer to his probings into the darkness of his memories.

"I… I don't think so."

Kaoru decided to ease his father's struggles by changing the subject. "Oh, Dad, another thing. The MHC virus has been sequenced, right?"

"Saiki brought by a printout of it two days ago."

"Well, have a look at these figures."

Kaoru showed the printout to his father; he'd highlighted with a marker the total number of bases in each gene.

"What about them?"

"Look at the number of bases."

3072-393,216-12,288-786,432-24,576- 49,152-196,608-6144-98,304.

Hideyuki read the nine numbers off in order. But by the look he turned on Kaoru it was evident he hadn't noticed anything special about them.

Kaoru enunciated clearly as he explained. "Get this, Dad. All nine of these numbers equal two to the
nth
power times three."

Hearing this, Hideyuki looked over the numbers again at some length, before crying out. "Nice catch!"

The old light returned to Hideyuki's eyes as he lost himself in their scientific back-and-forth; it only lasted an instant, but that was long enough for Kaoru to notice. It pleased him at the same time that it made his chest tighten. How long had it been since his father had praised him like this?

"Do you think it's a coincidence, Dad?"

"It can't be. What are the chances of all nine numbers-some of them six digits turning out to equal two to the
nth
power times three? Extremely low. Any time something overcomes that kind of improbability, it means something. You were the one who told me that, that night ten years ago."

Hideyuki gave a weak laugh. Kaoru replayed in his mind his memories of that night and his family's back-and-forth; a summer as hot as this one and a childhood dream fanning anticipation of a trip to the North American desert. That place, once a fun-filled destination for a family vacation, had changed drastically for him, but it still drew him with great force.

As Kaoru and Hideyuki sat there reminiscing about times spent together, the hospital corridor outside burst into a commotion.

Two or three people ran past, creating a sense of tension not often felt in a non-emergency ward. Apprehensions stirring, Kaoru listened closely.

He heard what sounded like a woman's scream mingled with a male voice barking commands. The woman's voice sounded familiar. He was sure of it: it was Reiko.

"Excuse me," Kaoru said, glancing at his father and getting up.

He opened the door and looked up and down the hall. He saw a woman scurrying down the corridor away from him, following two men in guards' uniforms. She was wearing a casual yellow housedress; the zipper on her back wasn't zipped all the way up. Kaoru himself had fumblingly unzipped that dress not long ago; he knew the white neck above it. This was Reiko.

She wore sandals with no socks; a further glance showed that she was in fact only wearing one sandal. This made one shoulder rise and fall with her strides. She must have been in quite some hurry as she'd left her son's sickroom.

Realizing the situation must be urgent, Kaoru chased her, calling her name.

She didn't even look back, but followed the two guards around a corner and through the door to the stairs, beside the elevator.

She was screaming; just what her screams meant was not clear. It sounded like she was calling out a name, but with all the noise, Kaoru couldn't make it out.

"Reiko!"

Kaoru sped after her, opening the stairwell door as it slammed shut in front of him and rushing in. In the stairwell was a freight elevator, and beyond that the fireproof door to the emergency stairs. This door opened from either side, in case of emergency, but any unauthorized entry by this means would show up on the security monitors, bringing guards at a run. Of course, the system was also designed to prevent people from jumping to their deaths.

Reiko and the guards opened the door to the emergency stairs, and over their shoulders Kaoru could see the child. The outside wall had a window in it, marked with a red triangle: this window opened from the outside or the inside, so that firemen could use it as an entrance in an emergency. The window was open now, and curled up on the windowsill sat Ryoji.

The boy turned a mocking gaze on the panicking adults and continued to kick and dangle his legs in his usual way.

As soon as they saw Ryoji, the guards stopped in their tracks and began trying to talk him down.

"Calm down."

"Don't do it."

"Come down from there."

"Ryo!" Reiko croaked, not at her son but at the narrow square of ceiling above him.

Ryoji seemed to notice Kaoru standing behind his mother. Their eyes met. Then Ryoji rolled his eyes back in his head until only the whites were visible, and leaned back. Kaoru's last glimpse of Ryoji's eyes showed him something no longer alive.

The next instant, Ryoji threw himself toward the sunset behind him and disappeared.

Kaoru sat next to the bathtub with his hand in the running water, adjusting the temperature so that it would be on the tepid side. At first the water felt a bit hot to the touch, but as he grew accustomed to it he decided it was close to body temperature. Then he got in and sank back until the water was up to his shoulders. He soaked a while. Once the last droplet had fallen from the tap, the bathroom was silent. It was unusual for him to take a bath on a weekday afternoon like this.

He lay back until his head rested on the rim of the tub, closed his eyes, and pricked up his ears. He hugged his knees and curled into the foetal position. He had the feeling that his heartbeat was being picked up by the water, making wavelets in the tub.

He tried to empty his heart, but it was no use. The same scene kept replaying in his mind.

It was nearly a week since Ryoji had jumped to his death from the hospital emergency stairs.

Help me. Help Ryoji.

Ryoji had ended his young life before Kaoru's very eyes, forsaking his mother's wishes.

The sight of Ryoji jumping had made a strong impact on Kaoru. The moments just before and after, the empty look in Ryoji's eyes as he leaned backward, Reiko's scream. The images, the sounds, the most fragmentary details were tragically etched into Kaoru's brain. They'd appeared in his dreams every night for the last week.

Immediately after Ryoji had jumped, Kaoru and Reiko and the others had rushed to the window to look out. They could see the boy's body twisted unnaturally from its collision with the concrete. They could see rivulets of blood, all flowing in the same direction, shining reddish-black in the setting sun. Reiko fainted on the spot; Kaoru picked her up. He made arrangements for Ryoji's body to be taken into the emergency ward, but he already knew just by looking that it was too late. The chances of surviving a twelve-story drop onto a concrete surface were virtually nil.

Sometimes he dreamed about the stain Ryoji's blood left on the concrete. The stain was still there, in a corner of the hospital courtyard. The boy's life was gone, but it had turned into a shadow which lingered on the surface of the walkway. Kaoru couldn't make himself go near it.

Ryoji's suicide was an impulsive act, but there was something premeditated about it, too. When he made his move he'd dashed straight for the window in the emergency stairwell. He must have known the windows there were the only ones that opened from the inside. He must have had his eye on them for some time.

The motive for his suicide was obvious. He'd finished the scintigram, and was now facing his fourth round of chemotherapy. He must have been filled with revulsion at the thought of that miserable struggle starting again. And it was a struggle against an enemy he couldn't defeat. Sooner or later, his life would end, and until then there would be only agony. He must have begun to weigh the question of which was better, to prolong his life a little and thereby ensure more suffering for himself, or to cut his life short and spare himself the pain. Perhaps he'd taken into consideration the way his mother suffered watching him.

With the MHC virus ravaging his body, Ryoji had chosen death. Kaoru could understand his feelings, could understand them painfully well. This was something that touched him-a catastrophe that would befall him in the not-too-distant future. This was an enemy Kaoru himself would have to fight. He understood Ryoji's act.

But that didn't mean he wanted to end up the same way.

You 've got to concentrate all your intelligence on confronting this enemy that wants to destroy your body, your youth.

Those were his father's words. If he wanted to escape death, he'd have to fight, and he'd have to win. And he had only one weapon, just like his father had told him: his intelligence.

Kaoru sank deeper into the bathtub. Now the water was up to his earlobes.
Do I have that kind of strength?

The more he thought about it the stranger it seemed. All these events connected with the MHC virus springing from somewhere close to him, closing in on his body as if he'd been assigned to save the world.

You 're overestimating yourself.

Unable to stand the heat any longer, he got out of the tub.

Saving the world actually had a nice ring to it. He wouldn't mind looking like a hero, playing at saviour. But he had a personal matter he had to attend to first. Nothing world-class-something far more local in scale. This evening, for the first time in a week, he had a rendezvous planned with Reiko.

He wiped himself clean of perspiration and then put on a brand-new T-shirt and jeans.

He hadn't seen Reiko since Ryoji's funeral.

Since then, she'd refused even to meet him. Finally, she'd offered to speak with him for an hour this evening. This would be his only chance. Kaoru would have only tonight to find out why Reiko had closed her heart to him.