Parasite Eve (33 page)

    Toshiaki turned to Shinohara,
whom he could not see, and shouted, “Get a fire extinguisher! Hurry!”

    He swallowed flames as they
shot into his mouth, burning the lining in his throat. In between brutal coughing
fits, he heard a bell ringing in the distance. Dizziness overtook him.

    Something began to fall upon
him.

    It poured continuously,
covering both of them. Asakura’s movements weakened. The flames died down,
while the floor grew slippery. Gradually, he felt the heat being drawn away.
Toshiaki moaned. His body was drenched, his shirt stuck firmly to his chest. He
opened one eye and looked up at the ceiling.

    Something was spreading out
from a single point and falling upon his face.

    He closed his eyes.

    Water.

    When Toshiaki came to, he was
on a stretcher.

    His eyes popped open and
darted around instinctively. He was in the auditorium. Droplets of water were
still trickling from the sprinklers overhead. Smoke rose faintly from the
podium as from a blown-out candle. Toshiaki saw a man in white and shouted the
first thing that came to mind.

    “Asakura!”

    “You awake?”

    Shinohara peered at him with
a deathly pale face. Toshiaki seized him by the shoulders.

    “Asakura? Is she okay?”

    “Over there.”

    Shinohara turned his gaze
towards a darkened mass on a stretcher. A few paramedics were crowded around
it. It was a moment before Toshiaki registered what it was.

    “Asakura!”

    He crawled towards her, but a
medic held him back.

    Almost half of her skin was
burned, and her arms and face were swollen with blisters everywhere. Her hair
was crimped and smelled of sulfur. Toshiaki covered his face in desperation. He
heard Shinohara call to him.

    “Don’t worry, she’s still alive.”

    He looked up in disbelief.

    Asakura moaned. One of the
paramedics put an oxygen mask over her face and called for a transfusion.

    She was carried away.

    “The fire was coming from
that creature, so it didn’t touch her body directly. Still, it’s good the fire
went out quickly. Her injuries aren’t as bad as they look,” Shinohara said,
trying his best to console him.

    “...so she’ll be okay?”

    “She’ll be fine. There’s a
special burn victims unit at the Emergency Center. They’ll do some skin
grafting and it’ll heal up nicely. You’ll hardly be able to tell the
difference.”

    Toshiaki nodded.

    “You should be more worried
about yourself there. You were almost burned to death. Just take it easy and
let them take you to the hospital.”

    The paramedics restrained him
and tried to pin him down on the stretcher.

    “No.”

    He shook them off.

    “What’s wrong with you?” said
Shinohara, surprised.

    But Toshiaki ignored him. He
turned and ran towards the door, stumbling to keep his balance.

    “Hey, where are you going?
Wait!”

    His body stung all over,
Toshiaki kept running. He cursed himself over and over for having let this
happen to Asakura. Someone was chasing after him, but he shook off the hands of
his pursuer and made for the parking lot.

5

    Toshiaki jumped into his car
and started the engine.

    He shifted into Drive and
floored the accelerator. The car jumped forward as he released the hand brake.
He broke through the parking gate and was free. He flew down the street, then
veered right, executing a 90 degree turn into a traffic lane. The back wheels
jilted and squealed as he ran a red light.

    The digital clock on the
dashboard read 6:24. Everything darkened as a cloud formation covered the sun.
Fortunately, there was not much traffic. He continued along, swerving left and
right, passing every car he saw in front of him.

    Eve 1 had to be destroyed as
soon as possible. He could not afford to waste even a single second.

    Unfortunately, this was no
hallucination. Eve 1 had definitely called out to him that night in the lab.
Its shape had changed at the other end of the microscope, formed into Kiyomi’s
face, and projected his name into his brain. These events were real.

    Eve 1 said the day had come
for mitochondria to be free. She was Mitochondrial Eve and had been lying
dormant ever since animals were single-celled organisms. If she was telling the
truth, then in fact it had not been Eve 1 proclaiming its new vision.

    It was the mitochondria
themselves.

    The mitochondria multiplying
in Eve 1, curling around one another like roundworms. Mitochondria, in which he
had invested nearly all of his analytical time since being assigned to his
current post as a research associate in Biofunctional Pharmaceuticals. The very
same mitochondria had been manipulating Eve 1, their host.

    It explained Kiyomi’s
behavior in June at the lecture when she confronted Professor Ishihara with her
bizarre question. Toshiaki had been in charge of the slide projector and had
just stood there in shock when she raised her hand, a completely different
woman from the one he married.

    After the lecture, Toshiaki
had pressed her for an explanation. Had she learned about mitochondria from
somewhere? How had she ever come up with such a bold hypothesis? But to the
end, she provided no answers. Now, however, it was quite clear where her ideas
had come from. Mitochondria claimed to have enslaved nuclei and that was
precisely what they had accomplished.

    Toshiaki remembered an article
he once read about a game called “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.” Each player had two
types of cards, “Cooperation” and “Betrayal”. Both players chose an action and
laid out their cards simultaneously. If both played the Cooperation card, each
received three points. If your opponent put out the Cooperation card, but you
put out the Betrayal card, the opponent received zero points, while you
received five. If both had picked the Betrayal card, one point was given to
each. As the players moved through rounds, trying to figure out each other’s
strategies, they were really negotiating. It was a perfect analogy to the
natural world, where different life forms stretched any advantage to its
fullest potential while maintaining symbiotic relationships.

    The most effective strategy
was to begin with Cooperation, then copy the opponent’s move from the previous
round. In other words, you started out as Mr. Nice and retaliated as necessary.
This was called a “Tit for Tat” stance. Though rudimentary, simulations
indicated that, in the end, such a strategy optimized one’s chance of surviving
in nature.

    The symbiotic relationship
between mitochondria and their hosts was no exception. Nuclear genomes and
mitochondria had been living alongside each other since long ago. Everyone
believed that their game would simply go on for good. At least, the nuclear
genomes thought so.

    What if the game wasn’t meant
to go on forever?

    If the next round was
announced to be the last?

    In that case, there was a
sure hand to play. You followed the “Tit for Tat” rule up until the last round;
for the last round, whatever your opponent had played in the previous round,
you had to play Betrayal. Simple as that.

    Mitochondria were ready to
end the game; they had already decided to break from their symbiosis. And so
they had laid out their Betrayal card.

    Now, their opponent could
only lose.

    “No way.”

    Toshiaki bit his lip. No way
this could be.

    The Pharmaceutical Sciences
building came into view. He pumped the accelerator to beat out a traffic light.

    Just then, the light changed
to yellow.

    The compact in front of him
suddenly put on its breaks. Toshiaki hardly saw it coming. He swore and jerked
the wheel, only to see a sedan in the opposing lane rushing towards him. He
turned back again and barely squeezed between the two of them. The sedan veered
off to the right into a row of trees. Toshiaki turned again, almost tipping his
car over. A horn blared behind him. He changed gears and accelerated. He came
out onto a T cross-street. Skid marks from his back tires reflected in the rear
view mirror. He shifted gears and raced towards his goal.

    Just how far could Eve l’s
mitochondria take their host? Mitochondria were the birthplace of energy, and
the movement of all life was dependent on the expenditure of that energy. As
long as oxygen and sustenance were present, mitochondria could produce an
endless amount of it.

    Toshiaki flew around the
curve at 50 mph. Luckily, there were almost no cars coming in the other direction.
The Pharmaceutical Sciences building showed its face from beyond the trees.
Almost there.

    He could see the bus stop in
front of the building. He made a sharp right turn. The car bounced and fell
back with a thud. He’d heard something scraping below but pressed on without a
moment’s hesitation.

    The white building towered in
front of his eyes. The six-story edifice looked unusually immense. The
surroundings were almost dark. There were very few cars in the parking lot.

    Toshiaki drove directly up to
the entrance and slammed on the brakes, screeching to a halt. As the car
settled, he opened the door and ran into the building.

    He flew through the lobby and
rushed up the stairs. His hard soles hit the floor loudly, filling the building
with his fear. He climbed to the fifth floor in a single breath.

    The long hallway was steeped
in darkness. No one was there. He ran as fast as he could toward his lab and
the Cultivation Room.

    He opened the door to the
seminar room and grabbed the Cultivation Room key hanging on the wall, then
went and jammed the key into the knob. His hands were shaking. His breathing
was irregular. He turned the key once, pulling the knob at the same time, and
ran inside. It was dark. He reached out a hand and jumped when his fingers
touched the incubator door. He could hardly breathe. He swallowed and opened
the door.

    When what was inside appeared
on his retina, Toshiaki let out a scream.

6

    The incubator’s interior was
filled with strange lumps of flesh. A suffocating vapor that smelled of culture
medium, with stomach acid, sweat, and saliva mixed in, pierced his nostrils.

    Toshiaki edged back. He felt
vomit rising to his throat, but could not look away.

    It looked like entrails had
been stretched out like clay, minced up, and thrown together into its present
state. Slime oozed from all over. Rose-colored lips moved seductively, a
lilting tongue flapping between them. A series of tentacles tipped with nails
stroked the body from which they extended. A reddish black crevice down the
center contracted together with its surrounding folds. On the other side was a
smooth and sublimely curved breast, towering like an enormous confection. In
the midst of the grotesque organs that surrounded it, it alone was pure and
beautiful. Every time a pulse ran across the flesh’s surface, it shivered
gently.

    The lips puckered up.

    The head-like blob in which
they rested stretched out snakily and lifted like a goose’s neck. It honed in
on Toshiaki and formed a smile like a crescent.

    “Toshiaki...”

    Hairs stood up all over his
body.

    A protrusion in the snaking
neck swelled from a speck to the size of a potato, then moved up and settled
above the lips. It expanded further into cheeks. A nose popped out between
them. Two closed eyes carved themselves out. A forehead spread out. A woman’s
face. Thin, black hair sprouted like countless earthworms emerging from the
soil. Toshiaki covered his mouth, at last realizing what was taking shape.

    Kiyomi opened her eyes.

    She caught him in her sight.
He tried to look away, but their gazes were locked. Her pupils glazed over.
Crimson capillaries spread throughout the whites of her eyes as they expanded
into perfect circles and stared.

    “I’ve been waiting...”

    Her head came closer on its
long neck.

    “I’ve been waiting...waiting
for you,” Kiyomi repeated with flushed cheeks and a smile. She stretched out a
tongue and licked her lips.

    The flesh around her neck
extended to the sides, forming shoulders and a pair of delicate collar bones.
The exposed breast shifted and adhered itself to her chest. Another slowly
swelled up next to it.

    Kiyomi’s upper body was now
almost complete.

    A slender waist and small
navel took shape. Her torso swelled out on both sides like fins, dividing into
arms. Tentacles crawled sinuously about and gathered into wrists. Kiyomi lifted
up her hands from within the slimy liquid and wriggled her fingers. She bent
her head back and took a deep breath. She touched her throat with both hands,
then groped herself gently from chest to waist.