Birthday

1

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.

Then he did it after all.

She rejoiced in his accomplishment, although she had no idea whether isolating the source of the virus helped treat it. She was simply glad for him.

"Does that mean you've found a cure?"

Amano didn't answer her question. Instead, he launched into another long explanation.

"The two scenes you just witnessed represent, if you will, the beginnings. As you saw, the individual known as Sadako Yamamura has the ability to record her voice onto an audiotape solely by willing it. It shouldn't be possible, according to the scientific laws of the Loop world. At the risk of repeating myself, our world and the virtual space of the Loop world are ruled by exactly the same physical principles. You also saw that this Sadako Yamamura dies once, only to effect her own rebirth twenty-four years later through Mai Takano's womb.

This too is a phenomenon that common sense tells us is impossible. Some say it's the result of a computer virus, but the truth is we don't know the actual cause yet, and knowing it might not help us solve the problem anyway.

And the problem is: how do we deal with the virus that was thus produced, regardless of how it came to be?"

Reiko was confused. By that logic, isolating the origin of the MHC virus didn't mean they had learned how to vanquish it. It meant Kaoru's discovery had been in vain; she didn't want to think it.

Reiko confronted Amano with her doubts. He gave her an earnest answer.

"It's like asking why we exist. We do exist, you and I, here and now as human beings. Why do humans exist at all? That question and its answer are of a different order from the question of how to manage society and improve it. Why do humans take the form they do, why are they ruled by desires? Knowing the answers won't necessarily help us learn how to live better. We simply have to accept what's here and manage things as they are.

"Please don't misunderstand me, though. Kaoru's discovery was truly significant. It allowed us to describe the virus's evolutionary process.

"Are you with me? Let's go back to the beginning.

There were warning signs. Sadako Yamamura, being the unique character she is, produces a videotape that kills anybody who watches it in a week's time. The only way to evade death is to make a copy of the videotape and to show it to someone who hasn't yet seen it. Pursued to its conclusion, this means the videotape's numbers should increase exponentially. Along the line, as a result of some mischief, the tape mutates, evolves, metamor-phoses into other media. It spreads like wildfire—or like a virus infecting its victims. In fact, a kind of virus appears in the bodies of those who watch the videotape. In the Loop world they call it the ring virus. Women who contract the virus while ovulating become pregnant without insemination and give birth to Sadako Yamamura.

"You see now. The first scene you witnessed was just that: Mai Takano, infected with the ring virus, giving birth to Sadako."

Reiko felt relief. She couldn't help but think that whatever calamity might have befallen the Loop, it had nothing to do with her. As she listened, only half believing, to Amano's story, she tried to imagine a videotape that killed you a week after you watched it, such a videotape spreading through the world, creating a virus, attacking a woman's womb and implanting a new life form. If that ever happened in reality, people would panic—no telling what they'd do. Rumors feeding on rumors, things would deteriorate at an accelerating rate.

"So what happened?" She was ready for this to end.

"The Loop world lost its diversity. Everything was assimilated to the Sadako Yamamura genotype, became cancerous, and died. Without biodiversity, extinction is only a matter of time. Just as the Loop was dying out, however, the project was frozen for budgetary reasons.

That was twenty years ago."

The words "cancerous" and "extinction" piqued Reiko's curiosity. The conversation finally seemed to be arriving at reality.

She hugged herself, rubbing her upper arms with her palms. "Sounds just like the real world. Kind of frighten-ing."

"Exactly. Reality and the virtual space reflect each other. They correspond to each other."

"Do you mean they're influencing each other?"

"You could put it that way."

"Like—like a mother and a fetus?"

"That's quite an apt comparison." Amano sounded impressed.

Reiko was just trying to apply the far-fetched tale to herself, to find some way to wrap her mind around it. It had occurred to her that Loop was somewhat similar to the womb. It was a world of its own, a space housing a life created by parents. A mother's state of health affected her fetus. The reverse was also possible. And it wasn't just a question of physical condition, either. A mother had an emotional and mental influence over her fetus that wasn't always reducible to explanations via matter. If the mother was happy and at peace, the fetus breathed peacefully; if the mother was frustrated or angry, the fetus's heart rate increased. An illness in one could cause grave damage in the other.

That was Reiko's thinking as she asked her next question. "Did Loop's extinction affect the real world?

Is that what happened?"

"Yes. It exerted an invisible influence. But apart from that, there's another factor at work, which we've been able to study. It seems that the Loop world's virus invaded the real world, where it evolved into the MHC

virus."

Tabling for the moment the mechanism by which a virus from the virtual world could function in the real one, Amano began to tell her why the ring virus had crossed over into the real world. What Reiko heard next floored her.

"Among those in the Loop world infected with the ring virus was an individual named Ryuji Takayama.

He's the only being ever to cross from the virtual world into ours.

"This Takayama dies in the Loop world. But Professor Eliot—Chris Eliot, the father of the Loop project—

decided to bring him back to life in the real world by refabricating his genetic information. It wasn't possible to take him apart on a molecular level and recreate him, so the only option was to embed his genetic information in a fertilized egg and to arrange for him to be born into this world as an infant. Unfortunately, he carried the ring virus. At present the thinking is that there must have been an accident during the DNA breakdown-re-constitution phase at which point it escaped from an in-testinal bacterium. The hypothesis, and it's well-founded, is that the ring virus mutated into the MHC

virus. A comparison of the DNA base sequences of the two viruses reveals a shocking degree of similarity."

Amano stopped talking and fixed Reiko with a gaze.

Reiko noticed the change and braced herself.

"Ryuji Takayama was reborn into the real world twenty years ago."

Amano seemed to place special emphasis on twenty years, and Reiko wondered why. That was Kaoru's age, she noted.

"I think it would be quicker if you had a look at this." Amano called up a third scene on the monitor.

"Please don't be shocked. That is—I'm sorry... No matter what I say, I know it'll be a shock, and in your condition... But I don't know what to say."

He seemed not to relish the responsibility that had become his. But Amano's expression cleared and he continued:

"Now, watch. This is Ryuji Takayama, of the Loop world."

He pressed some buttons on the keyboard and enlarged the scope.

It was a rear view of Takayama as he sat in an office at the university studying logic. The vantage point gradually rotated until they were seeing him from the front.

Still seated at his desk, Takayama raised his head and looked up at the ceiling. Amano zoomed in on his face.

Reiko looked at the image on the screen and uttered a name, and it was not "Takayama." But her face expressed none of the shock Amano had expected. She simply reacted as anyone facing the image of a loved one onscreen might: she'd called his name out of habit. She did not, could not, comprehend, not at once, that Ryuji Takayama and Kaoru Futami were the same person.

2

It didn't matter where Kaoru's DNA came from.

Reiko didn't care. Life emerged from nothingness.

The child inside her—before the sperm fertilized the egg, it hadn't existed.

The only things that mattered, Reiko felt, were acts.

Like those passionate moments with Kaoru, stolen while her son Ryoji was off getting tested for chemotherapy, when they could use his room like a hotel—the im-pulse had been a pure one, a loving one. They hadn't acted on physical instinct alone unaccompanied by feeling. Their acts had been driven by love, and the result was that she carried new life within her womb.

But still.

It wasn't that she didn't understand the concept.

Given that the Loop life forms had DNA, she was prepared to accept that science could reconstruct them. But still...it was like being told all of a sudden that Kaoru was a cyborg or something.

She'd had intercourse with Kaoru a number of times in that hospital room, with the curtains open and the brilliant afternoon sunlight shining in. There in the bright light they had examined each other's organs, lapped each other's fluids, felt each other's pulses against their mucous membranes. She'd taken his semen into her mouth. She could remember its bitter taste, the feel of it on her tongue. It tasted like something secreted from a living body; it tasted like life.

Reiko had only a general grasp of the mechanics of one of his sperm reaching her egg and fertilizing it. If she did understand every detail, it wouldn't have changed what surfaced in her memory now, which was the act, and a recollection of the emotions of which it had been the manifestation. The new life had been created out of thoughts, out of will.

I love you.

That didn't change upon learning Kaoru's prove-nance.

Amano, meanwhile, had no way of knowing that Reiko was occupied with confirming her love for Kaoru.

As a scientist, all that was on his mind was whether she understood the process.

"I get it," she said. "Kaoru's birth did not result from the sexual union of his parents."

Her response reassured Amano somewhat. If she got that much, he would be spared the barrage of questions.

They'd just saved a lot of time. "I'm glad you do," he said.

What Reiko wanted to know was not the "why" of the beginnings of his existence, but the current progress of it. In short, where was he and what was he doing?

"Where is Kaoru now?" she asked Amano.

He gave a little sigh and shook his head. He looked at his wristwatch, assumed a thoughtful pose, then slowly stood up and ordered two cups of coffee over an intercom. Reiko thought his actions affected. She had a bad feeling about what was coming next.

At length a young woman appeared with the coffee.

Amano distractedly brought his to his lips and said, without meeting Reiko's eyes, "Please, have some coffee."

Then, haltingly, he began to tell her, not where Kaoru was, but about a scientific device called the Neutrino Scanning Capture System, NSCS or Neucap for short. It used phase shifts caused by neutrino vibrations to make a digital record of a living creature in three dimensions, down to the last detail, including the state of its proteins and electrical fields. Through neutrino irradiation, the machine also made a record of brain activity—thoughts, emotions, memories—capturing literally every piece of information and storing it as data.

Reiko was only half listening, but when Amano mentioned that the NSCS was located in North America, deep underground at the Four Corners, where the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado meet, she looked up with a start. That was where Kaoru had been headed on his quest to find out about the MHC

virus.

"That's where Kaoru is, isn't it?" She clung to the idea.

Amano merely looked uncomfortable. He dithered, unwilling to confirm or deny her guess. Reiko watched him wordlessly, commanding herself to be calm no matter what he said next.

"It was discovered that the telomerase sequence in Kaoru's DNA was not TTAGGG. What this means is that while the MHC virus produced the TTAGGG

telomerase sequence and attached it to the end of his DNA like it does to all its victims, in Kaoru's case it was unstable, breaking down almost immediately. In short, he had perfect resistance to the MHC virus."

"You mean, Kaoru won't come down with MHC?"

"That's correct. The virus doesn't cancerize his cells."

"That's wonderful..."

But the pounding in Reiko's chest would not subside. Instead, that "Neucap" had taken root in her imagination, where it was now glowing, pale and ghostly.

"I'm not sure how else to put it. It was what the whole world had been waiting for. The key to defeating the MHC virus was found in Kaoru's own body."

Reiko thought back over things Kaoru had said and done. He must have sensed, intuitively, that he was going to make a huge contribution to discovering the origin of the MHC virus, and a cure to it. He'd carried that destiny around with him since birth—he'd been on a kind of mission.

"So he's going to be able to help find a treatment."

"Absolutely. That's putting it mildly. His complete biodata has been analyzed, and we're quite close to perfecting a breakthrough treatment. It's all thanks to Kaoru."

Complete biodata.

The words caught her ear. From the course of the conversation, it wasn't hard to imagine that Kaoru had submitted himself to the NSCS. But the direction Amano was taking the discussion worried her. He hadn't volunteered any information as to what had happened to Kaoru's body in the process of providing his complete biodata. The professor was being evasive on that point.

"Did you use this NSCS on Kaoru?"

"Yes." Amano nodded.

"What happens to someone's body when the NSCS

is used on it?"

"Kaoru's body was completely sterilized and he was placed in a tank of purified water, where he floated in the center of a dome two hundred meters in diameter.

Neutrinos were shot at him from every point along the sphere's surface. They passed through his body and reached the opposite point on the sphere, in the process accumulating information about his molecular structure."

She didn't care about the mechanism. Her voice rose in frustration.

"What happened to his body?"

"In order to get his complete biodata, it was necessary to expose him to radiation intense enough to break down his cells, and as a result..."

Reiko's hair flew about as she leaned abruptly forward.

"That is, what happened was..."

Reiko nearly screamed.

Amano seemed to be trying to impress upon her that he bore no responsibility in the matter—his voice grew angry, although his anger had no particular object.

"Listen to me. As a result, his body was liquefied. It was destroyed."

"Liquefied? Destroyed?" In a daze she repeated the words. She tried and failed to imagine that happening to a body. What happened to his life? She knew the answer to that, but she couldn't accept it.

She started to speak, but bit back the words. Her mouth opened and closed helplessly; she looked like she was about to hyperventilate. Amano took pity on her and pronounced.

"Kaoru is dead to this world."

Reiko and Amano stared at each other for a long time. Amano couldn't avert his gaze from her big eyes, turned slightly down at the corners. He'd have to take her emotional explosion head-on.

Reiko was the first to look away. Tears welled up in her eyes; the next moment she'd collapsed face down on the table, heedless as some of her hair landed in the coffee.

Her voice was muffled as she moaned, "I can't believe it..."

She didn't know what to say. Two years ago she'd lost her husband to MHC; two months ago her son, af-flicted with the same disease, had killed himself. And now—or rather, a month ago—her lover, the father of the child she was carrying, had also departed this world, and in a manner she couldn't even begin to describe. What a catastrophe—she could feel her will to live withering away.

I can't take it anymore.

She'd already been sick of life before coming to the research center. Now that Amano had informed her of Kaoru's death, she could feel her helplessness metamor-phosing into a distinct death wish. She had to staunch this sadness at its root, and the only way to do that was to destroy the body from which her emotions sprang.

It didn't matter that Kaoru's biodata could cure her own condition. She could take no more. She might overcome her cancer and live several decades more, but her sorrow would stay with her forever. She didn't want to live in such a state. This she could say with perfect certainty.

No more.

She stood up. As she did, she knocked over her cup and spilled coffee on her lap, but she didn't seem to care as she whirled around and headed for the door.

"Where are you going?"

Amano pursued her, grabbing her by the wrist.

"That's enough."

"No, it's not. I have more to tell you."

"I know all I need to know."

"You don't know anything yet."

Reiko reached for the doorknob, ignoring him. But Amano held her arm. In pain, she yelled, "Leave me alone!" Anger was unusual for her.

Amano couldn't back down. Kaoru had had his mission; Amano now had his. He had promises to keep—to Dr. Eliot, but more importantly to Kaoru.

"Won't you please calm down and listen? I promised Kaoru I'd do this."

Reiko held still. She stopped resisting and waited for Amano's next words. The line about promising Kaoru seemed to have worked.

"A promise..."

"Yes. It's my task to bring you and Kaoru face to face. Before he left on his journey, Kaoru made me and Dr. Eliot promise. I have a duty to follow his instructions. It's my way of repaying him for what he's done—

save humanity, no less. What I'm going to do is call up the appropriate moment and bring you and Kaoru face to face."

"Face to face? You mean...I can meet him?"

"Yes, yes, of course. He's alive and well on the other side."

Reiko half turned around, coffee dripping from her hair. She looked pale, haggard.

"Please, sit down." Amano indicated the sofa.

It took a little while for Reiko to suppress her emotions and return to normal. She paused for a moment, slowly fixing her hair and face, then followed Amano's suggestion and sank onto the sofa.

Amano kept looking at his watch. It bothered Reiko.

"Are we alright for time?" she asked.

"What? Oh, it's just that we've got an appointment in ten minutes."

"Who's your appointment with?"

"Kaoru."

Reiko started to feel confused again. What validity was there to an appointment with someone who'd been dead for a month?

Amano tried, gently, to clear up any misunderstand-ings.

"First of all, I'd like you to know that Kaoru freely chose to undergo NSCS."

"Did he know it would kill him?"

"He did. The NSCS digitizes the emotions of the subject at the precise moment of scanning. It wouldn't work if we tied someone up and forced them to undergo neutrino irradiation. When someone is full of fear and hatred, or denial, the body stiffens and we can't get a reading of their natural biodata. So I must ask you to fully accept the fact that Kaoru went in of his own free will. He welcomed death with a serene heart and an un-ruffled state of mind so that we could get an accurate scan of his biodata. He had the most exalted of motiva-tions. He was sacrificing himself to save the human race.

And let me be more specific. Kaoru particularly wanted to save you, and the child you carry, and his parents."

Amano's words weighed on her. If Kaoru had died for her and her child, suddenly her life became a much more important thing. She felt more valuable in her own eyes.

Amano continued:

"Kaoru's death meant two things. First, as I keep re-iterating, it enabled us to utilize his biodata to find a cure for MHC. Second, digitizing his molecular information allowed us to bring him back to life within the Loop world.

"The cancerization of the Loop world and the cancerization of the real world relate to each other in subtle, intimate ways that you expressed through the metaphor of the mother and the fetus. Restoring biodiversity is the only real solution to the problems of both biospheres.

Kaoru died in this world and left us his biodata, and we'll make the fullest use of it. We needed him to come back to life in the Loop and to bear the burden of returning that world, too, to its normal state of biodiversity. In short, he needed to carry out the duties of a god. His death was simultaneously a departure into the Loop world. When he arrived, the Loop project—which had been frozen for twenty years—was reactivated. It got a new start, from a point just this side of extinction."

"Can't you bring him back to life in this world, then?"

"We can't restore him just as he was. It's possible to create a new life with Kaoru's DNA using cloning technology, which developed at the end of the last century.

I'm sure I don't have to explain to you that while such a being would have Kaoru's DNA, he would have different life experiences—he'd be a different person. However, the Kaoru that was brought back to life within the Loop is exactly the same as the Kaoru who lived here—the same thought patterns, the same emotions, and the same memories."

"So you're saying he remembers me."

"Of course he does."

It finally sank in that Kaoru was alive in the other world. But that still didn't change the fact that he'd died.

As long as he was in the virtual world, they couldn't in-teract physically. They couldn't communicate—or at least, she couldn't see how. All she'd be able to do was watch him on a screen, as though he were some character in a television show. Wasn't it worse to have her loved one so close at hand and be unable to touch him?

"Can the Loop beings see us?"

It was the next logical question. She knew, because she had experienced it twice now, that she could observe the Loop world. But even as a layperson she could surmise that the reverse might not be so easily accomplished.

"No, they can't. Just like we can't peek into the world of the gods."

But the image that came into Reiko's mind was not of god and man.

A few days ago Reiko had gone to see her obstetrician, and the doctor had shown her the fetus. She'd lain down on a bed and hiked up her blouse to expose her belly, and the doctor had applied the ultrasound to her skin, summoning an image of the fetus on the monitor.

The doctor had talked to her about the baby's development. Reiko had been struck by how easily the echo machine showed her the inside of her womb. Here, too, the comparison of the Loop to a womb proved helpful to her.

A mother could see the fetus in her womb, but the fetus could not be conscious of its mother in her entirety. Perception in this case was a one-way street.

And so Reiko had no trouble accepting the fact that while the real world could look in on the Loop, the reverse was impossible.

"I understand. Now let me meet him."

She intentionally used an expression that implied they'd be in the same space even though she knew that she'd see him and not the reverse. She wanted to feel like they'd be together, even temporarily. If only she could recapture the feeling of his skin touching hers...

"Alright. It's about time we left this room. I think Kaoru has things he wants to tell you. He was evidently quite insistent that Dr. Eliot promise him this meeting.

He didn't want to leave you a message by holographic memory. I think he just wanted to feel for an instant that you and he were in the same place at the same time, to feel that you were there before his eyes."

They went into a laboratory divided down the middle by a standing screen. Amano went to a computer and input a time and a place. Reiko sat where she was told.

He asked if she wanted to use a helmet display and data gloves.

"What happens if I use them?"

"The experience will be three-dimensional. Alto-gether more realistic. The data gloves will allow you to touch Kaoru's body."

Without a moment's hesitation, she chose to use them.

She put on the equipment and waited for the time to come. Two minutes to go. She steadied her breathing and wiped the coffee from her hair with a handkerchief, arranging it behind her head. She knew he wouldn't be able to see her, but her feminine instincts insisted.

It had been two months since she'd last seen his face. Now he was dead—seeing him would feel like they'd put TV cameras in heaven or something. Her anticipation mounted. She wanted to see him calm and at peace. She thought it might reassure her, to a degree.

3

In Loop time, it was nearly two pm on June 27, 1991. The latitude and longitude coordinates were aligned precisely as they should be. Reiko was about to experience the Loop world in three dimensions, sight and sound.

As the system started, she could feel that she was being taken to another place. Her surroundings were blurry white, and countless droplets of moisture floated all around her. Her body was thrust between them. She seemed to be floating in clouds and her body felt light.

She was not afraid. In fact, she felt quite comfortable, as if she'd obtained a new, freer body.

It didn't take her long to realize that those were actual clouds obscuring her field of vision. She made her way forward until she passed through a rent in the clouds to the other side. She found herself looking down at a coastline, a peninsula extending out into the sea.

Her point of view descended until the intricate coastline became so clear she felt she could reach out and touch it.

The land sloped steeply down to the ocean, leaving precious little space for the seaside pines and only a thin strip of beach.

A paved road wound its way through the hills, shining up at her grayly. The Loop world's sun seemed to be at her back; she couldn't see it, but she could see the reflection of its rays on the road, and on the waves, glitter-ing. She was able to sense that the sun was there behind her.

She saw a human figure on an animal track that veered off the road toward the ocean. At first she couldn't tell what it was looking for as it wandered back and forth along the pine-covered hillside. Was it trying to find a clear field of vision? Or someplace where it could bask in the rays of the sun as they broke through the clouds?

Finally the figure sat down in a grassy clearing on the slope. It then looked straight up at where Reiko's

"eyes" should be.

All was silent, except for the surf in the distance and the wind that surrounded her. As her vantage point lowered and the ground rose to meet her she got a curious sense of spatial relationships. It wasn't like landing in an airplane; it was slower than that. She'd never para-chuted, but she imagined this was what it felt like.

The figure sitting there holding his knees was known in her world by the name Kaoru Futami, while in the Loop he was called Ryuji Takayama. Time in the Loop moved six times faster than in the real world; the month Reiko had spent since last talking with him corresponded to six months there. But that wasn't important. What mattered right now was that Kaoru, too, was aware that Reiko was right in front of him.

She looked down on him from a height of several meters, gazing at his forehead, his nose, the strong-willed set of his mouth. He smiled up as if searching for Reiko's face floating there in the sky. He knew, he had to know, that she was looking at him.

Reiko stayed where she was for a while and allowed memories of Kaoru to pass through her mind. They'd spent so little time together, shared so few spaces. The hospital was practically the only place where they'd voiced their love for each other, but Reiko's son had committed suicide there. Pleasant memories of the place coexisted with sorrowful ones.

Reiko searched for recollections that were purely of Kaoru, fleshing them out, comparing them with the face she was now seeing. Kaoru was right there in front of her, but she closed her eyes.

An image of herself and Kaoru replayed in her mind.

He was walking along the hospital corridor. When he saw her, his face lit up with a joy he didn't even try to conceal. She missed that innocence of his. She could recall the warmth of his skin as he hesitantly touched her—as he picked her up with ease and carried her to the bed. She recalled how they had stood looking over the city from the top floor of the hospital, talking about what they'd do if they could conquer the illness, losing themselves in unrealizable dreams.

Do I want to capture those memories? Do I want to re-experience them?

No, that wasn't it. She wanted to go forth with Kaoru into the future. But he was dead. He didn't really exist anymore. He wasn't anyone she could go forth with.

But when she opened her eyes, he was even closer.

He moved his lips. Clearly he was trying to say something, but she couldn't hear him—was the machine mal-functioning? She told Amano, who was sitting beside her, watching her, and sure enough, it seemed there had been a mistake. He adjusted the automatic translator so that Kaoru's words could reach her.

Kaoru was looking straight upward, and his gaze bristled with determination. He was saying something, in simple, clearly enunciated words. At first it sounded like static, but as Amano made the requisite adjustments Reiko began to make them out. As a result of passing through the translator, Kaoru's voice sounded subtly different, but she understood what he was saying.

"It's going—to be—alright."

He gave a big nod, as if to confirm it with himself.

It's alright.

What was alright? Was he beating a drum for the world he'd given his life to protect? Where did he get that kind of confidence? Yet, Reiko could tell that her attitude toward life, which had already undergone such drastic changes in the few hours since she'd come to the research center, was approaching a new conclusion.

Kaoru had sacrificed himself to save Reiko and the child she carried, and now he sat before them saying,

"It's alright." With him affirming the world, she had no grounds for doubt.

I'll live.

The thought pierced her body. She'd begun to lose the sense that she was really alive, but now, in a way that transcended all causes, she suddenly had it back.

Just before Kaoru had set out for the desert, Reiko had been hinting at suicide, and he'd extracted a promise from her.

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

His promise was that in two months he'd reappear, a solution in hand. He'd kept his promise.

Reiko moved her hands, encased in data gloves, and touched Kaoru. She placed her hands on his shoulders and felt his prominent shoulder blades, covered in well-toned muscle. He was just the same.

Kaoru rearranged his legs so that he was sitting Indian-style and stretched out his hands. Reiko grasped them; he didn't respond. Of course he didn't. He couldn't see her. But she didn't give up.

She desperately repeated the motion, again and again, hoping that her desire to communicate might move him. She ran her hands up his arms, entwined her fingers in his. Meanwhile Kaoru waved, scratched his head, and in general did exactly the opposite of what she wanted. Finally, he seemed to realize something. He mused, arms hanging at his sides, then held out his hands again. It was a gesture of surrender; her will, not his, would determine the course of this.

Reiko placed her hands on his and left them there for a while so that they could begin to feel each other's intentions. She was afraid that any sudden movement might sever her connection to him. Then, carefully, she moved a hand. His hand made a corresponding movement. He'd sensed her. She was sure that Kaoru could intuit that he was holding her hands even if he couldn't see her.

Reiko cautiously placed his hands on her chest, then slowly moved them downward. Their clasped hands were like an umbilical cord linking the real world with the Loop. She guided his hands downward, to her belly, to her navel.

"Can you hear it?"

She hoped that the tiny heartbeat was felt against his skin.

Kaoru nodded, and said again, "It's going to be alright."

Perhaps his voice reached the fetus. It moved in her like never before.

4

When she walked through the hospital doors, Reiko's heart was a tangle of complicated emotions. This was the hospital where her son Ryoji had jumped to his death, so she'd expected it to affect her badly. She anticipated grief, but to her surprise the first memory that came to her was of meeting Kaoru.

She went up to the third floor and crossed the spacious lobby to the elevator for the B wing. The third floor was where the cafeteria was, overlooking the courtyard.

Reiko had first met Kaoru there.

He'd been looking at her, but men were always looking at her. She'd shot him a pointed glance, but it didn't affect him in the least. In fact, his gaze grew more determined and it soon became impossible for her to ignore it. A few days later, she had the chance to speak with him. Once she learned what kind of person he was—once she glimpsed his ideals—she found herself attracted to him as a woman. It was partly to increase her contact with him that she asked him to tutor her son.

But then they became lovers, and as a direct result of that, her son resorted to killing himself. She couldn't blame him for despairing, knowing how painful the tests were for him, while she and Kaoru were just waiting for him to leave the room so they could indulge their passion for each other. He'd begun to feel like an intruder, and that had robbed him of his last hope.

"I'll be gone, so you two knock yourselves out."

His suicide note had bound her like some spell.

In the period immediately following his suicide, she had tried to tell herself that he would have died anyway of MHC. Now that Kaoru's biodata had revealed how to fight the disease, Ryoji's death affected her more than ever. If only he'd endured a little longer, the techniques made possible by Kaoru's sacrifice might have saved him.

The elevator stopped on the seventh floor, and Reiko stepped out into the hallway and looked around.

For a moment, she lost her orientation. Space seemed to warp around her. Halfway down the hallway was an emergency door, behind which a stairway stretched up and down into the darkness. Reiko's neural cells resisted remembering anything more. On the landing there was a small triangular window that could be opened from the inside or the outside in an emergency. One evening three months ago, Ryoji had jumped from that window, turning himself into a red stain on the concrete below.

Her meeting with Kaoru, her parting with Ryoji—

they'd both happened in the same place. No matter where she looked, for her, the hospital was a tangle of memories.

Though she hadn't regained her composure, Reiko looked at the scrap of paper in her hand, confirmed the number written on it, and knocked on a door.

"Come in."

The answer was immediate, as if she was expected just then, and from behind the door she heard the whisper of cloth rubbing against cloth.

She opened the door to find Hideyuki Futami leaning against the wall in an unnatural posture, his pajamas open in the front. The room smelled of bodily excre-tions. Reiko took a couple of steps into the room and shut the door behind her. She reminded herself that the smell belonged to Kaoru's father, and it ceased to bother her as much.

"Pleased to meet you. I'm Reiko Sugiura."

Hideyuki moved away from the wall and a smile lit up his face. "I'm glad you've come. Please," he said, indicating a metal folding chair.

Hideyuki had known she'd be visiting him—she'd contacted him ahead of time. He already knew that his son Kaoru and she had been lovers, and that she was pregnant. Kaoru had confessed it all to him just before he left.

Reiko knew that the joy lighting up Hideyuki's face was for her and the child she carried. Though this was their first meeting, she recognized the sincerity in his face.

She took a seat in the chair Hideyuki offered her.

She examined his features, without precisely meaning to. She was curious to see if his face revealed how well he was holding up against the cancer. She also felt a certain gratitude toward him for raising Kaoru.

Kaoru had come into the world via an implantation of chromosomes from the virtual world into a fertilized egg, which had then been placed in a woman's uterus.

At the same time, he'd grown up as the son of Hideyuki Futami and his wife. He may not have inherited Hideyuki's DNA, but Hideyuki had raised Kaoru with care as his only child. Meanwhile, the life within Reiko had inherited Kaoru's DNA.

Given that its ultimate source was an artificial life form, Reiko might have been expected to feel strange about the child, as if she were carrying an alien thing within her. But she found she was able to accept the facts with no qualms whatsoever. She could feel the immense strength of will that had been passed down from Hideyuki to Kaoru and now to her child. Her rendezvous with Kaoru a month ago had confirmed that.

Kaoru's message had enabled Reiko to find the will to go on living. She felt that a face-to-face meeting with Hideyuki, who was making a miraculous recovery thanks to information Kaoru's sacrifice had made avail-able, should strengthen her determination.

And that was why she couldn't stop gazing at Hideyuki now with curiosity and gratitude, and concern for his condition.

"You look like you're doing well."

Of course, her comment was not informed by the way he'd looked before, but Kaoru had told her all about his condition: how the cancer had moved decisively into his lungs and how, since further surgery was impossible, all that was left was to wait for death. It had been a tug of war between life and death, but judging by Hideyuki's appearance now, life seemed to be winning.

"I feel good. I feel so light these days. Well, I suppose that might just be because I've had so many organs removed." He laughed.

They proceeded to tell each other what had been happening in their lives lately. Reiko drew for the over-joyed Hideyuki a verbal picture of how Kaoru had been reborn in the Loop world and how he'd given her his bold message. Hideyuki, ever the scientist, used his body as an example to explain how they'd taken the telomerase sequence from Kaoru's DNA and introduced it into the cells of MHC patients with groundbreaking results. He was trying to comfort Reiko, who was a carrier of the disease herself, and it worked. The MHC virus was no longer something to fear.

Finally, Hideyuki's interest turned to Reiko's condition.

"Is everything going well?"

Reiko smiled and patted her belly. At the moment there were no problems; the fetus was growing well.

Hideyuki asked when she was due, and she told him the truth. The date was about three months ahead, and rapidly approaching. But when he asked about the baby's sex, she gave the vaguest of answers.

"I wonder."

In truth, she knew the baby's sex. Last month, when she'd gone to the obstetrician for an ultrasound, she'd looked at the monitor and seen a cute little protuberance right where the baby's legs joined.

Ah—a boy.

Lying there on the bed watching the screen, she'd actually uttered the words. The doctor maintained a studious silence, but a nurse was standing nearby and her expression indicated that Reiko was right.

She had decided not to let Hideyuki know that it was a boy. She didn't want him to expect the child to be a reincarnation of Kaoru. She decided that ambiguity was what was called for.

Reiko gathered herself to leave, and Hideyuki began to get up to see her to the door.

"You don't have to get up. Please, lie down."

"It's alright, never mind about me. Where are you planning to have the baby?"

She lent Hideyuki a hand as he braced himself against the wall and hobbled toward her. She mentioned the name of a local obstetrics clinic.

At that, Hideyuki stopped in his tracks.

"So you're not going to have it here."

She could sense reproach behind his words. The university hospital was close to his heart; he had lots of colleagues on the staff, and his son had studied there as a medical student. He no doubt felt that in an emergency, she'd get better care at the hospital than at some little clinic down the street.

Of course the idea had occurred to Reiko. But the fact that the hospital was where Ryoji had killed himself held her back.

"Well, I thought about it, but..."

Hideyuki couldn't know that her son had killed himself there. She hesitated to voice such inauspicious memories right now, so she was left floundering for a reason.

"You ought to have it here." Hideyuki was virtually pleading with her. He plainly wanted to see his grand-child as soon as he possibly could. He might have escaped a once-certain death, but he wouldn't be checking out of the hospital for quite some time yet. If she had the baby in the hospital, he could see it right away, and much more frequently after that.

Reiko understood all this, and it shook her. A mere thirty minutes of conversation had told her all she needed to know about Hideyuki. Even if he hadn't been Kaoru's father, she would have liked the man.

"I'll consider it."

In reply Hideyuki stretched out his hands to clasp hers. His hands felt like Kaoru's.

"Come back and visit again sometime. I'll be waiting."

Reiko had a feeling of déjà vu. Everything from the way he greeted her to the passionate grip of his hands was the way it had been with Kaoru. Only, now, the roles of visitor and visited were reversed.

As she closed the door behind her, she thought,

Maybe I should have the baby here after all.

5

A month before she was due, Reiko began to slip back into melancholy. At night, alone in her room, her anxiety spiraled out of control, and she began to fear she was going mad. Winter was almost over. It was March now, nearly six months since Kaoru's departure.

Her condo was too big for someone living alone.

With its huge living room and three bedrooms, it had been almost too much even when she'd lived there with her husband and son. Now its vastness oppressed her. It symbolized emptiness itself; she couldn't bear it. Having lost her loved ones one after the other, she was now alone—not strictly speaking, but close enough—in her fight. The enemy was no longer the MHC virus, but an overwhelming solitude.

The living room was crammed with luxurious fur-nishings, each one the product of her late entrepreneur husband's financial clout. They were without value now.

Reiko sank down onto the couch, pulled her knees up, and buried her face in them, sobbing. She couldn't figure out what to do to make up for the desolation she felt inside, a desolation so powerful it made her tremble. Her life was a bleak landscape stretching out before her. Though she told herself to live, despair was always with her.

I just want someone to talk to.

That was her sincerest wish. She was sure Hideyuki would play that role for her splendidly, if she wanted him to. They shared the same emotional wounds, and for that reason, among others, he was sure to be a good conversation partner. She'd already done the paperwork to specify the university hospital as the place where she was going to have the baby. But Hideyuki alone wouldn't be able to stave off her sudden attacks of loneliness—to help her master the enemy that occupied these rooms.

Reiko closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind of the spaciousness of the apartment. As she did so, a com-pact, edited version of her life played in her mind. A landscape made up of memorable events from her younger days—grade school, middle school, high school, college—floated before her mind's eye. An objectified view.

She knew exactly why she was seeing these third-party visions of her past. The other day, organizing her closets, she'd found, quite by accident, a floppy disc full of digital images.

They'd been assembled twelve years ago for display at her wedding. A rush of nostalgia came over her and she ended up looking through them again and again on the monitor. She'd provided the digital images herself, but her friends had edited them together into a light-hearted, even humorous version of her life. It had been ages since she'd looked at some of those pictures, and so, seeing what her friends had put together, she'd laughed out loud.

The sequence had been displayed on a huge screen in the wedding hall. It began with scenes of her as a baby and ended with a shot of her at twenty-two standing side-by-side with her future husband. It was hardly a complete picture, just a simple sketch of her life from ages zero to twenty-two.

Reiko paused on the last scene. It had been shot with a still camera, not a videocam; she and her future husband were standing with the ocean at their backs.

Reiko wasn't facing the camera. Instead she was twisted to one side, sticking her belly out toward her husband.

Why had she assumed such an awkward pose?

Reiko recalled the conversation they'd been having when the photo was taken. They weren't married yet, but already she was carrying her husband's child. She had wanted to make it clear in the photo that the child was being born because he was wanted, that he would enter life welcomed. That was why she'd stuck her belly out and placed her hand on it for the camera. She'd made no effort to hide her pregnancy from the wedding guests, either. The master of ceremonies had paused on the image and announced to the crowd that twenty-two-year-old Reiko was carrying the groom's child, and the two of them had been bathed in cheers.

When she closed her eyes she could hear the applause. She'd had everything back then. Her parents were still alive, the man who was to be her husband was at her side, and his child was growing within her. Ryoji.

She hung her head, helpless in the flood of memories. Reflecting on the past never assuaged her desolation but only made it worse. It wasn't good for her to be alone. As long as she was, her mind would always be under the sway of images from the past.

"That's it."

She got up from the sofa and went into the room with her AV equipment in it.

The room held a computer with a huge display.

Amano had arranged it so that she could access and view the Loop from home.

She could access it: this didn't mean she could communicate with entities living within it. Simply watching them unilaterally could end up aggravating her frustration, but she decided not to let Amano's gesture go to waste. She followed his instructions and tried to call up an image from the Loop.

Amano must have preset it to focus on "Ryuji Takayama," because suddenly the monitor was filled with a close-up of Kaoru's face. Reiko cried out, remembering again how much she missed him.

Without any context, she didn't know where he was. Kaoru was lying on a couch, asleep. The couch looked like it might have been in the corner of a laboratory, but when she backed up her perspective-point, she realized it was actually a hospital waiting room.

In the Loop it was 1994. Three years had elapsed in it since the project's resumption. Having sacrificed himself and thereby contributed mightily to defeating the MHC virus in the real world, Kaoru had been reborn in the Loop as Ryuji Takayama to reverse cancerization there as well. He was thirty-seven now.

The youth of twenty Reiko had loved had now, in the space of six months, become a strong man three years older than her. The added years showed in his face, but they had given him a charm appropriate for his age.

She could see that even when he was asleep. But he was in a hospital, waiting for his name to be called. She wondered if there was something wrong with him physically.

His name was called, and "Takayama" opened his eyes. He seemed to have momentarily forgotten where he was; it always happened when he dozed off. He glanced around him, and for a moment Reiko imagined that their gazes had met. Her chest tightened with joy.

Unable to speak with him, she found herself interpreting each of his movements as they might relate to her, assigning some significance to everything.

Takayama went into an exam room and undressed to the waist, exposing his muscular body. Looking at him from behind, she could see a ten-centimeter scar running across his back. That hadn't been there when they were together. Had he gotten into an accident during his frantic activity in the Loop? The way the skin weltered up at the scar told her how serious the injury had been. Reiko got a funny feeling at the base of her spine from imagining him losing a lot of blood.

The examination took ten minutes. Takayama got dressed and went out to the reception desk where he waited for a prescription to be issued. Behind him Reiko could see a dozen or so patients on the couches waiting for their appointments. One of them caught her eye, and she gasped. It was a young woman with delicately balanced features, sitting with her legs crossed. Everything about her face—from her prominent forehead to her straight eyebrows, from the undeviating line of her nose to the slightly cruel, thin lips—was perfect. But it wasn't her beauty that had made Reiko gasp. She'd seen that face before.

Reiko paused the image and zoomed in on the woman's face. It took her only a dozen or so seconds to recall the name.

Sadako Yamamura.

This was the woman who'd turned the Loop cancerous. She'd had the ability to record sounds on a tape reel without using a recorder, and she'd honed the ability to the point of making a lethal videotape. Her videotape had mutated, branching out into all sorts of media.

When a woman who was ovulating came into contact with the images, she became pregnant with an entity that shared Sadako's DNA. Reiko vividly recalled watching Sadako crawl out of the womb of that woman who'd fallen into the rooftop exhaust shaft—the newborn, gnawing through the umbilical cord with toothless gums. Pregnant herself, Reiko had been unable to see it as merely virtual, as something totally unrelated to her.

Though it had taken place in an entirely different space, in the Loop, just watching it she'd shivered with horror.

That was how the Loop world had been unmoored in a flood of mutated media, all reproducing a single DNA pattern with astonishing speed.

And now the culprit, Sadako Yamamura herself, was sitting right behind Takayama, waiting for her exam with a look of total innocence on her face. Once he'd received his prescription, Takayama seemed to notice her, but his expression didn't change. He walked out of the hospital. It looked to be just an ordinary, everyday event.

In the hospital lobby Takayama passed another Sadako Yamamura. They both just kept walking, in opposite directions, hardly noticing each other. Takayama went into the parking lot outside the hospital entrance and opened the door to his car, while Sadako got onto an elevator inside the hospital and went up to a higher floor.

Takayama started his car. Reiko didn't know where he was heading, but he drove onto a trunk road and then stepped on the accelerator. Scenery started rushing past at high speed...

Reiko lost track of time as she watched. No longer was she able to see this as a television show, unrelated to her. She was watching a person's life. The images con-veyed the uninvented truth about an irreplaceable man.

6

Every day for the next month, at a predetermined time, Reiko accessed the Loop and peeked in on Takayama's life. It could be said without exaggeration that this was the only joy she was getting out of life.

Since time in the Loop moved at six times the rate it did in the real world, when she accessed it at the appointed time every day, she was watching images six days newer than the previous day's. She was only getting fragments, a few hours out of every six days, but it was more man-ageable that way. It would have been a waste of time to follow a life in its entirety. Better to take fragments and fill in the gaps with her imagination.

And by doing so she was able to understand the general unfolding of events. She watched sequences having to do with halting the cancerization of the Loop and recovering its biodiversity—events in which Takayama played a big part. Watching them gave her so much joy that she wanted to shout out loud.

She became more and more engrossed in watching the progress of the Loop world. As the Loop recovered, the loneliness weighing on Reiko started to disperse: the two processes began to resonate with each other, settling into a common rhythm. Takayama's actions were directly lifting Reiko's heart.

The Loop had literally begun to die, once. Once the denizens of the Loop had learned about the killer videotape and the mutated manifestations of it in other media, panic had set in, a panic that had the ironic effect of accelerating the spread of the virus. People didn't wait for the end of their week's grace period, and they weren't satisfied with showing the tape to just one other person.

Some individuals showed it to a host of other people.

Reiko was able to experience several variations on the process: people killing each other because of the tape, love affairs falling apart, people scheming to save loved ones. It was like watching a detailed picture of hell, with egotism on full display in all its forms. It was like watching the real world.

The world looked like it was going to end, but that wasn't how things went, thanks to the coming of Takayama to the Loop world.

Takayama did two things to prevent the cancerization of the Loop world. Three months ago, when Reiko had met him in Amano's laboratory, he had already succeeded in synthesizing a vaccine. That was no doubt one reason he could say "It's going to be alright" with such confidence. Since then, the vaccine had begun to prove itself effective.

Individuals who had come into contact with the mutated manifestations of the tape were programmed to die in a week or to become impregnated with the ring virus. It was simply a question of how to disable that program. Takayama approached the problem that way, according to the hypothesis formulated in the world in which he'd existed as Kaoru, and succeeded in developing the necessary technology. It wasn't all that difficult a task for him because he thoroughly knew how the world worked. The vaccine did two things for those inoculated with it: it disabled the program, and it gave people resistance to the program being installed again.

As the vaccine came to be manufactured in quantity and more and more people were inoculated, the mutated forms of the tape came to pose less of a threat. Instead of a deadly weapon they were now simply junk. They were allowed to fulfill their purpose as entertainment, but that was all anyone saw them as.

People used to call this the Killer Video. Are you brave enough to watch it?

It was becoming a relic of the past.

But there was another problem: what to do about all the Sadako Yamamuras who had flooded the world. The Sadakos were hermaphroditic, and they could reproduce on their own, so it was still possible for them to multiply with viral speed. The media terror may have died out, but if the Sadakos continued to occupy a larger and larger percentage of the human population, the Loop ecology was still in danger. Otherwise the Sadakos were harm-less, and public opinion wasn't hysteric enough, or the public will wasn't firm enough, to eliminate them. Some said this was the logical stance, but it was probably more accurate to say that everyone recoiled from the question of who was going to hunt down the Sadakos and dispose of them, and how.

However, a new virus was unleashed that resolved things perfectly. It was unclear whether it had existed in the Loop world all along and had simply mutated into a state of efficacy or if it had been intentionally designed, but either way, it inflicted decisive damage on the Sadakos and no one else. Left to its natural course, it effectively destroyed the source of all the problems. And in the process, the events left a warning for society as a whole, an eloquent testament to the risks of losing diversity and allowing all life to become assimilated to one pattern.

An organic community's resilience is directly tied to the presence of individual differences within it. Some live in the mountains, some live by the sea. Some live in a world of ice, some under equatorial conditions. Some have white skin, some black. The greater the range of individual differences, the greater the chances of surviving a catastrophic blow. A virus can harm individual beings that live in hot places while having no effect on ones that live in cold places. If it attacked both, the former would die while the latter would survive. As long as there are survivors, there can always be a new start—a chance to form a world with sufficient diversity. But if the entire world shares the same DNA, everyone in it runs the risk of succumbing to the same viral attack.

The virus that overcame the Sadakos served as proof of that. It seemed to work upon some physical peculiar-ity of the Sadakos, which caused them to die a natural death.

The Sadakos were not born through sexual reproduction, and they shared the characteristic of growing to maturity in a week's time. Once they contracted the virus, however, they grew old at the same advanced rate until they died of natural causes. The Loop world began to overflow with aging, dying Sadakos.

Reiko found herself curiously moved by the sight of Sadakos dying in the streets. She knew how much the original Sadako had dreaded getting old in her days as an actress—as a woman, Reiko couldn't bear to see her succumbing helplessly to the hideousness of age. The fact that it wasn't just one Sadako but myriads who were fighting and losing the battle only made it sadder.

The Loop world seemed to believe that the virus that was killing the Sadakos had arisen naturally. Reiko suspected that it was man-made, and she thought she knew by whom. Ryuji Takayama—Kaoru. She believed that he had taken his knowledge of the unique telomerase sequence in his own DNA and applied it to creating a virus that hastened cellular division. Amano had told her about the correlation between aging and the number of times a cell divided, and how the latter was limited by the length of the telomeres.

So, in the end, Takayama had created two products: a vaccine to disable the program that brought death or impregnation, and a virus to increase the rate of the clones' cellular division. Together these allowed the Loop world to recover its biodiversity.

Reiko moved her perspective-point back to widen her field of vision. In hundred meter increments, she gradually rose to a vantage point of several kilometers over the surface of the Loop world. Finally leaving the atmosphere, she noticed that the ball known as the Loop had changed color ever so slightly. It was beautiful now, hardly different from Earth.

Until a short time ago it had been covered here and there with dirty splotches, but now, with its biodiversity restored, the Loop world was returning to its original color. This was a mixture of many different hues, reflected in delicate shades, darkness and brightness added according to the light.

Reiko was relieved to see this. It was visual confirmation that Kaoru had accomplished the mission he'd gone down into the Loop to perform. The beauty and brightness of the image told her this faster than any words could have.

She wanted to go to sleep clinging to this feeling of relief.

She turned off the computer, thinking she'd watch more tomorrow, and lay her pregnant body down on the bed. She could feel the fetus kicking energetically inside her. It could come at any time now. She pulled the telephone up next to her pillow, just in case.

The next day, at the same time, Reiko accessed the Loop again. Six days had passed in the Loop world, and in just that short time, a change had come over Takayama's body. He was in the hospital again. He was in the same exam room, and he was undressing in front of the doctor again.

Reiko was looking at his back. In addition to the scar slanting across his back, she could see brown spots on his skin, and wrinkles on his neck. The change was drastic for such a short period of time. His hair was going white, and his hands, as he picked up his clothing, were dry and cracked.

Reiko took her vantage point around to the front and looked at his face. What she hadn't dared think before became a certainty now. The face she was looking at had changed. It was old.

It was Takayama, no doubt of that. His belly and chest still looked youthful. The contrast between them and his aged face put Reiko in mind of some unnatural power. Her anxiety grew.

The exam over, Takayama went to the reception desk for his prescription and then tottered out of the hospital. As he did, Reiko's monitor showed her the waiting room, where she'd previously seen two Sadakos in a brief moment; now there were none. Had they been completely expelled from the Loop world?

Takayama left the building and walked down the street. This time he wasn't driving, but walking along the pavement.

His shrunken back bore witness to extreme fatigue and physical decline. Walking seemed difficult for him.

Every now and then he'd stop and lean against an electrical pole or a wall, press on his chest and wheeze and cough.

Each time, he'd take out the medicine he'd just been prescribed and swallow a little, but he himself seemed to realize it was good for nothing but psychological comfort.

Obviously, Takayama was overcome by rapid aging.

Reiko thought she could guess why. He'd become infected with the same virus that had aged the Sadakos.

He must have foreseen it when he was developing the virus. Given the similarities of their manner of resurrec-tion into the Loop world, the virus was bound to affect him as well, to kill him. He'd known it but gone through with it anyway. He'd sacrificed himself twice over. He was a man burdened by fate.

When he could no longer stand, he made his way between some buildings to a set of steps leading up into a park and sat down on them. She could imagine him feeling the coolness of the concrete beneath him. What season was it, she wondered. Passersby looked to be dressed for chilly weather.

Sitting there on the concrete steps, Takayama was surrounded by people but steeped in a stunning solitude.

Nobody knew him as their messiah; everybody simply walked by without noticing him. Reiko was seized with a desire to reach out and touch his body so they could tend to each other's loneliness. If only she could. She was so close, but she couldn't even really hold his hand. For the first time since she'd begun accessing the Loop, she felt violently annoyed at the setup.

Takayama was leaning forward, hands resting on his weakly splayed knees. Sometimes he would lift his head and gaze at the sky; when he did, he looked strangely refreshed. Did he feel like he'd lived out his allotment of days? He'd certainly been through his share of death and rebirth. He looked like a man who had composed himself to meet a natural death, secure in the satisfaction of having accomplished his task. He stretched out his bent frame and leaned back against the steps. He looked more comfortable than before.

He was almost supine now, and she had a good view of the expression on his face. He was looking straight in her direction. He could probably see the sky from that space between tall buildings. But his stare seemed ready to penetrate to Reiko's side of the monitor.

Takayama started to say something to the sky but closed his mouth and licked his dry lips.

What's he trying to say?

His mouth opened only to clamp shut again several times.

Remembering Amano's instructions, Reiko tapped out some commands on the keyboard and locked into Takayama's perspective. It would allow her to see with her own eyes what Takayama was seeing with his.

The scenery changed, and just as she'd expected, the monitor showed her a small patch of blue sky between the tops of buildings. Reiko was now looking at the world through Takayama's eyes. It moved her to think that she was seeing the way he was seeing. When she looked more closely, she saw something resembling a human face floating in the sky.

Reiko recognized the face. She saw it in the mirror every day: it was her.

He's thinking of me right now and imagining my face.

Reiko felt Kaoru's feelings with painful intensity.

Even after he closed his eyes, the image of her face hov-ered there against the backs of his eyelids. She could actually see the strength of Kaoru's thoughts. He wanted her so much that his mind was creating her face for him.

Reiko could see it with her own eyes.

Only when the face in the sky started to blur and become double did Reiko become aware of her tears.

With Takayama's heart in her breast, she tried to imagine what it was he'd been trying to say—or not to say.

It seemed to her that, on the verge of death, he was reflecting on how happy he'd been with her. That made Reiko far happier than hearing him say goodbye.

The beating of his heart grew slower and fainter.

Death was approaching. The scene wobbled slightly. He seemed to be having a hard time keeping his head up.

Now his eyes stayed closed for longer stretches than they were open. At length, his surroundings faded away.

The skyscrapers, the trees, the crowds of people, all disappeared, and his field of vision was swathed in darkness. Reiko's face alone remained distinct. It stayed that way for a long time among the echoes of death.

The Loop world meant nothing to Reiko now. Seeing Takayama's final visions through the monitor made a far deeper impression on her than simply hearing about his death ever could. She disengaged from his point of view and allowed herself to stare at the Loop world from above for a time, lost. She knew that she had to accept Takayama's death calmly, just as he himself had. But she couldn't, not yet.

Later, when she'd managed to get herself somewhat under control, she eased her gaze away from the monitor. Her interest in the Loop world had faded now that Takayama was no longer in it.

Goodbye.

She turned off the power so that the virtual world disappeared from before her eyes. She would probably never look into it again.

It had only been for an instant, but Reiko had experienced death vicariously; strangely, she'd done so while seeing her own face through the eyes of someone she loved.

She didn't know if that was the reason, but a change had come over her body. Her labor pains hadn't exactly started yet, but her intuition was telling her:

It's coming.

She reached for the phone and dialed the number she'd been given.

7

Labor pains belonging to the first stage of childbirth came and went with a gentle rhythm. The fetus, which had been moving about so actively, quieted a bit now and moved to a lower position. Reiko felt as if a buoyant void occupied her chest area.

She climbed into a taxi and gave the name of the hospital.

"Having a baby?" the driver asked, and gently eased the car forward.

A large travel bag rested in her lap. She'd packed it some time ago with the things she'd need for the stay.

When Ryoji was born she hadn't needed to make any preparations. Her mother and husband had sat on either side of her in the car, holding her hands and encouraging her to "hang in there." Now she was on her own, and nervous.

She arrived at the hospital at exactly seven o'clock pm. She changed clothes and lay down on a bed to wait for her cervix to dilate completely.

The labor pains made her think of massive undula-tions. The intervals were shorter than the rising and falling of the tide, but somewhat longer than those between waves crashing onto a beach. Grimacing with pain, Reiko called Kaoru's name. It seemed like it might distract her from the pain to talk to Kaoru—he would be beside her, watching over her.

In between the waves, Reiko's ears picked up music.

At first she thought it was a radio in a neighboring room, but that didn't seem right.

She looked at the window, at the darkness it framed, and realized that the birth was going to last far into the night. She couldn't imagine that the music was coming from beyond the darkness. Maybe the hospital was playing some kind of background music for the fetus's benefit.

The music was soft, the melody mysterious and beautiful; it briefly lessened Reiko's suffering.

All at once she placed the source of the music. She could hardly believe it as she raised her head and stared at her belly.

"Stop singing down there and come out already."

She fantasized about her own son singing in the dark womb to ease his mother's suffering. Maybe the events of the Loop were still with her; she was starting to confuse the relationship between protector and protected, container and contained.

By a little after eleven, her cervix had completely dilated. Reiko was taken from the labor room to the delivery room and placed on the delivery table.

She started pushing in time with her labor pains, following the instructions of the doctor and the nurse.

The rhythm was quicker now than before, and the contractions of her uterus and abdominal muscles kept pace.

She could feel all the strength in her body concentrating in an effort to push the baby out.

She tried to switch to abdominal breathing like the nurse told her to, but it was difficult. Between the pain and her nervousness, the deep belly breaths she tried to take ended up as quick shallow ones. She needed to relax. She thought of Kaoru's face again and began to talk to him.

"Don't speak!"

She was calling Kaoru's name now with every groan, every ragged breath that escaped from the corners of her mouth. Each time, the nurse cautioned her not to talk—

it was wasting energy that she needed for the delivery.

Then the nurse gave a little cry and looked at the doctor. It had looked, just for a moment, like the baby's head had peeked out from Reiko's vagina.

The doctor gave a long sigh beneath his mask and clicked his tongue. He looked worried.

"She was dilated when she was brought in here, wasn't she?"

It wasn't really a question aimed at the nurse. He was just muttering to himself, confirming what he already knew. Her cervix, which had been dilated up until a few moments ago, had closed again.

Reiko had sensed something in their conversation, in the atmosphere of the room. She raised her head.

"What's wrong?"

"Oh, nothing."

The doctor had no choice but to give a vague answer, not wanting her to worry. But Reiko showed no hesitation about putting into words what the doctor was beginning to fear.

"Did my baby go back inside?"

"Well, that's certainly what it looks like." There was something so childlike about the way Reiko had spoken, it did away with the doctor's apprehensions and put him in a slightly mirthful mood. "Why don't we just wait a little while?"

Mother and fetus were both doing just fine, and it looked like there would be no harm in letting nature take its course. The energy involved in birth all went in one direction; there was no chance it was going to reverse itself. They took Reiko back to the labor room, where she settled down to wait for a while longer.

If the labor pains of a few moments ago had been a raging storm, Reiko now felt like she was in the middle of an evening calm. The waves had been immense—

where had they gone? Now that she asked herself that, Reiko began to find the peaceful respite unnerving. She could recall the exact instant when the energy shifted gently. When the nurse had given her little cry, Reiko had immediately known what it meant—she'd been about to cry out herself. She'd felt the air move against her skin right then.

"Hurry up and come out."

Somehow it seemed like the baby was reluctant, as if, having gotten a glimpse of the outside worlc^ it was trying to decide if it was a place worth going out into.

Reiko looked at the white wall beyond her dis-tended tummy and addressed her child.

"It's a pretty good place out here, you know."

She placed her hands on her abdomen and checked for movement, but there was no reply.

She glanced at the clock beside her pillow and closed her eyes. It was almost one in the morning. It had only been six hours since she'd checked in. She tried to calm down, telling herself it was still early.

An hour later the nurse came back to check on her.

Nothing much had changed. "Hang in there," she said, and left.

Right after that, Reiko had a mighty contraction. It felt like the entire contents of her abdomen were going to be pushed out. She groped for the buzzer beside her pillow but couldn't find it.

The baby's coining!

As that maternal intuition coursed through her body, consciousness receded.

The next day Reiko was lying in bed with a peaceful look on her face as the preceding night's struggle receded to the far side of memory, to be replaced by a drowsy, languid satisfaction. The pain of delivery had been transformed into the moving feeling of having delivered; joy welled up from deep within her.

A baby cried, right next to her. It wasn't in bed with her. The nurse was dandling it in her arms.

Reiko observed the baby's expression almost unconsciously. It was a boy, just as expected. Something about his face made him look like his father.

Behind the nurse was a thick pane of glass separat-ing the nursery from the outside to keep it germ-free.

The glass also acted like a mirror, reflecting the nurse and the baby. The real scene and the fictive one in the glass faced each other and swayed in the same direction.

Reiko could see the hint of a tall form looking down at the baby reflected in the glass. It was just a hint, a shade. It leaned over and brought its face close to the baby's, gazing at it, as if to whisper something to it.

The outlines of the image became clearer, its features more defined.

Kaoru.

Reiko raised her head, faced the image, and called to it. She had the feeling that words he'd tried to speak but couldn't before were finally emerging from his mouth.

Happy birthday.

The words tumbled from his lips, celebrating, not a day, but birth itself.

Reiko thought with pleasure: when her son grew older, how she'd tell him about his father, and watch his exploits together. This vision of the future made her heart dance. She was sure her son would be proud of the man his father'd been.

Reiko cradled Kaoru's words and repeated them to their son.

Happy birthday.