Loop (37 page)

"I won't. Trust me."

Kaoru listened carefully for Eliot's response, then turned and opened the door. Only he could go beyond that point. He slipped in, and the door shut behind him automatically.

An odd smell. Ions, perhaps. From this point, he'd receive instructions via loudspeaker. The metallic voice coming through the speakers was the only sound that came in from the outside. Kaoru was utterly cut off from the external world.

Following instructions, Kaoru took off the gown he was wearing, and then his sandals and his underwear. He went into the next room naked. According to what Eliot had told him, he was to pass through several clean rooms.

He had a pretty clear idea what was going to happen. He was going to be suspended in the centre of the huge sphere that was the neutrino scanning capture system, where he would be bombarded with neutrinos from all directions. But there was a procedure he had to follow first.

In the next room he saw a stretcher. A voice instructed him to lie down on it. He lay down face up, and the stretcher began silently moving down a narrow, dark hallway. It took Kaoru through an air shower, and then a shower of purified water. Together these cleansed the surface of his body of all contaminants.

As he passed each station on the line, he could see a digital meter with a reading flashing in red, numbers approaching closer to one hundred with each stage.
99.99… 99.999… 99.9999…
The gauges showed the degree to which the rooms, and thus their occupant, were free of impurities.

The stretcher conveyed Kaoru into a clear oblong container. Purified water, slightly warmer than body temperature, began to engulf him. The container was shaped not so much like a bathtub as like a slightly oversized coffin.

Kaoru was fixed firmly in place, floating in water. Next he was transported into the neutrino scanning capture system.

The water had a calming effect on him. Gradually he became unable to tell where his body left off and the water began, as his ego began to dissolve into tiny bubbles and joined the water.

Reiko's last words came back to him again, in what might have been his ego's last attempt at resistance.

I felt the baby move this morning.

She'd sounded so happy to be able to report on the baby's growth. The thought of the foetus in the embrace of her amniotic fluid allowed Kaoru to see his own situation as a bystander might. Come to think of it, he was in the same state as that baby, right down to its will to be born.

This place was a universe unto itself, ruled by utter darkness. Gravity had disappeared: his body felt weightless. He knew he was inside a sphere six hundred feet in diameter. His eyes should have been able to see its inner surface. But in the darkness the space surrounding him felt infinite.

As a child, he'd often gone out onto the balcony of his family's high-rise apartment to stare up into the night sky. Seeing the stars and the moon always strengthened his desire to fathom the universe.

What a different situation he was in now. Back then he'd stood on a height overlooking the ocean; now he was in a three-thousand-feet deep hole in the desert. Back then the air had been filled with the scent of the sea; this space was filled with the artificial smell of ions.

He thought he saw a blue light flash for an instant in the emptiness above him. Had the neutrino bombardment begun? The flash reminded him of a star twinkling.

Any moment now he would be bombarded with neutrinos from points on every part of the inner surface of the sphere. Each would penetrate his body and reach the point on the sphere wall opposite its point of origin. Molecular information about him would accumulate gradually, until Eliot would begin to get a three-dimensional digital image of his body's minutest structures. The more neutrino radiation he received, the sharper that image would become. He'd been told that the first rounds would simply pass through his body-he wouldn't feel much if anything. But that level of irradiation wouldn't provide enough information for their purposes. They would need to expose him to so much neutrino penetration as to actually break down his cells. Kaoru tried not to think about what would happen to him then.

There were more blue lights now, and they flashed more quickly, blinking energetically in the darkness. They was beautiful. They tore through space like shooting stars, glittering, leaving white trails behind.

Kaoru stared peacefully into the night sky. He felt like a child again…

He wondered if this was what astronauts felt like. They said that seeing the Earth from space brought one closer to the territory of the divine. If so, then it was a little different from Kaoru's situation after all. What he was aiming at was godhood itself.

Something was pressing rhythmically on his eardrums, strange, as he should be cut off from all sound in here. Someone or something was speaking loudly into his ear. Whatever it was, it couldn't be human. Maybe a digital signal from the virtual world?

Suddenly, an image was inserted into his mind. It was as if a Chagall painting had been forcefully placed inside his head. He wasn't seeing it with his eyes-it was like a cord from a video deck had been connected directly to his brain. Brightly coloured, impressionistic images flashed through his mind, disappearing as abruptly as they had appeared.

The bluish white lights connected into tangled thread work now, an infinite number of bands intersecting in the middle distance. The lines of light now filled the darkness. He could hear the sounds of their collisions, sounds he shouldn't have been able to hear… Digital signals whirled around him, caressing his earlobes.

His body was cast into the gravity-less universe. He felt as if he were floating up out of the tank of water and into the vortex of light. His mind wandered from his body, becoming clearer all the time.

Kaoru was entering the final stage now. Every second brought him closer to the end of this journey which had begun as a trip toward a point in the desert and had become a pilgrimage to death and rebirth.

The images were slipped into his brain, images composed of rough particles. Mosaic-like images, with indistinct edges. Try as he might he could no longer summon smooth, natural images as before. There wasn't enough information to analyze properly.

The neutrino bombardment intensified. His molecular structure began to take digital shape. As its resolution increased, the mosaic filter was removed from the images in his brain. Now they were reproduced before his mind's eye as perfectly natural images.

Vision was back to normal now. He thought he glimpsed, at the far end of a corridor of light, a Hades indistinguishable from the here-and-now.

His journey ended. His body disappeared from the real world and was reborn into the Loop.

The procedure had concluded. The tank in which Kaoru had been floating now contained no human form. Instead it held the liquefied remains of his destroyed cells. As his ego had melted into the water, so too had his body broken down into its smallest components, dissolving into the purified water. The water was no longer pure. Thanks to the bluish white light it didn't look bloody, but it was a noticeably thicker liquid than before.

His body was defunct. But Kaoru's consciousness still existed. Neutrinos had captured the state of his brain on the brink of death, the positions of his synapses and neurons, chemical reactions in mid-reaction, and had recreated them all digitally.

He was not to be reconstructed directly from this final blueprint. Rather, he would be reborn according to the information captured by the NSCS. The growth process would be carefully controlled, and after approximately a week of Loop time, the infant would grow to the physical state the subject had been in when he'd entered the NSCS. He should regain his original consciousness, as well.

Kaoru had a pretty good idea where he was now. Inside a womb. A real one, not a metaphorical one. He was inside a virgin womb, bathed in amniotic fluid.

He could hear his mother's heartbeat as if over a great distance. The sound echoed in the dark, sealed sphere, getting louder and louder.

Kaoru did not know whose womb he was in, but he knew he was about to be born.

He stretched out his body, filled with a desire to get out into the world.

The light was too bright: it hurt his eyes. But this wasn't the bluish flickering anymore. The light was steady and white, artificial. It seemed to come from overhead fluorescent light fixtures, the kind you find in hospitals.

In the light, he could see his umbilical cord, the grotesque thread that alone connected him to the mother. He reached out a hand and tried to sever it himself, and let forth a loud cry. A cry just like any normal baby's.

"Wah! Wah!"

It was the beginning of a new journey.

The day was so clear it was hard to believe it was the rainy season. Walking along on the embankment that separated the beach from the road, he set his sights on the horizon: the other side of the bay was obscured in haze. A sea wall extended out from the beach; several anglers stood on it, lazily casting their lines into the sea. It was still early in the summer, so there were no bathers yet, but a couple of families had spread sheets on the sand and were picnicking.

Gazing at this peaceful seaside scene he could forget that this was only a virtual reality. Six months had elapsed since his rebirth into the Loop. He'd adapted to this world completely, body and mind.

The previous October, Ryuji Takayama had died, once. His death had been confirmed, and an autopsy had been performed by a friend of his from medical school, Mitsuo Ando. Notwithstanding that, in January of this year Takayama had awoken from his three-month sleep, due to the combined efforts of Ando, his pathologist colleague Miyashita, and others. He had crawled out of the womb of a maiden named Sadako Yamamura, had torn the umbilical cord with his own hands, and in just a week's time he'd grown into the body Kaoru had possessed when he'd entered the neutrino scanner. Ando and Miyashita, unaware that the Loop had been created by a higher power, could not be expected to understand the true mechanism behind Takayama's resurrection. The three months Takayama had been dead corresponded to the twenty years of Kaoru's lifetime. And now the consciousness that had once been Kaoru had taken on Takayama's flesh in order to live in the Loop.

His living conditions were rather inconvenient-a dead man couldn't very well walk around in public-but he was in a perfect environment for research. Takayama had spent most of half a year in a laboratory lent him by Miyashita, researching the virus. This meant unravelling one by one the clues hidden within his own cells. It had taken half a year to finish the greater part of the research and to perfect a vaccine for the ring virus.

This was his first time out in a long while. He could feel the gentle wind cleansing his heart as it played over his skin. In his days as Kaoru he'd enjoyed the night-time breeze on the balcony of their apartment; evidently his tastes hadn't changed.

He could see the small form of a boy beyond the picnickers, standing where the waves petered out. The boy would creep hesitantly up to the water, and then dash back so as not to get his feet wet. Then he crouched and started digging a hole and making a sand pile. His body was bare from the waist up, and below the waist he wore a swimsuit, making his aversion to the water all the more conspicuous. His movements were quite careful. The boy wore a tight bikini-type swim-suit, and no swim cap.

The watcher thought about the first time he'd seen Reiko, at the pool. He remembered the queer impression her son Ryoji had made with his plaid shorts, not meant for swimming, and his swim cap from which not one strand of hair poked out. The touch of Reiko's skin, the last words they'd exchanged-these images and sounds remained clear in his memory. What was she doing now?

He was walking along the narrow embankment with a plastic bag full of canned drinks, carefully balancing so as not to fall onto the sand or the road. Unlike the ridge he'd walked in the desert, the embankment was only a couple of feet wide. As he walked he felt as though he were traversing the thin, fragile boundary between this world and the next.

The boy ran away from the waves toward the embankment-he was heading toward a man seated on the embankment about a hundred yards ahead. The seated man was the boy's father, the man he himself had come to talk to.

The man had eyes only for his son, and so was utterly unprepared for the visitor. Thinking it best not to startle him, Ryuji Takayama called out his name.

"Hey, Ando!"

Hearing his name called, the man looked up and all around. Then he caught sight of Takayama walking toward him, and his expression became one of dumb amazement.

"Hey, long time no see."

Takayama hadn't had any contact with Ando these six months. After assisting in Takayama's rebirth, Ando had left the university. He'd disappeared.

Takayama sat down next to Ando and leaned closer so that their shoulders touched. But Ando quite openly avoided meeting his eyes, instead returning his gaze to his son, still running across the beach toward him.

Nonplussed, Takayama took a beverage out of the bag he carried and quickly drank it down. Then he took another can out and offered it to Ando. "Thirsty?"

Ando accepted the can silently and popped the pull ring, still not looking at Takayama.

"How did you know I was here?" Ando asked calmly.

Takayama simply said, "Miyashita told me." Knowing that today was the anniversary of Ando's son's death, Miyashita had guessed that this was where he'd be, and he'd told Takayama.

A curious thing it was, though, that anniversary. Two years ago today, at this very spot, Ando's son had drowned, and yet now here the boy was. Forgetting his own situation for a moment, Takayama could not help but smile.

"What do you want?" Ando asked, in a voice thick with tension. He didn't seem very happy to see Takayama. Takayama had made a considerable effort to get here-he'd had to sneak out of the lab, then take a train and a bus. He felt he deserved a bit warmer a welcome. There seemed to be a misunderstanding of some kind.