Loop

1

The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the whitish ceiling. Kaoru next turned his gaze on all four walls in succession, then on anything else that came within his field of vision.

The room was perfectly sealed off, with no windows. There was a rectangular grating in one corner of the ceiling, most likely a vent for the climate control system. That had to be what kept the room at such a steady, comfortable temperature.

There were two cracks in the walls, each tracing the shape of a rectangle. Doors, of course, but since they were exactly the same colour as the walls he wouldn't have noticed them had it not been for the cracks. One had a sturdy-looking doorknob. He guessed this door connected to a hallway. The other door only had a little handle, and looked like it couldn't be locked from either side; probably it led to a bathroom or something.

The walls were covered not with wallpaper but with leather. At first he'd thought they were white, but as his eyes got used to what they were seeing he realized the walls were actually a light beige.

Over the course of these observations, Kaoru was able to confirm that his consciousness was in good working order. He was still alive, or so it seemed.

Still lying on his back, he stopped looking at things for a while, instead concentrating on each part of his body in turn. He commanded his chest to move, then his belly, his arms, his legs, and finally his fingers and toes. He was relieved to note that he could feel them all move.

It was easy enough to explain to himself the situation in which he'd been placed. He was in a little room with leather-covered walls, lying on a bed. It was that simple. Kaoru was the only person in the room.

Naturally, he was put in mind of hospital rooms, which made it even harder to figure out where he was.

He'd travelled to America alone and ridden a motorcycle to a point in the desert-or had he? Had he done all that in reality, or in a dream? He wasn't sure he could say. At the moment it would have been easier for him to believe he was in his father's hospital room, and that the whole thing had been a dream.

He'd been walking along the ridge in search of the cavern containing the long-lived ones, along the way glimpsing rock-paintings done by ancient Indians on the walls of little caves, illustrations that created an irresistible sense of mystery and perhaps foreshadowed the underground space that he believed was soon to manifest itself to him. But then had come the rainstorm, casting him into the depths of terror, pummelling him half to death.

His head still echoed with the sound he'd heard at dawn, just before the sun came out. That thunderous roar, that strangely out-of-place object hovering in space. An ultramodern jet helicopter painted gunmetal black. It seemed to him now that he'd lost consciousness just as it had flown up and away, showing him its underside.

He could string together the recollections, alright, but there was no way of verifying them. Reality and virtuality had become so confused that he didn't trust his memories.

The only way to confirm things would be to wait for the testimony of a third party. But he'd been awake for an hour now, and he'd been left alone the whole time.

Maybe I'd better get up and leave the room on my own… Kaoru sat up slowly. He felt no pain, but the difficulty with which he managed to raise himself told him that his body was still exhausted. He sat there on the bed trying to bring his breathing under control-he felt a rasp in the back of his throat. Sitting up was one thing. Moving around was another thing altogether.

He looked down to find a pair of sandals waiting for him beside the bed. They didn't belong to him. Somebody had put them there. Huge sandals. They'd dwarf his feet.

In the end it seemed that those sandals were urging him into action. He summoned all his willpower and lowered his feet over the side of the bed and into the sandals. They felt just as oversized as they looked, and they were heavy as well.

He tried walking across the room in them. He made for the room's single point of interface with the outside: the door.

But his feet were tired, and the footgear was bulky and heavy. His feet dragged. The hem of his white gown parted and he saw his thighs. He suddenly realized that he was wearing no underwear beneath the gown. He was buck naked except for this flimsy white gown he'd been dressed in.

The door was right in front of him now. He had no idea where he'd go once he opened it; he just wanted to know where he was. That was his only motive. What kind of place was this? He wanted to see what was outside. And if there was somebody, anybody, there, he wanted to hear what they had to say.

Kaoru placed a hand on the doorknob. Up until that moment it hadn't occurred to him that the door might be locked, but as he touched the knob, his intuition told him that it was. He turned the knob, pushed and pulled, but the door wouldn't budge.

So now Kaoru had achieved a deeper understanding of the situation into which he'd been placed. He'd been confined.

Even standing up was tough. He felt he'd better give up on going out and go back to bed instead. He released his hold on the doorknob and turned around.

At that moment, though, he sensed somebody on the other side of the door. Kaoru froze in place and listened to the click as the door unlocked.

He took a couple of steps backward and waited for it to open. He'd been denied any information about the person or thing about to appear. The person could walk through that door and introduce himself as a Martian and Kaoru wouldn't have been surprised.

The door opened quietly. He'd been expecting to see someone standing there. Instead, he saw someone sitting there: an old man in a wheelchair, staring straight ahead.

"I see you're awake," the man said in English. Kaoru nodded reflexively.

"You're Kaoru Futami. A pleasure to make your acquaintance. My name is Cristoph Eliot."

The old man held out his hand for Kaoru to shake. Kaoru glanced at the hand: it was abnormally large.

As were the feet that stuck out in front of the wheels of the wheelchair. Even seated as the man was, Kaoru got a good idea of his size. Overall, he was on the small side for a foreigner, but his hands and feet were disproportionately big.

Kaoru then wondered at himself and the way he was remarking on the irregularity of this man Eliot's body. Shouldn't he be in shock right about now? Why does this old man know my name? All of his identification, all his papers, had been lost with the rucksack.

He shook the man's hand, observing him closely. He had a head like an egg: not a single hair grew on it. His skin was porcelain white and lustrous. Judging by the hue of his skin, it was probably unfair to think of him as an old man. At the same time, he had a dark spot on his neck and left cheek, the kind of mark peculiar to old age. It contrasted sharply with his pale skin.

From Eliot's grip, Kaoru realized the man bore him no ill will, so he decided to ask the question that had been on his mind.

"What is this place?"

Eliot's greyish eyes narrowed and a smile played over his lips.

"The place you were trying to get to."

But the place Kaoru had been trying to get to was supposed to be a huge cavern with a village of very long-lived people in it.

He looked around the room with new eyes. The little sealed room, the beige leather walls- no, it couldn't be. This was too different from what he'd imagined.

Eliot seemed to pick up on Kaoru's perplexed expression. He raised one great finger and asked a question of his own.

"What do you think is above us?"

The ceiling, and beyond that-what? How was Kaoru to know?

Seeing he couldn't answer, Eliot answered for him.

"A thick layer of water." Not a "tank". A "layer of water".

Kaoru couldn't figure out what he meant. Was he using some sort of symbolic expression for rain? After his experiences of the last few days, Kaoru found that idea plausible.

Next Eliot pointed down with the same finger.

"And what do you think is below where you're standing?"

What could be beneath this little room? Earth, of course. But Kaoru wasn't about to give the obvious answer. He remained silent.

Eliot provided the answer to this question himself, too.

"A vast space."

Kaoru realized what he was being told: that he was suspended between water and space. But it still didn't make sense to him.

It would, however, explain some things. If what Eliot was saying was true, then the force of gravity in this area should be abnormally low. Gravity increases in spots with great mass underneath, and decreases in spots with low mass underneath. A vast empty space beneath his feet would account for the gravitational anomaly. It was persuasive.

Kaoru still couldn't believe it, though. Had he really reached his destination? If he had, if this was the place indicated on the fictional gravitational anomaly map, then he shouldn't be surprised that Eliot knew his name.

The old guy's trying to tell me that gravity is lower here. He knew I was trying to reach this place.

Confusion overwhelmed Kaoru, and he had to put his hand on the wall to steady himself. He was gasping for breath, but he finally managed to force out the question.

"Did you know I was coming?"

Eliot reached out a huge hand to keep Kaoru from toppling over, and said, in a voice full of charity, "Yes. You were meant to come here."

Kaoru felt hot. His fever must have come back.

"The only thing that wasn't predicted was that record-breaking storm."

Kaoru couldn't even tell any longer if he was burning up or freezing. He felt feverish, but chills were running over the surface of his body. He couldn't stay on his feet. Eliot's words were indistinct in his ears.

He brushed Eliot's hand away and tried to walk back to the bed under his own power. Halfway there he collapsed.

2

For the next three days Kaoru's task was to recover his strength. This expenditure of time, Eliot finally gave him to understand, wouldn't have been necessary had it not been for the rainstorm. Once his strength had been restored, Kaoru would be given the answers to all his questions. Until then, he was forced to recuperate in that little room, in ignorance of his real situation.

Eliot poked his head in once in a while, but mostly it was the nurse, Hana, who looked after Kaoru's health and other needs.

Kaoru thought Hana was a cute name: in Japanese, hana means flower. He asked her if it was her real name, but her only response was laughter. "You can call me that, at any rate." And it was easy to call her by it, once he got used to it.

Hana … It reminded him of delicate wild flowers blooming in a meadow-an image that fit the nurse to a "t".

Once Eliot had left them alone, Kaoru would barrage her with questions. What kind of facility is this place? Who is Eliot? Is there a purpose to all this?

He delivered himself of every question that occurred to him, with an effect that must have been overwhelming, but Hana simply smiled and held her peace, shaking her head to show that no answers would be forthcoming from her.

In face and body, Hana looked like a child. She couldn't have been more than four foot ten, and she had plump cheeks and big round eyes. If she'd worn her lustrous black hair down, sweeping back from her forehead to cover her whole back, she might have looked more grown up. As it was, she wore it tied tightly back, exposing her smooth, arcing forehead in a way that emphasized her youthfulness, obscuring her true age. The swelling of her breasts, too, was that of a half-grown girl, but he doubted she would get any bigger. Her small breasts, however, went well with her delicate Oriental features.

Kaoru was taken in by her childlike appearance, at first. He assumed that she wasn't answering any of his questions because she herself hadn't been let in on the truth. The innocence in her face seemed to indicate ignorance, so that even though she supplied none of the information he asked for, he felt no suspicion, no anger, toward her.

But Hana's skills as a nurse turned out to be such as to belie her appearance. Kaoru could recognize a good nurse when he saw one, having virtually lived in hospitals for almost as long as he could remember. It was as though she knew how to scratch him exactly where he itched. She was perfectly efficient, with not a movement wasted.

She had him hooked up to I.V.s, taking antibiotics, and trying to get sufficient sleep.

She was fairly taciturn as she went about her work. He thought he detected in her gestures an unnecessary briskness. He wondered, although it was unfair to her, if she was trying to minimize contact with his body. She had manual dexterity in line with her competence as a nurse, but sometimes her hands seemed to hesitate when it came time to touch him. And occasionally he caught her stealing glances at him, observing him as if he were something unnatural, alien. He noticed it more as time went on.

It was two days after he first met Hana. He heard the sounds that meant she was about to enter the room, and he pretended to be asleep, leaving his eyes open just a slit. He watched her gaze at him with curiosity as she quickly changed the I.V. bottle. It was almost a morbid curiosity he saw in her eyes-she was afraid of him and intrigued by him at the same time. This in turn piqued Kaoru's interest. What was she reacting to in him when she got that expression on her face?

She finished changing the bottle, and then bent over him, hips thrust back, observing him nervously. Surely she was convinced he was sleeping. But then why didn't she let down her guard?

Kaoru snapped open his eyes and grabbed Hana's arm. He hadn't intended to startle her, but that was the effect. She tried to let out a little scream, but couldn't find her voice. It died in the back of her throat, and all that escaped was a gasp.

"Why do you look at me like you're seeing a ghost?" Kaoru spoke slowly and distinctly. He wanted to calm her down, first of all. Her hand, the one Kaoru wasn't holding, was pressed to her cheek. She wasn't putting up any resistance worth the name: she didn't try to shake loose, didn't turn her head away from him. She swallowed her scream and looked down at him vacantly. She looked like she was about to burst into tears, a look that was a fine complement to her childlike features.

"I want to know. Why do you look at me like that?"

She shook her head sadly. "I'm sorry." The words seemed to come from the bottom of her heart, but they didn't answer his question. He could interpret them one of two ways. Either she was saying she was sorry for looking at him like he was a ghost, or she was apologizing for not being able to answer him. Or maybe it was both.

He let her go.

Her job was just to nurse him back to health. She'd been forbidden to open her mouth about anything else. Any explanation about the way she looked at him would necessarily involve explaining the whole situation he was in, and she couldn't do that. As Kaoru came to understand this, he decided to quit pressing her.

She remained standing next to his bed even after he released her.

"Isn't it difficult for you to talk?" Her sense of duty was showing through. Her first impulse was to check on her patient's condition.

"It's difficult for me not to talk. It's driving me crazy."

"Well, then, why don't you tell me about yourself?"

"What do you want to know?"

"Let's see… How about everything, starting with your birth?"

"And what good would it do you if I told you?"

"At the very least, I probably wouldn't look at you as if you were a ghost anymore."

In other words, she knew nothing about him. If she knew more, maybe she'd be able to look on him as a fellow human.

"I want to know just one thing about you first," Kaoru said.

Hana composed herself, without answering.

"If it's not too forward of me, I'd like to know how old you are."

Hana laughed. No doubt she'd been asked this any number of times.

"I'm thirty-one years old. I'm married and have two children. Both of them boys."

Kaoru's jaw dropped open in amazement. She looked no more than a girl, and yet she was telling him she was thirty-one. And a mother of two! An unexpected response, to say the least.

"I can't believe it."

"Everybody says that."

"I was sure you were younger than me." At twenty, though, he was eleven years her junior.

"How old are you?"

He told her. She furrowed her brow and in a low voice said, "Really?"

"I look older, don't I? But I'm really twenty."

Kaoru put a hand to his cheek. He hadn't shaved since arriving in the desert, so he figured he might look even older than usual.

He couldn't quite get over the shock that this woman was in fact older than him. It was bound to make him act differently with her.

Learning each other's true ages seemed to change something between them. After that, whenever Hana looked in on him, Kaoru watched for the chance to tell her a little more about himself.

Hana was a good listener. She only came by the room a few times a day, and they only had a limited time to talk, maybe ten minutes at a time. But she made good use of it, never getting off track, always eliciting more about Kaoru's past life.

And Kaoru found he enjoyed talking to her, telling her things. It allowed him to make sure of himself as he was now. Of course, doubts did come to mind, but he shunted them aside and he spoke haltingly of himself.

He told her of his childhood, what he'd thought about, the kind of dreams he'd had. Bits and pieces of life with his father and mother. Their plans to go off to America together, to the desert…

There were things that were hard to talk about. Most of all, his father's cancer: how it had dashed their travel plans, how their lives had revolved around hospitals ever since. How after several years his cancer had been identified as coming from the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus, and how there was essentially no hope of him recovering. How Kaoru's mother refused to give up, but had immersed herself in Native American legends until she found hints of a miracle cure, belief in which had allowed her to go on undaunted. How Kaoru, forced to balance his father's illness and his mother's headlong rush into spiritualism, had abandoned his early desire to study astrophysics for medical school.

As he spoke, Kaoru began to feel a nostalgia for it all. Over a period of four days he spoke to her for a total of two, maybe three hours. He certainly couldn't tell her everything about his life in that amount of time; he had to cut out a lot of things. But he remembered a lot of things too. Sometimes he'd have to fight back tears, and then sometimes he'd burst out laughing as he told her about some crazy thing his father had done.

A life that could be told in a mere two or three hours-could it be real? As he talked, his more distant memories began to cloud over.

"Haven't you ever been in love?"

Her question was perfectly timed. At that very moment Kaoru was wondering whether or not he should tell her about Reiko. He'd been leaning toward avoiding the subject, and if Hana hadn't spoken, he very well might not have mentioned her.

Telling her about his affair with Reiko would naturally involve telling her about Ryoji. The experience still filled him with sadness, and more than that with pain. Regrets always came to mind first, shame for his ill-considered actions. He realized that the room where he and Reiko had taken their pleasure and the room he was in now were rather similar. Of course, Ryoji's room had boasted a west-facing full-length window overlooking the green of the park and admitting the rays of the setting sun, while this room had no window at all. But that aside, in terms of size and the colour of the walls, the rooms were very much alike.

No matter how hard he tried, he'd never be able to communicate to Hana the carnal joy that Reiko had given him.

Kaoru confessed his feelings honestly. Now and then Hana looked at him disbelievingly, shaking her head and saying, "Oh, no," in a commiserating tone. Then when Kaoru revealed that Reiko was carrying his child, Hana's expression froze.

"And this child-it's going to be born?"

A strange way to phrase the question, he thought, but he didn't stop to worry about it.

"Of course, I want her to have it. That's why I came here."

Hana closed her eyes. Her lips were trembling and she seemed to be praying, although he couldn't hear her words.

In this windowless room, the only way to gauge the passage of time was by his watch. If it was to be believed, this was the evening of the fourth day. After he finished telling her about his and Reiko's child, Hana said, "That should do for today." She seemed not to be permitted to do whatever she wanted with her time; she was always cutting their talks short when she found the right moment.

"I want to hear the rest tomorrow, though." She spoke with kindness. This woman whom he'd once thought of as a child had now become a merciful mother-figure.

She placed a hand on his arm and contemplated him for a while, and then walked to the door. Once there, she stopped, glanced back at the bed, and then went out into the hallway.

The expression on her face as she looked back at him burned itself into Kaoru's mind. He'd seen it somewhere before.

He thought about facial expressions, deciding that they usually fell into a finite set of categories. People generally made the same sort of face placed in the same sort of situation: hearing a piece of good news, for example, or jumping from a high place. He tried to figure out what category Hana's expression belonged to.

Something came to mind immediately, something that had always stayed with him.

The situation had been almost exactly the same. A woman, dressed in white like Hana, walking out of a sickroom, turning around for a last look at the patient. A nurse.

Once, his father had been moved to a larger room, as a temporary measure. He'd just had surgery to remove the cancer from his rectum, and seemed to be making good progress. It had been a four-person room, and every bed held a cancer patient.

One of the nurses who frequented the room had been particularly popular with the patients. She was no great beauty, but she was attractive enough, and more than that she was the type of woman who just radiated goodness. She was always long-suffering toward her patients, listening to their demands with never a look of complaint. Kaoru's father had liked her, too. He'd joke with her and touch her bottom, all for the pleasure of being admonished by her like a child.

A time came when she left the hospital, albeit temporarily. She was in her second year of marriage, and in fact was seven months pregnant. She'd put in for a year's maternity leave.

On her last day at the hospital, she came by Kaoru's father's room to say goodbye. Kaoru was visiting his father at the time. She told the patients that she expected them all to be happy and smiling when she came back in a year, to which one of the patients joked, By the time you get back, honey, I'll have checked out of this place.

Kaoru seemed to remember the other two patients, but not his father, saying similar things. It was impossible to tell how sincere the patients were being. In any case the nurse just nodded in agreement as she made the rounds of each bed to say her goodbyes.

Then, as she left the room, she turned back to glance at the patients in their beds, exactly as Hana had done just now. The look in the nurse's eyes had not evaded Kaoru's notice then: it had been one of certainty that there were those among the patients she would not see, could not see, when she returned in a year. And not because they'd have checked out. Her look was a wistful one of final-for this life, at least- farewell.

The patient in the bed next to Kaoru's father had just learned that his lung cancer had spread to his brain. The next patient over had just lost his manhood to prostate cancer. Kaoru's father was the only one with some vitality left. All the rest were proceeding steadily toward their dates with death.

Awareness of that had informed the nurse's gaze. And now Kaoru had seen that same gaze directed at himself.

Why did Hana look at me like that?

It made him uneasy. He'd ask her directly if he could.

But as it turned out, Kaoru was never to see Hana again.

The next morning, at the usual time, there was a knock at the door. Kaoru opened it expecting to see Hana, but found Eliot instead, his huge feet sticking out in front of his wheelchair, his huge hands resting on the wheels.

Seeing that Kaoru was recovering smoothly, Eliot gave a satisfied nod. "How are you feeling?"

Kaoru's endurance was at its limits: he had so many questions, and all of them had been put on hold for so long. Hana's cuteness had helped him to bear it for a while, but facing Eliot he knew he couldn't keep them back much longer.

How am I feeling? You've got to be kidding. Why am I always the one who's got to answer questions? My physical strength is back, but at this rate I'm going to turn into a nervous wreck. How am I feeling, indeed!

He bit back his anger, but not all that effectively. His voice shook as he said, "Knock it off already."

Eliot evidently noticed the tension in Kaoru's voice. He held up his hands as if to tell Kaoru to hold on a minute, then paused. At last he spoke. "I get it. I think I understand your feelings. It's about time we get underway with our plans."

Plans? What plans? And what have they got to do with me?

With a hard look on his face, Kaoru began to press Eliot for answers. "First I want you to tell me where I am and what you're up to."

Eliot pressed his palms together.

"First I want to ask you something."

Kaoru waited silently for him to continue.

Eliot's voice was grave when next he spoke.

"Do you believe in God?"

3

Eliot showed him into a room with no windows. Why was this whole place sealed up like this? Kaoru disliked windowless rooms. This room was bigger than the last, though. There was a leather living room set in the middle of it.

Eliot invited Kaoru to have a seat on the couch. Kaoru did as he was directed. Then Eliot got out of his wheelchair. He stood up, rear end thrust backward, and without using a cane hobbled over to seat himself opposite Kaoru.

Kaoru couldn't help but stare. Since Eliot used a wheelchair, Kaoru had naturally assumed he couldn't walk. But he could: somewhat awkwardly, but fairly steadily.

Noticing Kaoru's surprise, Eliot flashed a triumphant grin. "You must learn to look at things without preconceptions. Trust nothing."

But Kaoru was already quite accustomed to suspecting everything. One thing he'd learned crossing the desert was how to keep his balance as he walked the hazy line between reality and virtuality. It was the one thing he'd most wanted not to lose during that rainstorm on the ridge.

"When are you going to answer my questions?" Kaoru said sulkily, ignoring Eliot's words. Eliot raised his hands in a gesture that seemed to say, Any time you want.

There were so many things Kaoru wanted to ask. He decided to lay aside his basic questions for the moment, and instead to start by exploring something Eliot had said earlier and which had been nagging at Kaoru ever since.

"I was fated to come here, from long ago. That's what you told me, correct?" Kaoru wanted to know why he'd said that. Doubtless he'd been speaking figuratively, but the way he'd said it troubled Kaoru deeply.

"It's a little early yet to explain that. If we go out of order, you're liable to end up screaming."

"In that case, you're going to explain things to me so that I understand, so that I don't end up screaming-right?" Kaoru was on edge again. Eliot's roundabout way of speaking rubbed him the wrong way. Kaoru got the feeling that this man held his life's rudder, and was laughing at the mother and father who'd brought him into the world.

"This was the only way to do it. I decided I would never be able to force you here. You had to come of your own free will. And looking at you now I can see that I was right about that." Eliot spoke as if to himself, then smiled. He spoke as someone who'd intervened in Kaoru's life. At that moment, Kaoru wanted to wring the old man's neck.

Eliot was unfazed by Kaoru's violent glare. For a time they were both silent.

It was Eliot who resumed speaking. "How much do you know about the Loop?" His hands were clasped in front of him, and there was something boyish in his upwards glance at Kaoru.

"It's an extremely well-designed computer simulation."

Eliot frowned, not content with that answer.

"Well-designed? That doesn't even begin to cover it. When I made the Loop, I made a world perfect in every respect."

"You made it?"

"I should say 'we,' I guess, but really, I was the one who had the initial idea for its structure." Now that he was discussing the Loop, there was a perceptible note of pride in Eliot's voice. The words came like water from a burst dam now; at times something like ecstasy was visible on his face.

"I was still a student at MIT. That's right, I was about the age you are now-this was nearly seventy years ago. The world was in love with astronauts-we'd just landed on the moon-and everybody was convinced that before long science would bring us space stations and space tourism. But I wasn't interested in outer space. My gaze was turned on another world, one I was trying to build myself."

Having said that much without pause, Eliot ducked his head and pursed his lips.

"Incidentally, do you know what makes the world go round?"

"The real world, or the Loop?"

It was easy to see what made the Loop go round: electricity. But the real world, that was a different story.

Eliot laughed at Kaoru's question.

"In this case, they're a lot alike. They move according to the same principle. The thing that makes the world go round-both worlds-is funding."

Eliot waited a few moments for the import of his words to sink in, then continued. "If the gargantuan project that was the Loop hadn't been funded, then that world would never have come into being. Neither this world nor that one will move without money."

Kaoru was listening closely now, eager to see what Eliot would say next, and how it would all connect to himself.

If only there had been funding, we might all be aboard space stations now. Eliot was right. Science, Kaoru knew, did not progress along a straight line in a vacuum sealed off from social conditions. Instead, it changed direction from time to time in response to the situation. Budgets were controlled by the opinions of societies and governments-priorities were determined according to what people wanted most at a given time. Seventy years ago, outer space was the canvas on which the future was expected to be drawn. Everybody imagined that humanity would make colonies of the moon and Mars, that shuttles would make regularly scheduled trips between the planets. It was the stuff of novels and movies.

But by Kaoru's day, not only had man not been to Mars, he hadn't even returned to the moon. In the end, man's presence on Earth's satellite had been limited to that one brief, shining moment. Since then plans for space exploration had moved along at a snail's pace, if at all. And for one simple reason. No funding.

In hindsight, it seemed odd that nobody had been able to predict that grinding halt.

Eliot, however, was saying that he had, in fact, predicted it. He was boasting of his foresight in turning his prodigious talents in another direction entirely.

He'd chosen as his academic fields computers, which at that time were unbelievably primitive compared to the ones Kaoru was familiar with, and molecular biology, which had just been revolutionized by the discovery of the double helix.

Eliot had had the uncanny intuition to combine these two emerging fields. His first research project had asked the simple question of whether or not it was possible to create artificial life within a computer.

He'd pursued this question through highly original means, and at length, his work began to bear fruit. Just as Eliot had foreseen, society's interest began to shift from space exploration to the creation of a user-friendly world of information. Computers were the stars of the age, and Eliot suddenly found that he had venues in which to present his work, and listeners to present it to.

With new wind in his sails, Eliot proceeded to develop the first self-replicating program, and then the first software that could evolve on its own. All without losing sight of his initial question. Is it possible to create artificial life in a computer?

He first realized his goal sooner than even he had expected, in the final years of the twentieth century. He'd never expected it to happen before the end of the century, he said; he'd shocked even himself. Of course, the beings he called life at that point were quite simple in structure, moving around onscreen in a way that resembled nothing so much as parasitic worms.

Then he caused male and female to appear, and at the beginning of the new century, new life had appeared within the computer of its own accord. The new cells divided again and again, and eventually they crawled around in the display just like their parents. Eliot called it a sight worthy of the new century.

Things accelerated after that. The basic process was much the same for all kinds of life forms. Producing fish or amphibians was all a matter of accumulating adaptations.

Having accomplished that much, Eliot allowed for an evolution in his ultimate goal. The question now became: Is it possible to create in a virtual space a biosphere on the scale of the Earth's?

This was the germ of the Loop project, an idea that at this stage was already pretty clearly defined.

At Eliot's invitation, scientists the world over began working toward a single goal. Computer scientists, medical doctors, molecular biologists, evolutionary theorists, astrophysicists, geologists, meteorologists-people from every branch of the sciences were involved. But interest wasn't confined to the hard sciences-economists, historians, political scientists, and social scientists of all stripes were paying attention, too.

Because it turned out to take more than just science to create a virtual Earth. It took an understanding of the humanities and social sciences as well. For this reason it was expected that the results of the Loop experiment would contribute to all fields. In addition to the basic evolutionary and biological mysteries, it was hoped that creating intelligent life forms in a virtual world would help provide clues to social problems such as wars and population increase, even fluctuations in the stock markets, areas in which it had been impossible to find definitive governing principles. Leading scientists in every field recognized the importance of the Loop project.

So the Loop started to function formally, in reality, with a budget equivalent to that of a full-fledged country.

Due to the reservations of certain government actors, the project couldn't be conducted in the open at first. Nobody could predict what might come of it-some new strategy for world domination, perhaps-and so it was felt that it should be carried out with the greatest circumspection. In the end, with no great ceremony, the project was launched as a joint effort by the U.S. and Japan.

The next name Eliot mentioned was one dear to Kaoru.

"Hideyuki Futami… Yes, he was a brilliant researcher. Young-fresh out of grad school-but he made the biggest contribution of anybody on the Japan side, I think." Eliot's phrasing tickled Kaoru-as was Eliot's intention, no doubt. Hearing one's father praised like this would make anyone feel good. Certainly that was the effect it had on Kaoru.

"Have you met my father?" Kaoru asked enthusiastically.

"Not face to face. But I heard about him, from my assistants."

Hideyuki had never talked much about the Loop. Kaoru was curious as to just what role Hideyuki had played in the project. He resolved to ask next time he saw him.

Eliot went on, interrupting Kaoru's thoughts of his father.

"I think you know what happened to the Loop after that."

"It turned cancerous."

"In the end, yes. But up to that point it was simply incredible. We'd never expected it to go so far."

He gave Kaoru a portentous look, as if urging him to ask the question.

"There was something you hadn't predicted?"

"Does it not surprise you? After all, you've seen a part of the Loop with your own eyes."

"So many things surprised me that I'm not sure what I should be surprised at."

Kaoru wasn't replicating Eliot's excitement, and this seemed to take the wind out of Eliot's sails: he sat there with his mouth half open, spittle dribbling from a corner of his lips. When a drop of drool began to descend on a clear string, Eliot finally noticed and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

"We'd expected that with physical conditions the same as on Earth, we'd get roughly the same sorts of life forms. We didn't dream that they'd be exactly identical. In those days everybody thought that the course of evolution was guided by chance. It couldn't happen the same way twice."

That was indeed one of the things that had surprised Kaoru. The course of evolution in the Loop had been exactly the same as on Earth, down to the last detail, and it certainly mystified him.

"So what did you conclude from that?" he asked.

"We didn't see life naturally emerging in the Loop at the very beginning. So we introduced it. We introduced RNA, thought to be the earliest form of life. Sowing seeds-that was the metaphor we used, but it was no metaphor. That RNA was in all reality a seed, destined to grow into a certain, specific tree of life."

Kaoru had taken part in a discussion like this before, he remembered. With Ryoji. Reiko was dozing nearby while Ryoji and Kaoru debated evolution. And the point Ryoji had been trying to make then was more or less the same one Eliot seemed to be making now.

"What are you trying to say?" Kaoru tried to keep his tone cool and rational. If he broke in too unnaturally, the old man might start drooling again, and Kaoru had no desire to see that.

"The Loop matched up perfectly with reality. Life didn't emerge naturally in the Loop-that's why we sowed the seeds. Don't you realize what that means?"

It hit Kaoru. He remembered what Eliot had asked him at the beginning of their long conversation. Do you believe in God? That gave Kaoru the answer.

"That reality is only a virtual world, too, right?"

"Indeed. Life didn't emerge of its own accord on Earth, either. So why are we here? Because somebody sowed the seeds of life here. Who? The being we call God. God caused there to be life on Earth, and He made us in His image. The Bible was right."

Kaoru wasn't particularly shocked by this. He'd had the same thought many times on his journey to this point, but he hadn't been able to prove or disprove it. This was mere reasoning by analogy. It had no bearing on reality. It could not be verified. In the end, it would be, as it always had been, a question of belief or unbelief.

"But that doesn't change anything, does it?"

Eliot sank into his couch as if pushed there by Kaoru's logic. "Even if reality was created by a god, I'm not saying it was made in the same way as what we created in the computer."

Before Eliot could finish the sentence, Kaoru was saying, "I guess God's world must be controlled by funding issues, too."

Eliot's eyes narrowed and flashed coldly. "You're making fun of me." His sternness didn't last long, however. He immediately resumed his former calm expression.

Kaoru glanced at the clock on the wall. This conversation had gone on for three hours already. He was getting hungry, and with no end in sight he was getting tired as well.

Eliot seemed to guess Kaoru's thoughts. "You must be fatigued. Why don't we take a break, watch an old movie or something. I'll see to lunch." His face was expressionless, betraying neither anger nor excitement. He produced a remote control, and a screen descended in front of one wall. He pressed PLAY.

Then he stood up slowly, returned to his wheelchair, and went to leave the room. Kaoru followed him with his gaze. When the door shut behind Eliot Kaoru heard it lock. The sound told Kaoru everything he needed to know about his current situation. He was still incarcerated. He'd have to find out why.

On the screen an old movie was playing, one he'd seen before. It was a sci-fi flick his parents had taken him to see when he was ten. He knew the theme song by heart-he'd liked the movie so much that he'd gotten his mother to buy the soundtrack, and he'd listened to it over and over.

A large black man dressed in white appeared and placed a sandwich and some tea with milk in front of Kaoru.

As he ate, Kaoru closed his eyes and listened to the music divorced from the images. It brought back more memories when he turned it into his own private movie projected onto the backs of his eyelids. Images of his family from the peaceful days before his father's cancer had been detected.

Kaoru didn't notice he was weeping until the tears creeping down his cheeks reached his lips. He wondered again about coincidence. Had Eliot chosen this movie at random, or had he put it on in full knowledge of the many memories it held for Kaoru?

If it was the latter, then things went a lot deeper than simple confinement. Maybe Eliot's been watching me all along.

He'd often felt, as a child, like somebody was watching him from behind. He'd always dismissed it as his imagination, but now the feeling came back, and it felt real this time. Kaoru lost his appetite.

4

Eliot returned about the time Kaoru finally finished his lunch.

"My, you certainly had an appetite," Eliot said, looking at the empty plate. "Good, very good."

"Can we cut the crap? I can't even tell you how this is making me feel." As a result of their talk this morning, Kaoru had accumulated even more questions than before. He couldn't wait to put an end to this farce. Why had he come here, anyway? To find out how to combat the MHC virus. He couldn't afford to kill time like this.

"Well," said Eliot, as he lowered himself onto the sofa, "our theme for the afternoon is you and your mission." Once again he seemed to have seen right through Kaoru. Now he couldn't leave even if he wanted to.

"My mission?"

"Yes. Why have you come here? To find a way to combat the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus, no?"

Kaoru and Eliot stared at each other for a while.

Kaoru felt a deep nervous annoyance. Eliot seemed to know all kinds of information about him, while he'd been provided with no knowledge about Eliot. It wasn't fair. He had a reasonable understanding now of the man's place in the history of science. But what Kaoru wanted to know was more private things. Maybe if he had a clearer idea of Eliot as a person, he wouldn't feel so uncomfortable.

"How about a pop quiz?" said Eliot, breaking in on Kaoru's thoughts. He extended his right index finger, pointing at the ceiling. He seemed to be thinking of himself as a teacher now.

"In what year was it discovered that when a neutrino interacts with another object its oscillation goes out of phase?"

Kaoru was familiar with neutrinos, a kind of subatomic particle. If he were asked their main characteristics, he'd be able to answer with three: they move at the speed of light, they have no electrical charge, and they're composed of energy. Looked at in that way, they're quite similar to light. The decisive difference is that even though they have energy they can pass through anything. Neutrinos given off by the sun pass right through the earth, coming out the other side and heading straight off into the darkness of space.

But what did that have to with anything?

Kaoru's answer came automatically. "2001."

Kaoru hadn't even been born yet, but he'd read the information in a history of science textbook, and he remembered it clearly.

"That's correct. In fact it was only at the end of the last century that the neutrino, which had always been considered mass less, was discovered to have mass after all."

"Yes, and?" Kaoru's irritation was rising, and he tried to interrupt. Eliot stopped him.

"Just wait. Hear me out. Everything's organically interconnected, and this affected our plans. You're probably not going to understand what I mean when I say this, but if the neutrino's phase shift had not been discovered, you would most likely not exist."

"Give me a break. Enough with the jokes already. What could the nature of the neutrino possibly have to do with my existing or not?" Neutrinos are said to comprise ninety percent of all matter. They're everywhere. But what did that have to do with Kaoru? He wouldn't be able to take much more of this.

"Alright, alright. I'll just ask you to keep that idea in a corner of your mind, and to stay with me for another three minutes while we talk about neutrinos."

Then Eliot proceeded to explain what could be done using the neutrino's phase shift.

It turned out that by shooting neutrinos at an object, measuring their phase shift, and then recomposing them, it was possible to create a detailed three-dimensional digital picture of an object's structure. Neutrinos could be projected through inorganic and organic objects alike. But it was the fields of medicine and pathology that expected to see the greatest applications of this discovery, because suddenly it became possible to have a digital record of an organism's entire molecular makeup. This was different from a mere DNA analysis. Sequencing an organism's DNA simply meant analyzing one cell out of the nearly infinite number of cells in a single organism. Using neutrino oscillation made it possible to record everything about a subject, from brain activity to the state of the heart, even memory.

"Not long after the inception of the Loop project, another team of researchers began to construct a piece of equipment known as the Neutron Scanning Capture System, NSCS for short. This would allow us to instantaneously capture an organism's molecular structure. Needless to say, their project too had a huge budget. I myself had no direct connection with the NSCS project, although of course I offered whatever advice I could."

Eliot paused there.

"How about some tea? You'll need some time to digest this information."

Kaoru obediently raised his teacup to his mouth. The tea was cold. Kaoru had heard a fair amount concerning neutrinos in his lifetime, but this was the first he'd heard of the NSCS.

"I'm sorry if this has been confusing to you. It's time now to bring the discussion around to the MHC virus, which threatens us all."

"Finally, we're getting to the point."

The news came as a relief to Kaoru. He was starting to be afraid that this, too, would lead nowhere.

"What do you know about the Human Metastatic Cancer Virus?" Eliot asked.

"I know that its genome has been sequenced. I've seen the results myself."

"And yet there's still no treatment for it, no progress on a vaccine to prevent it."

"Why is that?"

"It can take a long time to figure out where a virus came from. In the case of the MHC virus, an extremely long time."

By now, Kaoru felt he could guess where the virus had come from.

"The Loop, right?"

Eliot opened his eyes wide and stared at Kaoru. "How did you figure it out?"

Kaoru enjoyed the look of sincere amazement on Eliot's face. He felt like delaying his answer to prolong this pleasure, but he hadn't the patience. "The MHC virus isn't very large. It's only got nine genes, each of which ranges from several thousand to several hundred thousand bases in length. But the total number of bases in each gene comes out to equal 2(n) x 3. That can't be a coincidence."

Eliot groaned. "Nice catch."

"Not to brag, but I have something of a sixth sense when it comes to numbers. It didn't take much to figure it out."

"And from that you were able to guess where the virus had come from?"

"Well, why did they equal 2" x 3? That was the question. The times-three part was fairly easy to understand, since three bases together make one codon specifying a single amino acid. But what about the other part of the formula, the 2? No doubt I never would have gotten the idea had I not known about the Loop project. The 2 had to come from the binary code used by computers. The virus must have leaked out of the Loop somehow. That was its birthplace."

"Exactly." Eliot gave a weak smile and clapped his hands. Whether or not the applause was sincere, it sounded like mockery to Kaoru.

Kaoru lowered his voice in an attempt to sound calm. "So we know where it came from. Does that help us find a cure?" A cure for the virus- that was the main thing.

Eliot ignored the question. "When did you figure this out?"

"Huh?"

"When did you figure out the origin of the virus?"

"About a month ago."

"I see. For me it was about six months ago." He didn't seem to be trying to brag. He was counting on his fingers like a child, a look of unguarded remorse on his face.

"I want to know what you think about it," Kaoru said, pressing him.

Eliot's response was dilatory, as he started making excuses.

"It's too bad that it had to be cancer-such a common disease. Had it been something more distinctive, maybe we could have done something at an early stage. But it was able to blend in with normal cancer as it laid its groundwork. It was like the wanted man realizing the best place to hide is in the big city. Precisely because cancer is such a common illness, the virus was able to use it as camouflage. Think about it. Who would raise a fuss just because a researcher on the Loop project died of cancer? Whereas, if one of us had died from an unknown illness, we would have been quite active in looking for the virus that caused it. But with cancer… we mourned the loss of another colleague, but didn't suspect anything. It was able to sneak in and do away with us one by one."

Kaoru could sympathize. It had been a mere seven years since this cancer was definitely proven to be viral in origin, and therefore different from normal cancer. And it had only been a year since scientists had first successfully isolated the virus. And all that time, the virus had been laying the groundwork for an explosive spread.

Kaoru imagined that Eliot had lost people close to him to the virus. His gaze, one of hostility and regret, was focused on the past.

This was Kaoru's chance to find out more about Eliot as a person, but instead Kaoru brought the conversation back on track.

"Have you been able to figure out precisely how the virus escaped from the Loop?"

"Eh? Oh, yes. Of course."

"Will you tell me?"

"We froze the Loop twenty years ago. Time has stopped inside the Loop. All of its inhabitants are frozen in place. Do you know why we put an end to the project?"

"You're going to tell me you ran out of funding."

He didn't mean it as a joke, but Eliot, after a moment's shock, laughed heartily.

"That's absolutely right. We used up our budget. We'd gotten scholarly feedback from all directions, about as much as we were going to get, and the results had been quite good, at least valuable enough to justify the expenditure. But a project like that can't go on forever. Do you have any idea how many massively parallel supercomputers we buried in the New Mexico desert? Six hundred and forty thousand. And we put another six hundred and forty thousand in the ground underneath Tokyo. We needed our own power plants just to keep them running. They ate up a staggering amount of electricity, and it took massive amounts of money to keep them running. It couldn't go on forever. And then the Loop started turning cancerous."

Kaoru felt he knew all he needed to about how that had come about. Back at Wayne's Rock he'd witnessed for himself, with his own eyes and ears, the key scenes in that chain of events. He informed Eliot of this, and Eliot nodded twice.

"So you've seen it. Or, I should say, you've experienced it. But you don't know why it began to turn cancerous. Let me say right up front that I don't know, either. The making of that odd videotape, the spread of that new virus-these are things that the individuals within the Loop couldn't help but find impossible to explain. You're thinking that even if they couldn't explain it, I should be able to, as the one who made the Loop. But I have to be honest with you: I can't explain it. Not all phenomena in the world can be explained. We've always got problems that need solving; the world is always coming apart at the seams. There's no world anywhere without its internal contradictions. Maybe the real world's internal contradictions infected the Loop; alternatively, it's not inconceivable that it was the work of a computer virus. Our security was supposed to be perfect, but as long as the Loop was connected to the outside world, there was at least the possibility of it being breached. If it was a piece of mischief, it was an extremely well-wrought one. But what interested me most was one of the individuals within the Loop: Ryuji Takayama."

Eliot stopped there and turned on Kaoru a gaze that seemed to be searching for agreement. Kaoru obliged.

"Yeah, he's a pretty interesting guy, alright."

"He's unique."

"He must hold the key to the MHC virus."

Now Eliot's eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to peer into Kaoru's brain. As if it wouldn't do to take his eyes off Kaoru for a second now.

Slowly, with suspicion, Eliot said, "Did you not see Takayama on the monitor?"

"I spent most of my time seeing things from his perspective, actually." Kaoru answered carefully, each word given special weight, in imitation of Eliot; at the same time he was checking his own memory to make sure he wasn't making any mistakes. No, that was how he remembered it: he'd made full use of Takayama's senses as he re-experienced the event.

Eliot made an awkward sort of cry and blinked rapidly several times. "Oh-ho. That explains it." Uneasy, Kaoru watched Eliot's eyes as they darted around.

"Explains what?"

"Eh? Oh, nothing. It's just that the conversation begins to move in an interesting direction. Anyway. So that means that you heard Takayama's scream just before he died as if it were your own voice."

"That's right."

He could recall it all clearly, everything he'd seen and heard through Takayama's eyes and ears. On the brink of death, Takayama had found an interface with the real world, and he'd called it. Kaoru could hear Takayama's voice echoing within his body.

"What did Takayama say to you?"

Kaoru repeated the phrase, in as close as he could come to Takayama's intonation.

"'Bring me to your world.'"

"What do you think it means?"

"I think he deduced the existence of the Loop's maker, a god from his perspective, and he wanted that god to bring him back to life in that god's world-in other words, in the real world where you and I live. At least, that's what I took it to mean."

And Kaoru could sympathize with that request. How many times had he confronted his father with a desire to understand how the world worked? But it turned out that this world's working was a little too complicated to be fully comprehended. Every time he thought he'd chased down the answers, they receded a little farther into the distance, like an endless game of cat and mouse. He felt like he was chasing his own shadow, something he'd never ever be able to catch. If it turned out that the world had a maker, then going to that maker's own world would answer all his desires. It would surely tell him how his own world worked.

Eliot spoke calmly. "I understood Takayama's feelings completely. His request came not out of fear of death. What moved him was an insatiable thirst for knowledge. His curiosity about the world exploded in that instant, and it brought about what was to him a miracle."

"A miracle?"

"That's what it was to him. On the brink of death, his greatest desire was to cross over into this world. If the NSCS plans hadn't been in my head, I doubt the idea would ever have occurred to me. In fact, I'm sure it wouldn't have. But as I say, things are connected, organically. I believed I could see twenty, thirty years into the future, and based on what I saw, I made up my mind to grant Takayama's wish."

Kaoru cried out in surprise.

Grant Takayama's wish?

It was just as he'd suspected. Somebody had been rash enough to bring an entity over from the virtual world into the real one. Kaoru was speechless.

Eliot, though, was calm as he began to explain how he'd gone about bringing Ryuji Takayama into the real world.

It was impossible to bring him over as an adult, possessed of his current state of consciousness and all the memories it held. The only thing Eliot could do was extract genetic information from one of Takayama's cells, and based on it, use a genome synthesizer and the genome fragment alignment method to create DNA that would be valid in the real world. Once he'd analyzed Takayama's DNA sequence, it was essentially a matter of chemically synthesizing it.

The next step was to prepare a fertilized human egg, extract its nucleus, and insert the manmade Takayama nucleus in its place. Then all he had to do was return the egg to the mother's body and wait for Takayama to be born. The process wasn't all that different from the cloning procedures that had been developed in the last century. Nor was it all that difficult.

In short, the only way to bring Takayama into the real world was to allow him to be born here as a baby, a new human carrying all the genetic information of the virtual Ryuji Takayama.

"This was a grand experiment, to say the least. We were all quite excited at the prospect of bringing something from the virtual world into the real one. But we had to act in the utmost secrecy. I'm sure you can see why. If the media had gotten wind of it, they would have had a field day, saying we were playing God, ignoring the sanctity of life, that sort of thing. We'd seen the furore that had surrounded the first successful human cloning at the turn of the century, and we wanted no part of that. I doubt you can imagine what things were like then… Anyway, the plan was kept secret even from most of the scientists involved with the Loop."

"Not even my father knew about it?"

Eliot nodded once. "That's right. He didn't know. It was more convenient that way."

"So he was left out in the cold, is that it?"

"It wasn't like that, exactly… But, well, I guess you could say that…"

Eliot seemed at a loss for words. But Kaoru thought he could guess what came next. "So anyway, you mean…?"

"Yes, it's just what you're thinking. We collected Takayama's genetic data from a point just before he died. A point at which he was already infected with the ring virus. When we brought Takayama into the real world, we brought the ring virus right along with him."

"In other words, the ring virus that took over the Loop world was the basis for the MHC virus that's taking over our world?"

"That's what we think. Careful comparisons of the genetic sequences of both viruses reveal too many similarities to be explained away as mere coincidence. The ring virus seized on our plan to resurrect Takayama in this world as a chance to escape. We think the virus's RNA must have invaded an intestinal bacterium, as luck would have it, and thus made it into the outside. And then it mutated with frightening speed, as viruses are wont to do. The result was the MHC virus."

The sequence was essentially what Kaoru had guessed. What to do about it, though, remained a problem.

He leaned close to Eliot's face and said, "Let's clear something up right now. Have you or have you not figured out a way to conquer the MHC virus?"

"You said it yourself: Takayama holds the key."

"So Takayama is alive. Where is he now?"

Eliot rested his chin on his hand and gazed into Kaoru's eyes for a while. Then he snapped his fingers. "The eyes play tricks on one, don't they? What we think we know can affect our judgment."

Shaking his head, Kaoru leaned back on his couch. Eliot always evaded the important questions. He began to be suspicious of the old man again-what was he up to?

Eliot, meanwhile, was punching buttons on the remote control, ignoring Kaoru's nonplussed gaze. From one wall appeared a large computer monitor.

"You saw it all. You even put on the helmet display. But you failed to notice it. I suppose that's liable to happen. Your preconceptions got in the way, I suspect."

Kaoru thought Eliot was talking to himself; he was speaking as one might speak to a bird that's landed in one's yard. So Kaoru swallowed his annoyance and waited for Eliot to play his next card.

Eliot had called up on the screen the last moments of Takayama's life. He'd probably prepared this ahead of time-he had the scene up and ready to play with only a few commands.

"Let's go through it like you did, locked into Takayama's perceptions."

And they began to go through the same sequence of events that Kaoru had lived through already amid the ruins of Wayne's Rock. It was a week after Takayama watched the video, and he began to see signs of his impending death. Spurred by his final wish, he put the tape into the VCR and pressed play. Those mysterious, fragmented images danced across the TV screen. Dice rolling around inside a lead case. In the middle of a phone call, Takayama noticed the ever-changing dots on the dice and made a sound like a scream.

Just then it happened. A reflection appeared in a mirror at the edge of the monitor. A man with a telephone receiver held to his ear and a look of utter shock on his face. It was Takayama. While on the phone, Takayama's glance had momentarily settled on his reflection in the mirror.

Eliot paused the playback there and zoomed in on Takayama's reflection.

"You were locked into Takayama's perceptions, but your own preconceptions clouded your vision. Your mind's reaction was that you couldn't be seeing what you were seeing, and so it simply wouldn't let you see it. It happens. Take another look. Don't you recognize that face?"

The face in the mirror was slightly blurred. Eliot sharpened the image.

Kaoru sat face to face with Takayama's reflection. His jaw dropped. His nerves were buzzing, as if they didn't want to recognize the face.

Takayama's features were distorted by his expression of astonishment. On top of that, the imminence of death seemed to have abruptly aged him. But even so, there was no mistaking the outlines of his face, the muscular line of his jaw. Kaoru did indeed know that face. He'd known it all his life.

"This man holds the key to the MHC virus." Eliot poked Kaoru in the chest with a huge finger. "Kaoru, you're Ryuji Takayama."

Kaoru tried to block the words from reaching his brain, but their truth seeped into his body anyway. He felt the world collapse around him. His body, the flesh that he'd always thought of' as his, had betrayed him.

"It can't be." Kaoru turned his face toward the ceiling, eyes shut tight.

"We need your help. You must cooperate with us."

Kaoru saw nothing. Eliot's words entered his ears, but he couldn't grasp their meaning. All he knew was that the world was falling apart.

5

Kaoru sat on a boulder hugging his knees. From the flat edge of the ridge he could see a deep valley carved over the course of billions of years. Here and there he saw whitish mottled places on the rust-colored earth. Strangely shaped rocks stood out against the horizon, looking like creations not of nature, but of man. But man had not touched the landscape that stretched before him.

He hardly remembered the scenery from his hike along the ridge-the storm and what came after felt like events in a dream. When he'd huddled alone in the dark, had he been here, in the midst of this vastness? He gazed on it now as if for the first time, following with his eyes every wrinkle and furrow in the land. They reminded him, quite naturally, of the furrows on the surface of a brain. Kaoru's own brain was engraved with many memories, but its history was still comparatively short, only twenty years. Its origins, however, were utterly out of the ordinary. It had been born not of biological reproduction, but digital recomposition.

In the distance he could see a yellowish river flowing in a near loop. A strange sight. A manifestation of the synchronicity between the real world and the virtual?

He turned around, but there was no one there. Only the building housing the elevator that connected the underground laboratories to the surface, and next to that the heliport. A helicopter, painted gun-metal black, rested motionless on the heliport. This was the jet copter that had carried Kaoru's helpless body here after the storm.

Midway between the elevator building and the heliport was a dark hole, the entrance to a huge limestone cave stretching deep into the earth. In the cavern was a vast bowl-shaped depression filled with clear water.

Eliot had been telling the truth. Pointing to the ceiling and the floor, he'd spoken of a great layer of water above them and a great space beneath them. Both turned out to be actual.

They'd dug down into the earth to a depth of three thousand feet, and there they'd found this spherical hollow space, six hundred feet in diameter, floating there like a bubble. The layer of clear water was like a shield, keeping external radiation from getting into the hollow space. The natural landscape had been put to good use in installing the Neutrino Scanning Capture System in its underground shrine.

Kaoru still hadn't seen the apparatus, that machine that would decide his fate, be it the electric chair or… what?

He'd spent nearly a week in those labs underground. Now, finally, he was getting his first look at the place from the outside. His wish to go to the surface had finally been granted. Evidently Eliot had been kind enough to admit that he wasn't about to run away or hide.

The weather was calm. Kaoru was soaking up the afternoon rays after a week without sunlight. As long as he was in the sun, he was warm enough in just a T-shirt. He shifted his arms, still folded in front of him, rubbed his upper arms, and tried to pull his thoughts together, but it was no use. He couldn't even decide what there might be for him to decide. What was he to think of his life up to this point? There were no precedents to guide him. He was deeply troubled.

It was easy enough to doubt Eliot. That might even be the simplest solution: just deny everything he said. After all, who would believe he'd been created from genetic information taken from a virtual reality program anyway? That was like denying his very existence. Maybe Eliot was simply making up a story because he wanted to experiment with the NSCS. Kaoru should deny him that: he ought to leave this mountain of his own free will, after cursing Eliot with curses the likes of which the world had never known. And then… then what? Kaoru didn't know. Certainly nothing pleasant remained for him. He was going to lose the ones he loved. All he'd have left would be regrets.

He kept going back to the starting point. Monozygotic twins share the same genes and look virtually identical. If Kaoru and Takayama shared the same genes it would certainly explain their faces looking alike. Then there was the curious sensation Kaoru had experienced the first time he'd heard Takayama's voice directly, the same queer feeling he felt when he heard his own voice on a recording. So face and voice matched. But that alone was not sufficient proof. Those could be easily manipulated by computer.

Kaoru had pointed this out to Eliot. As if he'd anticipated Kaoru's doubts, Eliot merely held out a satellite phone.

"It's your father. I think you should talk to him."

Kaoru took the receiver and heard his father's voice from where he lay in his hospital bed. And once he'd heard what his father had to say, Eliot's story began to seem credible at last.

The most convenient way to raise Takayama's clone, it was decided, would be to choose one of the participants in the Loop project and have him raise the clone as his own child.

At the time, Hideyuki and Machiko Futami had been married for four years. They had no children. In fact, a gynecologist had recently confirmed Machiko's infertility.

But still they wanted a child. Eliot and his colleagues got wind of this, and through several intermediaries they approached Hideyuki about the possibility of adoption. Both Hideyuki and Machiko were receptive to the idea of bringing a newborn infant into their home and raising it as their own child.

Events progressed swiftly, and soon Eliot, through a devious route, delivered to Hideyuki and Machiko the newborn Kaoru. They were told nothing about the child's birth or lineage, under the pretence of avoiding future trouble. There was no telling if they would have been willing to accept the child had they known he came from within the Loop.

And so they brought Kaoru up lovingly as their own child, never telling him he was adopted.

As they spoke, linked by the satellite phone, Kaoru could picture Hideyuki lying in bed, weakly grasping the receiver.

"Kaoru?"

It was a joy to hear his father's voice, though it was weaker than he remembered it.

Kaoru and Hideyuki reported to each other on their recent doings. On hearing that his son was well, Hideyuki seemed happy. "I seem to be doing better myself lately," he said, although Kaoru had no way of knowing if it was true or not. Judging from his voice, it had to be a lie. He felt that his father's time was fast approaching.

Then, calmly, off-handedly, Kaoru asked his father about his origins. Hideyuki was sincerely surprised at first that Kaoru had discovered he was adopted, but then he seemed to decide that the boy was bound to find out sooner or later, and proceeded to tell him honestly how things had been twenty years before.

As he listened to his father's explanation, Kaoru had his eyes closed and said something like a prayer in his heart. Who had approached Hideyuki-where had he gotten Kaoru from?

Kaoru's prayer was in vain. His father's explanation matched Eliot's in every detail.

"Weren't you at all hesitant, Dad, to raise a child who wasn't carrying on your genes?" Kaoru asked quietly. Even if his mother was infertile, it wouldn't have been difficult at all to create a child who inherited their genes.

"Whether or not you had our genes wasn't what mattered. Parent-child bonds come from being together, from how they act toward each other. Think about our relationship over the past twenty years. You're my son, Kaoru."

These words etched themselves into Kaoru's cells.

Kaoru said goodbye and broke the connection, feeling that he'd never speak to his father again.

He watched Takayama's life over and over on the computer. As he went through episodes in the man's childhood when he displayed his rare talent for science in general and math and physics in particular, Kaoru couldn't help but feel that they were the same person. Even his gestures when absorbed in a book or deep in thought were identical to Kaoru's.

It was a strange experience to watch Takayama onscreen. Here was an individual with the same genetic makeup as Kaoru himself, growing up in a different environment-a different universe, no less. A man with a different personality from Kaoru, a different consciousness, but exactly the same features. An identical twin.

Kaoru got to his feet and strolled toward the end of the ridge. A downward glance showed him the edge of a sheer cliff, at the bottom of which could be seen a stream in its snakelike course. Its surface was green, either from a trick of the light or from the composition of the dirt dissolved in its water. Even now, the river continued to carve out its canyon, bit by tiny bit.

He realized he'd have to accept the facts. He was in this world because somebody had constructed him based on Ryuji Takayama's genetic information. It fit, and he'd better deal with it. He could deny it all he wanted, but he couldn't escape his fate.

Kaoru was destined to return to the Loop.

The wind had picked up. He took a step back from the edge of the cliff. It wouldn't do to be blown off the cliff and dashed on the floor of the canyon. That would mean the loss of valuable information-the end of two worlds.

Eliot's plan was a devilish one. He had indeed seen twenty years into the future, just as he'd averred.

Why exactly had Eliot felt the compulsion, twenty years ago, to grant Takayama's wish and bring his clone into the real world? Perhaps he'd seen it as an experiment in cloning, but more than that, it had to be because Eliot already had a clear vision of the NSCS. He'd already gotten the idea for a complete digitalization of a human being's molecular structure using the as-yet-unconstructed apparatus. Indeed, he'd already settled on a trial subject.

Nobody could be expected to volunteer for neutrino scanning, but without a volunteer, the machine couldn't be tested. The days when test subjects could be drafted against their will were long gone. Without a young, healthy, willing volunteer, this elaborate apparatus would simply go to waste.

Eliot put it best himself. "If we plucked somebody out of the Loop and kept him around long enough, then we'd have a legitimate reason for using the NSCS on him: to send him back. If he wanted to go home, we'd be in a position to send him there. Cloning is the only way to bring someone from the Loop into the real world, but things are different when it comes to sending someone from the real world into the Loop. Using the NSCS, we can reconstitute you inside the Loop as you are this very minute-your consciousness, your thoughts, your memories."

If he wanted to go home.

That was the condition, but that was also the rub. Why would he want that? He'd never see his father, his mother, or Reiko again. And his child… Kaoru had already planted his chromosomes inside Reiko's womb-he had a child on the way, via old-fashioned biological reproduction, and if he went into the Loop he'd never see the child's face.

If that was the only factor, he'd never play along with Eliot's scientific game. Not a chance. His genes may have come from the virtual world, but at the moment he was very much alive in this one. Home? This was his home now. No matter what he'd been before, since his birth here he'd lived his own life, chosen his own course. He liked it here.

But luck was conspiring against him. Kaoru was in a no-win situation.

During the process of reconstituting Takayama, the ring virus had escaped, eventually mutating into the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus. That was a fact. The ring virus had been embedded in Takayama's genes, and sometime during the operation of the genome synthesizer, something had gone wrong: a fragment had become embedded in an intestinal bacterium. Which was not to say that the ring virus had been cleanly extracted from Takayama's genes, returning his DNA to its pristine, uninfected state. No, it was likely that the ring virus was still there, a part of him.

As soon as Eliot told him this, Kaoru started to wonder. If this virus is embedded in my genes, why haven't I come down with MHC myself

Not only had he never come down with the cancer, but every test he'd ever undergone for the virus came out negative.

Eliot had an explanation for that. "Somewhere in the RNA-DNA transcription process, a mutation must have occurred, inserting a stop code. It didn't show up in tests. You see, the MHC virus causes a mutation in gene P53 of the infected cell. The virus itself has a telomerase sequence. It inserts the sequence TTAGGG into the DNA of the infected cell. This makes the cell immortal, but cancerous.

"As soon as we realized that the MHC virus came from Takayama, we obtained a sample of your cells and started analyzing them. I hope you don't mind. You may remember an unexplained blood test a while back… In any case. We were surprised to find that the telomere sequence in your cells was not TTAGGG. It seems that in your case, although the MHC virus produces a telomerase and attaches the TTAGGG sequence to DNA ends, it's unstable and soon breaks down. Your cells' lifespan doesn't increase, but your cells don't turn cancerous. You may be a new type of human being, one with true immunity to the MHC virus."

Eliot's explanation made a certain amount of sense to Kaoru. His immunity probably came from a slight discrepancy between Loop genes and real-world ones. All things considered, maybe that was only to be expected.

As Eliot's words flashed through his brain, Kaoru thought he could see the course of his past life stretched out in the canyon below him, trailing a tail of light. The course that light would travel in the future seemed to have been foreordained.

Kaoru wondered when the suggestion that he come here had first been implanted in his mind. He was ten when the gravitational anomaly map had made its way onto his computer screen, despite the fact that the information it contained was nowhere in the database he'd been using. Of course Eliot had sent it. No doubt he'd seen to it somehow that Kaoru come across the information on longevity zones, too. Eliot needed to keep Kaoru perpetually intrigued by this spot in the desert, but he couldn't be open about it. He had to continually feed Kaoru hints to keep his curiosity aroused. Eliot had allowed Kaoru to think that everything was his own discovery, one coincidence on top of another, while at the same time he'd carefully emphasized the mysterious possibility of salvation that this point in the desert seemed to offer them all.

Kaoru was sure that Eliot had been behind his mother's stumbling across the right Indian legends, and the article about the man who'd miraculously recovered from cancer. Such stories had been on the increase over the last six months or so-no doubt Eliot had sent out a lot more clues than the few that Kaoru and his mother had picked up on. But even those had been enough: Kaoru was here now.

He'd come here on his own, of his own free will, out of a sense of mission. That had been Eliot's ultimate requirement. The procedure wouldn't work if he'd captured Kaoru and brought him here by force. The NSCS would reproduce his exact mental state at the moment of scanning. If he'd been forced here, his mind would have been filled with fear and hostility, and those emotions would have gone with him. He'd need to go willingly, with a goal clearly in mind and a calm acceptance of his fate.

"It's not my style to use force," Eliot had said, but Kaoru knew what that really meant. The project would fail if the participant was unwilling.

Willingness and a sense of mission: Kaoru had showed up with exactly what Eliot required of him. And the carrot Eliot held out to him was quite enough to satisfy that sense of mission.

"The key to conquering the MHC virus is within you. Unless we can analyze your genome in three dimensions, your mitochondria, your metabolic cycle, your secretion factors, we're not going to be able to solve this. Simply analyzing your DNA sequence isn't enough. We need to digitize your entire body. We think that a special gene insertion method might prove to be a powerful treatment, but in order to understand the full effects of insertion, we need to run detailed simulations, and we need data on you for that. Do you understand what this means? The things we learn from you will have immediate application. Your father, your mother, your lover will be the first ones to benefit. It's only proper that you be rewarded for laying your life on the line."

Eliot's expression was earnest as he offered this promise.

The longevity zone Kaoru had imagined he'd find out here in the desert had proved to be a mirage. Its only vestige was this decrepit old scientist, Kaoru reflected bitterly. But what Kaoru had hoped to find in his longevity zone- a cure for MHC, something to save the lives of his loved ones, something to prevent the entire spectrum of life on earth from falling victim to this cancer-that was about to be granted him, in a most unexpected way. As long as he was willing to trade his body for it…

His body supposedly contained something that completely blocked the effects of the virus, and the best way to instantaneously and exactly lay bare that mechanism was to neutrino scan him. The things they learned would have immediate application. The terror of the cancer virus would disappear: life on earth would learn to coexist with the virus.

Kaoru understood the logic behind it. There was no time to pursue this knowledge by traditional methods. Long before they arrived at a cure, time would have run out-at least for his father. His mother would probably lose her mind, while Reiko might kill herself and the baby inside her.

He may have come from the virtual world, but he felt that this life had value, and was worth living. He'd been alive these twenty years-the hunger he'd satisfied with Reiko was proof of that. If it hadn't been for her, he might not have ever felt so alive.

I exist, right here, right now.

Beaming with confidence, he stood at the end of the ridge like one of those peculiar rocks visible on the horizon. He gathered all his courage and expressed it in a shout, as loud a yawp as he could make.

The sound of his voice echoed in the canyon, flew across the land toward the horizon, disappearing in the distance. He imagined that was how he himself would disappear, leaving only echoes behind.

His feelings toward Eliot were complicated, needless to say. They went beyond straightforward hatred. After all, it was thanks to Eliot that he had a physical body. All the pleasure and pain he'd experienced these last twenty years he owed to Eliot's ingenuity. If someone had asked Kaoru whether he'd wanted this life, he would have answered with a resounding yes. But then, if he'd never received this bodily existence, the cancer virus would never have been loosed upon the world.

Kaoru knew he bore no responsibility for that. But as a fact it was undeniable, and it weighed on his mind.

However, this was no time to be caught up in resentment, hatred, or the pricks of conscience. It was time for him to steel himself and pay the price. It was time to look to the future. Always to the future.

Kaoru turned around and strode purposefully away from the cliff.

6

It took another ten days to make everything ready. Kaoru spent the time going through the record of Takayama's life in the Loop, experiencing it until he knew it all, up to the moment of his death. He made it all his own, from the man's relationships with parents and friends to his scholarly learning, his habits of thought, the way he spoke.

By the time Kaoru got so that he could understand the language they spoke in the Loop without a mechanical translator, he'd essentially finished committing the man's life to memory. Perhaps because they shared the same genes, Kaoru found it felt rather natural to become the man in this way. In fact, the more he found out the less he considered Takayama a separate person. At certain moments Takayama's life seemed to overlap with his own.

On the morning of the big day, Eliot accompanied Kaoru down in the elevator. As they descended three thousand feet below the surface, all of Kaoru's misgivings melted away. He was about to cross over to that distant shore, but strangely he felt no fear. The special atmosphere of the place actually lent his mood a touch of solemnity, of grandeur.

The elevator doors opened. He could see a section of the NSCS control centre. Surrounded by thick security walls, the computers' lights were flashing. But they weren't inside the NSCS yet. Kaoru would go in there alone.

Eliot kept pace with Kaoru. He refused to use a motorized wheelchair, telling Kaoru that he preferred to propel one himself, to keep his muscles in shape. The old-fashioned wheelchair looked out of place here, surrounded by the latest technology.

Panting faintly, Eliot said, "I need to ask you something before we begin, so that we have no misunderstandings. You don't think I let loose the MHC virus on purpose, do you?"

The thought had crossed Kaoru's mind, but all his doubts on that score had been settled.

"Why would you do that?"

Kaoru went behind Eliot's wheelchair and tried to push for him, but the older man waved him away as he would a fly. "Don't interfere," he said, but kindly, renewing his grip on the wheels. "Why would I do it, you ask? Isn't that obvious? To ensure funding for the Loop."

True enough, if Eliot could make the case that restarting the Loop was a necessary step toward defeating the MHC virus, then he'd get a massive amount of funding. A cure for the virus was the top priority worldwide-if one were developed, it would bring huge profits all around. The return on investment would be phenomenal, to say nothing of what it would contribute to society. And with that funding, Eliot would be able to achieve his dream of reactivating the Loop, a dream that had been on ice for twenty years.

"You wouldn't do something like that."

"And why wouldn't I?"

"Because there'd be no way you could foresee how the virus would behave. That, and I have a hard time believing your hatred of the virus is feigned."

Eliot swallowed and made a queer sound in the back of his throat. He, too, had lost several intimates to the disease: it was obvious what fuelled his animosity toward it.

"I'm glad you understand. The virus's getting loose was an accident, pure and simple. Had I known the virus was this wily, this nefarious, I would have been much, much more cautious…" His words of frustration carried the weight of truth.

"I know. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be down here."

Eliot stopped his wheelchair and gazed vacantly up at Kaoru. His wide eyes were wet with tears.

"So you don't… hold a grudge?"

"For what?"

"For taking it upon myself to bring you to this world, and then saying, 'Time's up, back you go.'"

"But I wouldn't be here, as a human being, if it weren't for you. The last twenty years haven't been bad at all. In fact, you've given me a lot of great memories. I don't have any grudge against you."

Kaoru was trying to view things philosophically. He felt that if he failed to affirm the present world completely, then all that would be left to him would be fear of the world to come. Unhappiness had dogged him. He'd seen his father, his mother, and his lover infected with the MHC virus; he'd witnessed Ryoji's suicide. But he could still state unequivocally that this life had been a good one. It was the only thing that allowed him to remain composed as he walked down that hallway.

"Stop and talk with me for a moment." As ever, spittle hung at the corner of Eliot's mouth.

"Alright."

So the two of them stopped to shoot the breeze there in the middle of the long hallway leading to the neutrino scanner. Kaoru leaned back against the wall, and Eliot propped his head against the back of his wheelchair. They each laughed at the other's casualness.

"I'm sure I've already told you this, but we wouldn't have arranged for your birth here had there not already been plans for the NSCS. Everything's organically interconnected. If just one element had been missing, things would have turned out entirely different."

"So it's a mere accumulation of coincidence?"

"Certainly it's coincidence that's led us to restart the Loop-to be forced to restart it. But the Loop and the real world correspond to each other on some level."

Kaoru had begun to notice that himself. It was almost as if the virtual world, cancer-ridden and frozen in time, was reaching out to move the real world, to use it.

Eliot changed to a new metaphor as he continued his explanation. "There comes a point when a child-even one not particularly precocious in science-notices that the structure of the atom resembles the structure of the solar system. The child sees the atom and its component particles as constituting their own universe, and wonders if life exists on those miniature 'planets' just as it does on ours. That's the circle of life. That's why I named it the Loop."

"I think I said something like that to my father when I was in elementary school." And to Kaoru it seemed that it wasn't just the microscopic realm that might work like that. Maybe the solar system was but an atom, and the Milky Way an aggregation of atoms, a molecule. The surrounding universe was a cell, and all of existence a huge organism. A being that held within it a smaller being, which held within it a smaller being-like a series of nested boxes. Certain ancient religions took such a view, just as they saw life cycling through a series of existences, past, present, and future.

"What do you think happens if the circle is broken? The microscopic and the macroscopic are connected, interlocking-if part of the cycle is arrested, it's going to affect the rest of it."

"If the circle gets broken… well, it just has to be reconnected."

"That's right. But not simply by going back to the beginning and doing it over. We have to overcome the calamity that has befallen the Loop, and then reconnect it."

"So what happens to the Loop's historical trajectory? Its cancer?"

"The same thing that happens to any species that runs into an evolutionary dead-end: it goes extinct. Records will remain in the Loop's memory banks, but the events will be surgically removed from the real world's history, just like we'd cut out cancer cells. The history of the Loop will be shunted onto a side road. It will start again from a new page."

It reminded Kaoru of a river carving out a landscape. Water follows the shape of the land as it flows ever downward, but sometimes it finds itself trapped, and then it swells into a pool. Even then, the water is always searching for an escape, probing weak places in the ground until it succeeds in making itself a new path. It's easy to tell where a river ran into dead ends on its way to the sea: the tale is told by a river's oddly acute angles, its occasional islands.

The Loop was like a river in that respect. Right now it was stalled, its way blocked. But left as it was to stagnate, it was bound to find a way to overspill its containment and exert a negative influence on the real world. The real world corresponded to it, after all. While it was necessary to find real-world ways of dealing with the cancer virus, it was just as necessary to change the trajectory of the Loop, its history of cancer. Until that was done, there would be no fundamental solution.

It was Kaoru's job to overcome the blockage in the Loop, to make a new way for it to flow.

Eliot spoke again. "Sometimes the world needs divine intervention. So God is born of a virgin. And reborn. All the arrangements have been made."

Kaoru realized what he was being told: he was to become a god. It didn't feel real to him. He felt too vividly the sense of being pushed along this path.

He started down the hall again, and as he walked, he thought. That Indian's life I was shown at Wayne's Rock: what was the meaning of that?

Eliot had prepared that experience for him, of course. Kaoru had yet to ask why. Kaoru's own interpretation was that it had been a dress rehearsal for death. But another possible meaning had just occurred to him.

The Indian had seen his wife and child die before his very eyes. The cruelty, the loss, and his own inability to do anything about it had been much harder to bear than thoughts of his own death. Right up until the veil of darkness closed around him, his thoughts had been ones of pity, rage, fear at having been unable to save them. Those negative images had swirled around in the blackness of Kaoru's helmet display, and after taking it off he was determined not to ever have to feel that way again, in the virtual world or the real one. The Indian's story was not one of a man who had sacrificed his life for those of his wife and daughter. It was incomparably worse than that. It was the story of a man who'd been forced to look on helplessly while they perished.

Why was it necessary for me to see that-to experience it?

In view of subsequent events, the experience's effect on him seemed to accord with Eliot's plan. Kaoru's desire to never go through that again motivated his decision to sacrifice himself to save his loved ones. But now what planted itself in Kaoru was the idea that he'd been manipulated, trapped, into doing just what Eliot wanted him to.

He strode down the corridor with profoundly mixed emotions. Eliot chased him in his wheelchair.

"Don't you wish to make a phone call?"

Kaoru stopped. "A phone call?"

"Yes. Is there no one you wish to speak to?"

He'd already spoken to his father, not long before. He would have liked to hear his mother's voice, but he didn't know what he'd say to her. How was he supposed to explain what he was about to do? She'd lose it for sure.

Reiko. There was nobody else he could talk to.

Eliot showed Kaoru into a small room off the hallway and handed him a telephone receiver.

Kaoru dialled, praying she'd be in. Eliot gestured wordlessly to a monitor, as if to ask, Would you like video? Kaoru refused the offer. There was no need to make it a video-phone call. He had the feeling that hearing her voice alone, with no extraneous information, would better allow him to hold on to the memory.

A connection. "Hello?"

First contact with Reiko's soft voice had the unexpected effect of reducing Kaoru to tears.

Waves of emotion buffeted him. Memories overcame him, aural and visual. It was an explosion, triggered by her voice. He couldn't control himself.

"Hello? Hello?"

Kaoru realized he never should have called her.

7

The hallway ended at a black door. This was where Kaoru said goodbye to Eliot.

Eliot held out a gargantuan hand for Kaoru to shake. Kaoru returned his grasp, although not very strongly. The last words he'd exchanged with Reiko still occupied his brain-his heart had been shattered into a thousand pieces-his gaze was elsewhere.

"I seem to have lived too long."

Kaoru snapped back to reality. He looked down at Eliot and saw a man who had, indeed, grown too old for his own good. A man who had a precise grasp of how much longer he had to live.

I'll be following you eventually, he seemed to want to say, but in fact they were headed to different places altogether. Eliot would never go where Kaoru was about to.

"Don't forget your promise," Kaoru said. He'd extracted another pledge from Eliot, in addition to his promise to use the data from Kaoru's body to help his parents and Reiko first of all.

"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.