Spiral

EPILOGUE

On a day so clear it was hard to believe it was still the rainy season, Ando went to the beach. Two years ago to the day, at this very place, his son had died. It wasn’t that Ando made a point of coming here on the anniversary. He hadn’t come the year before. But today he had a reason to be here.

Unlike two years ago, the waves today were gentle as they approached the shore. White sand stretched away on either side, and here and there anglers stood casting their lines. It was still early summer, and there were no bathers, only two or three families picnicking on plastic sheets.

Ando felt as if he’d been transported back to that fateful day. The waves were different, and there was a seawall stretching out from the shore that hadn’t been there before; even the contours of the dunes had changed. To Ando, however, everything was just as it had been. The last two years now seemed to him nothing but one long nightmare.

He sat on an embankment from which he could look down over the beach. Sunlight as bright as midsummer’s hit him full in the face. Shading his eyes with his hand, he squinted at a small figure playing at the water’s edge. The figure didn’t approach the water, but squatted in place, barefoot on dry sand, digging holes and making sand piles. Ando couldn’t take his eyes off the figure.

He thought he heard someone calling his name. Wondering if he’d imagined it, he looked around. He saw a stocky man who was walking along the top of the embankment, headed straight for Ando.

The man wore a striped long-sleeve shirt buttoned right up to the top. The shirt looked about to burst; the man’s chest and upper arms were amazingly well-muscled. His short neck was wrinkled above his painfully tight-looking collar. The man’s blocky, angular face was sweaty, and he was out of breath as he approached, swinging a plastic bag from a convenience store.

Ando recognized him. The last time he’d seen the man, it was at the medical examiner’s office, back in October.

The man sat down beside Ando, shoulder to shoulder with him.

“Hey, long time no see.”

Ando didn’t reply. He didn’t even meet the man’s eyes, but kept his gaze on the small figure playing near the waves.

“Man, you just disappeared without telling me where you were going. What kind of way is that to treat a friend?” The man took a can of cold oolong tea from the bag, cleared his throat, and drank it dry in a few gulps. When he’d finished, he took out another can and offered it to Ando. “Thirsty?”

Ando accepted the can silently and popped the ring pull.

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

“Miyashita told me that today was the anniversary of your kid’s death. The rest was guesswork. You’re not that hard to figure out,” the man laughed.

Ando had to restrain himself. “What do you want?”

“Look, I had to take a train and a bus to get here. I think I deserve a warmer welcome than this.”

“Bullshit,” Ando spat.

“Ooh, don’t be mean,” the man said, a smirk playing over his lips.

“Mean? Where do you get off calling me that? Who do you think is responsible for your being here?”

“Listen, I’m grateful to you, I really am. You worked out just as I expected.”

Ando was reminded of just how far this man had manipulated him. In medical school, in their days playing at cryptography, this guy could toss out a code that Ando couldn’t possibly break, and then turn around and immediately crack one Ando had wrung his brain to come up with. Ando had felt annoyed and frustrated, but also somehow inspired by the guy’s cleverness. Not anymore. Now, he just felt used, and insulted. He found nothing to praise in the man.

Ando looked over at Ryuji Takayama, whom he had helped bring back to the world. Ryuji was facing forward, and Ando looked at his profile, wishing he could see inside Ryuji’s head. He wished he knew what this man was thinking. Then he remembered that last October he actually had laid his hands on the man’s brain. Not that it helped him understand any of Ryuji’s thoughts. And because he hadn’t, he’d let Ryuji’s codes lead him into a mess. If he hadn’t performed Ryuji’s autopsy, he would never have become involved.

“Isn’t this better for you, too?” Ryuji said in a patronizing tone.

“I don’t know about that.” That was the truth.

Down by the water’s edge, the little figure stood up and waved at Ando. When he saw Ando make a beckoning motion with his head, the boy came closer, kicking sand as he came.

“Daddy, I’m thirsty!”

Ando offered his son the oolong tea Ryuji had given him. The boy took it and brought it quickly to his lips.

Ando watched his son’s pale throat. He could almost see the cool liquid coursing down the little throat. Living, moving flesh and blood.

Compared to the sweat oiling Ryuji’s face, the droplets of perspiration rolling down the three-and-a-half-year-old boy’s neck were like crystal. Ando could hardly believe they were basically the same fluid.

“Hi there, kid. Want another one? We’re two of a kind, you know,” Ryuji said, fishing around in his bag.

Two of a kind. The phrase stuck in Ando’s craw. It was true, though: the boy and Ryuji had been born of the same womb. Ando found it utterly horrifying.

His son looked at Ryuji and shook his head, then raised his half-finished can of tea and said, “Can I have the rest?”

“Sure, drink up,” said Ando, and the boy went back to the water’s edge, swilling the can. Ando figured the boy wanted to play with the can after it was empty, maybe fill it with sand. Ando yelled after him, “Takanori!”

The boy stopped and turned around. “What, Daddy?”

“Don’t go in the water yet, okay?”

The boy grinned, and turned his back to him again.

Ando didn’t have to stress the point. The child was still afraid of the water, as if he remembered drowning. He probably wouldn’t go into the water of his own accord. Even though he knew that, Ando couldn’t help but be a little overprotective.

“Cute kid.”

Ando didn’t need Ryuji to tell him. Of course Takanori was cute. He was a jewel, an irreplaceable treasure that he’d lost once. A treasure that he’d betrayed the human race to recover. Ando still wasn’t sure if he’d done the right thing.

The reward Sadako had offered him in exchange for his help was to resurrect his son.

Half a year ago, when he and Miyashita had read those words in the letter Sadako had left in his apartment, Ando had found the idea too ludicrous to accept. But that feeling had passed in an instant, and he’d become a firm believer in resurrection. After all, he had Sadako herself as living proof. And he had carefully preserved a sample of his son’s DNA in the form of a lock of hair that he kept on the bookshelf. Without some cells from his son, the resurrection would have been impossible. If it weren’t for the fact that Ando’s hand had brushed against the boy’s head in the sea, catching those few strands of hair in his ring, Takanori’s genetic information would have been lost forever.

Scientifically speaking, it wasn’t difficult. As long as they had a maternal body with the special capabilities-as long as they had Sadako, in other words-modern science could easily take care of the rest.

The first thing to do was for Sadako to inseminate one of her own eggs. With both female and male functions, Sadako was the only one capable of implanting a fertilized egg in her uterine wall with no outside assistance. The next step was to remove this egg and replace its DNA with the DNA of the individual they wanted to bring back to life. True, it took delicate skill to extract the nucleus from one of the cells in Takanori’s hair and switch it with the nucleus of Sadako’s inseminated egg. But for a specialist, it wasn’t all that difficult. Theoretically, it was possible even to resurrect long-extinct dinosaurs, as long as their DNA survived.

The egg with its newly-implanted nucleus was then returned to Sadako’s womb. All they had to do now was wait for it to be born. The fetus crawled out of her womb in about a week, and a week after that, it had grown to the age at which the DNA sample had been separated from the rest of the original body. In Takanori’s case, it was the moment when the drowning boy’s head had touched his father’s hand, leaving a lock of hair behind. He even recovered all of his memories up to the point of his death. It appeared that memories were stored in the intron, the “junk” part of the DNA that doesn’t contain genetic code.

The Takanori that Ando was seeing now was in all respects identical to the son he’d lost. From his habits to the way he spoke, he was just like he used to be. He had all of his memories of his time with his parents, too, and speaking with him felt perfectly natural.

As soon as she’d presented Ando with his son, Sadako had demanded that he earn his reward. Her request was just what Ando had expected. She wanted him to use the same techniques to resurrect Ryuji. Bringing back Takanori was as much practice as payment. From the beginning, it had been Ryuji’s will to be reborn that had allowed him to expel the numerical code from his belly sutures, and then to insert a coded message into the ring virus’s DNA. And he’d gotten his wish. He’d gotten a body, and now he was sitting next to Ando in the flesh. It was he who’d been Sadako’s partner all along, and a formidable one at that.

This was the first time Ando had seen the resurrected Ryuji. As soon as he’d made sure that Ryuji’s DNA had been successfully switched with the inseminated egg’s, Ando had taken his son and disappeared. He told no one where they were going, leaving the rest of the operation in the hands of Miyashita and others. He figured that, with Ryuji’s conception, his role was over. With Ryuji around, there was no further need for him. Sadako’s greatest desire had been to have Ryuji around as a reliable ally.

At exactly what point had she and Ryuji decided to collude? Probably they’d communicated somehow at the DNA level, recognized in each other a valuable co-conspirator, and realized that a partnership would be for their mutual benefit.

But the question didn’t really interest Ando. His concern was monopolized now by the problem of how he was going to raise his son. To give himself time to think about it, he’d resigned from the university two months ago, and spent the time since traveling around and seeing the Japanese countryside. He had no particular aim. He just wanted to live at as far a remove from Ryuji and Sadako as possible.

Ryuji reached into a pocket and pulled out an ampoule.

“Here,” he said, offering it to Ando.

“What’s this?”

“A vaccine made from the ring virus.”

“A vaccine…” Ando accepted the tiny glass vial and examined it carefully.

Ando’s and Miyashita’s blood tests had come back positive. Just as they’d suspected, reading the Ring report had made them carriers of the virus. Ever since, they’d both been living in apprehension, wondering when the virus within them would start to act up.

“Take that and it’ll take care of the virus. Your worrying days are over.”

“Did you come all the way here just to give me this?”

“What, can’t a guy go to the beach once in a while?” Ryuji gave an embarrassed laugh. Ando let down his guard a little. No matter where he’d moved, he’d never have been able to relax as long as he carried the ring virus.

“So tell me. What’s going to happen to the world now?” Ando asked, putting the vial in his breast pocket and buttoning it shut.

“I don’t know.” Ryuji’s reply was blunt.

“Don’t give me that. Together you and Sadako are going to redesign the world and everything that lives in it-aren’t you?”

“I can tell you what’s going to happen in the immediate future. But after that… Even I don’t know.”

“Then at least tell me about the immediate future.”

“Ring’s sold over a million copies.”

“A million-seller, huh?” Ando already knew this. He’d seen it in newspapers. The book had already been through several reprints, a fact that was trumpeted in its marketing. But every time Ando saw the word “reprint” it made him think “replication”. Ring had been able to effect a near-instantaneous mass reproduction of itself. There were now more than a million people carrying the virus.

“They’re even making it into a movie.”

“A movie? Ring?”

“Mm-hmm. They cast the part of Sadako through an open casting call.”

“An open casting call?” Ando found himself reduced to repeating after Ryuji.

The resurrected man broke into laughter. “That’s right, an open casting call. And who do you think nailed the part of Sadako?”

Ando didn’t keep up on show-business news. “Tell me,” he said. How was he to know who’d passed the audition?

Ryuji was almost doubled over with laughter. “Don’t be such a dullard. You know her quite well.”

“Sadako… herself?”

It was only as he said the name that he realized the import of this development. Sadako had always wanted to be an actress. She’d joined a professional theater troupe right out of high school. She was no amateur, she had the training. It wasn’t surprising that she’d auditioned, and with her powers, she must have easily captured the casting director’s heart. Besides, it was an irresistible role. Sadako would be playing herself. Ando thought he could guess why. She wanted to project her thoughts into the film, so that when the movie showed the killer videotape, it carried her genetic information again. The extinct tape itself was now to be resurrected, and on a grand scale.

And what would be the result? Ando had no idea how big a hit it would be, but it was certain that a fair number of women would go to the theater to see it; those who happened to be ovulating would be visited by the same tragedy that had destroyed Mai. A week later, they would all give birth to Sadako, their own bodies cast aside as used cocoons, abandoned to decay.

And then the movie would hit the video rental shops, and then it’d be broadcast on TV. The images would spread far more quickly than they ever could have through one-copy-at-a-time dubbing. This would be reproduction at an explosive rate. And these new Sadakos would all be able to have children of their own, by themselves. Sadako had managed to work out a method by which she’d have the whole world wrapped instantly around her finger.

“Sadako’s going to breed with the media,” Ryuji said, finally done laughing and looking up.

“They’ll figure it out soon enough, and the movie will be suppressed.” Not just the movie, but the book, too. All circulating copies would be rounded up and burned. Ando wanted to believe that humanity would rally.

“Nope. Just think how huge the media industry is, and how many people in it have already been in contact with the virus. Even if Ring itself is destroyed, the media is going to be transformed by people who have contracted the ring virus. Just as that videotape mutated into a book, it’s going to get into every stream: music, video games, computer networks. New media will crossbreed with Sadako and produce more new media, and every ovulating woman who comes in contact with them will give birth to Sadako.”

Ando touched his breast pocket and felt the vial of vaccine. It would be effective only against the ring virus. It would be powerless against mutated media. Without knowing what type of media the virus would mutate into, it was impossible to concoct a vaccine that would be effective against them. Humanity would forever lag behind. Sadako, the new species, would gradually crowd out the human race until finally she’d driven it to the edge of extinction.

“And you’re okay with all that?”

Ando himself couldn’t peacefully sit back and watch as people died and Sadako took their places. But never mind him. Ryuji was taking an active role in the whole thing, helping it along. Ando simply couldn’t understand that.

“You’re looking at it from a human standpoint. I’m not. The way I see it, one person dies, one Sadako is born. Add one here, take one there, the total’s still the same. Where’s the problem?”

“That’s totally beyond my comprehension.”

Ryuji brought his sweaty face right up close to Ando’s. “Now’s no time for you to be bitching. You’re on our side now.”

“To do what?”

“You’ll get to intervene in evolution, for one thing. A pretty rare opportunity, if you ask me.”

“Evolution? Is that what you call this?” All the diversity of human DNA would converge with the single DNA pattern that was Sadako. Was that evolution? It seemed rather a point of weakness to Ando. It’s precisely because of genetic diversity that some plague victims die while others survive. Even if another ice age comes, thought Ando, the Inuit would be able to live through it, and this would be thanks to diversity, in this case of populations within the human species. If this diversity vanished, then the slightest mischance could lead to the downfall of the whole species. If, say, the original Sadako Yamamura had some defect in her immune system, the defect would be present in every subsequent Sadako. A simple cold could come as a mighty blow to a species.

Ando could only hope that happened. The only path left for the human race was to scrape by and wait for the Sadako species to die out.

“Do you know why living things evolve?” Ando shook his head. He doubted there was anyone who could answer that question with perfect confidence.

But Ryuji’s voice had that confidence as he continued. “Take the eye. I know I don’t have to explain this to an anatomist like yourself, Dr Ando, but the human eye is an amazingly complex mechanism. It’s next to impossible to imagine that a piece of skin evolved into a cornea, a pupil, an eyeball, an optical nerve connecting it to the brain, all in such a way as to make it actually see. It’s hard to believe it all happened by chance. It wasn’t that we started to look at things because there was now a mechanism by which to see them. There first had to be a will to see, buried somewhere inside living things. Without it, the mechanism would never have taken shape. It wasn’t chance that led sea creatures to first crawl onto the land, or reptiles to learn how to fly. They had the will to do so. Now, try and say this and most experts will just laugh. They’ll call it mystical teleology, an execrable excuse for philosophy.

“Can you imagine what the world is like for a creature that can’t see? To the worms crawling around in the earth, the world is only what touches their bodies there in the darkness. For starfish or sea anemones waving around on the ocean floor, the whole world is the texture of the rock they’re stuck to and the feel of the water as it flows by. Do you think such a creature can even conceptualize seeing? It beggars the imagination. It’s one of those things you can’t contemplate, like the edge of the universe. But somehow, at a certain point in its evolution, life on earth acquired the concept of ‘seeing’. We crawled up onto the land, we flew into the skies, and in the end we grasped culture. A chimp can comprehend a banana. But it’ll never be able to comprehend the concept of culture. It can’t comprehend it, but somehow it gets the will to obtain it. Where that impulse comes from, I have no idea.”

“Oh, so there’s something even you don’t know?” Ando said with all the sarcasm he could muster.

“Pay attention. If the human race goes extinct and Sadako Yamamura’s DNA takes its place in the end it’s because the human race willed it.”

“Does any species desire its own extinction?” “Subconsciously isn’t that what humanity desired? If all DNA were united into one pattern, there would be no more individual difference. Everyone would be the same, with no distinctions in ability, or beauty. There’d be no more attachment to loved ones. And forget about war, there wouldn’t even be any more arguments. We’re talking a world of absolute peace and equality that transcends even life and death. Death would no longer be something to fear, you see. Now, be honest, isn’t that what you humans wanted all along?”

By the end of his speech, Ryuji had brought his mouth even closer and was whispering into Ando’s ear. Ando, meanwhile, simply kept staring at Takanori, who for some time now had been crouched in the same position, packing sand into his empty can.

“Not me,” he replied. His son was special to him, unique. Ando had no desire to see things exactly as other people did. He could say that with confidence.

“Well, whatever,” Ryuji laughed, getting to his feet.

“Are you leaving?”

“It’s about time I took off. What are you going to do now?”

“What can I do? I’ll find a deserted island someplace out of the media’s reach, and raise my son there.”

“That sounds like you. Me, I’m going to watch the end of the human race. Once it’s gone as far as it can go, who knows, maybe a will beyond human wisdom will came raining its wrath down on us. I’d hate to miss that.

Ryuji started walking along the embankment.

“Bye, Ryuji. Say hi to Miyasnita for me.” Ryuji stopped again at the sound of Ando’s voice.

“Maybe I ought to teach you one more thing before I go. Why do you think human culture progressed? People can endure almost anything, but there’s one thing they just can’t survive. Man is an animal that can’t stand boredom. And that’s what set the whole thing off. In order to escape boredom, humanity had to progress. I imagine it’ll be pretty boring to be controlled by a single strand of DNA. Think about it in those terms, and it seems like you’d want to have as much individual variation as possible. But hey, what can we do? People just don’t want that variation. Oh, and one last thing-I think you’re going to be pretty bored on that desert island.”

With that and a wave of his hand, Ryuji walked off.

Ando had no definite plans as to where they were going to live. The future was still too uncertain for that. Prospects were such that maybe no plan, no matter how ingenious, would work. He’d just have to drift for a while and let happen what may.

Ando took off his shirt and slacks. He was wearing swim trunks underneath. He ran to his son, took the boy’s hand, and helped him to his feet.

“Let’s go.”

He’d explained to his son a hundred times what they needed to do today and why they needed to do it. They were going to swim out into the ocean just as they had two years ago, and then, when the boy was on the verge of drowning, Ando would take firm hold of his hand. Two years ago their hands had missed. Today they were going to hold on tight.

In the letter she’d left him, Sadako had written that when she was reborn in the exhaust shaft on the roof of that building, she realized it was the exact same situation, physically, as the bottom of the well where she’d died. And only when she had crawled out of the hole on her own did she sense, intuitively, that she’d be able to adapt to the new world. Ando thought his son needed to undergo the same sort of trial. The boy needed to be put in the same situation he’d been in two years ago.

Takanori had an abnormal fear of water, so strong that it was going to make daily life difficult for him if he couldn’t conquer it. As they walked along over the wet sand, Ando could feel Takanori’s hand tighten on his in fear every time seawater lapped at the boy’s ankles.

Now the boy turned to him with trembling lips and said, “Daddy, you promised, right?”

“Yes, I did.”

Ando had already prepared the reward he’d promised the boy for meeting his father’s expectations and overcoming his fear of the water. He was going to let him meet his mother.

“Mommy’s going to be so surprised.”

His wife didn’t know yet that their son had been brought back to life. Ando got excited just thinking about the moment when mother and son would be reunited. He’d have to think of a plausible story. Maybe he could say that the boy hadn’t drowned after all but had been rescued by a fishing boat; that he’d had amnesia, that he’d lived with other folks for the last two years. It didn’t matter how ridiculous the story was. The minute she touched Takanori, alive in the flesh, it would become the truth.

Whether or not they’d be able to make it as a married couple again was another question. Ando wanted to try. He gave himself a fifty-fifty chance.

A particularly big wave tame along and started to raise the boy’s body off the sand. The boy gave a little shriek and clung tightly to Ando’s waist. Ando held his son tightly to his side and waded out into the sea. He could feel his son’s heartbeat. That rhythm was the only sure thing in a world facing destruction. It proved they were alive.