Koji Suzuki - Loop

"Yeah, I guess so."

Ryoji turned his normally hollow gaze forward and began to stretch where he sat on the bed. He was smiling like he always did, although there was nothing funny about what they were discussing. It wasn't a healthy smile. It was the desperate grin of someone at the end of his own life scorning the world. Kaoru thought he'd gotten used to it, but it could still annoy him if he looked at it long enough. If his father smiled like that, he'd give him a good talking-to-he'd rip into him, father or not.

There was only one way to wipe that smile off Ryoji's face: goad him into a passionate debate.

Kaoru changed the subject. "So what are your thoughts on the theory of evolution?" It was a natural progression from genetics.

"What do you mean?" Ryoji squirmed and rolled his eyes at Kaoru.

"Okay, how's this for starters? Does evolution move randomly or toward a predetermined goal?"

"What do you think?" This was one of Ryoji's less pleasing habits. He always tried to ferret out his interlocutor's thinking first, instead of coming straight out with his own opinion.

"I think evolution moves in a certain direction, but always with a certain latitude for choice." Kaoru couldn't bring himself to give a ringing endorsement of mainstream Darwinian evolutionary theory. Even now that he was taking his first steps toward becoming a specialist in a natural science, he couldn't completely abandon the idea that there was a purpose behind it all.

"The direction theory. That's pretty much what I believe, too." Ryoji leaned toward Kaoru, as if he'd accomplished something.

"Shall we start with the emergence of life?"

"The emergence of life?" Ryoji looked truly astonished.

"Sure. How you look at the emergence of life is an important question."

"It is?" Ryoji furrowed his brow and looked like he wanted to get out of this question but quick.

Kaoru didn't appreciate this attitude of Ryoji's. For a kid like him it should be fun to play around with questions like this. The question of why life on earth was able to gain the ability to evolve was intimately connected with the question of how life first emerged on earth. Kaoru, at least, had gotten a lot of enjoyment out of debating this with his father.

"Well, let's move on, then. Let's grant that life emerged, by some mechanism we don't yet understand. So, next…" Kaoru stopped to let Ryoji step in.

"I think the first life on earth was something like a seed. That seed contained the right information so that it could sprout, grow, and eventually become the tree which is life as we know it, including humankind."

"Are there no variations?"

"Yes and no. The biggest tree grows from the tiniest seed. The size of the trunk, the colour of the leaves, the type of fruit-all that information is already contained within the seed. But of course the tree is also influenced by the natural environment. If it doesn't get sunlight it'll wither, if it doesn't get enough nutrients the trunk'll be thin. Maybe it'll be struck by lightning and split in two, maybe its branches will break in a gale. But no amount of unpredictable influence of that kind can change the basic nature of the tree as contained in the seed. Come rain or snow, a ginkgo tree will never bear apples."

Kaoru licked his lips. He didn't mean to contradict Ryoji. He basically agreed with him, in fact.

"So you're saying that if sea creatures learn to walk on land, if giraffes develop long necks, it's all because they were programmed that way from the start?"

"Well, yeah."

"In that case, we should assume that there was some kind of will at work before life began."

Ryoji responded innocently. "Whose will? God's?"

But Kaoru wasn't thinking about God per se, just an invisible will at work both before life began and during the process of evolution.

He found himself imagining a school of fish fighting with each other to get to land. There was an overwhelming power in the thought of all those fish, enough of them to dye the sea black, jumping around as they sought dry land.

Of course it was possible that sea life had never intended to go on land, but had simply succeeded in adapting to it after orogenic processes had begun to dry up the water. That was how the mainstream evolutionary thinker would explain it.

But the image that came to Kaoru's mind was of those hollow-eyed fish, yearning day in and day out for the land, dying at the water's edge and making mountains of their corpses. Mainstream evolution had it that a certain fraction of them had simply been lucky enough to adapt. Kaoru simply couldn't believe that. The transition from a marine to a land-based living environment involved changes in internal organs. Their insides had to be remade to allow for the transition from gill breathing to lung breathing. What kind of bodily trial and error had resulted in those changes? One kind of organ had been reborn as another. It was pretty major, when you thought about it.

Right in front of Kaoru was Ryoji's bald head. Because Ryoji was hunched over, the top of his head came up to the tip of Kaoru's nose. At this very moment, within that emaciated little body, a violent cellular conflict was being enacted. As it was within Kaoru's father Hideyuki. He'd lost most of his stomach, part of his large intestine, and his liver. And still, more as-yet-unknown cancer cells had taken up residence in some new spot in his body and were writhing there even now.

An unexpected inspiration came to Kaoru.

Cancer cells invaded a normal organ, changing its colour and shape and constructing new bulges, until the normal functioning of the organ was impaired and it died. The obviously negative aspects of this were what stood out, but at the same time it was possible to detect in the cancer's actions a certain groping towards something. By infiltrating the blood and lymph to penetrate cells elsewhere, it was experimenting with transplanting its immortal nature bit by bit. But to what end?

To create somewhere within the body a new organ adapted to the future. Maybe the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus was nothing but a sort of trial-and-error attempt to create a new organ.

In the process, large numbers of human beings would die, just as most of the fish had died at the water's edge. But just as after a hundred million years sea life had finally made it onto the land, someday, after countless sacrifices, maybe the human race would find itself with a new organ. Humanity would have evolved. Maybe an evolutionary leap comparable to the movement from the water to the land was impossible without something like a new organ. When would it happen?

Human cancer deaths were surging upward, but without knowing when the cancer cells had started their work it was impossible to know if the human race had just begun its fumbling toward evolution, or was about to complete it. The only thing certain was that the pace of evolution was accelerating. The time it took for apes to evolve into humans was shorter than what had been needed for sea creatures to evolve into amphibians, so much shorter that there was almost no comparison. So it was possible. The intervals in the evolutionary process were gradually getting shorter, so maybe it wasn't too soon for this to be evolution, too.

Kaoru wanted to think so. He wanted to turn his attention to anything that would afford him hope. He wanted to believe that his father would be the first one to successfully evolve, rather than just another sacrifice.

To be reborn. Kaoru would have wanted that, if it were possible. No doubt everybody wanted to live again. The gift of eternal life.

Since it was a property of the MHC virus to create immortal cells, it was only natural to fantasize about human immortality. Maybe even Ryoji had a chance.

Kaoru almost said so, but bit back the words. Anything that sounded like an affirmation of the illness might have the effect of loosening the boy's attachment to living.