Koji Suzuki - Loop

The Native American legend his mother had shown him had said to follow the warrior's guidance. No warrior would be appearing to him in reality, but the place to which he would have guided Kaoru had he appeared was already stored in Kaoru's memory. All he had to do was follow the strands of memory, comparing them one by one with reality, and he'd find his route.

There was no longer any doubt. The place would appear to him somewhere up ahead. Tonight, though, he must have rest. Kaoru unshouldered his pack and rested his legs.

Every step on the road thus far had further awakened Kaoru's senses. With no rhyme or reason, sensation after sensation had flooded his consciousness. He felt terror, jealousy, exultation, with no grounds for feeling them-they just came over him, stimulating his senses. He suspected that if he persisted in tracing their source back into the past, he'd eventually arrive at the moment of his own birth.

He spread his mat out on a flat rock and then curled up in his sleeping bag. It wasn't all that cold yet, but he knew that as the night wore on the temperature in the desert would plummet. In his bedroll he nibbled on some bread and sipped at some whiskey.

Suddenly he sat up and looked around. He had felt, or imagined he'd felt, something's breath on the back of his neck.

He could feel the chill of the stone through the mat and sleeping bag. The breathing was regular, rhythmic, like the working of a respirator, or the breathing of a predator eying its prey, trying to calm itself, body and spirit.

From the same direction, Kaoru could feel something gazing at him. He could plainly sense the will behind it. The gaze bored into the base of his skull, quickening his pulse.

He couldn't bear it any longer. He looked behind him. There he saw, maybe ten yards away in the shadow of a tree, a naked man on one knee training a bow and arrow on him. The man's skin was dark, so dark that he could have blended in with the night, but somehow Kaoru was able to make him out.

The man's long hair was tied back simply; he wore no feathers or other headdress. He looked to be of medium height and build, and his muscles hardly bulged, but he held the bow with the air of an expert.

Kaoru tried to move, and found that he couldn't. It was as though he was in one of those half-waking states where the mind is aware but the body is immobile. All he could do was stare at the arrow.

The man's right thumb was bent where he was pulling taut the bowstring. He was aiming at Kaoru's head. The arrowhead was of gleaming obsidian. Kaoru knew at a glance that this was no rubber toy.

The man's face was expressionless. Kaoru could detect there no hatred, but no charity either. No rapture. Only the stare of a hunter determined to faithfully perform his allotted part.

Kaoru stared dumbfounded at the slowly receding arrowhead. He felt no fear. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew this was not real.

But when he could see that the energy accumulating in the bow had reached a certain peak, suddenly the image of himself transformed into a beast burst into Kaoru's head. Reflexively he tried to duck. But the arrow had already been released. Its silently revolving tip grew to dominate Kaoru's field of vision. Kaoru leaned forward, as if throwing himself at the arrow, and then consciousness receded.

He was only out for a moment. When he awoke, he just lay there for a while, staring at the trunk of a tree that towered over him. He thought he'd fallen forward, but now, somehow, he was lying on his back. He brought his hand up to his right eye, the one the arrow should have pierced. It was unharmed. He stood up and looked around for the man with the bow. Gone. He'd disappeared without a trace.

Kaoru realized he must have been hallucinating. Maybe it was because of the peculiar atmosphere of the valley, maybe a memory imprinted on his brain long ago had been resurrected. The brown-skinned man had vanished, leaving the strong sensation of death in Kaoru's mind. He felt as if he'd absorbed death directly, like some kind of radiation.

Phantom it may have been, but the image of the revolving arrow digging into his eye, leading him into darkness, was something he couldn't chase away. It was a dry run for the death that was dogging his footsteps. More than the pain, more than anything, he found that it was the emptiness of death that filled him with bottomless horror.

Every time he experienced death he found a renewed appreciation for the fullness of life. Life and death brushed up against one another, intermixed. For the first time, Kaoru had a premonition of rebirth.

His breathing gradually came under control. As he regained his calm, he lay down again on the earth and looked up at the sky, head pillowed on his hands. Through a gap in one rim of the valley the full moon had appeared. Men had stood on the moon once, decades ago. As a result, the actual existence of the moon was something that was now within the realm of human knowledge. Most likely the sun, too, was really there, at the centre of the solar system.

But the Loop's sun and moon were real to its denizens, too, while Kaoru and others knew that they weren't, not in a spatial sense. Beings in the Loop were merely programmed to perceive time and space.

This train of thought reminded Kaoru of something his father had repeated to him once, a remark of one of the astronauts who'd landed on the moon.

It was just like in the simulation, the man had said when pressed for a comment.

That had stuck in Kaoru's memory. Before going to the moon, of course, the astronauts had been through any number of detailed simulations of the moon's gravity and other physical conditions, many of which had taken place in the deserts of America. Only after they'd experienced the moon walk virtually a number of times did they experience it as reality. What this astronaut was saying was that the reality was exactly like the virtual reality. No matter how fine the calculations, though, there should have been some differences.

Kaoru remembered the Bible's words about God creating the world in His own image. What exactly did it mean that the Loop had ended up looking just like the real world? In the Loop's primeval state life had not arisen naturally. Then the researchers had introduced RNA life forms. And these had become the seeds of all life in the Loop-they'd developed into a tree of life just like the real world's. Given that the Loop and the real world shared the same physics, it wasn't, perhaps, all that surprising that life should have taken the same form. But, to take a hint from the astronaut, shouldn't there have been at least a few differences?

Is this an epiphany?

He couldn't shake the thought that the real world itself was only a virtual world. Logically, the idea couldn't be disproved.

A god. A higher principle. There was nothing to stop Kaoru from accepting life as the creation of such a being. If this was simply a virtual world, then it was after all possible for the Holy Mother, as a virgin, to give birth to the son of God. Or for the son of God, having once died, to rise from the dead in a week's time…

With humanity on the brink of extinction, now would be a good time for God to come. If things went on like this, the whole world would turn cancerous. God had to be watching somewhere, invisibly.

Kaoru stared unseeing at the starry sky, pondering the advent of God.

He'd used up half of his food supply, but he'd made his way out of the deep ravine and onto the ridge. He was about to head northward, toward the mountaintop.

The scenery was locked away in his memory. Once in a while he would hallucinate seeing the tribesman, and that would call forth recollections, letting him know which way he should go. Kaoru emptied his mind and went where he was led.