Koji Suzuki - Loop

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.

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?"