Koji Suzuki - Loop

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.