Koji Suzuki - Loop

"Don't forget your promise," Kaoru said. He'd extracted another pledge from Eliot, in addition to his promise to use the data from Kaoru's body to help his parents and Reiko first of all.

"I won't. Trust me."

Kaoru listened carefully for Eliot's response, then turned and opened the door. Only he could go beyond that point. He slipped in, and the door shut behind him automatically.

An odd smell. Ions, perhaps. From this point, he'd receive instructions via loudspeaker. The metallic voice coming through the speakers was the only sound that came in from the outside. Kaoru was utterly cut off from the external world.

Following instructions, Kaoru took off the gown he was wearing, and then his sandals and his underwear. He went into the next room naked. According to what Eliot had told him, he was to pass through several clean rooms.

He had a pretty clear idea what was going to happen. He was going to be suspended in the centre of the huge sphere that was the neutrino scanning capture system, where he would be bombarded with neutrinos from all directions. But there was a procedure he had to follow first.

In the next room he saw a stretcher. A voice instructed him to lie down on it. He lay down face up, and the stretcher began silently moving down a narrow, dark hallway. It took Kaoru through an air shower, and then a shower of purified water. Together these cleansed the surface of his body of all contaminants.

As he passed each station on the line, he could see a digital meter with a reading flashing in red, numbers approaching closer to one hundred with each stage. 99.99… 99.999… 99.9999… The gauges showed the degree to which the rooms, and thus their occupant, were free of impurities.

The stretcher conveyed Kaoru into a clear oblong container. Purified water, slightly warmer than body temperature, began to engulf him. The container was shaped not so much like a bathtub as like a slightly oversized coffin.

Kaoru was fixed firmly in place, floating in water. Next he was transported into the neutrino scanning capture system.

The water had a calming effect on him. Gradually he became unable to tell where his body left off and the water began, as his ego began to dissolve into tiny bubbles and joined the water.

Reiko's last words came back to him again, in what might have been his ego's last attempt at resistance.

I felt the baby move this morning.

She'd sounded so happy to be able to report on the baby's growth. The thought of the foetus in the embrace of her amniotic fluid allowed Kaoru to see his own situation as a bystander might. Come to think of it, he was in the same state as that baby, right down to its will to be born.

This place was a universe unto itself, ruled by utter darkness. Gravity had disappeared: his body felt weightless. He knew he was inside a sphere six hundred feet in diameter. His eyes should have been able to see its inner surface. But in the darkness the space surrounding him felt infinite.

As a child, he'd often gone out onto the balcony of his family's high-rise apartment to stare up into the night sky. Seeing the stars and the moon always strengthened his desire to fathom the universe.

What a different situation he was in now. Back then he'd stood on a height overlooking the ocean; now he was in a three-thousand-feet deep hole in the desert. Back then the air had been filled with the scent of the sea; this space was filled with the artificial smell of ions.

He thought he saw a blue light flash for an instant in the emptiness above him. Had the neutrino bombardment begun? The flash reminded him of a star twinkling.

Any moment now he would be bombarded with neutrinos from points on every part of the inner surface of the sphere. Each would penetrate his body and reach the point on the sphere wall opposite its point of origin. Molecular information about him would accumulate gradually, until Eliot would begin to get a three-dimensional digital image of his body's minutest structures. The more neutrino radiation he received, the sharper that image would become. He'd been told that the first rounds would simply pass through his body-he wouldn't feel much if anything. But that level of irradiation wouldn't provide enough information for their purposes. They would need to expose him to so much neutrino penetration as to actually break down his cells. Kaoru tried not to think about what would happen to him then.

There were more blue lights now, and they flashed more quickly, blinking energetically in the darkness. They was beautiful. They tore through space like shooting stars, glittering, leaving white trails behind.

Kaoru stared peacefully into the night sky. He felt like a child again…

He wondered if this was what astronauts felt like. They said that seeing the Earth from space brought one closer to the territory of the divine. If so, then it was a little different from Kaoru's situation after all. What he was aiming at was godhood itself.

Something was pressing rhythmically on his eardrums, strange, as he should be cut off from all sound in here. Someone or something was speaking loudly into his ear. Whatever it was, it couldn't be human. Maybe a digital signal from the virtual world?

Suddenly, an image was inserted into his mind. It was as if a Chagall painting had been forcefully placed inside his head. He wasn't seeing it with his eyes-it was like a cord from a video deck had been connected directly to his brain. Brightly coloured, impressionistic images flashed through his mind, disappearing as abruptly as they had appeared.

The bluish white lights connected into tangled thread work now, an infinite number of bands intersecting in the middle distance. The lines of light now filled the darkness. He could hear the sounds of their collisions, sounds he shouldn't have been able to hear… Digital signals whirled around him, caressing his earlobes.

His body was cast into the gravity-less universe. He felt as if he were floating up out of the tank of water and into the vortex of light. His mind wandered from his body, becoming clearer all the time.

Kaoru was entering the final stage now. Every second brought him closer to the end of this journey which had begun as a trip toward a point in the desert and had become a pilgrimage to death and rebirth.

The images were slipped into his brain, images composed of rough particles. Mosaic-like images, with indistinct edges. Try as he might he could no longer summon smooth, natural images as before. There wasn't enough information to analyze properly.

The neutrino bombardment intensified. His molecular structure began to take digital shape. As its resolution increased, the mosaic filter was removed from the images in his brain. Now they were reproduced before his mind's eye as perfectly natural images.

Vision was back to normal now. He thought he glimpsed, at the far end of a corridor of light, a Hades indistinguishable from the here-and-now.

His journey ended. His body disappeared from the real world and was reborn into the Loop.

The procedure had concluded. The tank in which Kaoru had been floating now contained no human form. Instead it held the liquefied remains of his destroyed cells. As his ego had melted into the water, so too had his body broken down into its smallest components, dissolving into the purified water. The water was no longer pure. Thanks to the bluish white light it didn't look bloody, but it was a noticeably thicker liquid than before.

His body was defunct. But Kaoru's consciousness still existed. Neutrinos had captured the state of his brain on the brink of death, the positions of his synapses and neurons, chemical reactions in mid-reaction, and had recreated them all digitally.

He was not to be reconstructed directly from this final blueprint. Rather, he would be reborn according to the information captured by the NSCS. The growth process would be carefully controlled, and after approximately a week of Loop time, the infant would grow to the physical state the subject had been in when he'd entered the NSCS. He should regain his original consciousness, as well.