Koji Suzuki - Loop

Kaoru had a pretty good idea where he was now. Inside a womb. A real one, not a metaphorical one. He was inside a virgin womb, bathed in amniotic fluid.

He could hear his mother's heartbeat as if over a great distance. The sound echoed in the dark, sealed sphere, getting louder and louder.

Kaoru did not know whose womb he was in, but he knew he was about to be born.

He stretched out his body, filled with a desire to get out into the world.

The light was too bright: it hurt his eyes. But this wasn't the bluish flickering anymore. The light was steady and white, artificial. It seemed to come from overhead fluorescent light fixtures, the kind you find in hospitals.

In the light, he could see his umbilical cord, the grotesque thread that alone connected him to the mother. He reached out a hand and tried to sever it himself, and let forth a loud cry. A cry just like any normal baby's.

"Wah! Wah!"

It was the beginning of a new journey.

The day was so clear it was hard to believe it was the rainy season. Walking along on the embankment that separated the beach from the road, he set his sights on the horizon: the other side of the bay was obscured in haze. A sea wall extended out from the beach; several anglers stood on it, lazily casting their lines into the sea. It was still early in the summer, so there were no bathers yet, but a couple of families had spread sheets on the sand and were picnicking.

Gazing at this peaceful seaside scene he could forget that this was only a virtual reality. Six months had elapsed since his rebirth into the Loop. He'd adapted to this world completely, body and mind.

The previous October, Ryuji Takayama had died, once. His death had been confirmed, and an autopsy had been performed by a friend of his from medical school, Mitsuo Ando. Notwithstanding that, in January of this year Takayama had awoken from his three-month sleep, due to the combined efforts of Ando, his pathologist colleague Miyashita, and others. He had crawled out of the womb of a maiden named Sadako Yamamura, had torn the umbilical cord with his own hands, and in just a week's time he'd grown into the body Kaoru had possessed when he'd entered the neutrino scanner. Ando and Miyashita, unaware that the Loop had been created by a higher power, could not be expected to understand the true mechanism behind Takayama's resurrection. The three months Takayama had been dead corresponded to the twenty years of Kaoru's lifetime. And now the consciousness that had once been Kaoru had taken on Takayama's flesh in order to live in the Loop.

His living conditions were rather inconvenient-a dead man couldn't very well walk around in public-but he was in a perfect environment for research. Takayama had spent most of half a year in a laboratory lent him by Miyashita, researching the virus. This meant unravelling one by one the clues hidden within his own cells. It had taken half a year to finish the greater part of the research and to perfect a vaccine for the ring virus.

This was his first time out in a long while. He could feel the gentle wind cleansing his heart as it played over his skin. In his days as Kaoru he'd enjoyed the night-time breeze on the balcony of their apartment; evidently his tastes hadn't changed.

He could see the small form of a boy beyond the picnickers, standing where the waves petered out. The boy would creep hesitantly up to the water, and then dash back so as not to get his feet wet. Then he crouched and started digging a hole and making a sand pile. His body was bare from the waist up, and below the waist he wore a swimsuit, making his aversion to the water all the more conspicuous. His movements were quite careful. The boy wore a tight bikini-type swim-suit, and no swim cap.

The watcher thought about the first time he'd seen Reiko, at the pool. He remembered the queer impression her son Ryoji had made with his plaid shorts, not meant for swimming, and his swim cap from which not one strand of hair poked out. The touch of Reiko's skin, the last words they'd exchanged-these images and sounds remained clear in his memory. What was she doing now?

He was walking along the narrow embankment with a plastic bag full of canned drinks, carefully balancing so as not to fall onto the sand or the road. Unlike the ridge he'd walked in the desert, the embankment was only a couple of feet wide. As he walked he felt as though he were traversing the thin, fragile boundary between this world and the next.

The boy ran away from the waves toward the embankment-he was heading toward a man seated on the embankment about a hundred yards ahead. The seated man was the boy's father, the man he himself had come to talk to.

The man had eyes only for his son, and so was utterly unprepared for the visitor. Thinking it best not to startle him, Ryuji Takayama called out his name.

"Hey, Ando!"

Hearing his name called, the man looked up and all around. Then he caught sight of Takayama walking toward him, and his expression became one of dumb amazement.

"Hey, long time no see."

Takayama hadn't had any contact with Ando these six months. After assisting in Takayama's rebirth, Ando had left the university. He'd disappeared.

Takayama sat down next to Ando and leaned closer so that their shoulders touched. But Ando quite openly avoided meeting his eyes, instead returning his gaze to his son, still running across the beach toward him.

Nonplussed, Takayama took a beverage out of the bag he carried and quickly drank it down. Then he took another can out and offered it to Ando. "Thirsty?"

Ando accepted the can silently and popped the pull ring, still not looking at Takayama.

"How did you know I was here?" Ando asked calmly.

Takayama simply said, "Miyashita told me." Knowing that today was the anniversary of Ando's son's death, Miyashita had guessed that this was where he'd be, and he'd told Takayama.

A curious thing it was, though, that anniversary. Two years ago today, at this very spot, Ando's son had drowned, and yet now here the boy was. Forgetting his own situation for a moment, Takayama could not help but smile.

"What do you want?" Ando asked, in a voice thick with tension. He didn't seem very happy to see Takayama. Takayama had made a considerable effort to get here-he'd had to sneak out of the lab, then take a train and a bus. He felt he deserved a bit warmer a welcome. There seemed to be a misunderstanding of some kind.

Eliot had told him that everything was arranged for his rebirth. In any world, the idea of a dead man coming back to life would be pretty hard to accept. The stage would have to be set.

And set it Eliot had. He'd singled out Ando as someone who could be of use and sent him hints in code, all so he could arrange in as plausible a way as possible for Takayama's rebirth. Bringing Ando's dead son back to life was bait to get him to assist in bringing Takayama back.

In the case of Ando's son, an inhabitant of the Loop, there was no need to go through a neutrino scan. It was an intra-Loop transfer, a simple matter of reconstituting the boy's genetic information.

The Loop had been reset, six months ago, to the point where its cancerization had been triggered, and then restarted. Takayama's advent had been timed with the utmost care so as to enable him to conquer the calamity whose seeds had been sown. If he were to do nothing, the Loop would proceed along the same path, turning cancerous. He needed to construct for it a new history, make a new channel for its dammed-up waters. If he succeeded, the world he'd lived in before, too, would retain its genetic diversity.

"Listen, I'm grateful to you, I really am. You worked out just as I expected."

Takayama was indeed grateful to Ando. Just before coming to the Loop, he'd committed Takayama's life to memory. He knew of his school days with Ando, and he knew of Ando's brilliance. Without the help of such a friend, he doubted he ever would have been able to make his entrance in such a reasonable way as via virgin birth.