Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

“A virus borrows its host’s cells in order to reproduce itself, by definition.”

“Right.”

“And sometimes that reproduction takes place at an explosive rate.”

This, too, was common knowledge. One only had to think of the Black Death that ran rampant in the Middle Ages, or the Spanish influenza of modern times, to find examples of a virus proliferating wildly.

“So?” Miyashita urged Ando to continue.

“So think about it. The video tells people, ‘Make a copy within a week or you die.’ Even if the viewer did so, that’s just one tape turning into two. That’s a pretty slow growth rate. Assuming the subsequent viewers repeat the process, that’s still only four tapes after a month.”

“You’ve got a point, I guess.”

“That’s nothing to be scared of.”

“It’s not very virus-like, you mean. Right?”

“If it doesn’t increase at a geometric rate, then it’s hardly spreading at all.”

Miyashita fixed Ando with a glare. “What exactly is it you’re trying to get at?”

“It’s just that…”

Ando wasn’t sure himself what he wanted to say. Was he trying to put a worse spin on things? Certainly there were cases when a single virus spread virtually overnight to thousands, tens of thousands of victims. That was the raison d’etre of a virus, to replicate itself simultaneously in large numbers. Having copies made of a videotape, one at a time, was simply too inefficient. The results said as much; only three months after its birth, the tape was now extinct. Unless it had been reborn through mutation…

“It’s just that I have a bad feeling about this.”

Ando looked again at the photos of the ring virus. Vast numbers of them, piled up on one another. When several specimens overlapped, they looked like unspooled, tangled-up videotape. The psychic Sadako Yamamura, on the brink of death, had converted information into images, leaving some sort of energy at the bottom of that well. The video had been born as a result of the detonation of that energy. It wasn’t matter that was spreading, but information, as recorded on videotape and DNA.

He couldn’t shake the suspicion that some terrible mutation was taking place somewhere he wasn’t aware of. Ando had visited Mai’s apartment, and he’d also been to the rooftop exhaust shaft into which she’d fallen. He’d sensed the strangeness of her room and had felt the weird-ness of that roof underfoot. Maybe that was why he sensed danger bearing down on him more than Miyashita seemed to. He could almost hear the writhing, of something, accelerate under the earth.

“Do you sense some catastrophe?” Miyashita still sounded pretty relaxed.

“It’s just that it’s all so grotesque.”

Ever since Ryuji’s autopsy, Ando had been plunged into the world of the bizarre. Concrete felt soft and clingy under his footsteps, the scent of life pervaded an uninhabited room. One inexplicable phenomenon after another. And then there was the thing Mai had given birth to; the very thought made him shudder. Mai had been dead for a month and a half, and they still had no clue concerning whatever it was she had delivered. Ando doubted that what she’d had was just a cute little baby.

“Don’t be so gloomy. Even if it did manage to mutate, there’s no guarantee that it succeeded in adapting to the environment.”

“So you think the mutated virus might be extinct, too?”

“We can’t rule out the possibility.”

“Ever the optimist.”

“Recall the Spanish influenza virus, the one that swept the world in 1918. They found the same virus in America in 1977, but nobody died then. The first time around it slaughtered between twenty to forty million people worldwide, and sixty years later, it was basically harmless.”

“I guess a virus can weaken through mutation.”

It was true that since the discovery of Mai’s body, no more suspicious deaths had come to light. He’d kept a close watch on the papers and worked his contacts in the police department, but so far the net had come up empty. It was possible that Miyashita was right and that the newly reborn, mutated virus had failed to adapt to its environment in the short period it had to do so, and had lost its ability to spread. Maybe it was extinct.

“Any idea what we should do next?” asked Miyashita, kicking the floor and twirling in his chair.

“Well, there’s one thing I’ve let slip.”

“What’s that?”

“When and where did Mai get her hands on the videotape?”

“Does it matter?”

“It bothers me. I want to nail down the date.”

Ando felt he should have checked on this. He’d been too busy analyzing the virus and forgotten. Now, it looked to be the only thing left to do. He was virtually certain that the tape Mai had watched was Ryuji’s copy, but he didn’t know how or when it had passed into her possession.

Finding out proved surprisingly easy.

Assuming that Ryuji’s effects, including the tape, had been shipped to his parents’ house within two or three days after his demise, Mai could only have obtained it there. So Ando called Ryuji’s family.

When Ryuji’s mother heard that Ando was an old college friend of her son’s, she suddenly became very friendly. Ando asked whether or not a woman named Mai Takano had called on her.

“Yes,” the woman replied. She was even able to ascertain the date by looking at a receipt in her household-finance ledger. She’d bought a shortcake to offer Mai. November 1, 1990. Ando jotted down the date.

“By the way, why exactly did Mai visit you?”

Ryuji’s mother explained that Mai had been helping Ryuji with a work he’d been serializing by making clean copies of each installment, and that a page had been found missing.

“So she visited your house to look for the missing page, is that it?”

Ando jotted down the name and publisher of the magazine that had been running the series.

And then he hung up. He didn’t want to be asked how Mai was doing these days. If he told Ryuji’s mother that Mai was dead, he’d be sure to face a barrage of questions, and he simply didn’t have the kind of answers that would satisfy her.

Ando sat there with his hand on the receiver long after he’d broken the connection.

On November 1st, Mai visited Ryuji’s family home. While searching for the missing manuscript page, she found the videotape. She took it home with her. She probably watched it that very day.

He started to put together a hypothesis based on a November 1st starting point. It took a week for the virus to have its full effect. So something should have happened to her on November 8th. Ando’s date with her had been for the ninth. He’d called her several times that day, with no answer. It made sense. She’d either been in her room and unable to pick up the phone or already in the exhaust shaft.

He started to calculate backwards. The autopsy had been able to tell them how long she’d been alive in the shaft, and how long she’d been dead before she was discovered. She had died, according to the evidence, on or about the 20th of November, and she had fallen into the shaft about ten days before. It was perfectly in line with these projections to posit that the virus had worked its changes on her on the eighth or ninth, leading to her fall into the shaft. Thus it was probably accurate to assume that she’d watched the video on November 1st.

The next thing Ando did was to head to the periodicals section of the library to look for the magazine that contained Ryuji’s articles. He found it. And in the issue dated November 20th, he found the last installment of Ryuji’s work, a piece entitled The Structure of Knowledge. This told Ando something.