Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

Ryuji reached into a pocket and pulled out an ampoule.

“Here,” he said, offering it to Ando.

“What’s this?”

“A vaccine made from the ring virus.”

“A vaccine…” Ando accepted the tiny glass vial and examined it carefully.

Ando’s and Miyashita’s blood tests had come back positive. Just as they’d suspected, reading the Ring report had made them carriers of the virus. Ever since, they’d both been living in apprehension, wondering when the virus within them would start to act up.

“Take that and it’ll take care of the virus. Your worrying days are over.”

“Did you come all the way here just to give me this?”

“What, can’t a guy go to the beach once in a while?” Ryuji gave an embarrassed laugh. Ando let down his guard a little. No matter where he’d moved, he’d never have been able to relax as long as he carried the ring virus.

“So tell me. What’s going to happen to the world now?” Ando asked, putting the vial in his breast pocket and buttoning it shut.

“I don’t know.” Ryuji’s reply was blunt.

“Don’t give me that. Together you and Sadako are going to redesign the world and everything that lives in it-aren’t you?”

“I can tell you what’s going to happen in the immediate future. But after that… Even I don’t know.”

“Then at least tell me about the immediate future.”

“Ring’s sold over a million copies.”

“A million-seller, huh?” Ando already knew this. He’d seen it in newspapers. The book had already been through several reprints, a fact that was trumpeted in its marketing. But every time Ando saw the word “reprint” it made him think “replication”. Ring had been able to effect a near-instantaneous mass reproduction of itself. There were now more than a million people carrying the virus.

“They’re even making it into a movie.”

“A movie? Ring?”

“Mm-hmm. They cast the part of Sadako through an open casting call.”

“An open casting call?” Ando found himself reduced to repeating after Ryuji.

The resurrected man broke into laughter. “That’s right, an open casting call. And who do you think nailed the part of Sadako?”

Ando didn’t keep up on show-business news. “Tell me,” he said. How was he to know who’d passed the audition?

Ryuji was almost doubled over with laughter. “Don’t be such a dullard. You know her quite well.”

“Sadako… herself?”

It was only as he said the name that he realized the import of this development. Sadako had always wanted to be an actress. She’d joined a professional theater troupe right out of high school. She was no amateur, she had the training. It wasn’t surprising that she’d auditioned, and with her powers, she must have easily captured the casting director’s heart. Besides, it was an irresistible role. Sadako would be playing herself. Ando thought he could guess why. She wanted to project her thoughts into the film, so that when the movie showed the killer videotape, it carried her genetic information again. The extinct tape itself was now to be resurrected, and on a grand scale.

And what would be the result? Ando had no idea how big a hit it would be, but it was certain that a fair number of women would go to the theater to see it; those who happened to be ovulating would be visited by the same tragedy that had destroyed Mai. A week later, they would all give birth to Sadako, their own bodies cast aside as used cocoons, abandoned to decay.

And then the movie would hit the video rental shops, and then it’d be broadcast on TV. The images would spread far more quickly than they ever could have through one-copy-at-a-time dubbing. This would be reproduction at an explosive rate. And these new Sadakos would all be able to have children of their own, by themselves. Sadako had managed to work out a method by which she’d have the whole world wrapped instantly around her finger.

“Sadako’s going to breed with the media,” Ryuji said, finally done laughing and looking up.

“They’ll figure it out soon enough, and the movie will be suppressed.” Not just the movie, but the book, too. All circulating copies would be rounded up and burned. Ando wanted to believe that humanity would rally.

“Nope. Just think how huge the media industry is, and how many people in it have already been in contact with the virus. Even if Ring itself is destroyed, the media is going to be transformed by people who have contracted the ring virus. Just as that videotape mutated into a book, it’s going to get into every stream: music, video games, computer networks. New media will crossbreed with Sadako and produce more new media, and every ovulating woman who comes in contact with them will give birth to Sadako.”

Ando touched his breast pocket and felt the vial of vaccine. It would be effective only against the ring virus. It would be powerless against mutated media. Without knowing what type of media the virus would mutate into, it was impossible to concoct a vaccine that would be effective against them. Humanity would forever lag behind. Sadako, the new species, would gradually crowd out the human race until finally she’d driven it to the edge of extinction.

“And you’re okay with all that?”

Ando himself couldn’t peacefully sit back and watch as people died and Sadako took their places. But never mind him. Ryuji was taking an active role in the whole thing, helping it along. Ando simply couldn’t understand that.

“You’re looking at it from a human standpoint. I’m not. The way I see it, one person dies, one Sadako is born. Add one here, take one there, the total’s still the same. Where’s the problem?”

“That’s totally beyond my comprehension.”

Ryuji brought his sweaty face right up close to Ando’s. “Now’s no time for you to be bitching. You’re on our side now.”

“To do what?”

“You’ll get to intervene in evolution, for one thing. A pretty rare opportunity, if you ask me.”

“Evolution? Is that what you call this?” All the diversity of human DNA would converge with the single DNA pattern that was Sadako. Was that evolution? It seemed rather a point of weakness to Ando. It’s precisely because of genetic diversity that some plague victims die while others survive. Even if another ice age comes, thought Ando, the Inuit would be able to live through it, and this would be thanks to diversity, in this case of populations within the human species. If this diversity vanished, then the slightest mischance could lead to the downfall of the whole species. If, say, the original Sadako Yamamura had some defect in her immune system, the defect would be present in every subsequent Sadako. A simple cold could come as a mighty blow to a species.

Ando could only hope that happened. The only path left for the human race was to scrape by and wait for the Sadako species to die out.

“Do you know why living things evolve?” Ando shook his head. He doubted there was anyone who could answer that question with perfect confidence.

But Ryuji’s voice had that confidence as he continued. “Take the eye. I know I don’t have to explain this to an anatomist like yourself, Dr Ando, but the human eye is an amazingly complex mechanism. It’s next to impossible to imagine that a piece of skin evolved into a cornea, a pupil, an eyeball, an optical nerve connecting it to the brain, all in such a way as to make it actually see. It’s hard to believe it all happened by chance. It wasn’t that we started to look at things because there was now a mechanism by which to see them. There first had to be a will to see, buried somewhere inside living things. Without it, the mechanism would never have taken shape. It wasn’t chance that led sea creatures to first crawl onto the land, or reptiles to learn how to fly. They had the will to do so. Now, try and say this and most experts will just laugh. They’ll call it mystical teleology, an execrable excuse for philosophy.