Amano would neither confirm nor deny her suspi-cions. He told her that it was something he couldn't hope to explain over the phone and implored her to come to the center. Finally, she'd allowed herself to be persuaded, and here she was.
In the reception area that Reiko was shown into, she received a brief explanation of a massive project known as the Loop. When she heard that Kaoru had sat in the same room to hear the same lecture from Amano, she began to feel a kind of intimacy with her surroundings.
The Loop, she learned, was a global project to create an entire world with the aid of over a million massively parallel supercomputers. A world, it was called, but it didn't exist anywhere in space, just as images projected onto a screen didn't possess any extension of their own.
It was cyberspace. The scientists discovered that life did not occur within it naturally, but when they trans-planted RNA into it—RNA, the basis of life in the real world—life forms began to evolve of their own accord.
Perhaps because the source was the same, the biosphere came to be nearly identical to the real one.
Amano broke the Loop project down into bite-size chunks of information as he explained it to her. This wasn't a presentation to an academic gathering; all Reiko needed to get was the gist of it. Amano geared the explanation to her level of understanding, avoiding technical language as much as possible, and finally decided that she'd pick it up quicker if he showed it to her rather than just told her about it. He called up two scenes integral to the cancerization of the Loop world and had Reiko watch them. One concerned a young woman known as Mai Takano, pregnant though a virgin; she fell into an exhaust shaft on the roof of a building and there, in that constricted rectangular space, gave birth. The baby seemed to be in full possession of a will of its own from the very beginning. Tearing its umbilical cord with its gums, it crawled up into the outside world using a lifeline it had arranged for beforehand.
Reiko, pregnant herself, found the scene quite disturbing.
The next scene took her twenty-four years into the cyberworld's past and to an entirely different setting. But it had one character in common with the other scene: the baby that had crawled out of Mai Takano's womb.
Sadako Yamamura.
The second sequence seemed like a coming-of-age story set among a troupe of actors. It had more of a plot than the first but still had its unrealistic elements. A woman's voice was recorded onto a reel of audiotape without the intervention of a recording device; everyone who heard the tape developed heart problems and died.
That was the premise. Having heard a woman's voice and a baby's cry on a tape, the main character was confronted with death. But he was able to greet it just as he'd always hoped to, in the lap of Sadako Yamamura, the woman he'd been in love with twenty-four years earlier.
A soap opera.
Having shown Reiko these two fragments and asked for her reaction, Amano added a bit of explanation.
"They look like television programs, but they're not. Those people really lived and died."
Reiko tried to think this through with an analogy of her own. Since the end of the last century there had been virtual reality games, some of them rather skillfully done; as a child she'd played a few of them. With the years the characters got smoother and more consistent in their details, evolving into something quite like people. They were characters in games, made by humans, so it wasn't accurate to say they were alive. The life forms in the Loop, though, had evolved on their own.
They were life.
She spoke her thoughts. "So I should think of them as characters in a game come to life?"
Amano nodded.
"You can think of it like that if you want. The life forms in the Loop all have DNA. They're alive. As you've seen for yourself, they look just like humans.
They're separated into male and female, they fall in love, they reproduce sexually."
Based on what she'd seen on the monitor, Amano seemed to be telling the truth. The second video had shown a man and a woman falling in love and engaging in a sexual act. There was jealousy, also—in that, too, they were just like humans.
The Loop functioned on the same principles and laws as the Earth, Reiko was told, and there was no room for doubt that she could find. The Loop consisted of patterns based on the properties of carbon, nitrogen, he-lium, and the rest of the 111 elements that made up the universe, Amano said. Although Reiko couldn't imagine what that actually meant in terms of a computer system, she felt she more or less understood in her own way.
The scientific questions didn't interest Reiko. Loop beings lived in the Loop system, and that was enough for her. What interested her was Kaoru, the father of her child. Amano knew Kaoru. Why was he going on and on about this Loop thing?
Reiko remembered something Kaoru had once said to her.
Reality might just be a kind of virtual space, you know.
No, that wasn't precisely it—he'd actually said, in no uncertain terms, that reality was virtual.
Prior to the birth of the universe time and space did not exist. It was impossible to imagine such a situation—no time or space. Presented with the relationship between Loop and the real world, however, the idea became easier to envision. Thinking of the universe as a virtual reality removed the contradiction. Of course, that didn't mean that reality was just a computer simula-tion—it was something completely different, far beyond humanity's comprehension, operated by an unknown power. But with that caveat, there was no reason not to think of reality as a virtual space, no valid argument against it.
She recalled Kaoru saying something along those lines.
She tried to change the subject. "But..."
"I know." Amano raised his hands as if to stop her, and his expression said that he wanted her to indulge him just a little while longer. He did seem to make a greater effort to get to the core of the problem and spoke of the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus.
"The Loop world is not unrelated to the MHC virus that's destroying our world."
Reiko's body stiffened and she let out a little cry.
It was the MHC virus that had visited such unhappiness on her family. The virus had the demonic ability to turn cells cancerous and to cause them to metastasize and permeate the whole body. There was no end to the hatred she bore this enemy. Cancer had devoured her husband two years ago; two months ago, her son Ryoji had thrown himself from the window of the hospital where he was undergoing chemotherapy and hating it.
Reiko had fallen in love with Kaoru, her son's tutor, and together they'd conceived the child now in her womb.
Reiko herself was a carrier of the virus, and inevitably that meant Kaoru had become infected as well. More-over, Kaoru's father was in the final stages of his own cancer, undergoing treatment at the same hospital; Kaoru's mother was another carrier. On every direction Reiko was surrounded by misery, the MHC virus the cause of it all. Worldwide, the infected—concentrated in Japan and America—numbered in the millions. It was spread through blood and lymph, but scientists were discovering other routes as well. The disease was starting to affect animals and plants, and people were starting to whisper that this was going to be the end of all life on Earth.
"It's become clear to us that the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus originated in the Loop. It was Kaoru who figured it out."
It was the first time Amano had spoken Kaoru's name since she'd arrived. Reiko's body reacted to that first—she could feel veins twitch deep within her body.
Then he did it after all.
She rejoiced in his accomplishment, although she had no idea whether isolating the source of the virus helped treat it. She was simply glad for him.