"Does that mean you've found a cure?"
Amano didn't answer her question. Instead, he launched into another long explanation.
"The two scenes you just witnessed represent, if you will, the beginnings. As you saw, the individual known as Sadako Yamamura has the ability to record her voice onto an audiotape solely by willing it. It shouldn't be possible, according to the scientific laws of the Loop world. At the risk of repeating myself, our world and the virtual space of the Loop world are ruled by exactly the same physical principles. You also saw that this Sadako Yamamura dies once, only to effect her own rebirth twenty-four years later through Mai Takano's womb.
This too is a phenomenon that common sense tells us is impossible. Some say it's the result of a computer virus, but the truth is we don't know the actual cause yet, and knowing it might not help us solve the problem anyway.
And the problem is: how do we deal with the virus that was thus produced, regardless of how it came to be?"
Reiko was confused. By that logic, isolating the origin of the MHC virus didn't mean they had learned how to vanquish it. It meant Kaoru's discovery had been in vain; she didn't want to think it.
Reiko confronted Amano with her doubts. He gave her an earnest answer.
"It's like asking why we exist. We do exist, you and I, here and now as human beings. Why do humans exist at all? That question and its answer are of a different order from the question of how to manage society and improve it. Why do humans take the form they do, why are they ruled by desires? Knowing the answers won't necessarily help us learn how to live better. We simply have to accept what's here and manage things as they are.
"Please don't misunderstand me, though. Kaoru's discovery was truly significant. It allowed us to describe the virus's evolutionary process.
"Are you with me? Let's go back to the beginning.
There were warning signs. Sadako Yamamura, being the unique character she is, produces a videotape that kills anybody who watches it in a week's time. The only way to evade death is to make a copy of the videotape and to show it to someone who hasn't yet seen it. Pursued to its conclusion, this means the videotape's numbers should increase exponentially. Along the line, as a result of some mischief, the tape mutates, evolves, metamor-phoses into other media. It spreads like wildfire—or like a virus infecting its victims. In fact, a kind of virus appears in the bodies of those who watch the videotape. In the Loop world they call it the ring virus. Women who contract the virus while ovulating become pregnant without insemination and give birth to Sadako Yamamura.
"You see now. The first scene you witnessed was just that: Mai Takano, infected with the ring virus, giving birth to Sadako."
Reiko felt relief. She couldn't help but think that whatever calamity might have befallen the Loop, it had nothing to do with her. As she listened, only half believing, to Amano's story, she tried to imagine a videotape that killed you a week after you watched it, such a videotape spreading through the world, creating a virus, attacking a woman's womb and implanting a new life form. If that ever happened in reality, people would panic—no telling what they'd do. Rumors feeding on rumors, things would deteriorate at an accelerating rate.
"So what happened?" She was ready for this to end.
"The Loop world lost its diversity. Everything was assimilated to the Sadako Yamamura genotype, became cancerous, and died. Without biodiversity, extinction is only a matter of time. Just as the Loop was dying out, however, the project was frozen for budgetary reasons.
That was twenty years ago."
The words "cancerous" and "extinction" piqued Reiko's curiosity. The conversation finally seemed to be arriving at reality.
She hugged herself, rubbing her upper arms with her palms. "Sounds just like the real world. Kind of frighten-ing."
"Exactly. Reality and the virtual space reflect each other. They correspond to each other."
"Do you mean they're influencing each other?"
"You could put it that way."
"Like—like a mother and a fetus?"
"That's quite an apt comparison." Amano sounded impressed.
Reiko was just trying to apply the far-fetched tale to herself, to find some way to wrap her mind around it. It had occurred to her that Loop was somewhat similar to the womb. It was a world of its own, a space housing a life created by parents. A mother's state of health affected her fetus. The reverse was also possible. And it wasn't just a question of physical condition, either. A mother had an emotional and mental influence over her fetus that wasn't always reducible to explanations via matter. If the mother was happy and at peace, the fetus breathed peacefully; if the mother was frustrated or angry, the fetus's heart rate increased. An illness in one could cause grave damage in the other.
That was Reiko's thinking as she asked her next question. "Did Loop's extinction affect the real world?
Is that what happened?"
"Yes. It exerted an invisible influence. But apart from that, there's another factor at work, which we've been able to study. It seems that the Loop world's virus invaded the real world, where it evolved into the MHC
virus."
Tabling for the moment the mechanism by which a virus from the virtual world could function in the real one, Amano began to tell her why the ring virus had crossed over into the real world. What Reiko heard next floored her.
"Among those in the Loop world infected with the ring virus was an individual named Ryuji Takayama.
He's the only being ever to cross from the virtual world into ours.
"This Takayama dies in the Loop world. But Professor Eliot—Chris Eliot, the father of the Loop project—
decided to bring him back to life in the real world by refabricating his genetic information. It wasn't possible to take him apart on a molecular level and recreate him, so the only option was to embed his genetic information in a fertilized egg and to arrange for him to be born into this world as an infant. Unfortunately, he carried the ring virus. At present the thinking is that there must have been an accident during the DNA breakdown-re-constitution phase at which point it escaped from an in-testinal bacterium. The hypothesis, and it's well-founded, is that the ring virus mutated into the MHC
virus. A comparison of the DNA base sequences of the two viruses reveals a shocking degree of similarity."
Amano stopped talking and fixed Reiko with a gaze.
Reiko noticed the change and braced herself.
"Ryuji Takayama was reborn into the real world twenty years ago."
Amano seemed to place special emphasis on twenty years, and Reiko wondered why. That was Kaoru's age, she noted.
"I think it would be quicker if you had a look at this." Amano called up a third scene on the monitor.
"Please don't be shocked. That is—I'm sorry... No matter what I say, I know it'll be a shock, and in your condition... But I don't know what to say."
He seemed not to relish the responsibility that had become his. But Amano's expression cleared and he continued:
"Now, watch. This is Ryuji Takayama, of the Loop world."
He pressed some buttons on the keyboard and enlarged the scope.
It was a rear view of Takayama as he sat in an office at the university studying logic. The vantage point gradually rotated until they were seeing him from the front.
Still seated at his desk, Takayama raised his head and looked up at the ceiling. Amano zoomed in on his face.
Reiko looked at the image on the screen and uttered a name, and it was not "Takayama." But her face expressed none of the shock Amano had expected. She simply reacted as anyone facing the image of a loved one onscreen might: she'd called his name out of habit. She did not, could not, comprehend, not at once, that Ryuji Takayama and Kaoru Futami were the same person.