She could access it: this didn't mean she could communicate with entities living within it. Simply watching them unilaterally could end up aggravating her frustration, but she decided not to let Amano's gesture go to waste. She followed his instructions and tried to call up an image from the Loop.
Amano must have preset it to focus on "Ryuji Takayama," because suddenly the monitor was filled with a close-up of Kaoru's face. Reiko cried out, remembering again how much she missed him.
Without any context, she didn't know where he was. Kaoru was lying on a couch, asleep. The couch looked like it might have been in the corner of a laboratory, but when she backed up her perspective-point, she realized it was actually a hospital waiting room.
In the Loop it was 1994. Three years had elapsed in it since the project's resumption. Having sacrificed himself and thereby contributed mightily to defeating the MHC virus in the real world, Kaoru had been reborn in the Loop as Ryuji Takayama to reverse cancerization there as well. He was thirty-seven now.
The youth of twenty Reiko had loved had now, in the space of six months, become a strong man three years older than her. The added years showed in his face, but they had given him a charm appropriate for his age.
She could see that even when he was asleep. But he was in a hospital, waiting for his name to be called. She wondered if there was something wrong with him physically.
His name was called, and "Takayama" opened his eyes. He seemed to have momentarily forgotten where he was; it always happened when he dozed off. He glanced around him, and for a moment Reiko imagined that their gazes had met. Her chest tightened with joy.
Unable to speak with him, she found herself interpreting each of his movements as they might relate to her, assigning some significance to everything.
Takayama went into an exam room and undressed to the waist, exposing his muscular body. Looking at him from behind, she could see a ten-centimeter scar running across his back. That hadn't been there when they were together. Had he gotten into an accident during his frantic activity in the Loop? The way the skin weltered up at the scar told her how serious the injury had been. Reiko got a funny feeling at the base of her spine from imagining him losing a lot of blood.
The examination took ten minutes. Takayama got dressed and went out to the reception desk where he waited for a prescription to be issued. Behind him Reiko could see a dozen or so patients on the couches waiting for their appointments. One of them caught her eye, and she gasped. It was a young woman with delicately balanced features, sitting with her legs crossed. Everything about her face—from her prominent forehead to her straight eyebrows, from the undeviating line of her nose to the slightly cruel, thin lips—was perfect. But it wasn't her beauty that had made Reiko gasp. She'd seen that face before.
Reiko paused the image and zoomed in on the woman's face. It took her only a dozen or so seconds to recall the name.
Sadako Yamamura.
This was the woman who'd turned the Loop cancerous. She'd had the ability to record sounds on a tape reel without using a recorder, and she'd honed the ability to the point of making a lethal videotape. Her videotape had mutated, branching out into all sorts of media.
When a woman who was ovulating came into contact with the images, she became pregnant with an entity that shared Sadako's DNA. Reiko vividly recalled watching Sadako crawl out of the womb of that woman who'd fallen into the rooftop exhaust shaft—the newborn, gnawing through the umbilical cord with toothless gums. Pregnant herself, Reiko had been unable to see it as merely virtual, as something totally unrelated to her.
Though it had taken place in an entirely different space, in the Loop, just watching it she'd shivered with horror.
That was how the Loop world had been unmoored in a flood of mutated media, all reproducing a single DNA pattern with astonishing speed.
And now the culprit, Sadako Yamamura herself, was sitting right behind Takayama, waiting for her exam with a look of total innocence on her face. Once he'd received his prescription, Takayama seemed to notice her, but his expression didn't change. He walked out of the hospital. It looked to be just an ordinary, everyday event.
In the hospital lobby Takayama passed another Sadako Yamamura. They both just kept walking, in opposite directions, hardly noticing each other. Takayama went into the parking lot outside the hospital entrance and opened the door to his car, while Sadako got onto an elevator inside the hospital and went up to a higher floor.
Takayama started his car. Reiko didn't know where he was heading, but he drove onto a trunk road and then stepped on the accelerator. Scenery started rushing past at high speed...
Reiko lost track of time as she watched. No longer was she able to see this as a television show, unrelated to her. She was watching a person's life. The images con-veyed the uninvented truth about an irreplaceable man.
6
Every day for the next month, at a predetermined time, Reiko accessed the Loop and peeked in on Takayama's life. It could be said without exaggeration that this was the only joy she was getting out of life.
Since time in the Loop moved at six times the rate it did in the real world, when she accessed it at the appointed time every day, she was watching images six days newer than the previous day's. She was only getting fragments, a few hours out of every six days, but it was more man-ageable that way. It would have been a waste of time to follow a life in its entirety. Better to take fragments and fill in the gaps with her imagination.
And by doing so she was able to understand the general unfolding of events. She watched sequences having to do with halting the cancerization of the Loop and recovering its biodiversity—events in which Takayama played a big part. Watching them gave her so much joy that she wanted to shout out loud.
She became more and more engrossed in watching the progress of the Loop world. As the Loop recovered, the loneliness weighing on Reiko started to disperse: the two processes began to resonate with each other, settling into a common rhythm. Takayama's actions were directly lifting Reiko's heart.
The Loop had literally begun to die, once. Once the denizens of the Loop had learned about the killer videotape and the mutated manifestations of it in other media, panic had set in, a panic that had the ironic effect of accelerating the spread of the virus. People didn't wait for the end of their week's grace period, and they weren't satisfied with showing the tape to just one other person.
Some individuals showed it to a host of other people.
Reiko was able to experience several variations on the process: people killing each other because of the tape, love affairs falling apart, people scheming to save loved ones. It was like watching a detailed picture of hell, with egotism on full display in all its forms. It was like watching the real world.
The world looked like it was going to end, but that wasn't how things went, thanks to the coming of Takayama to the Loop world.
Takayama did two things to prevent the cancerization of the Loop world. Three months ago, when Reiko had met him in Amano's laboratory, he had already succeeded in synthesizing a vaccine. That was no doubt one reason he could say "It's going to be alright" with such confidence. Since then, the vaccine had begun to prove itself effective.
Individuals who had come into contact with the mutated manifestations of the tape were programmed to die in a week or to become impregnated with the ring virus. It was simply a question of how to disable that program. Takayama approached the problem that way, according to the hypothesis formulated in the world in which he'd existed as Kaoru, and succeeded in developing the necessary technology. It wasn't all that difficult a task for him because he thoroughly knew how the world worked. The vaccine did two things for those inoculated with it: it disabled the program, and it gave people resistance to the program being installed again.