Loop (25 page)

Why was Asakawa still alive? There could only be one reason. Sometime over the course of the past week he must have fulfilled the video's wishes, unbeknownst to himself. It was something he had done that Takayama hadn't. But what? Asakawa racked his brain. He'd been spared, but unless he could solve the riddle, his wife and daughter would die. What did the tape want?

At that point, Asakawa received an inspiration.

A virus lives to reproduce itself.

He'd stumbled onto it. The videotape was behaving like a virus. What it wanted was to reproduce. He'd had to make a copy of the tape, show it to someone who hadn't seen it, and thereby help it to increase in number. It all made sense. Asakawa had made a copy of the tape for Takayama. But Takayama hadn't made a copy for anyone.

Arriving at his conclusion, Asakawa grabbed his VCR, jumped into his car, and sped off for his wife's parents' house. His plan was to make copies of the tape, show them to her parents, and save his wife and his daughter.

The dubbing and playback went off safely, but a trial that would prove too much for Asakawa awaited him on the drive back home.

He was about to leave the expressway ramp when he looked in his rear-view mirror to see his wife and daughter collapsed on the back seat. "We'll be home soon," he said. He released one hand from the steering wheel and reached into the back seat to touch them. They were cold. Wife and daughter had both died of sudden heart failure at the appointed time. Even making copies of the tape hadn't dispelled the curse.

In despair and grief, Asakawa forgot himself. Confused, he failed to notice the stopped traffic ahead of him: he rammed the car into it head-on.

As the shock passed through his body, in the instant that he lost consciousness, he was asking himself:
Why are they dead? Why am I alive?

The twinned shocks damaged Asakawa's body and mind beyond hope of recovery.

Asakawa's eyes were open. His gaze was mobile, describing a slow circle around a point on the ceiling. Images passed from his retina to his brain, but he wasn't actively seeing. He was simply moving his eyeballs passively, randomly.

But even through those unwilled eye movements, Kaoru was able to guess at where Asakawa was now. The white curtain separating his bed from the next, the gleaming I.V. stand-the whole scene brought back painful, yet sweet memories for Kaoru. He was recalling the setting of his passionate exchanges with Reiko. Asakawa was in a hospital bed.

He must have been transported there right after the collision on the expressway. He must have been unconscious most of the time since: the display had been dark for long periods. Asakawa's retinas were covered in blackness most of the time, but occasionally, like now, he'd open his eyes and gaze vaguely around.

Through Asakawa's eyes Kaoru registered the faces of two men. One he'd seen hazily several times. From the white coat he wore it was likely that he was the physician attending Asakawa. The other face was new to him.

This second man came closer and peered into Asakawa's face.

"Mr Asakawa," the man said, placing a hand on Asakawa's shoulder.

Most likely he was looking for some sort of reaction to the tactile sensation, but it was no use. Asakawa was wandering in a pit so deep not even Kaoru's consciousness could reach him; no touch on the shoulder was going to rouse him from this.

The man moved away from Asakawa's bedside and asked the doctor, "Has he been like this the whole time?"

"Yes." The doctor and the other man exchanged a few more words. From what they said it was evident that the other man had a great deal of medical knowledge, too. Maybe he was a doctor also.

The man bent over again, peering into Asakawa's face. In an emotion-filled voice he spoke again. "Mr Asakawa." His eyes were filled with the charity of one who has undergone the same experience and can sympathize.

"I don't think he can hear you," the doctor said flatly.

The man gave up, leaving the bedside. "I'd like to ask you to notify me if there's any change in his condition." Kaoru found the man's expression interesting as he said this. He seemed particularly concerned about Asakawa.

He'd learn nothing more locked onto Asakawa's point of view. As long as he lay in bed in this in-between state, Kaoru's chances of being able to gather information were all but nil.

It's about time to choose someone new to lock onto.

Something told him that the man with the charitable gaze was the best candidate. He'd never seen his face before, but still he felt an inexplicable closeness to the man. Plus, his conversation with the doctor had showed him to be deeply involved with the case.

Kaoru typed some commands and de-assimilated his sense perceptions from Asakawa's, instead locking onto those of the visitor as he walked out of the sickroom. From that moment Kaoru was no longer bound into Asakawa's mind: instead, he was privy to the sights seen and sounds heard by his new subject, Mitsuo Ando. But there was no ease in Ando's heart, either. Kaoru looked to be in for more vicarious suffering. He sighed inwardly. He'd had enough of loved ones dying on him.

* * *

It wasn't long before Kaoru realized he'd chosen the right subject to lock onto.

Ando was the doctor who'd autopsied Takayama, and, just as Kaoru had suspected, he was deeply entangled in the affair of the videotape. He belonged to the forensic medicine department of a university hospital, and together with a pathologist friend he was determined to get to the bottom of things.

As far as they'd been able to ascertain, the number of people who'd died after watching the video was seven. In addition to the original four young people the total now included Ryuji Takayama and Asakawa's wife and daughter.

In each body they'd detected the presence of a new kind of virus. Ando was quite surprised when his friend told him about the virus; so was Kaoru. He was certain this virus was related to the one ravaging the real world.

Kaoru grabbed a nearby memo pad and started taking notes.

Need to analyze DNA of virus in Loop.

It was too much to hope that it might be the same sequence, but there could be similarities. It should be relatively simple to analyze the genetic information of a virus in the Loop world.

The world as seen through Ando's eyes was one of unrelieved misery. Kaoru didn't know why, whether it was simply due to Ando's personality, or whether there was another reason. Sometimes without warning his retinas would cloud over with tears. No, there must be some deep-seated cause, some incident in the man's past that had brought this sadness. Kaoru caught glimpses of it in Ando's present solitary life.

He was interested enough in the nature of the man's grief to want to search through his past, but there was no time for that now. Ando had just learned of the disappearance of a young woman he cared about, and he was searching for her.

The woman who'd disappeared was Mai Takano, a student of Takayama's. She lived alone in a studio apartment. He'd been unable to make contact with her for the past week.

She'd been connected to both Takayama and Asakawa, and now Ando suspected that something bad had happened to her, too. He decided to visit her apartment-there was always the possibility that she too was infected with the new virus.

Her apartment was empty. But the video, the one that killed its viewers in a week's time, was in her VCR. She'd evidently watched it. And all but a few seconds of it had been erased.

Ando wasn't sure how to interpret these findings. If she'd watched the video, there was no hope for her. She was probably already dead somewhere. It was just that her body hadn't been found yet.

So far the only person who'd seen the video and survived was Asakawa. He'd been spared because he made a copy of the tape. But his wife and daughter had died even though they'd made copies. Just what did the video want? It seemed utterly arbitrary about who it killed and who it let live. If there was a logical thread, it had yet to be found.

As he went to leave Mai Takano's apartment, Ando sensed the presence of a being he'd never encountered before. Something small and slippery that laughed like a girl.

Kaoru could feel it too, as he sat glued to the display. Something touched his ankles-he could feel something slimy against his Achilles tendons.

Impelled by fear, Ando opened the front door.

Something's here.

He felt sure of it as he stumbled out of the room.

Meanwhile, at the university, the work of analyzing the virus proceeded apace.

Ando was contacted by a newspaper reporter. He consented to meet because the man said he was a colleague of Asakawa's.

The reporter informed him of the existence of a floppy disk that contained an outline of the events of the case, written by Asakawa himself.

Ando had an idea of where the disk might be, and he managed to get his hands on it. There had been a word processor in Asakawa's car at the time of the accident. Asakawa's brother had it now. The disk was still in the word processor.

Ando opened the files on the disk and started reading. The document was entitled
Ring,
and it was well organized. Kaoru was already familiar with the events it recorded; its account matched up well with what he'd experienced through Takayama's and Asakawa's eyes and ears.

In effect, Kaoru was now able to confirm through the medium of writing the information he'd gained through Asakawa's sensory organs. The contents of the videotape had been transformed into the document called
Ring.

At this point, Ando received a message that had been encoded in a DNA sequence.

Mutation.

This hint sent Ando's reasoning off in another direction. The videotape left in Takano's room had been erased. The other two copies had been destroyed one way or another. The video itself no longer existed. However, the first copy had been partially erased at the end by the four kids who found it. In DNA terms, part of the genetic material had been damaged.

It occurred to Ando to think of the videotape, in the way it made use of a third party's assistance to copy itself, as similar to a virus. Having suffered damage to its genetic material, he hypothesized, the video had undergone a mutation. It had been reborn as a new species. The old species, the videotape, had served its purpose. It didn't matter to the new species if the old one became extinct.

There were two essential questions at this point.

If the video has evolved, what has it evolved into?

And:

Why is Asakawa still alive?

Then another clue presented itself. Mai Takano's body was discovered at last.

She was discovered in an exhaust shaft on the roof of a rundown office building. It couldn't be determined if she'd died of hunger or of exposure. The autopsy turned up no signs of a heart attack: her death, then, was different in nature from the other seven. She'd simply wasted away. If she hadn't fallen into the exhaust shaft, she would still be alive.

Even more puzzling were the signs that she'd given birth immediately after falling into the shaft. This was proven by scars resulting from the placenta being torn out, as well as by fragments of umbilical cord found at the scene.

This all gave rise to a new question.

What did Mai Takano give birth to?

Ando, who had known her, was bothered. She simply hadn't looked pregnant the last time he'd seen her.

They attacked the problem from a variety of angles. The toll of the dead who had had some connection to that video was now eleven-a figure that now included Asakawa, who had died in his hospital bed without ever regaining consciousness.

Ando and his colleague determined that watching the videotape had caused the virus to appear in the victims' bloodstreams. They also discovered that the virus had some notable characteristics. There were two strains: one shaped like a ring, and one shaped like a thread, or a broken ring.

The thread type was more prevalent in the bodies of Asakawa and Takano, who had not died of heart attacks. In the other nine bodies, only the ring type was found. This, then, seemed to be the factor that determined whether or not the virus would kill a person. If the ring was broken the infected person would live, while if the ring was unbroken, death would follow in a week's time.

Ando was desperate to find a logical explanation. It was then that he discovered another odd coincidence.

The thread like strain moves like spermatozoa.

There were signs that Takano had given birth. What if she'd been ovulating when she watched the video? What if the newly-created virus had headed for her egg instead of her coronary artery?

It seemed she'd been impregnated, and had then given birth to something.

But what?

Whatever it was, he'd encountered it in her apartment.

Ando applied the same logic to Asakawa.
As a man, Asakawa couldn 't bear a child. What did he produce instead?

That question would be answered for Ando very soon.

He received a visit from a woman who said she was Takano's older sister. He'd met her already, in the building where Mai had died. This time they became intimate.

She was in the shower, and Ando was flipping through a publisher's brochure, looking at the list of new books, when his eyes alit on a title of a book about to come out:
Ring.
To his surprise, Asakawa's report had been turned into a book, and was about to circulate in large numbers.

Ring:
that was what Asakawa had given birth to. The videotape had evolved into a book, and was about to propagate on a massive scale. By writing it, Asakawa had played a crucial role in that propagation.

Just then, Ando received a photograph of Sadako Yamamura. One look sent him into shock. She looked identical to the woman who'd just stepped out of his shower, the woman who said she was Mai Takano's sister. What had Mai given birth to?
Sadako.

Sadako, who was supposed to have rotted away at the bottom of a well in the mountains twenty-some years ago, had borrowed Mai's womb to effect her resurrection. But before that fact could sink in, Ando fainted.