Loop (33 page)

"So what did you conclude from that?" he asked.

"We didn't see life naturally emerging in the Loop at the very beginning. So we introduced it. We introduced RNA, thought to be the earliest form of life. Sowing seeds-that was the metaphor we used, but it was no metaphor. That RNA was in all reality a seed, destined to grow into a certain, specific tree of life."

Kaoru had taken part in a discussion like this before, he remembered. With Ryoji. Reiko was dozing nearby while Ryoji and Kaoru debated evolution. And the point Ryoji had been trying to make then was more or less the same one Eliot seemed to be making now.

"What are you trying to say?" Kaoru tried to keep his tone cool and rational. If he broke in too unnaturally, the old man might start drooling again, and Kaoru had no desire to see that.

"The Loop matched up perfectly with reality. Life didn't emerge naturally in the Loop-that's why we sowed the seeds. Don't you realize what that means?"

It hit Kaoru. He remembered what Eliot had asked him at the beginning of their long conversation.
Do you believe in God?
That gave Kaoru the answer.

"That reality is only a virtual world, too, right?"

"Indeed. Life didn't emerge of its own accord on Earth, either. So why are we here? Because somebody sowed the seeds of life here. Who? The being we call God. God caused there to be life on Earth, and He made us in His image. The Bible was right."

Kaoru wasn't particularly shocked by this. He'd had the same thought many times on his journey to this point, but he hadn't been able to prove or disprove it. This was mere reasoning by analogy. It had no bearing on reality. It could not be verified. In the end, it would be, as it always had been, a question of belief or unbelief.

"But that doesn't change anything, does it?"

Eliot sank into his couch as if pushed there by Kaoru's logic. "Even if reality was created by a god, I'm not saying it was made in the same way as what we created in the computer."

Before Eliot could finish the sentence, Kaoru was saying, "I guess God's world must be controlled by funding issues, too."

Eliot's eyes narrowed and flashed coldly. "You're making fun of me." His sternness didn't last long, however. He immediately resumed his former calm expression.

Kaoru glanced at the clock on the wall. This conversation had gone on for three hours already. He was getting hungry, and with no end in sight he was getting tired as well.

Eliot seemed to guess Kaoru's thoughts. "You must be fatigued. Why don't we take a break, watch an old movie or something. I'll see to lunch." His face was expressionless, betraying neither anger nor excitement. He produced a remote control, and a screen descended in front of one wall. He pressed
PLAY.

Then he stood up slowly, returned to his wheelchair, and went to leave the room. Kaoru followed him with his gaze. When the door shut behind Eliot Kaoru heard it lock. The sound told Kaoru everything he needed to know about his current situation. He was still incarcerated. He'd have to find out why.

On the screen an old movie was playing, one he'd seen before. It was a sci-fi flick his parents had taken him to see when he was ten. He knew the theme song by heart-he'd liked the movie so much that he'd gotten his mother to buy the soundtrack, and he'd listened to it over and over.

A large black man dressed in white appeared and placed a sandwich and some tea with milk in front of Kaoru.

As he ate, Kaoru closed his eyes and listened to the music divorced from the images. It brought back more memories when he turned it into his own private movie projected onto the backs of his eyelids. Images of his family from the peaceful days before his father's cancer had been detected.

Kaoru didn't notice he was weeping until the tears creeping down his cheeks reached his lips. He wondered again about coincidence. Had Eliot chosen this movie at random, or had he put it on in full knowledge of the many memories it held for Kaoru?

If it was the latter, then things went a lot deeper than simple confinement.
Maybe Eliot's been watching me all along.

He'd often felt, as a child, like somebody was watching him from behind. He'd always dismissed it as his imagination, but now the feeling came back, and it felt real this time. Kaoru lost his appetite.

Eliot returned about the time Kaoru finally finished his lunch.

"My, you certainly had an appetite," Eliot said, looking at the empty plate. "Good, very good."

"Can we cut the crap? I can't even tell you how this is making me feel." As a result of their talk this morning, Kaoru had accumulated even more questions than before. He couldn't wait to put an end to this farce. Why had he come here, anyway? To find out how to combat the MHC virus. He couldn't afford to kill time like this.

"Well," said Eliot, as he lowered himself onto the sofa, "our theme for the afternoon is you and your mission." Once again he seemed to have seen right through Kaoru. Now he couldn't leave even if he wanted to.

"My mission?"

"Yes. Why have you come here? To find a way to combat the Metastatic Human Cancer Virus, no?"

Kaoru and Eliot stared at each other for a while.

Kaoru felt a deep nervous annoyance. Eliot seemed to know all kinds of information about him, while he'd been provided with no knowledge about Eliot. It wasn't fair. He had a reasonable understanding now of the man's place in the history of science. But what Kaoru wanted to know was more private things. Maybe if he had a clearer idea of Eliot as a person, he wouldn't feel so uncomfortable.

"How about a pop quiz?" said Eliot, breaking in on Kaoru's thoughts. He extended his right index finger, pointing at the ceiling. He seemed to be thinking of himself as a teacher now.

"In what year was it discovered that when a neutrino interacts with another object its oscillation goes out of phase?"

Kaoru was familiar with neutrinos, a kind of subatomic particle. If he were asked their main characteristics, he'd be able to answer with three: they move at the speed of light, they have no electrical charge, and they're composed of energy. Looked at in that way, they're quite similar to light. The decisive difference is that even though they have energy they can pass through anything. Neutrinos given off by the sun pass right through the earth, coming out the other side and heading straight off into the darkness of space.

But what did that have to with anything?

Kaoru's answer came automatically. "2001."

Kaoru hadn't even been born yet, but he'd read the information in a history of science textbook, and he remembered it clearly.

"That's correct. In fact it was only at the end of the last century that the neutrino, which had always been considered mass less, was discovered to have mass after all."

"Yes, and?" Kaoru's irritation was rising, and he tried to interrupt. Eliot stopped him.

"Just wait. Hear me out. Everything's organically interconnected, and this affected our plans. You're probably not going to understand what I mean when I say this, but if the neutrino's phase shift had not been discovered, you would most likely not exist."

"Give me a break. Enough with the jokes already. What could the nature of the neutrino possibly have to do with my existing or not?" Neutrinos are said to comprise ninety percent of all matter. They're everywhere. But what did that have to do with Kaoru? He wouldn't be able to take much more of this.

"Alright, alright. I'll just ask you to keep that idea in a corner of your mind, and to stay with me for another three minutes while we talk about neutrinos."

Then Eliot proceeded to explain what could be done using the neutrino's phase shift.

It turned out that by shooting neutrinos at an object, measuring their phase shift, and then recomposing them, it was possible to create a detailed three-dimensional digital picture of an object's structure. Neutrinos could be projected through inorganic and organic objects alike. But it was the fields of medicine and pathology that expected to see the greatest applications of this discovery, because suddenly it became possible to have a digital record of an organism's entire molecular makeup. This was different from a mere DNA analysis. Sequencing an organism's DNA simply meant analyzing one cell out of the nearly infinite number of cells in a single organism. Using neutrino oscillation made it possible to record everything about a subject, from brain activity to the state of the heart, even memory.

"Not long after the inception of the Loop project, another team of researchers began to construct a piece of equipment known as the Neutron Scanning Capture System, NSCS for short. This would allow us to instantaneously capture an organism's molecular structure. Needless to say, their project too had a huge budget. I myself had no direct connection with the NSCS project, although of course I offered whatever advice I could."

Eliot paused there.

"How about some tea? You'll need some time to digest this information."

Kaoru obediently raised his teacup to his mouth. The tea was cold. Kaoru had heard a fair amount concerning neutrinos in his lifetime, but this was the first he'd heard of the NSCS.

"I'm sorry if this has been confusing to you. It's time now to bring the discussion around to the MHC virus, which threatens us all."

"Finally, we're getting to the point."

The news came as a relief to Kaoru. He was starting to be afraid that this, too, would lead nowhere.

"What do you know about the Human Metastatic Cancer Virus?" Eliot asked.

"I know that its genome has been sequenced. I've seen the results myself."

"And yet there's still no treatment for it, no progress on a vaccine to prevent it."

"Why is that?"

"It can take a long time to figure out where a virus came from. In the case of the MHC virus, an
extremely
long time."

By now, Kaoru felt he could guess where the virus had come from.

"The Loop, right?"

Eliot opened his eyes wide and stared at Kaoru. "How did you figure it out?"

Kaoru enjoyed the look of sincere amazement on Eliot's face. He felt like delaying his answer to prolong this pleasure, but he hadn't the patience. "The MHC virus isn't very large. It's only got nine genes, each of which ranges from several thousand to several hundred thousand bases in length. But the total number of bases in each gene comes out to equal
2(n)
x 3. That can't be a coincidence."

Eliot groaned. "Nice catch."

"Not to brag, but I have something of a sixth sense when it comes to numbers. It didn't take much to figure it out."

"And from that you were able to guess where the virus had come from?"

"Well, why did they equal
2"
x 3? That was the question. The times-three part was fairly easy to understand, since three bases together make one codon specifying a single amino acid. But what about the other part of the formula, the 2? No doubt I never would have gotten the idea had I not known about the Loop project. The 2 had to come from the binary code used by computers. The virus must have leaked out of the Loop somehow. That was its birthplace."

"Exactly." Eliot gave a weak smile and clapped his hands. Whether or not the applause was sincere, it sounded like mockery to Kaoru.

Kaoru lowered his voice in an attempt to sound calm. "So we know where it came from. Does that help us find a cure?" A cure for the virus- that was the main thing.

Eliot ignored the question. "When did you figure this out?"

"Huh?"

"When did you figure out the origin of the virus?"

"About a month ago."

"I see. For me it was about six months ago." He didn't seem to be trying to brag. He was counting on his fingers like a child, a look of unguarded remorse on his face.

"I want to know what you think about it," Kaoru said, pressing him.

Eliot's response was dilatory, as he started making excuses.

"It's too bad that it had to be cancer-such a common disease. Had it been something more distinctive, maybe we could have done something at an early stage. But it was able to blend in with normal cancer as it laid its groundwork. It was like the wanted man realizing the best place to hide is in the big city. Precisely because cancer is such a common illness, the virus was able to use it as camouflage. Think about it. Who would raise a fuss just because a researcher on the Loop project died of cancer? Whereas, if one of us had died from an unknown illness, we would have been quite active in looking for the virus that caused it. But with cancer… we mourned the loss of another colleague, but didn't suspect anything. It was able to sneak in and do away with us one by one."

Kaoru could sympathize. It had been a mere seven years since this cancer was definitely proven to be viral in origin, and therefore different from normal cancer. And it had only been a year since scientists had first successfully isolated the virus. And all that time, the virus had been laying the groundwork for an explosive spread.

Kaoru imagined that Eliot had lost people close to him to the virus. His gaze, one of hostility and regret, was focused on the past.

This was Kaoru's chance to find out more about Eliot as a person, but instead Kaoru brought the conversation back on track.

"Have you been able to figure out precisely how the virus escaped from the Loop?"

"Eh? Oh, yes. Of course."

"Will you tell me?"

"We froze the Loop twenty years ago. Time has stopped inside the Loop. All of its inhabitants are frozen in place. Do you know why we put an end to the project?"

"You're going to tell me you ran out of funding."

He didn't mean it as a joke, but Eliot, after a moment's shock, laughed heartily.

"That's absolutely right. We used up our budget. We'd gotten scholarly feedback from all directions, about as much as we were going to get, and the results had been quite good, at least valuable enough to justify the expenditure. But a project like that can't go on forever. Do you have any idea how many massively parallel supercomputers we buried in the New Mexico desert? Six hundred and forty thousand. And we put another six hundred and forty thousand in the ground underneath Tokyo. We needed our own power plants just to keep them running. They ate up a staggering amount of electricity, and it took massive amounts of money to keep them running. It couldn't go on forever. And then the Loop started turning cancerous."