Spiral (27 page)

"Lower the lights," Nemoto said.

"Yessum!" replied Miyashita, who quickly turned them off. Although they'd completed the base sequencing some time ago, this was their first chance to see the virus directly, with their own eyes. The virus that had been found in the blood of Ryuji and possibly Mai.

Nemoto went into the darkroom alone and fixed the ultrathin section on the holder. Ando and Miyashita sat in front of the console, staring at the screen in utter silence. Though it was still blank, both men's eyes were active as they chased mental images of what they would soon be seeing.

Nemoto came back and turned off the last overhead light. All set. Holding their breath, the three men watched the screen. Gradually, as the ultrathin section of cellular matter was illuminated by an electron beam, a microscopic world began to open up before them.

"Which one are we looking at?" Miyashita asked Nemoto.

"This is Takayama's."

The green pattern on the screen before them was a universe unto itself. A twist of a dial sent their field of view racing across the surface of the cells. Somewhere in there lurked the virus.

"Try increasing the magnification," Miyashita instructed. Nemoto responded immediately, taking the machine up to x9000. Another pass over the surface gave them a clear view of the dying cells. The cyctoplasm gleamed brightly, while the organelles had collapsed into black clumps.

"Home in on the cytoplasm on the top right and increase the magnification." As he spoke, Miyashita's face caught the reflection of the dying cells' mottled appearance and had the dull glow of a bronze bust. Nemoto increased the magnification to x16000.

"More."

x21000.

"There. Stop." Miyashita's voice rose, and he shot a glance at Ando, who leaned forward so that his face was right near the screen.

There they were… swarms of them!

The strands writhed around in the dying cells like so many snakes, biting and clinging to the surface of the chromatin.

A chill ran down Ando's spine. This was a new virus, the likes of which had never been seen before. He'd never seen the smallpox virus through an electron microscope, yet he did know it from medical textbooks. The differences between that and this were obvious at a glance.

"Oh my God."

Miyashita sat there sighing, his mouth hanging open.

Ando understood the workings of the virus: how it was carried along inside the blood vessels to the coronary artery, where it affixed itself to the inner wall of the anterior descending branch and caused mutations in the cells of that area until they formed a tumor. What he couldn't understand was how this virus he was looking at now could have been created via the victim's consciousness. This virus didn't invade the body from outside. Rather, it was born within the body as a result of watching a videotape; it was a function of the mind. That went beyond mysterious and Ando was dumbfounded. It represented a leap from nothingness to being, from concept to matter. In all earth's history such a thing happened only once, when life first came to be.

Does it mean, then, that life emerged due to the workings of some consciousness?

Ando's thoughts were veering off track. Miyashita brought him back with his next comment.

"'Ring', anyone?"

Ando returned his gaze to the electron microscope screen. It didn't take long to figure out Miyashita's remark; he was angling for something with which to compare the shape of the virus. Some specimens were twisted and some were u-shaped, but most of them looked like a slightly distorted ring, the kind one wears on a finger. "Ring" hit the nail on the head. There was even a protrusion at one point that resembled nothing so much as a stone on a setting. The screen looked like a view of a floor across which tangled-up rings and snakes and rubber bands had been strewn indiscriminately.

It fell to Ando and Miyashita, who discovered it, to name this strange new virus, and Miyashita's comment was by way of a suggestion. The ring virus.

"How about it?"

Miyashita wanted Ando's opinion. The name was perfect, but Ando felt uneasy for precisely that reason. It was too perfect and made him wonder if a God-like being were making itself felt. How did all this begin? Ando had no trouble remembering: it was with the numbers on the newspaper that had been sticking out of Ryuji's sutures.
178, 136.
They'd given him the English word "ring". Then he'd found that astonishing report, and it was entitled
Ring.
And now, this, which he beheld-a virus shaped like a ring. It was as if some will, changing form with each rebirth as it strove to grow into something ever larger, had chosen this shape as its symbol.

The microscopic universe contained kinds of beauty that came from cyclic repetition, but what Ando saw now was an ugliness that mirrored such beauty. And it wasn't just the abstract knowledge that this virus brought evil to humanity that made it appear ugly to Ando. What he felt was closer to an instinctive hatred of serpentine creatures. Any human being shown the image, with absolutely no prior knowledge, would probably react with revulsion.

As if to prove this, Nemoto, who had little idea of the origin of the virus, was visibly shaken. His hands on the controls trembled. Only the machine remained unaffected, emotionlessly spitting out negatives. Once he'd taken seven photographs, Nemoto gathered them up and went to the darkroom. While he waited for them to develop, he set the ultrathin section from Mai's blood cells in the holder. Then he resumed his place in front of the console and flipped the switch without ado.

"Next we'll be looking at Takano's."

They gradually increased the magnification, just as they'd done with Ryuji's sample. They had no trouble finding what they were looking for. Without question, it was the same virus. They were writhing just like the other ones.

"Identical," Ando and Miyashita stated at the same time. Neither of them could see anything to prevent them from reaching that conclusion. But Nemoto, the electron microscopy expert, was more sensitive to minor inconsistencies.

"That's strange."

Miyashita watched him tilt his head and stroke his chin, then asked, "What is?"

"I'd rather not say anything until I get a chance to compare the photographs."

Ever cautious in all things, Nemoto hesitated to draw a conclusion based solely on his impressions of Ryuji's virus. Science was about proof, not impressions, was his motto. That aside, Nemoto could swear he saw a quantitative difference. It wasn't a variation in the overall number of specimens of the virus present in each sample. What struck him was that, in Mai's sample, there were more broken rings. In Ryuji's sample, too, of course, some of the virus specimens had come undone, making u-shapes, or snake coils, but most of them were whole and looked like rings. In Mai's case, more of the rings were broken, and stretched out like threads.

In order to confirm his suspicions, Nemoto homed in on a likely-looking specimen and adjusted the focus until the specimen filled the screen. If the normal virus looked like a ring, then this specimen looked like a ring which had broken just on one side of the stone. The "stone" and its "setting" now looked like a head with a flagellum wiggling behind it.

The result was a shape that Ando, Miyashita, and Nemoto were quite familiar with. All three men were reminded of the same thing at the same time, but none dared say it.

6

Nemoto's first impression was borne out when he compared the photos he'd taken of the ring virus. In any given area of Mai's sample, there were more virus specimens that looked like broken rings or threads than in a comparable area of Ryuji's sample. Statistically speaking, roughly one in ten of Ryuji's viruses were broken, while in Mai's case, the distribution was around fifty percent. Such a manifest difference was unlikely to occur without a reason. Ando requested that samples from all the videotape's victims be put under the electron microscope.

It wasn't until the Friday after the New Year's holiday that all the results were in.

Glancing out the window in the lab, he could see that some of the previous night's snowfall still lingered among the dead trees of the Outer Gardens of Meiji Shrine. When he grew tired of analyzing the photos, Ando went to the windowsill to feast his eyes on the scene outside the window. Miyashita never rested though, carefully comparing the photos spread out on the desktop.

Including Asakawa and Mai, eleven people had died after coming into contact with the video. The same virus had been found in each victim's blood, and there was no more doubt the virus had been the cause of death. But regarding broken rings, the victims fell into two groups. In Mai's case and Asakawa's, broken rings made up fully half of what was found in their blood, while in everybody else's samples, only one specimen in ten was broken. It was not a particularly surprising result. It seemed that the fate of the infected person hinged on the degree of presence of the broken-ring virus.

The statistics indicated that once the broken-ring specimens exceeded a certain percentage, the host was spared death by cardiac arrest, though it wasn't clear yet exactly what that percentage was.

Mai and Asakawa had watched the video. The ring virus had appeared in their bodies. Up to that point, they were no different from the nine other victims. But something had caused some of the viruses to come apart into a thread shape, and the broken particles had surpassed a certain level. And that was why, even though they had watched the video, neither Mai nor Asakawa had died of a heart attack. The question was, what had caused the viruses in their bloodstreams to come apart? What set them apart from the other nine?

"Some form of immunity?" Ando wondered aloud.

"That's a possibility," Miyashita said, cocking his head.

"Or maybe…" Ando trailed off.

"Maybe what?"

"Is it something about the virus itself?"

"I lean more in that direction personally," said Miyashita, propping his feet on the chair in front of him and sticking out his great belly. "Thanks to the mischief of the four kids who watched it first, the video was doomed to extinction in the not-too-distant future. To find a way out, the virus had to mutate. All of this is just as Ryuji told us in his message. Now, then: how exactly did it mutate, and what did it evolve into? The answer to that, I believe, lies in the ring virus that Mai Takano and Kazuyuki Asakawa carried. In its irregular shape, to be precise."

"A virus borrows its host's cells in order to reproduce itself, by definition."

"Right."

"And sometimes that reproduction takes place at an explosive rate."

This, too, was common knowledge. One only had to think of the Black Death that ran rampant in the Middle Ages, or the Spanish influenza of modern times, to find examples of a virus proliferating wildly.

"So?" Miyashita urged Ando to continue.

"So think about it. The video tells people, 'Make a copy within a week or you die.' Even if the viewer did so, that's just one tape turning into two. That's a pretty slow growth rate. Assuming the subsequent viewers repeat the process, that's still only four tapes after a month."

"You've got a point, I guess."

"That's nothing to be scared of."

"It's not very virus-like, you mean. Right?"

"If it doesn't increase at a geometric rate, then it's hardly spreading at all."

Miyashita fixed Ando with a glare. "What exactly is it you're trying to get at?"

"It's just that…"

Ando wasn't sure himself what he wanted to say. Was he trying to put a worse spin on things? Certainly there were cases when a single virus spread virtually overnight to thousands, tens of thousands of victims. That was the raison d'etre of a virus, to replicate itself simultaneously in large numbers. Having copies made of a videotape, one at a time, was simply too inefficient. The results said as much; only three months after its birth, the tape was now extinct. Unless it had been reborn through mutation…

"It's just that I have a bad feeling about this."

Ando looked again at the photos of the ring virus. Vast numbers of them, piled up on one another. When several specimens overlapped, they looked like unspooled, tangled-up videotape. The psychic Sadako Yamamura, on the brink of death, had converted information into images, leaving some sort of energy at the bottom of that well. The video had been born as a result of the detonation of that energy. It wasn't matter that was spreading, but information, as recorded on videotape and DNA.