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ATG GAA GAA GAA TAT CGT TAT ATT CCT CCT CCT CAA CAA CAA

 

He'd abandoned this approach because it resulted in triple repetitions of the same letter, a very unusual thing in English. But what if the letters themselves needed to be rearranged? He thought of an example he'd read once, where the phrase "Bob opened the door" had been encoded as OOOOEEEBBDDTPNHR. As it was, the sequence contained far too many letter repetitions to make sense as English, but when rearranged according to a certain set of rules, it yielded a perfectly normal sentence.

This might work, he thought.

But just as he was about to get to work, he stopped. He could see where this was going, too. If he not only had to decide what letters each triplet stood for, but also had to figure out how to rearrange the letters, the task suddenly became a mammoth one. And it wasn't just a question of time. Without a key of some sort, he'd end up with the same sort of problem he had run into earlier: a plethora of possible solutions with no way to choose among them. He thought of the numbers that had led him to "ring" and wondered if they might somehow be that key, pointing him toward the right order in which to arrange the letters now. But first he'd have to figure out what letters the triplets stood for.

Another dead end.

You need a fresh angle on this, Ando told himself. He was trying to proceed by trial and error, but he felt like he was just trying the same thing over and over. Maybe he was too fixated on the idea of making each set of two or three bases correspond to one English letter.

The solution has to be something unambiguous, something that I can figure out without going through a long, complicated process.

He felt his concentration faltering, his eyes wandering away from the page. He suddenly realized he was staring at the hair of a young woman seated at the other end of the same table. With her head down like that, she looked like Mai Takano, especially her forehead.

Where is she now?

He worried about her safety, especially when he considered that she used to be Ryuji's lover.

Could Ryuji be trying to tell me where she is with this code?

He considered the possibility for a moment, but then discarded it with a derisive laugh as being too comic-book. How adolescent, to imagine himself as the famous detective out to save the heroine from mortal danger. Suddenly the whole thing seemed foolish to Ando. This probably wasn't a code at all. There was probably a perfectly scientific explanation for how that sequence of bases got into the virus's DNA. And once Ando admitted that possibility, he could feel his passion for code-breaking vanish. He was just killing time anyway, right? He was working awfully hard at it.

The setting sun was turning the hairs on his upper arm golden. All the intensity he'd had that morning was gone now. He thought about moving to another seat, where the sun didn't hit him, and started to get up. Looking around, though, he saw he was surrounded by kids, college students or high school kids studying for entrance exams, all dozing behind mountains of books. Moving wouldn't help him get his concentration back. The entire reading room was enveloped in drowsiness. Ando sat back down where he was.



Think about it logically, he told himself. There has to be a formula.

He sat up straight. He'd been trying to assign letters of the alphabet to trios of bases, but that didn't work out to a formula. If he could get it down to a one-to-one function, or even a several-to-one function, then the answer would become obvious. One-to-one, perhaps several-to-one… There had to be a formula like that to be discovered.

He stood up. Logically speaking, there was no other way. His intuition told him that he'd moved one step closer to a solution, and the realization blew away his torpor, spurring him to action.

He went to the natural sciences section, found a book on DNA, and started flipping madly through the pages. As his excitement mounted, his palms grew sweaty. What he was looking for was a chart that gave what amino acid each trio of bases formed.

Eventually he found one. He took the book back to his table and laid it out flat, opened to the chart, next to the coded message.

When a trio of bases, a codon, forms a protein, the codon is translated into an amino acid. The principles by which the translation takes place were contained in the chart Ando had found. There are twenty varieties of amino acid. There are four bases, meaning there are sixty-four separate combinations of three that can be formed. With sixty-four combinations standing for only twenty amino acids, it meant there was quite a bit of overlap. It was several-to-one mapping. Each trio of bases signified one amino acid or another (or a stop).

 

Consulting the chart, Ando wrote the abbreviated names of the amino acids below the forty-two bases of the code.

 

Next he took the first letter of the name of each acid and lined them up:

 

MGGGTATIPPPGGG

 

But this meant nothing. And he was still faced with triple letter combinations. It seemed he'd have to figure out what to do with them no matter what. There had to be another interpretation. For example, maybe a third straight repetition of the same letter meant that the first two should be interpreted as a space between words.

He tried that:

 

MG TATIP G

 

That wasn't English either.

 

But all the same, Ando felt he was getting somewhere. He could tell he was closing in on the solution. He didn't know why, but he felt that any minute now he'd come up with a word that made sense.

Met, Pro, and Gin were the ones that were repeated three times. He tried writing them out a different way:

 

 

He stared at this list for about a minute, and then he saw an English word he knew.

It occurred to him that the codons repeated three times might signify not "three" but "third". As in, the third letter of the abbreviation for the amino acid.

In other words:

 

 

 

 

Which meant the solution was: Mutation.

 

Forgetting where he was, Ando let out a groan. The only answer he'd been able to come up with, as a result of logic, method, and trial and error, was this. It was a simple, clear answer, and it had to be right.

But still he had to hang his head. He knew the meaning of the English word "mutation"-that is, he knew what it meant in an evolutionary biological sense. But he had absolutely no idea how he was supposed to take it in this context.

Just what the hell are you trying to say, Ryuji? He didn't speak the question aloud. But even in his own head, Ando could hear his voice tremble with excitement at having decoded the message.

 

 

 

He went to the hall, found a pay phone, and dialed Miyashita's number. He doubted his friend would be in, given it was a Saturday evening in the middle of a three-day weekend, but lo and behold, Miyashita was at home with his family. Ando was able to tell him that he thought he'd deciphered the code.

Ando figured Miyashita was probably in his living/dining room; in fact, he could practically see Miyashita's wife and children getting ready for dinner. Miyashita himself was cupping a hand around the mouthpiece to keep out the background noise but was unable to keep his halcyon home life from filtering through.

"Good show! That's excellent. What did it say?"

Miyashita had a loud voice to begin with, and with his hand cupped around the mouthpiece it rang even louder in Ando's ears.

"Well, it wasn't a sentence. It was just a single word."

"Okay, so it was only one word. What was it?"

"Mutation."

"Mutation?" Miyashita repeated the word several times, as if trying it on for size.

"Do you have any idea what it might mean?" Ando asked.

"I don't know. How about you? Any ideas?"

"Not an inkling."

"Listen. Why don't you come over?"

Miyashita lived in a tasteful condo in North Terao, in Tsurumi Ward in Yokohama. Ando would have to take the train to Shinagawa and transfer to the Keihin Express Line, but he'd be able to get there in less than an hour.

"Alright, I guess."

"Call me when you get to the station. I know a good bar near the station where we can knock one back and talk it over."

Miyashita's kindergarten-age daughter seemed to have guessed he was planning to go out. She clung to his waist and whined, "Stay home, Daddy!" Out of respect for Ando, Miyashita clapped his hand over the receiver and scolded her. Ando could hear him wandering around the house with the phone, trying to get away from her. Ando felt guilty, even though it hadn't been his idea to go out in the first place. At the same time, he felt an ineffable sense of loss and envy.

"We can do it another time if you want."

But Miyashita wouldn't hear of it. "No way. I want to hear all the details. Anyway, give me a call from the station, and I'll be right there."

He hung up, not waiting for Ando's reply. With a sigh of despair, Ando left the library and headed for the subway station, the harmonious sounds of his friend's household still echoing in his ears.

 

Ando hadn't taken the Keihin Express Line since visiting Mai's apartment eight days before. From somewhere near Kita Shinagawa Station the train ran on elevated tracks. He found himself looking down on houses and the neon signs. At six on a late-November evening it was already nearly pitch-dark. Turning his gaze toward the harbor he saw the Yashio high-rise apartments straddling the canal, their lit and unlit windows forming a checkerboard pattern. A surprising number of the windows were dark for a weekend evening. Ando found himself trying to find words in the patterns of light and dark; he'd had codes too much on the brain lately. On one among the forest of buildings he thought he saw the phonetic syllable ko- child?-but of course it meant nothing.

Mutation, mutation.

He kept muttering the word under his breath as he stared into the distance. He hoped that maybe the more he intoned it the clearer Ryuji's intent would become.

In the distance he heard a foghorn. The train slid into a station and stayed there; an announcement said they were waiting for an express to pass. Ando was on the last carriage. He stuck his head out the door to see the name of the station. Sure enough, this was where Mai lived. From the train he could see the street outside the station, lined with shops, and he started looking for Mai's apartment, relying on his eight-day-old memories. He remembered that when he'd stood in her room and looked out the window, he'd seen the Keihin Express station at right about eye level. He could see people waiting on the platform, which meant that he should be able to see her apartment from here.

But he couldn't see very well from inside the train, so he got off. He walked down to the end of the platform and stuck his head out over the fence. The shopping street stretched east at a right angle to the train tracks. Less than a few hundred feet away, he saw a seven-story apartment building he recognized.

Abruptly, he heard the sound of the express approaching from the direction of Shinagawa. Once it had passed, the local Ando was riding would shut its doors and continue on toward Kawasaki. Ando hurriedly looked for her window. He knew she lived in room 303, and that was the third window from the right. By now the express had passed, and the bell was ringing to announce the departure of the local. Ando looked at his watch. It was just past six. Miyashita would be eating dinner with his family right now. Ando was reluctant to arrive too early and disturb their precious family time. He figured he was about thirty minutes earlier than he wanted to be, so he decided to take the next train down. He let the local leave without him.

The third floor windows were more or less level with the platform where he was standing. He looked carefully at each of them in turn, but there was no light in any of them.

So she's not there after all.

It had been a faint hope, easily dashed. Then, just as he was about to look away, his gaze was arrested by a band of pale blue light emanating from the third window from the right. He squinted, wondering if he was imagining it, but there it was, fluttering like a bluish-white flag. It glowed so faintly, flickering in and out of view, that he would have missed it if he hadn't been looking so carefully. He leaned even farther forward, but it was too far away. He couldn't quite make it out.

He wanted to go back to her apartment. It should only take twenty minutes or so, which would put him right on schedule for the next train. Without hesitating another minute, he went through the ticket gate and out into the street below.

It was only when he was standing directly below her window, looking up at it, that he was able to figure out the strange light. Her window was open, and her white lace curtain had been blown outside the window, where it was dancing in the breeze, and the neon sign of a car-rental agency across the street was reflecting off the pure white of the lace. Sometimes the primary colors shining on the white cloth showed up like fluorescent paint, which explained the pale blue tinge that was just barely visible from the station. Still, there was a lot about the scene that didn't sit right with Ando. The window had been open and the curtain half closed when he visited eight days ago, but he could distinctly remember closing the window and pulling the curtain to the side before he left. He knew he hadn't left that window open. But there was something that bothered him even more. There was no wind to speak of on this early-winter evening. And yet the curtain had been blown beyond the railing until it was nearly horizontal. Where was that current of air coming from? He couldn't hear any wind. The leaves of the trees lining the street weren't moving. And yet, just above those motionless branches, the curtain danced. The scene was eerily off-kilter. But none of the passersby so much as glanced upward; nobody seemed to notice the odd phenomenon.

The only explanation Ando could think of was a mechanical one. Perhaps a powerful fan was blowing in the room, creating an artificial current flowing outward. But why? His curiosity was aroused.

He went around to the lobby. The only way he'd be able to find out would be to confront that room again.

The superintendent seemed to have the day off. The curtain was drawn at the counter of his office. The whole building felt quiet, with no signs anybody was about.

He took the elevator to the third floor and then walked toward room 303. The closer he got, the smaller and slower his steps became. His instincts were telling him to turn back, but he just had to know. The door to the outside hallway was open, and beyond it he could see a spiral staircase for emergency use. If something happens, maybe I shouldn 't use the elevator. Maybe I should just run down the stairs… Without knowing what exactly he was afraid of, Ando found himself planning an escape route.

He came to the door marked 303. Below the doorbell was a red sticker on which was written TAKANO. Everything was just as before. Ando went to ring the bell, but then thought better of it. Checking to see that the hall was deserted, he put his ear to the door. He couldn't detect a sound, certainly not the motor of an electric fan. He wondered if the lace curtain was still waving outside the window at this very moment. From what he heard beyond the door, he had a hard time believing it was.

"Mai."

Instead of ringing the bell, he called her name, gently, and knocked. No answer.

Mai watched the video, he reminded himself. And she, or someone, had taped over it, only two days before Ando's visit. The fifth day of her disappearance. Who had done it, and why?

Suddenly, Ando could feel again on his skin the strange atmosphere of the room, like the inside of a body. The water at the bottom of the tub, the dripping, the feeling of something brushing against his Achilles tendon.

Ando backed away from the door. In any case, all four copies of that demon video had been wiped from the face of the earth. The crisis was over. No doubt Mai's body would be found soon. No amount of screwing around here was going to bring him any closer to turning things around, Ando told himself as he started back toward the elevator. He was eager to get out of this place again, even at the expense of leaving without an explanation. He wasn't sure why, but he seemed to feel like this every time he came here.

He pushed the elevator call button. While he waited, he kept repeating to himself, mutation, mutation. He wanted to keep his mind on something else, anything. The elevator was taking forever.

From the hallway to his right he heard a resounding snap as a dead-bolt clicked. Ando's body stiffened. Instead of spinning completely around to look, he turned his head just far enough to see out of the corner of his eye. He saw the door to room 303 open slowly outward. He could see the red sticker: there was no doubt which door it was. Unconsciously, Ando pressed the elevator button again and again. The elevator was spending an agonizingly long time on the ground floor.

Seeing a figure emerge from the doorway, Ando braced himself. It was a woman in a summery green one-piece dress. She took a key from her handbag and locked the door, her face visible to Ando in profile. Ando studied the face. She was wearing sunglasses, but even so, it was clear to him that it wasn't Mai. It was someone else. There was no reason for him to be afraid, but his body was running far ahead of his mind at this point.

The elevator doors opened and Ando slipped inside. He went to push CLOSE but accidentally pushed OPEN instead. Finally, a few beats late, the doors started to close. Then, at the last second, a white hand insinuated itself into the crack between the doors, which reacted by springing wide open again. The woman was standing there. Her sunglasses hid any expression her eyes might have had, but Ando could see that she was around twenty-five, with perfectly regular features. With one hand against the edge of the doors, she stepped smoothly onto the elevator and pressed the close button, and then the one for the ground floor. Ando inched nervously backwards until his back and elbows were pressed against the elevator wall and he was standing on tiptoe. From that position, he stared at this strange woman, this woman who had come out of apartment 303, and directed a single question at her from behind:

Who are you?

An odd smell, different from the scent of perfume, tickled his nose, and he made a face and held his breath. What could it be? It smelled like it contained iron, like blood. The woman's hair reached down to the middle of her back, and her hand on the wall was so white it was almost transparent. A closer look revealed that the nail on her index finger was split. Her sleeveless dress was much too light for the season. She had to be freezing. On her legs she wore no stockings, and on her feet just a pair of pumps. He could see purplish bruises on her legs. This shocked him, but he didn't know why. As hard as he tried, he couldn't stifle the trembling that welled up from deep within him.

Shut up in that tiny box of an elevator alone with that woman, time seemed to drag for Ando. Finally they arrived at the ground floor, and Ando held his breath until the door opened. The woman walked straight across the lobby and disappeared into the street outside.

She looked to be about five feet tall, with a well-balanced figure. Her tight dress ended a few inches above the knees and showed off her derriere nicely, and she had a lithe walk. With no stockings to cover them, the backs of her legs showed up especially white, making the bruises on her calves stand out even more. The night was so cold that every other person on the street was wearing a coat, and yet off she went wearing nothing but a sleeveless summer dress.

Ando got off the elevator and then just stood there for a while, staring into the darkness after her.

 

 

Ando waited for Miyashita in front of the bank like he was told. It was a weekend evening, and the bank was closed. With its metal shutters down, the area in front of it looked curiously orderly. The darkness here was cozy, but as he waited for Miyashita to emerge from it, he couldn't rid his mind of the image of that woman from apartment 303.

He tried, but she was burned onto his retinas. The whole time he'd half-sleepwalked back to the station from Mai's building, and then the whole way here to Tsurumi Station, he'd been seeing her in his mind.

Who was she?

The most sensible explanation that occurred to him was that Mai's sister had gotten concerned about her sibling and come to check on her apartment. Ando himself had called Mai's mother and told her in simple terms what he'd found. If Mai did have a sister, and if she too lived in Tokyo, there wasn't anything in the least strange about running into her at Mai's apartment.

But there was something in the indescribable aura that the woman had exuded that negated such an easy answer. Riding in the same elevator with her had shaken Ando to the depths of his soul. She didn't seem to be of this world, and yet, she didn't look like a ghost, either. She'd definitely been there with him in the flesh. But Ando thought he would have had an easier time accepting her if she had been a ghost.

 

He saw a bead of light emerge from behind a mixed-occupancy office building and head straight for him.

"Hey, Ando!"

Ando squinted toward the light, and realized it was Miyashita, hurtling toward him on a small ladies' bike, complete with shopping basket. He must have borrowed his wife's bicycle.

With a squeal of brakes, he came to a stop in front of Ando. At first, Miyashita was too out of breath to speak. He just stood there, straddling the bike, elbows on the handlebars, head bobbing up and down as he gasped for air. Ando never thought he'd see Miyashita on a bike. The slightest exertion usually left him panting.

"That was quick." Ando thought he'd be waiting for at least ten minutes. Miyashita was never early for anything.

Having parked the bike on the sidewalk in front of the station, Miyashita put a hand on Ando's back and guided him into an alley where every building seemed to have a red lantern hanging from its eaves. His breathing had finally calmed a bit, and as they walked, he spoke to Ando.

"I think I know what 'mutation' might mean."

That explained why Miyashita had come on a bike. He was dying to tell Ando his ideas.

"What does it mean?"

"Let's have a beer first."

As they ducked under a shop curtain, Ando noticed that it said Beef Tongue. Miyashita didn't trouble to ask what Ando wanted; instead, the moment they were inside he called for two draft beers and an order of salted tongue. Miyashita seemed to know the proprietor. They exchanged glances of recognition as Miyashita and Ando headed for two counter seats in the back. Those were the quietest seats in the house.

First, Miyashita asked Ando what he had done to figure out the code embedded in Ryuji's virus. Ando took the printout from his briefcase and began to explain the steps he'd gone through. Miyashita nodded repeatedly. Before Ando was half finished, Miyashita seemed to be convinced of the soundness of his method.

"It looks like 'mutation' has to be the answer, alright. The proof of your approach is that it yields exactly one solution." Miyashita patted Ando on the shoulder. "By the way, I'm sure you've noticed what all this is analogous to?"

"What do you mean?"

Miyashita took a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. It had something drawn on it. Whatever it was, it had been done roughly, merely to illustrate a spur-of-the-moment idea.

"Have a look at this," Miyashita said, handing him the paper. Ando took it and flattened it out on the bar in front of him.

He understood immediately. It was an illustration of how the DNA double helix inside a cell replicates itself. The strands of the double helix are complementary: when the structure of one is determined, the other one is automatically determined, too. When a cell divides, the two strands separate, each one faithfully creating next-generation copies of the original. This process of copying a gene and passing it down from parent to child can be thought of as the basics of heredity.

This was, of course, elementary to Ando. "What about it?" he asked.

"Think for a minute about the mechanism behind the evolution of species."

There was a lot that still wasn't known about evolution. For example, the basic concepts of Kinji Imanishi's theory differed from those of Neo-Darwinism, but it was impossible to determine, definitively, who was right. All in all, it was "let a hundred flowers bloom" in the world of evolutionary theory; everybody, qualified or not, weighed in with strongly held opinions. But even without decisive evidence to settle the question, Ando knew that recent developments in molecular biology had come close to showing that sudden genetic mutations were a driving force in evolution.

So he answered by saying, with some confidence, "It probably begins with genetic mutation." He felt he could guess where the conversation was going.

"Right. Mutation is the trigger that moves evolution forward. So, how do mutations happen?" Miyashita took a long swig of his beer, and then pulled a ballpoint pen from his breast pocket. Before Ando had a chance to reply to his question, Miyashita was writing again on the illustration. The reason mutations occur. Ando tried to peer past his hand at the sketch.

"An error arises in the genetic code-some chance damage or displacement to the genes- and that error is copied and passed down. Thus, a mutation. Are you with me? This is the current thinking on the mechanism of mutation."

Miyashita pointed at his diagram with his pen to emphasize his points, but this wasn't anything that had to be explained to Ando. Genetic damage can be caused on purpose in a laboratory using X-rays or ultraviolet radiation. But, usually, mutations occur at random. The DNA sequence, which theoretically should be faithfully copied and transmitted to future generations, sometimes mutates due to a copying error, so to speak, and as enough of these mutations accumulate through replication, gradually a new species arises. A given mutation can be looked at as one small step toward evolution.

 

 

"Remember that analogy I mentioned, my friend?" Miyashita murmured. Finally it dawned on Ando what Miyashita was getting at. X was like Y. Now that Ando considered it, there was indeed a resemblance.

"You're talking about duplicating videos, aren't you?" Ando finally said.

"Don't you think it's basically the same thing?" Miyashita shoved two slices of tongue into his mouth and washed them down with beer.

Ando turned the paper over and spread it out on the counter, and then borrowed Miyashita's pen and began to make a diagram of his own. He needed to take stock of the points of similarity. Even if it was something he thought he already knew inside out, he knew it often helped him to map a thing out on paper.

On the 26th of August, a videotape came into the world in Villa Log Cabin. On the twenty-ninth, four young people lodging in that same cabin erased part of the end of the tape-the part that said, Whoever watches this video must make a copy of it and show it to someone else within a week. The kids taped commercials over this section of the video. To the videotape, it was as if an unforeseen, random event had damaged its genetic sequence, the chain of images. An error was introduced. The tape, now containing the error, was then copied by Asakawa. Naturally, the error was copied as well. Thus far, the process was exactly like the one DNA uses to replicate itself. Not only that, but the erased section of the tape, the message, was meant to play a critical role in the tape's ability to reproduce. In genetic terms, it was a regulator gene. Shock to a regulator gene can make it easier for mutation to occur. Had a trauma to the end of the tape caused the video to mutate?

Ando let the pen come to rest. "Hold on a second. We're not talking about a living thing here."

Miyashita didn't miss a beat. It was as if he'd prepared his response ahead of time.

"If someone asked you to define life, what's your answer?"

Life, in Ando's view, basically boiled down to two things: the ability of an entity to reproduce itself, and its possession of a physical form. Taking a single cell as an example, it had DNA to oversee its self-reproduction, while it had protein to give it external shape. But a videotape? To be sure, it had a physical form-its plastic shell, usually black and rectangular. But it couldn't be said to have the ability to reproduce itself.

"A video doesn't have the ability to reproduce on its own."

"So?" Miyashita sounded impatient now.

"So you're saying it's just like a virus…"

Ando felt like groaning. Viruses are a strange form of life: they lack the power to reproduce on their own. On that score, they actually fall somewhere between the animate and the inanimate. What a virus can do is burrow into the cells of another living creature and use them to help it reproduce. Just as the videotape in question had held its watchers in thrall by means of its threat to destroy them unless they copied it. The tape had used people in its reproductive process.

"But…" Ando felt compelled to object at this point. He wasn't even sure what he wanted to deny. He just felt that if he didn't, something catastrophic would happen.

"But all copies of the video have been neutralized."

There shouldn't be any more danger, in other words. Even if the videotape had been alive in the limited way a virus is, it was extinct now. All four specimens that had been introduced into the world had now been removed from it.

"You're right. The videotape is extinct. But that's the old strain." The beads of sweat on Miyashita's face grew larger with every swallow of beer he took.

"What do you mean, old?" asked Ando.

"The video mutated. Through copying, it evolved until a new strain emerged. It's still lurking out there somewhere. And it's taken a completely different form. That's what I think, anyway."

Ando could only stare open-mouthed. His mug was empty, but he wanted something stronger than beer now. He tried to order some shochu gin on the rocks, but his voice faltered and he couldn't make himself heard to the bartender. Miyashita took over, holding up two fingers and calling out, "Shochu!" Two glasses of the liquor were set on the bar before them, and Ando immediately reached out and drank about a third of his in one gulp. Miyashita watched him out of the corner of his eyes, and then said: "If the videotape did mutate and evolve into a new form during the process of multiple copying, then it wouldn't matter at all to the new species if the old one died out. Think about it. Ryuji went to all the trouble of manipulating a DNA sequence so he could talk to us from the world of the dead. I can't think of any other explanation for why he'd send us the word 'mutation'. Can you?"

Of course Ando couldn't. How could he? He brought the liquor to his lips time and again, but intoxication seemed still a long way off. His head was distressingly clear.

It might be true. Ando found himself gradually leaning toward Miyashita's viewpoint. Ryuji probably meant the word "mutation" as a warning. Ando could almost see Ryuji's face as he sneered, You think you're safe. You think it's extinct. But you won't get off that easy. It's mutated, and a new version is rearing its head.

Ando was reminded of the AIDS virus. It was thought that several hundred years ago some preexisting virus mutated and became what is now known as the AIDS virus. The previous virus didn't infect humans, and may well have been harmless. But through mutation, it took on the power to wreak havoc with the human immune system. What if the same thing happened with this videotape? Ando could only pray that the opposite happened, that a harmful thing was now innocuous. But the facts suggested otherwise. Far from becoming harmless, the mutated videotape had turned into something that killed anybody who watched it regardless of whether or not they made a copy of it. If that was any indication, the thing was getting even nastier. And with Ando unable to form any conclusions yet about Mai's disappearance, that left Asakawa as the only anomaly.

"Why is Asakawa still alive?" Ando asked Miyashita the same thing he'd asked him the day before.

"That's the question, isn't it? He's the only clue as to what that videotape has turned into."

"Well, actually… there is one other person."

Ando gave Miyashita a brief rundown on Mai: how the video had made its way through Ryuji to her, how there was evidence that she'd watched it, and how she'd been missing for nearly three weeks now.

"Which means there are two people who saw the tape and are still alive."

"Asakawa's still alive, although just barely. I'm not sure about Mai."

"I hope she's alive."

"Why?"

"Well, why not? We're better off with two clues than with one."

He had a point. If Mai was still alive, they might be able to figure out what she and Asakawa had in common. It might give them an answer. But for his part, Ando just hoped she was safe.

 

 


Date: 2015-12-24; view: 658


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