Parasite Eve Sephirotto Part 11

Dialysis machines were set up at every bedside, a sight that made him queasy. Everyone was lying around languidly with tubes in their arms. While many were looking intently through magazines and comic books, others, like the person next to Anzai reading tabloids, were simply idling the time away. And weaving among them like white threads were the nurses.

Anzai was informed that nearly three hundred people were receiving dialysis treatment there.

The patients varied in age. There were a few children Anzai thought to be even younger than Mariko and many who looked to be in their 70's. There was also a man his own age.

Maybe it was the fluorescent lights, but most of them seemed to have sickly complexions.

And despite the very modern machinery, everything seemed somehow run down.

It was not long before Mariko had to begin dialysis herself. The doctor said she would need to undergo surgery to have a shunt made for her. To enable dialysis, a tube had to be hooked up to a vein in the arm, and to facilitate this an artery was joined to the vein to widen it. Mariko would get an internal shunt. It was hard to make one for children, but it didn't get infected easily and therefore lasted longer.

Two weeks after the operation, Mariko's dialysis began. Three times a week, directly after school, she spent four to five hours in a hospital bed for the procedure, after which she took the last bus to return home by ten. This continued for six months. In that whole time, Anzai visited the hospital only a few times. Mariko spent more than enough time in bed alone, gazing absent-mindedly out the window. She sometimes had bad reactions to the treatment, which usually resulted in seizures. It couldn't have been easy on her, thought Anzai. When he recalled the figure of his sleeping daughter, he felt a twinge of pity. What crossed her mind as she watched her blood flow into the bedside monitor, the slowly turning blood pump and the long, thin dialyzer leading back to her arm? Only now did he wonder what she had gone through. At the time of the actual treatment, such things had hardly even crossed his mind.

"Please think of this as a temporary measure," the doctor had said. "In the case of young children with kidney failure who have to go through long periods of dialysis, side effects are not uncommon. The biggest concern is a stunting of body growth. Kidneys do have a role in physical development, and a failed kidney will hinder it. Growing taller means a lot to children. Were Mariko to continue dialysis like this, she might become deeply concerned about her height. Prolonged treatment would inhibit bone growth and have possibly adverse effects on her reproductive system as well."

"But what other options do we have...?"

"Transplantation is of course the best way to go. Would you like us to look into it for you?"

Despite the doctor's earnest offer, Anzai had been unable to get a handle on his emotions at that moment.

The most logical thing to do was to submit to the knife and offer one of his own kidneys. And yet, the idea frightened him. He was concerned for his own well-being and conferred with the doctor at great length about his hesitations.

Whenever Anzai went out drinking with his colleagues, their conversations always seemed to return to the topic of his daughter's condition. Anzai would answer only vaguely and try to change the subject, but since everyone was usually drunk, they were persistent.

Organ transplantation was a hot topic in the news at that time.

"Must be a beautiful thing they share, those parents who give organs to their own kids, wouldn't you say?" his superior slurred one time. "In other countries, they take organs from dead bodies and transplant them into the living. That's just barbaric if you ask me. Then again, we handle everything much more delicately here in j.a.pan anyway. Hey Anzai, what if you gave one of your kidneys to your daughter? You've got two of 'em, you know. You'd get along fine with one. How can you just stand by when she's in so much pain? Your wife is dead, so you're all she can depend on. That's what I'd call real love."

Though an affable smile came to Anzai's face, he was trying with all his might to quell the anger boiling up inside of him.

In reality, these were just the ramblings of someone who didn't have a child with kidney problems. Was he saying that Anzai was inhumane for not wanting to give up an organ? Did parents have an obligation, even in body, to their children? Was it his duty as a parent to make an unconditional sacrifice? Surgery was a horrible thought for anyone, and if he could find a path to avoid it, he would take it. Did that go against the love between parent and child? He almost voiced his opposition aloud, but instead tightened the grip around his gla.s.s and listened to what his colleagues had to say.

When he came to his senses, Anzai found himself at Yos.h.i.+zumi's office. He shook his head once and cooled his heated thoughts before knocking on the door.

10.

The sound of boiling water filled the air. Asakura placed a sample tube into it, then set the timer. At last, she was close to finis.h.i.+ng a day-long experiment. She sighed and looked around the room.

She was on the second floor of the Radioisotope Research Building. The room was used exclusively for the treatment of low level radioactive matter. She was the only one there, her surroundings having fallen into quietude hours before. It was past 10:30. Today marked the middle of summer vacation. Asakura smiled to herself. When no one was around like this, working through her experiments became a completely private endeavor.

She had come to campus early that morning to start importing proteins into Eve 1's mitochondria, having no time to concentrate on anything else. Before she knew it, day had turned into night. Considering she had taken no breaks since starting the experiment, she was very grateful to be nearing its completion.

Eve 1 really is intriguing, she thought as she stared blankly at the bubbles rising in the simmering water. In the two years since joining the course, she had worked with numerous kinds of specimens, but never had she seen anything so inexplicable.

Eve 1 was still propagating. Since Tos.h.i.+aki had introduced a clofibrate subjected to BSA conjugate, the cells were dividing at a rate faster than common cancer cells. He told her that Eve 1 had been sampled from a human liver, but this did not fit in with the sheer greed with which they evolved.

Asakura had tried asking Tos.h.i.+aki where exactly he procured the cells. Undoubtedly, Eve 1 had come from the ice box he was carrying that night on the stairs. He always managed to weasel his way out of answering the question every time it was posed. Asakura secretly tried looking them up in a cell bank catalog, but there was nothing registered under the name "Eve," nor anything that even resembled it. When she came up empty-handed, she figured it was a type of cell not named by anyone yet. In other words, the cells had not in fact been distributed from any other research facility. Tos.h.i.+aki had christened the cells himself.

This may have explained the secrecy, but still she could not help wondering where they had originated.

Tos.h.i.+aki had been looking after his wife. Or so she'd heard. He couldn't have had the time to be contacting other universities for laboratory samples.

This left her with only one logical explanation.

Asakura s.h.i.+vered at the thought.

She couldn't imagine Tos.h.i.+aki Nagas.h.i.+ma would ever do that. She'd always felt grateful towards him. It was thanks to him that she was able to tackle every experiment presented to her over the past two and a half years.

When Asakura began her senior year and enrolled in the Biofunctional Pharmaceuticals course, it wasn't for any particular reason. Thinking of it now, it was nearly impossible for third-year students to fully grasp the experiments they were conducting in their cla.s.ses. They chose courses purely out of careerist motives or which were reputed to be easy.

Asakura, too, had no burning desire to get into any particular cla.s.ses. But it was a hands-on lab session hosted by the Biofunctional Pharmaceuticals seminar course where she learned to truly enjoy the lab for the first time. In that experiment, she extracted plasmid DNA samples from E. coli, into which she inserted some genes. Until then, she had always thought of DNA as being mystical and sublime, yet here she was extracting it through surprisingly simple means. Though she initially had many fears about manually "cutting and pasting" DNA, she came to know the pure joy of actually accomplis.h.i.+ng it. She shared this sense of wonder with a teacher who happened to be nearby at the time. The teacher smiled gently and said, "That's exactly what we want you to see. It's the whole reason we do this."

That teacher was, of course, Tos.h.i.+aki.

At the post-session get-together, which was held in the Biofunctional Pharmaceuticals seminar room, her seat was, by chance, right next to his. She learned from him that his course studied mitochondria.

Only then did she think to join it. There was a place where she could perform fascinating experiments and acquire valuable skills along the way.

Her wish came true and, as fate would have it, she would conduct experiments under Tos.h.i.+aki's tutelage. Asakura still remembered the excitement she felt when she received official word. She felt more than fortunate to be learning from someone like him. He was the type who had broad interests and therefore possessed a wide variety of technical knowledge.

Because of this, she was able to experience firsthand a whole range of experimental situations. He taught her nearly all the methods he thought necessary for the field of biochemistry.

She soon learned to enjoy the scientific process, especially when her work pleased her mentor with good results. She was always amazed at his scrutiny. When interesting findings presented themselves, not only did he form a relevant hypothesis every time, but also devised a way to test it immediately. Asakura was often drawn into long discussions, at which times Tos.h.i.+aki's face was radiant. Overwhelmed though she was, she tried to catch up with him and read many an article. She decided to stay on for two more years after graduating simply because working with Tos.h.i.+aki was such a joy.

Asakura had never imagined that she'd enroll in a master's program. Of course, she loved her science cla.s.ses in high school, but she never once pictured herself in a white lab coat working on isotopes late into the night.

Her height had been the cause of many playground insults when she began to grow rapidly in fifth grade. She was soon the tallest of her cla.s.s, and the boys looked curiously small to her.

About halfway through her middle school years, some boys finally sprouted up and outgrew her, but she still stood out among the girls. She joined the volleyball club, where her height was much appreciated. Extracurricular activities were a positive outlet for her; they provided an arena where her sense of dedication could flourish.

In high school, she started to worry about her tallness.

Her growth had only begun to slow down when she reached S'8", but compared to those around her she was still quite tall. Her female friends expressed envy, and, though she smiled it away, inside she was a sack of sighs. She dated a few boys during her freshman year, but she could never get over her always being the taller one.

She also had difficulty trying to buy clothes that fit her, and finding stores that carried her shoe size was far from easy. So many times she had found clothing with just the kind of design she liked, but had to give up because it did not fit her. Whenever she was not in her school uniform, she usually resorted to s.h.i.+rts and jeans.

At school, she was sometimes the target of boys' teasing. Many of them were her friends, so the hara.s.sment was likely intended as nothing more than playful jabs, but regardless, she took it to heart because they were so persistent.

Asakura had no boyfriends in college. This did not make her feel lonely, however. Still, she sometimes asked herself if her self-consciousness about her height was making her squeamish with the opposite s.e.x. Maybe this habit of working so late every day was a weak way to deny that it was just so.

The piercing beep of the electric timer brought her back to reality. It was time to stop the boiling. She smacked her forehead for being so careless and removed the sample to put it on ice.

She set up some acrylamide gel in an electroph.o.r.esis machine. The top surface of the gel was segmented like teeth and pre-coated with a refined plastic. As soon as the Eve 1 sample was cooled off, she began applying it cautiously into each gap using a pipettman.

After portioning out everything that she needed, she flipped on the power supply switch. A dial spun around and settled as she set it at 20 mA. Right away, powder-like bubbles began to rise from within the immersion tub.

"Finally," Asakura said as she stretched. The immersion process would take close to three hours. She was free to do whatever she wished in the meantime.

It was just past eleven. If she stayed here and read, she was bound to fall asleep. She thought it might be best to go home for a while and take a bath.

She left the isotope ward and returned to her office. Taking her bag from her locker and turning off the lights, she went out into the hallway and locked the room.

It was about time she started preparing for her speech. She was to give an oral presentation at the annual meeting of the j.a.panese Biochemical Society in September.

Tos.h.i.+aki and a fellow colleague, along with a few students, had been invited to present their work. Asakura was nearly finished with the research she needed to complete for the meeting, with only two or three experiments remaining to be done.

She wondered just how long Tos.h.i.+aki would continue to a.n.a.lyze Eve 1. She was suspicious. The conference should have been his first priority right now.

As the lights had already been shut off, the corridor was dark, giving her an eerie feeling as she walked down its length. A lukewarm draft blew uncomfortably past her cheek.

Her sandals made unsettling echoes as they slid along the floor, their sounds seeming to hang in the thickly saturated air behind her.

Asakura could not stop thinking about how bizarre those cells were. Not only were they abnormal, it was almost as if they emanated some tangible force.

She honestly wanted nothing more to do with them, but could not very well say so to Tos.h.i.+aki. Though she had obediently worked on the experiments so far, it did not stop her from being gripped by a certain fear now and then.

Ever since she was little, Asakura sometimes had moments where she knew that she would be sick the next day, or get the feeling that they would lose a volleyball match. While they were trifles, these brief flashes of intuition affected her deeply. They always made the hair on her neck stand on end with an almost painful itch.

It was this same sensation now, growing stronger with each day working on those cells.

Asakura understood Eve 1 not by observation, but by intuition.

It horrified her. It would not normally have bothered her so much, were she not constantly working late nights with no one else around. In the lab she could distract herself with the radio, but music was not allowed in the isotope room. Maybe that was why she felt so vulnerable today.

She prayed that Tos.h.i.+aki would soon relieve her of any further work on the cells, but her wish was not likely to be granted any time soon. His attachment to Eve 1 was unnatural.

Ever since Eve 1 yielded such intriguing information, his att.i.tude had become quite cheerful.

Compared to the days after his wife's accident, he certainly seemed to have regained his former self. But that changed as soon as he began working on Eve 1. He would then take on the look of an obsessed man. Asakura was afraid to speak to him at such times, which made things even more difficult since she was dying to ask him all about Eve 1.

Tos.h.i.+aki did more than keep the cells alive. They were actually growing. It was as if they were...

Asakura held her shoulders.

It was as if they were happy.

Nonsense, she thought, forcing herself to deny what was already clear to her. As she started up the stairs, her feet instinctively picked up speed. She kept telling herself that it was nothing, that she was worrying too much. But she ran as fast as she could, wanting more than anything to get home.

11.

"We all have countless parasites living inside us," the stately professor began his lecture.

A large paper sign hanging in front of the stage read: "BIOFUNCTIONAL PHARMACEUTICALS COURSE, PROFESSOR MUTSUO Is.h.i.+HARA." He was a man in his early fifties. His hair was graying, but his voice had vigor.

Despite being a lecture hall, the rectangular room seated only ISO people and was much smaller compared to the liberal arts auditoriums, which typically accommodated over 300 students. Because the number of students in the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences during any given year tended to be small, this s.p.a.ce was more than sufficient. Kiyomi took a seat closer to the back where the stairs ascended and looked down at the seats below. There were least 50 people in attendance, half of whom were probably pharmaceuticals students.

There may have been a few from other departments like herself, but she suspected that nearly everyone there was actually enrolled in the Biofunctional Pharmaceuticals course. There were some auditors who were in their fifties and sixties, but no one in their teens.

One of the auditorium windows had been left open to let in the breeze. A cool draft flowed past her cheek and the sound of rustling leaves wafted gently towards her like ripples upon water. She glanced outside at the fresh green foliage sparkling in the sunlight.

Kiyomi was now in her third year of college. Her freshman and soph.o.m.ore years had gone by in the blink of an eye. She had been very active so far, taking notes in every cla.s.s, continuing with bra.s.s ensemble practice, helping manage the annual music festival, comparing notes with friends and trying her best not to miss a test. She even managed to relax now and then by going on group trips and ski weekends with cla.s.smates.

"So, are you getting an interns.h.i.+p next year or what?"

She'd had a sudden wakeup call when a friend blurted out this question one day.

Kiyomi realized she still had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. She had somehow completely glossed over the uncertainty which troubled her so much in high school. Now that college was half over, she knew this was the time to make decisions about her future. Even so, she had yet to feel motivated.

It was only June, but the days were warm. Refres.h.i.+ng summerly winds shook the branches of the shading trees and her white s.h.i.+rt fluttered. The skies were constantly overcast through fall and winter, but now they had cleared up beautifully, drenching the buildings and pavement with much needed sunlight.

Kiyomi was taking this opportunity to attend a public lecture being offered at the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Every year on the second Sunday of June, the school's faculty held free educational lectures open to the public in an attempt to dispel misconceptions about their field. The school's chair and profs would outline their research in some detail; this year, they were also going to discuss the basics of medicinal plants and devote some time to charged issues like drug side-effects and the AIDS virus. The s.p.a.cious medicinal plant green house, located at the rear of the building, was also opened to the public. Visitors were invited to have a small picnic outside. The event had been popular for quite some time, but Kiyomi had never joined in the festivities until a cla.s.smate invited her along.

The day was graced with a clear blue sky and gorgeous weather. Kiyomi took the bus with her friend and arrived at the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences around 9:30 in the morning. Kiyomi's university was typical in that it catered to many personal and academic interests, but it was best known for its various stellar scientific departments. The School of Medical Sciences and its affiliated hospitals were in the northern part of the city, the School of Agriculture was right near the subway station, and the School of Engineering was up in the mountains. The Pharmaceutical Sciences building sat atop a small hill, a five-minute walk from the School of Liberal Arts. When they got off at the bus stop they had a pleasant view of the streets spread out below. Maybe Kiyomi was imagining it, but the breeze seemed cooler up here.

There would be one lecture in the morning and three in the afternoon, each lasting an hour and a half. In the interim, everyone was encouraged to see and explore the greenhouse.

The morning lecture was to begin at 10 o'clock. Kiyomi went into the lobby, where an exhibit about Chinese herbal medicine was on display, and looked over the list of lecture topics. The first was ent.i.tled "Drug Manufacturing: Chemistry and Pharmacology" and looked to be a talk about the development of pharmaceutical products. Thinking this would be a little over her head, she looked slowly down the list to the afternoon schedule. She read, "The Benefits of Chinese Medicine," and "What is Gene Therapy?" ...

Then, the last topic caught her eye: "Symbiosis with Mitochondria: The Evolution of Cellular Society."

THUMP, went her heart.

She clutched her chest at this unexpected reaction. More than a heartbeat, it felt like a cry for help. Her breathing quickened. Her head was on fire. Her hands twitched with the aftereffects of the shock. She held her chest tighter to stop it. A single bead of sweat trickled from her temple down her cheek. She could not tear her eyes away from the words on the poster.

Kiyomi clenched her teeth and inhaled as deeply as she could. The strange beat was long gone, and in its place was her regular pulse, pumping blood.

Yet she was unable to move for a while. Another drop of sweat flowed down her face, following the same trail as its predecessor before falling to the floor.

"What's wrong, Kiyomi?"

Her friend looked worriedly into Kiyomi's face. She shook her head and said it was nothing, then looked up and tried to smile, but managed only a twitch of the lips.

"Really, I'm fine. Let's go in." Her companion looked worried, but nodded reluctantly and followed her outside.

Just before leaving the lobby, Kiyomi looked back at the poster once again. Why? she wondered. She'd felt the irregular beat when she'd seen the words.