Free Loop by Kôji Suzuki, Glynne Walley Page A

emergence of life?"
    "The emergence of life?" Ryoji looked truly astonished.
    "Sure. How you look at the emergence of life is an important question."
    "It is?" Ryoji furrowed his brow and looked like he wanted to get out of this question but quick.
    Kaoru didn't appreciate this attitude of Ryoji's. For a kid like him it should be fun to play around with questions like this. The question of why life on earth was able to gain the ability to evolve was intimately connected with the question of how life first emerged on earth. Kaoru, at least, had gotten a lot of enjoyment out of debating this with his father.
    "Well, let's move on, then. Let's grant that life emerged, by some mechanism we don't yet understand. So, next…" Kaoru stopped to let Ryoji step in.
    "I think the first life on earth was something like a seed. That seed contained the right information so that it could sprout, grow, and eventually become the tree which is life as we know it, including humankind."
    "Are there no variations?"
    "Yes and no. The biggest tree grows from the tiniest seed. The size of the trunk, the colour of the leaves, the type of fruit-all that information is already contained within the seed. But of course the tree is also influenced by the natural environment. If it doesn't get sunlight it'll wither, if it doesn't get enough nutrients the trunk'll be thin. Maybe it'll be struck by lightning and split in two, maybe its branches will break in a gale. But no amount of unpredictable influence of that kind can change the basic nature of the tree as contained in the seed. Come rain or snow, a ginkgo tree will never bear apples."
    Kaoru licked his lips. He didn't mean to contradict Ryoji. He basically agreed with him, in fact.
    "So you're saying that if sea creatures learn to walk on land, if giraffes develop long necks, it's all because they were programmed that way from the start?"
    "Well, yeah."
    "In that case, we should assume that there was some kind of will at work before life began."
    Ryoji responded innocently. "Whose will? God's?"
    But Kaoru wasn't thinking about God per se, just an invisible will at work both before life began and during the process of evolution.
    He found himself imagining a school of fish fighting with each other to get to land. There was an overwhelming power in the thought of all those fish, enough of them to dye the sea black, jumping around as they sought dry land.
    Of course it was possible that sea life had never intended to go on land, but had simply succeeded in adapting to it after orogenic processes had begun to dry up the water. That was how the mainstream evolutionary thinker would explain it.
    But the image that came to Kaoru's mind was of those hollow-eyed fish, yearning day in and day out for the land, dying at the water's edge and making mountains of their corpses. Mainstream evolution had it that a certain fraction of them had simply been lucky enough to adapt. Kaoru simply couldn't believe that. The transition from a marine to a land-based living environment involved changes in internal organs. Their insides had to be remade to allow for the transition from gill breathing to lung breathing. What kind of bodily trial and error had resulted in those changes? One kind of organ had been reborn as another. It was pretty major, when you thought about it.
    Right in front of Kaoru was Ryoji's bald head. Because Ryoji was hunched over, the top of his head came up to the tip of Kaoru's nose. At this very moment, within that emaciated little body, a violent cellular conflict was being enacted. As it was within Kaoru's father Hideyuki. He'd lost most of his stomach, part of his large intestine, and his liver. And still, more as-yet-unknown cancer cells had taken up residence in some new spot in his body and were writhing there even now.
    An unexpected inspiration came to Kaoru.
    Cancer cells invaded a normal organ, changing its colour and shape and constructing new bulges, until the normal functioning of the organ