EDGE (9 page)

Saeko listened intently, drawn by the idea of bicycles as fossils.

“There are strange similarities between the things mankind has created and the living organisms born on this planet. I won’t get into the mechanisms that governed the dawn of early life, but I find it unimaginable that they simply arose by coincidence from the stirrings of a thick soup of amino acids. Someday, when you’re older, Sae, I’ll tell you my thoughts on the matter. But for now, just know that we don’t know how it happened.

“Roughly 3.9 billion years ago—less than a billion years after the earth was formed—the first life forms were born. They were prokaryotes, life forms that lacked a cell nucleus, similar to bacteria. They were extremely simple in form, but they were alive nonetheless. For about two billion years after that, these extremely primitive life forms continued to exist with no progress whatsoever. Can you imagine that? No progress at all, for two billion years! That’s a mind-bogglingly long time span! The first life form to finally develop a cell nucleus came into being around 1.5 billion years ago. And then, roughly 600 million years ago came the great explosion of life known as the Cambrian Period. Suddenly, everything changed, and life took on all sorts of diverse forms. The life forms that were born in this period were totally different from anything that had existed previously. They were absolutely hideous by modern-day standards—often you couldn’t tell their tops from their bottoms or their heads from their tails. Around 400 million years ago, the first plants began to grow on land. Amphibians evolved and emerged from the water, the dinosaurs were born and then birds. Then came the mammals, and finally human beings capable of speech. They had a whole animal kingdom similar to the one we have today. But along the way, the overwhelming majority of species didn’t survive. They say that around 99 percent of emergent species are weeded out by natural selection. You’ve heard of the most famous ones, of course.”

Saeko had discussed the topic with her friends at school. The dinosaurs were famous for emerging during the Triassic Period, flourishing
during the Jurassic and dying out at the end of the Cretaceous, roughly 65 million years ago. There was no end of speculation as to the cause of their extinction, with various theories attributing their demise to a huge meteor impact, a massive molecular cloud, geological changes, or even continental shifts caused by plate tectonics. But ultimately nobody knew what really happened to them.

“Now, about the tools humankind has invented. Cro-Magnon man was the earliest modern human species, but even before that, simple stone tools were used by paleoanthropic man and primitive man. For example, the first tool created by primitive man was a hand axe made of stone, a little over a million years ago. For about a million years, the hand axe remained in use with no significant advancements. From our modern-day perspective, it’s an unfathomably long time span. Well? Doesn’t it remind you of how the first prokaryotes didn’t evolve at all for 2 billion years? But once civilizations began to emerge in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the banks of the Yellow River, mankind began to produce a vast variety of tools. It’s just like when the prokaryotes finally developed the cell nucleus and began to develop into multicellular organisms, though they still didn’t develop the ability to obtain energy by feeding on other organisms. There was no food chain yet. They were like the plant world. None of them consumed energy in order to move about.

“In the seventeenth century, after Ancient Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance, Newton brought classical mechanics to completion, and then we had the Industrial Revolution in Britain. It’s just like that great explosion of life during the Cambrian when all sorts of animals emerged. Afterwards, the process of mechanization and automation picked up speed, and before you knew it man was making all manner of devices. Take Japan. From the Yayoi Period to the Edo Period, there was very little change in the things people made. Everything really took off in the Meiji Period. Man’s creations don’t continuously evolve. They undergo a long latency period, and when the right time comes, there’s an explosion of variation. And the length of that latency period gets shorter and shorter as we move through time. The advances human civilization made during the nineteenth century don’t even compare to those of the twentieth century in terms of speed.

“Another similarity between the evolution of life and that of manmade technology is extinctions. Look at Japan. The palanquins and rickshaws used for transport in the Edo Period died out with the advent of automobiles and trains. When a more advanced technology is
developed, the older technology with the same function fades from existence. And yet there are some that survive. The steel axes we use today are more refined than their stone predecessors, but other than that they’re more or less identical. Knives, forks, spoons, and chopsticks maintain pretty much the same form they’ve always taken, and they’re unlikely to ever change. Examples in the organic world include archaebacteria—strains that have persisted since primordial times—and other life forms that have changed very little over the ages, like jellyfish, sea lilies, and coral.

“But what causes manmade technologies to go extinct? There’s a major difference between manmade objects and natural organisms. Manmade objects are created with a specific purpose in mind. Man didn’t just shake a toolbox and suddenly pull out a television. The drive begins deep in the human psyche and is then expressed in language. When a new object emerges that satisfies the same purpose as an older one, the older one falls into obsolescence. To put it simply, when man created the bicycle, rickshaws went extinct. To put it in terms of information theory, the new technology overwrites the old one. The technology saved under a new file name survives as a new species.

“Now, here’s a question. Was the first life on earth male or female? Single-celled organisms don’t actually have a gender, but if we were to assign them one, what do you think it would be?” Saeko’s father paused, waiting for his daughter’s response.

Saeko didn’t have to think for long. She knew which gender was the one capable of producing offspring, even in the case of single-celled organisms. The answer that immediately came to mind was “female.”

“I would say female.”

“Right,” Saeko’s father clapped his hands lightly. “The early prokaryotes would have to have been female. The actual distinctions between male and female probably emerged during the great explosion of life in the Cambrian, in tandem with the ability to feed off of other organisms. Perhaps sexual reproduction can be seen as a spin-off of the eat-or-be-eaten paradigm. Of the two sexes, the female is really the fundamental one that remains ever constant. It has the longer history, after all.

“There’s a parallel to that in the world of technology as well. Basic essentials such as hand axes, knives, spoons, and chopsticks have a long, stable history. Technologies that consume energy emerged much later and can be associated with the male sex, or with carnivorism perhaps. The male gender, animals, technologies that consume energy. The female
gender, plants, technologies that don’t consume energy. Don’t you think they fit nicely into two general categories? The female category is the one that’s unwaveringly stable. But add an engine and you’ve got a male technology. It seems to me that masculinity was an offshoot of femininity. The male gender is always unstable, always striving to return somehow to its point of origin. But why is that? Why is the natural world so full of opposing categories?”

Saeko had always taken for granted the abundance of opposites in life, but it wasn’t an easy question to answer. Clearly the male and female genders existed to enable organisms to combine their genes in order to leave behind more diverse descendants.

Her father explained that principle once as they played a game that involved stabbing tiny plastic knives into toy barrels where the player who let the toy pirate leap out of the barrel lost. The game was called “Pop-Up Pirate” and Saeko had gotten it in a New Year’s lucky grab bag at a department store. Saeko and her father played the game instead of doing rock-paper-scissors to decide whose turn it would be to scrub out the bathtub.

“Actually, worker bees and worker ants live by a fairly similar system. We could just as easily apply these methods to procreation. Pretend this brown barrel is a female—a single, enormous female! And this tiny plastic knife is a pathetic little male. A dozen or so males surround the female, stabbing her with their sex organs and injecting their sperm. There’s a plentiful blend of genetic information from more than a dozen individuals, not just two, and if everything works out well, a new life pops out—this pirate.”

No sooner had he finished speaking than her father’s knife activated the gimmick and the little pirate with a black cartoonish eye-patch sprung from the barrel and landed on the table. Saeko let out a cheer. The pirate represented a baby!

“The universe is composed of various opposing concepts. I want you to try to identify them, Sae. For example, some obvious ones would be the positive and negative poles of a magnet, or the north and south poles of the Earth. I want you to see how many pairs of opposites you can think of, and consider the mechanisms and origins that pertain to them.”

Saeko remembered what she had come to this library to find out at the beginning of junior high. She’d been trying to identify as many opposing concepts as she could. Her father seemed to believe that these pairs of opposites served to sustain the fundamental structure of the universe.

There were a number of connections between the message on her father’s postcard and the things he’d said about extinct species of bicycles twenty-two years ago on that spring day at Cycle Park in Izu.

The birth of life, the extinction of the dinosaurs, information theory, opposing concepts …

The young Saeko had opened her notebook at a table in the reading room and set about jotting down as many opposing concepts as she could think of.

Positive and negative, male and female, left and right, the North Pole and the South Pole, good and bad, progress and regression, light and darkness, life and death, war and peace
.

Those were the pairs she had come up with in junior high and inscribed in her notebook. Now that she was thirty-five years old and held a degree in the philosophy of science, she would have to do better than that.

Saeko began to write.

Objectivity and subjectivity, real numbers and imaginary numbers, logic and emotion, animate and inanimate, attraction and repulsion, waves and particles, matter and antimatter, chaos and order, bosons and fermions, relativity and quantum theory, material particles and virtual particles
.

Saeko wrote the word “brain” and her pen came to a stop for a moment as she tried to think of its counterpart. What part of the body functioned in opposition to the brain? The answer that occurred to her was “genes.” They were like a partner to the brain, and yet at times they acted in conflict, as when they dictated survival while the brain chose suicide.

The next item Saeko wrote down was “zero.” Computer bits were comprised of “ones” and “zeros” that represented the concepts of “on” and “off.” Did that mean that one was the opposite of zero? No. If zero were interpreted as inexistence or nothingness, its opposite would be existence or being. But the mathematical interpretation was also different. The opposite of “zero” was “infinity.”

The number zero was in fact a dangerous quantity that had been considered a heretical concept for a long period of mathematical history. It was different from every other rational or irrational number and could bring about drastic consequences if not handled with proper care. Dividing a number by zero resulted in an infinite singularity, an impossible calculation. Zero could easily wreak havoc on the ordered structure of mathematics, greedily swallowing up all else. For these reasons, it was feared like the devil in the Christian world of the Middle Ages. There
was one phenomenon in the universe that married the magic of the twin concepts of zero and infinity. A black hole.

Suddenly, Saeko hit upon a well-known pair of opposites that should have occurred to her in junior high school.

God and the Devil
.

Just as Saeko’s father had explained how males had split off from females, Saeko realized that the devil was said to originally have been a fallen angel. The mechanism by which a fallen angel became the devil resembled the way males derived from females. Both had originally emerged from their counterparts.

Perhaps the same could be said of the relationship between zero and infinity. The universe with its infinite sparkling stars was said to have emerged from nothingness a mere 14 billion years ago. In this case, too, one thing had bifurcated to spawn opposing concepts.

God and the Devil, zero and infinity … God gave rise to the Devil, zero gave rise to infinity. Moreover, the number zero was said to contain infinite energy. Black holes swallowed up all matter, allowing not even light to escape.

What was he trying to tell me?

If her father’s message had anything to do with his disappearance, she was determined to crack the riddle.

Having a goal to pursue gave Saeko the energy to go on living. It was thrilling to use her mind and push forward in her thoughts. But there was a limit to what she could achieve alone. She needed someone who could give her objective feedback on her ideas to give her thoughts more solid direction.

Two faces, father and son, popped into Saeko’s mind. It had been years since she had seen Kitazawa, but now he seemed to call her name.

7
Saeko meant to call Hideaki Kitazawa the next morning and visit his office in the afternoon, but she didn’t act quickly enough and ended up being called in for a meeting by editor-in-chief Maezono. When she showed up at the publishing house as requested, Maezono offered her another assignment.

Saeko’s story on the missing Fujimura family had been so widely noticed that the office now wanted to do a regular feature on current missing persons cases of a similar nature on a monthly basis. Without giving Saeko a chance to refuse, Maezono handed her a file detailing the
serial disappearances of two young men from Itoigawa City.