Loop (novel)

Loop (ループ, Rūpu) is the third novel in Koji Suzuki's Ring series, a horror story by the Japanese author. The book centers on a simulated reality called the Loop, a digital world identical to the real one, built to model how life first appeared and evolved. The events of the earlier novels, Ring and Spiral, take place inside this alternate universe. Unlike the other books in the series, Loop was never turned into a Ring film, though the 2000 video game The Ring: Terror's Realm borrows some ideas from it, including the simulated reality known as the Loop.

The plot follows Kaoru Futami, a medical student. His father, Hideyuki, falls ill with Metastatic Human Cancer (MHC), a terminal disease that attacks all living things—humans, animals, and plants. As his condition worsens, Hideyuki tells Kaoru about the LOOP project, a virtual reality simulator he helped create to recreate the emergence of life and the likely course of evolution. Nearly everyone involved in the project has died from the same cancer. Kaoru takes a tutoring job for a boy named Ryoji, an asymptomatic carrier of MHC, and meets Ryoji's mother, Reiko. Though she is 15 years older, Kaoru falls in love with her, and they begin an affair after Ryoji starts chemotherapy. When Ryoji discovers the relationship, he kills himself by falling backwards from a 12-story building. A month later, Reiko tells Kaoru she might be pregnant with his child. Kaoru also reads Ryoji's suicide note, which explains his reasons for taking his own life.

As Kaoru digs deeper into the LOOP project, his father directs him to a microbiologist named Amano, who worked on the project's final stages before it was shut down. Amano explains that LOOP used a network of a hundred supercomputers to simulate life, and mentions a scientist in New Mexico who might still be alive. Kaoru also learns that MHC cells all have a chromosome count of 2n times 3. His mother, Machiko, urges him to go to New Mexico after telling him a story about an "Ancient One" with a thousand watching eyes. There, Kaoru finds the scientist dead, but a computer in the lab turns on and instructs him to put on virtual reality goggles and gloves, pulling him into the LOOP simulation. Inside, he experiences the life of a Native American man with a wife and two children, who is brutally murdered by white colonizers. After leaving the simulation, Kaoru calls Amano for t