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twisted his body until he could close the door.
     
     

2
     
    Kaoru just couldn't get to sleep. It was already thirty minutes since he'd crawled into his futon after having given up on waiting for his father to get home.
    It was customary in the Futami household for both parents and their son to sleep in the same Japanese-style room. With its three Western-style rooms, one Japanese-style room, and good-sized living room, plus dining room and kitchen, their apartment was more than large enough for the three of them. They each had their own room. But for some reason, when it came time to sleep, they'd all gather in the Japanese-style room and lie down together. They'd spread out their futons with Machiko in the middle, flanked by Hideyuki and Kaoru. It had been like that ever since Kaoru was born.
    Staring at the ceiling, Kaoru spoke softly to his mother, lying next to him.
    "Mom?"
    No reply. Machiko tended to fall asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
    Kaoru wasn't what you'd exactly call agitated, but there was a faint pounding of excitement in his chest. He was sure he'd discovered something in the relative positions of gravitational anomalies and longevity zones. It couldn't be just a coincidence. The simple interpretation was that gravity was somehow related to human longevity- perhaps even to the secret of life itself.
    He'd discovered the correlation purely by chance. There'd been a documentary on TV about villages where people lived to extraordinary ages, and it just so happened that at that moment his computer screen had been displaying a map of world gravitational anomalies. Lately he'd come across a lot of information about gravitational anomalies while fooling around on the computer; he'd gotten interested in gravity. Between the TV screen and the computer screen, something triggered his sixth sense, and he'd overlaid the two maps. It was the kind of inspiration only given to humankind.
    No matter how prodigious its ability to process information, no matter how fast its calculation speed, a computer has no "inspiration" function, reflected Kaoru. It was impossible for a machine to bring together two utterly disparate phenomena and consider them as one. Were such an ability to arise, it would be because human brain cells had somehow been incorporated into the hardware. Human-computer intercourse.
    Which actually sounded pretty intriguing to Kaoru. There was no telling what sort of sentient life form that would bring into the world. Endlessly fascinating.
    Kaoru's desire to understand the workings of the world manifested itself in a lot of different questions, but at the root of all of them was one basic unknown: the source of life.
    How did life begin? Or, alternatively: Why am I here?
    Evolutionary theory and genetics both piqued his curiosity, but his biological inquiries always centred on that one point.
    He wasn't a single-minded believer in the variation on the co-acervate theory which held that an inorganic world developed gradually until RNA and DNA appeared. He understood that the more one inquired into life the more the idea of self-replication became a big factor. It was DNA that governed self-replication; under the direction of the genetic information it carried came the formation of proteins, the stuff of life. Proteins were made of alignments of hundreds of amino acids, in twenty varieties. The code locked away within DNA was in fact the language that defined the way those acids aligned.
    Until those amino acids lined up in a certain predetermined way, they wouldn't form a protein meaningful to life. The primordial sea was often likened to a soup thick with the prerequisites for life. Then some power stirred that thick soup up, until it so happened that things lined up in a meaningful way. But what were the odds of that?
    To make it easier to comprehend, Kaoru decided to think in terms of a much smaller, neater number. Take a line of a hundred amino acids in twenty varieties, with one of them