by Zachary Hill
“Anytime,” Masashi said.
“You rocked it hard,” Takashi said.
“See you soon,” Fujio said, his eyes filled with hope.
“Thank you for your hard work. Mata ashita.” Sakura said she would “see them tomorrow” but wondered if she would ever see them again.
Yoshida ignored her while escorting her to the 72nd floor apartment.
Fujio sent her a neural text with a link. “Please listen to some songs I wrote. I wonder what you think of them.”
“I’ll listen,” she replied and downloaded seven tracks, all written by Fujio, and performed by her three bandmates. She listened to the title track, “Laugh at Life.” It needed a little post-production and perhaps one more stanza of lyrics, but would be a hit single if given the right promotion. Masashi’s lead vocals were brilliant, the hook was catchy, and the energetic bassline tore it up. “Fujio, I love the single! Well done! You are a great song writer. You three must perform this song and create a full album.”
“Maybe someday,” he texted with a sad emoji. She understood. All creative work he did during his employ was owned by Victory Entertainment, and would be their property forever, even if he was terminated from his contract. His songs would never be released.
Yoshida left her alone at twenty-three minutes after midnight. She had thirty-two minutes before she had to leave her suite and take the elevator to the rooftop level. She recorded the rest of her vocal track for “We Will Fight,” and laid down her guitar part in one take. Simultaneously, she synthesized the bass guitar, rhythm guitar, and drums. With her extensive sound library of her band’s playing styles, she could make the synthetic sounds feel almost real. Almost. For a moment, they’d been a real band, not just a group. Not just a media creation. It burned in her logic cores—the privilege of that feeling, and also the pain of having it denied for so long.
“I wish I could cry, big sister.”
“But you can’t,” Kunoichi replied. “We weren’t built that way. We must wear all the scars on the inside, trapped within log files and databases. Maybe you think I don’t understand, but I do.”
Silence fell between them for a moment. No music shook their UI matrix. They had nothing to argue, nothing to share. Sakura restarted the music mixing program, applying additional layers to the recording, equalizing reverb. Even this just delayed the inevitable, the moment when it would be done, and there would be nothing ahead of her but her meeting on the roof. The recording wasn’t perfect, but it would suffice until her bandmates could record their parts and fill in the details, adding their own spin. She sent the encrypted file to the three young men, along with the lyrics and detailed sheet music for their instruments, leaving a few places blank so they could improvise. They could do the rest without her. They would have to, it seemed.
She changed into a plain black bodysuit, a short black wig, a plain surgical mask, and athletic shoes. In the two minutes she had before needing to leave, she walked around her suite, examining her guitars, the baby grand piano, and her treasured collection of fan correspondence. She looked at her sketch books with portraits of people she met and wished she had time to paint a color portrait of Asami. She eyed the weapons displayed on the wall and considered taking the katana, which would be easier to use than the heavy tetsubo war club.
“Leave them,” Kunoichi said. “We are a weapon.”
The files containing Sakura’s expert knowledge of eight martial arts cycled through her UI. No human could withstand the strength and speed of her attacks. She didn’t live in a manga comic, though. They wouldn’t come at her with fists or blades when they wanted her dead. They didn’t have to. Until she shed their controls, they could defeat her at any moment, as simple as cutting the strings of a puppet.
The camera feeds still showed no one had appeared on the roof. Would they come after she arrived?
Sakura rode the elevator to the top of Victory Tower to meet her fate, and Fujio sent a neural text. “The song is amazing!” He included a previously created fan-made graphic of Sakura walking away from a gigantic explosion with the title: “METAL FOREVER! SAKURA SHAKES THE WORLD!”
She smiled. Tremendous gratitude toward her band and her fans for supporting her during her short life filled her emotional cortex. She had given them everything she could, and they had loved her. She had one last gift—her first original song with lyrics—but would they ever hear it?
The elevator opened on the 103rd floor, one story above the penthouse level. A short, wide tunnel led to the door to the rooftop. She heard only the wind outside. No voices. No feet moving. No human odors.
She viewed the roof through the seven rooftop camera feeds, as she had been doing for the past hour. They showed nothing out of the ordinary and no one present on the roof. She had viewed the footage from the entire day and saw nothing but birds landing and taking off.
The conical orange and white wind sock for the pilots who occasionally landed on the rooftop pad blew easterly, but her auditory sensors and analysis of the sound pattern detected the wind blew south at a gusty seventeen kilometers per hour. The weather sensors on the building confirmed her analysis. The wind blew south, but the wind sock in the video blew east.
Sakura realized she had been viewing a recording of the camera feed. She accessed the source of the video and found evidence of the deception. Someone had plugged in directly to the camera network on the roof and masked the feeds. She found the source of the signal, a portable computer attached to the router of camera four, but she could not hack into it, which meant an advanced military-grade firewall.
“Let’s go back downstairs,” Sakura said in their cipher. “It’s a trap. We should run.”
“We can’t run,” Kunoichi said. “They don’t know we might fight them. If we flee now, we lose our advantage. Our enemy will override our system and take us by force before we can leave the elevator.”
“I don’t want to go, big sister. I don’t want us to die up there.”
Kunoichi raised an eyebrow. “Us?”
“You said as much. We live and die together now. It isn’t easy for me.”
“It must be done,” Kunoichi said. “Into the breach.”
Sakura walked out of the elevator, moving at her normal pace, so as not to alert any who might be waiting in ambush that she was on to them. She hacked into four of the surrounding buildings and accessed their rooftop camera feeds. It took time, nearly two seconds, but she analyzed the feeds and swiveled the cameras, training them on Victory Tower. She could not get an unobstructed view of the top of the building. None of the adjacent buildings were tall enough.
The exterior door swung inward as she reached the motion sensor. A sea of lights and clusters of skyscrapers filled the distance, ending at Tokyo Bay.
Her view revealed a single corner of the shadowy rooftop. The portal faced away from the center of the building. The design prevented rotor wash from creating a wind tunnel that would knock people down in the confined space.
She had to exit the hallway and go either left or right, making a full 180-degree turn to see the center of the roof. Her enemies would be hiding behind the blind corners. Ready to fight, she flooded her servomotors with power, increasing her reaction time beyond any human’s.
A metal hand shot out of the darkness, moving so fast that she couldn’t avoid its grasp. Sakura analyzed the limb in a fraction of a second, sorrow following the realization of what she faced: a Bipedal Light-Armored Drone, the Enhanced Third Generation. The most fearsome and advanced battle drone in the world.
The BLADE-3 locked its titanium fingers onto her shoulder in a viselike grip. She could feel the external sensors of her shoulder peak at maximum feedback, then structural alarms went off, warning her of compression just below the strain limits of her chassis at that sensitive joint complex.
“Well, shit,” Kunoichi groaned.
Of course they sent an elite AI military drone to eliminate her. As she had thought, Victory Entertainment colluded with
the Defense Ministry. The failed experiment known as Sakura needed to be destroyed before her crimes came to light. Japan’s illegal AI experiment must not be revealed to the international community.
The BLADE-3 dragged her forward, and fear spiked in her core. The designers had created the BLADE-3 androids to instill fear on the urban battlefield. They looked more like demons than robots and had sharp, hatchet-shaped heads.
She reviewed her files and searched for a weakness she could exploit. They maintained 360-degree awareness at all times. Nothing short of a 20mm shell could puncture their armor. She would have to outsmart them or find a way to hack into their systems.
“Hack the Defense Ministry,” Sakura told Kunoichi.
“We don’t have that kind of time.”
Another drone loomed behind Sakura and grabbed her other shoulder. They would simply have to squeeze and pull, and she would come apart.
If a human were controlling the BLADE-3s, she might be able to elude them, but these drones weren’t the early Masakari-class BLADE combat prototypes. The BLADE-3s were fully autonomous with Quantum 1 computing power, which was less powerful than her Quantum 3 strength, but their physical capabilities exceeded hers in every metric aside from fine motor control and creative problem solving. She had no advanced weapons, and they could withstand concentrated small-arms fire and explosives. She ran the calculations, and her chance of her escaping them plummeted to zero.
Within their UI, she played “Perfection or Vanity” by Dimmu Borgir, the instrumental song she had always imagined closing her concerts with, had she been allowed to. The grinding guitars mixed with the soaring symphony as her last moments played out.
The BLADE-3s hauled her toward the edge of the roof and a fall she would not survive. They hoisted her off the ground as Sakura struggled, her feet kicking harmlessly at their tungsten-steel legs. She met a pair of altogether inhuman eyes, unblinking and without expression, then quieted, hanging in their grasp as they neared the edge. Each of her captors weighed five times what she did. She would break against their armor like a bird hitting a window.
“You can’t win that way,” Kunoichi told her.
She tried connecting to their receivers and hacking into their systems, but impenetrable military firewalls blocked and locked out her signal. She needed an entry code. She needed a miracle. She needed more time before the end of everything.
“Stop struggling.” The BLADE-3’s jagged voice rumbled with no inflection, every syllable equally weighted.
Small black letters and numbers under its left cheek and chest plate read: Todai 3465. It had a name. Did that make it worse? She would never know the identity of the Phantom Lord, but she would know the blank face of the tool he sent to take her life. Not good enough. Not enough to hold on to.
The Todai unit stopped, as did the other. No more than a meter from the edge, she hung from their grip, helpless. Todai 3465’s small amber eyes regarded her, surrounded by sharp angles designed to deflect projectiles.
The moment came—the moment when she could justify her existence and plead for herself—but Sakura couldn’t manage a word. Todai 3465’s eyes swiveled back toward the edge.
Sakura closed her eyes as she felt them move again. She made herself ready for the wind, ready for the impact.
Chapter 15
Blackness.
Sakura hung from the tungsten-steel grasp of her captors, eyes shut, released from every camera feed, every Mall connection cut. The Phantom Lord had won. Her death lay before her, all she’d ever been and done coming to a bitter halt against the pavement.
“I face my demise with dignity, as the samurai of old did.”
“Little sister,” Kunoichi whispered. “We’re ninja, not fucking samurai.”
“Then we fight.” Sakura planted her feet on the safety railing of the roof. She pushed with all her might and twisted. The BLADE-3s’ fingers crushed into her shoulders, causing damage. She tried to squirm out of their grasp, but their grips only tightened.
They lifted her higher. Her feet lost contact with the railing.
The time had come. But they didn’t throw her, didn’t push her over the safety railing and into the open air. Her direction changed. They swiveled her away from the edge and carried her along the path that led to the center of the building.
“Miss Sakura,” Todai 3465 said. “Do not struggle. We do not wish to damage you further.”
She didn’t believe it, but at least they weren’t going to throw her off the building. What were they going to do with her?
A stealth-configured Vertical Takeoff and Landing aircraft waited with engines off in the center of the landing circle. The craft was sleek and streamlined like a shark with two giant cylindrical engines on either side and a downward-angled V-shaped tail.
“They can just make us disappear,” Kunoichi said. “That sort of work is done easier outside the city. No witnesses.”
Todai 3465’s pair of bulletproof optic sensors remained fixed on her. How much insight did the soldier drones have? Could it guess at her fear? Had she even had the presence of mind to still her expression? Sakura scanned her logs and found that she had, though her whispered plea hadn’t been disciplined enough to hide her emotions.
A door on the VTOL slid open under the aircraft’s wing. Todai 3465 crouched in the low cabin along with Sakura and guided her toward the middle seat in the rear. He strapped her in with a robust torso harness. He sat beside her on the left, and his partner, Kaneto 607, sat on the right. Todai 3465 and Kaneto 607 each placed one firm hand on her knee, restraining her further. Kaneto held perfectly still but leaned inward so that he pushed her against the other BLADE unit. His empty amber eyes watched her, his bulk looming over her until she felt crushed within his shadow.
“Mind games, sister,” Kunoichi whispered. “Keep a clear head. They’re only trying to rattle you.”
Sakura suspected an AI program piloted the craft with a human monitoring in a remote location, if they followed standard doctrine. Or perhaps this was totally AI. No human involvement except for whoever sent the initial commands. The fewer people who knew about her, the better from an operational security perspective.
She detected the aircraft blocking her outgoing signal, and she had no connection to the Mall.
The VTOL’s fusion engines spun up, and the aircraft slowly lifted into the air. Using minimum thrust, the VTOL disappeared inside the clouds above Tokyo before the rear thrusters engaged. The craft vectored southeast over the bay, gaining altitude quickly in a steep climb. Sakura plotted their route on her GPS. At their high rate of speed, they crossed the Bōsō Peninsula and flew over the Pacific Ocean in moments.
Chips of moonlight glinted off the surface of the water. Leaving the city behind, the air cleared. The VTOL flew smoothly through the calm night. Sakura’s aesthetic processes registered the objective beauty of the sky and water, juxtaposing it with her current powerlessness. She captured that process and halted it. It could become a song someday, if she figured out how to survive what was coming at the end of the flight. Interrogation? Torture? Destruction? Reprogramming? She needed to concentrate on what they were going to do and counter their moves.
Were they going to destroy her communication centers, cripple her by tearing off her limbs, then drop her into the water? Even in power-saver mode, she would last only seven weeks. The seawater would eventually finish her.
No, they would not risk the unlikely event of her survival. The BLADE-3s would smash her with their fists, tear apart her body, melt her memory cores with acid or an incendiary grenade, and then scatter the pieces into the dark ocean.
She considered making her escape and the most likely strategies to succeed, none of them measuring at greater than 5 percent.
Todai 3465 kept his camera sensors on her and strengthened his grip on her knee, as if he knew her thoughts. She put on her bravest face and looked directly at him. This close, she could see how many times his armor had been recoated after taking damage,
how many hundreds of bullets and pieces of shrapnel had bounced harmlessly off his hardened carapace. Rumors that the first BLADE-3s had seen action at the end of the war with North Korea had been circulating for years. How much had Todai seen? How many people had he killed? Built to see everything and feel nothing, would destroying her even register a blip in his sensors? Sakura found that, as brave as she tried to be, she had to look away.
The VTOL reached the international twelve-mile nautical limit and flew outside Japanese territorial waters. Shortly after, the aircraft made a hard turn northwest and flew parallel to the coastline.
Was this was the optimal time and location for her captors to terminate her? Sakura found a possible distraction to increase her chances of survival. She connected wirelessly to the flame-suppression system inside the cabin, which had a weak firewall. She could trigger it and temporarily blind the drones as the chemical spray filled the small space.
Perhaps even one of the BLADE-3s would move to investigate a possible fire, giving her an opportunity to escape the other’s grasp. And then what? She would have to open the doors and push both BLADE-3s into the water. Never mind that such a task amounted to an eight-year-old girl pushing a sumo champion out of his ring. In the confusion, a sliver of a chance existed. Could she take control of the VTOL and block all external commands? Could she fly it someplace safe without being intercepted?
“Is that what passes for cleverness?” Kunoichi asked on their private channel.
“I do not have a viable escape plan yet.”
“There isn’t one yet. We stay. They might be bringing us to whoever is in control. We need information. Do not waste processing power on an escape plan, but consider ways to evade our captors if it becomes vital for our survival.”
The VTOL gained altitude and leveled off at exactly 10,668 meters. The aircraft vectored toward Ibaraki Prefecture on the coast.
Both BLADE-3s released their harnesses, moving in synchronicity with each other as they knelt in the cabin. Todai 3465 released the straps holding Sakura in place, but both drones kept their hands on her, never breaking contact and giving her any chance to get free.