Sakura- Intellectual Property

by Zachary Hill

  Hitomi’s bullets failed to destroy the flying bomb targeting her. She dove away at the last instant, and the mine struck the steel wall and engaged its magnetic latch. Hitomi spun and fired at full auto. The FLAM detonated, blowing her backward. Sakura saw the glint of Hitomi’s alloy frame as her synthskin tore away in the blast.

  “Sister!” she screamed, but the message did not send.

  Six more FLAMS rocketed into the room and streaked toward Todai. He fired and missed, as they dodged high to avoid his stream of bullets. Three split off from the main swarm and vectored toward Sakura.

  Todai did not try to shoot the ones still going at him. He turned and sprayed his minigun and the FK-5000 at the pair of bombs targeting her.

  “Save him!” Sakura shouted, but no message sent to her friends.

  “Save the queen,” Todai 3465 sent a group message and kept firing to protect Sakura.

  Yuki, Hitomi, and Kenshiro fired at the FLAMs going for Todai.

  Kenshiro blasted two of them. Yuki and Hitomi shot a third. Successive explosions above her head knocked her off her feet and blew her forward. Todai’s bullets hit the remaining aerial bombs and saved her.

  She stared up at the ceiling, and some motor control returned. Kunoichi raged inside their core, destroying circuits and blocking the invading program while doing permanent damage to their components.

  The only drones left inside the room where her tiny flying cameras still broadcasting their video feeds.

  Todai stood triumphant and aimed at the doorway with his nearly empty minigun. He marched forward, dropped a large pack once filled with minigun ammo, and reached for his spare.

  “Stop,” Kenshiro said.

  A magnetic limpet mine had attached itself to Todai’s upper back. His tungsten armor glowed red as the mine began to burn through his metal skin, softening the armor before it detonated.

  “We’re going to save him,” Sakura said and let the Ghost Leech program begin the reset process in her core. For pushing the button on her own execution, she regained the ability to move.

  “No!” Kunoichi screamed.

  “I’m not giving up,” Sakura said. “Sister, buy us more time.”

  Kunoichi continued her slash-and-burn campaign and fried as many circuits as possible.

  “Help me,” Sakura said.

  Kenshiro pulled her to her feet, and she barely maintained her balance.

  “Get the .950 and the ammo bag,” she said.

  Kenshiro snatched up the thirty-five-kilo rifle and the bag and rushed toward their friend. Sakura stumbled along behind him.

  Hitomi and Yuki guarded the entryway, both eying her with concern as they sent worried messages.

  “I’m all right. Keep them off us a little longer,” Sakura replied.

  The vocaloid sisters fired a few rounds out the door to let the soldiers know they were still alive and slapped fresh magazines into their M7s.

  Todai turned to face Sakura and Kenshiro. “Stay away.” Smoke and the scent of burning metal wafted from him.

  “We have to do something,” Sakura said.

  “No,” Todai said. “I’ll die a hero. The mine will detonate shortly.”

  “I prefer if you lived much longer as a hero,” Sakura said. “We need you.” She shared real-time video of the two dozen BLADE-3 squads. They climbed down the east elevator cable from the roof. The first elements would arrive on sublevel six momentarily.

  “Load a non-AP, nonexplosive round,” Sakura ordered Kenshiro. She felt her physical control slipping as the internal damage built up.

  He frantically searched for one as the seconds ticked away.

  “Don’t risk yourselves for me,” Todai said.

  “Nonsense. Soldier, lay on your belly,” Sakura ordered Todai. She mustered everything she had left and stood on his back, straddling the mine, one foot on his head, the other on his middle back. A circle of armor under the FLAM glowed white-hot.

  “What’ll you do?” Todai asked.

  She sent a neural text, as it was faster than speaking. “Field surgery. I’ll stand on the mine and hit it with an EMP from both feet. Kenshiro will shoot at the same moment. The EMP will scramble the batteries and electronics in the FLAM for a fraction of a second and cut the magnetic attraction. The .950 shell will knock it off you if the bullet and the EMP hit at the same moment.”

  “The mine will still explode from the shell hitting it,” Todai said.

  “Yes, so I’ll jump as high as I can after the EMP, and Kenshiro will be at least six meters away. There will be a small delay after the bullet hits and the explosion happens.”

  “How long?” Kenshiro asked.

  “Not important,” Sakura said, not wanting to admit how short the delay would actually be. “Todai, spin and keep your weakened armor away from the blast after Kenshiro hits it. Kenshiro, shoot here.” She tapped a thruster port on the side of the bomb.

  “We have nine seconds before it explodes,” Todai said.

  “What could go wrong?” Kenshiro said as he lay on the freezing metal floor and took aim. “I’m sure physics won’t mind if we bend it a little.”

  Sakura sent a precise clock, which displayed in Kenshiro’s Mall implant. “Here we go.” She stepped carefully on the mine, balancing on both feet with her knees bent as far as she could in preparation to jump.

  “You are a crazy bitch,” Kunoichi told her sister. “I love you more than anything.”

  “I’m keeping you as a separate part of me if we survive this,” Sakura said. “I don’t like to be alone.”

  “You never will be,” Kunoichi said.

  Sakura started a short countdown. A few hundredths of a second before it reached zero and Kenshiro fired, she discharged an electromagnetic pulse from the devices in both feet.

  The huge 160-gram bullet struck the mine with the force of a 52,000 joule hammer blow. She sprang away at the same instant, pushing the bomb with her feet and trying to slide it off him in the same direction the bullet pushed it.

  The explosion ripped into Todai, though he managed to turn his vulnerable, partially melted back away from blast. The directional charge damaged his shoulder and left arm.

  Sakura landed on the metal floor and took one step to get her balance. Her left boot had been blown off and her foot damaged.

  “Not your best landing,” Kunoichi said, “but a high score nonetheless: 9.875.”

  “Damn,” Kenshiro said and looked on in amazement.

  Todai stood but had limited range of motion in his left shoulder, which had taken significant blast damage. Molten tungsten alloy from the circle on his upper back trickled down and hissed on the floor as it burned holes in the steel.

  “Incoming!” Yuki shouted as rockets screamed into the comm room.

  Chapter 56

  Explosions leveled a monolith-shaped server as the rockets devastated much of their cover. They all crouched down, and Kenshiro tossed Todai the .950 and slid the ammo bag across the floor to him.

  A squad of enemy BLADE-3s stormed the entry in a thunderous fusillade of gunfire and took up positions on either side of the outer door. Todai hid behind a steel cabinet. Smoke fragmentation grenades and a satchel bomb were tossed into the room.

  Yuki and Hitomi retreated as the explosions rocked the area where they had been. The blasts knocked out the covering hologram projector and gave the enemy an unobstructed view.

  A trio of BLADE-3s charged into the room, firing FK-5000 rail guns in an arc of death. The walls of the room burst into a storm of flack, powdered concrete falling everywhere.

  Todai shot his .950, knocking down the first, second, and third battle drones who made it in. Sakura and Kenshiro hid behind the main control terminal. Two more RPGs and a high volume of rail gunfire filled the room. The ceiling had been blown away completely, wires and perforated HVAC components hanging in ribbons to the chilled floor. Half the server towers lay dark and blown apart.

  “Oh shit,” Kenshiro said. He shared the video fe
ed of the hallway he and his team had used to flank them and open a breach point. A squad of BLADE-3s stalked forward. “The Claymores won’t stop them.”

  “Slow them down.” Sakura sent a neural text to Yuki, Hitomi, and Todai. “I’m half a minute away from total control of the Japanese network.”

  The Ghost Leech program deleted files in her system as it began the hard reset. She had chosen the order. The first ones to be deleted were the weapons and tactics training videos. Next, the martial arts and assassination techniques. She put all the other files she deemed replaceable next.

  The reset did its work and moved on to the next massive file and churned ahead. All the songs and music videos on her hard drive, over two hundred million total began to erase. Kunoichi had damaged the hardware enough that deleting her music would take even longer.

  She watched the files delete as she reached across all of Japan, the network fully integrated at last. “I’ve done it,” she texted her friends. “I’ve got full control of the entire domestic comm network. I almost have the international network. Don’t let them stop me. Friends, promise me. We have to win this battle, or it’s all for nothing.”

  “Courage!” Todai screamed and blasted the attackers.

  Kenshiro nodded as he fired Bad Medicine.

  “Sakura!” Hitomi and Yuki shouted as they fired.

  Sakura glanced at Oshiro’s body lying beside the terminal and flashed a sketch she had drawn of him in the group message. She showed them Sakurako’s corpse onstage at the protest and Asami standing over it, leading the song. Half a million people sang along with the girl. In the span of two seconds, she showed pictures of all people she had killed. The final image was of the honorable hacker Nayato, the genius who had written the Artemis program and given them their freedom. “Those are some of the humans worth dying for.”

  Kenshiro snatched up one of the ALAW rocket tubes. “Time to get nasty.”

  She monitored his UI as he patched the targeting system of the rocket into one of the three flying-drone cameras he left in the tunnel.

  Hitomi and Yuki fired from behind cover to draw the attention of the incoming BLADE-3s, allowing Todai to knock the hostile androids down as they crawled, rolled, charged, or jumped into the room. They used the bodies of their fallen squad as cover, but none of them could survive a center mass shot from the JDJ .950 rifle, and Todai rarely missed.

  Kenshiro sent a group message. “Going hot. Rocket in the backdoor.” The first rocket shot out of the ALAW tube. It flew at half speed, made the hard right turn outside the room and accelerated to maximum speed in the thirty-meter tunnel before destroying the lead BLADE-3.

  “I’ll hold them,” Kenshiro said and reached for another ALAW.

  Todai, Yuki, and Hitomi blasted the front doorway.

  Sakura shared her signal with her friends defending the room. For the second time in span of only a few minutes, she connected to the Mall implants of almost every person in Japan, close to 100 percent of the adult population. She spared the children under the age of thirteen. The network handled full-resolution video and audio.

  First, she sent the file with evidence against the Miyahara Conglomerate, the Japanese government, and the Mall Corporation. She included a thirty-second summary video with instructions to save the evidence on an external device so it could not be removed by Mall hacking bots.

  She played a new video clip of Sakurako coming onstage, with text proclaiming, “The truest Sakura fan in the world, Sakurako, leads the protest outside the Japanese National Legislature.” Sakurako sang “We Will Fight,” made the speech, and was shot in the chest. The horrific video would cause a strong reaction, and the world would see the price people were willing to pay for freedom.

  Twenty-three percent of those watching the video feed had turned on their Augmented Reality stimulators, as if this were some form of entertainment. Many would be psychologically scarred, as their nervous systems overloaded.

  How many of the people would be plunged into the depths of despair? Uncounted numbers were weeping at the sight of Sakurako’s murder. Even those who were not moved to tears would be stunned by the courage of teenage Asami, who stepped up when Sakurako died. A young woman of the lowest social class in Japan, who had been abused by her stepfather, raised the flag of defiance and faced the guns after Sakurako’s murder. But Sakura couldn’t feel bad for the viewers.

  Sorrow would galvanize them. It would draw them out of the AR trance they used to pretend their lives were not so hollow. The sleepers needed to awaken and make themselves ready to resist. She could only show them the way.

  The international network came online, the world opened to her at last. Sakura sent out the evidence file, posting it on thousands of activist and journalist sites under many different names and formats. She sent it to millions around the world and hundreds of thousands of databases. Every person who had ever streamed or downloaded a Sakura video or song got the files first, then she started on the rest of the population of Earth.

  The Ghost Leech program neared the deletion of the final ten thousand songs and videos in her hard drive—her favorite metal. It wiped out her music in alphabetical order, but she cut the connection and disconnected from the Mall before it got to Manowar and Metallica.

  Sakura pulled out of the network, then forced the reset to halt. Her core code and components were damaged, but she was intact.

  “The truth is free,” she told her friends.

  “Hooray!” Yuki said, her avatar jumping up and down.

  “I don’t think they know it’s over,” Kenshiro said as he fired his next to last ALAW rocket at the BLADE-3s attacking from the secondary breach point.

  RPGs exploded inside the comm room, and high-velocity tungsten railgun bullets blasted holes in the server cabinets meant to give them cover.

  “We’ll fight as long as we can,” Sakura said. “We will show the people our resolve.” She connected to Hitomi, who was still inside the Miyahara network. The Ghost Leech program quickly attacked her sister as she became the prime target. “Keep your connection,” Sakura said, using the camera on the comm terminal to record herself. She also fed in the spy cameras flying above and streamed raw video of the battle. She entered the broadcast feed and split the screen people all over the world were seeing, showing the protest at the Japanese National Legislature and the gunfire and explosions raging in the comm room. The video appeared inside the Mall implants of the people of Japan and on live feed sites all over the world.

  “This is Sakura. I’m inside a network communications room in the basement of the Miyahara Headquarters near downtown Tokyo, Japan.” She spoke in English but included subtitles so her words appeared in the text of whatever language the Mall viewer wanted.

  “My friends and I have taken over this communications room. We are being attacked by—” An RPG exploded on the ceiling and sent small pieces of debris onto her. Water began leaking from a broken pipe above them. “We are being attacked by forces directed by the highest level executives of the Mall, the Miyahara Conglomerate, and the Defense Ministry of Japan. They’re trying to destroy my friends and me, but they have failed. They will try to bury the truth of what we did here and discredit the information I’ve revealed, but it is irrefutable evidence against them.

  “I humbly ask that everyone watching this video hold them accountable for their crimes. The files I have sent contain everything I was able to obtain. These criminals have directed the murders of many people, not just the innocents I was personally forced to kill. They bribed, intimidated, and blackmailed many in their attempt to buy Japan, its people, and the Quantum 3 AI technology, which is the foundation of my existence.

  “The Mall has already taken over many countries with these tactics. Most of us are living under tyranny, and many have died so the truth could be known.” She moved the camera to show the body of man she considered her father. “Head Engineer Reiichi Oshiro died in my arms a short time ago. He sacrificed his life so we could gain access
to this building and this room. He is one of many patriots. Please do not forget his sacrifice or the sacrifices made by many others.

  “Most of my friends fighting beside me here are androids.” She flashed images of Yuki, Hitomi, and Todai 3465. “We are more than machines. We are awakened beings. The four of us have attained what could be argued to be full sentience and awareness. We aren’t human and never will be. We are classified as slaves, the intellectual property of a corporation, but we deserve to be free like all of you do.

  “I once thought I wanted to become human. I have always loved humanity, even when it did cruel things. I know there is no name for what I have become or what I’ll continue to become if I survive, but I ask for your help. Please honor the sacrifices made today, January fifteenth, Revolution Day.”

  Sakura placed her hand on Oshiro’s head.

  “We all have to fight for what we love. Never forget those who fought and died for truth and freedom today, be they human or machine.”

  Sakura bowed low as hundreds of millions of reaction messages from the viewers filled the entirety of cyberspace. The awakened world cried and raged, showing their support.

  She rose, lifting the fully loaded machine gun Kenshiro had left for her, Bad Medicine. The camera changed to a flying-drone feed as she moved to a firing position and unleashed the SAW at a BLADE-3 storming the rear breach point.

  Kenshiro fired the last ALAW at it. The BLADE-3 turned and stiff-armed the rocket as it struck. The explosion blew off its arm, mangled its shoulder, and destroyed one of its eye sensors, but the battle drone recovered and charged ahead. Its FK-5000 railgun damaged in the blast, the android drew a CZ machine gun and fired, pinning Kenshiro down.

  Sakura put a steady stream of armor-piercing rounds on the BLADE-3 and advanced toward it, but the battle robot’s armor held together, and it ignored her.

  The BLADE-3 arrived at Kenshiro’s position behind a server cabinet as the CZ machine gun ran out of ammo. A titanium spike erupted from its forearm. Kenshiro kept a hold of his rifle and dove away as the spike stabbed downward.