Cybernetic Samurai

by Victor Milán

  For the fourth time in five years, Takai Jisaburo took a holiday from his post in YTC’s top secret TOKUGAWA lab. And for the first time, he did not take his wife and son with him to the Japan Alps or a resort on the Inland Sea. Instead, he went off to Tokyo on his own for three days. Sitting amid the jovial clamor and companionable darkness of the beer bar, he could still feel the pain on Yoriko’s face when he told her he was leaving alone.

  She thinks I’ve come up here to see a mistress, he thought. Nothing could have been further from the truth; his wife and their seven-year-old son were all the world to him, unsuitable as that may have been to a healthy Japanese male. When he was with ICOT, back in his ministry days, his coworkers had often teased him for his refusal to avail himself of a substantial pool of “office ladies” more than willing to ingratiate themselves with important scientists embarked upon the exciting work of creating the fifth generation. They called him kaka denka. Perhaps he was. But he loved Yoriko and their son, Taro—which meant firstborn—with a single-minded intensity that matched his devotion to his work. Yet he couldn’t tell Yoriko his reason for coming to Tokyo alone. He couldn’t even tell himself.

  He’d considered himself amazingly fortunate seven years ago, when YTC had stepped forward to offer him a lucrative and prestigious job. After a truly valiant effort, ICOT had managed no better than a tie in the race for so-called artificial intelligence. As the trade war with America had warmed, and it became obvious that Japanese technology wasn’t about to take a huge leap ahead of the rest of the known universe, ICOT’s status began to slip even more rapidly than the Japanese economy. Maverick Yoshimitsu Telecommunications lacked status, it was true. But the very fact that it took more note of ability and achievement than seniority—even as ICOT had—was one of the things that made it a loner.

  Confident in his abilities, Takai accepted eagerly. He won numerous bonuses, and several times the commendation of Yoshimitsu Akaji himself, for his absolute artistry in software engineering. When a chance came to become part of the TOKUGAWA Project he was skeptical—but once he assured himself such a breathtaking conception might become actuality, he’d been more than happy to take part, to return to the cutting edge, as to a mistress.

  That he would be working under a foreigner and a woman at that, took him aback, Worse, of his three superiors within the project, two were women and two foreigners, a combination hard for a self-respecting man to swallow. But swallow it he had. As a scientist—and as an artist—he couldn’t resist the challenge of artificial sentience; for the sake of Yoriko and Taro, he couldn’t resist the potential rewards participation offered: honor, fame, money. Old Yoshimitsu was legendarily tightfisted, but he believed in seeing meritorious service rewarded.

  Remembering that, Takai went over O’Neill’s head after she turned down his request for promotion, directly to Yoshimitsu Akaji himself. That misshapen old fool Aoki Hideo had tried to keep him out, but Yoshimitsu himself had insisted on seeing him. And letting him know in no uncertain terms that Elizabeth O’Neill was the head of the TOKUGAWA Project, that in her lab her word was law, and that though Takai’s contributions had been duly noted and appreciated, his place was where she said it was. On the spot, Takai had requested his leave; thinking it would give the brilliant young technician a chance to cool down, Yoshimitsu assented at once.

  For three days now, Takai Jisaburo had drifted through the Tokaido crowds, gazing at the shops along the New Ginza, taking in a few art exhibitions, wandering with mixed sensations of guilt and daring through the Japanese technological museum in the lower floors of the MITI Pyramid, spending his nights at the bars and geisha houses. All that time, he’d carefully repeated to himself that he merely needed to unwind. To get away from the pressures of the lab.

  A hostess with heels like spear shafts and a floor-length purple silk gown slit to the waist swayed by his table, inquiring with a sideways tilt of sloe eyes if he needed a refill. Implicit in the look was the promise that he could have just about anything else that he wanted; he was obviously a man of some importance, and very handsome as well. When he responded with nothing more than a distracted shake of his head, she shrugged and sashayed on. Maybe he didn’t like women.

  “May I sit down?”

  He raised his head from contemplation of the detergent ring of suds around the surface of the beer in his glass. A young man stood by his table, wearing a dark blue Western-style suit and tie and a smile of precisely measured friendliness that was oh so familiar to him from the old days. His heart began to trip rapidly, like a tack hammer nailing tar paper to a roof. He shrugged, made himself say, “I would be honored,” in a calm voice.

  “The honor is mine.” The smiling young man slid out the chair, flowed into it, raised a hand for the waitress’s attention. She slithered back, a knowing and completely misguided expression on her lovely cynical face. “I’ll have a vodka,” the young man said, raising his eyebrows at Takai.

  “Whiskey.”

  The waitress faded into darkness. The young man sat back in his chair and crossed his legs, completely at well-tailored ease. “Enjoying your stay in our imperial beehive?” he asked in a bantering tone.

  Takai stared at the stale piss-colored beer in his glass. He nodded; he didn’t trust himself to speak. Here it was, the achievement of the unacknowledged goal: he would spend the night alone tonight, but he was being seduced all the same.

  * * * * *

  TOKUGAWA’s education progressed with the muggy weeks of southwestern Honshu summer Aoki Hideo was delighted with his pupil’s progress, Yoshimitsu Akaji even more so; TOKUGAWA was turning out to be everything he’d hoped it would be. Plans were made to rush ahead with an idea the old man had been tossing about for several years, to upgrade extant computers in the old home complex on the island of Kyushu and in the Floating World satellite to the performance level of the IPN that housed TOKUGAWA, so that TOKUGAWA might program them with versions of himself.

  Kim Jhoon refused to leave Yoshimitsu Central; so, to the surprise of both Yoshimitsu Akaji and Dr. O’Neill, did Takai Jisaburo, foregoing the chance to have an artificial sentience project all his own. So Wali Hassad was shipped off to Kyushu, and the diffident Nagaoka Hiroshi, to his dismay, was bundled onto a shuttle and spat into orbit from Hakata Pelagic Launch Facility, a space complex owned by a Western European combine, which occupied an artificial island between the city of Fukuoka on the Kyushu mainland, and the Iki Island National Dolphin Preserve. The war—or wars—in Europe had thrown the facility’s actual ownership into doubt, engendering a slew of lawsuits both in Japan and in the World Court in Lisbon, but meanwhile the vehicles lifted on schedule.

  The only person who didn’t seem delighted with the project of TOKUGAWA was Yoshimitsu Shigeo. Lately, though, Aoki thought he’d noticed a peculiar smile playing over the young man’s features whenever someone mentioned the sentient program. Doubtless it was just an old man’s imagination.

  * * * * *

  For the first time in her life, Elizabeth O’Neill was in love.

  Her waking hours she spent dreaming in rapport with TOKUGAWA; asleep, she dreamed of rapport. For her, the TOKUGAWA Project was the biggest success of all. It had turned out in a way she had never dared admit, even to herself, that she’d hoped it would.

  She continued to run the preplanned scenarios for TOKUGAWA—to justify continuing to receive her substantial monthly paycheck from YTC, if nothing else—but mostly it was now TOKUGAWA who ran scenarios for her. If that was the proper way to consider them; instead of carefully structured learning experiences, these were shared adventures, wild and marvelous and free,

  As TOKUGAWA promised, O’Neill was able in her dream body to run and jump and swim and climb without limit, to feel the exhilaration of exertion of trim potent muscles, without the concomitants of fatigue and pain. As advertised, she was even able to sprout wings and fly at will, soaring up above the little meadow with its blunt basalt cliff and little brook, which she’d come to think of as
theirs. She found the experience oddly disorienting and tried it seldom after the first time.

  But they weren’t bound by the little mountain clearing TOKUGAWA had first created for them. They could travel anywhere in time and space O’Neill desired—indeed, anywhere she could imagine. They attended a joust in Camelot and watched brave knights vie for the favor of fair Guinevere in gorgeous panoplies of plate and chain—of course, O’Neill knew that to portray Arthur and his heroes in fourteenth-century drag was like having Richard the Lionhearted and Saladin fight out their campaigns using the equipment and organization of the Yom Kippur War, but that was how the champions of the Round Table had been imagined ever since the time of Malory, and how they’d been portrayed in the stories O’Neill loved as a child.

  O’Neill had always loved dinosaurs, too. With TOKUGAWA as her guide, she traveled back to the Mesozoic era. From a granite promontory, they watched a Tyrannosaurus rex run down a duckbilled hadrosaur that was bleating like the air horns of a freight train booming down the old AT&SF line that ran through Colorado Springs, a rapid purposeful waddle, the hunting monster’s rigidly held counterpoise tail swinging from side to side and scything down a stand of small saplings. After the chase had reached its foreordained and bloody conclusion, TOKUGAWA transported them instantly to the lowlands, where they sat in the shade of a stand of towering, palmlike cycads and watched a pair of brontosaurus, ridiculous bulky-bodied hose-necked creatures, mating on the verge of a cypress swamp. They produced an even more robust commotion than the dying duckbill had.

  TOKUGAWA and O’Neill made love in the late Triassic afternoon, with the ferns around them talking soft stridulations against the boles of the towering cycads, and a meter-long dragonfly hovering above them, a metallic iridescence glittering a thousand colors in the sun.

  Much time they spent in medieval Japan, viewing kabuki drama with commoners, passing unnoticed through thronged streets, watching the great battles of the feudal epoch from safe vantage points. They were present at Dan-no-ura, at the very southern tip of Honshu, when the victorious Minamoto drove the rival Taira clan into the surf. They witnessed Seki-ga-hara, where TOKUGAWA’s namesake Ieyasu threw down his rivals with muskets and cannon, and the storming of Osaka Castle, where he gained final victory over the heir and last adherents of the late dictator Hideyoshi.

  On one of those afternoons, after watching the gaily clad thousands of men struggle and die, O’Neill turned to TOKUGAWA, fairly glowing in the simulated sun. Her nipples were erect; she squeezed his hand. “Isn’t it glorious?” she asked, breath burring in her throat.

  And TOKUGAWA turned away, not trusting himself to answer.

  * * * * *

  TOKUGAWA was puzzled.

  When he wasn’t hosting a fantasy for Elizabeth—which took not only his entire conscious attention, but also the preponderance of the “subconscious” functions he commanded as well—TOKUGAWA especially liked to wander through the convoluted datalink mazes of the systems to which he had access. He thought of it as spelunking. There was a definite sense of exploration, of wandering through labyrinthine passageways, exploring myriad uncharted side routes, discovering hidden wonders. To his inhuman senses, the raw stored data, the protocols—whether binary or LIPS in its infinite variety—had a texture of their own; he took sensuous pleasure in stroking them, the pliant data surfaces, until they coalesced into what was, to him, an image: a statistical portrait; a series of events; a program, involute and beautiful as a Bach cantata.

  No longer did he suffer childish pangs over the lack of a human body. He could go anywhere sensory inputs or computers hooked into the global Net, the far-flung ecology/organism of data linkages that had become man’s environment as surely as air and soil and cement—and that was nearly everywhere. He’d seen sunrise over the bay of Rio de Janeiro from a security monitor on the outside of a government R&D lab high up on the foothills; he had read files on dissidents in Johannesburg and scanned with horrified incomprehension the details of a megalomaniac scheme called Project Stardust/Golden, enacted by the government of PEACE in what had been the north western United States. He scanned news reports broadcasts netted, or cabled for print media from all over the world, and with his access both to the files from which the stories were compiled, and, when he wished to take the trouble, frequently the personal notes of the reporters who had followed the stories, he realized the tremendous discrepancies between the fact as it happened, the fact as it was perceived, and, especially, the fact as it was publicized. He also noted the lesser gaps between truth and the press in relatively free countries like EasyCo, SoCal, and Japan, in comparison with state-controlled media of dictatorships such as Indonesia, Brazil, and the Russian Christian Federated Socialist Republic. Most accurate of all were the polynational datanet news services, though that wasn’t saying a lot.

  From somewhere, probably a childhood memory of O’Neill’s, TOKUGAWA had picked up a phrase to the effect that you found your best adventures in your own backyard. Pursuant to that wisdom. TOKUGAWA was walking through the files of YTC Central’s computers, which he regarded with about the same familiar propriety, if not affection, as Yoshimitsu Akaji regarded his rooftop garden, when he chanced upon a surprising datum: a ten-kilobyte file newly entered and sealed so that only the voiceprint of Yoshimitsu Shigeo could open it. Elizabeth had always loved mystery novels and had infused TOKUGAWA with her enthusiasm; he had read the ones she’d recommended, making routine data requisitions on those not already digitalized, so that librarians in the citadel or elsewhere would feed the desired books into devices that would turn the pages for the benefit of his optical scanners. Here was a mystery indeed, and TOKUGAWA set happily to work, feeling very much like Raffles the master cracksman as he set about “picking” the unbreakable lock Shigeo had had his technicians set on the file.

  It wasn’t much of a challenge. TOKUGAWA could quite probably have simply overridden the lock and gone into the file directly himself; instead, by poking around the memory locations that held the code sequence itself he was able to tease it from the nonaware Gen-5 system in a manner of nanoseconds. Then he entered the code sequence himself, using a digitalized analogue of Shigeo’s own voice and doing a better rendition of it than Shigeo himself could have achieved. The computer gave an obedient picoelectric hiccup and disgorged the contents of the file.

  TOKUGAWA found himself deeply perplexed. Using the pilfered data he reconstructed a remarkable transaction: tentative contact with a New Wave macroengineering firm in SoCal; negotiations through a series of cutouts; the transfer, in minute trickles converging into a substantial stream, of company funds under Shigeo’s discretion; the shipping of a certain weighty and carefully mislabeled parcel across the Pacific in stages to Yoshimitsu Central. TOKUGAWA understood at once why Shigeo had been at such pains to hide every detail of the transaction.

  The question was, why would Yoshimitsu Shigeo import a one-megaton thermonuclear mining device, install it in a disused storage chamber deep in a subterranean section of the Citadel, the location of which—the very existence of which—was carefully erased from all maintenance and structural records, and install a destruct sequence keyed, like the temporary file recording the affair, to Shigeo’s voice?

  Is he planning treachery? TOKUGAWA rejected the idea instantly. Shigeo wasn’t simply president of YTC, he was a Yoshimitsu, the heir apparent. No. The young scion of the Yoshimitsu clan feared something, some twist of eventuality to which he clearly preferred suicide.

  I’ll have to ask Elizabeth. TOKUGAWA knew he was supposed to be Japanese, but, in truth, O’Neill still understood the Japanese character far better than he. It was one of the problems of sentience; he had access to just about every bit of information ever compiled about the residents of the Land Where the Sun Rises, but understanding was circumscribed by the limits of his experience.

  Briefly he considered asking Yoshimitsu Shigeo. He rejected that quickly, too. Shigeo neither liked nor trusted him, and not only because of the
childish prank TOKUGAWA had played upon him. Moreover, Elizabeth had forbidden him to communicate with Shigeo again unless the young man initiated communications himself.

  I’ll ask Elizabeth, he thought. She’ll know the answer. She always does.

  CHAPTER 16

  “The Crane and the Turtle, with the Fortunate Mountain beyond,” Ishikawa Nobuhiko said, gesturing across the calm water glinting between lily pads on the pond at the southern end of Yoshimitsu Akaji’s rooftop garden. “Truly, Yoshimitsu-san, you have provided yourself a view rich with good portent.”

  Yoshimitsu Akaji smiled. He enjoyed little more than showing his garden off to someone who appreciated it. Of course, the administrative vice-minister appreciated the garden primarily on an intellectual level; he recognized the allusive nature of the black weathered rocks looming out of the pond to represent traditional Chinese symbols of immortality that had passed into Japanese lore, marked the way almost every vista presented the three classical planes of Chinese painting to the viewer. Here the pads, like broad green footprints strewn thickly on a deserted fairground, and the quiet ancient rocks provided the foreground, while the mixed grove of red and black pines across the pond, concealing both the tea pavilion and the far wall of the roof garden, provided the middle ground; beyond them Takara-yama, today black against a gravid grayness of rain clouds, provided the background.

  My illustrious guest could write a dissertation on my garden, Yoshimitsu told himself, yet, truly, the American Dr. O’Neill sees it with her heart. Still, it was flattering to have the fine technical points of the garden’s design—which Yoshimitsu Akaji had overseen himself—properly acknowledged.

  A path of smooth flagstones spaced with careful irregularity meandered from the pavilion halfway down the eastern edge of the garden, which masked the head of Yoshimitsu Akaji’s private elevator, through camellias and azalea bushes, past carefully sculpted persimmon trees, into the grass-grown edge of the brook. Rain had recently ceased, and freshness animated the air, crisp as the breaking of a spring-green leaf. The cool fingers of autumn stroked down the mountain breeze, but rain smell evoked poignant vernal memories. Here the flagstones ceased, and the two men trod soft turf, Yoshimitsu beneath wooden sandals, Ishikawa under the slick soles of Oxfords like obsidian mirrors. They made their leisurely way to the head of the pond, then along the shallow stream rambling into it from the artificial cascade in the north to swirl away through concealed outflow ducts and be pumped back up to the waterfall to resume its endless journey.