Cybernetic Samurai

by Victor Milán

  But Yoshimitsu Shigeo and his sister were not to be deprived utterly of their patrimony, Toda was at pains to assure him. This operation was not a hijacking. Hiryu Cybernetics planned to pay the full book value for Yoshimitsu Telecommunications Corporation to the shareholders of YTC—meaning primarily Shigeo and Michiko. Toda had shown him a schedule, printed out on YTC’s own computers, explaining how payment would be made. If either of Yoshimitsu Akaji’s offspring lived to be around 150, they might see the last payment made for the “forced sale” of YTC and its holdings. What it amounted to was a handsome annual stipend for the siblings. Hush money.

  They murder my father and my employees, hold my people as virtual slaves, keep me prisoner in my own room, and they think they can simply buy me off? He squeezed his eyes shut, working the clay by feel alone. The urge for revenge writhed within him like an aged and gnarled root, dripping in cistern darkness. If there were anything he could do…

  He thought again of Kelli and her tan lines. Another bribe. He felt a small sting of betrayal, though it was not truly a surprise to him that she had either been planted or suborned by MITI. He’d always known, down deep, that it must be the case. Nor had that knowledge made him reticent about discussing YTC affairs with her, in the sated confidence of his bed. Perhaps… perhaps it was in small way a payment for her rather skillful sexual favors. He had no particular illusions that his pudgy body and grunting inexpert exertions held unbreakable fascination for the red-headed American. For Toda Onomori to blandly offer the woman’s company—displaying his own complicity and a knowledge of Kelli’s betrayal—was an insult that twisted him like a wet washrag.

  The tone of the voice from the wall unit changed, breaking into his concentration. “Shut off!” he snarled. Somehow he no longer felt the need for synthetic company.

  “Yoshimitsu-sama?” the voice said again.

  The fingers of his right hand clenched convulsively, crumpling the half-formed vase. He had heard that voice before. The skin at the back of his neck grew taut. “I told you to shut off,” he shouted.

  “If you command me to, I will.” Why is the damned machine being so formal? he wondered wildly. What’s it going to do to me now? “But there is something I beg permission to discuss with you.”

  “What’s that?” he made himself ask through opisthotonic jaws.

  “The recovery of Yoshimitsu Telecommunications Corporations.”

  * * * * *

  “Doihara Kazuko is here, Mr. Vice-Minister,” the neuter but human-inflected voice of Ishikawa Nobuhiko’s shosei computer said.

  “Let her in.” The muscles of his face began to sag. He wasn’t looking forward to this.

  The computer returned to the audio part of the broadcast it had been monitoring. “—sporadic fighting continues in the seaport of Aomori, in Aomori prefecture, where a party of foreign mercenaries are engaged in mopping up resistance by security forces of the giant Eight Islands Shipping & Exporting Corporation. Eight Islands is owned by the Dai-Nihon Holding Company, based in Tokyo. The mercenaries are believed to be in the employ of Hiryu Cybernetics Industries, Incorporated, a longtime rival of…”

  The door whispered open. Doihara Kazuko stood there, eyes downcast. She wore an olive green skirt suit with a pale green blouse. Every pleat was sharp as a blade, every straight black hair placed with perfection, yet when she raised her face her eyes had bags beneath them. At a discreet distance behind her stood two burly men in the crisp white uniforms and billed caps of MITI security, electric truncheons at their hips.

  After a moment, Doihara’s gaze met Ishikawa’s, faltered, held. “Come in, Kazuko,” Ishikawa said. “You guards may go. Thank you.”

  The guards traded glances. “Mr. Vice-Minister—” one began.

  Ishikawa’s open palm slammed down on his desktop. “Leave,” he barked. The guards drew back hurriedly beyond range of the door scanner, and it slid shut behind the trimly dressed young woman.

  Ishikawa picked his hands slowly off the desk, combed a vagrant strand of hair back from his forehead. “Sit down, Kazuko,” he said, his voice gentle.

  At the slap of his palm on the desk, she’d dropped her eyes again. She crossed quietly to a chair, sat. After a moment, she said, “I’m sorry, Ishikawa-sama.” She raised her head. “I’m sorry that I acted against you,” she said in a firmer voice. “But I’m not sorry for what I did. I accept full responsibility for what I’ve done.”

  He studied her. Two days’ close confinement seemed to have done her no harm. When she’d been arrested in a phone booth near a nightclub in downtown Tokyo she’d of course had only her purse and the clothes on her back. But after she’d been brought in, Ishikawa had dispatched a MITI security team to her apartment to bring her clothing and personal effects. Looking at her now, Ishikawa felt the stir of longing. He’d been able to relax his guard with her, to cease for a time being the hard-charging executive, to allow the human, hesitant side of him to show. And look what it’s come to now.

  “I’m disappointed in you, Kazuko.” Again her eyes fell. “We had a filter subroutine laid over the entire national telephone network, screening for calls to Yoshimitsu offices anywhere in the country. We were trolling for Yoshimitsu intelligence agents; a call from a place like a phone booth downtown tripped a good half dozen lookout parameters.” He shook his head. “You should have used the datanets, satellite-linked out of the country and then connected back in, say, from Indonesia. We’re tapping the datanet relays, too, as you well know—but it would have taken us longer to track you.”

  Doihara was looking at him again, her eyes hot and dry and red-rimmed. A certain tentativeness remained in her posture. A wild animal wariness. She had been expecting one of his famous screaming, fist-pounding temper tantrums—or, worse, head-shaking sorrow over her betrayal. Anything but a master-to-pupil lecture on tactics. “You aren’t angry with me?” she asked huskily.

  “No.”

  The NHK announcer was still talking about the battle in Aomori. Doihara nodded at the desktop speaker. “I was right, Ishikawa-sama. Yamada-sama was right; you’ve started something you can’t stop.”

  He shook his head. “Hiryu has overstepped itself, that’s all. We’ll let them have their head now, and bring them up short later.”

  “You really don’t understand, do you?” She hesitated, then reached into an inside pocket of her jacket for a pack of cigarettes. Briefly he wondered if the casual quality he’d let their relationship assume, as evidenced by her failing to ask permission before smoking, had helped bring things to this turn. “You’ve pulled a vital stone from the dam, and now the torrent is sweeping it all away. How will you respond to this latest move of Hiryu’s? Announce to the public that the YTC takeover was valid, but the attack on Eight Islands is wrong?” She shook her head. “That would make the ministry seem to be equivocating. And when other companies begin to follow Hiryu’s lead and attack their rivals openly—what can the ministry say then, when they’re doing nothing but following its own benevolent administrative guidance?”

  He leaned forward intently. It was suddenly vital to him that she understand him, approve of his actions. “We did it for the nation,” he said, speaking slowly and precisely. “The nation understands. It approves.”

  “Your—our—hirelings in the press approve. The foreign press is calling us barbarians.” A sad fraction of a smile. “Yamada-sama would have said they were right.”

  “We did as we had to. Yoshimitsu was dangerous. They had possession of an incredibly potent instrumentality. And they refused our control. Something had to be done.” He didn’t tell her that Hiryu techs had been able to make no headway with TOKUGAWA and had begun to claim that the so-called sentient program was no more than an elaborate hoax. If only those bloodthirsty doitsu hadn’t murdered Dr. O’Neill, Ishikawa thought. He longed to punish the men responsible for that particular atrocity, as well as the murderer of Yoshimitsu Akaji—whose death Toda had blandly tried to pass off as heart failure until Ishikawa
had sent in government doctors to examine the body—but that Vietnamese devil Tranh had been too shrewd. He hadn’t only pulled his men out of YTC Central when the Hiryu security forces relieved them; he’d had them—and himself—out of the country within an hour.

  “It’s on our shoulders, only ours, to control the chaos before it breaks loose.”

  “You think you have Hiryu under control?” Her tone was openly scornful.

  He looked at her, bemused. “Of course. Chairman Ogaki is a reasonable man. He knows better than to cross the ministry.”

  “Will a drunk put down a freshly opened bottle of sake after a couple of swallows? Hiryu’s tasted the heady wine of disobedience. Will they put it aside for cold obedient water?” She stunned him with a laugh. “You’re a fool, Nobuhiko. A fool and a dreamer.” She stood. “So am I. Send me to jail or whatever you’re going to do to me; I’m ready.”

  He leaned back in his chair, shut his eyes, steepled his hands in front of his mouth. “Go home. Return to work tomorrow, or next week, or whenever you feel ready.”

  He felt her gaze on him like midday sunlight. “I don’t understand.”

  “You betrayed my trust in you. Yet I fear the modern poison has tainted me too; I can’t find it in myself to punish you for doing what you thought was right for the ministry and for the nation.” He smiled, bittersweet. “And I find your assistance far too useful to dispense with lightly, even though your grasp of intrigue yet leaves something to be desired.” Still she stood, uncomprehending. He opened his eyes to weary slits. “I seem to be getting in the habit of coddling disobedience,” he said dryly. “Now go.” He was still sitting there, immobile as a carven Kami when the door slid shut behind her.

  * * * * *

  Frustration built in Toda Onomori like a breaker bound for shore at the technicians Hiryu Cybernetics had flown in to the citadel. They reported no success at all in evoking a response from TOKUGAWA, or even coming up with any evidence to substantiate its existence. He himself still felt, instinctively, that the gaijin bitch had been lying about TOKUGAWA being a hoax.

  He was not a man who bore frustration well. The Hiryu technicians had been made fully conversant with his displeasure. The Yoshimitsu personnel who had worked in O’Neill’s lab insisted that the TOKUGAWA Project had been a success, and even personal attention from some of Major Craig’s assistants had not shaken their stories. Yet the Hiryu technicians pointed out that the very nature of sentience and awareness was such a tenebrous proposition that they may just as easily have been taken in by clever trickery as any layperson. There were no hard and fast answers in this area, and not even scientifically applied jolts of electricity could produce them.

  “We succeeded,” Takai Jisaburo said earnestly. “I’d stake my life on it”

  Toda regarded him beneath half-closed lids. If I deigned to be so obvious, he thought, I’d point out that you re doing just that, little man. “Our Hiryu technicians are the finest in Japan,” he said. “They’ve assured me that Dr. O’Neill was being quite candid in her disavowal of the success of the TOKUGAWA Project. After all, before the war, Dr. O’Neill’s theories were held in considerable disesteem by her peers.”

  Takai stared at him in haggard dismay. This isn’t turning out the way I anticipated. No, not at all.

  He hadn’t foreseen the violence of the assault. Why had Hiryu employed such animals, who’d shot poor Kim Jhoon to pieces before his eyes? Kim was a Korean, true, who occupied a position Takai in all justice should have held. But shooting him down like that had been an atrocity, unforgivable.

  Since the intaking of YTC Central, Takai had been held prisoner in his quarters beneath the keep, not even allowed to see his family in the little subdivision down the Hagi road. The Hiryu people had been polite, but their politeness seemed like a cheap fabric shroud tossed over a solid lattice of contempt. He’d scarcely been allowed to stir from his small apartments. He’d only been permitted into the lab—his own, now—a few times during the last three days, and then under guard, once to provide a sight inventory of the equipment, the other times to answer brief questions from Hiryu personnel. His own technicians seemed subdued, and he had not been allowed to speak with them. Of Dr. O’Neill there had been no sign, and the questions he’d addressed his… captors… had been met with curt professions of ignorance.

  “No.” In his emotional exhaustion and exasperation he omitted the honorific. “Our people were the best. Dr. O’Neill picked them personally. Where is she? What’s happened to her?”

  “Regrettably, she has suffered a relapse of her condition.” YTC’s new chief executive officer inclined his shining bald head backward by the width of a few of the hairs he didn’t have. “Why do you care? I thought the object of your betrayal of your employers was to become head of the lab, and of the TOKUGAWA Project”

  Takai winced. Anger briefly flared. How dare he talk to me this way? “What I did, I did for the nation,” he said heatedly. “It was inappropriate for gaijin to have charge of a project of such importance for our people. And I was offended by Yoshimitsu-san’s obdurate resistance to the benevolent guidance of the ministry. Remember, Toda-sama, I worked for the ministry before entering Yoshimitsu’s employ.”

  Toda raised three fingers of his left hand off the desktop. “The colors of treachery are manifold, like a rainbow, and like a rainbow they require no explanation. In any event, you should be pleased to know that your confinement has ended. You are now in charge of the TOKUGAWA Project” He settled his bulk back in the gel-filled chair. “If, as you insist, the project was a success, you should have no difficulty in producing results at once.”

  Takai straightened. This was more like it. He bowed briskly. “You shall have your results, Ogaki-sama.” He turned and strode the few steps to the door, paused, turned back. “And Dr. O’Neill? She’s receiving good care?”

  Toda smiled beatifically. “Rest assured,” he said, “that she’s receiving every bit of the attention her condition requires.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Down there in the dark, down in the center of things, TOKUGAWA began to make things move.

  Mundane matters, the autonomic motor functions of ventilation, of providing food and water and sloughing off waste, of shipping and receiving, which TOKUGAWA handled without conscious effort, all these continued. Likewise the routine chores of the citadel’s fifth-generation system, downloading files, running extant routines or programming new ones, continued without apparent disruption.

  The key word was apparent. Every so often a morsel of input or output was altered, subtly, undetectably. For their part the interlopers could not discover the slightest indication that any kind of sentience dwelt within the computer network of the Yoshimitsu Citadel—to the mounting fury of chairman Ogaki and his viceroy Toda.

  It wasn’t for lack of trying. Under the increasingly frantic direction of Takai Jisaburo, the imported Hiryu techs and the rump of O’Neill’s crew judged by Takai and Major Craig trustworthy enough to allow into the lab, did everything they could to elicit some response from TOKUGAWA. At first, cowering in fear and grief and hopeless fury in the darkness at the center of him, he had resisted reflexively, fearfully, all attempts to access him. Now he did so as a part of a strategy worked out with his friend Aoki and his overlord Shigeo, who remained reluctant to have any dealings with the program.

  Shigeo’s reticence had inspired TOKUGAWA to contact the old general manager in the first place. On hearing of the fall of Yoshimitsu castle, and drawing correct inference from the lack of the mention of Yoshimitsu Akaji in the news broadcasts, Aoki Hideo had been overcome with grief and guilt. He took an overdose of sleeping pills, and only prompt action by the infirmary’s staff at the Yoshimitsu complex on Kyushu saved his life.

  When it was apparent that Yoshimitsu Shigeo was sunk too deep in depression and distrust of TOKUGAWA to act, the program had called Aoki in his hospital bed at the Fukuoka facility. Skeptical at first, the aged executive had found his desire to live r
eawakening as he grasped the potential offered by TOKUGAWA.

  Without so much as disturbing the Hiryu security monitors—human or Gen-5—TOKUGAWA arranged a satellite-relayed voice link between Aoki in Kyushu and the captive Yoshimitsu Shigeo. Though the young scion of Yoshimitsu Telecommunications remained dubious of his “ally,” the bracing talk Aoki Hideo gave him at least coalesced his concentration out of a diffuse haze of depression. The three of them had begun to put together the elements of a plan.

  * * * * *

  Since the 1970s, much had been made of “unauthorized computer access”—breaking and entering someone’s electronic premises, siphoning out data, rewriting the files for fun and profit. In the early 1980s, the idea enjoyed a resurgence of popularity after a group of enterprising American teenagers got caught invading other people’s data playgrounds, including, supposedly, the Department of Defense. The media made much of it; the useful term “hacker,” originally denoting someone who “hacked around” with computers rather than treating them as incomprehensible black boxes, was downgraded to mean a sort of digital cat burglar; and a flurry of laws were passed to make everything better, proving yet again that King Knut got his feet wet in vain.

  Of course all the overheated talk of trapdoors and siphons and whatnot was predominantly bullshit. There were remote invasions of electronic privacy; but vastly fewer than were popularly supposed. Like sieges in ancient times—and the fall of Yoshimitsu Citadel—computer theft or tampering was usually an inside job. The preponderance of it was accomplished by someone who already had access to the data in question.

  Nonetheless, virtuosos existed, and the measures taken to keep them out were strenuous and ingenious. The fifth generation had, naturally, been enlisted by both sides. The modern datajacker operated like an electronic musician; he prepped his ensemble and sat down to play. Some performed vast orchestral set pieces to lull the digital guardian dragons; others got down and jammed, rocking and rolling with AI routines geared to improvise, playing off the bass line or following the lead guitar. The watchdogs fought back with lockbacks, tails, tracers, backtrailers and their own assorted artificially intelligent gremlins.