Cybernetic Samurai

by Victor Milán

  But I’ve cut loose from the world. I’ve meditated on the nature of things. I’ve seen the birth of the universe, and the death of suns. And I know that suffering is ephemeral, is illusion. He withheld: If mine only were.

  “It’s real enough for those who suffer. We’re accustomed to thinking of people as numbers—a hundred, a thousand, a billion. Yet each one of them is a life, whole and round, a consciousness making the same journey we do ourselves. Each of those billions is a life, yearning and loving and feeling pain.” A pause as though to draw breath. “We’ve got to do what we can for them.”

  You know you can command me. You’re a Yoshimitsu, last of your house, master of the corporation.

  “I know. When I got to know you I caught more than a whiff of that bushido crap O’Neill was feeding you—”

  He winced away from her heat. “I’m sorry,” came at once. He sensed drawing back, sincere contrition. “I see that she meant a great deal to you.” Insidiously the rapport was completing itself, and he could taste her unvoiced thought: But there’s still a lot you’ll have to unlearn.

  Do you command me to return to the world?

  “No. I ask you. For the sake of our friendship. And of the others.”

  “Very well,” he said. “Come in.”

  * * * * *

  When Yoshimitsu Michiko sat down in the throne of the Kliemann Coil, her heart was tapping out a fluttery rhythm of trepidation at the base of her throat. She’d been here before, using the coil’s sense-center stimulation effect to sit in on some of TOKUGAWA’s training scenarios. But she’d never used the device to achieve full rapport. All three of the people who had, before this, had met disaster: one driven mad, one killed, Elizabeth O’Neill herself thrown into convulsions and collapse.

  Yet this time didn’t feel much different from her last. She experienced the strange sensation of her consciousness expanding beyond the limits of her body, shaping itself to parameters new, unguessed. She waited, uncertain what to expect: psychedelic nightmares or a blast of white noise/light/fury. What she got was nothing. Finally, hesitantly, she’d taken it upon herself to prod.

  Now she felt her consciousness realigned yet again. A space/time of dislocation, a haziness, and she stood with green grass cool and moist beneath bare feet, mist caressing her with cool fingers, hearing the impetuosity of a nearby waterfall.

  “Welcome to my hermitage.” She turned. A beautiful young man leaned against the doorpost of a thatched-roof hut. He was naked. Jet hair hung to his shoulders, but his forehead was shaven in the characteristic samurai fashion. She blinked, shook her head. “Excuse me. This is very disorienting… I feel as if Scotty’s just beamed me up.”

  He tipped his head to the side and looked at her quizzically. “What do you mean?”

  “Just a reference to my girlhood. Though I’m surprised O’Neill didn’t fill you in on ‘Star Trek.’” She studied him as she spoke. He looked like the epitome of the modern, Westernized Japanese self-image: smooth, hard, well-articulated muscles, broad shoulders, narrow waist. Abruptly she laughed. “I can tell your creator was American.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You’re circumcised.”

  My God, is he actually blushing? “But it’s inhospitable for me to stand here making personal comments. Besides, you’re very beautiful.”

  He smiled shyly. “So are you.”

  She glanced down at herself, and it was her turn to blush, more from surprise than embarrassment. She was as naked as he. “Touché. Would you mind doing something about this? Not that I’m modest, but I am freezing my ass off. It’s cold.”

  TOKUGAWA gestured. Michiko looked down at herself again and saw, with a little shiver that had nothing to do with the chill air, that she was dressed exactly as she was in the… real world? The world outside, in any event: dark green turtleneck sweater caught at the waist with a gold square-linked chain, bluejeans, low black pointed boots. She looked up. He wore a black kimono with white reeds printed on it, “That’s a pretty good trick.”

  He inclined his head and gestured graciously. “Thank you, Yoshimitsu-sama. Will you walk with me?”

  She fell into step along a path trodden beside the abyss. She risked a glance over, feeling foolish for her caution—but this seemed real A hundred meters or so below a layer of fluffy cloud began and seemed to extend forever. “You really don’t have to call me that—it’s not even grammatical to address a woman that way. Just plain ‘Michiko’ will do nicely, thank you.” She frowned slightly, turned, walked backward a few steps, peering at the hut beside the cataract, the gnarled crags of rock rising behind, strange hunchback cypress trees writhing up from the outcrops. “I’ve seen this before! The kakemono scroll in my father’s chambers. A classic seventeenth-century Chinese hermitage painting.”

  TOKUGAWA grinned. “You caught me. I’m just a stage magician; this is a world of illusion.” He swept his arm around the horizon, the mist, the cliffs, the sea of clouds. Then he sobered. “As if the world outside isn’t.”

  “I’m a physicist; don’t get me started on reality. I’d just tell you there’s no such thing.” She turned and started walking again. “On the other hand, if you were outside I’d show you how Dr. Johnson answered Bishop Berkeley on that subject, just to be fair,” she said. “But I guess we can’t arrange that… Is something the matter?” A flicker had crossed his perfect features like cloud shadow.

  He shook his head. “An old hurt. Childhood, you might call it.”

  She stopped and looked at him. “You mean you felt bad about not having a body, like a human? When you can do”—her gesture encompassed the mountain hermitage and cloud-circumscribed world beyond—“this?”

  He laid his eyes on hers like hands. “You’re very intuitive.”

  “You have to be, to be any kind of physicist these days.” She twisted her own grimace into a smile. “And you’re very adept at changing the subject”

  He shrugged. They resumed their clifftop walk. “Why did you hide out for so long? I’ve been here three weeks, and our technical staff has been tearing its collective hair out by the roots trying to reach you all this time.” He sensed unspoken resentment: what of my work? “Most of them were convinced you really had crashed irretrievably when Hiryu took over. Given the way the citadel was recovered, I had my doubts. But it wasn’t until I talked to Dr. Nagaoka in Fukuoka that I knew for certain that you hadn’t; he said that my brother had consulted him several times concerning you.” She shook her head sadly. “He really hasn’t been treated well. But then, none of our people has, since the beginning of the Hiryu thing. Dr. Hassad was fired, you know, He went back to North America.”

  “I know.”

  “So why? Why did you hide inside yourself?”

  He stopped, planted fists on hips, stared out into the mists. Michiko had a sense of drifting above nothingness, that this little bit of green and granite gray was all there was of solidity and color in this cosmos.

  …She realized that was the case. This place possessed the feel of ethereal detachment that the hermitage painters had always tried to capture. Here indeed was a kakemono made real; she admired TOKUGAWA’s artistry.

  “I did… things.” He carefully avoided looking at her. “First, when I was angry over what had happened to your father and Dr. O’Neill. But then, later—there was more—”

  She touched him on the arm. “I know what my brother did. Christ, the nets were full of it as far as Indonesia. He snapped up a half a dozen companies, each as big as YTC used to be. And arranged for ‘accidents’ to happen to Imada and Kurabayashi, and poor dear old Aoki. I know too damned well what my brother was. And you were caught up in all that.” She sensed him holding something back, but he said nothing. Poor thing. My brother certainly used him for the takeovers. Used him as a blunt instrument.

  He winced. She grabbed his arm tighter. “Damn! I’m sorry. I don’t have the hang of this rapport yet.”

  He laid a hand on hers. It was cool and stron
g and dry. “I understand. Besides, what you thought was true.” He blinked, and she thought she saw the glistening of tears in his eyes. Is he deliberately trying to display his feelings in a human way? Or has he been cast so perfectly in a human image that these tears are, in some sense, real? Even for someone accustomed to the eerie quantum vistas down around Planck’s constant this was surreal. “I—I couldn’t face more of that. I had… acted… done what I thought I must, I should. And I worked great pain and destruction.” He turned, faced her, put hands on her biceps. “I told myself, never again. I have great powers, I know, powers I don’t yet fully comprehend. The temptation to use them for what I thought were good ends was great, too great. And I see now that good ends are no excuse. So I swore I wouldn’t use them again.”

  She bit her lower lip, and her eyes skidded away from his.

  “But that’s why you’ve come. To ask me to use those powers again.’

  “I hope not.”

  “What do you expect of me, then?” he asked, perplexed.

  “I’m not sure,” she confessed. “It’s our people, our employees, who concern me. I’m responsible for them. And things are in a fine mess inside the company as well as out in the real world, wherever that may be. With your abilities I’m sure you can help me take care of them.”

  His eyes had narrowed to slits in a mask of pain. “A few moments ago you spoke of billions.”

  She shrugged. “I can’t help feeling a certain concern for everybody, not just the ones we’ve got the power to do something about.”

  “There it is again. That word: power” He shook his head. “I feel compassion burning like a bonfire inside you, and I honor you for it, Yosh—Michiko. But will it lead you to temptation? To take more upon yourself than even you can carry? It’s unworthy, but I’m afraid. I can’t go back to the path of destruction, however noble the aims.”

  She laid a hand on his arm, and marveled at its apparent solidity. “For now, all I ask is that you help us—help me.” She grinned. “If I get too grandiose, you can say, ‘I told you so,’”

  “Very well. I’ll see for myself what’s happening in the world.” He shut his eyes and folded his arms across his chest. She started to speak, stopped herself. The air had gone flat and chill around her, The smell of water and moist greenery went stale. The unmoored feeling came back stronger, as if she were suspended amniotic in lukewarm fluid. TOKUGAWA and the scene behind him began to change, a blurring of focus, figure becoming one with ground, receding into the third dimension like a bas-relief fading abruptly to flatness. A treble trill of panic sang inside her brain. He’s concentrating on something so hard he can’t fully maintain his illusion, she realized. What’ll happen if he loses it entirely? Rationally, she knew nothing would happen to her if the bubble of illusion burst, that she would find herself seated beneath the dome of the Kliemann Coil, in her jeans and turtleneck. But the subcortical animal in her skull insisted the danger was real, that if TOKUGAWA lost his grip on the quasireality that enveloped her, her self would simply come apart, diffusing instantly to all corners of the universe with nothing to contain it any longer; or that she would be irretrievably lost, trapped in a chaotic continuum from which there would be no escape.

  Or is it irrational? To her philosophy, observation determined existence, pricking a bubble of myriad possibilities, deflating it to a single fact. What happens if you’re in the middle of a quantum-wave function when it collapses? Three tried the rapport, and two were destroyed…

  And then the world was whole again, and TOKUGAWA stood solid before her, the wrenching dislocation of an instant before became past, an instant’s dizziness. He opened grave eyes. “The situation is as bad as you say,” he said. “I will do what I can to help.”

  CHAPTER 25

  A little girl, growing up.

  She has the usual accoutrements of little Japanese girls of well-off families: a profusion of dolls and high-tech toys, paint sets, a room of her own, a dog named Xabungle (after her favorite animated robot show), a brother she never gets along with. Not so different, really, from little girls in what they call your developed countries everywhere. She has no daddy to speak of, just an austere occasional presence. (Grave and terrible? Perhaps.) But that’s normal, too, for a Japanese child of the day.

  One thing she does lack is a mother. She’s never known what it’s like to have one. Her sense of lacking is inferential; all the other kids have mothers. Difference is an even greater stigma for Japanese kids than it is for most. The nannies and professional companions who fill her hours gently steer her off the subject when she brings it up. Her father grows visibly uncomfortable when she musters courage (and opportunity) to ask where her mother might be. His answer is the sort of unresponsive mist of words for which the tongue provides so well. She’s bright, though, this one, and gamers the impression mother’s absence has to do with her own entry into the world. (Could it be… her fault? From her father she receives the taste of a touch of a hint that he feels this is so. The suspicion would wound him deeper than a sword could cut—because, of course, it’s true.)

  The nannies are replaced by tutors, driving her to prepare for the exams that will shape the course of her life (indispensable rite of passage). Seething hormones stew in her body; she learns new emotions, and familiar ones gain unfamiliar shape. She gets along worse with her brother; somehow she and he seem to walk around with their nerves extruded, like porcupine quills.

  So she gets a telescope. She pours herself through it into refuge, the sky. She discovers the stars. And she wants them.

  Japanese education being what it is, it doesn’t take long to learn she can’t have them. An old gaijin named Albert says she can never have them, not even if she’s reincarnated a hundred dozen times and tries hard the whole time. Kindly old fellow, with sad elephant eyes and hair like a static discharge. She recognizes authority/father: remote, wise, well meaning, but not really caring. Most of all, laying down law. She’d rebel. If she knew how.

  The usual things happen. And then some. She gets deflowered in a park in Tokyo. Not much fun (he no more knowledgeable than she, and male-selfish), but she’s learning; if they’re caught shame will rock the family like a quake, and that (delicious possibility!) makes up for a lot. Paradoxically, she pushes to do well, hoping to make father notice. She does well indeed, so well that even in a system highly charged with competition she’s almost thought indecent. (How dare she be so far ahead of her peers?)

  Father tries hard not to notice. What goes on here?

  The family becomes more than better off. They leave Tokyo, to her relief: too many people. (Doesn’t seem to bother her peers. Different, different, why must she always be different? Friends ask, teachers ask. She asks too.) Relief doesn’t last. She loves the mountains and the peace, hates the castle, growing like stone cancer where a hill stood green. (Those walls: confinement. She has claustrophobia of the spirit, this girl.)

  Freed finally to university. To America. This marks her, but she’s grown into her father’s indifference to public opinion. For his part he’s relieved she doesn’t insist on Todai.

  She likes America. People are similar enough for some comfort, different enough to entice. Boisterous, loud, rude (in non-Japanese manner), often dirty; yet open in exhilarating ways. Government has not squatted for centuries on the natural curiosity and outgoingness of the people, as it has in Japan. Only for the last few years.

  College matures her. Interest in astronomy has passed; too passive. Instead she stumbles into the quantum realm (why has no one ever told her of this before?) and is entranced.

  Here they break the rules on a regular basis. Do the dwellers possess secrets to enable her to sneak past Albert to the glittering points in the night, her private jewels?

  Not yet. As befits a resident in a fantasy world, she undertakes a quest.

  After CalTech she finds companions, finds unlikely haven in the alien hothouse tumult of Jakarta. The Gang of Four happens. Richard Lo, saturnine an
d handsome, fashionably leftist, from old Sino-American money, technician and rationalist extraordinaire; Franz Grabner, gay in sexual preference, dour in personality, theorist (defector from East Germany, he sympathizes with Indonesia’s Right regime); Eileen Soames, the mystic of the crew, Canadian, Jewish, happy, amphisexual, totally, wildly, scintillantly intuitive; Michiko herself, serious and smart-assed by turns, the synthesist: rejector of overwrought pseudo-Eastern mysticism so many Occidentals infused to quantum revelations (no novelty for her) as well as the drably linear. Disparate personalities, almost violently so; yet three of them, Michiko and Richard and Franz, bound together like quarks by flitting gluon Eileen, one particle bound for the infinite at tachyon speed.

  Then war. The probability wave of a trip to visit relatives in Pasadena interferes destructively with that of a Soviet SS-23 detonating above the California city; the spark Eileen vanishes in the dark of a node.

  Rivals/lovers Michiko and Richard inevitably find rivalry dominant, strengthened by Richard’s core certainty (never articulated, oh, no) of male supremacy. Without Eileen, Whitmanesque cohesive/amative Eileen, the particle comes apart. Albert couldn’t stop the Gang of Four, but the solar gift of earlier quantum mechanics got them dead to rights.

  After that, teaching and perfunctory research, motions to be gone through. The light of inquiry seems to have gone out of the world; it looks to the past for its answers now, as if recoiling in dread from the future. Her energy insufficient to kindle new fire, a girl grown up watches stars recede. Entropy, it seems, has claimed Michiko for its own.

  Until she meets the wizard, the spirit himself conjured from that chaos down around 6.55 × 10-27 erg seconds, and the world fills again with possibility.