Ghost in the Shell

by James Swallow

  When the secure elevator opened at the end of the hallway outside the banquet suite, the Major felt it like the distant tensing of a muscle. That’s not right. According to the Maciej’s security server, the express and local elevators to the forty-third floor had been locked off for the duration of the meeting, deactivated for all but the direst of emergency circumstances.

  Six Asian men in identical dark suits of corporate cut, carrying identical briefcases, all exited the elevator in swift order and approached the closed doors to the banquet room. They were differentiated mainly by the style of VR glasses they wore and the placement of their facial scars.

  The two grey-suited Hanka security bots standing guard outside the banquet room looked human. One prepared to stop the unfamiliar men, saying, “Gentlemen, excuse me, I think you have the wrong—” But before the bot could finish the lead stranger shot both bots down, leaving them sparking and inoperative. The faceplate of one slid upward, revealing a black skull casing and a glowing red light that dimmed as the guard’s functions ceased.

  The Major felt a surge of an adrenaline-analogue flood through her, but she was controlled as she spoke into her comm. “Hallway. Six men. Shots fired. Section Nine ETA?”

  She listened for the sound of police sirens, her aural software picking out the faint skirl on the breeze wafting upward. Sergeant Batou was usually her backup in these situations, but the mission brief hadn’t shown a need for him tonight.

  This meant the stocky Scandinavian was driving a Section Nine jeepney as fast as he could toward the Major’s position. With him were Borma, Togusa, Ishikawa, Saito, and Ladriya. Section Nine was the most highly skilled and lethal anti-cyber-terrorism squad in the district, perhaps the country. But, right now, Batou felt as though they might as well be traffic cops. The Major needed them, and here they were, nowhere near in position and still on the road. Their intelligence profile for this operation had been low-threat with a clear objective, to follow up on intel chatter about a possible data intrusion at the Maciej, but he thought that was no excuse. “Two minutes out, Major.”

  “Too long,” the Major said into the comms. “I’m goin’ in.” She pulled the VR headset’s cable from her cyber-enhanced neck ports, ending the transmission of the scan to Aramaki.

  “Hold!” Aramaki shouted into the comm, but the Major was no longer listening.

  Within the corridor of the Maciej Hotel, the six assassins continued forward, all pressing the catches on their briefcases at the same time. The cases dropped to the floor, leaving each of the men holding a stubby machine gun.

  With a flick of her wrist, the Major cast off her black coat, revealing a pale combat thermoptic bodysuit beneath. Silk-thin, the material was made of an ultra-light compound that could turn a blade or low-caliber round at close range. But this was not the material’s greatest advantage. When inactive, the thermoptic suit looked white, with a jigsaw, fish-scale pattern connecting its sections. Activated, the thermoptics made the suit and its wearer virtually invisible; someone looking for it might see a rippling shape in the air, something that looked like clear glass shimmering through water, but no more than that.

  “Major, stop!” Aramaki commanded, but he could not hear her presence on the comms. She had disabled hers, probably so that she wouldn’t hear any more direct orders from him that countered her own perceptions about what she should do next. Aramaki’s mouth tightened. The Major was a superb agent, but there was such a thing as taking too much initiative in the name of duty.

  On the rooftop, the Major took a pistol out of the holster built into the side of her uniform. She cocked the weapon.

  In the banquet room, Dr. Osmond felt in danger. His cherished plan was being demolished, bit by bit, with every word his hoped-for client uttered. “I’ve heard this speech before,” the president declared, “from your competitors.”

  The geisha in the red kimono poured more sake into Osmond’s cup. The president gestured at the beverage.

  Osmond felt something wet on his hand and looked down to see the sake had filled the bowl and was now overflowing, streaming over the sides and spilling on to the lacquered table beneath. “What are you doing?” the doctor demanded of the artificial geisha. It continued to pour as if his cup was still empty, and Osmond saw the president push back in his seat, suddenly dismayed.

  “And now, Hanka Robotics serves it with milky sake,” the president finished, as though the malfunctioning geisha was making his point for him.

  Osmond colored, his fury building. He had come too far to have this all ruined because of some mechanical glitch. Maintenance had assured him all the bioroids at the hotel had been in perfect working order. The geisha began to blink rapidly, and then its jet-black doll’s eyes refocused on his face. “Hey!” he snapped, aiming a finger at the errant machine. “Hey, hey, hey!”

  The machine ignored him and Osmond finally put his hand over the cup to stop the overflow.

  The geisha’s reaction was as fast as a striking cobra. Her pale white hand shot out and grabbed Osmond’s finger, bending it the wrong way against the joint with a percussive crack of snapping bone. He let out a high-pitched scream as the president and his retinue fell back, and the other Hanka execs scattered in surprise. Pain lanced through his arm and Osmond desperately tried to extract himself from the geisha’s grasp. He was having difficulty adjusting to the sudden change in his predicament. Just a few seconds ago he had been worried about losing the account and now it seemed that he might be about to lose much more.

  The president reacted to the geisha’s actions with fear, tinged by righteous indignation. “This is what I’m talking about.”

  Osmond might have replied, but the geisha struck him across the head with the sake pot and spun him around. He screamed again.

  “Whoa!” the president yelled. Some of the banquet guests began to shout and rise to their feet in confused panic; others simply asked what was happening.

  Dazed and half-blinded, Osmond felt the synthetic pull him into a chokehold and tighten its grip on his neck. He gasped for air as his vision swam. The three other geisha bots took hold of other guests in similar fashion. The room erupted in screams and chaos.

  On the rooftop, the Major stepped forward into the yawning rush of the night and closed her eyes, embracing the wind. She plummeted like a falling knife down the side of the hotel tower, the windows flashing past her in a blur. Her eyes snapped open and she silently triggered an activation sequence. A wave of distortion seemed to envelop her, bleeding out color, turning her into a glassy apparition, a heat-haze mirage. The bodysuit’s thermoptic camouflage was power-hungry and fragile, but it was enough to render her near-invisible.

  “Major!” Aramaki cried into the comms again. He got no response.

  The doors to the banquet suite crashed open and the six men entered, fanning out. Before the Hanka party and the West African retinue could react, the assassins opened fire without hesitation. They mowed down members of the African delegation and the Hanka Robotics team alike, seemingly at random. Still, when the shooting stopped, both Osmond and the president were still alive, albeit they were both crouched down and cowering in terror.

  In an underground bunker, where light came primarily from the flickering devices all around, a man stood on the filthy and wet floor, watching the mayhem from the surveillance provided by the echo box. He needed no screen for this; the audio and video streams both fed into him directly via a vast network of cables plugged into a large apparatus on his neck. If this was uncomfortable, he showed no sign of it.

  There was no one here with the man, no one to hide from in this secret place, but even so, he wore a hooded cloak that shadowed his features and concealed his form, making him look something like a medieval monk. He gave an order, seemingly to the air, in a voice that paused at odd moments, as though it was generated by a computer. “Initiate… the hack.”

  In the banquet room, the surviving guests whimpered, even more frightened now.

  The red-clad
geisha bot took no notice of any of them except Osmond. The synthetic leaned forward over him and, with a wet click, its delicate ceramic face split down the middle and snapped open. The bot’s inner workings had been designed for function, not intimidation, so it was simply coincidence that it now looked like a cephalopod from the worst imaginings of a psychotic. Hungry cable tentacles writhed down out of its metal jaw and lunged into the bot’s prey.

  Osmond let out a pained gurgle and went limp as the geisha bot’s cable heads locked into the open quik-ports on the back of his neck. He began to twitch like someone deep in REM sleep. His eyes became an opaque blue-white, like those of a day-old corpse. The neural jack was a penetrator device, a brute force cybernetic link capable of burning through any implanted firewalls and stripping a person’s memories bare. The machine was hacking the contents of his mind.

  Suddenly, gunshots smashed through a window, killing two of the gunmen and destroying one of the geisha bots. The humans spurted blood as they collapsed. The synthetic shut down in a messy, jerky heap, its body writhing and sparking, gushing thin streams of whitish liquid silicate.

  The geisha holding Osmond, its face already distorted, now transformed further. Its legs twisted back against their joints in a way no human could ever have managed, and folded up around Osmond like a spider grasping its prey. The machine scuttled jerkily away across the carpeted floor, and then clambered up the wall. Hands becoming claws, the machine kept Osmond prisoner as it dragged itself and his insensate form up and out of reach, until the bot paused in a high corner of the ceiling.

  More gunshots blasted through a different window, hitting and disabling another of the geisha bots. The four surviving gunmen fired back, roaring with inarticulate rage, their bullets shattering more glass and sending shards in a deadly rain to the street far below. The giant cyborg-spider was impervious, keeping its tight grip on Osmond as it continued to drain his data, even as yet other geisha bot was taken out.

  Then an entire glass wall imploded. The Major smashed through it in a running leap, not slowed by the glass fragments that sliced into the room around and ahead of her, her pistol never pausing in its fire. The Major turned off her thermoptic camouflage as she entered the room, knowing that her sudden appearance would give her an added advantage by startling her adversaries. She used the momentum of her entrance to run up the wall, sprinting at a ninety-degree angle to the floor. In the moment it took the surviving gunmen to react, she acted on instinct, diving and firing, her semiautomatic pistol barking as she took down three more of the armed men with pinpoint shots to the head or the throat. An ordinary human operative would have never been able to move with such speed, but the Major was very far from ordinary. But as fast as she was, the Major could not avoid every bullet streaming in her direction and a round struck her left arm, forcing her to stifle a grunt of pain-feedback.

  The two remaining intact geisha bots in black kimonos displayed more self-preservation than the human assassins by raising their arms in surrender.

  The rest of the Section Nine team arrived in the street below beneath the massive purple sign identifying the Maciej. They raced under the exceptionally long entryway awning to the hotel’s front door, passing a trio of splindly, non-fleshed synthetic servants.

  The Major fired at the spider-like geisha bot in the red kimono. The shots found their mark. The stricken bot released Osmond. The man fell to the floor, dead. He hadn’t been hit, but his brain was so traumatized by the bot’s hack that it had shut down even the most basic impulses governing his lungs and heartbeat. The bioroid collapsed onto its back beside him, its legs crumpled over its back, fluids pooling around it as its wrecked systems began to shut down. It reached out to the Major with an arm.

  The Major wasn’t concerned—the bot was about to cease function at any moment. It couldn’t hurt her. And then the bot spoke in a child’s voice. “Help me. Please. Don’t let me die.”

  The Major realized that the bioroid’s gesture was not a threat, but an entreaty. This made so little sense that the Major almost didn’t know how to respond. She stuck to her mission. “Who sent you?” she demanded.

  The geisha spoke again, pleading. “Help me. Please.”

  “Answer me!” the Major insisted.

  Then a different voice came through the geisha’s speaker. It was male, both more and less mechanizedsounding that the geisha’s speech had been. It was—although the Major had no way of recognizing it—the same voice that had instructed the geisha to hack Osmond. Now it said, “Collaborate with Hanka Robotics and be destroyed.” The geisha opened the rest of its face, the cold metal petals folding outward to display the gold metal skull beneath.

  The central cerebral processor module for Hanka’s geisha model was mounted in the head, just behind what would have been the nasal cavity of a human being. A high-velocity bullet through the center of the face would crack it in two, immediately rendering the machine inert.

  The Major was seldom unnerved, seldom moved to unnecessary action, but the geisha’s pleas, followed by the terrorist threat, infuriated her. She emptied her pistol into the geisha’s head until the unit was no longer operable. The mechanical face closed, returning to a semblance of normality as it ceased all function.

  The Major stared at it, allowing herself to exhale, even as she wondered what the hell had just happened.

  She heard hard breathing nearby. One of the gunmen was bleeding out, but still alive. He pulled a grenade from within his once-elegant suit jacket.

  A booted foot ground down on his wrist and the gunman groaned weakly. Batou had arrived. The big Scandinavian calmly concentrated his weight onto his prisoner until he heard bones crack. The gunman gasped in agony.

  Batou shook his head reprovingly. “Uh-uh.” He ended the assassin’s pain by putting a round through the man’s skull. He scooped up the grenade, made sure the pin was securely in place, then went over to see how the Major was doing. “You okay?” He winced, inhaling softly as he got a better look at his colleague. “You’re injured.”

  It took Batou’s words to bring the Major out of her reverie. She raised her left arm to see a big red-rimmed wound that ran from her wrist to mid-forearm, exposing the robotic parts within, dripping the same kind of white liquid that had splattered out of the geisha bots she had destroyed. She looked down again at the one that had spoken to her, begged her…

  Batou, better at reading the Major than anyone else in the Section, sensed that she felt some sort of kinship—totally unwarranted, in his view—with the wrecked machine on the floor. “You’re not the same,” he assured her.

  The Major turned and headed for the door.

  “Hey. It’s just a robot!” Batou shouted after her.

  The Major ignored Batou, heading outside as a squadron of local law enforcement, wearing vests that identified them as police, flooded into the room. She activated her thermoptic suit, becoming invisible once more. Some of the cops bumped into her, grunting in surprise at the unseen obstacle. She ignored them, too.

  2

  INNER UNIVERSE

  There was no sense of transition for her, no moment of alteration from the dreaming world to her waking reality. Not anymore. It was just one of many tiny human things that she had lost, small details that no longer wove through her life.

  At dawn, light filtered dimly in through the windows of the Major’s apartment. Outside, a giant holographic woman was smiling over the harbor. The Major was fully conscious, though not yet dressed to go outside. She had on her sleep wear, a dark blue undershirt and shorts, as she sat up on her single-tatami bed, silently examining the damage she had sustained the night before. Instead of a mattress, the space beneath her body was a series of illuminated glass coils, a platform containing hidden sensors to scan her for signs of damage, and electromagnetically stimulate the nano-mech elements in her artificial bloodstream should any be found. The coils also generated a low-level power field capable of contact-charging her body’s internal power supply while she
was offline.

  The bed could not repair the hole in her wrist, though. The bio-proxy skin had clotted around the edges of the ragged gouge in her flesh, but it hadn’t knitted closed. The circuit matrix beneath was still visible. She would need to get one of the Section Nine mech-techs to take a look at that for her, but for now the limb seemed to be functioning adequately despite the surface damage.

  Seeing the tech inside her surface flesh reminded the Major of the dying—no, de-activating—geisha bot that had said it didn’t want to die. It had been fully mechanical, incapable of such sentiment. As a machine, it was also incapable of life in the first place, so it could not fear death. The begging must have been programmed by the terrorist who orchestrated the attack. And yet her own circuits did resemble those of the bot.

  The Major knew there was no use in such thoughts. More important, there was no time for them. There was no day when her skills were not required by Section Nine. When she knew herself to be fully charged, she reached up to her neck to disengage the twin zeta-cables trailing from the ports there. The connectors came free with a metallic click and she let them drop away.

  She stepped into what she thought of as the shower. It served the same function as a regular shower, though it only resembled one insofar as it was a stall. The Major hung suspended there while lights pulsed around her, emitting photosynthetic rays that cleaned detritus from her skin and refreshed the electrical impulses underneath.

  When she was done, she dressed. Then she was startled by an organic noise that had no place in her sparsely furnished apartment: a meow.

  The Major turned and saw, in a wall alcove, a grey-and-black striped tabby cat wearing a blue collar. The animal was up on her hind legs, reaching out with a front paw to bat at a bug. Then the cat momentarily broke into jagged video lines before vanishing completely.