Ghost in the Shell

by James Swallow

  She exhaled. It had been a glitch. The Major had been experiencing more of them lately. Nothing alarming, but she shouldn’t have them. And why a cat, of all things? Maybe she’d subconsciously noticed a fragment of holo-advertising and it had lodged in her memory somehow. The image did seem familiar.

  The Major opened a small package containing vials of yellow medication that kept the glitches at bay. She plugged one vial into the quik-port in her neck. When it was empty, she unplugged it, grabbed her jacket and left the apartment.

  * * *

  In the sky over the street, the gigantic hologram of a woman promoted something in Japanese. Garbled audio made her pitch indistinct. Besides, she was competing for airspace with a giant sologram billboard, which proclaimed in both text and a female voiceover, “Your skin deserves the best, and so do you. Try our hand cream.”

  More holo-ads filled the air around these, although none contained the leaping cat from the Major’s glitch. The chill that made the other people on the street pull their coats tight didn’t reach her as she threaded out of the habitat blocks and down through the narrow passages that led into the alley markets. A light rain was falling. A lot of people had umbrellas protecting their heads, but some either couldn’t afford such luxuries or, like the Major, would rather get wet than not have their hands free.

  She had a motorbike in the underground vehicle dock that could have taken her in across the loops and curves of the city’s elevated highways, but something about the encounter in the Maciej the night before made her want to walk the distance to clear her mind. It wasn’t an impulse she could have articulated, just a vague need to draw herself out of her own head, to move through the city and get lost for a little while in the ebb and flow of ordinary humanity.

  The concrete canyons of the alleys extended away in every direction for kilometers, ribbons of asphalt barely wider than a subway carriage but all of them crammed with teeming swarms of humanity, along with quite a few synthetics. Her old MA-1 repro flight jacket simply helped her blend in; many people who weren’t in the military liked to wear the clothing, in the hopes that it made them look tougher, less vulnerable.

  Even at this early hour, with the sun just starting to climb over the peaks of the tallest habitat towers, the district was already busy. Vendors hawked all kinds of wares from every angle, some of them selling from inside makeshift bubble-tents or the gutted shells of cargo containers, fans of solar cells reaching up above them to provide power to lights or heater plates. Others worked out of their backpacks, sitting cross-legged in the middle of a blanket with a halo of goods spread out around them. The oldest and best-established pitches would actually have a veranda or maybe tables and chairs. The hot, greasy cooking smells of roasting meat and boiling noodles wafted up along the passages, mingling with the acrid tang of ozone and stale human sweat. The voices swirled around in a cacophony of languages, mostly Japanese, but enough others to make it sound like the whole world had gathered here to barter. The Major could credit neither her superior training nor unparalleled programming for her ability to ignore the clamor. Anyone who wanted to get anywhere on time in the city had learned to tune out distractions in order to arrive at their destination unhindered.

  She joined the river of people moving westward, drifting with them at a walking pace. Many of the citizens passing by her were moving through worlds of their own, insulated from reality under digital hoods that fed them music or active video feeds, the enhanced media modules plugged directly into neural ports behind their ears. The more expensive modules provided not only sound and vision, but also a sensory component. It was possible to purchase high-end tech that would mask the real world with a virtual environment, so that if one preferred to walk through an art gallery or along a sunlit beach rather than down New Port City’s choked streets, it was easy to do so.

  The Major felt a prickle on her skin—intellectually, she knew that was not physically possible, because her dermal layer was precisely, uniformly controlled from her mech-core’s central processor unit—but the psychosomatic response from her all-too-human brain made it feel real. She paid enough attention to the glowing yellow grids in the road to avoid being hit by traffic, but she also listened to her instinct, warily scanning the faces around her.

  * * *

  The Major reached the entrance to the National Security Force building that housed the Department of Defense Section Nine headquarters. There was nothing outside the building that indicated Section Nine was within. In fact, it would be hard to find Section Nine on any organizational chart of the city’s law enforcement hierarchy. Existing on a semi-covert level, the unit’s grant of an exclusive counter-terrorist mandate meant that its operations often took place outside the public eye, with oversight only from the highest levels of government. Section Nine’s corner of the public security arena went far beyond the remit of the more common crimes the police department dealt with, and they were situated above—figuratively and literally, in terms of floor placement—the special weapons and tactics divisions. In the articles of investiture that had allowed Section Nine to be created, there was vague language about “extraordinary threats” to the city’s security and public welfare, and provisions for “extreme response” to “unseen dangers.”

  What that came down to in day-to-day operations was the use of a team of talented and diverse individuals—soldiers like the Major or Batou, former intelligence officers like Aramaki, or ex-cops like Togusa—to neutralize enhanced criminal and next-level terror threats.

  It was a mission that made the Major feel like she was making a difference, and these days that was all that drove her onward.

  Even on the primary floor entirely occupied by Section Nine, nothing about the place spoke to the unit’s elite nature. A small staff of admin bioroids and technicians did most of the office chores while the core team concentrated on investigation and arrests. Off the grid from the city’s other police units, they had no obvious precinct house for a potential enemy to target, and little footprint to leave them vulnerable to infiltration. If it wasn’t for the ornamental shield on the wall, the entire floor could have been mistaken for some small-scale corporate data farm.

  The Major glanced at the shield as she passed it. Section Nine—Cyber Terror Response Division. Quite what the ministry thought of their near-clandestine unit wasn’t something that the Major or her team spent much time dwelling on. There was always another operation coming down the line, always another threat on the horizon.

  The others were already in the building and followed the Major into the conference room. It was expansive and mostly bare. Couches ringed the walls, but the space was otherwise unfurnished. The evidence the team studied was mainly in the form of three-dimensional holograms; it would have been foolish to clutter up the central viewing area with a table and chairs.

  As the team filed in, the Major sensed a familiar crackle of tension in the air—the same cocktail of anticipation and unspent energy she had experienced a hundred times before, on missions and out on the battlefield. Each member of the unit had been recruited because of a skill set that fitted Section Nine’s remit, each one of them in the top percentile of their capabilities. Of course, that also meant that their personalities didn’t quite always mesh, but in the field that never seemed to be a problem. Whatever their quirks or differences were outside of operations, all of them were professional enough to put them aside when the guns came out.

  Batou, big and bearded, self-consciously ran a hand through his bleached hair and managed a wan smile at the Major. He looked troubled, but then he almost always did. Batou was her strong right arm out in the world, thanks to a firm partnership between them that had formed out of an unconscious acceptance that they worked well together. Before Section Nine, Batou had been a member of the Swedish Army’s Special Operations Group, and he took orders without question.

  Togusa was the newest member of the team. The guy was pure police through and through. He retained the formality of his old dete
ctive unit, wearing a suit and tie on the job even in Section Nine. He was also a rarity in the city, a near-untouched natural human with no more than the most basic enhancement implants in his body—and still he had been putting away crooks bristling with cyber-tech at a rate that had earned him a bunch of commendations. The Major had warmed to the guy from the start; Togusa was honest and showed himself willing to get right into the thick of things.

  Ladriya was the tough Anglo-Indian who handled their on-site tech. She was also the only woman on the team besides Major. When Ladriya talked, she sounded as though she came from south or east London, though her family was originally from somewhere in southeast Asia. To hear Ladriya tell it, her folks hadn’t been thrilled that instead of taking a job close to home, she’d wound up all the way in New Port City, doing work she could never discuss in her weekly video chats with Mum and Dad. The Major was grateful for Ladriya’s wanderlust. The woman’s technical skills were part of what kept the team on the bleeding edge, and like most of Section Nine, she was more interested in results than in salutes and protocol. Today, Ladriya sported a sonic piece on her right ear for work and a gold ornament on her left as an assertion of personality.

  Ladriya was carefully ignoring Borma, whose machine-optic eye implants raked over the room. If there had ever been something between those two, it had never followed them to the job. What the Major knew about Ladriya’s professional past was the kind of deliberately hazy narrative that belonged to someone from the intelligence community. Borma and his skill with explosives suggested a former career as a demolitions specialist.

  Saito, the group’s primary sniper, glanced in her direction, his unblinking hawk-eye implant fixing her for a brief instant. He came from a mercenary background, from years working as a private military contractor, and he was another of Aramaki’s personal recruits. She wondered what had swayed Saito away from a lucrative profession as a shooter-for-hire and into a new role with Section Nine. As always, the chief played his cards close to his chest on that matter, and Saito was in no hurry to open up about it.

  Ishikawa, the last member of the team, was Section Nine’s resident information warfare specialist. He had his father’s surname, his mother’s Afro-Caribbean good looks, and almost the same London accent as Ladriya. Ishikawa also looked very young, just out of his teens, despite his scruffy beard. Something seemed off about him this morning, and it wasn’t just his usual hangover.

  “So, what do we have on Osmond?” the Major asked.

  Ladriya knew that the immediate information was required. She was sorry she didn’t have more to give. “So far, very little.” She turned on the holo-floor in the middle of the room, which projected three-dimensional images of the late Dr. Osmond. Everyone took a seat to view the data. “He was the head of Hanka’s robotics division. Human, but of course cyber-enhanced.”

  They all knew a man in that position would have had the most highly developed cyber-protection in existence implanted in his neural system. Batou voiced what everyone was thinking. “So, how did they hack him?”

  The hologram now displayed the fatal attack on Osmond in the banquet hall. The Major indicated the action being played back in the hologram. “Somehow this geisha bot got past his encryption.”

  It was never wise to ignore the Major, but Togusa couldn’t help it. He was distracted by a change in Ishikawa. The man had had some sort of new cyber-enhancement done, made more provocative because Togusa couldn’t readily decipher what it was. “Something’s different.”

  Ishikawa sighed softly.

  Togusa refused to be put off. “What’d you get?”

  “Why you always think he’s out there enhancin’?” Ladriya teased. Ishikawa had a few low-level neural enhancements and a couple of simple bio-modifications, but it was an open secret that he wanted more than that. These days, it was the equivalent of what getting a new piercing or a tattoo had been, back when those had been considered slightly daring.

  “Because he is,” Togusa replied, defending his original question.

  Ishikawa removed all doubt by pulling up his shirt and displaying the crimson line of a fresh surgical scar across his belly. “Cyber-mech liver,” he explained. This was a combination of computerized and robotic components. “Been savin’ up for a while.” He grinned. “Now it’s last call every night.”

  Togusa was appalled. “You got enhanced so you can drink more?”

  Ishikawa grinned wickedly, clicked his tongue and winked.

  Ladriya gave a snort of laughter at Togusa’s reaction. “Embrace the enhancements, Togusa. Me and the Major? We wouldn’t be here without it.” True enough. Almost everyone on the team had been wounded in action at some point and had required cyber enhancements to save their lives. And everyone knew the Major was nothing but cyber enhancements, except for her brain.

  Togusa hoped the Major didn’t take offense, but he was proud of the fact that all of his skills were honed by practice and experience, not technology. “I’m all human… and happy, thanks.”

  The Major did not respond to his words. Instead, she remained focused on the mission. “Any more information on the ceased geisha bot?”

  The holographic display now showed the red-clad bot that had pleaded with the Major; lists of printed information scrolled alongside the image.

  “Hanka’s running scans,” Togusa said. “Dr. Dahlin will have the report ready by—”

  He broke off abruptly as the hologram of the geisha bot vanished, replaced by the Section Nine S9 logo as Chief Aramaki entered the conference room.

  3

  INTERFACED

  Everyone rose swiftly and stood at attention on Aramaki’s arrival. The chief did not bother with verbal greetings. Unlike most men commanding military units, Section Nine’s top officer did not shave or crop his hair. Instead, he wore it in a style that was wide on either side at the top and tapered in more closely to frame his lined and firm features, giving him the look of an old but still fierce lion that was for some reason inside an office building instead of out prowling the veldt. He perpetually wore the kind of stern expression that was better suited to some hard-ass schoolteacher or an unforgiving mob boss.

  At the chief’s nod, everyone in the team sat down on the couches again. “I have been speaking with the prime minister,” Aramaki informed his subordinates. “He wants a full report. Togusa.” Aramaki indicated that the man should speak.

  Togusa obediently activated a hidden control, and the room dimmed as a crimson-hued hologram display rose up out of the floor and swiftly sketched in a series of holograms showing three different people that the Major had never seen before. Aramaki sat now as well, concentrating, as Togusa summed up what they’d uncovered so far. “Following last night’s attack, three more Hanka scientists were murdered at the company’s central laboratory.” There had been several other recent Hanka deaths, but those had, until now, been chalked up to ill fortune with petty criminals and coincidence. No more—even without the attack in the banquet room, this proved a pattern.

  “The first two were shot,” Togusa continued, inhaling softly as he indicated two of the holograms, “and the third was beaten to death by his own service robot.” He moved to indicate the third hologram, which displayed a dead scientist slumped over a desk that had fist-sized holes pounded into it. “All showed signs of cerebral hacking.” Togusa manipulated the hologram so that it now focused on the dead man’s quik-port.

  “The same as the geisha did to Osmond,” Togusa added, even though his colleagues were well aware of this. “And all were senior figures in Hanka. Just like Osmond. A message was left at each of the crime scenes by someone identifying himself…”

  Togusa brought up a new hologram. It was fuzzy and incomplete, but part of a face was clear, a young Caucasian man peering out from under a hood. Togusa finished, “…as Kuze.”

  The same voice and the same warning the Major had heard in the banquet room now came from the hologram. “Collaborate with Hanka Robotics and be destroyed. C
ollaborate with Hanka Robotics and be destroyed.”

  Section Nine had considered the possibility that the murders were anti-tech bio-purity militants or counter-capitalists targeting Hanka as part of their agenda, but those theories appeared increasingly unlikely. The attacks seemed designed to demonstrate that enhanced minds could be hacked, without consent, without control.

  Batou felt his skin crawl a little, but he ignored it. It was the secret fear of everyone with a neural interface: no matter how good your firewall, there was a chance you could fall prey to a mind-hack. He made a mental note to check his interface barrier software for an update when the briefing was over, just to be on the safe side.

  Aramaki spoke decisively. “Togusa. You and Ladriya go speak to Mr. Cutter, the CEO of Hanka. Major and Batou, get Dahlin’s report. Find out what she recovered from the geisha.”

  Batou stood and bowed to his commander. “Aramaki.”

  “Major!” Aramaki said, before the Major could follow. The chief stood, indicating she should follow him into his adjoining office as the rest of the agents exited the conference room by the opposite door.

  Two female attendants shut the double doors behind the Major, then stood silently to either side. The Major had never heard either of them speak in the entire year she’d been with the Section. So far as she knew, both women were entirely human, but they’d had some sort of neural enhancement that allowed them to stand unmoving for hours.

  The chief’s office brought together tradition and technology. There was a bonsai tree on a side table, which Aramaki had painstakingly cultivated himself. The furniture was a combination of dark carved wood and leather. One of the walls was green marble shot through with white. The desktop was made of the same marble, with a single plain teacup sitting on its surface. The wall behind the desk was alight with shimmering green circuitry. The Major waited, standing, as Aramaki sat down behind his desk, facing away from her and staring at the circuitry, as though it might give him insight into her rebellious actions.