Ghost in the Shell

by James Swallow

  Aramaki smacked his lips, then spoke. “I told you not to jump.”

  “I had to, or more would have died,” the Major countered.

  Aramaki’s tone made it clear he did not accept her explanation for the previous night’s exploits. “You are a member of my team, and my responsibility.”

  The Major wanted to make it clear that she understood her own responsibility when it came to the terrorist Kuze. “I will find him, and I will kill him. It’s what I am built for, isn’t it?”

  Aramaki at last turned in his chair to face the Major, then held her gaze as he spoke with uncharacteristic softness. “You are more than just a weapon. You have a soul… a ghost.” He paused for a moment, thinking how best to help the single-minded woman before him connect with her own humanity, no matter how violent her work. “When we see our uniqueness as a virtue, only then do we find peace.”

  The Major bowed her head to him, in gratitude as well as formal farewell. It was more than kind of Aramaki to take time to speak to her so personally. She only wished she knew how to take his advice.

  * * *

  The streets were even busier, if that was possible, than they had been in the morning. The Major and Batou, both clad in jeans and jackets to blend in, adroitly made their way on foot through the pedestrians and peddlers heading in all directions. Many of the people were too distracted by their own tech to watch where they were going.

  Above, one floating billboard for Locus Slocus depicted a doctor giving a flower to a child, “Safely reconfiguring your child’s genetic structure. Families: built better.”

  Given all of the drama, real and fictional, based on men’s concerns about making sure their genes were passed down through successive generations, Batou wondered how that particular technology would fare with the public, but he had more important matters to discuss with the Major, starting with her strange reaction to the deactivated geisha bot. “What was going on with you at the hotel last night?”

  “Nothing,” the Major declared, not looking at him. “I’m fine.”

  A pair of beat cops hurried past, their uniforms flashing the word POLICE.

  “You sure?” Batou pressed.

  Before the Major could respond, a male street hustler emerged from the crowd, targeting the Major with his spiel. He wore a turquoise snakeskin jacket over a white t-shirt, and the entire left side of his face was covered in mech. He smelled as if he’d spent the last week without showering while he sampled his own product, which was likely the case. “Hey, sweetheart,” the hustler began, zeroing in on the Major.

  “Move,” Batou said. He tried to get between the punk and the Major, but the idiot ignored him.

  “You want an upgrade?” the hustler crooned.

  Batou glared. Some street dealer offering illegal cyber-enhancement to the Major, of all people, might be comical if it wasn’t so annoying. “Move,” Batou repeated.

  “I have anything you want,” the hustler promised.

  Batou lost it. “Back off!” He gave the man a hard shove, sending him tumbling backwards. The dealer’s squawk of pain was drowned out by a loud male Japanese-speaking hologram and the giggles of two nearby girls, who were apparently amused by the altercation.

  And still the Major didn’t react. She was hard to read at the best of times, but Batou thought she seemed unusually remote today.

  They reached a marketplace full of food vendors. The smells and sounds were as varied as the languages. Sweet, sour, savory, salty—whatever anyone might want to eat, it was all here for the best prices in the city, as the vendors were quick to shout from their stalls.

  Batou spotted a butcher he knew and called out, “Hey, Ming!”

  “Hey, Batou!” the butcher called back, coming out of his stall. “I got your bones.” He handed over a bag filled with animal bones and scraps of meat, whatever leftovers he couldn’t sell for human consumption.

  “Thanks, man.”

  Ming gave him a nod that said Batou was entirely welcome. It certainly beat having the offal sitting in the booth’s garbage cans, attracting rats and stinking up the place until the weekly trash pick-up. Ming added, “See you soon.”

  Batou saw the Major’s cocked eyebrow. He was pleased to see something had piqued her curiosity, even if it was something as mundane as the contents of the bag. “For the dogs,” he explained.

  Batou turned down a dark, damp alley. The Major followed. “For someone who doesn’t like people, how come you care about dogs so much?” she said.

  Batou shrugged, his bleached hair the one bright focal point in the alley’s dimness. “Don’t know. I just like strays, and they like me.”

  “They like you ’cause you feed them,” the Major pointed out.

  They passed a delivery man pounding for entry on a dingy metal door, despite the holographic sign proclaiming, CLOSED 11AM–4PM.

  Batou hoped the noise wouldn’t scare off the dogs. “You got no heart,” he teased the Major. He didn’t mean it, and she knew that, but he did think there was more to stray dogs than simple hunger.

  Sure enough, four dogs came out of the shadows, tails wagging. “Hey, girls!” Batou was happy to see them, and so far as he could tell, they were happy to see him. Two were large and black, their breeds unknown, and one was some kind of German Shepherd mix. Batou whistled and began feeding them before a smaller dog—a basset hound—trotted up to him. Batou made sure the little guy got his fair share. “Hey, Gabriel,” he said to the canine. “Meet Major.” Then he looked up. “Major, Gabriel.”

  Gabriel wagged his tail and while the Major said nothing, she smiled down at the dog.

  * * *

  Later, the rain came down harder. Batou and the Major were in his car on one of the many downtown highways, where a holo billboard above touted, “With Digital Pharmacies, you can erase painful memories.” The vehicle was a modified Lotus that would have been at home on any racetrack in Europe. It was sleek, black with silver accents, low to the ground, with a roof that slanted downward over the front seat. Batou told everyone he’d bought the car for its speed and precise handling, but everyone knew as well as he did that its appearance had been a powerful factor in his purchase decision.

  The Major had been silent since the alley. Batou thought she might talk about the investigation, or why she had been so troubled, but when she finally spoke, she said, “We used to have a dog.”

  Batou looked over at her. “Seriously?” He chuckled, surprised. “I had you down as more of a cat person.”

  Now the Major chuckled as well.

  “You don’t talk about that stuff, huh?” Batou observed.

  The Major frowned slightly, not sure what he meant. “What?”

  “Your past.” He hoped the question wouldn’t cause her to shut him out again.

  Her answer was honest. “Well, I don’t remember much. Just fragments. Bits and pieces.”

  “What about family?” Batou asked.

  The Major still couldn’t even find a sense of genuine sorrow, only regret that she could access neither the memories nor the feelings they ought to have caused. “My parents,” she told Batou, “they died bringing us to this country.” She remembered there had been a dissident crackdown in their homeland, that the authorities had been after her father, that it seemed too dangerous to stay. But she couldn’t remember their home clearly, or exactly what her father had done that put him at so much risk that they had to leave. She could not even remember whether she had seen her parents go into the water when the boat sank, or if they’d been somewhere else on the deck. She barely even remembered what they looked like. Ouelet had said that the memories would gradually come back, that she was still suffering psychologically from what had happened and that her mind was distancing itself from the events until she could emotionally deal with the trauma. The Major hoped that was true. She clearly remembered everything since waking up in the Hanka operating room well enough, but of course she had cybernetic memory upgrades to help with that. “Our boat sank in the
harbor. I almost drowned. And it feels like…” The Major found that she wanted Batou to understand how things were for her, why she wasn’t better at being a friend to him, to anyone. “There’s always this thick fog over my memory and I can’t see through it.”

  “You’re lucky,” Batou replied. “Every single day I get screwed by my memories.” That was putting it mildly. Batou inhaled. He wished he could forget what had happened, what had been done to him and, worst of all, what he had done. He thought it was a miracle he hadn’t lost his mind. “It’s better to be pure.” He exhaled. “Like you.”

  The Major smiled in response and chuckled again, mostly at the suggestion that she was pure. She couldn’t recall her life before Section Nine, but she doubted what she’d done since joining the task force fit anyone’s definition of “pure,” even Batou’s.

  She looked out the window, and for a moment saw something very strange. There, in the middle of the intersection, with vehicles driving all around it, was a small pagoda made of brown wood. She stared at it. And then it flashed, de-resolved and vanished. Just like the cat in her apartment this morning. Another glitch.

  * * *

  They made good time along the expressway and into the corporate sector, before Batou brought his car into a parking bay in the shadow of a huge glass office tower. The Major snapped off her seatbelt and climbed out, taking a breath of cool air.

  Up here, in the sector of the city where wealth flowed freely, it was a world away from the habitat levels choked with people. Around them, elegantly-manicured lawns and abstract pieces of sculpture dotted a vast plaza of clean lines and steel arches. The headquarters of the big mega-corps rose out of the white stone and reached high into the sky, each of them like glassy fortresses emblazoned with company logos.

  The Hanka Robotics tower was a place the Major was as familiar with as her own apartment. The building bore the company logo and had its own entrance plaza, decorated with early robotic prototypes. One silver replica of an antique robot loomed almost two stories high. Hanka was also famous for its weapons systems, and replicas of these were on display as well, including a small multilegged tank that looked like a giant artificial spider. A female voice wafted over the plaza’s public address system: “Welcome to Hanka Robotics.”

  It felt odd to be here on public security business instead of for more personal reasons, but the Major pushed that thought away and followed Batou through the entry grid. The voice over the PA continued: “All visitors must display appropriate credentials at all times.”

  * * *

  In Ouelet’s operating room, the Major sat while delicate-looking instruments, attached to a semicircular arc, repaired the robotics within her injured left arm. The skin had been removed from her hand, leaving the metal fingers bare for easier access. The epidermis would be replaced when the work was completed. Her quik-port was attached to Ouelet’s small, flat computer so that the doctor could read the Major’s data, which scrolled down in cascading lines of gold text through the air, like rain on a windowpane.

  “Open and close, please,” Ouelet directed.

  The Major obediently flexed her skinless left hand.

  “You have damaged internal systems,” Ouelet noted. With only minor surgery going on, the doctor still wore sterile slippers, but the red scrubs were gone. Instead, the doctor was clad in a translucent aqua lab coat over pale hospital garb.

  The look suited Genevieve’s gentle nature, the Major thought. She grinned. “Maybe next time you can design me better.”

  Ouelet replied with a soft chuckle as she smiled back. There was genuine warmth in her expression, and in her words as she asked, “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” the Major replied. It was true—it was annoying that the circuitry in her hand had been impacted by the bullet, but her wrist didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt. “I can’t feel anything.”

  “No,” Ouelet persisted, “you. In there.” The doctor never let an opportunity pass to remind the Major that she still possessed a human brain and, therefore, according to Ouelet, a human soul.

  “I’ve been having glitches.” The Major’s confession was reluctant. “But they’ll pass.”

  Ouelet registered concern. “Have you been taking your medication?”

  “Yeah. But these ones are still cycling.” Remembering both the cat and the pagoda, the Major added, “I had two this morning.”

  “Sound or image?”

  “Both.”

  Ouelet picked up the portable computer terminal that was still plugged into the Major. A waterfall of complex data tumbled down the screen, the dense lines of neural patterning code that were Mira Killian’s higher brain functions. The doctor peered at the strings of information and nodded, indicating that the glitches were revealed in what she was reading. “I see it. Have you made any unencrypted downloads?”

  The Major frowned slightly. “No.” Taking action when circumstances demanded, as she had in the banquet room, was one thing. Risky behavior for its own sake was something else entirely. Some people loved the thrill and the danger, but the Major would sooner drink from a sewer line than make an unencrypted download; the sewage wouldn’t do much harm to her synthetic organs, whereas the download could leave her vulnerable to hacks or even destroy her internal network. And Genevieve Ouelet, of all people, knew this. “Just delete them for me.”

  Ouelet nodded. “Consent?” The question was a legal formality. Any cyber-enhancement user had to give their official consent to any manipulation of their data, including deletion of glitches.

  The Major observed the formality in turn. “My name is Major Mira Killian, and I give my consent to delete this data.”

  With a few practiced finger strokes, Ouelet deleted the glitches and put down the terminal. “It’s done.” Seeing that the Major still looked troubled, she added, “No big deal.” She unplugged the cables from the Major’s quik-port.

  But the Major wanted more information about the glitches. “What are they?”

  Ouelet inhaled, contemplating how to phrase her answer. She kept her voice light. “Sensory echoes from your mind. Shadows. Can’t be sure.”

  The Major wasn’t satisfied. “Well, how do you know what’s a glitch and what’s me?” With so few memories from before she had been installed in the synthetic shell, she couldn’t be sure herself.

  “The glitches have a different texture… to the rest of your code.” Ouelet swallowed uneasily, then smiled again. “I can see everything. All of your thoughts, your… decisions.”

  Even when it was Genevieve scanning the data, the Major was perturbed by this absolute invasion of her thoughts. “I guess privacy is just for humans.”

  “You are human.” There was an urgency in Ouelet’s voice now. She wanted the Major to believe as she believed. “People see you as human.”

  The Major wondered how it was that Ouelet, even with data access to every thought and experience, still didn’t understand what it was like. “Everyone around me seems to fit. They seem connected to something. Something I am… not.” She paused, trying to find exactly what she wanted to say. “It’s like I have no past.”

  “Of course you have a past.” Ouelet’s voice was reassuring, though she was turned to look at something else in the room. “And with time, you’ll feel more and more connected to it, and to them.”

  Ouelet returned her attention to the Major’s arm. The equipment had finished making repairs and new unmarked skin covered the area, as though no injury had ever occurred.

  “Open and close, please.”

  The Major opened and closed her fist again. The fingers and wrist moved exactly as they should and the skin showed no signs of strain.

  Ouelet smiled. “Ah.” She affectionately ran her hand over the healed forearm and returned to what was really bothering the Major. “We cling to memories as if they define us, but they really don’t.” Ouelet paused and put her hand on the Major’s shoulder, her gesture and words both offering comfort. “What we do is what defines us.”
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  * * *

  Batou had waited with as much patience as he could muster outside Ouelet’s office. He’d called Ishikawa to send in some analytics techs to make sure he hadn’t missed something at the crime scene, but he was glad he was to be on the move again when the Major finally emerged.

  As the two of them headed down yet another hallway in the endless maze that was Hanka Robotics, this one leading to the Forensics Department, a female voice announced, “You are entering a Hanka secure area. Authorized personnel only. Please disable communications enhancements.”

  The Major and Batou disabled their internal comms and entered the forensics lab. The cybernetic morgue was a cross between a dystopian hospital and the inside of a machine shop. Unlike a regular morgue for humans, the data forensics lab was kept at uniformly blood-warm temperature—reportedly the optimal atmosphere for preserving magnetic bubble memory substrates, or something like that. Batou didn’t care about the reason, he just knew that being in here made him uncomfortable.

  As he trailed after the Major into the main lab, he pulled at his collar and looked around. The geisha bot that had hacked its way into Paul Osmond’s grey matter was lying on a steel operating table, its mechanical innards open to the waist. Its faceplates were peeled back in their flower-like, open configuration, showing the gold-hued cyber skull beneath. The eye sockets were empty. Red, blue and black cables dangled out of the mouth like dead tentacles.

  Bent over the slab in the center of the blue-tiled room was Dr. Sonia Dahlin. She had her light brown hair cut fashionably short and slicked back from her forehead, and her makeup was well applied to maximize her appeal in a non-showy way, but her manner was matter-of-fact to the point of brusqueness.

  The lab’s window had an unexciting view of a row of unfinished bots, their female gender made evident by their bare metal breasts. A male bot in shapeless orange clothing stood inactive in the doorway.