Ghost in the Shell

by James Swallow

  The techno-pathologist had her hands deep inside the geisha bot’s torso. Dahlin didn’t look up, but her tone made it clear she didn’t appreciate having visitors. “I’m busy.”

  Batou found the pathologist’s obvious desire for solitude just too tempting. “Dr. Daaahlin!” he drawled, as if he was overjoyed to be in her presence, and she likewise couldn’t wait to see him. He knew how irritated she’d be by his pretend familiarity. “Are you finished yet?” He also knew the insinuation that she worked too slowly would irritate her even more.

  Dahlin still didn’t look up, but her tone suggested she wouldn’t mind if it was Batou on her slab instead of the bot. “If you hadn’t riddled the geisha with bullets, this would be much easier.”

  Now Batou feigned hurt. “I didn’t shoot her.”

  The Major kept it simple. “I did.”

  Dahlin finally favored them both with a weary glance. She knew Section Nine needed results right away, but forensic scans and analysis of the sheer amount of data would take a while She sighed. “This is gonna take days. I need to run hundreds of potential simulations.”

  “We don’t have the time,” said the Major, confirming Dahlin’s timeframe fears.

  Dahlin tried to explain the complexity of the problem. “She was a Hanka companion bot. But she was reprogrammed for cerebral hacking.”

  As the two women talked, Batou wandered over to another slab and, curious, pulled back the sheet. One of the dead gunmen from the banquet room massacre lay there, as lifeless as the geisha bot. The gunman’s torso and head were human, but his arms were robotic and there were wires protruding from his eye sockets.

  “What was on her drives?” the Major asked.

  “Nothing,” Dahlin replied. “The data was destroyed as it was transmitted. No sign what she was after.” Whatever had been stolen from Osmond’s brain was now in the hands of the terrorist who had engineered the hack. He had made sure nothing was left behind that could lead back to him or even suggest what he ultimately wanted. “The hardware was vandalized. They ripped her up.”

  The Major briefly contemplated their options. She leaned in over the dead machine’s broken shell. “Then I have to do a Deep Dive.” This was the term for the complex process whereby one cyber-consciousness fully meshed with another for investigative purposes.

  Dahlin, who as a scientist should have been on board with this, objected. “You can’t encrypt during a Deep Dive.”

  “I know.” The irony of her earlier exchange with Ouelet about not downloading unencrypted data was not lost on the Major; a Deep Dive into a terrorist-corrupted bot would be infinitely more hazardous. But the investigation was in danger of stalling, and she didn’t want to wait for another Hanka Robotics executive to be murdered. What if the next body to drop was Genevieve Ouelet? She would never be able to forgive herself.

  Dahlin took a soft, annoyed breath, pushed herself away from the slab, then rattled off the ugly possibilities. “They could have left traps in her. Mag pulses. Viruses.”

  As Dahlin sat down behind a control console, Batou for once took the pathologist’s side. “Mm, she’s right.” The Major gave him a look but Batou was not deterred. “You’ll be exposing your mind to whoever hacked her. You’ll be wide open.”

  He wasn’t saying anything that all of them didn’t already know. “I have to get inside her memory,” the Major replied. The geisha had had a functioning memory right up to the moment bullets had obliterated her cranial hardware. The Major removed her pistol, then began taking off her jacket. “It’s the fastest way to find Kuze.”

  Dahlin put a cigarette to her lips, clicked a square lighter to get a flame and took a pull, trailing thin vapor. Never known for her humanitarian concern, she was still opposed to letting the Major take the risk. “It’s too dangerous. And highly irresponsible.”

  The Major didn’t offer any further verbal argument. Instead, she sat on the empty slab next to the one holding the geisha.

  Batou grabbed a cable and held it out to the Major. He was so worried that she could hear it in the way he breathed, but ultimately, he was always on her side. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  The Major nodded. “You see any bad code headed my way, pull me out.” She knew Batou would stop the Deep Dive at the first sign of trouble.

  He sighed, but guided a zeta-cable into the Major’s lower neck ports. He then ran the cable through an echo box splitter that routed the data to the pathologist’s command terminal. As the other woman connected the synthetic to the rig, the Major lay back, and regarded Batou’s grim expression.

  She flashed a near-smile at him and joked, “How come you’re the one sweating?”

  Batou didn’t smile back. Instead, he sighed again and turned to Dahlin, resigned. “Run it.”

  Dahlin emitted her own sigh, expressing skepticism, and extinguished her cigarette into a glass of water full of floating butts. Then she raised a detachable section of her cyber-enhanced face, so that her eyes and temple appeared to be in front of her forehead, revealing the quik-ports installed in her eye sockets. She inserted a virtual-reality monitoring device into the quik-ports, so that she could maintain contact with the Major through the Dive.

  Then Dahlin flicked a switch on the console and spoke formally into a data recorder pick-up, reciting the mandated legal jargon. “Cyber-mind connection to the Major now active and unencrypted. Consent required for data download.”

  The Major, lying on the slab with her eyes closed, gave the mandated response. “My name is Major Mira Killian, and I give my consent.”

  Dahlin input a command to execute the program and, in the real world, the Major twitched on the slab.

  A split second later, the Major felt the zeta-cable in her neck go hot. The cable sparkled with amber data that bore her consciousness into the geisha bot, and the Dive began with a swooping, vertiginous sensation. She had done this before, but every time was different, each Dive a new shock to the system. She felt herself fall down through the slab, and then plummet down to the bottom of the sea. It was like her memories of drowning, except that instead of being pulled to safety, here she kept descending through the deep, inky waters, never to be found. And then she fell further, through the geisha bot’s broken face.

  In the void between the ticks of the clock, the Major’s consciousness was projected into the non-space of the geisha’s synthetic mind. She saw a light. Streamers of broken, faltering code shot past her, falling meteorites of dying data that burned out as they became nothingness.

  It was a continuous stream of motion-recall, and as she fell into it, suddenly she was seeing the recent past through the dead machine’s eyes. Beyond the flickering code was a three-dimensional space. The voice of a companion bot spoke, too close to come from anywhere but her own throat, and the Major understood that she was doing the talking, even though the ultra-feminine Japaneseaccented voice was nothing like her own. “Konnichiwa,” said the companion bot, uttering the Japanese word for “hello.” She expressed formal gratitude in both English and Japanese. “Thank you. Arigatou gozaimasu…”

  The Major could see that she was in a contemporary nightclub. The hostesses, bartenders, gangster customers and companion bots crowding the place were all frozen in time, though a neon sign on the wall flickered. It read, “Sound Business.” The name suggested the owners were fond of puns, as it proclaimed both that the establishment was run prudently, and that the music pulsing from the club’s many speakers was one of its chief attractions.

  The still images crumbled, data bytes dissolving like columns of ash, then resolved further along, showing the same people in new poses. The Major made her way through the unmoving patrons and waitresses, searching for the geisha bot. There were plenty of real women and companion bots here, but none were the one she sought. It unsettled the Major that she could hear running conversations around her, even though the people were statue-still. They also looked ghostly, as if they had all died yet remained upright.

  “Thank you,” the
companion bot repeated. Her words echoed slightly. “Arigatou gozaimasu.” This was followed by a burst of laughter from some of the customers, and rapid comments in Japanese.

  The Major, the only moving figure in the room, found the red-robed geisha near the back of the club. She was surprised to find that this version looked more like a real woman in a geisha mask than a bot with a painted faceplate. Before the Major could begin to examine the geisha, the images in the nightclub moved, as though someone was shifting a series of life-sized photos or sculptures.

  Suddenly, a burly thug grabbed the geisha, which uttered a frightened protest, but in a low voice. Her ingrained fear of disrupting the club’s patrons was greater than her fear of assault.

  The thug ignored the geisha entirely and said, “Yes,” in Japanese.

  The images crumbled again, and now the burly man was dragging the geisha through a back door.

  The Major followed. She had lost sight of both the geisha and her abductor, but the geisha’s agonized shriek sent the Major running in the direction of the sound. She could also hear the thug’s cruel laughter and taunts as she went through the back door and down a long hallway. It was dark and grimy and smelled of chemicals.

  The Major found herself in a large basement work room. She was presented with another frozen tableau, this one of a man in a dark cloak with the hood pulled up over his head. He was performing a hack on a supine geisha bot clad in white. This image, unlike the rest, did not crumble and give way. Even without seeing his face, the Major knew the cloaked figure was Kuze—and, unlike the rest of the individuals she’d seen so far in the Deep Dive, he was not motionless. Kuze turned and thrust out his arm like a magician casting a spell—

  And the Major was flung back into darkness. She could just make out movement around her, and then she was surrounded by scores of black, decaying robots that were intent on tearing off the bioroid flesh from her synthetic bones. The machines crowded in, closer and closer…

  In the forensics lab, Batou saw the Major trembling violently on the slab. Her shoulders shook and her back arched.

  Batou could see she was in trouble. “Disconnect,” he ordered Dahlin. “Get her out.”

  The Major grunted and twitched, imprisoned in the Dive’s code. “Get her out!” Batou shouted this time.

  “I’m trying!” Dahlin snapped back. “But she’s being hacked.”

  This only made the situation worse, as far as Batou was concerned. “Get her out now!”

  In the Deep Dive, the Major yelled in desperation as the swarm of predatory, ruined robots closed in around her.

  In the forensics lab, the Major convulsed.

  Dahlin frantically typed commands into her instruments. Her hands weren’t free, so she called to Batou, “Now!”

  Batou grabbed the cable and, with a grunt of effort, yanked it out of the Major’s quik-port, releasing her from the Deep Dive.

  The zeta-cable was supposed to be removed from the quik-ports slowly and carefully, so when it was suddenly torn away, the Major sat bolt upright. Batou put his hands firmly on her shoulders so that she wouldn’t fall. Her eyes were wide and unfocused in terror. She shuddered and gasped, trying to get her bearings.

  Batou was trying to catch his own breath. What had happened to the Major in there? Was she still herself? Did she know where she was now? Was there anything he could do to help her? He expressed all of this with, “Are you okay?”

  The Major managed to control her breathing enough to speak. “I know where he is.”

  4

  SOUND BUSINESS

  Downtown New Port City was the city’s vampire district, a place that lay near-dead and dormant during daylight hours, but came to neon-fueled life at night as the reckless or the dangerous congregated in its bars, nightclubs and drinking pits. These establishments nestled beneath the skyscrapers, rather the way cockroaches congregated under blocks of cement.

  Just off the main drag, an alley led to a black-framed door retrofitted with atmosphere processors, where a garish illuminated sign gave the promise of illicit thrills within. The Sound Business club looked exactly as it had in the memories of the dead geisha synthetic. Batou, protected against the night air by a long brown coat that—not coincidentally—could conceal all manner of items, made his way over to where the Major and Ladriya were waiting for him. A collection of discs and an empty metal frame were propped up against the alley wall, looking like three-dimensional punctuations in the copious graffiti all around. Ladriya, in a padded jacket with a bright blue and green pattern, looked up, acknowledging Batou’s arrival.

  The Major had changed into a red jumpsuit with diagonal zippers to sell the fiction that she was just some well-off dilettante from the corporate zone, slumming it down here for kicks.

  “I know this place,” Batou said, keeping his voice soft. “They run black-market mech. You tooled up?”

  Ladriya indicated her well-armed backpack. “Yep.”

  The Major nodded, mentally reconstructing what she had gleaned of the club’s layout from her Deep Dive into the synthetic’s mind. “Target’s the basement,” she instructed the others. “I’ll lead. Switching to mind-comms.” Pure humans did not have the ability to process mental information as data. The Major had insisted that using spoken word over the mindcomms enabled her to communicate with her team more quickly. She pulled a medication vial out of her quik-port, then looked back at Batou. “Hope you’ve been practicing.” He was a great practical fighter, but he sometimes forgot not to speak aloud when the comms were in use.

  “That’s unfair!” Batou called after the Major as she headed out of the alley. Then he remembered to turn on his comm. “It just takes me a moment to—” he realized he was still speaking out loud and finally switched to the mind-comm, “—get the hang of it.”

  On the far side of the street from the nightclub, a threadbare noodle bar wreathed in steam was doing slow business, with only a couple of diners sitting on the benches with their faces in bowls of ramen. One of them was Togusa, who paused to tap his own implant and then continued to eat.

  Above, a billboard advertised “sexy lipstick” in Cantonese, and all around, people on the street were chattering and laughing. The Major headed into Sound Business. The club’s front door led straight to a staircase that funneled guests to the nightclub’s main floor.

  In the pool of light spilling from the sign above the door, the Major picked out the hulking forms of doormen as she descended the stairs. She pegged them as private security soldiers rather than regular bouncers. “Two mercs at the doors,” she said into the mind-comm, without breaking stride. “Armed and enhanced.”

  “Copy that,” Batou replied, now secure in the mind-comm’s use. “We’ve got it covered.”

  Ladriya split off from Batou and headed for the back of Sound Business, while he continued to the front door.

  A peculiar sense of déjà vu washed over the Major as she reached the bottom of the stairs. Although she had never been in the place before, having briefly shared the memories of the reprogrammed geisha, it felt like she was returning to somewhere that held horrors and darkness for her. She frowned, dismissing the thought, and looked around.

  A hard-edged bass beat thumped the thick air of the club where it issued out of tall speaker stacks across the room. Holographic strippers took up some airspace; several holo wrestling matches were also on view, drawing cheers and wagers. Knots of gruff men sat in booths on shiny vinyl couches clustered around private tables half-hidden by screens. They all bore the colors of the local gangster crews, the nubs of yakuza tattoos visible around their wrists or poking out from their starched shirt collars. Hostess synthetics in plastic outfits flitted back and forth between the groups, bringing them trays of beer or cycling through false bouts of laughter at their offcolor jokes. A male hologram offered some variety, asking a patron, “Or is this more your thing?”

  Nearly all of the customers seemed to be armed. “There’s a lotta heat in here for a nightclub,” the M
ajor reported into the comm.

  “It’s a yakuza club,” Batou replied over the comm from his position outside the building. “What did you expect? I quite like the place.”

  The Major smiled, her tone dry as she replied into the comm, “Why am I not surprised?”

  Dancers cavorted inside transparent cubes around the stage, and as she watched, the Major saw a Caucasian girl rise up into one of them, her hands drawing shapes in the air as she gyrated seductively toward a guy who had just settled in at the rail.

  Things were moving too slowly. “I’m gonna have to draw some attention,” the Major informed her team over the comm, “see if I can access the basement that way.”

  Even among so many attractive women, both real and synth, it wasn’t difficult for the Major to get herself noticed. As she walked across the main floor, a lot of people looked her way, especially the men.

  A young gangster, called Diamond Face because of the way light sparkled across his metal lower jaw, paid close attention to how the Major moved and the look of her skin. She was not the usual Sound Business customer. The combination of his mech jaw and flesh upper lip slurred his speech a little, but that was better than being knocked out every time he got punched during a bar fight. Not that he was worried about being hit by this out-of-her-depth babe while he worked out exactly what she’d had done to her. It looked special.

  At the front door, Batou was stopped by the pair of bouncers and the old-fashioned accordion security gate behind them. Handsome types, pretty ladies and hatchet-faced gangsters were waved through without comment, but a guy like Batou was subject to a little more scrutiny. He sighed and allowed the bouncers to scan and frisk him, secure in the knowledge that they wouldn’t find anything dangerous on him. His gaze crossed that of a tall, spindly doorman with cyber-optic eyes and what looked like ritual scars on his face. The man’s enhancements were showy and definitely not legally sanctioned.

  “You’re not here looking for any trouble, are you?” the bouncer asked.