In the dining room, Batou advanced on another yakuza soldier, who looked as though he was seriously considering continuing to ingest his noodles rather than bother with the intrusion, giving Batou a hard stare. Then he went for a gun at his waistband and Batou kicked the table into the man’s midsection. Before the hoodlum could retaliate Batou put two bullets in him.
The kitchen staff proved difficult. Some of them cowered under the furniture, but others were loyal to the yakuza they served, coming at Major, Ishikawa, and Saito with knives and cleavers. The Section Nine operatives successfully shot all their assailants, emboldened kitchen staff and yakuza soldiers alike.
The tattooed woman who had installed the quikport ran in from the other room, brandishing her drill threateningly at Ishikawa.
“Put it down!” Ishikawa yelled at her.
The Major spotted another yakuza pulling a pin out of a grenade. She shot him before he could throw it. The dying man fell into a pile of white powder, the grenade dropping from his hand.
Batou saw the grenade rolling just as he entered the kitchen, Tagusa right beside him. “Grenade!” he screamed.
Ishikawa managed to duck as the weapon exploded, blowing white powder all over everyone and everything. The kitchen looked like it had been hit by a blizzard, but no one in Section Nine was injured.
The Major, satisfied her people could take care of themselves, left the kitchen. She advanced through a hallway where more loincloth-wearing yakuza were having white powder applied to their torsos and limbs.
Batou hadn’t registered the open cage along the wall. It wasn’t until the man squatting inside the cage grabbed him from behind that the agent regretted not paying more attention sooner. Now Batou grappled with the yakuza, trying to free his gun hand.
In another part of the kitchen, the yakuza woman had given up on using her drill for its original purpose and was attempting to club Ishikawa with it. She didn’t look round as Batou shot another man, but traded blows with Ishikawa until he was able to knock her out.
The Major continued deeper into the warehouse, making her way through a labyrinth of deserted underground corridors. In one room, dead and dying men hung suspended from the ceiling in enormous plastic disposal bags. Those still living whimpered, but did not attempt to free themselves. The Major could see they were too far gone to help and besides, they were yakuza. She did not want to turn them loose.
In another room, this one much larger, dozens of white-powdered, shaven-headed men in monks’ robes sat in two concentric circles, every single one with the same vacant expression on his face. Each man had a high-speed zeta-cable jacked into his receptor ports, and the thick wires coiled away into fat bunches that rose together to form a dome of strands that ran into the ceiling, tap roots for heavy traffic junction boxes and server arrays.
The Major took a deep breath and went inside. In the air all around her were snatches of overlapping, garbled Internet conversations, almost as unsettling as the seated men who were here physically but not mentally. Or were they conscious in any way? The Major peered at them, curious. Then realization came.
“Major!” Batou called to her over the mind-comm. “Come in.”
“I know why we couldn’t find him,” she told Batou over the comm. “He’s using human minds to create a network of his own.” These men were data hosts who had been kidnapped, blackmailed or bribed by Kuze so that their brains could be used as Internet servers. Kuze was routing his code through them to cover his tracks. Which meant that they connected to him.
“We’re coming to your position,” Batou told her.
On some level, the Major knew that she ought to stay where she was and wait for back up, but every fiber of her body was tense with the need to push on and find Kuze. She needed to confront him, to look him in the eyes for real this time. Nothing else would be enough. She kept walking, her attention on the passageway ahead. For a moment, she sensed something in her peripheral vision, but when she turned to look, all she saw was more gray, wet hallway.
She passed another room full of bagged yakuza victims. She kept going.
What stopped the Major in her tracks was another glitch. The burning pagoda was in front of her again. This time, a teenage Japanese girl was being dragged out of it by the New Port City police. A teenage boy, also Japanese, was trying to pull the girl away from her captors. The girl was screaming in distress. “Hideo!” she shouted, and the Major understood this must be the boy’s name. Then the glitch disappeared.
Without warning, a yakuza gangbanger burst out of the darkness and stabbed a brutal-looking stun baton at the Major’s chest. It was a close cousin to the device No Pupils had tortured her with back at the Sound Business nightclub. Thousands of volts arced between the steel tines at its tip, threatening pain and feedback damage through her mech nerves if it made contact.
But this time she was ready. As if a switch had flipped inside her head, the Major was instantly in attack mode. Instead of retreating, or even going for her pistol, she launched herself at the man.
Her limbs became a blur of kicks and punches, parrying his attacks one after another as she drove him backward. The snarling yakuza found a lucky opening and managed to land a swift, glancing blow with the stun baton, but she deflected it before the weapon could release a full charge into her. They fought viciously in the tightly enclosed space, pirouetting around one another in an obscene, savage waltz. The Major sent quick, hard chopping impacts into his chest, snapping his ribs where each blow landed.
The thug reacted, crying out in agony, and she smashed him across the throat with a cobra-strike punch. He fell to the floor, no longer a threat to her—but he had not been alone. She dropped a second assailant, but then another heavily tattooed yakuza enforcer was right there, a taser in his fist. He didn’t wait for her to react, just jammed the business end of the device into her quik-port.
Losing control of her movements, the Major sank to the floor. The voltage flooded through her and there was nothing she could do as the yakuza guard jabbed the prod at her ports repeatedly, electrocuting her again and again. The Major had a strong tolerance for electricity but when more men joined in with their own weapons, five hundred thousand volts of screaming energy shot through her cybernetic body. The Major’s last sensory input was the smell of the cheap tobacco on the man’s breath.
Then darkness came and took her.
8
PROJECT 2571
This time, when the Major awoke, the jarring shift in place and time felt almost human.
There was no instantaneous transition from the non-state of inaction to the full awareness of being present. The wetware of her organic brain struggled to process the events, and slowly her senses returned to her.
She was floating above a dirty concrete floor. At first she thought that, impossibly, gravity had ceased to function around her. Then she became aware of her body’s own weight, all of it concentrated around her neck and the steel column of her artificial spine. There was a vise-like device holding her head in place, connected at her temples, and her feet did not reach the ground.
Odd collisions of noise and ambient sound washed back and forth through her neural processors until at length they began to separate out into distinct nodes. Somewhere off to her right, water dripped in a steady metronome-tick rhythm. Behind her, an electric generator was humming softly, providing power to the faint lights arrayed up above.
Her processors filtered out more sounds. Mechanical noises nearby, the soft irregular click of manipulators and the whisper of motion.
“Hello?” She tried to reach out with her mindcomms link, but the system was dead and everything she did to try to reactivate it only emphasized her powerlessness. The same was true of her legs and her arms, dangling inert and useless. This was not the result of the stun-shock that had knocked her offline. Someone had activated a neural shunt, bypassing the command pathways from her brain case to the rest of her central operating functions. She could open her eyes, she could spea
k, move her head a little. But nothing else. Her captor had been very thorough.
She was hanging from the ceiling by cables jacked into the ports on her neck. The shunt that digitally paralyzed her from the neck down was in there, working its control over her body. With effort, the Major shifted her gaze and took in the chamber around her fully for the first time. Her internal chronometer showed that twenty minutes had elapsed since the fight in the junction room. She was somewhere else now, in what looked like an old survival bunker from the chaos of the Third War. This was the underground bunker from her visions of Kuze.
And here, really present and not a hologram, was the man still covered by his hooded robe.
Despite her vulnerable position, when the Major spoke, it was a demand. “Tell me who you are.”
The man’s reply came with computer stutters and glitches, as well as the occasional electronic buzz. For all his technological brilliance, this was something he could not fix, or else did not wish to. “I am that which you seek to destroy.” His voice echoed slightly after he finished speaking. “In this life my name is… Kuze.”
The Major’s every instinct was to fight against the cables holding her, but she couldn’t move. “What are you doing to me?”
“I have c-connected you… to a network of my own creation,” Kuze told her. “Wh-wh-when I am finished in this world… my ghost can survive there and reregenerate.” He walked with a rolling limp, slightly unbalanced, but it did not lessen his powerful presence.
Kuze had proved beyond doubt that he had no hesitation about killing people, scientists, law enforcement and civilians alike. Why had he taken the Major prisoner instead of taking her life? “What do you want from me?” she asked.
“I became… fascinated with you.” And then Kuze removed his cloak and revealed himself. The Major met his gaze.
Intact and complete, he would have been quite handsome. But the visage beneath the hood was distorted, as if shown through a cracked lens. He had the face of a Caucasian man, or at least part of a face. Some of it was bare bioroid skull. He looked to be about the Major’s age, and it appeared that he had been assembled as she had been. But in his case, many of the parts fit poorly and much of the shielding was absent, leaving his inner robotic workings exposed. Tech mesh covered his right side and his chest was open in the middle, revealing cyber-organs beneath. His synthetic ribcage was clearly visible from the back, open to the elements, naked machine skeleton and titanium spine. The left side of his faceplate was metal, with no epidermis, and the skin on the right side of his face was scarred. The fingers of his right hand were bare metal, but the back of the hand had skin tattooed with the image of a woman’s eye. He had another tattoo on his left shoulder.
There was a peculiar androgynous beauty to him, a strange sort of fragility that masked what the Major knew of his deadly nature. His eyes were green, and looked as though whoever had crafted them had made them as much or more to simulate pure human emotion than as receptors for his cyber upgrades.
The Major knew they were only implants, but still she was unsettled by their expression. What was it… hunger? Rage? Surely not… affection?
He was standing before her, real and within her grasp, if only her hands could reach and subdue him.
Kuze continued with his explanation, the electronic buzz making the words stutter. “Reading your, your-your-your code while you were inside that geisha. Like nothing I had… felt before and yet so… familiar. We are the same.”
The Major’s body was numb, but she felt searing fury at the comparison. She kept her voice level, knowing that a show of temper would only put her at more of a disadvantage. “We are not the same. You kill innocent people.”
“Innocent, is that, th-th-that what you call them?” Through all the glitching and buzzing, Kuze still sounded wry. “I am as they… made me.”
The Major suddenly experienced a sinking sense of doubt, hoping she was wrong. “Who made you?”
He cocked his head, a wry smile playing over mismatched lips. “What have they told you? That you were the first? The first cerebral s-salvage?” The green eye implants shone with what appeared to be strong emotion and his voice grew rueful. “You were born ofof-of lessons they took from-from my failure.”
The Major did not want to believe what he was implying. “What are you talking about?”
For all the distortion in his voice, Kuze’s bitterness was clear. “I was conscious while they dismembered my body and discarded me… like garbage.”
She said nothing. She could not. He was saying that he was an earlier, failed prototype of the experimental process that had resulted in her new life. If it was the same process, it was the same scientists. Hanka scientists. He was saying that they had dismantled him after they determined that he was not a viable prototype. And that they—that Genevieve Ouelet—had been lying to the Major all along. It wasn’t possible.
“I… was lying on a table,” Kuze went on, “listening to doctors talk about how my-my mind had not meshed with the shell that they had… built.” A shade of anger crept into his voice. “How Project 2571… had failed… and they had to move on… to you.”
The electrocution by his minions, the paralysis, these had been violation enough, but he was not finished. Kuze placed his fingers upon a set of contact points hidden beneath the synthetic flesh of the Major’s face and applied careful pressure. There was a wet click in her jaw and the seams of her cheek plating bubbled to the surface. He removed the left side of her faceplate, leaving the synthetic skull open from forehead to upper lip, exposing the complex circuitry, artificial musculature and alloy bones beneath that comprised the structure of her face.
The Major gasped, not because it hurt—she could not feel it at all—but because it was both so invasive and so intimate. And because Kuze looked neither disgusted nor clinical, the two emotions she’d seen in those few humans who’d seen inside her shell. What he saw inside her seemed to leave him… entranced.
“What a beauty you are,” Kuze said to the Major. He brought the disconnected cheek plate close to his face, as if it was a delicate flower and he wanted to bask in the scent. “They have improved us… so much… since they made me.” He paused. “They thought that we would be a part of their evolution, but… they have created us… to evolve alone…”
He reattached the section of the Major’s faceplate that he’d been holding. It snapped back into place easily, its joins undetectable. “…beyond them,” Kuze concluded.
So Kuze really thought he and the Major were some kind of new breed, superior to humans? “Evolution,” she taunted him, “that’s what you call killing everyone who made you?”
Kuze sounded frustrated. “You-you’re not… listening to me.”
The Major felt that she’d listened quite enough. “You’re a murderer.”
“They-they-they tried to kill me first.” The buzzing of his artificially generated voice grew louder. “It is… self-defense.” He slapped his own chest, indignant. “Defense of self!” He lowered his voice. “More will die… until they tell me what they took!” Enraged and despondent, he slapped his own head.
“I won’t let that happen.” The Major knew that Kuze could destroy her if he kept her paralyzed, but in his belief that they were connected he seemed unwilling to do so.
Kuze backed up this theory by making a sound of inarticulate anger, then running up and putting his face right up against the Major’s, yet making no move to harm her. “You want to kill me?” He studied her eyes for a reaction. “Like everyone else.” He looked resigned. “Do it then.”
And then Kuze astonished the Major by pressing his head against her chest and embracing her. “Do what you were programmed to do,” he murmured, a taunt of his own, implying that she had no free will, only thoughts that had been implanted in her mind.
Then he freed her, reaching up to her neck to disengage the neural shunt.
At once, all the cables let go of her. No longer suspended above the floor, the Majo
r fell, gasping and shaken, slumping onto Kuze’s shoulder. Her body’s active cyber-systems suddenly flooded back into her control and it was like a hot wave engulfing her.
He gently lowered her to the ground. The Major immediately grabbed the pistol from his belt, then punched him clear across the room and fired at him repeatedly.
Kuze staggered to a stop. The gunshots had barely fazed him. The Major noticed something, stopped her attack, and approached him. Her attention was caught so completely that she was no longer worried what the killer might do next. “What is that?” she asked.
On his chest, Kuze bore a large blue-black tattoo of something the Major could not forget: rendered in delicate strokes, the pagoda from her visions.
She was so distressed that she slapped at the tattoo, as though the image on Kuze’s body had somehow caused the images in her mind. “What is that?”
“I c-can’t remember,” Kuze said, plaintive. “B-but I am haunted by it. Do you see it?”
She was staggered. Kuze saw the same glitches that she did. She could accept that there was something about the brain implantation process that caused glitches, but why the hell should it cause two different subjects to see exactly the same thing? What had happened to both of them?
Elsewhere in the warehouse, Batou and Togusa were chasing the Major’s signal as quickly as they could. It had been inactive for some while, but now it was on again and they intended to speed to her side—while fighting their way through the yakuza guards that kept springing into their path. Despite the fact that the Section Nine agents were better armed, better trained and a lot better prepared than their enemies, Batou was starting to have some concerns about how much ammo they had left.
And yet more yakuza poured into the hallway. “Togusa!” Batou yelled. Togusa sprang to the side to kick down a closed door, while Batou lay down a spray of covering fire for him, mowing down the men trying to kill them both.
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