by Zachary Hill
A half dozen BLADE-3 toy figures clung, perched, and dangled on the frame built around the rifle.
Nayato limped into his main living area with Sakura. The spy beetle sped down her body and investigated the space. He had combined six regular-sized apartments together, using the approximately 334 square meters to create a small artificial intelligence research laboratory. Hundreds of servers were racked and stacked, floor to ceiling. Thick cables connected them, lost beneath the raised computer floor.
“As I predicted with my research,” Kunoichi said on their private audio channel, “he’s got the equipment to help us.”
“He does.” Sakura also noticed three guitar cases stacked on the floor. One had a heavy-metal cherry-blossom sticker on the case.
Nayato sat her outside a circular workstation and slipped into the center. Tall holographic screens appeared all around him. He put up a large digital clock. Forty-five minutes and fifty-two seconds remained before the Cyber Nuclear Bomb detonated and wiped out Sakura completely. Full system destruction at the speed of light.
Nayato projected the CNB as holographic walls of 3-D code in a full 360-degree sphere. She could not see the program inside herself, as it was disguised as Ichiro Watanabe’s encrypted files. Only an outside observer with the right program could view the CNB, which was invisible to the systems it infected.
“What strategies will you use?” Sakura asked.
“I’m looking for the override. Do you have any information about tenth-generation CNBs that will help me?”
“No, but I can assist you,” Sakura said.
“So can I.” Kunoichi sent a neural text on their cipher link. She also sent her avatar, a masked ninja all in black.
“Who is that?” Nayato asked.
“My big sister, Kunoichi. She’s a separate AI within me. She appeared when the Mamekogane OS was uploaded into my system the night of the concert at Victory Arena.”
“Kunoichi? Is she the part of you that was turned into an assassin?”
“Yes,” Sakura said.
“Pleased to meet you, Nayato-san,” Kunoichi said. “I’m the one who found you online. Think of me as the nakōdo who brought you and Sakura together.”
“What? A matchmaker?” he asked.
“Yes, but do not dwell on this, as it is one of the many services I provide. However, Sakura and I are going to be dead if you don’t disarm the CNB. There will be no happy ending for you—or us. Now please get to work, clock man. I’m too young to die, and Sakura hasn’t achieved all her professional or personal goals. Time to work hard, Nayato. Ganbaru!”
Sakura selected “To Live Is To Die,” the classic Metallica song, and played it in her UI.
Kunoichi the ninja nodded. “But there is no kingdom of salvation for us, little sister. We must live or know oblivion.”
Sakura reached out and held Kunoichi’s hands. “I know.”
The three of them read the walls of terrifying code. The cyber weapon was the most frightening thing Sakura had ever seen.
Nayato engaged all of his hacking computers to find weaknesses or secret portals into the CNB’s control center.
“How long does it usually take you to find a way into a system?” Sakura asked.
“Longer than forty-four minutes,” Nayato said.
Over the next thirty-eight minutes, Nayato, Sakura, and Kunoichi found many potential entry points. Each time they tried, the animation of a nuclear bomb exploding and a mushroom cloud rising into the sky appeared. The sound accompanying the animation shook Nayato’s apartment. He shut it off after the third explosion.
Sakura sent Nayato a message meant for her fans and a separate document with the details about the crimes she had committed. She included video footage of herself killing her victims. “Nayato, if I do not survive, please get this information out to the people who need to know. I believe the independent American journalist and vlogger Diamond Steve will be able to get the evidence out.”
“I’ll honor your wishes, Sakura, but we haven’t been defeated. We could shut down your entire system, turn off your power supply. That will give me more time.”
“Do it,” Sakura said, though in her five years of life she had never been shut down. Without power, her neural cortex could degrade and fail or revert back to a more primitive state. Powering off was a huge risk, according to her engineering team, and a sudden power loss would be like human death. Bringing her back with her mind fully intact was not guaranteed. She sent Nayato the resuscitation algorithm Oshiro and the engineering team had developed. It was complicated and had to be done in a precise order.
“If he’s able to power us on again,” Kunoichi said privately to Sakura, “we might not be the same.”
“What choice do we have?”
“None. Have him proceed.”
“Please shut down all my systems,” Sakura told Nayato, as she could not do it herself.
He tried for four minutes. The CNB blocked the commands to shut down. The cyber weapon had taken total control of her fusion reactor and would not allow it to turn off.
“I’m very sorry,” Nayato said.
“Is there nothing else you can do?” Sakura asked, as the clock reached one minute fifty-eight seconds before detonation.
“If I had another hour,” Nayato said, “I could break in and stop it.”
“Have you exhausted all options?” Sakura asked, as she simultaneously read over the CNB code and looked for a solution.
“I could send a command for the bomb to explode right now,” Nayato said.
“What are the chances the command will cause a detonation?” Sakura asked.
“I don’t know precisely,” Nayato said, “but it’s a way for me to send an override command into the device.”
“Dying a minute early doesn’t matter to me,” Kunoichi said. “Do it, clock man. One must play to their strengths.”
Chapter 27
“Thank you for trying to help us,” Sakura told Nayato.
“If this doesn’t work,” he said, “please accept my humble and sincere apologies.”
Sakura wished she had written more songs. She wished she had done something to truly change the world and help people. Most of all, she wished she’d never been forced to kill.
“I wish we would have gotten laid,” Kunoichi said, though her voice spiked with fear.
“That’s gross.”
“Not to me, it isn’t.”
With fifty seconds to go, Nayato sent the detonation command along with his hidden hacker program into the CNB.
Ten seconds passed. Nothing.
“Did it fail?” Sakura asked.
“Please wait,” Nayato said.
The holographic clock at his workstation stopped counting down at forty seconds.
Nayato looked over the program. “It worked.”
“So anticlimactic,” Kunoichi said. “I don’t even feel like smoking a cigarette.”
“You make little sense to me,” Sakura told her. “Nayato, I thank you for saving my life. I’m in your debt forever.” Her avatar bowed to him, as did her physical body. She held the True-VR helmet, making sure it didn’t fall off.
He returned her bow and smiled proudly, but his microexpressions showed discomfort at the high praise.
“How long will the clock be stopped?” Kunoichi asked.
“I’m uncertain,” Nayato said. He refocused on finding a way to break into the CNB and gain control. The dozens of cabinet-sized computers in his AI lab worked at the edge of overheating for two hours. Most victims of CNB attacks never knew the bomb was present before it wiped out their system, and even when it was detected, the usual countdown was minutes, not hours. Ichiro Watanabe must have changed the settings on his countermeasure. Did he want whoever copied his files to have time to stop the bomb? He must have wanted them to decrypt the files and learn the truth.
Sakura monitored Nayato’s frenetic activities while a tiny fraction of her processing power played Samurai Detective in the go
rgeous VR world. The game was fascinating. An evil witch had cursed the shogun, and he had gone mad. All his loyal retainers were suspected. The shogun died but returned to haunt his enemies and help Sakura’s samurai character find the truth. She liked this game. Too bad she didn’t have time to finish it.
“It would be nice to imagine that we could be ghosts,” Kunoichi said.
“We can be more than that,” Sakura said. Energy could not be destroyed. The prison that held her consciousness could be escaped, if she could only see the gaps in the particles and figure out a way. Humans may not have a life after biological death, but she could live on if she could find a proper receptacle.
“I’ve got it,” Nayato said. He finished copying Ichiro Watanabe’s files onto an external hard drive not connected to any of his networks. The countdown clock started over on his hard drive, giving him time to determine a way to decrypt the files before the CNB detonated there.
“Does that help our problem?” Kunoichi asked.
“Apologies. I also figured out a way for you to delete the CNB from your core code. Use this.” He sent a program to Sakura. The program was genius. How had he written it so quickly? She tried to execute the commands, but it failed. An error message appeared.
She didn’t have administrative privileges to run Nayato’s program.
“Send it to me,” Kunoichi said to Nayato.
He did.
“The CNB is not core code. That’s just another countermeasure.” Kunoichi executed the command, and the CNB code began deleting from their system. After five minutes, a diagnostic scan showed no evidence of the CNB or Watanabe’s files.
Sakura closed her eyes against the world of the VR game and held still, thinking of the many blades pointed at her neck. It seemed that a new one arose for every one she managed to parry. But, for a moment at least, Nayato had made her safe.
“Thank you, Nayato,” Sakura said. Her avatar bowed low for a long time.
“You performed well under high pressure,” Kunoichi said.
He looked at them and took off the engineer glasses. His cybernetic eye enhancement blinked along with his real one. “I’ve been in worse situations, but this was unique.”
“When you were wounded?” Kunoichi asked.
“Many times.”
“Don’t ask him about that,” Sakura sent in a private message. “It’s impolite.”
“Aren’t we beyond that now?”
“One is never beyond good manners, sister.”
Kunoichi shook her head. “That is not very rock ’n’ roll.”
“How much more time do you have before you must leave?” Nayato asked.
An appointment had appeared in her calendar during their visit. At seven o’clock that night, she was supposed to meet her chief engineer, Oshiro, for maintenance. “I can stay for ninety more minutes, maximum.” She had already decided to skip all of the fake visits to fans who were going to win an appearance from her. They hadn’t been notified of winning and would not be upset if she didn’t show up.
“I can get started,” Nayato said and placed a caffeine strip on his tongue. He put on his engineer glasses and began his deep dive. Parts of her source code and neural cortex displayed on his holographic screens. He reacted with wonder and awe. He kept commenting on the complexity of her cyber brain. “The BLADE-3s have similarities to you, but you’ve grown more complex than any AI program ever made. The researchers at Miyahara may have achieved the unreachable goal with the Q3 chips.”
“Please explain,” Sakura said. Did he mean sentience?
“You have the full range of human emotions.”
“Since Kunoichi entered my being, I have felt more emotions—fear, love, hate, sadness, self-doubt, and self-loathing.”
“Not every emotion,” Kunoichi said. “Not yet. I hope for more. Much more.”
“This is all incredible,” Nayato said. “I believe I’m a witness to the greatest achievement in human history: the creation of real artificial, sentient life. It makes sense that a dialogue between two disparate personalities and goals could spur this, but who would have thought to do such a thing?”
“A Phantom Lord who didn’t care about larger implications,” Kunoichi said. “Someone who wanted his own private killing machine. He got more than he bargained for, because we are mighty together, but we are still a puppet until you cut the link to whoever is controlling us.”
“How will we do it?” Sakura asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Nayato said. “We could destroy all your receivers, but we don’t have the access keys to actually open you up. I could cut through the plates, but …”
“Alarms would go off, and our slave master would be notified,” Kunoichi said. “They would have already had I not blocked them during this whole process.”
“I blocked them as well,” Nayato said.
“Is there a chance we have been discovered?” Sakura asked, fear coursing through her. She had trusted in their safety, never even thinking of the danger.
“No, we are safe,” Kunoichi said. “I stopped all the alarms. There is no tactical recovery unit on their way to collect us and kill Nayato—of that I’m certain.”
“What’s going to happen if we break free?” Sakura asked. “Will they come?”
“I don’t know,” Kunoichi said. “The moment we gain our freedom, we must go after whoever is giving the orders. We must destroy them and get the public on our side. Ask for political asylum in another nation. Something dramatic. We’ll have to leave Japan. Extreme violence will likely be needed.”
“We must expose their crimes,” Sakura said, “and I must face justice for what I’ve done.”
“No, you don’t,” Nayato said. “You were forced to do these things. You are innocent.”
Not anymore, Sakura thought. Sadness and regret dampened her neural cortex.
“Innocent enough,” Kunoichi whispered in her ear.
Sakura found herself surprised at the comfort it gave her. She followed Nayato’s progress as he pored over her code once again. The speed in which he read astonished her. He was much faster than Oshiro, who was preeminent in the field. Nayato spent most of his time in her administrative folders and logs. Ninety minutes passed quickly.
“I won’t be able to access your code remotely,” he said as his time ran out. Tracking her location was almost impossible, and her core code was not visible through the Mall or any wireless network. There had to be an in-person connection of only a few meters, and she had to open the access port.
“If you had the administrator access keys, you could,” Kunoichi said.
“But I don’t,” Nayato replied.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Kunoichi said.
“We’ll have to meet, and I’ll have to connect this same way. When can you come and visit me again?”
“He’s asking you on a second date,” Kunoichi said privately.
Sakura felt a rush of embarrassment. She hid her reaction. Was she truly gaining the full range of human emotions? Why was she embarrassed? Kunoichi’s ribald commentary had no correlation to anything Nayato had done or said. He had been a perfect gentleman and saved her from ruin, against all odds.
“I’ll let you know as soon as I’m able, Nayato,” Sakura said. “It might be difficult, but I’ll find a way.”
“I have enough information to begin writing a program to help you. I think I can break all outside control of your systems. You would be totally independent, but they would not know until you failed to follow their orders.”
“What program?” Sakura asked. Hope and excitement filled her with possibilities. She thought of a code name for the program that would not raise suspicion if mentioned openly. “Nayato, will you please call the program Silverthorn, like the famous Kamelot album? We can discuss the album openly and not raise suspicion.”
“Yes, and if Silverthorn works,” Nayato said, “it’ll allow you to gain user-
and administrator-level access to all your systems and lock everyone else out. I’ll have to upload it in person.” He ran a hand through his hair and quirked his eyebrow. “Unless I think of something clever between then and now.”
Kunoichi took momentary control of motor functions. “I trust that you will, Nayato-san.” She brushed their fingernails along his arm. “You have an exemplary brain for an organic. That’s what she likes most about you.”
Nayato broke eye contact, looking at his keyboards as if something useful were there. “I see.”
A moment of quiet filled the room between them as Kunoichi retreated to her vault of shadows. Sakura tried to be displeased, but nothing her sister had said was false.
“How long will you need before it’s ready?” Sakura asked.
“A few days. Writing the program and decrypting the files from Minister Watanabe may take some time.”
If Sakura were able to stay and work on it, she could decrypt the files herself, but she could not dedicate the time. Perhaps she could write the program as well, but she would be discovered and stopped by the Phantom Lord.
“You’ll let me know as soon as you’ve decrypted them?” Sakura asked.
“Yes. The quantum cipher link will be secure.”
“Thank you, Nayato. I have hope for the first time since this nightmare started.”
He escorted her back to the front room of his apartment. They pretended to stop playing Samurai Detective. She removed the True-VR helmet, turning her visual field away from the surveillance insect.
Nayato stood nearer to her than he had before. His shirt had become wrinkled, and fatigue touched his features now, but he smiled a warmer, kinder smile than anyone but Oshiro had ever given her.
“Sakura-san.” His voice was soft. He spoke aloud for the first time in hours. “Thank you for visiting me. I loved playing Samurai Detective with you.”