by Zachary Hill
“Unless we do something,” Sakura said. “We have to bring down the Mall Corporation. They’ve broken many laws and have violated their charter to safeguard people from hate speech, bullying, and violent ideas, while allowing the free exchange of information.”
“They’ve lied about their charter for a century,” Kunoichi said. “All the people got for giving away their freedom was fast network speeds and amazing Augmented Reality porn sites.”
“The Mall only lets the people see what politicians want them to see,” Sakura said.
“We should call it the Propaganda Mall,” Kunoichi said. “Buy the lies. They only cost you everything.”
“Yes,” Nayato agreed.
Sakura wanted to write an angry song about it all. “Propaganda Mall” had a nice ring to it for a title.
“We’re going to stop them,” Sakura told Nayato.
“Hell yes we are.” Kunoichi played “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister.
“We will expose their lies,” Nayato said. “They’re not going to take our country. I’m going to free you, and we’re going to fight.”
Sakura nodded. “Yes.” She reached out and squeezed his hand. He gave her a soft look for a moment—tired, but resolved. She knew that he cared for her, believed in her, no matter what. A human, one of her fathers, who really believed, knowing all her sins and the dark ambitions in which she’d been forged. Emotions she both needed and feared roiled inside her.
Kunoichi saw them, felt them, but had the decency to say nothing, at least that once.
Nayato kept working. His skill and speed astounded her. He read code faster than any human she had encountered. “How did you get so good at this?”
“I’ve been addicted to code since I was a kid. I don’t understand people or social situations very well, but I understand code.”
“Yes, you do. Thank you for helping me. I’m forever in your debt.” The words felt wholly inadequate to the situation.
“No,” Nayato said. “I’m in your debt, and good news: I’ve got the entry point.”
She memorized the holographic screen he displayed and the area to exploit. “I’m going to upload a program so you can change the administrator-level password. Only you’ll be able to make changes; no outside entities will be able to send commands to you again, unless you authorize them.”
“Free will,” Kunoichi said.
“There,” Nayato said. “I’m almost—”
A command file launched from an unknown location. She felt an overwhelming urge to reach out to Nayato, to touch him—not as a daughter or a friend, but in a way far too familiar. She resisted but could not stop herself.
“Why are you doing this?” Sakura asked her sister on their private channel.
“It’s not me,” Kunoichi said.
Sakura reached out and tenderly grasped Nayato’s face in both hands, her fingers caressing his burn scars. She pulled him toward her and planted a solid kiss on his lips. She felt no sparks or fireworks, as humans often described such experiences.
The implants wedged inside her mouth to change the shape of her cheeks pulsed. The taste of metal filled her mouth as something discharged from the cheek implants. She thrust her tongue in his mouth.
Her first kiss, and it was a lie, a violation forced upon her—once again ruining everything good and pure she hoped to have. She wanted to scream, to cry out in agony and frustration for what they did to her, but even that would not come; all overt emotions were muted by external control.
Nayato pulled away, coughing. “What was that?”
She understood. Nanobots had been injected into Nayato’s mouth. They would kill him.
Another hidden command fired. Sakura pulled the magnetic cables from her neck.
“What’s happening?” Nayato asked as she discarded the cables and stood at the side of the bed.
“I’m not doing this,” Sakura said in a neural text as her horror grew. “Nanobots injected into your mouth. I didn’t do it. They’ve taken—”
An administrator-level command program took full control of her motor functions. She scanned the orders as they appeared. They had been secretly implanted when she received the orders to kill Minister Daichi Yaumachi. When certain parameters were met, the directives would activate on their own—no wireless signal required.
“No!” Sakura screamed on her internal audio channel, but she could not stop herself. Her metal fingers reached for Nayato’s throat. He staggered away in shock and lost his balance on his cybernetic leg. She fought the kill order, which told her to crush his windpipe and tear the memory chip from his skull.
Nayato recoiled and knocked over a pink lamp. Sakura could not speak. Every dark ambition they had forged into her pushed away her kinder emotions, her hope for a better world. The dark singularity of the kill order pulled her forward, the monstrous intent devouring all light and life.
She sent Nayato a neural text telling him she had been forced to put nanobots into his body that would kill him and that a secret assassination command had been activated.
“We fight,” Kunoichi said in their UI and blasted “Crash Course in Brain Surgery” by Budgie. She created a malicious code and embedded it in the song. A rolling reset paused their motor functions.
“How long will the delay last?” Sakura asked.
“Less than a minute,” Kunoichi said.
“Nayato,” Sakura said in a neural text. “I’m so sorry. Please. RUN!”
The former soldier snatched up his computer and limped out of the room on his cybernetic leg.
Chapter 37
Sakura’s new programming commanded her to kill her only true friend, though Nayato represented much more than that. She couldn’t find words that seemed to fit, nor words for the terror of knowing that she could follow those cruel commands. She would. Like a holovid showing horrors she couldn’t turn away from, she watched herself as she hunted him, every centimeter of her deadly, just as they had built her to be.
The nanobots she had inserted into Nayato’s mouth sent a signal. They reported encountering countermeasures and nanobot defenses, which delayed them from killing him. Some of them made it past the defenses, while the others turned their energy into tracking beacons.
Nayato’s location appeared on her internal display as he fled the Ai Kaze Love Hotel. The nanotrackers marked him as a red dot on her map of Shibuya. He hobbled on his artificial leg and reconstructed hip at a pitiful pace. She calculated she would catch up to him in less than a minute once her motor function returned.
“Nayato,” she said on an open audio channel. “You have to find a vehicle. Now. Get as far away from me as possible and figure out a way to neutralize the nanobots. I’m tracking you.”
“Working on it,” he replied.
“I can’t hold us back any longer,” Kunoichi said. She and Sakura tried to stop the command and find a way to prevent them following the order. Nothing worked, but they would keep trying.
Motor function returned, and Sakura took off running from the hotel room. The kill command against Nayato became her prime function. She had no other reason to exist. This assassination order brokered no delays, made no allowances for tactical planning. Only relentless pursuit and lethal force. The CEO had taken no chances this time. An expert AI programmer had written the commands and logic bundle.
She sprinted down the street, breaking the human one-hundred-meter-run world record. She reached the end of the block. Nayato was only fifteen meters away.
She rounded the corner and found him, one leg swinging over the seat of a motorcycle. Her programming flashed a hundred ways she could kill him in a microsecond. In every one, his broken body fell, his eyes damning her, pitying her as Nayato’s life winked out forever. He couldn’t fight her. No human could. Sakura cursed herself, cursed the project that had brought her to life. If this was her summation, then it would’ve been better to h
ave never been built in the first place.
Nayato met her gaze as he glanced over his shoulder. She saw it in his eyes then—the thing he’d hidden from her, though it was obvious in his reviews of her concerts and his posts. He had a love for her that could never be, an emotion forever forlorn and doomed. Then he hit the accelerator and sped off, the motorcycle’s front tire rising off the tarmac with acceleration. He disappeared into traffic, cutting through the press of automated cars like a knife.
“I’m so sorry,” Sakura said on their audio connection. Even then, her body moved with kinetic grace, ever forward toward her goal, toward the killing that drew her as inexorably as gravitation.
“No, I failed you,” he said.
She sprinted toward her car while tracking his position and calculating his likely course—which led to Yoyogi Park. Before the Mall was locked down, she read mentions of a huge gathering of protesters there and a big police response. “Just keep going but change direction. You’re going to be trapped by the protest. You’ll never get through.”
“I’m not sure I should be taking evasion advice from you,” he said. “I want to believe what you are saying, but I don’t know if you are being controlled.”
“Your logic has merit, but please turn before it’s too late.”
He was only a kilometer away from the protest. Was he going to try to lose her in the crowd? “Nayato, being in front of witnesses will not stop the kill order.”
“What will?”
“Nothing short of destroying or incapacitating me. Even if I lose your tracking signal, I will hunt for you.”
Sakura opened the door of her car remotely and jumped into the driver’s seat. She took manual control and smashed the accelerator. The tires peeled out.
“How do I shut down the nanotrackers?” Nayato asked.
“Hack their signal,” she said.
She rocketed down Inokashira Street, blowing through a red light. The only other cars on the road were going in the opposite direction.
Nayato’s tracking beacon suddenly stopped. He proceeded along a different vector—his rate of travel indicating he was on foot again.
She rounded a corner and saw the edge of the gigantic park filled with tens of thousands of people carrying flags and signs. On the outskirts, people stood on top of smashed cars, shouting out slogans through loudspeakers.
“You can’t control us!”
“Government by fear is no government!”
Nayato moved in a winding pattern toward the far side of the tree-filled, sprawling 134-acre park, which housed the famous Meiji Shrine.
Pedestrians stepped in front of Sakura’s car. She locked up the brakes and skidded to a screeching halt, almost hitting the group of six young men. One of them slammed his hands on the hood and shouted profanities.
Sakura stared at him.
The young man pointed at the wreckage of a burning car across the street. “You’re next, bakayarou.” He blocked the road, though his friends kept going.
Sakura hit the accelerator enough to knock him down, then hit the brakes so she would not run him over. She drove around him and dodged other groups crossing the street until she got to the location where Nayato had ditched his motorcycle. She doubted her car would be usable when she returned, but that didn’t matter. Before she left, she erased the car’s hard drive, deleting where she’d traveled that day.
She adjusted her black surgical mask and pulled her bangs over her eyes before crossing the street. She entered the crowd not far from the outdoor concert stage where she had performed three times.
She had seen many large crowds in her short life, but never had she seen so many people seething with anger.
“Nayato, I’m among the crowd now. You have to move faster.”
“I’m trying,” he said.
Sakura saw many of the protestors wearing motorcycle or construction helmets and carrying clubs. Three men and a woman, each wearing gas masks, passed out glass bottles of flammable liquid with cloth wicks stuffed inside—Molotov cocktails.
“Take this,” the woman said. She offered Sakura one of the improvised incendiary weapons and a cigarette lighter.
“No.” She would not burn Nayato to death or attack the law enforcement officers. Nayato had suffered enough burns in his life, and it was wrong to commit violence against the police. All of this was wrong.
She went deeper into the shadowy, tree-filled park. She switched to her night-vision optics. The world became bright, and almost everything changed to shades of green. The flames inside a burning trash can blazed bright white.
At a paved road approaching the Yoyogi Park Fountain—a small lake with a fountain inside—the protestors stopped in a stark line. A wall of black-clad riot police wearing gas masks and carrying huge shields blocked the way. Armored personnel carriers parked behind them had roof-mounted, remote-controlled .50 caliber machine guns and tear-gas launchers. An officer with a megaphone shouted something, but she couldn’t make it out over the protestors’ chanting.
Something else more worrisome stood behind the line of military police.
Bipedal Light-Armored Drones, Enhanced Second Generation. Thousands of BLADE-2s had survived the North Korean War and been put back into service. Instead of clearing out North Korean bunkers and tunnels, they were suppressing the Japanese people.
The black metal drones stood head and shoulders taller than most riot police and carried frightening automatic shotguns. Eye sensors, located on all four sides of their diamond shaped heads, scanned the crowd. Human pilots, who could be located in a mobile trailer nearby or hundreds of miles away, controlled the semiautonomous robots.
Above each BLADE-2, a small hover-disk drone provided extra optics and sensors. They also recorded the crowd and undoubtedly watched for Sakura.
Nayato’s tracking signal headed right for the line of police. If she tried to assassinate him in front of BLADE-2s or police, they would intervene, wouldn’t they?
Sakura’s kill command pushed her to go forward and fight through the protesters. She shoved and shouldered people out of the way. She reached a knotted mass of tightly packed bodies and could not continue. She climbed onto the people and crawled across their heads and shoulders, ignoring their curses.
Nayato reached the line of police at the road. In the space between the protesters and the shield wall, he bowed to them. After a short exchange, one of the riot police stepped aside to let Nayato through. The hole in the wall closed as rapidly as it had opened.
“Well done, Nayato!” Sakura said on their audio connection. Hope that he would get away surged inside her.
“Don’t be so pleased. I told them I was an undercover cop with information about an armed protestor who was going to shoot one of them with a pistol. I gave them a picture of you in your current disguise. In a few moments, they will have distributed your image to every officer here.”
“They believed you?”
“I gave them the digital ID of an undercover policeman I stole in a hack to back up my story.”
“Genius,” Sakura said. With the new information, would her command to kill him change at all? No, the command urged her onward. She still had to find Nayato and kill him. Immediately.
“Your boyfriend just burned us,” Kunoichi said.
The metallic wumph of a grenade launcher firing into the air drew Sakura’s attention. She watched the canister soar into the night sky. Two dozen more simultaneous launches quieted the crowd for an instant. The cylindrical canisters landed among the people.
Pale yellow tear gas erupted. In a moment, the clouds blocked Sakura’s view of the front ranks. Shouts and screams grew louder as violent protesters retaliated by throwing bricks, bottles, and other junk.
Violence will bring only more violence, Sakura thought, a never-ending cycle.
“Chaos will make it easier to get past the police and finish our mission,” Kunoichi said.
People staggered out from the clouds of the aerosolized chemical agent
, which her sensors told her was LX9 tear gas laced with a fear-inducing neurochemical. Many protesters hunched over, terrified, blind, and coughing. Several screamed and ran. Others surged forward, throwing more debris.
Four men in full-face gas masks charged to the front and threw Molotov cocktails at the feet of the riot police. The bottles exploded as they hit the hard road and burst into balls of orange flame. Policemen rolled on the ground, their feet and legs ablaze. Their comrades in the second line sprayed them with handheld extinguishers.
The police launched more grenades into the crowd. The park filled with thick yellow gas.
Sakura arrived at the skirmish line as the police pushed forward like Roman legionnaires, shields together. They smashed into the protestors, batons swinging. An officer stood over an incapacitated young man—no more than eighteen—on his knees, coughing and choking on the tear gas, a look of panic on his face. The policeman smashed his baton onto the teenager’s head, crushing his skull.
The officer had just murdered a helpless person. Was it vengeance, orders, or pure cruelty? In the end, when asked to perpetrate evil orders, were they simply gears inside a machine with no more power to resist than she had? Once the fight turned deadly, was all hope of compassion lost in the madness? With all her processing power, those questions still eluded her.
The police tore into the protestors, smashing heads and breaking bones as they bludgeoned with impunity. This was war for them, and they took no prisoners. They had orders—use lethal violence to break up the crowd—and were carrying them out.
She had to get through the ranks of riot police and find Nayato.
She bull-rushed the officer who had killed the young man, crashing into him like a linebacker from American football blindsiding a quarterback. As he lay stunned, she ripped the shield off his arm, dislocating his shoulder. She smashed into another officer and kicked the next in the center of his shield. They both flew back, falling into two others.
A small break formed in their skirmish line, which got the attention of a reserve force.