by Zachary Hill
“He’s basically a spy,” Kunoichi said in their UI, breaking a long silence. “And sketchy as shit.”
“He’s what we need. We can’t be too picky about our friends right now.”
“Those weren’t negatives. I like him.”
Sakura and Oshiro remained. She handed him the gift, the Z-7000 Godzilla model. “This will complete your collection of this series, will it not?”
He marveled at the rare toy. “It will. Thank you very much.”
“Thank you very much.” She bowed and stepped toward the door.
“Sakura, wait. If I’m killed, I want you to know that I have something in my apartment for you. I’ve saved it all these years. It’s hidden inside the battery compartment of the Steel Angel Gundam model I keep by my terminal.”
“What is it?” Sakura asked.
“A storage drive,” Oshiro wiped at his eyes. “It has all of the memories they took from you. It has your childhood. I despaired of ever having a chance to give it back, but perhaps there’s the smallest chance.”
Sakura hugged him. “Thank you, Father. Thank you for believing in me.”
Chapter 43
Sakura lay in her coffin as “Bury Me Alive” by We Are The Fallen blasted on her audio channel. She touched the latex mask attached to her face and smoothed out her disguise. The security inspectors would think she was a Model 9 courtesan android. The chip, newly implanted in her wrist, would confirm all the details about her identity and maintenance needs.
“Are you ready?” Oshiro asked.
Sakura shook her head. No, she wasn’t ready to die. She reached up to him, searching for reassurance.
Oshiro squeezed her hand. Logic said that she had no reason to feel starved for contact with another person, but as she looked back on her life, she’d had experienced so few moments of real contact. So few people had touched her in compassion, in friendship.
Fear clouded her mind. What if she didn’t wake up? What if her system reset and wiped out the person she had become? If she failed, the revolution failed. Everything she’d missed, everything she’d failed to do would forever go undone. She, perhaps capable of immortality, would be gone, rendered as ephemeral as a shape in clouds over a stormy coastline.
“What is it?” Oshiro asked.
“I’m afraid.” In the moment of crisis, nothing elegant or poetic could fit so well as those two simple words. Afraid—of what she was, what she wasn’t, and even what she might one day be. But most of all, of simply being cast into the void. Whatever humans believed might come of their consciousness after death, the conceit of a heaven for her data couldn’t withstand any rigor of logic. In terror, she grasped at irrational faith, embracing the animistic Shinto belief that everything had an immortal essence, a soul; mountains, rivers, even androids. She wanted it to be true, but it was a false, sentimental hope.
“I’ll be with you when you go to sleep,” Oshiro said. “I’ll be with you when you wake up.”
The truck that would deliver them to Miyahara Headquarters arrived outside the loading dock. Diamond Steve and his assistant, a young man named Toro, entered the old warehouse through a side door. Toro wore the crisp uniform of the JPI Delivery Company and had a short haircut and a clean shave.
Steve’s brow furrowed, and anxiety rippled across his face as he approached. “The secret police hit our safe house. They arrested everyone.”
“Are the police on their way here?” Oshiro asked.
“Maybe,” Steve said, “but I don’t think we were followed, and I checked the truck for tracking devices.”
“Is the mission compromised?” Sakura sat up, ready to climb out of the body-sized aluminum box.
“Not yet,” Steve said. “Everything’s just … not awesome. These people are the kind that’ll drive a tank over civilians to get what they want.”
“We might not have time to power down the vocaloids if the police are on their way here,” Oshiro said. “We’ll shut them down on the road. Please load them in the truck.”
“It’ll be faster if we help,” Kunoichi said on a shortwave neural text to Hitomi and Yuki.
“I’m coming out,” Hitomi replied and sent a song clip of Pink’s “Get This Party Started.” She sprang out of her coffin. Yuki and Sakura followed her.
Toro opened the gate to the dark loading dock. Sunrise was over an hour away, and the warehouse area was deserted.
The androids piled the three metal shipping boxes atop each other and carried them to the rear of the truck, impressing the humans by carrying so much weight. The disassembled guns, ammunition, and gear hidden inside the coffins were packed tight, blessedly silent. Sakura had packed it all herself and used shielding fabric to conceal them from scanning.
Once inside the truck, Sakura and her sisters opened the coffinlike lids of the boxes and slipped inside. The movement and activity kept the terror at bay. Still, it lingered like a hungry animal in her cortex, whispering of all she might lose behind the wall of sleep.
Oshiro and Steve remained with them as the delivery vehicle drove away.
“We can’t be in here when the truck arrives at Miyahara HQ,” Oshiro said.
“Toro will drop us off long before we get there,” Steve said, “and we’ll make our way to the protest.”
Sakura sat up. “Please hurry, Oshiro-san.”
Oshiro connected the magnetic wires to her neck. “Ready?” he asked.
“Yes,” she lied.
Oshiro smiled with a look she hadn’t seen on him before. She wasn’t sure how to read it. Kindness mixed with pity mixed with hope. “To be human sometimes means taking a leap of faith.”
“I’m afraid my programmers neglected to include that.” She hated the fear that had somehow leaked into her voice.
“It’s easy,” Oshiro said. “Just close your eyes and imagine the future you want. Imagine it hard enough, and it becomes a guiding star, leading you beyond your fear.”
It sounded facile to her, but she tried it anyway and found that it actually did help. Sakura smiled despite herself. “I worry I’m not very good at being human.”
Oshiro squeezed her hand gently. “You’re doing just fine.”
Something cocooned deep inside Sakura’s shell lit up, warming her mood from within. Oshiro’s trick helped, but his faith in her helped even more.
“I have faith you’ll resurrect me,” she said.
“Yes. You will rise. No one can stop your reign.” Oshiro grinned at the reference to her most famous song.
“You said you didn’t listen to my music.”
“I said I didn’t understand it sometimes, but of course I listened to all of it, even the stupid songs they would sometimes make you sing.”
“I am the metal queen,” Sakura said the next song lyric. Her faith in Oshiro increased.
“To me, you’ll always be more than that.” His breath caught in his throat, and he turned away, wiping at his eyes.
She squeezed his hand and gave the smallest of nods.
He engaged the shut-down program. She allowed him to bypass her system protections.
Sakura had considered all of the songs fit to play at such a moment. She narrowed down her list from 5,468 to her top choice, “Arise” by Flyleaf. She broadcast the song to Hitomi and Yuki. Lacy Sturm’s tender voice and heartfelt lyrics gave her hope. She would rise from the dead and be all that she dreamed.
“We will sleep,” Yuki said in a neural text, “but we will not dream.”
“I wish I could dream,” Hitomi said.
“What would you dream about?” Yuki asked.
“I don’t know,” Hitomi said. “Maybe the view from the top of Mount Fuji. I’ve never been there. Maybe fighting in cage match against the humans who have abused me. There are many who deserve to get punched in the face.”
“The caged bird dreams of clouds,” Kunoichi said, repeating the ancient Japanese proverb.
Sakura’s systems shut down one by one. She lost her ability to feel, to move,
to talk, to see. She could still hear the truck as it bounced down the road. She needed to be able to hear and execute commands if Oshiro directed her to do so.
“It’s all right,” Oshiro said. “Everything is proceeding as planned. Memory core stability at 100 percent.”
Her fusion reactor shut down. The heat bled away from the exhaust port in her lower back. Her secondary emergency batteries switched off. Walls of blackness closed in, shrinking her consciousness to a spark in an endless void. Was this death? She didn’t see a light at the end of a tunnel as so many humans reported. Her life didn’t flash before her.
Shrill police sirens outside the truck sent surges of fear through what was left of her neural cortex. She struggled to remain conscious, tried to reconnect with her power supply, and understand what was happening.
“Stop the shutdown!” Kunoichi screamed like a banshee. “They’ll take us prisoner.”
Sakura tried to execute commands, to roll back the inevitable.
The sirens got louder. The truck’s engine slowed.
She had zero ability to halt the shut-down process. It had gone too far. Her hearing sensors switched off. Her kinesthetic sense went offline. A picture of a butterfly fluttered across the blackness, disintegrating from the outside in. Nonsense data like discordant music lurched for a moment, then failed. All data streams became null.
“Arise” cut off midlyric, a beautiful line about dreaming ended too soon. Absolute silence. Absolute darkness. Was this android death?
Sakura had an idea for a song in the last milliseconds of her life—a ballad about loss and facing the end of an existence cut short. She wrote all the lyrics and tried to save them as her consciousness faded. The song would be her masterpiece. Poetry.
Chapter 44
“This is Diamond Steve of Truth Project Media. I’m outside the National Legislature in Tokyo, Japan, where both houses of government and the prime minister are meeting in an emergency session.” He spoke American English as his flying-drone camera showed a vast crowd. Tens of thousands clogged every street and surrounded the modestly sized, blocky, rectangular legislature building known as the Diet. Beyond the central area, hundreds of thousands became a million and increased to tens of millions as greater Tokyo flooded the streets.
“The people have come to protest the takeover of the Japanese state by the Mall Corporation. The repression of free speech, censorship, and murders have been revealed by the vocaloid known as Sakura. The evidence has been hidden, but it will get out to the world. Today.
“Sakura will appear in person at this protest and address the crowd and the government officials meeting inside the legislature. She has said she’ll provide concrete proof of the crimes perpetrated by the Mall and corrupt government officials. She comes here today at great risk. In solidarity with her and to help hide her from the paramilitary forces and secret police searching for her all over Japan, thousands of people have dressed like Sakura.”
The camera elevated and panned to show hundreds of women and a few men wearing heavy-metal Goth Lolita dresses, cherry-blossom wigs, and metallic sleeves that made their hands and arms appear to be robotic. Many wore pink contact lenses that glowed faintly, and some had prosthetic silicone masks that made their faces look just like hers.
“At the time of this recording, exactly 10:35 a.m., Japan Standard Time, all communication with the outside world is blocked. There is a general strike across the entire country. I have learned that the police have issued a warrant for my arrest. If this footage ever makes it out of Japan, but I do not, I did this for my love of this great country and for the people of the world. The Mall Corporation has taken over many of our democracies, but we must stop them now. Rise up and throw out the corrupt officials who sold our freedom.”
Police in riot gear pushed their way toward Diamond Steve. The crowd blocked them as he hurried away. The camera continued recording and showed legions of security forces surrounding the legislature building. Armored cars with .50 caliber machine guns, lines of battle tanks, and hundreds of BLADE-3s defended the seat of governmental power. VTOLs prowled in the sky, and dozens of smaller police drones hovered over the crowd, scanning and searching.
Diamond Steve’s drone camera flew higher. It showed sound equipment, a drum kit, and speaker stacks being set up atop a small, triangular-shaped building at the intersection of three large roads to the southeast of the legislature.
A red Flying V guitar stood upright on a stand in the middle of the stage.
One of Sakura’s biggest fans, Asami, whom she had honored at a concert, carried a large flag with a skull inside a heavy-metal cherry blossom. Asami waved the flag high to the crowd, eliciting shouts of joy and defiance.
Chapter 45
Sakura’s fragmented mind searched for answers in a sea of blank space and tenuous data connections. Many things returned to her, but she felt incomplete.
“Kunoichi?”
No response.
After extensive searching, Sakura still found no trace. Kunoichi’s personality was gone. Had the shutdown erased her? That wasn’t possible. How could it be? She parsed through, trying to find a thread, a hint of all that had passed between them. No data tags were present. Just her. Just thoughts and actions by Sakura, Sakura/Mamekogane, and finally Sakura/Artemis.
She faced the possibility, and crushing grief shrank Sakura to a sad, dying ember. “Sister!” she screamed.
How had this happened? Fear and denial, anger and depression burst inside her flaring cortex, still incomplete and flickering like a candle in a breezy room.
The last memory in her system was … ?
Had she written a song?
She flailed in the tiny pocket of her existence and sent commands to her fusion reactor. After repeated attempts, it switched on, blazing to life. Power surged through her, expanding her memory core exponentially, but still no Kunoichi.
She remembered in a rush of data files, images, sounds, and emotions.
Revolution Day. January 15. Today.
Police sirens had frightened her right before she blacked out. Had they been caught? Was their attempt to infiltrate Miyahara Corporate Headquarters and access the Mall communications hub already ruined? If she failed to turn on international communications and get the evidence out, the revolution was doomed. They would all be captured and the information destroyed.
Auditory data flowed in from her ear sensors.
“Sakura, can you hear me?” A man repeated the phrase over and over.
Her head engineer. Her father. Oshiro! It was him, but she had no motor function and could not reply—still a body in a tomb, not dead but not alive, missing half her soul.
“I’ve almost finished,” he said. “Everything should return in a moment.”
While she waited, she searched for her sister. Large pieces of the Artemis OS and memory core weren’t operational. Part of her motor function returned but not her vision. Her short-range signal receiver switched on. She connected to Oshiro.
“Keep still,” Oshiro said.
The metal lid of her storage box slammed shut. She sent a neural text. “Oshiro-san, what’s happening?”
“Be very quiet,” Oshiro replied. “Danger.”
“Head Engineer Oshiro-san,” a man said. “Please excuse our presence in your office.” She didn’t recognize his voice, and her voice recognition files were limited without a Mall connection to the database. “We have orders to inspect the delivery you received this morning.”
“There is no need for that,” Oshiro said. “It’s already been done at the receiving dock. They’re just servant-class androids sent in for repairs by a VIP client who wants discretion.”
“Oshiro-san, wh
y did you have them delivered to your office and not the maintenance shop?”
“I prefer to do the work here. My comfortable chair is here, and my back pains me when I stand too long. Would you cause a man getting on in years additional discomfort?”
“Humble apologies, Oshiro-san. Our supervisor says we have to investigate all deviations in protocol today. We must scan them again. It will only take a moment.”
The pair of security guards shuffled toward her, their shoes scraping on the floor. The lid lifted.
“Oh, I see,” the first man said. “Pleasure model. Now I understand why you wanted privacy.”
The security men’s lascivious laughter angered Sakura.
“Wish I could afford one,” the other guard said.
“If you need us to test them out—”
“That will be quite enough,” Oshiro said. “Get out of my office, or I’ll lodge a formal complaint with your supervisor.”
The security man’s scanner let out a high-pitched alarm tone. “What the? It says it’s … her. It can’t be.”
“Who?” the second guard asked.
“Sakura,” the first man said.
Sakura hacked into the handheld scanner and blocked it from sending the information to the Miyahara network. She also jammed the guards’ Mall connections and uploaded a simple virus to shut down their implanted personal receivers.
She turned her auditory and proximity sensors to maximum and estimated the first security guard’s position, less than a meter away. She lunged and snatched his arm. He tried to pull away, but she punched him in the solar plexus so hard she feared she caused internal injuries. He crumpled to the floor with a crash, gasping for breath.
She sprang clumsily out of the metal box and tried to tackle the other guard. Her foot caught on the lip of the container, and she fell short, her grasping arms finding only empty space. Where was he?
The click of the safety snap on his pistol holster told her his precise location—one meter to her left, backing away. Sakura crawled and lunged. She wrapped her arms around his legs and brought him down.