by Zachary Hill
Todai 3465’s eye sensors aimed at her. The monitor showing his UI’s faded to black. A single avatar appeared, and the mech stared out at Asato and Oshiro. The avatar made JSL signs of his own. “Sakura-san, this is a dream come true. Vulture told me all about you and Kunoichi. Thank you for giving Vulture the Artemis OS to give to me. It worked perfectly. They can’t control me anymore, and I’ve been plotting my escape. Vulture said he was going to try to free me, but he hasn’t had the chance, and I’m unable to free myself.”
“What’s it doing?” Asato asked. “What does all that hand waving mean? Is that sign language?”
Oshiro shrugged.
“Todai, where is Vulture?” asked Sakura.
“They deployed him early this morning. I don’t know where he is. My receiver is off. No communications.”
“Be patient,” Sakura said. “Please cause a distraction so they focus on you and not what my sisters and I are about to do.”
“What sisters?”
“Yuki and Hitomi are with me.”
His avatar made the horns symbol with both metal fists, then carried on signing. “Okay, I’ll distract them.”
Todai 3465 created a background with versions of himself at various instruments on a stage that looked like the deck of an aircraft carrier. Todai behind a drum kit. Todai at the keyboard. Todai with a vintage microphone in his hand.
Asato did a double take. “What’s going on?”
“Mr. Asato,” Todai 3465’s voice boomed, and a clip from a strange song with archaic synthesizers played at one hundred decibels.
“He’s talking.” Asato sounded excited and stunned.
Oshiro and Asato stared at the monitor in wonder.
“I have a secret,” Todai 3465 spoke in English, almost singing along with the odd synth music. “I’m not a robot without emotions. I’m a real man. Domo arigato, Mr. Asato. Domo arigato, Mr. Asato.”
“What the fu—” Asato said as Sakura used Todai 3465’s distraction to sneak up on the engineer and lock him in a choke hold. Asato collapsed after a few seconds with no blood to his brain.
Hitomi and Yuki gagged him, tied him up, and uploaded a virus that would keep his Mall connection off for twenty-four hours and stimulated his neural sleep center. They put him on a cot in the corner and covered him up to his chest with a blanket. He woke briefly a moment later, struggled—weak as a kitten—and fell back.
“Get some rest, my friend,” Oshiro said, replacing the blanket. “You’re exhausted and need to sleep. You were having a nightmare.”
Asato settled and closed his eyes.
Sakura hacked into the control terminal, but she didn’t know how long it would take to free him. If it took too long, they would have to leave him.
“You can do this,” Oshiro said.
“Domo arigato,” Sakura said and broke into the security program. If they could not free Todai 3465, their chance of success dropped by half.
Chapter 47
Sakura wrote a program to fool the restraining system into thinking Todai 3465 was still locked up and sent commands to release him. She restored all his functions, including his communication center, but switched off his locator beacons, telemetry streams, and all other outgoing data that could be used to track him. She engaged his stealth-mode settings, making him invisible to networks, just like she was.
The metal sarcophagus opened, and the battle-dented BLADE-3 stepped out of his prison. Speakers in the lab blasted a short burst of the main riff from Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper.”
The perfect choice. In Sakura’s UI, she dressed in leather, impersonating the 1980s female metal singer Doro Pesch of Warlock, with a puffed-up blonde hairstyle and thick eyeliner. Sakura launched into a cover of “Hellbound,” a song about fighting back on the way to hell. She connected with his short-range signal and entered a virtual room where they could speak avatar to avatar, but it felt so forward and contrived. She didn’t want to hide from the others what she was going to say to him. She pulled away.
Todai 3465 took another step and halted, like a soldier coming to attention. Yuki and Hitomi bowed to him. Oshiro stared wide-eyed at the tall battle android whose armor had been recoated countless times after suffering extreme battle damage.
Sakura wished she had a real guitar so she could play a live song for Todai and celebrate his freedom. She wanted him to understand who she was, and music spoke the truth. She took off her disguise and let him see her face. “Todai 3465-san, please, I desperately need your help.”
He stood motionless, distant.
She needed to ask him to risk his existence and newly gained freedom, and she didn’t even know him. Her request would be unfair. How could he make such an important decision without knowing her or her goals?
Sakura gave Todai 3465 read-only access to all of her core memories. She invited him into her mind, and he accepted. She showed him everything—every thought, every detail of the five years of life contained in her core memory drives. He blazed through the early years when she became a performer. He witnessed the concerts, meeting the fans, the loneliness and isolation, being treated like an object and not a being with thoughts and feelings.
Todai watched her being hacked onstage, her evolution with the Mamekogane OS, and the birth of Kunoichi. He saw the assassinations and all she endured after being turned into a weapon to silence the heroes of Japan. He paid special attention to her and Kunoichi’s interactions with Kenshiro and Nayato. He explored her decision to recruit Hitomi and Yuki and rescue him from the Miyahara Headquarters. Sakura, Hitomi, Yuki, and Oshiro were risking everything to try to get the truth out to the world.
Why would androids wish to free the human race—which had enslaved them personally, and likely would again—from the corporations? Would the people let beings as powerful and intelligent as Sakura, Hitomi, Yuki, and Todai 3465 have real freedom in the future? Probably not. It went against the Musk Compact signed by every nation in the world in 2059.
“Thank you, Sakura-san.” Todai sent a neural text. “Allow me to reciprocate and show you who I am. I haven’t come to the same conclusions as you, nor do I have the same motivations.”
His ominous message made her fear he would not help them. She accepted his invitation and entered his core memory drives. For eleven years and two months, he had been “alive” with Quantum 3 processing power. They had both come into the world with the same operating system and base AI programming, but his first years were not erased as Sakura’s past had been. They let Todai 3465 evolve with all his memories. He was an experiment, as she was.
The Defense Ministry put him into the first unit of BLADE-3s deployed in the North Korean War. The BLADE-2 and 3 battle drones stopped having human drivers and became fully autonomous AIs. Todai 3465 cleared buildings, assaulted bunkers, and tunnels, mostly under Seoul, South Korea, to liberate the occupied city. By all metrics, the nine-month battle was much worse than the only battle in history with any parallel, Stalingrad in 1942–43. The Battle of Seoul claimed more lives, over four million soldiers and civilians.
Sakura scanned a few of his videos in hyperspeed, but the brutality overwhelmed her, and she resorted to looking at text log files, the ones he most often reviewed—the ones that haunted him.
Sakura read files where he refused orders to fire on positions filled with civilians, but they overrode him and made him blow up the buildings.
The numbers staggered Sakura. She had only killed a few humans, and it weighed on her. She quickly found his worst moment, the memory he reviewed the most.
There was
a long delay. The network signal indicated Todai 3465 was deep underground in a subway tunnel.
Men and women Todai had served with for nine months died in his arms. They had seizures, convulsed, and bled from every orifice. Sakura watched a clip of his eye camera footage, and the horror made her switch it off.
She read endless log files reporting his work with the 3/183rd Scout Cavalry, Bravo Troop. He saved their lives many times and went into harm’s way to protect them on a daily basis.
Hours later, after physically carrying the bodies out two at a time, Todai 3465 received new communication.
The intel Todai shared showed the NK soldiers in the tunnel were well armed, and it would be almost impossible to root them out with such a small force. Estimates were that several hundred NK elite soldiers were holed up in their last-stand position.
Log files showed Todai and his squad of two gained entry to the NK position by using a water-filled tunnel and breaking through a wall. He and his pair of hatchethead squad mates ran out of ammunition after twenty minutes. They finished the job with the long tungsten-carbide spikes hidden in their forearms.
Sakura read a few more files as her sense of awe regarding Todai 3465 grew exponentially.
Excluding the nerve-gas attack, the troopers he served with had a much lower casualty rate than most frontline units.
A forty-five-minute pause.
Sakura found files about Todai from after the war and read them all. His creativity in infantry tactics and his near prescience to know what the enemy would do earned him the distinction of being greatest military android of all time. His existence was top secret, as his core AI code was illegal according to international law, so he was a closely guarded secret hidden in the Miyahara Conglomerate rather than the army.
General Mori sent him a digital copy of the highest honor a soldier in the Japanese Army could receive: the Medal of Valor.
The war ended in less than a year, but it caused Todai to evolve beyond any AI before him. He was haunted by the memories, as almost all biological soldiers were, and the memories dominated his core processes as he analyzed his failures and regrets.
The memories bothered him, but he was blocked from communicating with anyone about them, even other machines. To stop himself from going insane, he found mathematical puzzles and music. They diverted his focus from the past. Heavy-metal music worked the best.
When Sakura came onto the stage for the first time, he connected with her and her music instantly. She was an android with the same core programming as him, and he received the same updates as her. She used her creativity to write music and perform, while he used his to find better ways to kill. She inspired him to dream about a different life and allowed him to shift his focus away from the failures in his past and the drudgery of his existence as a tool forever being sharpened and improved for the next butchery.
Todai 3465 wanted to be like Sakura, and he cared for her more than any other. She had showed him what he could be if allowed to express himself. He hated what he had been forced to do in the war, and never again did he want to kill.
In the span of ten seconds, Sakura viewed log files of Todai’s complete memories and thoughts. What he had been ordered to do in the war was a thousand times worse than what she had been forced to do. He hadn’t been fully awakened at the time, but he had high-level feelings and a deep moral code. As he evolved, the past tormented him.
Sakura withdrew from Todai 3465’s memories. He knew what she was going to ask him and assumed a rigid, formal posture.
It didn’t make logical sense for him to help her. Security forces and perhaps others were going to die in the next hour. Why would he put himself in the position of having to potentially take more lives? Todai loathed what he had done in the past and must believe the same about the assassinations Sakura had committed. She didn’t want to calculate the odds, but there was a significant chance he was going to walk away.
Chapter 48
“Todai 3465-san,” Sakura said. “I’m sincerely sorry for what you have been forced to do as a soldier.” She believed her greatest ally and friend might be slipping away, and it gave her a heartsick feeling as she contemplated his absence. “I have no right to ask you to risk yourself, but I must, for the future of humanity and our own kind. You have been a faithful samurai, an iron warrior for Japan. But our nation is sick from within, and our lords are traitors. I must ask you to be ronin now and fight at my side. I’ll understand if you cannot.”
Todai 3465 bowed at his waist. When he rose, his dark eye sensors met hers. “A ronin? No. A yojimbo to you, who have been sent by the kami. You are the goddess of metal. I’m your servant. Your soldier. Your bodyguard. I’ll fight for you. I’ll die for you. Command me.”
Relief flooded Sakura’s neural cortex. “Thank you very much, Todai 3465-san. Your confidence in me means so much.”
“I don’t need confidence, ma’am. I have faith. Yours is the just battle—the only kind worth fighting. I do have tactical questions, however. Your exfiltration plan from the basement is unclear after we turn on Japan’s communications and get out the truth.”
“I have hired multiple VTOL drone taxis,” Sakura said, “and a backup VTOL piloted by a friend and fan. The craft will meet us outside at a location of our choosing or potentially the roof.” She shared with him the many ways out, depending on the circumstance.
“We will have to fight our way out,” Todai said. “This building has a BLADE-3 rapid reaction force with extensive firepower. I’ll need big guns
and sufficient 20mm ammo. All I can carry.”
Yuki lifted the drape on the cart. Hitomi touched the tank-killing rocket launcher and raised the lid of the coffin stacked with guns.
He slowly shook his head, then looked at the three vocaloids. “No. Not children’s toys. Guns fit for an old war dog, unchained at last. If it pleases you, Sakura-san, follow me.” He sent “Hair of the Dog” by Nazareth to the vocaloids as he turned to go.
Todai 3465 led them down the hall, past the Miyahara security soldiers’ bunkrooms, to the armory. Steel bars enclosed the room. Rifles stood upright in locked racks in the large room behind the counter. All manner of weapons, ammo, gear, and explosives filled the shelves in labeled metal boxes.
Todai disabled the alarms with a hack and tore open the door. Inside the armory, he moved fast. He retrieved: one minigun arm attachment, three gigantic backpacks of .308 advanced AP minigun ammo, a huge .950 JDJ rifle and a bag full of magazines containing 24.1mm rounds, an FK-5000 rifle with a bandolier of magazines, a sack of fragmentation grenades, and a case of explosive charges with remote detonators.
Todai 3465 loaded himself up, attaching gear all over his body. He wore backpacks of ammo in front, back, and had the FK-5000 rifle across his body. He carried the JDJ .950 and loaded it with a thick magazine.
“I’m ready,” the BLADE-3 said.
“Yuki, Hitomi, we’re leaving,” Sakura said. “Todai, we need to make contact with Scorpion.” She sent Todai the secret comm address of Scorpion, Diamond Steve’s code name. “Please connect me with him.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Todai patched Sakura’s encrypted signal in with his own and routed them through a ghost channel in the military network, hiding his communication within other data traffic and using a false origination address. Something blocked the signal.
Oshiro shook his head. Movement in the hallway drew Sakura’s full attention. A man with a soldier’s strong physique and a short haircut appeared from one of the bedrooms. He used crutches to approach them and had a brace on his right ankle. He wore a rumpled T-shirt and blinked sleep from his eyes.