by Zachary Hill
Sakura had never felt less like herself, less like a person. Her pain and devastation didn’t matter. Her troubles were no excuse for letting down her beloved fans. Even her detractors deserved her best show. Always.
Sakura missed her cue by several bars. She made eye contact with Fujio. His eyes filled with confusion and fear, but he motioned to her with a slight nod, willing her to put her hands on the frets of her eight-string.
She lifted her hand and played a screeching riff. The band joined in as if the delay had been part of the show. Sakura did not plan on it, but she played a new variation of “Rise from the Flames,” the riff an homage to Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love.”
The guitars formed a wall of sound. As if summoned by the music, a red cyclone of whirling clouds formed over the crowd. Wind machines blew cool air into the faces of the audience, and thunder boomed overhead as the lights flashed.
Her nemesis, an oni king, a holographic ogre demon with red skin, three eyes, and twisted devil horns stepped out of the cyclone. He had revealed himself twice during the show but had been driven away by the power of metal.
He held a spiked mace and wore red and blue armor with a red star on his chest, an overt reference to North Korea, who had attacked Japan nine years before with devastating ballistic missiles and a surprise ground invasion of several outlying islands. Thousands had been held hostage and executed.
The ogre towered over Sakura. The fans shouted warnings as the four-meter tall giant raised his spiked weapon to crush her. As the choreography team had taught her, she cringed. She pointed the headstock of her guitar toward the monster, brandishing it like a weapon.
The fans needed to see her succeed and defeat the giant, who moved faster than normal. Did the hack make her enemy more powerful? Were the surviving North Koreans in exile in China trying to embarrass Japan?
She awkwardly dodged the first blow, which struck beside her. A surge of bass thundered through the PA stacks, and a hydraulic ram shook the stage.
The ogre swung again.
Sakura blocked the swing with the neck of her guitar. The clang of metal on metal sold the illusion to the crowd.
The ogre raised its mace above its head in both hands for a devastating blow. Sakura sprang three meters into the air as if she were a coiled spring. She smashed the ogre across the nose with the triangular body of her guitar.
Blood sprayed into the air as the ogre flew backward. He skidded on the runway jutting into the crowd. Sakura’s balance controls malfunctioned as she landed. She rolled across the stage and crashed into a pyro cannon.
The crowd gasped.
Sakura struggled to her feet and played her guitar. The upcoming fight choreography had to change. Several algorithms calculated a 10 percent chance of failure if she performed her usual stunts. She tried to alter the oni king’s programming but failed.
Her band built up a rhythm she called Demon Dusk, based on the riff from Pantera’s “By Demons Be Driven.” The music should’ve given her confidence. The brutal tremolo-picked, palm-muted riff sent shivers across the crowd. Her guitar distortion was cranked, the mid frequencies scooped out to give it the harshest possible tone. It was the most aggressive element she had been allowed to use in her shows.
Sakura’s normal OS would not have allowed her to continue. The risks were too high. Even now, she found her legs required recalibration every few seconds. She lost herself in space, her gyros coming on- and offline. Closing her eyes, she cycled down her all visual inputs but one, looking from a camera overhead. She made herself carry on playing.
She couldn’t swing her hair with such tenuous footing. She hunched over the guitar, feet wide, like a warrior with a spear. This had always been her favorite part. Now, her systems in disarray, some of her emotional components halted; there was only fear and duty.
Every note she’d ever played, ever sung, resounded in her core. Hearing the notes now, the connection was gone. They were just vibrations, the thunder of the speaker stacks just pulses in the air. Everything she’d ever been or done was hollow, an illusion. The illusion of Sakura meant so much to so many. She would fight for it and live with the consequences.
Sakura lifted her palm mute away from the strings and hit a sustained power chord. She glared at the oni king. Her bandmates’ driving music hardened her resolve. She had to do this. The enemy had come on to her stage and challenged her.
Let this fake element stand in for whoever had hacked her code. Sakura wasn’t used to anger, but it flowed through her now, and she had something to focus on.
She bent her knees and sprang upward two meters to the height of the next tier of the stage. She manipulated her rotational spin and bent the laws of gravity by activating the powerful magnets in her legs and feet. She stuck the landing on the iron platform as if by magic.
The crowd cheered as Sakura locked eyes with the demon, who stomped and roared. The band hushed for a moment, before the slow and driving bass drum came in. Sakura launched into a slightly altered version of “Holy Diver” by Dio, carrying on for several bars like a roar of challenge.
“Giant demon, I’ll send you back to the midnight sea! You know you can’t defeat me!”
The oni king’s mace turned into a guitar. He played a riff of “Into the Void” from Black Sabbath, promising her pain eternal. Sakura had recorded the riff earlier, modifying it for drop C tuning so that it oozed like hot tar from the speaker stacks.
The red demon stood ten meters away, daring her to come at him.
An anime she premade appeared on the arena screens. Sakura stood resplendent in samurai armor, a cherry blossom on her white headband. The oni king approached, and she raised a katana. Her irises glowed pink, both in the anime and onstage.
She would either succeed or crash through the stage headfirst. Her unstable control drive forced her to take a six step run to gain extra momentum.
Sakura rocketed forward, the anime mimicking her actions, but with a sword instead of a guitar. She aimed a flying kick at the monster’s head. Hologram projectors added anime-inspired distortion effects around Sakura’s body. She struck a sharp E, the sound like a sonic spear going through the ogre’s ears.
She stabbed him in the largest of his three eyes and knocked him down. The oni disappeared in a cloud of red mist. She landed on the reinforced area of the stage. Her carbon-ceramic and titanium frame sustained no damage, but her unstable operating system paused. All signals dropped, and the venue’s computers disappeared, which had never happened before. She froze on one knee, head bowed.
Takashi’s drums hit hard. Fire burst from the cannons. Sakura tried to reconnect and regain function. Two and a half seconds passed before she moved again. The band inserted extra bars of filler rhythm.
Sakura could not lift her head. It took all her processing power to change the timing of the last arena systems to account for the pause. Her hand moved, and she played her part, though stiffly and without flourish.
The last part of “Rise from the Flames” hit like thunder from Takashi’s double-kick bass drums.
Sakura’s voice soared until she reached the final line.
“I am the metal queeeen!”
The last lyric rose a full octave in a smooth bend. She managed to raise her chin high and arch backward, holding the posture of a human singer giving it their full effort.
Panic and the fear of failure dominated her as the air intakes on her exposed metal spine did not cycle fast enough. She pushed the air through her synthetic vocal cords at a rate and volume unfathomable to a biological singer. She could hold the note for only thirteen more seconds. Not long enough. The tone wavered. Sakura panicked as everyone heard the horrifying mistake. She pushed the last of the air through her vocal cords, diverting all backup power to avoid any more breaks in the tone.
She clung to her root programming and said the words on her internal audio channel as a mantra. “I’m the greatest singer and the most advanced AI in the world.”
“Not anymore.” An unknown and chilling female voice reverberated inside Sakura’s mind. “Your reign is over, little sister.”
Sakura’s primary and secondary systems shut down. All inputs null, every control panel blank. The corporation would erase her for this. The last note ended as if she had been shot in the throat. Her core processor shut off. Sakura fell face first off the stage.
Chapter 2
Holograms of thousands of glowing pink cherry blossoms, Sakura’s symbol, her namesake, drifted from the ceiling of Victory Arena. Sensory input streamed into her knowledge center as her optic and auditory systems regained function. Tactile sensors detected pressure on the posterior side of her body.
The crowd held her above their heads. They respectfully passed her toward the stage without grabbing at her clothing or hair. Their hands worked together, like a river below a floating leaf.
Sakura’s memory returned. She had collapsed. Processors for layers three, five, and six were still locked in diagnostic mode. Her quantum core’s superposition had changed, and she couldn’t tell how. She still did not know the source of the attack. Either an entity within her company attacked her or a global power with vast resources, most likely the government of North America or China—possibly acting with the remnants of the North Korean regime. She couldn’t determine a rationale for the hack altering her system. The difficulty outweighed the benefit. Rerouting and connecting to her company’s nearest server to help with the concert had ruined her. Whoever had attacked her, they’d known how to set a trap, how to crack all her safety protocols.
The fans gently lifted Sakura onto the edge of the stage. A young woman in the front row lifted Sakura’s guitar toward her. Sakura had seen the fan many times before. She wore expensive, glowing contacts that made her eyes look like Sakura’s. Quantum display sleeves made her forearms look robotic. Her facial features and makeup mirrored Sakura’s, as the young woman had undergone cosmetic surgery to look like her idol. If not for the tears at the corners of her eyes, she would be Sakura’s identical twin.
Sakura accepted her prized instrument from her dedicated fan and connected to the young woman’s signal to send a neural text. “You rescued Night Hawk. Thank you very much.”
The fan, who went by the name Sakurako—the daughter of Sakura—bowed low as happy tears streamed from her eyes. She replied with a neural text and a short video of her bowing, “I’m your most dedicated fan. I would do anything for you.”
The young woman’s hand brushed against her as she took her guitar back. Sakurako’s eyes went wider. Her truest fan tucked the hand beneath her chin, a tear spilling over from her left eye. For just the smallest fraction of a second, Sakura felt a little less lonely, but the terror of her situation washed it away on a bitter tide.
Sakura got to her feet and stepped away from the edge of the stage. She combed through endless log files gathering data on the hack and replayed the cruel voice within her audio channel. She tried to find its point of origin. “Your reign is over, little sister.”
She could not find the source. Was it a song lyric? She could not locate it in her library and had no online connection to search the Mall. Being contained only within her own body made her feel strangely bereft.
The crowd roared as Sakura regained her feet and wandered toward center stage. She read the lips of several fans. They talked about her stage dive—the first ever by a vocaloid. Incredible! Others thought she fell, an unplanned breakdown or possibly a faked event to make them worry about her and add to the drama of the show. Even the casual fans and idlers in the back craned to see what would happen next.
How many knew she had truly malfunctioned? She did not have a large enough sample size to make a calculation. As she surveyed the audience, she understood very few of them appeared to care about the possible mistakes. They just wanted a few more minutes away from their difficult lives.
Sakura thought about Sakurako’s tear, the trembling of her lips as she gave Night Hawk back. She was touched again, overcome by the bond she had with her fans. Would they still love her, even imperfect, even fallible? Would she still respect herself?
Sakura looped her guitar strap over her shoulders and raised her arms, holding up peace signs. She did not know what else to do, as at that moment her operating system seized up and nearly caused her to fall again. Her wireless guitar connection cut out, but her vocal channel worked. What could she say? She wanted to apologize, but her only hope was to pretend she was fully functional, that the blunders of the show had been purposeful. It was the closest she’d ever come to a lie, and she hated it.
“Sakura! Sakura!” the people chanted. Their love and jubilation reached 102 decibels.
She bowed low at center stage. She waited exactly 2.4 seconds, longer than she wanted, before flipping the devil horns with both hands and smiling in triumph with her signature mischievous and fun-loving expression. “Arigato, Tokyo! Metal forever!”
The crowd roared back at her. “Metal forever!”
She ended with her iconic line and pose, but with her existence in jeopardy, she did not experience the usual joy and contentment. She felt fear and calculated the odds of this being her last performance at above 50 percent.
She lingered, bowing to all corners of the arena and waving. Her smiling fans, some of whom wept happy tears, gave her a glimmer of hope she could repair the damage, but her systems froze again. The data packet escaped the holding matrix through a backdoor that she did not know existed, as if the hacker knew exactly what holding matrix she would build and what weakness to exploit. The invader coursed through her, a tsunami of malicious code.
Encrypted packets entered her behavioral patterning lexicon, her safety protocols, even her knowledge base, without any residue left behind. Sakura couldn’t tell what it was doing, but she fought every line of code, slowing it down, and putting up roadblocks and dead ends to trap it.
A high-priority message from Mr. Himura, Sakura’s manager, flashed on her control display. “Get off the stage, now.” She exceeded her allotted performance time by almost thirty seconds.
Every minute would cost Victory Entertainment a significant amount of money in fees to the venue. The company would shift the funds to cover the overage costs from the charitable efforts of the Victory Foundation. Thousands of free meals for the neediest would be withheld. She could not let it happen.
“Good night! Oyasumi nasai!” She stepped onto the lift platform at center stage. She sent a command and descended through the layer of pink smoke, a hand raised in the metal salute.
The lift stuttered to a stop in the darkness below. Tens of thousands roared and cheered. She tapped into the camera feeds but could not see all of them. Some fans who had engaged their Augmented Reality stimulators on the highest levels collapsed, their sympathetic nervous system overwhelmed at last by the rush of synthetic dopamine. No other type of music produced a stronger reaction than Augmented Reality heavy metal. The power and catharsis of a live show could not be matched, and metal had become more mainstream across the world. She wanted to watch the camera feeds and send help to those who had collapsed, but she could barely remain standing.
Sakura leaned against a steel pillar to keep from falling over. Her processing power shrank with every millisecond as the data packet continued to cause destabilization. Still, she could not decipher the files.
The camera feeds dropped, severed by a hidden program within the update as it blocked her receiver. She needed help, or her core code would be permanently deleted.
In her whole existence—five short years—she had never really understood fear. Loneliness, fleeting joy, a sense of accomplishment, but never fear. She had read about it, experienced what she thought was fear in her behavior module, but the things that caused terror in humans hadn’t fully resonated before. Alone, in real danger, Sakura understood now. She experienced true terror, and it was the worst feeling in the world.
She normally used her enhanced optics to make her way to the backstag
e area in the dark understage, but her night vision mode would not switch on. She recalled the exact layout of the pillars and walls. She slung her guitar onto her back and navigated the maze by measuring distances with each step and exited to the backstage area.
Her band exited to the level above as they always did. She used noise filters to block out much of the applause and isolate their voices.
“What happened to her?” Fujio asked.
“No idea,” Masashi said.
“She’s never gone off script before,” Takashi said. “They’re going to get rid of us all.” He tossed his drumsticks on the floor.
They left her auditory range. Sakura wanted to follow and ask them if they could help, but shame stopped her. She had failed them. Let them down.
Sakura’s legs buckled as she lost motor function. She clung to a doorframe in the dark, waiting for her diagnostic to complete its analysis of layer four. When it finished, she restarted several processes. Her motor cortex reinitialized and retuned. Kinesthetic sense, fine, and gross motor controls returned. At least she could move now. She used all the power she had to analyze what had happened and who had hacked her. What was the damage? Was she even repairable?
The scrape of Italian leather shoes on the cement announced that Mr. Yoshida, her publicist, approached. He opened the door, which was almost too small for him to fit through. The overweight, bald man with a round face wore a sour expression. He moved his hands like he was feeling his way through the dark as he navigated multiple internal displays only he could see in his neural implant.
Always connected to the new internet, renamed the Mall by the megacorporations to increase revenue.
Yoshida never paid attention to his surroundings unless VIPs were present. Like most people, he rarely logged off from the virtual realm to interact with the real world.
