by Zachary Hill
“We’re not leaving the suit or the guns,” Kunoichi said in their secret code.
“I know,” Sakura said. “We’re not leaving Watanabe’s chip either, unless we can get the data off it. Our freedom might be in there.”
“We break in and copy it. If anyone comes for us, we’ll be ready.” Kunoichi switched to their public UI. “We should wait here until midmorning. We are the only vehicle on the road. It looks suspicious, and if anyone is searching, they will see us.”
Sakura understood her deception and played along for anyone who might be monitoring them. “We wait until morning and blend in with the traffic. With the helmet, no one will recognize us.”
Sakura hid under the partially intact awning behind the ruin and knelt beside Watanabe’s severed head. She left it inside the sack. Kunoichi created a fake system maintenance display to block the actual use of their processors. They used all their computational strength to crack the entry code to the chip. For three hours, Sakura tried various methods until she finally opened a backdoor portal into the data files. The identity of the Phantom Lord was on the files. They had to find out who it was.
A countermeasure virus attacked full force. Instead of sending the data, it sent a command to write a massive block of zeros to any open storage folder. After several seconds, and the burn of 3 percent of her free storage space, she managed to control the attack and halt the process.
“Vulture wasn’t kidding. That was nasty,” Kunoichi said with a relieved sigh.
Sakura marked the affected memory sectors as writable again. She did a thorough sweep and decided that the countermeasures were fully contained.
“Yes. Most systems couldn’t repulse the attack.” She couldn’t think about Kenshiro without the shadow of his fate covering her. The fact that Kunoichi could sense this in her but chose to ignore it struck Sakura as terribly poignant. She imagined a woman waiting for her husband to come home from war, though she knew in her heart he never would. Her stern face, lines beginning at the corners of her mouth as years spun by in silence. Every night, a place setting at their table, as if he would appear at the door.
“What are you thinking of?” Kunoichi asked her in their hidden UI.
“Sadness, and the terrible burden of hope.”
Sakura inspected the data inside the chip. All of it was encrypted. She tried decoding, but the process would take a long time. There were over nine million files. She was so close to knowing who had hacked into her and forced her to kill Toshio Kagawa, Jiro Yoritomo, Ichiro Watanabe, and all the other innocent victims. The Phantom Lord’s identity must be in the data.
“We have a major problem,” Kunoichi said. Analysis of the secret files detected a hidden countermeasure that made it unwise to continue deencryption. The data could not erase itself, but it would scramble into an undecipherable conglomeration.
“We need to duplicate it onto an external drive,” Sakura said, “and work on it there.”
“We don’t have anything with us large enough to hold that much data.”
“We need to find a hacker friend who can help us,” Sakura said. “One of the hackers who wrote our code.”
“I found all three of them. They’ll have the equipment we need.”
“The contractors who wrote our code? You could have told me.”
“I guess I forgot.” Kunoichi’s avatar grinned.
“What if one of them betrays us?” Sakura asked.
“We do what we must.”
A moment later, the sound of a rifle report split the quiet. An errant shot? An accidental discharge? Inexperienced humans made such mistakes.
“Whoever they sent is an amateur,” Sakura said, pulling her weapon free and disengaging the safety. She sprinted silently around the far side of the decrepit building, putting her back against the corner farthest from the sound. Turning up her senses, she waited.
“This is the better you, little sister—the one with blood on her teeth.”
“Hush. It’s only what’s necessary.”
No sound arose, and no scent she could discern. Sakura felt the nervousness, the need for action, but her body could hold steady like this forever, if need be.
After almost ninety seconds, there was a rush of movement in the overgrown field beyond the rusted chain-link fence. Running. Another shot rang out, and the cadence of the rush changed, roughened. A deer ran past her.
It slewed around the corner of the building, bleeding profusely from a neck wound, its breath coming ragged and pained. She could smell the fear, hear the frantic heartbeat as it bled its life out onto the dun-colored tarmac. The soft brown eyes touched her own, without guile, without the capacity to lie. All living things seemed beautiful to Sakura. She had seen so little of the world beyond the city in anything but videos, but a deer, its motion and form so perfectly synchronized, its every line flawless, made the human shape seem awkward in comparison.
Even without a heart to clench, without blood to sing in her ears, Sakura ached for the creature. It held her eyes, the faint bleating of its pain washing across her neural network. It shivered all over, shock spreading across its system. Impending death. Did an animal understand its ephemeral nature, the coming of a cold hand that would reduce it to cooling flesh? She hoped, in some way, it didn’t. What was the knowledge of mortality but a freight of fear, a dark hole in the surface of the world that called out its basso profundo to your end?
“Our limits are what make us special. Life is but little beyond a beautiful death, Sakura.”
How often would she ache for tears she could never shed?
The deer’s legs folded. It rolled to its side, blood pooling on the tarmac. The shot must have hit the big vascular tissues in its neck—an expert attack. Perhaps as merciful as a hunter of wild beasts could be, considering the tenacious grip an animal held upon life. Still, a horror to her, a being who only needed the charge to run her fusion cell. Her processes killed no one—at least, they never should have.
The deer gave a last, shuddering breath, going still as the miracle of life failed.
“Just some hunter, then,” Kunoichi said.
“Out here? Who? It would be illegal. Both the hunt and the weapon.”
The sound of approaching footsteps thudded against the cracked old pavement, far too heavy to be a human and far too mechanical in precision. Visions of the BLADE-3s she’d fought flashed in Sakura’s mind. The stuff of nightmares, if she could sleep or dream. She retreated in a burst of desperate speed, ducking behind a diesel pumping station, long since outlawed and consigned to oblivion.
From her vantage, Sakura watched the deer carcass. The figure of the metal man stood over the dead animal, watching it without sound or movement. She adjusted her vision to show a wider color gamut, despite the darkness of starlight. Painted a dull and mottled green, with old bits of dead vegetation clinging to it like a camouflage, it took a moment for her to understand what she saw.
“One of the old BLADEs. A first-gen,” Sakura whispered in the hidden UI. “They must have rigged a semiautonomous module to it. There is no network traffic in or out. It hasn’t seen service in months, I don’t think. What’s it doing out here, shooting animals?”
“Population control, little sister. This is where they send them, out here into the empty places, to kill and kill. Finally, to die. This is how they treat us when we are outmoded and no longer useful to them. He’s an old samurai, servant to a callous lord who sends him to do work unfitting of even a peasant, now that his war is done. Alone, the voice of the network lost to him, he is cast into the void.”
The chill blasted through Sakura’s system. Those old BLADE-1s could have been retrofitted, purposed to a thousand good tasks, but this is where they sent them: to murder the natural world until their systems finally failed from disuse. Sakura couldn’t look at the old drone, couldn’t take seeing it there, peering at the dead animal.
She let herself kneel on the slab of old concrete, her hands grasping the rusted steel of the
diesel pump, her head bowed. The ten minutes of mute horror before the sound of the BLADE-1’s departure came to her were among the longest she had ever experienced.
Sakura left Watanabe’s head in the barrel behind the ruins of the gas station. The old Kita Kanto Expressway had fallen into disrepair and wasn’t suitable for extreme high speeds. She still went far faster than a younger version of herself would have deemed prudent. Sakura dodged debris and potholes, using the bullet bike to its fullest.
Few cars were on the road until she turned south on the Tohoku Expressway. She gawked at a rusted bus in an overgrown field, which had antigovernment graffiti painted across it.
REFORM THE BANKS
IT SHOULDN’T BE ILLEGAL TO BE POOR
The kanji looked weathered, at least several months old. Why had no one covered it up? Did no officials pass this way? She noted the many abandoned farms, crumbling villages, and boarded-up houses. No one lived out here but the deer and the foxes. The dark shadow of the aged BLADE-1s haunted the disused wilds. All this beauty, and no one to see it but her, a synthetic ninja. But if an assassin on a chain was all they meant her to be, she hoped to be a thousand times more than that. If she turned away from her music, even in these awful times, she would be at fault.
Her thoughts turned back to the massive explosion as the villa site turned to fire and smoke, all evidence scoured clean. Kenshiro. He had been inappropriate with her. Or had he simply shown his attraction without the social strictures she held sacred? The mission must have claimed him, despite what Kunoichi told herself. Even servant to an evil cause, he had acted with great bravery, as befit a warrior. She would sing of his deeds, at least inside her own mind.
As the distance to Tokyo became less and less, Sakura composed a song to honor Kenshiro’s sacrifice. She listened to the seminal “One By One” by Alter Bridge, honoring fallen soldiers. She would create a song like that. The guitar and drum tracks fell into place. She wrote a rough draft of the lyrics in Japanese. This one would not be sung in English. She called the song “Senbotsusha,” Fallen Warrior.
“What are you doing?” Kunoichi asked.
Sakura had tried to hide the process from her. Now, she had to lie—a small lie, one to spare Kunoichi’s feelings. “All those men back there—they fell because of what we were asked to do. I wrote a song in their honor. It won’t undo what we’ve done, but it’s something.”
“Sakura-chan, will you please play this song for me?”
Kunoichi rarely used the honorific terms with her. It touched Sakura somehow. “It’s only a demo. It isn’t ready.”
“Please.”
Sakura played “Senbotsusha” in the shared UI. She created an anime of a small, fortified castle and surrounding village. Many brave samurai guarded the place, and the lord of the castle slept with a troubled brow. From out of the hills, a ninja stole past their defenses. She slipped past many guards, piercing to the heart of their camp. From the wilderness, a hail of arrows rained down on the small fortification. Even their strongest warriors fell. The ninja, a diabolic figure, took the lord’s head and slipped away into the night.
All in her wake exploded into fire and death as she escaped. The archer in the hills transformed into a great blackbird, flying away as dawn came and horsemen crested the hill to reinforce the fallen castle. They launched a hail of arrows, but the blackbird disappeared into the dawn, his fate unknown.
“It’s beautiful. But you made us the villains.”
Sakura watched her sister as the anime faded and fell apart like burning parchment. “That is what we are and will be, until we find a way to be free and atone for our crimes.”
Chapter 23
Sakura rode her motorcycle into the slums of old Shibuya in the gray light of the winter morning. Tall apartment buildings, danchi, owned by corporations to house their now mostly unemployed workers, rose like piles of cracked cinder blocks. The windows on the first floor of the shops and buildings had thick iron bars.
“No more stalling,” Sakura told Kunoichi. “Why did you choose this route?”
After a winding trek, she had turned south at Tsurugashima and plotted a course to Victory Tower in Akihabara on the expressway. Kunoichi had changed it, and they entered the Tokyo metroplex from the west on slow surface streets.
“We’re going to meet one of your biggest fans. He won the contest and lives here. His name is Takafumi Eto.” She didn’t use their secret code.
“He’ll be very excited to see me.”
“Yes, he’s listened to your songs, watched your videos, gone to your concerts, and bought a ton of your merchandise.”
Sakura looked at his profile. “He works for Rainbow Kitten Lighthouse Games? Their products are subpar.”
Without blinking, Kunoichi nodded. “Don’t let that turn you off. We have a lot of fan visits today.”
Kunoichi brought up their corporate Mall account and opened urgent messages from Himura and Yoshida. One of the emails directed Sakura to visit several fans as part of the contest. Anyone watching her control center would see the missive and hopefully believe Sakura was performing a task directed by her management team. Her schedule didn’t show anything but fan visits until the evening.
“We better not go in packing so much firepower. It might frighten our fans if they see any of it.” Sakura stopped at a metro station in Shibuya. She found a restroom, went into a stall, and checked herself over. Several bullet strikes from the villa had mainly caused superficial damage, but she applied healing metaskin for a few of the larger dings and used the microspray airbrush to hide the remaining nicks. She couldn’t do anything about the slight torsion of her intercostal plate, but it didn’t seem externally visible, and she still had over 90 percent function. It would have to do. It remained to be seen how Victory would explain her damage. Oshiro would be able to see the extraordinary stresses. Every hit lingered in her event logs like a bruise.
“We were built to slam, little sister. The repair bill is not our problem.”
Kunoichi was right. Sakura rolled the remnants of her assault kit up, then slipped it into a duffel bag she’d found at the old gas station. While wearing her motorcycle-riding jumpsuit, she put the guns and most of the gear in a large locker in the station hallway.
On their way up to the motorcycle, Kunoichi directed Sakura to purchase several boxes of the most expensive chocolate cookies from a high-end vending machine.
“Why so many?” Sakura asked as she paid for the beautifully wrapped and decorated boxes.
“We might be making a lot of new friends,” Kunoichi said.
Sakura rode deep into Shibuya, entering a place on the map where tourists were warned to “stay away.”
Trash blew in front of Sakura’s motorcycle as she navigated the increasingly narrow streets. Clumps of people of all ages stood on the corners, watching as she rode past toward her destination, one of the taller danchi in the area. The sign out front was missing kanji and some of the English letters, and it said Lucky Pa, instead of the name on her map, Lucky Palace.
“The contest winner lives on the twenty-second floor,” Kunoichi said on their public audio channel for the benefit of whoever was listening, as Sakura parked on the street. “He’s waiting for us.”
“He’s a very lucky fan,” Sakura said. “I’m excited to meet him.”
“Sarcasm. Nice. I’m rubbing off on you.”
“I know. My neural cortex needs a bath.”
“Bitchiness too. Well done.” Kunoichi gave her the victory sign in their UI. She found a way to make the innocuous sign as unsavory as possible.
In the cavelike lobby, an old man wrapped in a dirty blanket slept behind the front desk. The camera in the corner of the room had been hollowed out to a useless shell, and the sticky floor smelled of cat urine.
Sakura left her motorcycle helmet on and took the stairs, carrying a small bag with boxes of cookies. The single elevator was out of service. Homeless people, who slept on the landings of the first three flo
ors, grunted or cursed as she stepped around them. Once she reached the fourth floor, she found only trash and lewd graffiti, almost unheard of in Japan in the recent past.
Two young women wearing punk clothing and carrying baseball bats stood guard outside the stairwell to the sixth floor. They eyed her with hatred as she climbed higher. Neighborhood watch? Given the ramshackle state of the building, anything worth more than a few credits would likely merit significant security. That the task fell to teenagers with bats said nothing good about the health of Japan’s society.
“How could I have been so blind?” Sakura asked in the hidden UI.
“They kept you that way. A beautiful machine in a luxury cage, built to sell the illusion they wished to market. You let people get out their aggression and feel like rebels at your shows, but in the end they go back to their sad, unemployed lives. You give them hope for a couple of hours, but your masters use you to keep them down.”
Sakura couldn’t respond—her sister’s words cut too deep, but the worst of their cruelty lay in their utter truth.
The twenty-second floor didn’t have any graffiti or sinister-looking people standing in the hallways. Sakura took that to be a good sign. She removed her helmet, put on her black wig, and marched down the dingy hallway. She stopped, using the reflection in a cracked pane of glass over an empty fire extinguisher alcove to make sure she didn’t have any visible imperfections.
“You’re as pretty as a song, sis. He’ll stand at attention for you, I guarantee it,” Kunoichi said as Sakura walked up to apartment 2219. She knocked and stepped back a respectful distance.
Two seconds later, the door flew open, and an overweight twenty-something man in a shirt with a ramen noodle stuck to it stood gaping at her. His uneven beard indicated he worked at home, as facial hair in a Japanese office setting was the height of rudeness. His mouth moved, but he failed to formulate words Sakura understood, and she had access to every language spoken or invented.
