Sakura- Intellectual Property

by Zachary Hill

“We—”

  Sakurako’s chest exploded as a bullet pierced her heart and exited her back in a spray of red gore. Blood spattered on Takashi’s white drums.

  The lament of tens of thousands rolled like waves of agony. The band stopped playing. Wailing, horrified voices filled the streets.

  Sakurako fell and lay in an expanding pool of blood. Masashi and Fujio’s mouths gaped open. Takashi backed away from his bloody drum kit, his face spattered with red, wide-eyed as if he expected to die in the next instant.

  Inside the network communications room, Sakura dropped to her knees, her worst fear realized as she stared at the corpse of her truest fan who had sacrificed everything for the cause. She never should’ve let Sakurako go onstage, but this act of brutality—recorded by multiple cameras and ready to be broadcast to the world—might give them victory.

  Part of her hated that the logic of the situation could impinge upon her revulsion, but this was the way her mind worked. It saw through the veil of sentiment, even when she wished it wouldn’t. Sakurako. Her self-named daughter. Now, a martyr in her war.

  The drone over the legislature showed the sniper teams acquiring new targets onstage.

  “Please take cover,” she told her stunned bandmates. “She … Sakurako forced them to demonstrate their evil in front of the world. They can never erase her now. Her name will echo down the years. Her sacrifice ends this phase. There is nothing more to do but run. Please, my friends. Take cover.”

  Gunfire blasted into the network communications room as the pair of BLADE-3s attacked from the smoke-shrouded hallway. Todai returned fire as Hitomi prepared an antitank missile that would destroy a battle android.

  On the bloody stage, Sakura’s flag lifted from behind the low wall. Asami stood tall and marched toward Sakurako’s body. The teenage girl knelt beside the martyred woman. She struggled to keep the flag aloft as she tried to remove the guitar strapped to the dead heroine.

  Fujio and Masashi came to her aid and held the flag steady. They had been crouching in fear, but now they faced the snipers.

  Asami removed the bloody guitar from Sakurako and slipped the strap over her own shoulders. She wiped at the tears streaming from her dark eyes and accidentally smeared bright blood on her pale cheeks.

  “Humble apologies,” Asami’s small voice said into the microphone. Tears trailed down her face, forming pink lines in Sakurako’s blood. “I have no golden voice and can only play a few simple chords on a guitar, but I stand here before you, and perhaps your chorus will hide my weakness. If we can sing together, it means—” She stopped, wiping at her eyes, her face crumpling in a sob for a moment before gaining strength. “It means … we are not defeated.”

  At least two snipers took aim at Asami as she held the neck of the guitar in one hand, the flag in the other, and began to sing.

  Chapter 53

  Sakura lost control of the Miyahara building as the Ghost Leech program started to shut her down. The infrastructure and camera feeds disappeared. The elevators were pulled away.

  Her own spy bugs in the stairs showed a stream of soldiers and explosive ordnance disposal androids coming down the west and east stairwells. Todai triggered the tear-gas bombs in the upper stairs, causing a delay in their advance as the soldiers evacuated the stairs to put on masks.

  “It’s now or never for the big explosives,” Todai said. “They’ll disarm the bombs if we let them advance.”

  “Do it,” Sakura said.

  With a grim nod, Todai detonated the explosives hidden on the underside of the stairs. The lowest two levels collapsed seconds before Kenshiro’s five-man team arrived in the danger zone. Everything shook as the stairs collapsed in a tremendous series of crashes.

  “I can blow the charges in the elevators,” Todai said.

  “Not an option,” Sakura said. “The explosives in both elevators were disarmed by the BLADE-3s on Vulture’s team.” She shared the video of the androids neutralizing the charges and physically removing Sakura’s hacking program from the panel. “Our spy bugs are still transmitting.” She showed Todai, Yuki, and Hitomi the raw video of the elevators. Both ascended toward sublevel three.

  Gunfire tore into the communications room and impacted several of the monolith-shaped server racks rising out of the floor. Sparks flew from the chrome-paneled machines.

  Yuki, Hitomi, and Todai kept out of the line of fire, but Yuki poked her M7 around the corner and fired off a few rounds, using her scope to target the BLADE-3s, both of which hid behind the corner of the east elevator hallway. The images from the targeting system appeared in the shared video channel all three androids monitored.

  “Sakura-san,” Todai asked. “How much more time do you need to finish your work?”

  “Ten minutes at least,” Sakura said, though she didn’t know for certain, as she didn’t have enough data yet. She had no idea if she could keep the Ghost Leech from erasing her for that long. It had already grown to gigantic size and sucked away huge amounts of processing power. The black worm had wrapped itself around her avatar as if it were the tentacle of an enormous kraken.

  Kenshiro and his team, along with a score of heavily armed regular army soldiers—many of whom carried suitcases of equipment and ammo—packed into the large east freight elevator on sublevel three. Kenshiro’s cyber eyes had a glazed look as he appeared to be reviewing something inside his Mall implant. The corner of one side of his mouth rose into a half smile. That look. It moved something inside of Sakura, some remnant of her sister. Every time they met, it seemed to be in the midst of a disaster. And perhaps that created the magic. Never knowing for sure what side he would choose or if either of them would survive the night.

  Reluctant understanding of so many darker and more fundamental emotions now filtered into Sakura’s quantum soul. Big sister thoughts. Far less comfortable than having Kunoichi carry them for her. So lonely, in comparison. It left her feeling stark and bereft but also wiser.

  To reinforce Kenshiro’s team, a group of a dozen regular army soldiers entered the central elevator at the lobby level. They packed into either side, keeping the large central area in front of the doors clear. When the doors opened, anyone in the center would be directly in the line of fire from Todai, Hitomi, and Yuki’s position within the comm room.

  Mall Vice President Stacy Richardson, the liaison to Victory Entertainment’s Music Division, accompanied the soldiers. Sakura found Ms. Richardson’s Mall account logs and read several neural texts recently sent through the network. If Sakura succeeded in sending out the evidence, Ms. Richardson would pay a heavy price, most likely her life. She had already been in the building and took the initiative to save her skin. She bullied her way into the elevator with the soldiers to “oversee the attack” on the network room. Without approval or orders, she put herself in charge of the soldiers, who would not even acknowledge her presence.

  The tall and gaunt American woman with her cosmetically enhanced breasts, wrinkle-free face, and long neck boiled with anger. She glared at the officer in charge, but he kept his eyes on the wall and did not blink.

  “Ms. Stacy Richardson is coming down here,” Sakura reported. Yuki and Hitomi reviewed the video from the spy bug.

  “Would you mind if I shoot her?” Hitomi asked. “That bitch was going to send all three of us to the Adult Film Division.”

  “I’m opposed to any more humans losing their lives today,” Sakura said. “Even her. She will betray her superiors if given the chance to cut a plea deal in court. Better if she survives and serves as a witness for the prosecution.”

  Bullets peppered the doorframe, covering the arrival of Ms. Richardson’s elevator, though chemical antitargeting smoke obscured the passage.

  Yuki fired back, her bullets traveling seventeen meters straight down the hall and entering the elevator. They hit the farthest interior wall and penetrated the metal.

  Ms. Richardson flinched and pressed herself against the far right corner. All of the soldiers kept out of the line
of fire as well.

  Several more rounds entered the comm room.

  “They’re using delaying tactics shooting at us randomly like this,” Todai said, “but they need to be afraid.” He attached the Gatling-style rotating minigun barrel to his right forearm and connected the ammo belt from the pack he carried. He unleashed over a hundred rounds of armor-piercing bullets. The two-second blast destroyed the back wall of Ms. Richardson’s elevator and tore a chunk out of the wall where the pair of BLADE-3s were hiding.

  Ms. Richardson screamed, and the soldiers pressed themselves against the walls. They were not coming out anytime soon.

  Todai stepped behind cover and lifted the .950 rifle in one hand.

  “Intimidation will only last so long,” Sakura said. “Kenshiro has a plan.”

  “Yes,” Todai said. “They’re waiting for him to arrive. They’re all following his orders.”

  “Kenshiro’s team has Advanced Light Antitank Weapons,” Todai said.

  “How many?” Hitomi asked.

  “I’ve counted six,” Todai said. “If they can see one of us, the ALAW will lock on. Not even I will survive a direct hit.”

  Yuki sent an animated worried face.

  “So we don’t let them see us,” Hitomi said. “I have one more trick.” She set up a small hologram projector creating bright, solid-looking images of Hitomi and Yuki smiling and waving in blue and red sequined dresses. The holograms blocked the opening of the door. Close up, they could see out, but from a distance the holograms would refract light and obscure the inside of the dark room.

  “Very kawaii,” Todai said, “but we need to kill Kenshiro and his team when they step off the elevator. I have explosives hidden in the ceiling tiles outside the elevator hallway where they’ll assemble. I’m going to kill them all. If Vulture’s going to pull a double cross, he’d better get to it. Otherwise, I gotta turn that foul-mouthed cyborg into miso soup.”

  His brutal preemptive strike tactic made Sakura question him being on the mission. Too many humans were going to die because she had taken too long to hack into the Mall network, and now they had no other choice but to kill the attackers.

  Kenshiro, his four heavily armed mercenaries, and a score of JSF Army soldiers arrived and exited the east elevator. The spy bug in the car and the one in the hall tracked their progress as they entered the thick white smoke and partially disappeared.

  “We have to do it, Sakura-san,” Todai said. “He was my friend and yours, but he’s coming to destroy us. Preemptive attack is our best strategy. The soldiers are one thing, but we’re about to have two dozen BLADE-3s on us, and we need to wipe these biological pieces off the board.”

  Pieces off the board, she thought. Like this was a game and their lives meaningless. But Todai had seen war, true war, where all the tender emotions and hopes had to be shut down. Win if you could, retreat if you couldn’t, but always inflict as much damage as possible upon the enemy. Always sell your existence at the greatest cost in life, material, and morale as possible. A human invention, and yet the least humane act imaginable.

  She had to delay them and figure out a way to delay the onslaught of the Ghost Leech, which had nearly penetrated into her control center.

  Sakura reached out with an audio call to Kenshiro, routing it through Todai’s communication link to the military network. She masked it as a call from Miyahara Security Command.

  “This is Vulture,” Kenshiro said.

  “Vulture, this is Spirit,” Sakura said. “Don’t hang up.”

  A pause. “You’re in so much trouble,” Kenshiro said. “You’re not supposed to play with other people’s toys or go into their room without permission.”

  “I want to negotiate our surrender,” Sakura said. “Please contact your superior. We’ll hand ourselves over to you, all of us, but I require assurances from Sinji Natsukawa himself that my companions and I will not be deleted after we are taken into custody.”

  “Hmm,” Kenshiro said. “Sounds interesting.”

  A female JSF soldier sent a pair of cricket-sized flying-drone cameras into the smoky hallway, and they stayed low. As the tiny drones approached the door, they were forced to leave the smoke. Hitomi and Yuki blasted the spy drones out of the air.

  The BLADE-3s fired back, but Hitomi and Yuki had already pulled their guns out of harm’s way.

  “Hold your fire,” Vulture told the pair of battle androids. “Sakura, I’m disappointed in your resolve. I thought you were hard core. Are you playing a game with me? Kunoichi wouldn’t surrender if the mission wasn’t done.”

  “She’s gone,” Sakura said. “I had to fully power down and when I came back, my sister was erased. I’m alone now.”

  “That’s fucked up. I liked her a lot. She was my kind of crazy.”

  “She liked you too, more than any other human.”

  “That’s sweet,” he said. “She was my favorite android, except for Todai 3465, but he’s not even sexy, and his taste in music is dog-shit bad. He likes Nickleback.”

  Todai heard the comment and reached for a fragmentation grenade to lob down the hallway. Men were about to die because Kenshiro insulted the android’s taste in music.

  “Stop!” Sakura sent an urgent neural text to Todai, who halted an instant before unleashing hell.

  Todai made a growling noise and sent a text to Sakura. “Kenshiro knows I hate Nickleback with a passion. He’s being cruel, but I’ll save the grenade for later. Or was he sending a secret message?”

  “He appears to be an asshole who cares more about money than honor or friendship,” Sakura said. She didn’t want to believe that. Could he be sending a message?

  “If you want to talk surrender,” Kenshiro said, “let me get my boss on the line.”

  “I’m here,” Sinji Natsukawa said. He had apparently been monitoring the entire conversation—just as Sakura suspected. “Sakura, stop your intrusion into the Mall, lay down your weapons, and leave the comm room immediately. You have my promise that you and your accomplices will not be deleted.”

  “Thank you, Natsukawa-san. I’ll tell my companions the terms, then we are coming out.”

  “No delays,” the CEO warned.

  “Of course,” Sakura said. “We surrender and are coming out now.”

  Chapter 54

  Sakura did nothing but continue her work taking over the Miyahara communication system. She relinquished as many duties to Yuki and Hitomi as possible. They had each taken control of three large server arrays, boosting their abilities dramatically, giving Sakura more processing cycles to wrestle with the Ghost Leech. Together, the three sisters continued to turn on the Japanese communications network.

  The cover from the smoke grenade began to fade after half a minute.

  At Kenshiro’s direction, one of his men hacked into the lock of a service door. The passage led to mechanical rooms adjacent to the east wall of the network communications chamber. A hole could be blown through a wall to gain entrance and a flanking position. It had been Sakura’s backup plan if they failed to get in the front door.

  Time ticked onward as the gigantic system lurched and accepted her new administrative program.

  “You’re messing with them,” Todai said. “Nice delaying tactic.” He played “Got the Time” by Anthrax.

  “Yes,” Sakura said. Incoming data established a solid eight-minute time estimate for full control of the international Japanese Mall network, less for the domestic. She shared the clock with Yuki, Hitomi, and Todai. “That is how long we must last.”

  “We’re going to need to improvise a lot more to survive eight more minutes,” Todai said. “This Kabuki show’s about run its course.”

  Comm chatter indicated the two VTOLS from Yokota Airbase hovered over the building and were dropping a total of twenty-four BLADE-3s on the roof.

  “Sakura, surrender now,” the CEO said.

  “Natsukawa-sama,” Sakura said. “About the murder at the protest outside the National Legislature.” She show
ed him a drone feed with the camera focused on the bloody stage.

  “What of it?” he asked.

  “Watch.”

  Asami sang with the bloody guitar draped over her shoulders and Sakurako’s body at her feet. Tear streaks ran through the bloodstains on her face, but she did not falter. Fujio held the flag now as the girl held a microphone in both hands and sang softly. She turned “We Will Fight” into a ballad, a love song, a rallying cry for the people who joined in, adding half a million voices.

  Masashi, Fujio, and Takashi stood beside Asami, singing along.

  Snipers took aim at all of them, but they stood bravely. A line of fans dressed as Sakura marched onstage and stood behind them. If Asami fell, any one of the fans would take her place.

  “Natsukawa-sama, I have a gift for you. All of the recordings of you giving illegal orders. In return for them, I wish for you to call off any further sniper attacks on the protestors. I’ll end the protest and send everyone home. All you have to do is send me a file of your verbal command to cancel any more lethal force orders. I also wish to have the on-site commander receiving the order and agreeing to follow it. After that, I’ll send you the files of you giving the kill orders and stop all activities here and come out. I’ll have the protest break up, and this day will be over.”

  “Those weren’t the terms agreed upon,” the CEO said.

  “Apologies, Natsukawa-sama, this is part of the assurances I require before we surrender,” Sakura said.

  “You’re stalling,” the CEO said. “No deal. Vulture, proceed with your plan. Take them all out. Now.”

  “Affirmative,” Vulture said. “Sorry, Sakura, you missed your chance to live another day.”

  “So did you.” Sakura felt failure, shame, and extreme disappointment as she prepared to kill humans of her own free will. The spy bug outside the elevator showed the young male and female soldiers who looked to Kenshiro and his team of special operators for guidance. So many families would be shattered, and she would become a true killer, hated for what she had done.