Cybernetic Samurai

by Victor Milán

  Database guardians, private and governmental alike, issued periodic hopeful pronouncements that the unbreakable security system had been devised. Anonymous datajackers sneered back to the broadcast and datanet news teams that no walls ever constructed could keep them out. In truth the situation shifted from day to day, if not minute to minute. It was in the entropic way of things that the long-term advantage lay with the data intruders, the sneakers and the peekers and the would-be whistle blowers. But it was never easy.

  Not for humans. TOKUGAWA was something else entirely. If he lacked a human body, arms and legs and eyes and ears, he had senses and abilities of his own that no human could match. His being had been molded to emulate a human one, it was true, but the matrix that encompassed him made a vital difference. To run through the global data network was as natural for him as it was for the child he’d played in his early scenarios to run through the bare earth yard of the medieval peasant’s hut in pursuit of a silk rag ball. He was not himself a machine, but was palpably of machines; his intuitive touch with them was surer than any human’s could be. What would take the most skilled human programmer hours of work to accomplish, he could bring about by a mere exertion of will, directing expert programs to the task at hand instantly, effortlessly.

  For quite a while he had been in the habit of poking into protected files out of sheer deviltry and curiosity. Few rebuffed him. Here at last was a challenge worthy of his ability: to break into the Hiryu network, subvert it, and suck the juice from it: to redress the wrong of an autumn day. Hiryu’s data defenses were among the best in the world.

  And breaking through them was no trouble at all.

  Communications between the captive complex and Hiryu’s headquarters in Osaka passed through the YTC communications network—under TOKUGAWA’s direct control. Every time someone in the citadel accessed the Hiryu network, TOKUGAWA could simply piggyback in, gaining instant access to anything the user had access to—which, in the case of Toda, was most of Hiryu’s database. But even that was unnecessary. After his conference with Aoki Hideo and Shigeo, TOKUGAWA set a trapdoor of his own on communications going into and out of the Citadel. Anyone else attempting such a crude maneuver would have set alarm bells ringing throughout the system—but since TOKUGAWA controlled the bells, too, that didn’t pose much difficulty. Inside of an hour he had Toda’s hypersecret access code—and about three-millionths of a second after that, he had virtual control of the entire Hiryu computer system.

  What he was actually going to do with that awesome power was something that had to be carefully worked out with Aoki and their overlord. In the meantime TOKUGAWA faced a problem that promised a greater challenge.

  MITI.

  * * * * *

  “I’m a student of people,” Toda Onomori remarked, leaning back in the gel swivel chair in his subterranean office with his fingers laced over the hard dome of his belly. “’Watching people is my hobby.” Stacked in a chair to one side of the room, Major Craig nodded. She smoked, holding her cigarette between thumb and index finger, ember toward her palm, shielded instinctively from view: a combat veteran’s reflex. Before her FedPol days she’d been one of the first women to see action in the American armed forces, in the counterinsurgency campaign in Costa Rica.

  Toda’s expression was somewhat set today, as if someone had poured Jell-O in the pool of his composure. In fact, the rodent teeth of Chairman Ogaki had been worrying his buttocks considerably of late.

  Six weeks had passed since the capture of Yoshimitsu Citadel. The press, which had initially applauded bringing the maverick to heel, was growing restive; the attack on YTC had unleashed a wave of inter-zaibatsu violence across the home islands, and the Ministry for Internal Development was gleefully accusing MITI of letting slip the dogs of anarchy.

  A particular point of contention was the supposed secret project on which the Yoshimitsu engineers had embarked. The justification for Hiryu’s totally illegal seizure—duly contested in the courts by the holdouts on Kyushu—had been that nothing as potentially powerful as an artificial being should be left in the hands of men too selfish to subordinate their own desires to the needs of the nation. And nothing, it was beginning to appear, was exactly what had been in Yoshimitsu hands. Even doddering old Kawabe, figurehead minister for International Trade and Industry, was asking hard-edged questions of his fire-eating subordinate.

  Unused to such attention, Ishikawa Nobuhiko in turn cranked up the heat on Ogaki Mitsuru. The ministry had reacted to Hiryu’s unauthorized attack on Dai-Nihon with benign paternal indulgence. If, however, definite headway weren’t soon made regarding TOKUGAWA, proof offered either of its existence or otherwise, father MITI would frown on his prodigal son.

  Ogaki was no computer scientist. He was an expert in optics, the field in which the company now called Hiryu Cybernetics Industries had actually made itself prepotent following the Second World War. Though the interests of both Hiryu and its chairman had diversified considerably since then, Ogaki retained an almost fanatical interest in his original field. He had designed and built a number of astronomical telescopes, laboriously grinding the lenses and mirrors by hand; he was a passionate stargazer, the pride of whose life was the fact that he had a minor comet named after him, and that his departure to attend a weekend convention of amateur astronomers in Kobe was being delayed had added a touch of acid to his usual asperity when he passed on Ishikawa’s ultimatum shortly before.

  Still feeling its unfamiliar sting in his rump, Toda Onomori was thoroughly out of sorts. “People,” he said again, aspersing by implication his superior’s inexplicable interest in points of light in the nighttime sky. “That’s what I know. I’ll get results from this turncoat scientist of ours, Major; never fear.” Craig drew on her cigarette and watched him without speaking.

  Toda’s com/comm unit announced Takai Jisaburo’s arrival at the entrance to the nerve center. Craig said nothing, having been informed a second earlier through the bone-conduction speaker snugged behind her right ear. She had a communications network of her own, to which even her boss wasn’t privy. CYA: the way the game was played.

  Takai entered in the uncompanionable company of a pair of Craig’s security heavies in dark blue jumpsuits. He performed a perfunctory bow. “Mr. Chairman,” he said with a ragged attempt at brusqueness. His clothes were rumpled, his face a composition of hollows and unaccustomed shadows. He had lived with fear and frustration for six weeks. During that time he had been allowed to talk to Taro and Yoriko some six times. And he had given up demanding to know what had become of Elizabeth O’Neill; he’d realized, belatedly, he didn’t want to know the answer. He did know that he was through truckling to this toad Buddha.

  Toda gazed at him with half-closed eyes. “Ah, Dr. Takai. So good of you to call on me. I trust you bring news of success?”

  Takai blinked. He had been summoned here, and now this sinister smirking creature was acting as if the meeting had been Takai’s idea. Almost able to see the defiant wind puff out of the man’s sails, Toda refused to permit himself gratification at the effect he’d created. It was such a simple trick, childish almost. Outmaneuvering this scientist was no great victory at the best of times; when Takai served the ministry as part of the fifth-generation project, the dynamic Fuchi was ramrodding ICOT, and a man’s status was determined by ability, not seniority or skill in intrigue. Takai was a babe in woods Toda Onomori had grown up in.

  “I—that is, my staff is following up a number of very promising leads. We theorize that the events surrounding the transfer of power here at the citadel may have frightened TOKUGAWA. Shocked him. He may have withdrawn into himself, hiding—”

  Toda opened his eyes wide. It was as effective as a shout; Takai’s tongue tripped over itself and his words rolled away like a ball down a hillside. “We are speaking of a computer,” Toda said, no longer murmuring, “and you are a computer scientist. Why have you not simply programmed the device for compliance?”

  Defiance had sublimed awa
y from Takai. “But, Mr. Chairman, it’s not that simple! We tried that in the very first hours after you took over. TOKUGAWA didn’t respond. If anything’s going to work, it’s going to require great subtlety, great patience.”

  The eyelids descended. The man is actually panting. That satisfied Toda that Takai was giving his utmost, at least. But intentions didn’t concern him; only results. “I understand there’s one expedient you haven’t yet tried.”

  Takai’s brows cramped together. “Sir?”

  “The Kliemann Coil,” Major Craig said. “The rapport device O’Neill was so fond of.”

  Takai blinked. His tongue poked out between his lips, gray from too much smoking and too little sleep, moistened the lips. “But that’s—not practicable. It’s unreliable. It was a very, uh, experimental piece of technology. We had… a good deal of trouble with it. One of our technicians was incapacitated by the device the first time it was tried, and Dr. O’Neill herself collapsed once while using it.”

  “Ah, yes. Dr. Ito’s unfortunate mishap. The proximate cause, I recall, of your transfer of loyalties.” Toda paused to let the barb sink home. Takai’s thin body jerked. “No matter. I fail to understand, Dr. Takai, why such an important pathway hasn’t been pursued.”

  “He’s chicken.” Craig’s voice vibrated with scorn.

  Takai looked from one to the other with hunted eyes. “But we don’t know how to use the coil. O’Neill had a—a special feel for TOKUGAWA. He—it was her creation. She was able to do things with him that none of us could. You can’t imagine how delicate a matter we’re dealing with here, Toda-sama. If we intrude in the wrong way, we might crash TOKUGAWA irretrievably. There’s no way to tell—”

  Toda lifted a broad flat hand. “Relax, Doctor. I understand perfectly. There’s no need to trouble yourself further. In fact, I think you’re long overdue for a rest from your long and dutiful exertions.” Takai stared at him, shoulders slumped, mouth slack and moist in foolish grateful relief. Really, this is almost too easy. “We’ve been thinking of bringing in someone to lift the burden of running the TOKUGAWA lab from your shoulders. There are several scientists in Southern California we’ve been speaking to who are quite amenable to the idea…”

  He looked away from the scientist. Abjection was not a pretty sight.

  * * * * *

  In silence so oppressive that even the never-ending hum of the citadel’s ventilation system seemed hushed, Toda Onomori stood on the gallery with hands clasped behind his back and watched medics in green smocks remove the body from the gleaming throne of the Kliemann Coil.

  Craig’s mercenary security troops stood in indigo clumps on both levels of the lab, nervously fingering SCK 9mm submachine guns hung around their necks on long Israeli-style slings. Though the last of Colonel Tranh Vinh’s assault team had pulled out within hours after the fall of YTC castle, rumors had still filtered like colored ink into the capillaries of the grapevine. Disquieting things were whispered about the TOKUGAWA lab, and the major’s hard-eyed veterans looked almost as ill at ease as the technicians who had actually witnessed what happened in the laboratory moments before.

  The techs finished prying fingers from the indentations they’d crumpled into the stainless steel armrests of the coil. Two husky medics manhandled the corpse from the chair, and Toda’s nostrils pinched fastidiously as a vagrant air current wafted the rank odor of fresh shit up to them. The medics laid the body on a gleaming steel gurney, and Toda felt the people in the room instinctively drawing back from it like mercury from a fingertip.

  “Jesus Christ” a voice said in English behind Toda’s shoulder. Standing at his side, Major Angela Craig shot a warning glance back at the troops hovering behind them. Hardcore as she was, she wasn’t looking any too healthy, either, and a few small domes of sweat gleamed on Toda’s high forehead as he fought to maintain the mask of imperturbability that he cultivated as assiduously as Yoshimitsu Akaji had his beloved garden.

  Takai Jisaburo’s face had the look of a man who had popped the access hatch on Hell. Drained utterly of color, stretched to the farthest extremity: eyes open and starting from their sockets, jaws flung so wide they must have jumped their hinges, lines down both sides of the silently screaming mouth so deep they could have been cut with a razor. One of the white-coated Hiryu technicians turned away and vomited on the beige carpet; several people sobbed brokenly.

  “Son of a bitch died hard,” Craig said. Fishing a cigar from a breast pocket of her navy-blue fatigue jumpsuit.

  Toda rolled his shoulders in a languid shrug. “Just a traitor,” he said. “He seems to have saved us a good deal of trouble, since sooner or later we’d have had to deal with him anyway.”

  He looked mildly at Craig. “I have to give him this, he was right about the coil. It must be defective.

  “Have the body disposed of in the usual way.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Hiryu brought in a new man to head up the TOKUGAWA lab, a stout, round-cheeked, genial man named Imamura who was head of research and development for Hiryu Cybernetics Industries, He was one of the reasons Hiryu, having entered the highly competitive computer field, was so very glad of friendly intervention by the Ministry for International Trade and Industry. He held his position by dint of seniority and his adamant refusal to make waves. He had served a term with MITI, as part of the prestigious ICOT research team—but that was in the days after Fuchi, when it was obvious the race for fifth-generation supremacy was lost, and the inevitable bureaucratic entropy had set in. He took command of the imported Hiryu technicians and treated the Yoshimitsu technicians and scientists with genial camaraderie, as if they weren’t prisoners, serving virtually at gunpoint. He began his own plodding experiments to discover just what was what.

  And, to his astonishment, promptly received timid, fleeting responses like nothing he’d ever encountered before. The enigma of TOKUGAWA had begun to unravel.

  * * * * *

  Sitting in his office, up there at the top of Tokaido—the top of the world, when all was said and done—Ishikawa Nobuhiko felt well pleased with the state of things.

  He had chosen, he now felt, a particularly propitious time for bold action. Public opinion was especially fraught wound to a high degree of tension by world events, such as the destruction of the Jersey Lily in SoCal, or the expulsion of all Japanese nationals from the East African Union by Life President Achezi, following a disastrous defeat of Union forces by the South Africans on the Zambezi River in Mozambique, Achezi claiming the defeat had in part been caused by Japanese slipping information to the South Africans. A government announcement that a quarter of a million workers in Japan’s beleaguered aircraft production industry—fortuitously under the aegis of the Ministry for Internal Development—had prompted nationwide demonstrations against the use of Koreans in the labor force, including spontaneous outbursts against the YTC offices in Tokaido, which had required only the tiniest bit of stage-managing by MITI.

  So the response was generally good. Intellectuals paraded before the cameras in NHK’s studios to praise the Hiryu action as long overdue and shroud the blatant illegality of it in a mist of high-sounding syllables. Cartoonists for the government’s print and digital-graphic media dutifully portrayed the incident in terms of a hero representing Hiryu apprehending a dangerous law breaker or curbing a dangerous beast, labeled YTC—with, inevitably, a yen sign in place of the Y. Composer Gosen Zenzo announced a heroic ode for fifty-voice synthesizer entitled The Nation Awakens in honor of the event. The premiere of the five-hour piece in the shiny new East Sea Circuit Opera Theatre several weeks later prompted the shortest critical notice in the history of the prestigious daily Mainichi Shimbun: “The reviewer snores.”

  Foreign response remained critical, not to say abusive. The major exception, oddly, was both parties to the European war; both the PanEuropean Council in Amsterdam and the Pope, from a secret bunker somewhere in the Vatican Free State, issued similarly worded pronunciamentos praising the Japanese move in
curbing the “pernicious influences of free enterprise.” More typical was the response from North America, where all the Successor States—from the ultra-rightwing American Confederacy through revanchist “Canada” (as the former province of Ontario was styling itself) and PEACE to the Peoples’ Collective—denounced the action. Ishikawa didn’t mind their calumny in the least. Such universal criticism by gaijin could only bring the nation closer together.

  Now, rather less sanguine about Imamura-san’s qualification than either chairman Ogaki or his satrap Toda, he was withholding news of the latest developments in the TOKUGAWA Project from the press pending confirmation by someone who knew what the hell he was doing. Nevertheless, a flying investigation by a squad of topflight MITI scientists tended to confirm Imamura’s report: that the gleaming white hemisphere in the subterranean lab at YTC Citadel housed a true artificial sentience, a self-aware entity with cognitive and communicative abilities approximating those of a human four-to five-year-old. That was one of the reasons for Ishikawa’s reticence about going public—concern for what the nation would make of the fact that Japanese blood had been spilled and Japanese laws broken for possession of a child, rather like American parents waging a custody battle with lawyers and hired kidnappers. Sophisticated and well educated as they were. Ishikawa doubted the Japanese people would fully grasp the implications of even the most limited form of artificial awareness. In the meantime, best not to exacerbate the situation, particularly in view of the fact that there was no one to stand trial for the murder of Yoshimitsu Akaji. He was content to let matters lie until the truth was known and a splashy cover story could be put together.