Cybernetic Samurai

by Victor Milán

  He reached the glass-box apartment complex in which he lived. No blocky graceless danshi, this, with plumbing that began to fail before the first occupants moved in, and galvanized metal outlets for the smoke of the hibachis that provided most of the heat and cooking for the occupants jerry-rigged out the windows to draw brush strokes of black soot up raw concrete flanks, but the exclusive domain of MITI brass. Since Minister Kawabe lived on his estate in the fashionable Kamakura district, the luxurious penthouse on the twenty-third floor rightfully belonged to Ishikawa Nobuhiko. Moving Doihara Kazuko in with him hadn’t been much of a production; as his assistant she’d rated a relatively sizable apartment just six floors beneath his.

  He smiled on a transient thought of Kazuko. Strangely, her actions during the Yoshimitsu takeover had somehow broken down a barrier between them, permitted them to find one another as they never had, as coworkers or lovers either one. She had, after all, acted in what she saw to be the interest of the nation in attempting to defy him—and she’d been right, he saw that now. Punishing her for patriotism would mean return to feudal days, the times before Unification when a man’s loyalty went to a daintyo without thought of the nation—a recidivism his critics had been shrilly accusing him of attempting since early this evening.

  Weariness surged, threatening to swamp him. He shook it off. Tempting to give way to the clamor of the mob and resign. He wondered if they were worth the anguish, his imperial dreams for nation and ministry.

  A gang of workmen engaged in street repairs impossible during daylight hours paused in their work near the apartment’s entrance to offer respectful greeting to the administrative vice-minister. Even the workingmen know me, he thought proudly. He smiled and nodded acknowledgment. This is no time for weakness, he thought, and strode resolutely up the steps.

  A slot waited beside smoky-looking armored-glass doors to swallow the identification cards of those seeking admittance to the building. Ishikawa had to go through no such rigmarole. He simply strode up to the door, was identified visually by both humans and fifth-generation routines monitoring the security pickups there, and the doors swished open for him so that he entered without breaking stride. He walked the plastic runner laid coyly across lush maroon carpets to the elevator bank, commanded an elevator in abstracted voice.

  Vibrations shivered up through the soles of his feet. He felt more than heard a deep thrum, like the ringing of a great brazen gong deep in the earth. Earthquake! he thought, eyes darting from side to side. The muscles of his legs quivered with the need to run, to race outside the confines of the building before it collapsed on him. Modern Japanese architecture was designed to withstand quakes, especially since the war. But in his marrow Ishikawa had the fear every dweller in the megaplex lived with, of the stupendous Tokai quake long predicted by seismologists, which would release as much energy in the blink of an eye as a thousand Third World Wars in the very heart of Tokaido and bring the stoutest buildings smashing down in heaps of cement and glass and ruptured frail protoplasm. Kazuko, he thought.

  No second shock came. The vibration hovered in the air about him, diminuendoing, and for some reason he was reminded of the sun’s ringing astronomers described. Nothing, he thought. Just a tremor—

  The elevator door opened. From his eye’s left corner Ishikawa saw the work gang on the street, ghosts glimpsed through gauze, pointing upward and shouting without sound. Light fell on them from above, strange and harsh even through the polarization of the armored glass around the lobby, as though the full moon hung on the spike of the apartment tower had suddenly grown fiendish bright, discolored. He ran to the sliding doors, thrust them open with his hands when they failed to give way rapidly enough, stepped out into a street full of dancing yellow light, like the light of a paper lantern at a village festival enormously magnified. He looked up.

  Fire sprouted from the summit of the apartment like a bougainvillea blossom, Streamers of yellow-white flame splashed down the precipice of glass, and a rain of fiery droplets descended, consumed before they fell halfway to earth. Dense smoke spilled across the swollen impaled moon.

  “A helicopter!” one of the workers cried, voice trip-hammering with excitement. “A terrible thing! He just flew into the top of the building. Nobody could have gotten out.”

  “I hope there wasn’t anyone in the penthouse,” remarked another calmly as sirens began to wail from within the building.

  “Kazuko!” Ishikawa screamed and ran slipping up the icy steps.

  * * * * *

  A slot ate Ishikawa Nobuhiko’s identity card, regurgitated, and let him in; the Gen-5 servant that opened the door of a vice-minister’s penthouse at his approach was not for this wretched cubicle on the eighth floor of the MITI apartment block. He entered, flicked on the lights by hand, slumped onto a plastic chair curved like frozen taffy. His net bag of rice, noodles, and vegetables he let thunk to the thin carpet by his feet. He lacked the energy to take off his snow-dusted overcoat, and the four paces to the cramped kitchen seemed the voyage of a thousand kilometers.

  His penthouse had been hell. A Tokaido Police Department helicopter had been making a routine sweep over the crater-front district when it suddenly and apparently of its own volition had nosed into the top of the apartment building; he’d heard the recording of the police pilot screaming, “I can’t hold her, she won’t respond.” Then silence. The chopper had caught its skid on the meter-and-a-half-high containment wall that ran around the penthouse balcony, tumbled in air, struck, and exploded. High-octane fuel burst through the shattered glass doors like a volcano’s pyroclastic flow, flooding the apartment with fire.

  And Kazuko. The little wall had saved her life—for what that was worth. Had it not tripped the helicopter, the craft would have crashed through the apartment like a kamikaze of old, smashing her before it exploded. As it was, only a few chunks of debris and shards of glass had struck her before the fire caught her up.

  The doctors said she had at least a 40 percent chance of survival. Cultured skin force-grown for grafting was a long-established medical technology, and the genocidal fire-bomb raids of the American war a half century before had given burn-trauma treatment a special honored niche in the Japanese medical curriculum. Fire & Rescue was one function that seemed immune to the dégringolade of Japanese society, and an elite heliborne emergency team had been on the scene within five minutes, bursting through the window at one end of the corridor and leaping into the building from a rope ladder, braving the clumsiness of bulky asbestos suits.

  It took four of them to restrain the administrative vice-minister of MITI, pounding his fists against a door sealed by the building’s emergency monitor, from hurling himself into the flames when the Gen-5 guardian opened the door to the firefighters. He wasn’t sure they’d done him a kindness.

  All night he’d hovered at the hospital where a team of doctors fought to save his assistant. They were still at it when he left at six in the morning to return to work at the ministry.

  His head swung lax on his neck. It was all coming down in ruins, everything he’d worked for, as surely as if the Tokai quake were cutting loose at last, The press—government organs as well as the independents—were pillorying MITI as they hadn’t since before the war, Prime Minister Fudori, crossing an abyss on a rapidly fraying rope, promised a full investigation into the YTC scandal, which meant a bureaucratic bloodbath. Violence flamed throughout the home islands as zaibatsu sponsored by MITI’s rivals savaged Trade and Industry’s pampered darlings. The ministry, Ishikawa Nobuhiko’s life, his world, had lost credibility, lost face. Barring some miracle, its power and influence in the nation was over; it might even be “reorganized,” that is, obliterated, its powers and duties stirred up and ladled out to extant ministries, or a new one cast to take its place. It had happened often enough before; and MITI had already used up its quota of good fortune by surviving the debacle of the trade war with America.

  Ishikawa’s only dream had been to make his ministry flagship o
f the nation. Now it was headed for the shoals—and Minister Kawabe, without ever directly saying so, had made it abundantly clear that he, Ishikawa, would go down with the ship. Much as Ishikawa wanted to believe the minister was turning craven to save his wattled old neck, even that consolation eluded him. He was certain the old man was availing himself of a chance to avenge the death of his friend Yamada, for which he blamed his administrative vice-minister.

  I tried to stand off chaos, he thought. Can it be, as poor Kazuko said, that I’ve asked it in instead?

  Wearily he rose. Snow had melted into the fur collar of his coat and puddled like spent semen on the colorless thin carpet. In his penthouse had been a doboshu robot who would take his coat and hang it in the bathroom to dry. No more. He was reduced to this cheerless closet, cold and bare, whose very heating was controlled—badly—by the building’s master system. He could conceivably have tried to bump a less exalted administrator from quarters higher up in the building—but he honestly didn’t know whether he had the pull any longer. He couldn’t face finding out.

  “Ishikawa.”

  His head snapped around, and he glared at the com/comm console on its little desk built out from the wall just past the orange plastic-covered sofa. “What is it?” he snapped, energized by anger; while he still held the title of administrative vice-minister for International Trade and Industry, he was damned if anyone was going to address him in that tone of voice.

  “This is TOKUGAWA”

  He stood very still. The Tokugawa family still existed, influential in Japanese affairs; yet he knew at once this had nothing to do with them. He knew who was speaking to him. Unreality caught him up in weightlessness like a dream of flight. “The tones and rhythms of your voice are fully human. Really very good, Dr. O’Neill is to be congratulated.” He rubbed his eyes. “So it’s true, after all. You hoodwinked those Hiryu fools, took them in totally, Made them believe you were no more than a child.”

  “I did, Ishikawa-san.”

  “And may I infer you arranged this afternoon’s transfer of power at YTC Central and Hiryu? I presume such is well within your capabilities.” He laughed. “I must say, TOKUGAWA-san, this is a pleasure unexpected in more ways than one. I predicted at the very outset that you were too valuable a tool to be left in the hands of a maverick like Yoshimitsu. I was right. It pleases me to know that.”

  He licked thin lips. “What do you want of me?” he asked, almost eagerly, anticipating the necessary, even the just, response.

  “Your life.”

  “Ahh.” The breath slid from him.

  “You are responsible for the deaths of Yoshimitsu Akaji and Dr. O’Neill. It is my duty to avenge them.”

  “That wasn’t my doing. I gave orders that the old man and doctor weren’t to be hurt. That damned mercenary, Tranh—he killed them, or let his men get out of control and do it.”

  “l don’t believe you.” A pause. “Very well. A psychological stress evaluation indicates you’re telling the truth—as you know it. Yoshimitsu Akaji died fighting the invaders in his own garden. Dr. O’Neill—” Despite himself, Ishikawa marveled. I hear real sorrow in his words, he thought, so like my own. “—was murdered by Toda Onomori and the American, Major Craig, with the concurrence of chairman Ogaki. They withdrew her medication and permitted her to die.”

  “Those bastards,” Ishikawa said sincerely, “those stupid, shortsighted bastards. And what happened to them? I take it their deaths weren’t… accidental?”

  “You are correct, Mr. Vice-Minister. Technicians installed small antipersonnel devices of the type called mini-claymores in the desks of both executives, believing them to be black box antibugging equipment. The work orders so indicated, as did the dummy casings that contained the units. I must tell you, Ishikawa-san, that my lord, Yoshimitsu Shigeo, has no knowledge of my actions in this matter. I bear full responsibility.”

  The tone of calm reasonability jarred Ishikawa more than any tirade could have. O’Neill-san crafted a mind in the image of a man, Ishikawa thought, but was it a madman?

  “I regret the necessity for the deaths of the two police officers in the helicopter last night,” TOKUGAWA continued. “I seized control of their craft’s autopilot; I thought that I had timed the crash properly for you to have reached your apartment, but apparently you were delayed—”

  “You fool!” Ishikawa shouted, his vision blurring. “You killed Kazuko!”

  “She was guilty.”

  “She wasn’t. She disapproved of the plan to take over YTC, She—she betrayed me, trying to warn you, to warn Yoshimitsu the attack was coming. Our security barely caught her in time.”

  There was silence. “I have reviewed the records of MITI security. They confirm your story,” the disembodied voice said. “I am truly sorry.”

  “That makes it better,” Ishikawa said bitterly.

  “You do not deny your own guilt, Ishikawa-san?”

  “No. I, and I alone, am responsible for the attack on Yoshimitsu Central. I accept full responsibility for the deaths of Yoshimitsu Akaji and Dr. Elizabeth O’Neill. I believed that I was acting in the best interests of the nation.” Bitterness again; “I believe now that I was right.”

  “Do you fear death, Mr. Vice-Minister?”

  “It would be a relief.”

  “Please go into the kitchen, Ishikawa-san.”

  Frowning perplexity, Ishikawa took three steps forward to the door of the cramped kitchen. The dining table had been slid out from its slot in the wall. On it lay a wakizashi, unsheathed, a piece of rice paper folded about its short, sharp blade.

  He bowed. “I thank you, TOKUGAWA-san,” he said, smiling. “You are most thoughtful.”

  CHAPTER 23

  In the presence of the surviving members of the YTC Board of Directors—Suzuki Kantaro, the acerbic union leader, had disappeared during the Hiryu interregnum—and the TOKUGAWA lab staff, Yoshimitsu Shigeo hung with his own hands a lacquered wooden rack on the wall behind the glabrous hemisphere of the Integrated Processing Nexus. On the rack he placed a fine wakizashi from his father’s collection, and below that, the priceless Muramasa long sword that Yoshimitsu Akaji had held in his hands when he died. It was a very somber ceremony, if a bit mystifying to most of those present.

  Yoshimitsu Shigeo found it all rather ridiculous. It was entirely Aoki Hideo’s idea. The old man had a way of knowing what he was talking about—though Shigeo intended to walk his own path from here on in. But Aoki, who understood TOKUGAWA better than he, strongly urged him to this rigmarole. What Shigeo did understand was how advisable it was to keep his bound demon loyal, even, indeed, at the price of making himself look silly.

  So TOKUGAWA received the dai-sho from the hand of his lord and became truly samurai.

  * * * * *

  Doihara Kazuko lived. When her condition stabilized, the doctors charged with her care received curious instructions.

  On a cold midwinter morning she was bundled up to the helipad on the roof of Tokyo Imperial University Medical Center and handed into the care of a gaggle of nurses and medical technicians, who carried her into a large passenger helicopter with the blue YTC logo blazoned on the side. It lifted with a thumping of rotors into a sky the color of blue ice, canted, and was gone.

  The Med Center staff scratched their heads. It was all highly irregular. Orders were orders, however, so they went below, went back to their duties, and forgot about it.

  * * * * *

  The wheel turned. The lurid seppuku—in this case literally hara-kiri, “belly-cutting”—of MITI’s once-popular administrative vice-minister formed a nine days’ wonder, eclipsed shortly by overwrought speculation concerning the fate pursuing the hapless ministry. In a matter of weeks four more members of the Oversight Council died in mysterious circumstances.

  Atsuji Shunko of Operations and analysis specialist Mitsui Toshio were killed with twenty-three other people when their packet jet crashed into Tokyo Bay seconds after takeoff from the new Tokaido Internati
onal Airport.

  Maejima Isamu was found dead in his apartment, apparently scalded to death in his shower.

  Cho Rokuro, the planning officer, was entering a subway car when the train started prematurely despite safety overrides on the doors. Five people were killed, and Cho badly injured. He was rushed to the new Todai Medical Center, where he received a massive transfusion. The blood proved to be of the wrong type. He died in convulsions.

  With his death shortly after the beginning of the new year, every member of the Oversight Council that had sat in judgment on Yoshimitsu Telecommunications late last summer was dead. Prime Minister Fudori’s fragile regime finally caved in under sensational accusations of death squads at work, punishing those responsible for the government’s embarrassment in the Yoshimitsu affair.

  One more datum might have added a vital piece to the puzzle. But its significance wasn’t widely appreciated. In mid-January, news hit the international datanet that famed Hessian siege expert Colonel Tranh Vinh of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam had been shot to death at a sidewalk café in Phnom Penh, along with his Lebanese-born mistress. His two executioners fled on foot into the crowd. Vietnamese police were making inquiries and expected to crack the case shortly. Fat chance; even in the docile capital of captive Kampuchea, the locals never knew the answers to any questions the Yuen asked. On account of the colonel’s notoriety the murders enjoyed a certain currency, but only a handful knew that the master merc had been involved in the original capture of YTC Citadel—and they weren’t talking.