Cybernetic Samurai

by Victor Milán

* * * * *

  “Fire fighting.” Michiko sat with her feet on the desk of the small office she’d commandeered on the second aboveground floor of the Citadel, perusing sheafs of printout. The windows were open on a wet cool spring morning. The smells of rain and the fresh lush first-growth grass sauntered in on the breeze. Yet Michiko felt as if she could barely breathe. Tension gripped her throat like a hand.

  “I beg your pardon?” TOKUGAWA’s voice said from the com/comm console.

  “Fire fighting. That’s what we’re faced with now. My dear brother ‘shed his playboy image to prove himself an able executive,’ it says here,” she said, quoting the New Japan cover story on Shigeo. “But it sure wasn’t long before incipient paranoia warped his critical faculties way out of shape. His crazy campaign against every zaibatsu in the islands wasn’t the only axe he had to grind with reality, it appears.” She tossed the folded fan of paper on top of the clutter on her desk. “Christ. He treated our own people like serfs. Our own people. Some of them are six months in arrears. If it weren’t for company housing and automatic credit at the commissary, half of them would have starved to death. They couldn’t even go somewhere else—not with the new labor laws our beloved coalition government rammed through the Diet after Fudori came tumbling down. The bastards have got workers bound into their jobs like medieval peasants to an estate.”

  “There are the government-sponsored work farms.”

  Michiko grimaced. “Does the phrase ‘concentration camps’ suggest anything to you?” She tossed her head angrily, cleared a sweep of black hair from her eyes. “That’s what finally pushed America over the edge to dictatorship, when the Left and the Right patched up their differences and settled down to forbid everything that wasn’t compulsory.”

  That seemed to require no response, which TOKUGAWA made.

  After a moment Michiko riffled the printout with her thumb. “No, we take care of our own; we don’t ship them off to slave-labor camps to do backbreaking shitwork a robot could do twenty times faster.” She chewed lightly at a thumbnail. “I wish I knew how we were going to do it.”

  She gazed out the window through gauzy curtains of drizzle. Takara-san looked green and smug in his new spring coat; one reason she’d picked this office was that she could see the mountain that was the only thing about this godforsaken pile she truly loved. She thought of the clearing she’d spent so much time in as a girl and wondered if she’d get to see it again. No time. There’s never any time.

  “You know what Shigeo’s buccaneering did to us, don’t you? We’ve got amazing assets, but we’re illiquid. Bone dry. And with the economic situation the way it is… Every zaibatsu’s turning into an armed daimyate right out of the Onin War, whether it wants to or not; if any dog won’t show teeth, the others rip him apart, and with every minister in the cabinet backing his own favorite, there doesn’t seem much chance the dogfights will end soon. Overseas, every country with more than six surviving citizens is sharpening its knives for a rematch of the Third World War, and they’re all casting envious looks toward what civilization we haven’t kicked apart yet. I just don’t know where we’re going to come up with the money.”

  She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, slid her palms up and combed fingers through her hair. “Shit. I don’t blame you—but what did Aoki think he was doing, letting Shigeo get us into this hole?”

  “Aoki-san served his master obediently. Just as—just as I did.”

  She glared at the blank screen. “That’s a crock. He was a man—a damned good one—not a lapdog. And I’m not quite sure what you are, my friend, though superhuman seems a fair guess.” She shook her head. “I’m going to have to do something to clear your head of this samurai crap you picked up from O’Neill. It’s romantic, ridiculous, and largely untrue.”

  She waited expectantly. TOKUGAWA said nothing. She made herself unwind a quarter turn. Jesus, what’s the matter with me? Here I’m trying to pick a fight with a computer, And poor TOKUGAWA won’t even snap back at me for putting down his beloved creator, because that would be disloyal.

  “What a bloody mess,” she said aloud. “I wish poor Aoki hadn’t killed himself.”

  “He didn’t.”

  Her brow came down as if squeezing sudden pus through her hot black eyes. “That bastard, Shigeo! I suspected that Hideo was pushed from that chopper”

  “I’m afraid I misled you, Michiko-sama,” TOKUGAWA said slowly. “Truly, Aoki didn’t kill himself; he jumped, but I think it was only to save me from having to kill him.”

  “What?”

  “Your brother ordered me to kill Aoki-san, as he had ordered me to kill the others before him: Hosoya, Kurabayashi, Imada Jun.”

  “And you did it? You murdered those men?” She jumped to her feet.

  “I did. And I… killed your brother as well. The Flying Swallow Trap did not deploy by accident”

  She grabbed the hair over her ears. “My God. My God. What are you?”

  Before TOKUGAWA could answer, she jumped up and fled from the room.

  * * * * *

  Fine colloidal rain filled the rooftop garden. It brushed her face like a curtain as she stepped out of the pavilion that hid the elevator. She hugged herself tightly below her small breasts and listened to her footsteps echo as she walked along the veranda.

  A wrinkled ancient man stood at the top of an old-fashioned bamboo ladder fixing the shakes of the pagoda-style roof. He smiled, displaying a set of yellowing store-bought teeth that looked as if they dated back to the Second World War and nodded vigorously in lieu of a bow. She made herself smile and nod acknowledgement.

  The garden was full of workers undoing the neglect of six months. To her left, several men repaired the artificial cascade, long choked with debris; others cleared leaves and dead brush, pruned back overgrown shrubbery, pulled up weeds by the handful. One old man stood shaking his head at a dead plum tree, tears running down his leather cheeks.

  For some reason she couldn’t articulate even to herself, one of her first moves on returning to the Citadel had been to order that her father’s garden be restored. She’d tried to make herself believe it was a humanitarian gesture; the small army of specialists who had tended the garden when her father was alive had been reduced to living off the charity of the company store in the little employees’ village a few klicks down the Hagi road, old men dying one by one of uselessness. But that wasn’t the whole story, she knew.

  A pair of gardeners stood barefoot in the cold stagnant water hard by the footbridge, pulling up water weeds with bamboo rakes. They bowed and smiled as she passed. She nodded again, smiled again. The lady of the manor accepts the homage of her servitors, came a thought that tasted stale as the water in the overgrown pond.

  She walked along the bank toward the pond. My father died somewhere nearby. She wondered at the dryness of her eyes. The manner of his death caused her a certain embarrassment, guiltily acknowledged: the old man had gone to his death like the hero of a cheap chanbara epic. With a sword in his hand like a samurai—as if a man of his caste could even legally have possessed a katana, after the risen peasant Hideyoshi held his great sword hunt to ensure that none of his compeers could follow him up the ladder of Japanese society. Grand and ridiculous, and why couldn’t they have let him die in bed?

  On the pond’s edge she paused. It stank. I hope they get the watercycling system up and running again soon, she thought, though I don’t know why it matters. I don’t know if I’ll ever come up here again.

  Backtracking, she turned up and right onto the little path, scarcely discernible beneath a mat of long-fallen leaves, that led to the tea pavilion. She climbed up, helping herself by grabbing roots, and impressed despite herself that her father routinely made the climb at his age. Wet branches slapped her in the face.

  In the doorway of the pavilion she sat with elbows on knees and stared into the undergrowth crowding the bases of the trees of the artificial woods. What am I doing here? she asked herself. I’m
a scientist. I should be in my own lab, peeling back the underlayers of reality, not playing businesswoman in a gloomy stone fortress.

  But that was crap. She’d beaten the order expelling all Japanese nationals from Indonesia by a week. Not that the edict would have applied to her; she and the rest of the physics faculty at the university were a jewel the regime wasn’t about to pluck from its own crown, even if the old Nobel-nominate Gang of Four were dispersed to the winds. But could she have stayed?

  Life had mutated into waking nightmare. The riots, the repression, the looks of fear set permanently in the faces of students and faculty. The disappearances. Who? No, you must be mistaken. We never had anyone of that description here. Her prize graduate student, a young woman from Kota Bharu in what had been Malaysia, beaten and raped by the secret police. They wouldn’t treat her at the hospital, and she bled all over my bathroom. No. She had nowhere else to turn but this place that had never been home.

  TOKUGAWA’s a killer. The totality of realization burst in her guts like a bomb. He killed Imada and Kurabayashi and Hosoya… and poor dear Aoki… and my brother. Her eyes stung suddenly, and she tightened her brows like a compress. I haven’t wept for my father. I’m damned if Ill waste tears on Shigeo!

  Shutting her eyes seemed to help. She’d overreacted to TOKUGAWA’s revelation, she knew. But it was a body blow to learn that the friendly, innocent, eager-to-please golden youth of the hermitage had executed men she had lived with, even grown up with. She recalled playing Tarzan on Aoki’s knee while he sat grave as Buddha, and this time she didn’t begrudge the tears.

  It was a bad movie plot: computer turned killer. Somehow before, when TOKUGAWA confessed having killed Ogaki and Toda and the MITI men, it had seemed different, remote somehow. Unreal, until it suddenly came home.

  She looked up. The mist thronged round like ghosts. Poor TOKUGAWA, she thought. I was wrong. He’s still an innocent. As much a victim as Aoki. And I acted as if he were a monster.

  She stood. A low-hanging branch spilled water down the neck of her blouse, an icy rivulet. She jumped, shivered, then laughed, surprising herself. I’ll go down and make amends with TOKUGAWA, she thought.

  And then I’m going to do something about that damned bushido gibberish O’Neill stuffed his mind with.

  * * * * *

  “Dr. Yoshimitsu.” The thin man in the old-fashioned white lab coat smiled and blinked at Michiko through his equally anachronistic glasses, thick as the bottoms of bottles. “Good to see you here in the lab.”

  She gave him back the smile with a nod. “Dr. Nagaoka. I trust your work goes well on the HIDETADA and MUSASHI projects.”

  “Oh, yes, very well, very well indeed. Thank you.”

  He veered off, suddenly shy, and she climbed down the metal stairs to the lower floor. Inside she was cursing her brother again. Of Elizabeth O’Neill’s first team only Nagaoka and Wali Hassad survived the Hiryu interregnum. Shigeo had called Hassad back from Kyushu and promptly fired him, telling him to his face that he had no need for gaijin scientists. Nagaoka Hiroshi he reduced to the status of software-maintenance tech in Fukuoka, a job for which the anthropologist wasn’t even qualified.

  Michiko reactivated the push to create two more artificial entities, in the Floating World and at Fukuoka. To head the project she wanted Hassad, but she couldn’t find him. Things in North America were crazier than usual. Texas had invaded the People’s Collective of New Mexico, and rumors scurried through the net that Mexico was covertly backing the Texican incursion in retaliation for PC raids into Sonora, and that the infamous anarchist activist Morgan Walker would make temporary peace with his archenemies, the Collective—who had a price of ten thousand grams of gold on his head—to repel the invasion. Fear that war would spill out of the arid Southwest had the whole continent agitated. Michiko couldn’t turn up any trace of the Palestinian-born scientist.

  So she put Nagaoka in charge. He was the least well versed in computer science of any among O’Neill’s elite, but that didn’t matter. The hardware work, totally beyond his scope, was mostly done; what remained consisted primarily of refining O’Neill’s original stochastic technique for evoking awareness. That in turn was being accomplished primarily by TOKUGAWA himself, incorporating the suggestion Michiko had made to Dr. Hassad, an eon ago, to replace the unwieldy Fourier equations with an atomic-decay random-number generator Nagaoka’s post was mainly a sinecure—to inspire the technicians putting the finishing touches on the project, and to make restitution for the humiliation her brother had subjected him to.

  She settled into the coil with a greater-than-usual thrill of anticipation; not fear, any longer. What whipped her pulse to a gallop was the experiment she was about to perform.

  The dome descended, cutting off vision of the lab. She felt the phantom touch of the coil’s field on the naked surface of her brain and expanded outward beyond her body. She didn’t go into communion with TOKUGAWA, not yet. There was work to do first.

  With a thought she summoned a file into the IPN. Hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence, she reviewed the file, created a new one, grafted the two together. She was a more-than-competent programmer herself—you had to be, to ride the edge of quantum theory—but O’Neill’s team had been as far ahead of her in their field as she was of Newton in hers. The code she was revising had taken hundreds of hours’ work by some of the hottest cyberneticists alive to create. Her alterations took a matter of seconds.

  Here was the cause for excitement. Gen-5 utility routines existed by the score to help nonprogrammers write programs. This was light-years beyond. She had merely to form a thought, a conception an intention; and TOKUGAWA—all unaware, he assured her, keeping his consciousness focused elsewhere—made it real. The potential took her breath away.

  There—it was done. “Peekaboo,” she said, slightly giddy. “Look into my eyes…”

  +

  The page’s heart pulsed with forbidden excitement. The whole castle was alive with it: the taiko, ruler of all Japan, had come to visit…

  Feeling somehow as if he’d lived this scene before, the page hid in the darkened garden and watched through the window of the pavilion as the two most powerful men in the nation held colloquy over a pair of splendid swords. His heart jumped into his throat as he watched Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the man who would be shogun, turn his back on Tokugawa Ieyasu, whom everyone knew longed to make himself master of Nippon. And Ieyasu stood with the blade naked and eager as a woman in his hands, and yet did nothing…

  Hideyoshi left the pavilion, rolling his brusque way through the moonlit garden toward the brightly lit castle and the revelry it contained: From the doorway Ieyasu gazed after him until he was out of sight. The page stayed hidden in the bushes, waiting for his master to leave so he could take his own covert departure.

  Instead, the lord of the Kanto turned and looked out the window, straight to where the page was cowering.

  The page tried to make himself smaller. I’m caught, he thought in lambent terror, and he wondered what his fate would be: beheading, dismemberment with a bamboo saw, boiling alive.

  Ieyasu emerged and crooked two fingers. “Come here,” he said, gruffly but not unkindly. “I know you’re there. And I know why you’re there. You will bear my name someday, four centuries after I’ve gone to be a kami—or to the Buddhist hell, as the case may be. So I think it appropriate, since you’re to be my successor in a manner of speaking, to explain a bit about how things really go in this world.”

  Not believing, scarcely understanding, the page came forth , brushing bits of leaf from his clothes. Ieyasu stood waiting with his hands tucked into the wide sleeves of his shitagi for warmth. The page blundered through carefully tended undergrowth to join him on the path. He noticed the daimyo wore the two Muramasa swords tucked through his sash.

  Ieyasu walked deeper into the garden, the page at his side trying not to stumble in his nervousness. “You watched the little drama in the pavilion, did you not? Of course you
did. What did you see?”

  The page opened his mouth. What came out sounded more like a frog being stepped on than speech.

  “Never mind. I’ll tell you what you saw. Our regent gave me the opportunity to strike him down and seize power myself. I was so overawed by this display of personal power that my treasonous resolve evaporated and I could do no more than pledge my fealty anew. Thus it transpired, eh?”

  He emitted a guttural laugh. “Nonsense. I was startled, I confess; I never thought Hideyoshi had the style for a gesture like that. I do admire him, damn him. But admiration didn’t save his life.”

  Forgetting himself the page stared at his lord in consternation. “Consider. The country’s pacified, but barely. Hideyoshi has many allies. And there remain lords of the ilk of Uesugi and Mori, who have apparently submitted but secretly await their opportunity to turn on the kwampaku, the regent. If I were to strike Hideyoshi, here and now, would they not rush to avenge him—each hoping that the zeal with which he dragged me down might propel him upward?

  “Our contentious lords of Nippon resemble grains of that useful gift of the gaijin, gunpowder. It ill behooves me to strike a spark.

  He stopped, gazed fondly up at the castle. “Since—just for this evening—I have the ability to see the future, let me describe it for you. Hideyoshi will die a few years hence, universally mourned—most of all by his loyal servant Ieyasu, who will become one of the guardians of Hideyoshi’s heir Hideyori. In fifteen years, I’ll cast down Osaka Castle and Hideyori with it. Toyotomi’s line will end, and my descendants will rule Japan for two centuries and a half.”

  The wind softly rattled the leaves of a maple overhead. Ieyasu smiled and shook his head. “Loyalty? Bushido? Dreams. Gekokujo is the reality: those below rising against those above. That’s why Hideyoshi disarmed the heimin—and it won’t keep them from rebelling with monotonous regularity.

  “Expedience. That’s the key to us Japanese—those of us who walk with both eyes open. See that you do. I’d hate to have you disgrace the name we both bear.” He stepped back and gestured brisk dismissal. “Go now. Back to your future world—so unlike the one into which I was born, and so very much like it.”