Ghost in the Shell

by James Swallow

  The Major had stopped fighting Kuze and was listening to what he had to tell her. It was horrible, it turned her world upside down, but there was too much proof he was telling the truth.

  “Don’t… take the medication… that they give you,” he warned her. “They use it to suppress your memories. Your shell belongs to them, but not your ghost. Your ghost is yours. Remember that, and maybe you… can remember it all.”

  He might have said more, but a grenade blast tore one of the doors off its hinges. Batou and Togusa sprinted in through the roiling dust. Batou at once levelled his gun at Kuze. “Get away from her!” Batou shouted. “Get down on the ground… now!”

  Kuze pulled two Uzis, firing them simultaneously at Batou and Togusa until the weapons clicked on empty. The two agents ducked for cover and returned fire, but no one was struck in the exchange. Kuze dropped the machine guns, turned and ran, vanishing into the surrounding darkness. Somewhere down the hall, a door slammed.

  “Major!” Batou shouted.

  He was relieved to see that she appeared unharmed—but she was staring at him with distrust. In disbelief, Batou watched as the Major turned and fled through the doorway. “Major!” he shouted again. He got no answer.

  9

  STAND ALONE

  The residential tower was a city within the city, a self-contained vertical ark that could accommodate all the needs of any of its well-heeled occupants without them ever having to leave the confines of the building. Only Hanka’s best and brightest resided here, where each apartment was a penthouse in itself, an isolated retreat from the rest of the city’s tumult far below.

  From the outside, the hundred-story condominium was aesthetically pleasing. The windows in all of its many apartments were round rather than square, with the philosophy that the inhabitants could look outside and see a world that was, for them, literally globe-shaped. The theory was that this provided perspective, a calming start to the day and end to the night: this was where you were in the place of things.

  The interior echoed the exterior, walls painted neutral pinkish beige, with rounded archways instead of rectangular doorways. The archways led from the living room to several smaller spaces barely larger than alcoves, each one two steps up from the main floor, with walls that curved to a rounded ceiling.

  Genevieve Ouelet had made one of these smaller spaces her bedroom. The whole apartment was spartan, with no furniture save for bathroom fixtures and the yellow-tiled block for viewing holo data in the center of the living room. Ouelet didn’t even have a bed. She lay sleeping on a thin mattress covered with a nest of blankets on the bedroom floor, exhausted from the day’s horrendous events. Even the ceiling light overhead did not wake her.

  The Major stood quietly over the sleeping doctor. She had shown her Section Nine identification to the doorman, so he was obliged to let her inside. The Major had told the doorman that Dr. Ouelet was expecting her. Perhaps that was even true. She had never been here before. Something had always made it seem improper for her to cross the boundary between Ouelet’s working world in the labs and the office at Hanka, and the doctor’s personal world here in the tower.

  Ouelet would have slept through until morning, but she sensed something amiss. The perception pierced her dream state, enough to wake her. For an instant, Ouelet thought the shadow falling across her was a remnant of her dream. Then she saw it really was the Major, understood that she was awake, and gasped.

  “Oh, Mira.” Ouelet sighed in relief. “Oh, my God, you’re safe!” She expected a friendly response and waited. When the Major didn’t speak, Ouelet filled in the silence. “You’ve been gone for hours!” She swallowed. “And no one knew where you were.”

  The Major said nothing. She just kept up her level stare, straight into Ouelet’s eyes.

  “What?” Ouelet was pleading now. “You’re scaring me.”

  When the Major stepped forward, Ouelet instinctively retreated, scrambling backward on hands and bent knees until she was in the bottom of the wall’s curve. This was totally unlike Mira. “Calm down,” the doctor instructed, trying to contain her fear.

  The Major finally spoke, and her tone was calm enough. It was her words that frightened Ouelet. “How many were there before me?”

  Ouelet contemplated her options and decided there was no point in trying to deflect the question. The Major clearly knew there had been experimental prototypes before her, robots implanted with human brains. She tried to answer in a way that would blunt the Major’s anger. “The intricacies of shelling your mind, it had never been done before. It was inevitable there would be failures.”

  “How many?”

  “Dozens,” Ouelet conceded.

  The Major wanted the exact number. “How many?” she repeated.

  “Ninety-eight unsuccessful attempts before you.” The enormity of the admission fell between them. Ouelet’s regret appeared genuine, but the Major didn’t care.

  The Major’s head moved up and down, less a nod than an attempt to contain her rising outrage. “You killed ninety-eight innocent people.”

  “No, I di—” Ouelet stammered over her protest and tried again, “didn’t kill anyone. You wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t exist if it… if it weren’t for those experiments.”

  “‘Experiments’?” Now the Major was the one backing away. She felt an urgent need to get away from this woman, this lying, manipulative hypocrite who had positioned herself as a surrogate mother. “Is that what I am to you?”

  “No!” Ouelet protested.

  But the Major turned and walked out of the bedroom.

  Ouelet scrambled to her feet and rushed into the living room after her, so quickly that the bottom of her lightweight night-robe lifted and floated behind her as she ran. “No, Mira!” The Major wouldn’t meet her gaze, but stared pensively into the middle distance.

  Ouelet began anew with her explanation. “Sacrifices were made.”

  “Where did the bodies come from?” the Major wanted to know. “Where did I come from?” She turned to Ouelet and advanced again.

  “Mr. Cutter brought them to us,” Ouelet said. Her tone was defensive. Then it became ashamed. “I didn’t ask questions.”

  The Major no longer knew whether to be angry or despairing or just numb to the core. Every fact she had known about herself was falling away and breaking. “The harbor! My parents. The way they died. Did that happen?” The memories of the refugee boat, of people drowning in the harbor, still seemed real, but they felt different from the memories of the pagoda and even the cat, the memories in the glitches.

  Ouelet took her time before she finally confessed, her eyes downcast. “No. We gave you false memories. Cutter wanted to motivate you. To fight terrorists. I didn’t approve. It was cruel, but my work, it was important, and you were born. You were so beautiful.” Ouelet reached out a hand to touch her splendid creation, the child that had been birthed by her work, but the Major grabbed her hand to stop her.

  She had been lied to by Ouelet: about her memories, her parents, the reason that she existed. The Major was so livid she could barely get the words out. “Nothing I have is real.” Before she could lie to her once more, the Major said flatly, “I found him.”

  Ouelet knew the Major was talking about Kuze. Her face reflected her dismay. “I told you to be careful.”

  “You knew where he was the whole time,” the Major accused. “You built him.”

  Ouelet desperately wanted Mira to understand what had happened with Kuze. “He had a violent, unstable mind. The cerebral connections wouldn’t hold!”

  The Major began walking to the door. Ouelet continued, pleading her case to Mira’s back. “I tried to save him!”

  This might have been Ouelet’s cruelest lie yet. “No,” the Major said. “You left him to die.” She went out through the apartment door. Ouelet’s lip trembled as she lowered her head in despair, but the Major never turned back.

  * * *

  A pair of hycops, helicopter drones with airplanes
tyle wings, soared above New Port City, training red searchlights on the ground below as they conducted radar scans of every floor of every building.

  In the streets below, Batou monitored the scans as he maneuvered his car through the traffic. “Nothing on Kuze yet, sir,” he reported to Aramaki over the mind-comm. “Checking upper zones next.” He was more concerned with the answer to his own question. “Is there any word on Major?”

  Aramaki’s voice betrayed nothing. “She’s gone. Off-grid. Silent.”

  So the Major had cut herself off from all communications and computer networks, and was thus untraceable. Unless you knew her as a person. As Batou did. “Copy that, sir. I know where to find her.”

  * * *

  At the bottom of New Port City Harbor, the water was dark and cold, a world separate from the one above. In the depths of the night-dark sea, there was only the faint shimmer of shifting tides, and scant light trickling in from far above. The Major hung in blue-black water, slowly descending as gravity pulled her down. As she went deeper, the sounds of the distant city began to fade, gradually to be replaced by a thick, all-encompassing silence. Her eyes opened as she sank.

  Despite the pollution that had killed a lot of life here, hardy thick kelp stretched up from the bottom and large, bioluminescent white jellyfish were all around. Unlike humans, the jellyfish were not taken in by the Major’s exterior. They sensed that she was mainly inorganic matter, which made her neither prey nor threat. When they brushed against her, their trailing poisonous tentacles did not sting.

  The Major would not have cared if they had. This was her chosen place of contemplation, where she could think without distraction or disturbance. There were no lies here, no deceptions, no contradictions, only silence that had been much the same since the Earth had cooled eons ago. There was no data here, either, nothing that could have made the Major what she was. It was a world in which Ouelet, and Hanka, and all the rest had no place. Finally, she reached the muddy floor of the channel and let her body settle to the ground, causing clouds of disturbed sand to billow about her.

  Her dark hair floated around her head in small tendrils, making her look a bit like some exotic marine creature, as she stood upright on the harbor floor, reaching inside herself for some fraction of serenity. Down here, she needed no apparatus to breathe. Down here, she did not need to pretend she was a normal human being.

  Here and here alone, in the nothingness—at least for a time—she could be herself.

  The Major recognized the shadow of a watercraft above her. She wore a wetsuit with diver’s flippers, and now she used them to paddle and push as she ascended. Dawn had not come yet. She surfaced next to the small boat bobbing in the harbor’s mild currents. Far off on shore, a dull rainbow glow came from the city’s lights and holograms, reflecting in the low waves. White lanterns on the boat’s sides provided more distinct illumination.

  At one time, the little old-fashioned craft had been a tugboat. Batou had bought it on a whim, intending to take it out on fishing trips, but the choppy waters around the bay and the baseline toxicity in the local marine life disabused him of that idea. He had a line over the side nevertheless, but he mainly used the boat for drinking and generally getting away from people. From here, it seemed like the shore was one massive urban sprawl extending as far as the eye could see. An endless city, from horizon to horizon. Like the Major, he felt the need to leave it behind on occasion.

  He saw her head emerge from the ink-black depths of the channel. She glared, looking annoyed to see him. He waited on the wooden deck while the Major pulled herself in over the side and landed gracefully on her feet. Her epidermis reacted to the cold and she shivered. “I didn’t ask you to come here,” she said.

  “You never ask,” Batou replied. “But I always do.” There was no resentment in his words. He tossed her a towel, sat down next to a fishing pole and took a swig of beer from a can.

  “Did they send you to bring me in?” the Major pressed.

  Batou took another swallow of beer. “I’m just here to fish. Did you see any?”

  The Major wasn’t having his casual act. “You’re a company man, you follow orders, so if they ordered you to kill me…”

  Batou was hurt, but he tried to keep his tone light. “Stop saying shit like that. You’re gonna piss me off.”

  He grabbed another can of beer. When he turned to offer it to her, she shook her head, so Batou tossed the beer can back into the cooler.

  “What’s it like down there?” He’d always wanted to ask her, but somehow never had before.

  “It’s cold and dark. Just a million miles away. No voices. No data streaming. Just… nothing.” She took a breath. “It scares me.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  The Major did not respond at once. Batou took another swig of beer. Then she answered him. “It feels real.”

  Batou had something more urgent he wanted to ask, about the Major’s unexpected reaction to Kuze. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “I don’t know who to trust anymore.”

  He felt saddened, and a little uneasy. “You trust me, right?” Batou had to ask.

  The Major turned and studied him for a moment, then dipped her head in a nod. “Yeah, I do. I just don’t like it.”

  Batou couldn’t help grinning. The Major was all business. Any emotion, even trust, was bound to vex her, but that was one of the things he liked about her. Any loyalties she had were hard-won, and true.

  The Major stepped into the boat’s tiny cabin. It didn’t have a door, so she kept her back to Batou as she peeled off the dark blue wetsuit, then toweled herself dry. He turned in the opposite direction to give her privacy. It would be completely improper for him to ever think of the Major in a romantic sense. Even so, Batou was acutely aware of her appearance and the exceptional curves of her female form, and he would be mortified if he ever did anything to alert her to that awareness.

  “I need you to take me back,” she told him. “There’s more I need to find out.”

  “Sure.” Batou swallowed the last of his beer.

  * * *

  Ouelet felt even more miserable than she had before, in part because what had happened during the Major’s visit had had time to fully sink in, and in part because there were now two Hanka guards posted in her apartment, watching her every move as she communicated with Cutter over the comm.

  Cutter was in his office. His holographic image perfectly conveyed exactly how angry he was. “Dr. Ouelet, what have you told her?”

  He was asking both about Project 2571 overall and Kuze specifically. “She knows,” Ouelet replied into the comm. There was no point in trying to keep this from Cutter; he’d find out anyway.

  “I’m bringing her in,” Cutter informed her.

  * * *

  Batou went forward to secure the bow line as the Major leapt off the boat. She reached for the vial of medication she kept with her, no matter where she was. It was time for her morning dose. She had the vial in her hand—and then remembered what Kuze had said about the medication’s true purpose. Right now, she was more inclined to believe him than the Hanka doctors. Instead of absorbing the medication via her quik-ports, she threw the full vial into the bay.

  She heard a vehicle motor. Hard-earned reflexes made both the Major and Batou react. They were halfway toward reaching for their sidearms when a Hanka security team poured out of a jeepney. The private soldiers wore black ballistic armor and masks, and were armed with machine guns, which they pointed straight at the Major. She might have been able to take all of them on by herself. Had this been part of a mission, she certainly would have tried. But Batou would be caught in the crossfire, and if by some miracle he survived that, he’d be arrested for trying to help her.

  The team leader spoke aloud into his comm. “Hanka Security to headquarters. We have the Major.”

  10

  DISCONNECT

  Once more at Hanka Robotics, literally the last place she wanted to revisit, the Ma
jor was strapped to a gurney, being wheeled down a corridor by a red-gowned surgical team. She could do nothing except wonder if this would be like the last time it happened, when she’d been put under and awakened to a set of new, false memories.

  Then she glitched. The two teenagers she’d seen in her vision of the burning pagoda were here, in a Hanka surgical prep room. Both of them were restrained at the waist, and tied down to separate gurneys. They reached for each other, hands just touching, but the contact was short-lived as the doctors pulled them apart.

  “Motoko!” Hideo cried out.

  The girl sobbed. She and Hideo had been so happy, and then—why had they been taken? Why were they here? The Major was only observing the glitch, but she knew what was in Motoko’s soul.

  “Motoko!” Hideo cried again. He reached for her.

  She tried to reach for him. “Hideo!” She was disconsolate.

  “Let’s go,” a male doctor said. Hideo’s thrashing, grasping arm was pulled back. The glitch ended. The Major didn’t feel as sure of Hideo’s emotions as she had Motoko’s, but she still empathized with how the young man in her vision had felt. She was alone in Ouelet’s operating room for the moment, but at least she was sitting up in the exam chair rather than lying flat. The Major was sedated, woozy from the drugs and restrained by a device clamped around the upper portion of her skull. She tried to crane her neck for a look through the observation window into Ouelet’s office, but the angle was wrong, and besides, the apparatus around her head made it difficult to bend her neck. The sedatives made her feel as though her body and limbs had been filled with cement.

  Snatching a few hours of troubled, turbulent sleep had not helped Genevieve Ouelet to salve her conscience, so she turned back to the single thing that could give her peace—the work.

  Returning to her lab in the pre-dawn hours, she had set to processing the analysis of a new neural substrate software model, but even this could not stop her focus from drifting. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw Mira Killian’s face, filled with raw hurt and accusation.