Ghost in the Shell

by James Swallow

  Ouelet had been troubled by rumors around the building, talk among the security staff that Mira had been suspended from her duties at Section Nine and was now being considered a flight risk… even a potential threat.

  She didn’t want to believe that. She didn’t want to consider that she had been responsible in some way.

  The scientist kept replaying their last conversation over and over in her mind, wondering if there was something else she could have said, some way she could have handled things differently so that Mira would not have vanished into the night.

  Cutter was watching the Major through the large observation window separating Ouelet’s office from the operating room. The doctor entered her workplace and joined the executive by the window.

  Cutter noted the small-scale model of Project 2571’s unadorned shell on her desk. There was also a humanoid skull and a little vial of yellow medication. Ouelet wasn’t one for decoration, so clearly the shell and the skull had deep meaning for her. The medication was no doubt because Ouelet didn’t yet understand what was going to happen.

  “Why is she sedated?” Ouelet asked.

  Cutter gave her a patronizing look. “She’s been turned by a terrorist. But you know that already.”

  Ouelet said nothing. Instead, she sat down at her desk and looked away.

  “You should’ve called the first time she came to see you,” Cutter continued. His tone was acid. “Instead, you gave her information.”

  Ouelet’s temper flared. This connard had seriously expected her to betray Mira to him? “What makes you think you have the right to tell me what to do and what—”

  Cutter spoke right over her. “2571 took us close.” Ouelet know that what he meant was not her definition of success—a perfect meld of human and synthetic—but rather a creation that would be totally loyal to Hanka. “It’s time to move on to the next iteration.”

  The color drained from Ouelet’s face, horrified at the implication in Cutter’s words. “2571 is not a failure. I’ll delete all the data and reprogram her. She won’t remember him at all.”

  But Cutter had made up his mind. “No. No, no, no, no, no. You download all the data on the terrorist, and then I order you to terminate.”

  Ouelet was stunned. She knew that she had heard Cutter correctly, though she desperately wished that she hadn’t. She felt close to tears. “What?” She felt sick, hollowed out by what Cutter was demanding from her.

  “You’ll build one that’s better,” Cutter assured her.

  She tried to bargain with him. “I’ll delete everything.”

  Cutter knew as well as Ouelet did that even a total memory wipe didn’t guarantee that rebellion wouldn’t form in the subject’s brain all over again. “You’ve deleted before.”

  Mira was Ouelet’s creation. Cutter was overstepping his authority here. “She’s mine,” the doctor countered.

  “No,” Cutter said. “She’s a contract. With me.”

  Mira was more than an experiment that had come to fruition; she was a living being. Ouelet would not kill her. As head of Hanka Robotics, Cutter shouldn’t want this either. “We succeeded,” she told him.

  Cutter inhaled angrily, mustering another retort.

  “She’s more than human,” Ouelet continued. “And more than AI. We changed her entire identity. But her ghost survived!”

  “Her ghost is what failed us,” Cutter spat back. “We cannot control her. She’s no longer a viable asset.”

  Cutter took a vial of red liquid from his pocket. Ouelet knew exactly what the substance was. Applied to a quik-port, it would cause all functions to cease, both biological and cybernetic. He placed the vial on Ouelet’s desk. “You should be the one to do it.”

  * * *

  Ouelet entered the operating room and began working at the computer terminal attached to the Major’s head.

  The Major held on to a kernel of cold fury at the indignity of her treatment. Her life and her freedom had been removed as cleanly as the flesh of the old, human body she didn’t remember, and there was nothing she could do to prevent it. She wondered what Section Nine had been told about her. Had Cutter convinced them that she had been suborned by Kuze, that she was now as much a threat as he was? Were they ready to shoot her on sight? Not Batou, never Batou, but the others… What did Aramaki believe?

  Ouelet was behind her, so the Major couldn’t make eye contact, but maybe that was just as well. “What are you doing to me?” Her words were slurred from the sedation.

  The doctor’s voice was soft and reassuring. “I’ll run the standard synaptic, upload your data on the raid. Find out exactly what Kuze told you.”

  “You know what he told me,” the Major retorted. She might be drugged, but she wasn’t so out of it that she wasn’t infuriated that Ouelet was still keeping up the pretense that the Major was mistaken. “The truth.”

  From the office, Cutter observed the interaction through the window. Why was Ouelet prolonging the inevitable? Guilt? Wanting to spend a little more time with her prized specimen before starting over?

  Ouelet typed more commands into the computer.

  “You’re deleting everything, aren’t you?” the Major said. She wondered what memories would be implanted this time. The same ones about the terrorist attack in the harbor, or some new scenario? It didn’t matter. Whoever she was now would be gone.

  “No,” Ouelet said.

  This time, the Major hoped Ouelet was lying. If not… “Make it so I don’t remember… you.”

  Ouelet winced, glad that Mira could not see how that struck home. Not that the doctor blamed her patient. Ouelet inserted a small tool into a hidden pin hole socket concealed within the Major’s black hair at the back of her head. With a high-pitched click, the tool rotated and the back of the Major’s skull opened like a flower, petals of artificial skin and polymer-ceramic skull plates peeling back to expose the dark titanium brain case beneath. Within the case, sheathed in a complex web of molecule-thin connectors, the Major’s organic brain was suspended in a bath of processing fluids and support nutrients.

  The Major began to recite the rote statement required at the start of every cyber-medical procedure. “My name is Major Mira Killian, and I…” she deviated from what she’d said every other time, “do not consent to the deletion of this data.”

  Ouelet used the manipulator tool to open a second hidden port beneath the brain case, presenting a receptor plug for an intravenous chemical line.

  “I do not consent,” the Major repeated. “I do not consent.”

  “We never needed your consent,” Ouelet told Mira, sadly. “Yours or anyone’s.”

  So the consent was just a ruse that Hanka used as a form of false reassurance, making their cyber-enhanced subjects compliant and trusting. Even that had been a lie. The Major realized out loud, “You’re killing me… aren’t you?” Tears welled up in her eyes. It wasn’t the prospect of death, but rather that everything she’d known was false. She had trusted Ouelet, having absolute faith that the doctor was saving what was human in her, keeping her human. Instead, she had been taking it away. Now it was going to end, and none of it was true. Perhaps she should be glad it was over.

  Ouelet saw the moment unfold in her thoughts before she committed to it. In an odd way, it was like watching a hologram commercial, a three-dimensional image moving through a series of preprogrammed motions over and over. Abstract and unchanging. In its own way, inevitable.

  Before her, Mira’s body lay tense and trembling against the support frame.

  Ouelet kept her hands low. She knew that Cutter was observing through the window. She did not want him to see that the vial she inserted into the injector was filled with yellow liquid, not the red he had given her. Ouelet did not speak as she attached the inoculation device to a syringe, then plunged the syringe directly into Mira’s brain.

  The Major gasped, reacting to the drugs.

  Ouelet replaced the portion of skull she had removed and stepped around the side of the
operating table, so that her back was to the observation window and Cutter beyond it. Mira could now see her face. She spoke very quietly. “Mira? Can you hear me?”

  Keeping her hand below where it could be seen from the other room, Ouelet pressed a button. The restraints unclamped from the Major’s skull, leaving her free.

  Cutter didn’t need to see exactly what Ouelet was doing to realize something was wrong. He turned from the window and moved to the office door.

  “Mira, this is your past.” Ouelet took something from her pocket and pressed it into the Major’s hand. “Your real past. Take it.”

  The Major looked down at her palm, not yet understanding. Lying there against her flawless artificial skin was an old mechanical key stamped with numbers, attached to a keychain with a fob bearing the inscription 1912 Avalon Apartments.

  She no longer felt drowsy and heavy. Instead, energy was coursing through her body, both its biological and synthetic components. Her limbs were free.

  In Ouelet’s office, Cutter pressed the button to open the door so that he could go into the operating room. The door remained shut. He began to pound on it. “Guards!”

  Ouelet swept the dazed Major’s legs off the exam chair and set her upright on her feet. “Come on, come on!” Ouelet entreated. “Come on, go!”

  Pulling Major along with her, Ouelet ran to the door. Two Hanka guards were standing outside. Ouelet gasped in dismay. The guards shoved her out of the way, charging at Major.

  The Major lashed out with a few strategically placed blows that laid both men out cold on the floor. In the doorway, she turned to look back at Ouelet. The doctor was sitting on the floor, not poised to run or even stand.

  “Go,” Ouelet said, tears coursing down her face. “Go!”

  The Major hesitated a moment longer, then ran alone into the corridor.

  “Hey!” a third guard yelled as he charged at her.

  The Major swung a truncheon that she’d taken from one of the downed guards in the operating room. The weapon connected solidly with the charging guard, the impact rendering him unconscious.

  A female voice spoke over the facility’s PA system. “Security alert on Level Twenty-Five.”

  A door swung open and another guard came running out, gun aimed. He shot at the Major, who threw herself to her knees and used her momentum to slide into the guard’s legs, knocking him over.

  He groaned in pain as two more guards ran into the corridor. The Major sprang up, using the baton to subdue one of the men as he fired his gun ineffectually. She grabbed the guard’s gun hand, struggling to control the weapon.

  “Initiating lock-down procedure,” the PA system announced.

  The Major squeezed the guard’s hand, his finger still on the trigger, shooting the second guard coming at them. The Major switched her grip on the guard she was holding and hurled him into the wall.

  “Please,” the PA system urged, “relocate to your designated safe room.”

  The Major took a moment to catch her breath and evaluate the situation. She ran back down the corridor and grabbed the guard’s gun off the floor.

  “Security alert on Level Twenty-Five,” the PA system repeated. “Please relocate to your designated safe room. Thank you for your cooperation.”

  Still trapped in Ouelet’s office, Cutter couldn’t quite believe what had happened. He knew Ouelet was arrogant, but this was too much. She had proved beyond a doubt that she couldn’t be trusted, in her judgments or her actions. He glared at her through the observation window as she got up from the operating room floor and turned to look at him. There was no apology in her face, not that it mattered now. She had put sentiment for 2571 over her professional obligations, over her duty to Hanka, over Cutter’s orders. It was unforgivable.

  Ouelet’s value was really only in what she had brought to the projects. Her research was at Cutter’s fingertips and there were many other genius-level IQs at Hanka Robotics that could pick up where she left off—less involved, less sentimental scientists who would relish the challenge of building his perfect soldier. In the end, the woman had jeopardized the entire program, out of her own weakness. Ouelet had never had a child of her own, and it was clear to him now that she had projected that part of herself onto the Major.

  “That’s the problem with the human heart,” Cutter told Ouelet. He raised his pistol and shot twice through the glass. Both bullets struck Ouelet in the left side of her chest. She lived just long enough to comprehend what had happened. She did not look surprised as she died.

  * * *

  Even at half her normal capacity, the Major was still a match for the best-trained human, and her hard-wired, combat-programmed training was now fully active. She attacked and disarmed the security personnel who crossed her path with ease. Her actions were rote and mechanical, operating on a level that was instinctive, beyond her normal thought processes. It was now simply escape, evade, and survive.

  In the Hanka parking garage, the Major found a motorcycle that suited her needs, a fat black Honda with plenty of torque. She jumped onto it and broke open the ignition control with a twist of her fingers, hot-wiring the system. The electric motor hummed to life and she gunned it, lifting herself off the seat and leaning into the handlebars.

  The parking lot guard tried to grab her. He caught the motorcycle’s rear frame and was dragged along behind it as the Major sped down the exit ramp. Once she was sure of her balance, she kicked the guard off, and he tumbled into the wall.

  The ramp emptied out into the downtown streets of New Port City and the Major turned the bike to blend in with the traffic, soon leaving the tower of Hanka Robotics far behind and out of sight.

  11

  FLASHBACK MEMORY

  Aramaki was normally hard to read, but Batou and Togusa, summoned to his office, could tell the chief was extremely unhappy. His words were more curt and clipped than usual, and Cutter was there via hologram, which never improved the mood of anyone in Section Nine. Worse, while Cutter sounded convincing, the story he told didn’t jibe with the Major they all knew.

  “I want to see her scan,” Aramaki told Cutter’s hologram.

  “She killed Dr. Ouelet!” Cutter exclaimed. Even if that were true, and Batou didn’t believe it, they should be allowed to see what had gone wrong with the Major’s cerebral enhancements.

  But Cutter did not want Section Nine anywhere near the Major. “You’re to have no further contact with her,” the Hanka CEO stated. “Hanka Security will hunt her from here.”

  Batou spoke up without asking for permission. “And what are their orders?”

  “To terminate on sight.” Cutter didn’t seem the least bit distressed by the prospect.

  “You want to kill her?” Batou exclaimed. “You built her!” He moved angrily towards the hologram, as though Cutter were physically in Aramaki’s office and could therefore be punched in the face.

  Cutter didn’t respond, but addressed Aramaki instead. “Have your sergeant stand down.”

  “The Major would never harm Dr. Ouelet!” Batou said, trying to make the chief see reason.

  Togusa put a restraining hand on Batou’s arm. “Come on.”

  “She’s not the Major anymore!” Cutter sounded irritated that no one at Section Nine had grasped this. “We have a Section Nine operative under terrorist programming. This goes public, your unit goes down.”

  So now Cutter was threatening to disband the entire Section Nine department should it prove an embarrassment to Hanka.

  Aramaki inhaled, then said, “You kill her, you kill us.” Even if the whole business managed to stay secret, Section Nine would fall apart if one of their own were officially murdered. The team wouldn’t work for Cutter if he had the Major’s blood on his hands. Batou’s respect for the chief grew.

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” Cutter said in a tone of false courtesy. Then his hologram cut out, dissolving into falling fragments of code that glittered before vanishing.

  Batou turned to the chief.
“So what now?”

  Instead of speaking, Aramaki reached behind his desk, opened a drawer and took out an old-fashioned revolver. Its leather holster was embossed with the image of a samurai with his sword raised above his head, about to strike at an enemy.

  * * *

  The Avalon Apartments complex was arranged in a towering set of rings. At one time, the design plan had called for an atrium with majestic trees in the middle of the circular walkways that engirdled each floor, but that notion had fallen by the wayside as the place grew cheaper and dingier. Now it just looked like some kind of giant upended tube. Characterized by crumbling concrete, rusted railings and lines of laundry hanging from windows, the Avalon was home to those who didn’t have the means to get themselves off of New Port City’s bottom rungs and had reluctantly made their peace with it.

  The residents went about their morning, and none of them spotted the lithe female figure loitering in the shadows. None of them saw her fingering the key in her hand, turning over the question of what it might represent in her thoughts.

  She entered one of the buildings around the circular courtyard and took a rattling elevator up to the nineteenth floor. The Major could hear the tenants chatting or watching television through the poorly insulated walls.

  On the walkway of the floor below, a mother and her toddler emerged from another elevator. The child said something and the mother answered. Her words were unclear but the affection in her tone wafted up to the Major. A comedian was doing a routine on TV in one of the apartments; his patter brought laughter and applause from his studio audience.

  The Major found the apartment door of Unit 1912. She listened for a moment, holding her breath. Now she was here, she found herself frozen in a final moment of indecision. She truthfully had no idea what she would find on the other side of the door. It was ajar, and a cat ran out—a grey-and-black tabby with a blue collar, identical to the one in her glitch. The animal ran straight up to Major, winding around her legs, purring.

  Instinctively, she picked up the cat. “Hey, hey.”