Ghost in the Shell

by James Swallow

  The tenant of 1912, presumably the cat’s owner, came hurrying out of the apartment. “Oh, the, Pum—Pumpkin!” she called to the cat.

  Looking down at the walkway, where she expected the cat to be, the elderly woman almost collided with the Major. She was Japanese and looked to be in her sixties, slim, small, and well-kept. There was a proud and weary cast to her face. Unlike most people in the city, who wore muted, neutral colors, Hairi Kusanagi was clad in a stylish, if outdated, dress of deep greens, blues and purples arranged in a print that suggested elements of a folktale. Hairi was startled briefly by the woman holding her cat, but she straightened and smiled. “Oh, you surprised me.”

  She had a strong Japanese accent, but spoke in English, perhaps assuming that the Caucasian Major might understand her better that way. Pumpkin, nestled in the Major’s arms, gave a contented meow. “Ooh,” Hairi chuckled, “she likes you.”

  The Major didn’t know exactly how to respond to either the woman’s amiable manner or the cat’s placid acceptance. For that matter, she didn’t know how to explain what she was doing here. She couldn’t imagine they had ever met before—that would stretch coincidence to the breaking point—but the impression of the older woman seemed strangely potent, almost familiar, and the Major felt a flicker of confusion. Perhaps this woman was somehow famous and the Major had heard of her on the news? She also had an air of contained sorrow underlying her kindness. The Major began speaking before she’d determined what to say. “I was looking… for, um… ”

  Hairi didn’t seem bothered by the stranger on her doorstep. She stuttered occasionally as she spoke. “No, co-come in.” She opened the door wider and beckoned. The Major was so surprised that she stood where she was. “No,” the older woman said, “come, come. Okay.”

  The Major, still carrying Pumpkin, followed the woman into the apartment. It was small but neat, with artwork and photos on the wall.

  “Okay,” Hairi said. She turned to the Major. “Can I offer you some tea?”

  “Okay,” the Major replied.

  The older woman nodded, as though that was the answer she wanted. “Uh-huh.” She headed into the kitchen where she lit the burner under the kettle. Unlike the Major’s apartment or the homes of the Hanka scientists, this place was thoroughly lived-in. The paint on the kitchen walls was fading, but there were green plants in pots on the sill by the window’s wooden frame, hangers on a line that stretched along the ceiling, and colourful mismatched cups on the draining board. In the main room, cheap chairs flanked a square table that held a basket of citrus fruit. Hairi Kusanagi might be old, and she looked like she had regrets, but she clearly had a life.

  The Major set Pumpkin down. The cat promptly trotted through the open door of a bedroom. The Major looked inside, curious, and found that everything in the room was draped in plastic, to keep it exactly as it had been, so that neither dust nor the passage of time could harm it. The posters on the wall, the bedspread, the dolls on the shelf, the clothes in the closet all suggested that the room belonged to a teenage girl.

  Hairi appeared just behind the Major. “That’s Motoko’s room.”

  The Major stiffened at the name of the girl in her glitch visions.

  The older woman, as if anticipating a question, said, “My daughter died a year ago.”

  No wonder Hairi had an air of such grief about her. “I’m sorry,” the Major said, meaning it.

  “She ran away,” Hairi said. “She was difficult. And, uh, we fought.” She managed a chuckle at the memory.

  The cat was now on the bed, cleaning herself. The animal also seemed familiar to the Major, more familiar even than the glitch visions would explain.

  The older woman looked philosophical as she added, “But I guess we all fight with our parents, right?”

  The Major looked around and noticed a small bronze pagoda on a shelf in Motoko’s room. She stared at it. It, too, seemed very familiar.

  “Uh, please come and sit, yeah?” Hairi gestured for the Major to come out of the bedroom and sit at the dining table. The Major sat politely as Hairi retrieved a teapot from the kitchen, then sat across the table from her. All around the living room were framed still photographs. Almost every one included the same young girl, as a child and as a teenager. None of the images showed her past that point, however. The resemblance to Hairi was striking. The girl must be Motoko. If these pictures of her were taken just before her death, she had died young.

  The Major wasn’t sure how she ought to express her sympathies. She hoped the older woman would speak again. Hairi chuckled softly, but then smiled nervously and looked away.

  An awkward silence fell. When it was clear Hairi wasn’t going to speak up, the Major did. “What happened to her?”

  “Mmm, I don’t know.” The older woman’s chuckle this time was melancholy. “Um, the Ministry sent me her ashes, and they told me she took her own life. But Motoko…” She shook her head with certainty. “Ah, no, no, no.” Another chuckle, this one in recognition of the Ministry’s falsehood, one so obvious to her that it was bleakly amusing someone had dared to give it as an explanation. “I n-never believed them. Sh-she was happy… living in the lawless zone with her friends. She’d write her manifestos about how technology was d-destroying the world. Oh, then one day the police came… and they ran.” She paused. “It’s strange.”

  In the kitchen, the kettle started to whistle. Hairi went to turn the burner off, continuing, “I see her in so many young women. On the street, in my dreams.” She returned from the kitchen with the kettle in hand, pouring water into the teapot, “As if she’s still here.” She sighed, fond nostalgia coloring her speech. “Ah, she was fearless! A-and wild. You remind me of her.” The nervous chuckle came again. “Sorry.”

  The Major stood up. This was all very strange. “How do I remind you of her?”

  “The way you look at me,” the woman told her. There was strong emotion in her tone and in her gaze, but there was curiosity as well. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” It was an admission of despair. The Major suddenly could not bear to be here any longer. She did not know where to go next, or what to do with what she had found, but she felt she had to go at once.

  “Wait, wait,” Hairi called before the Major could reach the door. “Wait!”

  The Major stopped and turned to face her.

  “Will you come again to visit me?” the woman asked, hope in her voice.

  The Major was flooded with contradictory emotions—she felt that she would come apart if she remained any longer, and yet she also felt a pang at leaving. “I will,” she promised, and then left before Hairi could see the tears falling from her eyes.

  * * *

  Aramaki sat at his desk in the semi-darkness of his office, loading bullets into his old-fashioned revolver.

  Most of Section Nine had been deployed on individual search and sweep investigations, scouring the city for any sign of Major Mira Killian. A report from a police drone had turned up a possible sighting in the lower city, but it was a dead end. Aramaki was not surprised. The Major was one of the best operatives he had ever worked with, and he knew that if she wanted to vanish into the metropolitan sprawl and go unseen, then there was little they could do to find her. With a conventional fugitive, Aramaki could count on them, sooner or later, to make a mistake or overlook a crucial detail. The Major, on the other hand, simply wasn’t wired that way.

  But he knew her well. He knew that she would not disappear, not like this. Not without making things clear first.

  When she made contact, he was waiting for it.

  “Aramaki.” The chief’s name echoed through the ghostly pseudo-telepathic space of the mind-comms link. The Major was walking on the bridge heading away from the apartment complex, her black coat flapping in the cold wind. It hadn’t started to rain yet, but thunderclouds were piling atop one another in the sky. “Listen to me. I was never in a terrorist bombing. My parents… everything was data they installed in my mi
nd.” She took a breath. “And there were others. Runaways like me… considered disposable. Kuze was one of them. That’s why he’s coming. For Hanka.”

  Aramaki rose and leant on his desk, forming the words sub-vocally to be transmitted into his encrypted neural implant. “Can you prove this?” Aramaki asked into the comm.

  “Dr. Ouelet can,” the Major replied.

  Aramaki was blunt. “Ouelet’s dead.”

  The Major was too stunned to respond. Despite everything, Genevieve Ouelet had known the Major as she was now better than anyone alive, and she had saved her life in the end. The Major had thought Ouelet might get into trouble for engineering the escape, but she was sure the doctor was far too valuable to Hanka for her to be too severely punished.

  Aramaki broke into her reverie. “Cutter says you killed her.”

  She knew that Cutter was behind everything, behind the deaths of the runaways, the theft of the Major’s true identity, and now this. The Major told Aramaki, “Put me on the grid.” If she showed up on the computer networks, the help she needed would come to her. “I need Kuze to find me.”

  Aramaki walked to his office door, put on his overcoat and picked up his briefcase. His two assistants opened the office double doors to facilitate his exit. “Cutter will see you, too,” he told the Major.

  “I know,” the Major replied over the comm. “But I need to do this.”

  Cutter was already monitoring the conversation from his office, listening in on the Major and Aramaki through a surveillance cable he had plugged into his quik-port. He was not surprised that the unstable Major would seek out the even more unstable terrorist Kuze, but he was disappointed in Aramaki. Cutter had always believed that the old man put duty above all else. Of course, Aramaki might see his duty as being dictated by a certain version of the facts, but Hanka was the underpinning of everything in this country. His loyalty should be to his employer, the corporation, even when that meant embracing changes. Since it wasn’t he would have to go too.

  “I’m going to meet with the prime minister,” Aramaki told the Major over the comm. “Cutter will be held responsible for what he has done. He must be stopped.”

  The conversation ended and Cutter removed the monitoring cable from his quik-port. He sighed and said aloud, “The virus has spread.”

  * * *

  Aramaki’s beat-up brown sedan was in its usual space in the open-air parking lot next to the building where the Section Nine office was housed. Someone of his rank could have easily requisitioned a new model, even a limousine with a driver, but Aramaki hated ostentation, and he hated waste even more. The engine was still in top shape. Also, he had found that driving alone was an excellent way to clear his mind so that he could concentrate on what mattered most.

  He got into the driver’s seat, briefcase still in hand, and reached out to the Section Nine team over his mind-comm. He had little doubt that the link was no longer secure, but he had to risk making contact. Batou, Togusa and the others had to be warned. “All agents switch to mind-comms, now!” Tense, he shifted his briefcase to his right side as he awaited a response.

  Before a reply had time to reach Aramaki, the passenger window blew inward, shards of glass flying. A team of three assassins, each wearing a black military jacket and dark trousers, faces hidden behind full tactical masks, opened fire on the chief’s car with machine guns. Aramaki slid to the floor, holding his briefcase above his head. The assassins completely riddled the vehicle with bullets.

  When the machine guns at last stopped chattering and the car had more punctures than intact metal, the leader of the assassins took out his pistol and approached the vehicle. No one could have survived the barrage of gunfire, but it was necessary to check. The assassin reached for the door handle—

  The door flew open, slamming the assassin in the head. Aramaki could hear the man scream from beneath his mask. He emerged from his ruined car, completely unharmed, and fired his old .357 Magnum at the assassin. The revolver was virtually an antique in this modern era, but it still possessed incredible stopping power—and at close range it shredded the assassin’s body armor, blasting him back off his feet and into a heap.

  Aramaki had been put in command of Section Nine because of his clear strategic thinking, uncompromising work ethic and his seniority. Contrary to what people like Cutter might have thought, the chief had not been taken out of the field due to any fading of his abilities; age had not diminished him in the least.

  Now he used his considerable marksmanship and experience to employ his briefcase as a shield while the two remaining assassins fired at him. Aramaki aimed at the second shooter, who was still reacting to the thunderous reports of the old Magnum. The second assassin fell.

  Catching sight of his target, the third assassin opened fire, bullets clanking into the flank of the parked car. This time, Aramaki landed an aimed shot in the shooter’s chest, dropping him to his knees.

  The first man he’d shot was still alive and trying to get away across the asphalt, coughing up blood and retching as he crawled. Aramaki kicked him over onto his back, as one might flip over a cockroach, and gazed at the wounded man with something almost, but not quite, like pity. “Don’t send a rabbit to kill a fox,” he advised. Then Aramaki shot the assassin in the head.

  He snapped open the revolver’s cylinder and let the spent brass shell casings fall from his gun onto the dead assassin’s chest, then started walking at a casual pace toward the sidewalk. “We are burned,” he warned his team over the mind-comm. It wouldn’t count for much in a frontal assault, but at least they’d know not to walk into a Hanka trap and they’d know not to reveal anything over the comms that they didn’t want Cutter to hear. “I repeat. We are burned.”

  * * *

  Batou sat on the rooftop of the apartment building where he lived, enjoying the feel of the cool night air on his skin and the high view of the city around him. He’d brought the basset hound mix Gabriel home with him, and now the dog was thumping his tail at Batou’s side—until the dog smelled trouble and whined.

  “Shh,” he told the dog. He could sense the approaching hitmen as well, but didn’t want them to know it before he was ready. Batou’s pistol was concealed in his lap.

  * * *

  Togusa was eating dinner in a noodle shop. He glanced up at an overhead mirror, reaching for a concealed weapon at his waist as he saw the reflection of an armed man coming up behind him. Suddenly he twisted in his seat and shot the gunman, then pivoted and shot another. Finally he leapt to his feet and shot a third approaching from directly ahead of him, a feat that gave him pride but scared the hell out of passing pedestrians, who scattered in shrieking panic. Togusa leant against a wall and emitted a sigh of relief.

  * * *

  Having taken care of the cadre on the rooftop, Batou pushed his car to its limits, stripping gears and sending other drivers spinning out of his way as he raced through the night.

  * * *

  In a place of safety, Kuze lay still while a geisha bot tended to his repairs, each of her actions controlled by his commands. He could simply have remained here forever, but even though he and the bot were similar in their physical composition, they were not the same. She did not have a ghost as he did, and that loneliness had become more than he could bear.

  * * *

  The Major was on a different road, back on the motorcycle she’d stolen from the Hanka parking lot. A billboard floated past her with the legend NIVOZEN.” She headed for the ramp labeled CENTRAL.

  * * *

  “Mr. Cutter.” The operative’s voice reached Cutter over the comm. He was in a Zen garden on the rooftop of Hanka. It was a place of peace, with large green plants and a rectangular lily pond. He summoned a large hologram that showed him the entire city, but he saw no need to be tense while observing the endgame from this safe distance. “We’ve located the Major on the grid,” the operative reported. “She’s in the lawless zone. Air support five minutes out.”

  “Is the spider tan
k within range?” Cutter inquired into the comm. He manipulated the hologram so that it zeroed in on one section, now displaying in detail a large plaza in the lawless zone. In the plaza’s center was the pagoda from the Major’s visions, as well as a large banyan tree. Cutter sat on a garden bench facing the hologram, settling in for his inevitable victory.

  “Yes, sir,” the operative replied over the comm. “Awaiting your orders, sir.”

  * * *

  The Major dismounted the motorcycle in the plaza. The place appeared to be completely abandoned, and had been that way for some time. She remembered what it had looked like, though. She wandered over the broken pavement until she came to the charred remnants of the pagoda, nestled in the roots of the banyan tree that had kept growing despite the fire damage. A flock of pigeons took wing at her approach, startled by the active life continuing amidst the destruction.

  Another glitch unfolded as the Major looked up, though this one was both longer and much smoother than the ones that had come before. In it, a blinding searchlight shone down on the pagoda from a hycop. An officer in charge issued stern warnings through his megaphone. Flames were engulfing the little building. The soldiers who had set the fire were everywhere, rounding up the adolescents who had made their home in the pagoda. The teens were all yelling in anger and terror as they were being hauled out of the burning dwelling, then beaten to the ground. And Cutter had been there, standing to one side, keeping his expensive shirtcuffs and shoes clean as he watched the raid unfold.

  The officer issued another warning. The girl Motoko sobbed and screamed as she was torn from Hideo’s arms, despite all his efforts to hold onto her.

  “Motoko!” Hideo cried. Their voices echoed in the Major’s memory. Hideo’s despairing screams became harder to hear as he was dragged away in the other direction, but a soldier pulled Motoko along, straight toward the Major.

  The elements of the glitch vanished one by one—the soldiers, the pagoda, the other teenagers, Hideo—until only Motoko remained. When the vision of Motoko reached her, it was as if the two figures—machine and girl—were merging. Then Motoko vanished as well, leaving the Major alone in the plaza.