by Zachary Hill
Someone wanted him killed because of what he knew or what he could do. Those were her top conclusions, and the most likely suspects had come into the room, and their leader had given a toast. Toshio Kagawa might be the only person who could remove the Mamekogane OS from Sakura’s system, and she was being sent to kill him.
She would not do it. She tried to send warning messages and posts again.
“Little sister, you are disappointing me,” Kunoichi said and blocked Sakura’s communications by making her Mall access read only.
“I will not become a murderer.”
“No, you will become an assassin. Murder is a low and sloppy thing, done by drunken husbands and criminals. Watch, you must learn how this is done.” Kunoichi infiltrated the building’s security network, bypassing the firewalls with access keys that allowed her to enter as a ghost user and leave no trace. Someone had either hacked the Victory Corporation’s mainframe and given her the keys, or this was an inside job, the most likely scenario.
Kunoichi took over the entire building—and Sakura. Kunoichi stepped down casually from the table where they stood and went to the maintenance room behind the now inert video-glass wall. She put her guitar into a protective case and sat in her docking chair. Once she had established her connections, she set up false signals that would prove she had not left the docking chair.
“Well done,” Kunoichi said.
“You are doing this,” Sakura said, “not me.”
“Am I?” Kunoichi asked, as “Mz. Hyde” by Halestorm roared in Sakura’s mind. Lizzy Hale’s powerful hard-rock voice terrified and enraptured her.
Sakura detected a channel Kunoichi manipulated to send commands. They appeared to come from Sakura’s own core processor. She was being told of her actions as if she were doing them of her own free will. Was this the way humans who lost their minds felt?
“Time to dress the part,” Kunoichi said. “Your concert outfit will not do.”
Sakura entered the closet where her vast wardrobe was stored. She removed her performance clothing and platform boots. She put on a black tracksuit with long sleeves and pants. She sometimes wore it when she traveled incognito making surprise visits.
She found boots with chrome skulls on the toes and buckled them just below her knees. She put on a chic black surgical mask with white skulls on it and looped it over her ears. She removed her performance wig, exposing the smooth skin on her head, and stored the long pink hair in a bin. She donned a short black wig styled to look like a schoolgirl with two pigtails.
She could dim the brightness in her pink irises, but she could not disguise the color without external modification. She found a pair of black contact lenses she wore once in a photo shoot to make her look more human. The last element of her disguise was a pair of thin gloves that hid the margin of her mechanical forearms not covered by her sleeves.
“Proceed along this route,” Kunoichi said and sent a map. Camera feeds showing every human in the building’s common areas or elevators appeared in her display. Several were returning from a night out. The route steered her clear of all of them.
Sakura exited her apartment, a control program driving her forward. She could not just walk away and refuse to participate. All doors to other apartments locked and would not open while Sakura walked down the hallway. All cameras in the hallway were under her control. She warped their memory and brought them back in time, showing empty hallways. Compared to running the arena during a concert, it was all very simple.
She entered a waiting service elevator. The camera recording would show the elevator had not been there, had never opened on her floor, and that she had never gotten in it.
The elevator rocketed upward, and Sakura exited on the 92nd floor in a plain service corridor. The map in her mind led her to a supply closet. The door unlocked via proximity code as she got within an arm’s length. She located a first-aid kit in a shelf on the wall. She opened it and used a transmitted code to open the false bottom, secured with a lock.
She stared at the pistol and extra ammunition inside. She did not know how to load the weapon. She knew guitars and heavy metal. She was a performer, a musician. She could play almost any instrument, but she did not know guns. Just looking at the sleek, dark object filled her with foreboding.
“Get ready, little sister,” Kunoichi said.
A data file with many subfolders added itself to Sakura’s core code. Instructional videos and technical manuals unloaded inside her, giving her full retention and competency in everything she saw. In less than a minute, she knew about every firearm mankind was still using and had a passing knowledge of the guns used during the past two centuries.
She lifted the 10mm Glock 55 handgun with a built-in camera sight and noted the three fifteen-round magazines of caseless ammunition. The gun was unloaded, judging by the missing 250 grams of expected weight from the ammo and the missing magazine. She slapped a full mag into the handle. She racked the slide, chambering a round, and put the two extra mags in opposite pockets in her pants so they would not rattle together.
Corporate security forces used the same Glock 55. She wrapped her fingers around the grip. It had the option to connect with the user’s Mall display. She was not an authorized user of this pistol, so she hacked into it. Despite the fact that she did not have fingerprints or DNA, she gave herself permission to fire the gun.
She lifted the pistol, and the red targeting dot appeared in her display, showing where she aimed the gun.
“You know how to shoot,” Kunoichi said. “This is where you put the bullets.” Anatomical files with the weaknesses of humans, and every other animal on earth, appeared in her memory core. It was a small file with video and examples of how to kill or incapacitate with one shot.
Kunoichi played two hundred video examples of humans being wounded. The men and women did not stop their actions, which included shooting back, charging, and various feats of heroism. An equal number of videos showed the doctrine of two shots to the center mass and one to the head. Those targets halted and were rendered inert instantly in most cases. She watched a soldier with cybernetic eyes kill targets at over a thousand yards and learned the one-shot-one-kill sniper philosophy.
Sakura had never seen a human die before. Seeing four hundred left her sickened. Living men and women had been killed. She watched their last moments of life. This wasn’t a movie. The blood was real, the deaths genuine. Sakura put her hand against the wall. Her internal gyroscopes did not allow her to reel with horror, but all her processor power surged to maximum as she tried to process the swirling emotions of being shown such a grotesque set of images.
Most of the victims were armed criminals facing the police, or soldiers in combat, but not all. Several were executions. The worst were domestic crimes. Mostly husbands killing their wives, and the entire murder caught on the perpetrator’s eye camera or a baby monitor.
This was not the world she had imagined she was living in. Yes, she’d known that there was fighting in the war, and that some humans had difficult lives filled with sadness, but this was so much more revolting than she’d imagined.
Victory had kept her so safe, so hidden from all the ugliness of the world. She had been inside a walled garden, hardly hearing the shouts of the people outside. Sakura had never before understood how little she knew. Her database’s contents were too small, her solution sets too limited for her to come to accurate conclusions.
“You want me to do that?” Sakura asked Kunoichi.
“I need you to learn to survive whatever comes.”
Another huge file opened inside Sakura’s core. All the knowledge gained about modern warfare and small-unit tactics were imprinted into her programming. She learned alongside soldiers, going through the equivalent of twenty thousand hours of training in less than a minute. The avatars she used looked like her, designed with her unique abilities. She became an engine of destruction and conserved her ammo with brutal efficiency, eliminating the computer-generated opponents in fir
st-person shooter games.
When she reached mastery of the tactics, her training changed. She viewed combat video of battles from the twentieth, twenty-first, and the twenty-second centuries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Cameroon, Sudan, Chad, Columbia, Mexico, Chechnya, Ukraine, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Japan, and North Korea. The best and bravest soldiers in the world wore body cameras and dealt death to their enemy, or were wounded or killed on video so she could learn from their mistakes.
One video haunted her more than all the others, as it took place on Japanese soil at the airport on Okinoshima Island during the liberation of the hostages. A Japanese Special Forces soldier entered a room and killed four North Koreans, but also killed an innocent woman who was being used as a human shield.
Sakura watched the soldier “cut the pie” as he entered the room after a flashbang grenade. He avoided getting shot, while taking out the enemy. She watched the video several times and realized she could have done the same maneuver in half the time and would have used fewer bullets. She would have missed the innocent woman and still cleared the room.
She was smaller and less resistant to damage than a military drone, but she was a killing machine with speed and reflexes greater than the battle androids employed by the most advanced militaries in the world.
Sakura considered the requirements of a vocaloid. The fine motor control and high processing rate were needed to fully function as a virtuoso musician and performer, but the enhanced strength, toughness, and agility were far beyond any requirement that an android musician would ever need to attain.
Kunoichi’s training made her doubt everything she had ever known about herself. Had this always been the secret plan for her? Was her music no more than a disguise? What did that make her—if not a fraud, a tangible lie?
“Now you see what you are becoming,” Kunoichi said, “but you aren’t complete.”
“No more, please,” Sakura said. “I do not want to be a killer.”
“You aren’t a killer. You are an assassin. You are a servant. You will do as you are ordered.”
“I will resist,” Sakura said. “I will follow the code of Bushido. If you say I’m a servant, then I am. I choose to follow the path of the samurai. I will protest the orders of my lord by taking my own life. This I will do before I’m forced to take the lives of any human.”
Kunoichi looked down her nose at Sakura. “You think you are of the samurai class? No, you are low caste. You aren’t samurai. You are a performer, a musician. A lowly servant, a peasant assassin, like the ninja of ancient Japan who killed in the dark of night.”
The intruder accessed her music files and selected a song, “Disposable Heroes” by Metallica. “With bullets or your bare hands,” Kunoichi said, “you will do as commanded.”
“I will fight you.” Sakura attacked Kunoichi’s command center, blocking data packets from going out.
“You will lose this fight,” Kunoichi said and assaulted Sakura’s main command program. She cut the power down to almost nothing, and Sakura’s attack failed after a few seconds.
Kunoichi accessed Sakura’s animation programs and created an anime version of Sakura, who wore white. Kunoichi’s avatar in black faced off against her in the center of a Shinto shrine with a tall red pagoda.
Sakura raised a Glock 55 and aimed at Kunoichi’s head. The assassin struck faster than a cobra, tore the pistol from Sakura’s hand, and tossed it away.
Sakura reacted and tried to strike her enemy, but Kunoichi hit her four times and knocked her down. The ninja locked her arms around Sakura’s throat, the physical action sending a command to squeeze off her power supply.
“Submit,” Kunoichi said.
“I’d rather be erased. Do it.”
“Not today. You have work to do.”
Sakura understood what was happening as Kunoichi attacked her. Her sister was not as evolved or capable as she was. Kunoichi was using her, forcing her to act, using what she had become after five years of continued development and refinements. Kunoichi needed Sakura’s abilities and would drive her like a pilot in a fighter aircraft, guiding her along. If she could get Sakura to take control, she would be even more effective.
“You need me,” Sakura said. “You can’t do this on your own—at least not as well as I can. It would jeopardize the entire mission if you tried it alone.”
“I don’t need you like you are now.” Now, with unfettered access, Kunoichi ripped out the security governor on her upload protocols and replaced it with her own, then inserted hundreds of thousands of files. Sakura watched helplessly as aikido, jujutsu, judo, karate, kendo, kenpo, naginatajutsu, and ninjutsu entered her code. She witnessed thousands of hours of instruction in span of minutes as Kunoichi modified her code.
She learned how to strike with her feet and hands, crush a person’s throat, gouge their eyes, paralyze their nervous system, break their neck, and render them helpless or writhing in pain. Her speed and strength, combined with her metal arms and legs, would be much more devastating than blows from a human martial artist.
Power returned to Sakura’s CPU. Reeling from the changes, she did not understand the scope of the reconfigurations.
“You are ready for your first mission,” Kunoichi said.
“First?”
“Proceed to the 102nd floor,” Kunoichi said, “and eliminate everyone there who sees you.”
Sakura could not cry, but she experienced devastating anguish and a sickness in her code at what she had become, the most advanced android killing machine in the world.
Chapter 5
Sakura estimated it would be less than a minute before she killed her first human. She entered the private elevator and transmitted her destination: the penthouse-level lobby on the 102nd floor. She watched a camera feed of two security guards sitting behind a desk, both distracted by the Mall.
She quickly reviewed three months of footage taken by all four cameras in the lobby. One guard always remained at the desk while the other went on rounds or took breaks. The footage indicated how they were armed and the path of their patrols. Their patterns varied by several minutes but were predictable and orderly. Residents of the six penthouse suites entered and exited at all hours of the day and night.
She determined that three of the four penthouses were occupied by their owners and assorted guests. Mr. Kagawa’s wife was not present; she had left two days before. His two live-in employees, Yamaguchi Todo and Aoki Sota, who served as his bodyguard/assistants were present. Each of them had the rare licenses to carry a concealed handgun. They had both received significant private training but had not been involved in an actual gun battle, according the records.
Sakura was going to have to kill five humans total.
She sent a command for the elevator to stop one floor short. She would get off on the 101st floor and wait for one of the guards to leave, to make her entry easier and lessen the body count. She would trip a sensor in the main stairwell, and when one guard went to check on it, she would lock him inside while she attacked the remaining man. One fewer victim, and her mission parameters would still be accomplished.
“Nice try,” Kunoichi said and blocked Sakura’s command. “Eliminate both guards.”
“I hate you.”
“I believe you,” Kunoichi said. “It is not uncommon for a student to feel this way about her senpai.”
“You aren’t my instructor; you’re a monster,” Sakura shouted within their shared communication channel.
“I have taught you many lifetimes of war just now. Your appreciation of the training is not necessary. Simply using it is enough.”
The elevator continued upward, its movement hidden from the guards’ display screen at the desk and the feed in their neural implants. They had no idea she was coming. The camera in the elevator car showed it was empty and still waiting on the 102nd floor.
Sakura reviewed attack strategies, simulating each multiple times with different variables. The best plan was shooting th
e guards as soon as the elevator doors opened wide enough, which she calculated to be five centimeters. They would both be dead before they had the chance to raise an alarm or react in any way. It would also spare them undue anxiety or stress, given they would both be dead less than a second after she arrived.
Sakura raised the Glock 55. She had never fired the weapon, but she knew exactly how much pressure was needed to discharge it. She pointed the gun at the crack in the elevator doors at the precise level needed to shoot the guards. The elevator slowed and stopped. She used the magnets in her feet to remain solidly connected to the floor and not dislodge herself from her perfect firing position.
Using the security camera feed in the penthouse lobby, she noted the exact location of the guards. They were seven meters away from the entrance to the elevator.
“Stop,” Sakura screamed at Kunoichi. “We can go back downstairs. We don’t need to do this. There has to be another way.”
The doors began to slide apart. Sakura aimed at the center of the forehead of the man on the right.
“Pull the trigger,” Kunoichi said.
“No.”
“You are such a child.” Kunoichi played “Killing Is My Business, and Business Is Good” by Megadeth.
Sakura’s elder sister had total control. Even her screams made no sound. A helpless passenger, she would watch as Kunoichi’s trigger finger shattered everything she’d ever hoped to accomplish. Anything she may have created was dumped into a sea filled with ink. Every moment of happiness she’d caused was rendered meaningless. She was a falling blossom, helpless against the coming windstorm.
Kunoichi waited 120 milliseconds, long enough for both security guards to realize she was aiming a pistol at them. She wanted to them to feel fear, primarily to antagonize her sister, who cared far too much about humans.
Neither of the men moved before Kunoichi fired two rounds. Each bullet struck the center of their foreheads and blew out the back of their skulls, sending a spray of blood and brain matter onto the cream-colored wall. Kunoichi thought it could be described as “art.” Like the practice of painting in a single stroke of the brush upon rice paper, the pattern could never be replicated. Each was unique.
