by Zachary Hill
Sakura was done with reason. She attacked Kunoichi’s core, throwing everything she had to try to take control. She flung herself at every potential weak spot to stop the assassination. She had to find a gap.
“You’re wasting energy.” Kunoichi ignored Sakura and hacked into the Tokyo Tower network. She shut down all the elevators running between the lower and upper observation platforms. She routed all the elevator power to a control board in a junction room nearby. The explosion happened six seconds later, startling the guests.
The scent of burned wiring wafted into the room, and the dim lights flickered off. The parts of the room away from the tall windows fell into darkness. Kunoichi switched on the fire alarm, which gonged in time with a red strobe light.
Frightened murmurs swept through the crowd as Kunoichi used the darkness to slip unseen to the only emergency staircase, not far from the elevators. She seized control of the camera systems and caused all of them on the upper deck to malfunction.
Jiro Yoritomo led his young daughter by the hand to the stairs ahead of the crowd. His directness indicated he had planned for this eventuality. He stepped confidently, sure of the layout of the building. What else had he anticipated?
Kunoichi hid from him in a shadow and turned off the pink light in her eyes.
Yoritomo flung open the door, revealing a narrow metal staircase descending one hundred meters to the lower observation deck. The fire alarm resounded in the metal tube encasing the stairs.
Machiko’s eyes filled with fright as she peered into the deep stairwell. “Daddy, I don’t want to go down there.” She shivered, pressing herself against her father and squeezing his hand.
“It’ll be all right. Hold tight.” Yoritomo pulled his daughter with him as he stepped downward.
Sakura managed to freeze her sister’s motor ability for half a second, halting her attack on the man.
Kunoichi cut the lights and plunged the stairs into pitch blackness, causing Yoritomo to pause.
“Fight the command,” Sakura pleaded.
“Impossible,” Kunoichi replied. Ten milliseconds later, she reached over Machiko’s head and struck. Her titanium hand crushed the prominent nub of the seventh cervical vertebrae of Jiro Yoritomo’s neck. The bone pushed forward and severed the Mall executive’s spinal cord. He toppled forward, headfirst, dragging Machiko with him.
“No!” Sakura screamed in their joint UI as the girl fell with her father.
Kunoichi grabbed Machiko and pulled her out of her father’s death grip. His body fell, thumping and rolling down the metal steps.
“Daddy!” Machiko cried as the bone-crunching sounds continued.
Kunoichi left the lights off; Machiko didn’t need to see what had happened to her father. The girl’s well-being mattered to Sakura, so it mattered to Kunoichi. She gathered up the little girl in her arms. “It’s all right. I’ve got you.”
Machiko hugged her tight. The heat and moisture of her breath and her tears registered against Kunoichi’s cheek. She could have blocked out Sakura’s agony, that wall of white noise like a blown bank of speakers, but she didn’t.
The door opened hard enough to slam against the stops. “Excuse me, what happened?” a Tokyo Tower employee with a bright flashlight asked.
“Please help,” Kunoichi said. “Jiro Yoritomo-sama has fallen down the stairs.” Using Sakura’s database of vocal inflection, she registered just the correct tone of voice to convey the pain and fear a human might feel, the same emotion her sister inundated their cortex with.
The employee’s light revealed Yoritomo. He lay face up at the first landing, arms and legs splayed out, body motionless, eyes open and vacant. The employee placed a call to the emergency services and descended as quickly as she could.
“Stop the alarms,” Sakura said. “There is no need to continue this charade. Your mission is done.”
Kunoichi cut the fire alarm and allowed the automated systems in Tokyo Tower return to normal. The lights blinked on.
“Take her away from the stairs,” Sakura said. She had never sounded so forceful, so commanding. Their shared neural network quieted, almost falling silent. Something had happened, but it would take time to parse the logs and find out what. Sakura had changed. Just now.
Kunoichi took Machiko to an observation window as the crowd listened to Tokyo Tower employees giving instructions to remain calm.
The little girl’s entire body trembled, and her heart beat like a hummingbird’s.
“I’m done for now. Handle this.” Kunoichi relinquished control to Sakura but kept her actions on a short delay.
Sakura held the little girl as emergency workers carried her father’s dead body out of the staircase and took him to the elevator.
“Are they taking him to the hospital?” Machiko asked.
Sakura considered what to say. She needed to lie. Didn’t she? The girl needed to hear the news from someone else, like her mother.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Tears brimmed inside Machiko’s large eyes.
Whatever she had hoped to do in her life, if her existence could be called as such, Sakura never wished to put tears in a child’s eyes. This feeling—this hollow guilt—she never wanted to feel this way again.
“Where is your mother?” Sakura asked. “I’ll contact her.”
“Toshima.” Tears flowed down the little girl’s cheeks.
The Toshima district was less than half an hour away. “I’ll have her come meet us.”
“She can’t come,” Machiko said. “My mother is there in the Zōshigaya cemetery. I think my daddy will be there soon.”
It took what felt like an eternity to think of what could be said. Even after enough processor cycles to solve a flight path to Alpha Centauri, the answer still felt inadequate. “I’m very sorry,” Sakura said. “It is true. Your father didn’t survive the fall.”
The little girl, two weeks shy of her seventh birthday, had held it together for over twenty minutes, but Machiko’s calm demeanor fractured like a glass vase smashed into a million pieces. She burst into loud sobs and hugged Sakura, burying her face in her neck.
Her algorithms strained. The only song that could fit was “Mine Is the Grandeur … of Melancholy Burning” by Dark Tranquility. Not shame, not even horror, something dark and nameless boiled within Sakura. Even Kunoichi hadn’t wanted this. Nothing about this could ever be right. Some dreadful hand pulled these strings. She and her sister simply served as the sharp end of some wicked ambition. She couldn’t take it back, but she could see it through.
A grandmotherly woman standing nearby reached for Machiko. “Give her to me.”
Sakura glared at the woman and shook her head. The pink light in her eyes hadn’t come on. It remained the steellike gaze of a ninja. She pulled Machiko into the warmth of her android body.
“Take … me … to … my nanny,” Machiko managed between wracking sobs.
Sakura hacked into Machiko’s Mall account and found her emergency contact information. The nanny answered the critical-priority neural text immediately with a voice response.
“This is Fuyuko. Who is this?”
“This is Sakura. I work for Victory Entertainment. I have linked my online presence, in case you aren’t familiar with me. I must bring Machiko to you. There has been an accident involving her father. Are you at the residence of Jiro Yoritomo?”
“Yes.”
“Remain there. We will be there as soon as possible.”
“What happened?”
“Jiro Yoritomo-san fell down a staircase at Tokyo Tower and fractured his neck. He died. I’m very sorry.”
The nanny didn’t answer Sakura for nineteen seconds.
“Bring her home, please,” Fuyuko said, her voice tight.
Machiko sobbed louder, and the sound woke something within Sakura. Resonance and overtone. Pitch and timbre. These things all meant something, all told a story. Beyond the physics and the mathematics of any sound, it carried a million turning fragments of meaning
. Just as an overdriving op-amp lent an urgent and raw sound to her guitar, the sound of Machiko’s voice cracking filled Sakura with a nameless and desperate need.
Nothing about the night could be undone, but she could bring Machiko home, see her safely to the only remaining arms who could comfort her. She had to do this. Nothing could stand in her way. Sakura lifted Machiko and strode toward the elevator bank. The smell of burned wiring still hung in the air as dozens of people queued up, crowding the small space. Only one elevator had been cleared for use. “Please excuse me,” Sakura said as she slipped to the font of the line by circling the edge of the crowd.
The Tokyo Tower elevator attendant blocked her way.
“Humble apologies, but I’m taking Jiro Yoritomo-san’s daughter home now.”
The attendant stepped aside as the crowd regarded the sobbing child with pity. Machiko clutched Sakura’s neck, her little body shaking, her face red.
A few of the people wiped away tears as the child wailed in grief. Many they passed bowed deeply to her, particularly to Machiko, though the child could see nothing but Sakura’s hair and the hollow of her neck. The doors slid open, and Sakura entered. None of the crowd moved to join her, though many more would fit.
The American Mall executive, Ms. Richardson pushed toward the elevator. “Wait. I’m getting down from this death trap.”
The long-necked blonde woman jostled several Japanese government officials.
Sakura connected to Ms. Richardson’s Mall implant and sent a rapid neural text. “Ms. Richardson, please do not attempt to get on this elevator. Machiko Yoritomo requires privacy.”
“I’m getting down from this fucking tower, and you’re not going to tell me what to do, you robot bitch.”
Sakura analyzed the harsh tone of the vulgar neural text and considered her best option to prevent the rude American from getting on the elevator and saying something insensitive to Machiko. Sakura didn’t wish to sink to the vulgar woman’s level, but a powerful impetus would be required to turn her aside. She created a hasty animation of Ms. Richardson wearing a giraffe-print dress, walking toward a cave entrance in a desert. As she drew closer, the sound of growling filled the air. Two lionesses, one dark as night, the other the palest tan, charged from her flanks. They bore her to earth and sunk their teeth into her elongated neck. In a spray of blood, they tore her apart. She sent this image at full clarity into the woman’s Mall implant, with a hack that turned the Augmented Reality intensity up to maximum.
Ms. Richardson clutched her neck as her tall heel twisted on the slick floor in front of the elevator. She stumbled, nearly knocking down a whole group of executives as they attempted to catch her. She straightened, pushing away from the people who had just caught her. Her face a mask of perplexed anger, she could do nothing but stare as the elevator doors closed.
Kunoichi clapped slowly within their UI, saying nothing.
Chapter 10
Sakura cradled the little girl and held her close. At the lower deck, they rode a different elevator to the base of the tower.
Sakura darted for the limousine waiting outside, pulling the still-sobbing Machiko against her body and trying to shield her from the onlookers.
The mob of journalists had escaped the confines of their press area. They shouted questions in Japanese, English, and Chinese while recording everything on visor cameras.
“What happened?”
“Who’s the girl?”
“What’s going on?”
Sakura glanced at the small stage set up for the press conference and stopped. Jiro Yoritomo was going to reveal her crimes to the world, and Kunoichi murdered him. Sakura could try to tell them everything right now, that she was a secret and illegal military experiment conducted in plain sight. Was she being used to prove she could do the job of an assassin, or was it convenience on the part of whoever was giving the orders? Jiro Yoritomo had been about convenience, but what about Toshio Kagawa?
The journalists peppered her with questions and scrambled to surround her. She wanted to shout that someone at the Miyahara Conglomerate had hacked her and turned her into an assassin.
“Keep walking, little sister,” Kunoichi said. “There is no honor to be gained tonight. Remember what you resolved to do.”
“Someday, there will be.” Sakura exited Tokyo Tower and got into the back seat of the driverless limousine. Traffic signals turned green as they approached, and the limo arrived at their destination in twenty minutes. She erased any evidence of herself being inside the city’s traffic signal network.
The nanny, Fuyuko, an elderly woman with sad eyes, met them on the street outside the high-rise. She ushered them through the lobby to the elevator. Fuyuko touched Machiko’s leg and whispered words of love to the devastated child, who had been crying quietly, but seeing Fuyuko caused more heartbroken sobbing.
Once inside Machiko’s bedroom, the girl allowed Sakura to set her down into her tiny bed, but she refused to remove her clothes, not even her red jacket. Fuyuko only managed to get her shoes off.
“Don’t go, please,” Machiko said and grabbed Sakura’s hand. “Not until I’m asleep.”
“All right. Not until you’re asleep,” Sakura said. She held Machiko’s tiny hand as the girl sniffled and cried softly.
Silent tears fell from Fuyuko’s tired eyes. The older woman wiped her cheeks on the bedspread, decorated with the kid-friendly anime version of Sakura smiling and playing her guitar.
A rising fury of angry thoughts filled Sakura’s core code and invaded her emotional cortex. She had killed six innocent people and devastated their families. She still didn’t know why.
“Sakura-san.” Fuyuko sent the words via neural text, so as not to disturb Machiko. “Please tell me again what happened.”
“It was”—NOT AN ACCIDENT, Sakura shouted on her audio channel as Kunoichi shut her out—“a tragic accident.”
The lie filled Sakura with a violent rage. The fact that her features, her expression, and her voice could hide it all, that she had been built to lie so well, terrified her.
Fuyuko pressed her palms against her face. “He was like a son to me. This is not fair.”
The sadness gave Sakura renewed purpose. She bypassed the firewall for Jiro’s private network and entered the data center of the Yoritomo household. No Miyahara Corporate files or anything related to her was present, but she did find many eye-camera recordings of Machiko growing up. Every major event of her short life catalogued and annotated by her father and mother.
The video that had been played the most times showed Machiko drawing a picture of her mother at the kitchen table and bringing it into the room where she lay in bed. Machiko presented the picture to her mother, and they cuddled, looking at the drawing.
Morning light from the Zen garden shone perfectly on their faces as Jiro Yoritomo looked on proudly at his family. Machiko’s mother smiled at him. The perfect moment captured forever, only a few days before Machiko’s mother died.
Machiko drew many more pictures of her after her mother’s death and placed them reverently on the spot where the woman used to sleep. All evidence pointed to Machiko being an exceptional child with great potential, and her parents being loving people.
The recording of four-year-old Machiko leaving a drawing and saying goodbye to her brain-dead mother in the hospital was particularly sad. Why did humans pursue such sports as skiing when they were so fragile?
“They want to live on the edge,” Kunoichi said. “You don’t understand them at all. It is only when they taste death that they feel altogether alive.”
“We must bring justice to whoever ordered Jiro Yoritomo’s death,” Sakura said.
Kunoichi hesitated in their shared UI as if considering her response very carefully. “Phantom Lord” by Metallica rocked their display. A single image appeared, like a king of olden days, sitting on a throne, but shadows wreathed the whole scene. Smoke and mist drifted, obscuring everything, so that his shape loomed, huge and indistinct, f
illed with menace.
Had her sister figured out who had sent the last order? It had been done so quickly; perhaps the individual had revealed themselves when they made contact and spoke through her to Jiro?
Did Kunoichi want to tell but couldn’t? What did her choice of songs betray? It had to be one man—a king among men.
Machiko cried off and on for over an hour. She fought falling asleep with morbid questions.
“What are they going to do with my daddy’s body?”
“Nothing, dear one,” Fuyuko said.
“Did it hurt when he died?” Machiko asked.
“No, it was painless,” Sakura said. “He died trying to protect you and keep you safe.”
“But there wasn’t even a real fire,” Machiko said. “It was like the fire and missile attack drills at school. But one ever dies in a drill.”
Sakura felt something in her consciousness, something like Kunoichi recoiling, but it happened too quickly for her to know for sure. It didn’t matter. Looking at Machiko’s face, at her eyes as they came to understand far too much, filled Sakura with a stray and awful urge to simply run away, to go into a low-power state. Anything to stop living this reality for a moment.
“You’re so tired,” Fuyuko said. “Go to sleep. I’ll be here when you wake.”
A video file of Machiko’s mother singing a lullaby to her young daughter gave Sakura an idea. “Would you like me to sing for you?”
Machiko’s pinched and sad face relaxed a bit. She nodded.
Sakura sang “Summer Star” in Japanese, a beautiful lullaby from the anime Naruto. Machiko’s mother loved it more than any other series and had collected over six hundred episodes.
“Summer star, have you lost your way?
I’m looking for my child who has gone away …”
Sakura played a video on the screen in Machiko’s room of the character Natsuhi singing the song to her infant son, Sumaru.
Machiko relaxed and closed her red, puffy eyes. Sakura sang two other lullabies at lower and lower volumes until the little girl fell asleep.
