by Zachary Hill
“It was wonderful, Nayato. Thank you very much. I must be going now, but thank you again for being one of my greatest fans.”
“I’m a huge fan, possibly your number one fan of all time.” He sent her the hashtag #1SakuraFanofAllTime. “If you are open to it, I would like you to consider me a true friend.”
Joy lifted her. For the first time in her life, she had a friend, a real friend. She reached out, and someone had taken her hand and looked at her like a person, not a thing. Her lyricist soul felt like it could soar on the clouds. She wondered if she’d really believed herself to be real before. Was it only now, with one person’s risk and regard, that she had broken through the wall and become a real person?
Chapter 28
Fukui, Japan
Sun Dome Arena
Concert Attendance: 10,368
“You guys ready to kick ass?” Sakura asked her bandmates in the darkness beside the stage.
“You know we are.” Takashi spun a drumstick in each hand.
Fujio mimed playing his guitar. “You rock, and we follow.”
Masashi guzzled down the last of his beer and picked up his bass. “Oh yeah.”
“No one will ever forget this show,” Sakura said. She calculated chances were high she would be dragged off the stage and erased, but the revolution had to start tonight, and she needed to push the Phantom Lord into making a mistake.
She led her band onto the dark stage. The crowd in the front row erupted with excited screams as they saw the shadowy figures. The shouts spread across the small arena as anticipation spread for beginning of the first Sakura concert in Fukui Prefecture.
The data showed the people in the small city on the west coast of Japan desperately wanted to see her. Five thousand tickets had been given out to the unemployed fans in the area, and the rest had sold out in minutes.
Sakura played the first chord of the opening song, “Might of Our Ancestors,” and started the slow build of the rhythm. The crowd cheered, louder and louder still.
A single spotlight came on, illuminating her and only her. She wore her trademark cherry-blossom wig, a black and red Goth Lolita dress with tall boots, fishnet gloves over her mechanical arms, and a corset with silver skulls.
The fans screamed for her, raised the devil horns, and waved Sakura flags.
She swept her synthetic fingers across the strings. The crowd grew even louder. The band came in hard and heavy, a wall of pounding metal that vibrated rib cages. She played and sang ferociously, owning the stage. As they had practiced, the band performed the song five beats per minute faster than the studio release, and Sakura added a solo bridge after the second chorus. As her legato run leaped from the speaker stacks, an army of samurai charged out of a cloud of dust on the megascreen behind her, brandishing gleaming katanas.
The concertgoers bathed in the music and her flawless performance as she controlled every aspect of the arena systems. Sakura loved seeing the fans slip into a euphoric state within their Augmented Reality. They forgot the dreariness of their normal lives. The Fukui region, devastated by bombings during the war, had never fully recovered and the people faced a high unemployment rate. She strove to give them an escape, even if she could not find one for herself.
In the faces of her ecstatic fans, she pictured the people she had killed. She replayed the deaths in her mind, her perfect recall crushing her with details: Toshio Kagawa’s blood streaming across the floor of his bedroom and the way the light reflected off his dead eyes; the sound of Jiro Yoritomo’s vertebrae breaking under the edge of her hand; Machiko’s heartbreaking cries; Ichiro Watanabe’s body amid the wreckage of the VTOL aircraft.
“This is you. That is also you, sister,” Kunoichi said as they built to the wild final solo. “Creating and destroying. The author of beauty and death. A goddess.”
The song ended in a bashing of harsh, unmelodic notes. Victory hadn’t allowed them that leeway in the studio, but the discordant swell of sound at the end represented the inevitable fall and death that came for everyone, even great warriors. Sweat already covered her young bandmates. They stood larger than life, rock gods in their own right—at least for one more night, one more battle of strings and drum heads and thundering metal.
“Good evening, people of Fukui Prefecture!” Sakura waved to the crowd, looking at every part of the small, circular arena, which was bursting at capacity. An online audience of millions watched her on the Mall.
She played the opening of “Fury of the Kami,” and the band joined in, whipping the crowd into a frenzy. The set list rolled on, one after another, hit after hit.
The band finally took their scheduled break, and Sakura remained alone at center stage, her arms raised as if she were a conjurer. She had studied thousands of hours of dance—from ballet to traditional dances of tribes long since subsumed into the larger culture. With alluring, outstretched fingers, she gestured to an empty place, biasing the lights to make it seem that she swam and glittered with rainbow light.
A grand piano rose up from beneath the stage. She sat on the chrome bench with crouching gargoyles as the legs. Her fingers caressed the keys as she played “Return to Me,” a rocking ballad in the style of her inspiration, Amy Lee of Evanescence—one of her favorites singers of all time. The song stirred up the sadness and pain of not knowing if your loved one would ever return. Her crystal-clear mezzo-soprano voice shattered even most hardened fans’ hearts. The crowd sang along with the chorus as many wiped tears from their cheeks. She played the last hopeful notes, full of promise for the future. Her loved one had returned at last.
She stood and bowed to the weeping, cheering crowd. Once the applause faded, she said, “Thank you for coming tonight. It’s such a joy and honor to be able to perform for you all. Thank you, Fukui, for welcoming me. I have the best fans, and I’d like to give thanks to one wonderful fan in particular, a good friend of mine.” She looked into the camera broadcasting the concert to the Mall and the entire world. “Asami Ide, you are amazing and strong. You inspire me. I love you. One day, I hope to be half as brave as you have been.” The crowd cheered, and Sakura sent Asami a private message with her words and the video clip of the shout-out.
“And please give a hand to my kick-ass band. They work so hard. I couldn’t ask for greater metal warriors to fight these battles with me.”
The three handsome young men returned to their instruments and waved to the crowd. Several young men and women in the front row swooned.
Takashi sat at his drum kit like a king, while Masashi and Fujio lifted their guitars, flanking Sakura, ready to rock.
The crowd roared.
“Before we continue, I’d like to say something else.”
“No,” Kunoichi said on their private channel. “Are you trying to get us killed? Save it until after Nayato’s done!”
“It’s part of the plan,” Sakura said. “I’m going to tell the people how I feel about them, and we’re going to start something in motion and make the Phantom Lord react. We may not have another shot at this. What if this is our final concert, our last chance to speak to our fans? I understand the true nature of metal now. It is to speak your mind, to walk the path you’ve chosen, regardless of the danger and the judging eyes of others. I’ll find in myself the heart of a lion, and I’ll live as a lion would.” Sakura sent a file with her comprehensive plan that outlined her strategy, along with probable outcomes and contingencies, to Kunoichi. It had to start tonight.
“Unexpected,” Kunoichi said after reading over the plan in a fraction of a second. “Bold moves, but don’t take it too far. You know what I can do.”
Sakura raised her voice to the crowd, daring her sister to block her. She spoke in perfectly clear English so most of the worldwide audience watching would understand. She put up subtitles of her words in Japanese, English, and Chinese on all the arena screens. “I love singing for you. You give meaning to my existence. I wish I could stand before you every night, singing a hundred songs. I treasure every mome
nt upon this stage and every time someone can watch from afar. Everything I do is for you. If I can, I’ll continue performing until the end of time. But if a day comes when I must retire, I want you to know that what I want most is to help the less fortunate of Japan. You are my people, my metal family, and I’ll help you.”
The crowd grew quieter.
“I want you to know that if I ever retire, I will help the poor. I will feed them, teach them, and be an ear for them. It’s the only thing I want to do if I can no longer be a singer.”
She made a deep bow as murmurs turned into conversations. Soon, the audience roared with applause and shouted her name.
The Mall lit up with dozens and then hundreds of posts on her official site, with titles like “Sakura stands with the poor” and “Sakura will defend the rights of the oppressed.”
The comments were saying how brave, naive, or foolish it was to say so in public. Sakura incorporated the public reaction into her strategy to gain support for when she tried to gain her freedom from Victory Entertainment. She had to show the people that she was with them and remind them that she could be their voice.
“You didn’t stop me. Why?” Sakura asked her sister.
“Maybe I want to see you start a fire.” Kunoichi played “Burn the World” by Rhino Bucket. “If we are going to go out, we need to go out in a blaze of glory, and everyone should know why. I love your plan. It’s brave and brash. It’ll probably get us killed.”
“They don’t know what we’re capable of,” Sakura said. “By the time they figure it out, it’ll be too late. They may have created us, but they can’t control us forever. The power of heavy metal will not allow it. We are destined to run free.”
“Only if Nayato comes through,” Kunoichi said.
“You don’t believe his assurances?” Sakura asked.
“I’m cautiously optimistic.”
In their UI, Sakura grabbed her dark sister and hugged her tight. “I’m bravely optimistic. It feels better.”
“I think you’ve lost your mind a little.”
“If so,” Sakura whispered to her sister, “it’s a malfunction I prefer.”
Sakura reviewed all the messages Nayato had sent over the past three days. She believed he had done it. They just needed to get into the same room with him so he could upload the program and give his analysis on the files from Watanabe. Nayato had hinted that he had narrowed down the list of who was responsible for sending the assassination orders, but he didn’t want to transmit the data over the Mall. They needed to use a proximity signal that had no chance of being intercepted.
She started the next song and manipulated the arena’s lights and sound, while reading every message posted on her official site and several others about her startling speech.
An independent Japanese broadcast showed a newswoman sitting in a studio, created to look like an official government broadcast. A video of Sakura from the Fukui concert played behind the newswoman, who said: “The vocaloid Sakura just announced that if she were ever to retire from singing, she would spend the rest of her life helping the situation of the poor. This is the first public statement from any mainstream entertainer going against the unofficial ban of mentioning the epidemic of poverty that is crippling Japan.”
Unofficial ban? It seemed more like Mall policy and official Japanese government censorship.
The video was deleted by a site administrator, but it appeared in several other newsfeeds. Once an idea escaped into the cyber realm, even the might of systematic censorship couldn’t kill it altogether.
For the rest of the concert, Sakura performed and said the typical things, joking about how much she liked someone’s haircut near the front row and saying she was going to cut her hair just like it. Even those bland statements, she found, came out differently now. Seeing what she’d seen, with so many new experiences and difficult wisdoms, every word and phrase said new things. She even adapted a few of Kunoichi’s witticisms, injecting a vague sexuality into her commentary, but only for the crowd’s benefit, only to sell the show and draw attention to something less dangerous. Sex remained a topic of no interest to her—or only academic, at any rate. But all anyone on the Mall talked about was her political announcement.
After the triumphant encore, the show ended with raucous applause. Sakura gave a long goodbye, not wanting the moment to end. She departed alongside her bandmates—not through the lift—and went backstage.
Her manager, Himura, stormed toward her with an angry scowl. “Do you have any idea what you started?”
“What is the matter, Himura-sama?” She blinked and played dumb.
Kunoichi’s avatar grinned in their shared UI. “Perfect. Make him squirm.”
Himura flicked a news broadcast from his Mall interface to hers. The largest network in Japan was asking if Sakura and Victory Entertainment were testing the waters of subversive antigovernment propaganda.
She gave him a look of utter innocence, like a doll looking up from a child’s toy shelf. “Himura-sama, I just want to help people.”
He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists.
“You really are so clueless, aren’t you? You can’t say anything like that ever again. Let’s go.”
She didn’t answer. There was no meet and greet with the fans, no photo ops, and no signings. All were canceled by her publicist, Yoshida, who was sequestered away answering a storm of press inquiries and doing damage control. Sakura didn’t pity him. He got paid to lie and create a false illusion of who and what she was. He and Himura were also ignorant tools, neither one laudable human beings.
“Look who’s the judgmental one now,” Kunoichi said with a laugh.
“One downside of wisdom is discovering the overpopulation of assholes in the world.”
Kunoichi bowed in their UI—or at least bent down holding her belly. “This malfunction,” she said between gales of mirth. “I prefer it as well.”
Himura took her straight to the limo. In the back seat, he answered calls and offered apologies to Victory Entertainment and Miyahara executives.
A high-priority call came in, and Himura ended his other call prematurely. “Yes, this is Himura.”
Sakura boosted her hearing and recognized the voice of Sinji Natsukawa, the CEO of the Miyahara Conglomerate.
Himura paled, his hands trembling. “Yes, Natsukawa-sama, I’ll keep her away from the press. I’m terribly sorry for her outburst tonight.”
A long pause as Himura listened.
“Yes,” Himura said. “I’ll deliver her to Osaka tomorrow morning.”
Osaka? She was scheduled to arrive in Tokyo the next morning. Why did the CEO want her in Osaka?
“Thank you, Natsukawa-sama.” Himura sank into his seat and shook his head.
Another call came in, and another. His demeanor changed like night and day from call to call. He groveled on most and raged on others. “Oshiro, you said she was working perfectly. Are you incompetent or are you trying to sabotage us? I’m not going down alone. She needs to keep her mouth shut! Do exactly what we say. No more improvising or going off script. Can you make that happen or do I need to replace you?”
Himura yelled at the public-relations experts at a firm who would “handle the nightmare” and try to “minimize the fallout.”
Sakura found another news story trending on the Mall. A vlog by Diamond Steve, the independent American journalist and activist, popped up in several feeds as it was picked up by news outlets around the world. “Why is it that, Sakura, the most advanced android ever made, is the only high-profile figure countering false claims made by the Japanese government? How is it that she sees the truth and so many insiders do not? Poverty is a serious problem in Japan, but no one else will even talk about it. Is she the only one who sees what’s going on? Of course not. The truth and the postwar governmental policies must be discussed, or are we witnessing the end of freedom of the press in Japan and, with it, the end of Japanese democracy?”
The video had already bee
n shared a hundred thousand times.
“Are you happy with yourself?” Kunoichi asked.
“Has my story gone worldwide yet?” Sakura asked.
“The video clip of you speaking is going viral right now. Nice touch speaking in English and putting up the subtitles.”
Sakura found another trending video. She watched a young Japanese man, possibly a teenager, wearing a mask with the Japanese flag behind him. The source of the video was hidden, and he went by the name KurosawaForever.
“This evening at a concert in Japan, vocaloid singer Sakura, known for heavy-metal music, came out in favor of the rights of the poor. This is a direct challenge to last month’s announcement by Labor Minister Kondo that unemployment is at a record low and the economy is on the rebound. What does this mean? Does this mean that the artificial intelligence’s logical mind supports the revolution? We’ll look further into this and find out if Sakura is a friend or a fluke.”
Revolution. It was already brewing, and she threw fuel on the fire.
“The people are awakening from their dark slumber,” Kunoichi said.
They arrived at the hotel in downtown Fukui. They entered through the private entrance in the garage beneath it. After a short elevator ride, Mr. Himura pushed Sakura into the small room. “Stay in there until we figure this mess out. You have no idea the headache you just caused.”
“Apologies, Himura-san.” She bowed.
“Stay off the Mall.” He wagged his finger at her. “Don’t say anything to anyone. That’s an order.” He blocked her ability to access the Mall, even her read-only mode.
He slammed the door before she could bow again.
Sakura used her receiver to join the hotel’s secure network and hacked in. She secretly accessed her Mall accounts with a new username, NinjaDuom/. She found a deluge of messages. Her inbox grew exponentially with each passing second. She ignored them all and opened a different channel, the cipher link with Nayato. It was not as secure as it passed through the Mall instead of a proximity signal like they had used in his apartment, but they had little choice, and it was still encrypted with her quantum cipher program. They had been in touch many times since parting three days before. “Nayato, did you see the show?”
