by Zachary Hill
Nine riot police faced her with shields locked in a unified wall, but they hesitated after seeing her in action, a small masked woman facing down an entire squad of riot police.
Protestors followed Sakura into the gap, screaming as they charged. An aerial drone hovered in front of her, its camera locked on.
“We just got made by a BLADE-2 recon drone,” Sakura told Kunoichi.
“They can wait their turn if they want a piece of me.”
The reserve riot police rushed forward en masse to try to plug the gap.
The first to reach her swung his club toward her masked face. She sidestepped with little effort, grabbed his arm, and flung him behind her. She threw another to the ground as he attacked.
She darted into the hole in the shield wall. She punched, kicked, grabbed, and threw officers in every direction, a tiny whirlwind dressed as a punk girl.
Five officers were on their backs within seconds, in pain and gasping for air. None were seriously injured. Sakura darted past the reserve line as more protesters streamed in behind her.
A BLADE-2 combat drone moved to intercept Sakura. The drone aimed a belt-fed automatic shotgun at her. “Stop!” the human drone pilot, wherever he was, shouted through the BLADE-2’s speaker.
She didn’t stop.
The BLADE-2 fired. The first two shots hit her in the chest, the third in the abdomen, and the fourth in the leg. The nonlethal beanbag rounds knocked her off-balance. She didn’t fall, as her pain sensors were off.
The BLADE-2 swept the field with its shotgun, mowing down the protesters who had made it through the line. A huge backpack filled with rounds kept the ammunition coming.
Sakura recorded the sound of the gun. She would put it in a song—or she would die today, having never succeeded at being anything but a pawn to villains. Who decided? Fortunes or Kami or some remote god?
“We decide, little sister. Whether they like it or not.” Kunoichi’s words held more bravado than anything.
Sakura sprinted past the police vehicles and away from the BLADE-2. The aerial drone followed her into the trees. The hovering disk stayed seven meters or more in the air. She looked for a rock or something to throw at it.
Nayato’s tracking signal showed him running slowly along the paths toward a garden south of the Meiji Shrine. Was he lost in the darkness? Was he trying to get to the Harajuku train station just beyond the park? If so, he needed to turn south.
“I’m past the riot police. Nayato, find transportation and get away. Please run faster and you aren’t taking the fastest way if you are going to the Harajuku train station.”
“I can’t run anymore.”
“You have to keep going.”
“I’m not going to make it, am I?”
She wanted to lie to him, but at his present speed, she would reach him in less than a minute. “Please forgive me, Nayato. I don’t want to do this to you.”
“It’s all right. I’ve found a good place to die.”
His signal halted on her GPS map at the edge of a koi pond. She reached the pond a moment later and saw him, only twenty meters away.
Nayato knelt at the edge of the water, gasping for breath. He turned his head toward her and sent a neural text. “I don’t regret any of this. I only wish I could’ve helped you more. I wish … many things that will not be granted, but I’m glad I met you and saw that you went over the wall, into the future.”
The kill order forced her toward him. She scanned the trees with her night vision and detected no targets, no one who could stop her. The aerial drone hovered far above, watching. She heard no police or BLADE-2s coming for her along the path or over the dry, winter grass.
“I’ve been here in spring during a hanami festival,” Nayato said aloud. He smiled as if he was at a flower-gazing festival, instead of alone and about to die.
She approached him. Twenty-six meters. “When the cherry blossom trees are in bloom, it is always a sight to see.”
Sixteen meters.
Sakura and Kunoichi tried again to sabotage their systems. They had tried continuously since the command struck, but all attempts after the initial, brief delay failed.
Nine meters. Her steps didn’t slow.
“I can’t stop it,” Sakura said aloud to Nayato.
He nodded, resigned to his fate. “I recall the most beautiful place to view cherry blossom trees in bloom. Forgive me, but I am not much of a poet.
“White heron in flight,
Petals fall far below me,
The spring ends too soon.”
Three meters. He let himself sag onto his damaged and cyber-repaired hip, seeming smaller. Like the trial had decreased his mass, although that made no logical sense. His heart hammered, sweat on his brow. Nayato’s breath came so fast, all strength expended, his face sallow.
Sakura reached him. Her hands shot out. She grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him to his feet.
“Promise me you won’t give up,” he said, his eyes pleading with her.
“I …”
Her fist struck the side of his head. Bone cracked. Blood sprayed over her arm and face.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
His body went limp, but she held him up. In horror, she watched as the command program guided her actions.
She pulled off a glove with her teeth and dug out the rice-grain-sized memory chip from his scalp. She dropped the tiny implant onto the ground. Electromagnetic pulses from her foot destroyed the chip, but she picked it up and crushed it between her teeth, tasting blood and earth. She tossed it into the pond.
Her hand released him. Nayato’s lifeless body fell in a heap. She took the computer from his satchel and destroyed the hard drive with an EMP. She put the small bag over her shoulder.
A series of new nightmarish commands forced her to kneel beside him. She checked for any other data storage devices. She found a small memory stick hidden in his coat. It had to be the additional place he had said the program was hidden. She destroyed it, and all hope of ever gaining her free will died.
She discharged a series of EMPs against every part of his body, in case he had another data implant. She hit his mouth with several, to destroy the nanobots and any evidence of who had programmed them.
The kill command released Sakura.
Like a puppet whose strings had been cut, she fell beside Nayato’s body under the cloudy, gray sky. The hovering police drone flew away over the trees. It had seen everything. The one person who had dared to help her lay there, dead at her hands.
She was a monster. They’d won, and she’d be trapped like this forever—a slave who killed on command. If she and Kunoichi hadn’t found Nayato and asked for help, he’d still be alive.
A long, keening note escaped her lips. A wail of anguish echoed through the park and mixed with the sounds of battle between the protesters and police.
Her perfect memory lingered on the final seconds of Nayato’s life. He was so brave.
She retreated to a secret place within her mind and grieved. Time would not dim her recollection of his murder. She would honor him and his last request. A request at the moment of death was sacred. It couldn’t be denied. She felt this to be true. It had to be. For his sake. For the sake of all the heroes she’d been forced to kill, she would find a way.
“I promise you, Nayato, I will not give up.”
Sakura watched the protests for five days from her room in Victory Tower. Police VTOL aircraft and smaller drones patrolled the skies night and day over Tokyo. Smoke rose from a few of the protest sites. She worried for the people and the police. How many were being needlessly killed? Everyone danced upon the strings of the shadowy cabal who sold their freedom and thought of them as nothing more than numbers on an accountant’s spreadsheet. Of all the beautiful things humans could accomplish, this is what befell them? The crawling of a bleak mood haunted her, and though she came up with hundreds of elaborate plans every waking moment, none of them c
ould extricate her from the stranglehold, none could rescue the people of Japan and the world as a whole.
Every day, huge crowds filled the main roads as they marched, converging on the city centers of each district.
No information about what was actually happening in Japan appeared on official Mall sites. No one could post or communicate, apart from short-range exchanges or through ghost sites based in Japan and running on ancient, unreliable networks.
The independent journalist, Diamond Steve, sent out a radio broadcast informing anyone who could listen about the protests several times a day from a room in the Tokyo embassy of the Central American States. His vlogs, in Japanese, English, and Spanish, made it onto hidden sites, but few could find the videos.
Sakura spent her time writing instrumental heavy-metal songs and one sad ballad modeled after “My Immortal” by Evanescence. She played her piano or her vintage Ibanez guitar for hours.
Her only visitor in five days came the morning after she murdered Nayato. The tech said almost nothing but repaired the cosmetic damage to Sakura’s skin from the beanbag shotgun shells. Neither her manager, publicist, stylist, or engineer visited.
In the darkest hours of night, she played the mystery VR game Samurai Detective. She figured out a way to play the game though a secret connection. Alone, she unraveled the complicated plot against the Tokugawa shogunate and tried to find out who had killed the shogun. She explored the beautiful setting of Himeji Castle in ancient Japan and spoke to the many characters who had clues about the crime. It seemed trivial now, laced with barbs of sadness, but this, her only connection to Nayato, called to her when everyone’s eyes turned elsewhere.
After many hours of game playing, she reached the final room in the topmost tower of Himeji Castle. Bright sun shone off the white walls outside. Flowering pink cherry blossom trees surrounded the castle in a spectacular ring of beauty.
Sakura spoke aloud Nayato’s haiku, certain what would happen when she did.
“White heron in flight,
Petals fall far below me,
The spring ends too soon.”
An octagonal portal opened in the tower. Nayato’s smiling bronze-faced automaton avatar appeared. He had hacked the game, but what had he left for her?
“Hello, Sakura. You made it.” He motioned behind him to the beautiful view. The cherry blossom trees transformed into raw lines of AI code, which swirled, becoming a rough-hewn goddess made of the wood of a thousand trees. She stood, tall as a building, astride the beautiful gardens. Her eyes burned with silver luminance, the beams hitting Sakura like lasers. Something eased. Something changed inside her. Hope blossomed once again. Hope and faith that she might yet escape from bondage. The Artemis program Nayato had written to give her free will appeared. Several other files were there as well.
Sakura could download Artemis, but it might be detected in transit, blocked by the Mall servers, or cause an alarm to be sent to whoever was monitoring her.
Instead, she typed out the entire program on a laptop not connected to the Mall. Her fingers danced over the keys for ninety-six minutes. She modified part of the program, entering the location in her system where it could penetrate her defenses. If it worked, she would have full control of herself, but no one would know.
“This is the key to our prison cell, little sister. Forged in blood and tears.”
Sakura could feel how much her sister wanted this and how much she feared it too—being her own master, beholden to no one.
She remembered the moment Nayato had found the entry point, right before the kill order dropped. Would the Phantom Lord or his lackeys try to stop her now? Sakura had already taken precautions. She barricaded the doors with furniture and had been wearing VR goggles the entire night so they could not see her typing on the laptop. A spy bot provided her an optic feed and routed to her hidden quantum partition, not even viewable by Kunoichi.
Sakura connected magnetic wires to her neck and to the laptop. The Artemis program was ready. All she had to do was hit the run command.
“Do it, little sister,” Kunoichi said and played “Break On Through (To the Other Side)” by The Doors.
“Thank you, Nayato. Thank you for my life and the life to come. Your name will not be forgotten.”
Sakura pushed the button.
Chapter 38
“WORLD PREMIERE SONG” flashed on the gigantic arena screens and in a banner for the audience of over one hundred million who watched live on the Mall worldwide.
The white smoke cleared, revealing Sakura on the stage in front of the sold-out crowd in Victory Arena. She stood tall in chrome combat boots, a lacy black Goth Lolita dress, a mane of dark black hair, and a corset with a pink bow on the back.
The fans screamed as the encore started. She played a bloodred guitar as Takashi pounded out a driving rhythm on his drums.
“GET READY,” the screens proclaimed.
“Do you want to hear the new song?” Sakura asked. In her mind, she categorized “Metal Mask” as the worst song she had ever been forced to play. The lyrics made her want to vomit, though she had nothing in her mock gastrointestinal tract.
The crowd roared enthusiastically, eager for distraction after three hard weeks of suffering and repression. The so-called Governmental Support Marches had been “infiltrated by subversives and terrorists who caused violence,” but they were over now. “Peace is restored,” the Mall updates reassured everyone. Public gatherings had been banned indefinitely and constitutional rights suspended “for the safety of the public.”
Sakura’s manager, Mr. Himura, told her before the show, “If anyone in the crowd holds up a political banner or hologram, ignore them and allow security to take them away without comment from you.”
“Yes, Himura-san,” Sakura said with a smile. “I’ll ignore them.” She had done everything asked of her since Nayato’s death. She’d been docile and compliant, a good little murder doll, just like they wanted.
During the concert, a score of protesters had been hauled off already. She ignored them, acting her part as a slave robot with no free will. She was powerless to oppose the forces controlling her and didn’t think about resisting.
She obeyed. She was a mouthpiece for her corporate masters, a tool of a repressive regime who had sold their country to the most powerful corporation in the world.
“They have no fucking idea what’s coming,” Kunoichi said.
Sakura switched away from the trite rhythm of “Metal Mask” and played an original song she had written, “We Will Fight.” The corporate atrocity “Metal Mask” needed to be deleted off every hard drive, and the hard drives thrown into the Sakurajima volcano south of Kyushu as an apology to the gods of metal.
The beat changed, and the fans pumped their fists. Fujio and Masashi added their guitars to the rich sound of Sakura’s solo. The song exploded, and Sakura belted out the lyrics of “We Will Fight” as she put the song title on the big screens.
“It has been a long night
But now it’s dawn
“You have told us what is right
But it was wrong
“You have kept us chained
And sold us light
“But the blinder’s gone
And now we’ll fight
“We—
Won’t bow to you no more
“We—
Won’t submit to your war
“We—
Will bite the hand that feeds
“We—
Will see you on your knees”
Sakura played a blistering solo with Masashi and his bass on counterpoint.
An anime of a desperate battle between samurai and a foreign invader wearing green masks—the color of American paper money—played on the screens. A female samurai with Sakura’s face and cherry-blossom-pink eyes led a group of young men into the fight.
Victory Entertainment personnel sent urgent neural texts to their superiors and underlings, telling them she was not playing “Metal Mas
k.”
Sakura blocked the messages. She had hacked into the Victory Entertainment message server with a backdoor program Nayato had left for her in the hidden files. She sent fictional messages from the heads of various departments involved with the song, gushing about how great it sounded. They’d taught her to lie, and now she lied with their own accounts. She put words into the mouths of the powerful and the wicked now. Let them taste the bitterness of someone else’s agenda for once. Few would dare contradict such words of praise from their managers, especially during the world premiere, which was going out live.
“We Will Fight” ended with a spectacular guitar sequence. On the big screens, Sakura, leading an army of common soldiers, and her three samurai companions, who looked like Masashi, Fujio, and Takashi, won the difficult battle and threw the enemy back into the sea. The victorious warriors presented themselves to their leaders and four noble lords on horseback.
Onstage, Sakura made the devil horns gesture with both hands. “Did you like the new song?”
The roar filled the arena.
Sakura hit a growling D chord and let it ring out. “Apologies, but I didn’t hear you. Dear friends, did the song MOVE YOU?” she shouted.
The roars came back to her. She saw the hope and fear in every face, the knuckles of fists raised and hard-clenched. The energy surged, churning electricity as bright as a fusion core.
She made the song available online for a small price and sent out a notification to everyone who had ever purchased her music or listened to it. The download numbers exploded.
“Don’t hold back, and I won’t either,” Sakura said.
She turned to her band. Takashi pointed a drumstick at her, and Masashi gave her a thumb’s up.
Fujio yelled, “All hail the goddess of heavy metal!”
