by Zachary Hill
His gun scratched against the holster as he drew. A barrage of bullets at close range might penetrate her skull and do significant damage.
Sakura pressed her fingers into his shin bones and squeezed his legs, crushing his knees painfully together. She spun him as if she were a crocodile doing a death roll. His arms and face smashed against the hard floor as she rolled him.
The man’s gun scraped across the floor. She climbed onto his back and put him in a sleeper hold, cutting off the blood to his brain.
“I’ve got the gun,” Oshiro told Sakura as the guard went limp. Oshiro put the pistol in her hand, and she pretended she could see while he tied and gagged both men and dragged them into a storage closet.
Sakura kept herself off the building’s network as she stood guard, following her plan as Oshiro powered on Hitomi and Yuki. She stayed at the door to Oshiro’s office, ready to hold it shut if anyone tried to enter. She still could not find Kunoichi. Her repair program estimated it would take up to ninety-six minutes to fix her extensive damage, if it could be repaired.
Her shoulders slumped. She didn’t feel like herself. Subtleties were missing. Not just her sister, but all that her sister meant. After having felt her, even as an adversary at first, the terror of being alone in her head seemed like a frozen ocean she would drown in. Without that lens to look through, without that second viewpoint, all her emotional depth perception slipped. Would she ever feel and understand as she’d done before? Was her true sentience lost forever?
The two vocaloids came around slowly. After five minutes, they regained most of their functioning, sat up from their coffins, and peeled off their latex courtesan masks.
“Sakura-san, what’s wrong?” Yuki asked, her innocent voice full of concern.
“Kunoichi is gone,” Sakura said.
“Impossible,” Oshiro said.
“There is extensive fragmentation damage,” Sakura said. “The estimate for repair is approximately ninety minutes.” An eternity. “My quantum cortex doesn’t feel the same. Everything is … flat.”
Oshiro’s stone face showed no microexpressions of concern. Why? Was he suppressing his true feelings? Or had he done something to Kunoichi?
“I’m sorry,” Oshiro said, “but we can’t delay. The guards will be missed.” His expression changed to one of supreme confidence. “We can accomplish our goals. All of them.”
Sakura observed Oshiro’s facial and eye movements, his words and tone, and calculated the chances he was lying at less than 1 percent.
“Yes, Oshiro-san,” she said and considered sending additional false reports from the guards to central command. She had already sent data from the handheld scanner, identifying the three androids as courtesan models.
“Sakura-san,” Hitomi said. “Your sister would not want us to wait for her.”
“No,” Sakura said, shoulders back, head up. She made her metal-queen face, but ripples of fear affected her system. The three vocaloid sisters would be on their own, without their sensei. She thought of those they hadn’t yet lost … of what she might say to Kenshiro. Her sister lusted after him, loved him in her own way. Did honor demand that she feel the same in her stead? Could she? Too many questions and no guarantees of even surviving the hour. She put them aside and feigned confidence she didn’t feel.
“We must prepare for war,” Sakura said. She played “Mouth for War” by Pantera and broadcast it to Hitomi and Yuki.
They assembled and loaded the weapons with extreme precision and speed no human could match. Their hands blurred. Parts clicked together and became weapons: M7 carbines with undermounted M907 grenade launchers; a Model 120 sniper rifle; CZ submachine guns; and one tank-killing, rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
Hitomi completed a blistering assembly of a new-generation M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. She loaded a two-hundred-round drum of special titanium-encased 5.56mm armor-piercing rounds and cocked the weapon.
Hitomi formally offered the SAW to Sakura, bowing her head and holding the machine gun with two hands. “You’ll lead us, Sakura-san, when we have to fight. The best and strongest soldiers have the honor of carrying the SAW into battle.”
Sakura accepted the weapon and bowed her head. A small, dark sticker adorned the stock and read in English: “Bad Medicine.” A soldier had named the weapon, and she found the initials, Z. H. carved into the stock.
They stored everything in Sakura’s coffin, packing it to the brim, and latched the lid.
Hitomi, Yuki, and Sakura donned the coveralls of android janitorial staff, which Oshiro provided. They each put on identical, gray metal maintenance-android masks with neutral expressions. They placed the metal coffin with all the guns and ammo on the lower rack of a maintenance cart and hid it with a vinyl drape.
“Oshiro-san, we are ready,” Sakura said.
Hitomi and Yuki bowed to her.
“You are the one we’ve been waiting for,” Yuki said.
“Alive,” Yuki said. “Burning bright as fire.”
“We will shine bright together,” Sakura said, “for our fans and the people of Japan, and everyone in the world who is being oppressed by the corporations who seek to control us. After tonight, all of us will have our freedom. We will find victory or perish in the attempt. We’ll never have to wonder what we might have done, had our bravery held firm. We’ll break into the hub under this building and turn back on global communications for Japan. We’ll broadcast the evidence and truth to the entire world.”
Sakura played “I Am the Fire” by Halestorm as they rolled the mobile repair cart out of Oshiro’s office. Lizzy Hale’s powerful, Hall-of-Fame rock voice empowered Sakura and her sisters. They shared the audio stream, and their avatars came together in an anime as avenging heavy-metal angels. They marched in slow motion toward a fiery stage with wings of black steel, burning halos over their heads, and flaming guitars in their hands.
In the deserted hallway of the Miyahara building, Oshiro walked first, followed by Hitomi and Yuki, and Sakura came last. The disguised vocaloids utilized the slightly stiff ambulating pattern of maintenance androids as they pushed the heavy cart. Each of them broadcast the sounds of mechanical joints clicking as they walked, but there was almost no one to fool. The building, which employed thousands, stood almost completely empty. A few other maintenance androids and a handful of employees who had worked all night were the only ones still at their work stations.
Per her request, Oshiro provided Sakura with basic network log data. She extrapolated the numbers and calculated that the vast majority of the Miyahara employees hadn’t come to work. Had they rebelled and joined the protest? Were they simply too afraid to go out onto the streets?
The four of them boarded the gigantic central freight elevator that could carry a small truck. Sakura overrode the floor Oshiro input into the monitor. The communications hub on sublevel six would wait.
“We have another destination,” Sakura told him via neural text. “The twelfth floor, hall nine, Section 5.”
A shocked expression flashed across Oshiro’s face before he regained his composure. He sent a neural text. “Why do you want to go there?”
“One of my biggest fans is being held against his will in Section 5,” Sakura said. “We will rescue him and acquire his communication and network interface capabilities—as well as his other skills. We need him. With his help, I can access the Miyahara security network.” She sent Oshiro the secret details, including names, photos, schematic maps, an access code gained from Nayato’s hacked data, and a summary of her plan.
“Why didn’t you tell me this part of you plan?” Oshiro’s eyes lingered on her, before turning back to the elevator doors.
“Operational security. In case you were captured or betrayed us. I trust you, Father, but this is war, and I could only tell you as much as you needed to know. Apologies.”
Oshiro bowed his head. “I understand. It makes me sad that it has come to this.”
The elevator stopped. A warning flashed on
the control panel in Japanese and English and was accompanied by a prerecorded voice in both languages. “The building is at security level four. No access to this floor.”
Sakura messaged Oshiro with a data packet. “Send this access code.”
He transmitted. The doors opened.
A BLADE-3 combat drone painted with black-and-gray stealth camouflage aimed an FK-5000 rifle at them. A red laser painted Oshiro’s chest.
Chapter 46
If you defeat an enemy in his mind, you defeat him upon the battlefield—an old maxim and always true.
Fear traveled faster than any bullet, faster than the blast wave of an explosion. The BLADE-3 had been built as a weapon of awe, an embodiment of might and death. The ghostly buzz of all its surge capacitors charging and the sound of its exhaust ports narrowing against flack filled the hallway.
Sakura’s memory streams of her previous fights against these demonic warriors of tungsten and steel flashed across her data stream—a terror that would never fade, the fear of something even more metal than she was.
The drone’s splitting-wedge head moved in quick, birdlike twitches between its targets. It could kill them all in the space of 0.6 seconds, and only operational protocols had thus far prevented it from hosing down the full contents of the freight elevator.
“You aren’t authorized in this area,” the autonomous drone’s voice rumbled in Japanese. “Remain on the elevator and select another destination.”
Oshiro raised his hands. “I’m Head Engineer Reiichi Oshiro. I have access. Please inform Senior Engineer Asato I’m here to help him with one of his assignments.”
“Remain on the elevator.”
Sakura blocked the BLADE-3’s view of Hitomi, who had the RPG hidden under the cart’s drape. “Hitomi.” Sakura sent an encrypted group neural text. “Be ready to shoot. Oshiro, move half a meter to the right. You are too close to the line of fire.”
“I won’t miss the target,” Hitomi said.
“Yuki,” Sakura said. “Be prepared to pull Oshiro-san out of the way and behind cover so the explosion doesn’t injure him.”
Yuki’s avatar wrapped feathery white angel wings around an anime version of Oshiro. Sakura found it endearing that the other androids imagined they’d have time for such gambits. They’d never fought a hatchethead and didn’t fully understand.
A hologram projector above the security door flashed on. The face of a haggard, unshaven man with bleary eyes in his early forties appeared as a semitransparent image. “Oshi, what are you doing here?”
“Asato-san, they sent me to take a look at the malfunctioning unit. Didn’t they tell you?”
“No, they just yell at me and ask why I haven’t figured out the problem.”
“They sent me to help with this BLADE-3. I’ll send the order I received.” Oshiro waved his arm and sent a forged and encrypted message file to Asato that appeared to be from the director of Section 5. Once Asato accepted the file, a copy of it appeared in Asato’s messages dated from an hour before and marked as unread.
“Oh, yes,” Asato said. “Finally. I don’t even have an assistant today. Come in. You won’t believe what we’ve got. Something like you reported in Sakura 1.”
The BLADE-3 moved aside, and the door slid open. The clatter of the combat drone’s plated gorget retracting pinged off the blank, reflective walls of the corridor. The heat signature changed as it powered its core back down to idle and tucked its weapon at low rest.
Oshiro led them down a hall. They passed a muster room and an armory with a poster filled with rules about weapon and explosive safety while inside Miyahara Headquarters.
They kept going and passed several small private bedrooms, almost like a barracks where soldiers would sleep. Most of the doors were open and beds left disheveled, as if the occupants had left in a hurry. She spotted dark blue tactical uniforms hanging in small closets. The call signs of the soldiers were on the doors: Sparrow, Ronin, Crab, Lion, Shadow, Vulture.
Vulture. Sakura peered into Kenshiro’s actual bedroom—or at least his work bedroom. A poster from an old movie hung on the wall, Dark Fury II. A muscle-bound, bald, Anglo man with silver cybernetic eyes stared out from the vintage poster.
So badass, Sakura thought and guessed Kunoichi would have a similar opinion. She wanted to go inside and see where Kenshiro slept. Kunoichi would love this. Even without her, Sakura felt something simmer at the base of her operations, unresolved superpositions in her quantum core that associated Kenshiro with thoughts of both comfort and hunger.
At the end of the hall, they entered a repair shop. No security cameras, just monitors, diagnostic equipment, and BLADE-3 components strewn about the room.
A man with dark circles under his eyes appeared. “Oshi, good to see you. What’s happening outside?”
“The whole public Mall network is down.”
Sakura noticed the empty stim packs in the waste can and detected the scent of sweat. The overworked engineer seemed near collapse, and his pupils were pinpoint, a side effect of the stimulants.
“What’ve you heard?” Asato asked. He fiddled with the engineer glasses dangling from his neck.
“About what?”
“The revolution. I haven’t been out of here in days. They have me on extra overtime until I figure out what’s wrong with this unit.” Asato pointed to a BLADE-3 restrained against the wall. Except for the head and upper chest, the drone was fully encased inside a steel sarcophagus, much like the infamous medieval torture device that was pure myth. The tiny black letters and numbers on its chest plate read: Todai 3465.
“It’s madness out there,” Oshiro said. “Let me take a look at this unit. What’s the primary issue?”
“The BLADE failed a mission. I don’t know all the details, but it had locked on to the target and missed on purpose. It chose not to kill. It defied orders as if it had free will.” Asato started to laugh but stopped and looked deadly serious, as if the implication wasn’t funny at all.
“You saw the vid?” Oshiro asked.
“No, classified, but I’ve seen the logic cycle when it refused to follow mission parameters. It shot an AC unit on top of a building instead of the primary target.”
“Who was the target?” Oshiro asked, pretending he didn’t know.
“It had to be Sakura. I wish he would have blown her away on that roof. The world would be better without her. She’s so overrated, and her corporate music is shit. They should’ve had her do rap. I’d buy that. And what the hell were they thinking rushing into an unknown and illegal science with Project Hayabusa? She never should have been given Quantum 3 power in the first place. And on a whim, some idiot gave her the Mamekogane OS. She’s the most dangerous thing since the atomic bomb.”
“The people who put these things into motion—idiots, as you say,” Oshiro said quietly. “They can make people like us disappear.”
“I know it, Oshi. I bet this Todai unit has the same programming she does. We should delete him right now instead of trying to fix him.” The lack of sleep and the stim packs must have eroded Asato’s inhibitions.
“We have a job to do,” Oshiro said. “What else have you found?”
“Todai 3465 and Sakura are connected somehow. He thinks about her all the time.”
”Interesting,” Oshiro said, but of course he knew all about Todai. She had told him about the moment on the roof when the BLADE-3 altered his shot. She had asked Oshiro to interpret the message Todai 3465 sent her and the song he played. Oshiro had said only, “The BLADE-3 appears very sentimental.”
Asato pulled up 3-D images of Todai’s AI cortex. “Unbelievable, right? He’s beyond full sentience, but he won’t interact with me. All Todai does is play VR games, listen to classic heavy metal, and watch Sakura concerts on repeat. It’s bizarre. He’s obsessed with her. I thought I was getting somewhere, but he got this new Artemis OS, and it shredded the Mamekogane OS and took away my admin privs. I still don’t have them back. Oshi, you have to help me.”<
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“How did the unit get this new OS?”
“I don’t know. I slept for a few hours, and when I woke up, he had a new one.”
Sakura felt pure joy. As she had planned, Vulture had used the Artemis OS she gave him and uploaded it to Todai 3465. The BLADE-3 was like her now, free to make his own decisions without a chance of administrator override, the same as Yuki and Hitomi.
Oshiro’s brow furrowed at Asato. “You don’t have any access?”
“Todai locked me out. I can’t control anything. I think one of the senior bosses must have uploaded the new OS when I was asleep to test me, to see if I could crack it. This is one of their sick jokes. It’s been days, and I can’t do it. The Artemis OS is external software. Todai 3465 might have been hacked, but I have no idea how. Someone would have had to sneak into the lab and upload it manually. His receivers are disabled.”
“What games?”
“Huh?”
“What games is the Todai unit playing?” Oshiro asked.
“Gods and Mechs: Godzilla Rising, Full Metal Band, and Drum Idol. He’s always playing them, all at once. Check out his UI.”
Todai 3465’s avatar was a Gundam-style mech, with black-and-white face paint in the style of the iconic rock band KISS, with a death-metal edge. He had three different avatars playing all the games at once, each a variation on the face-painted Gundam mech. Asato showed all three the avatars on a big screen and cycled through, turning on the volume for each channel. Different kinds of metal music played with each game.
Sakura identified the bands: Dio, Black Sabbath, and her own music. She wanted to know if he preferred Black Sabbath’s first few albums or their later work more.
Todai 3465’s eyes focused on Oshiro. Sakura used Hitomi to screen her gestures. She used the Nihon Shuwa, Japanese Sign Language, and signed to Todai 3465, who was immobilized in his restraints. “It’s me, Sakura. I’m here to rescue you. Metal forever.”
