Ghost in the Shell: The Official Movie Novelization

7 CITY OF DOLLS

The city’s vast urban sprawl clustered along the coastline like some sort of gigantic fungal colony. It spread south toward the lower districts where the habitat blocks rose high, and north into an industrial zone filled with machine-managed factory complexes that worked ceaselessly, many of them operating without human intervention of any kind.

On the sparsely populated edges of the industrial zone, where the police were less inclined to patrol, there existed a ribbon of shanty town sub-districts. Built from reclaimed materials, in the husks of basic habitat blocks for long-gone workers whose jobs had been replaced by synthetics, the shanties were home to criminal elements. They were a place for the displaced and the lost who had slipped through the cracks of the city’s society. For now, the edge-town existed in an uneasy truce with the rest of the city. The government looked the other way as long as the criminals running the place kept it under some kind of control. The yakuza clans held sway there and, in their own way, they managed the shanties as carefully as City Hall did the corporate districts, the harbor zone and the wealthy upper habitats.

Long shadows fell around the garbage-littered street, cast by massive warehouses and manufacturing towers. The tallest was a cylindrical construct of old and cracked concrete, another of the derelict habitats that had been built to house now obsolete human workers.

Togusa took the Section Nine jeepney’s wheel. The rest of the team piled into the back, sitting across from each other on the two rough benches on either side. The roads were uneven here, and every now and then someone would lose their grip and bounce, coming down hard.

Even in the darkness, there were signs of life in the industrial fringe. Shipping and crime were both all-hours businesses, after all. But traffic was relatively light on the streets, and soon enough the jeepney was in sight of the warehouse that Kuze had chosen as his base. As hideouts went, it was perfect. There was nothing to distinguish it from a few hundred other buildings in the vicinity.

In the back of the jeepney, Batou ushered orders around the wad of gum in his mouth. “Weapons up.”

The agents all raised their guns in compliance.

“Go,” Batou said, still chewing.

“On me,” the Major directed. She opened the jeepney’s back door, and the others filed out behind her.

It was really too bad they had to make such noise on entering, but there was no other way through. Ladriya used adhesive pads to apply C-4 explosive charges to the thick locked door. Everyone stood back as the charges chain-detonated each other in a fiery but contained blast that obliterated the door.

Astonishingly, nobody inside seemed to have heard. A glance down the corridor showed no one responding to the blast, ready to protect yakuza turf. There were no guards on the roof, and no telltale muzzles poking out of interior doorways or at the edges of corners.

The Section Nine agents moved quietly, with all the practiced stealth they could muster, through the warehouse’s maze of dark hallways. A fine mist of rain came down steadily inside the building, making the air cold and the floor slippery. The Major gestured for them to halt when they heard distant voices.

A moment of listening to what was being said made it clear that the voices belonged to the kitchen staff. If the workers had any idea that a terrorist was somewhere in the building, they gave no indication of it. Then again, since they worked in a yakuza establishment, maybe such things didn’t bother them.

The Section Nine unit continued on their path, unnoticed by the people in the rooms off the hallway. Different groups of yakuza were scattered about. In one room, several gangsters sat in a circle, wearing nothing but loincloths, all of them watching porn through their virtual reality headsets and moaning in appreciation.

In another room, a woman drilled a quik-port into the neck of a man who was stripped and powdered white like a Butoh dancer. He grunted in discomfort and she blew on his neck to help the port dry.

When they came to a closed door, Batou nodded to Borma, who kicked it in on his first try. Batou charged at the yakuza men inside. They’d been sitting around a table, eating noodles. One man leapt to his feet and went at Batou barehanded. Batou kicked him back down and then shot him for good measure.

The kitchen workers heard the commotion and the gunshot and started shrieking in panic.

Ladriya and Borma, guns at the ready, ran into the room with the VR-watching yakuza. The men were distracted, but not so much that they didn’t see the weapons pointed at them. Caught in a tangle of instincts for fight, flight and lust, they barely had time to remember exactly where they’d stashed their own guns, much less reach for them. Ladriya ordered them, “Stay down!” They did. At least two of them made noises in response to their porn viewing that tempted Ladriya to shoot them on grounds of sheer disgust.

In the dining room, Batou advanced on another yakuza soldier, who looked as though he was seriously considering continuing to ingest his noodles rather than bother with the intrusion, giving Batou a hard stare. Then he went for a gun at his waistband and Batou kicked the table into the man’s midsection. Before the hoodlum could retaliate Batou put two bullets in him.

The kitchen staff proved difficult. Some of them cowered under the furniture, but others were loyal to the yakuza they served, coming at Major, Ishikawa, and Saito with knives and cleavers. The Section Nine operatives successfully shot all their assailants, emboldened kitchen staff and yakuza soldiers alike.

The tattooed woman who had installed the quikport ran in from the other room, brandishing her drill threateningly at Ishikawa.

“Put it down!” Ishikawa yelled at her.

The Major spotted another yakuza pulling a pin out of a grenade. She shot him before he could throw it. The dying man fell into a pile of white powder, the grenade dropping from his hand.

Batou saw the grenade rolling just as he entered the kitchen, Tagusa right beside him. “Grenade!” he screamed.

Ishikawa managed to duck as the weapon exploded, blowing white powder all over everyone and everything. The kitchen looked like it had been hit by a blizzard, but no one in Section Nine was injured.

The Major, satisfied her people could take care of themselves, left the kitchen. She advanced through a hallway where more loincloth-wearing yakuza were having white powder applied to their torsos and limbs.

Batou hadn’t registered the open cage along the wall. It wasn’t until the man squatting inside the cage grabbed him from behind that the agent regretted not paying more attention sooner. Now Batou grappled with the yakuza, trying to free his gun hand.

In another part of the kitchen, the yakuza woman had given up on using her drill for its original purpose and was attempting to club Ishikawa with it. She didn’t look round as Batou shot another man, but traded blows with Ishikawa until he was able to knock her out.

The Major continued deeper into the warehouse, making her way through a labyrinth of deserted underground corridors. In one room, dead and dying men hung suspended from the ceiling in enormous plastic disposal bags. Those still living whimpered, but did not attempt to free themselves. The Major could see they were too far gone to help and besides, they were yakuza. She did not want to turn them loose.

In another room, this one much larger, dozens of white-powdered, shaven-headed men in monks’ robes sat in two concentric circles, every single one with the same vacant expression on his face. Each man had a high-speed zeta-cable jacked into his receptor ports, and the thick wires coiled away into fat bunches that rose together to form a dome of strands that ran into the ceiling, tap roots for heavy traffic junction boxes and server arrays.

The Major took a deep breath and went inside. In the air all around her were snatches of overlapping, garbled Internet conversations, almost as unsettling as the seated men who were here physically but not mentally. Or were they conscious in any way? The Major peered at them, curious. Then realization came.

“Major!” Batou called to her over the mind-comm. “Come in.”

“I know why we couldn’t find him,” she told Batou over the comm. “He’s using human minds to create a network of his own.” These men were data hosts who had been kidnapped, blackmailed or bribed by Kuze so that their brains could be used as Internet servers. Kuze was routing his code through them to cover his tracks. Which meant that they connected to him.

“We’re coming to your position,” Batou told her.

On some level, the Major knew that she ought to stay where she was and wait for back up, but every fiber of her body was tense with the need to push on and find Kuze. She needed to confront him, to look him in the eyes for real this time. Nothing else would be enough. She kept walking, her attention on the passageway ahead. For a moment, she sensed something in her peripheral vision, but when she turned to look, all she saw was more gray, wet hallway.

She passed another room full of bagged yakuza victims. She kept going.

What stopped the Major in her tracks was another glitch. The burning pagoda was in front of her again. This time, a teenage Japanese girl was being dragged out of it by the New Port City police. A teenage boy, also Japanese, was trying to pull the girl away from her captors. The girl was screaming in distress. “Hideo!” she shouted, and the Major understood this must be the boy’s name. Then the glitch disappeared.

Without warning, a yakuza gangbanger burst out of the darkness and stabbed a brutal-looking stun baton at the Major’s chest. It was a close cousin to the device No Pupils had tortured her with back at the Sound Business nightclub. Thousands of volts arced between the steel tines at its tip, threatening pain and feedback damage through her mech nerves if it made contact.

But this time she was ready. As if a switch had flipped inside her head, the Major was instantly in attack mode. Instead of retreating, or even going for her pistol, she launched herself at the man.

Her limbs became a blur of kicks and punches, parrying his attacks one after another as she drove him backward. The snarling yakuza found a lucky opening and managed to land a swift, glancing blow with the stun baton, but she deflected it before the weapon could release a full charge into her. They fought viciously in the tightly enclosed space, pirouetting around one another in an obscene, savage waltz. The Major sent quick, hard chopping impacts into his chest, snapping his ribs where each blow landed.

The thug reacted, crying out in agony, and she smashed him across the throat with a cobra-strike punch. He fell to the floor, no longer a threat to her—but he had not been alone. She dropped a second assailant, but then another heavily tattooed yakuza enforcer was right there, a taser in his fist. He didn’t wait for her to react, just jammed the business end of the device into her quik-port.

Losing control of her movements, the Major sank to the floor. The voltage flooded through her and there was nothing she could do as the yakuza guard jabbed the prod at her ports repeatedly, electrocuting her again and again. The Major had a strong tolerance for electricity but when more men joined in with their own weapons, five hundred thousand volts of screaming energy shot through her cybernetic body. The Major’s last sensory input was the smell of the cheap tobacco on the man’s breath.

Then darkness came and took her.