Ghost in the Shell: The Official Movie Novelization

8 PROJECT 2571

This time, when the Major awoke, the jarring shift in place and time felt almost human.

There was no instantaneous transition from the non-state of inaction to the full awareness of being present. The wetware of her organic brain struggled to process the events, and slowly her senses returned to her.

She was floating above a dirty concrete floor. At first she thought that, impossibly, gravity had ceased to function around her. Then she became aware of her body’s own weight, all of it concentrated around her neck and the steel column of her artificial spine. There was a vise-like device holding her head in place, connected at her temples, and her feet did not reach the ground.

Odd collisions of noise and ambient sound washed back and forth through her neural processors until at length they began to separate out into distinct nodes. Somewhere off to her right, water dripped in a steady metronome-tick rhythm. Behind her, an electric generator was humming softly, providing power to the faint lights arrayed up above.

Her processors filtered out more sounds. Mechanical noises nearby, the soft irregular click of manipulators and the whisper of motion.

“Hello?” She tried to reach out with her mindcomms link, but the system was dead and everything she did to try to reactivate it only emphasized her powerlessness. The same was true of her legs and her arms, dangling inert and useless. This was not the result of the stun-shock that had knocked her offline. Someone had activated a neural shunt, bypassing the command pathways from her brain case to the rest of her central operating functions. She could open her eyes, she could speak, move her head a little. But nothing else. Her captor had been very thorough.

She was hanging from the ceiling by cables jacked into the ports on her neck. The shunt that digitally paralyzed her from the neck down was in there, working its control over her body. With effort, the Major shifted her gaze and took in the chamber around her fully for the first time. Her internal chronometer showed that twenty minutes had elapsed since the fight in the junction room. She was somewhere else now, in what looked like an old survival bunker from the chaos of the Third War. This was the underground bunker from her visions of Kuze.

And here, really present and not a hologram, was the man still covered by his hooded robe.

Despite her vulnerable position, when the Major spoke, it was a demand. “Tell me who you are.”

The man’s reply came with computer stutters and glitches, as well as the occasional electronic buzz. For all his technological brilliance, this was something he could not fix, or else did not wish to. “I am that which you seek to destroy.” His voice echoed slightly after he finished speaking. “In this life my name is… Kuze.”

The Major’s every instinct was to fight against the cables holding her, but she couldn’t move. “What are you doing to me?”

“I have c-connected you… to a network of my own creation,” Kuze told her. “Wh-wh-when I am finished in this world… my ghost can survive there and reregenerate.” He walked with a rolling limp, slightly unbalanced, but it did not lessen his powerful presence.

Kuze had proved beyond doubt that he had no hesitation about killing people, scientists, law enforcement and civilians alike. Why had he taken the Major prisoner instead of taking her life? “What do you want from me?” she asked.

“I became… fascinated with you.” And then Kuze removed his cloak and revealed himself. The Major met his gaze.

Intact and complete, he would have been quite handsome. But the visage beneath the hood was distorted, as if shown through a cracked lens. He had the face of a Caucasian man, or at least part of a face. Some of it was bare bioroid skull. He looked to be about the Major’s age, and it appeared that he had been assembled as she had been. But in his case, many of the parts fit poorly and much of the shielding was absent, leaving his inner robotic workings exposed. Tech mesh covered his right side and his chest was open in the middle, revealing cyber-organs beneath. His synthetic ribcage was clearly visible from the back, open to the elements, naked machine skeleton and titanium spine. The left side of his faceplate was metal, with no epidermis, and the skin on the right side of his face was scarred. The fingers of his right hand were bare metal, but the back of the hand had skin tattooed with the image of a woman’s eye. He had another tattoo on his left shoulder.

There was a peculiar androgynous beauty to him, a strange sort of fragility that masked what the Major knew of his deadly nature. His eyes were green, and looked as though whoever had crafted them had made them as much or more to simulate pure human emotion than as receptors for his cyber upgrades.

The Major knew they were only implants, but still she was unsettled by their expression. What was it… hunger? Rage? Surely not… affection?

He was standing before her, real and within her grasp, if only her hands could reach and subdue him.

Kuze continued with his explanation, the electronic buzz making the words stutter. “Reading your, your-your-your code while you were inside that geisha. Like nothing I had… felt before and yet so… familiar. We are the same.”

The Major’s body was numb, but she felt searing fury at the comparison. She kept her voice level, knowing that a show of temper would only put her at more of a disadvantage. “We are not the same. You kill innocent people.”

“Innocent, is that, th-th-that what you call them?” Through all the glitching and buzzing, Kuze still sounded wry. “I am as they… made me.”

The Major suddenly experienced a sinking sense of doubt, hoping she was wrong. “Who made you?”

He cocked his head, a wry smile playing over mismatched lips. “What have they told you? That you were the first? The first cerebral s-salvage?” The green eye implants shone with what appeared to be strong emotion and his voice grew rueful. “You were born ofof-of lessons they took from-from my failure.”

The Major did not want to believe what he was implying. “What are you talking about?”

For all the distortion in his voice, Kuze’s bitterness was clear. “I was conscious while they dismembered my body and discarded me… like garbage.”

She said nothing. She could not. He was saying that he was an earlier, failed prototype of the experimental process that had resulted in her new life. If it was the same process, it was the same scientists. Hanka scientists. He was saying that they had dismantled him after they determined that he was not a viable prototype. And that they—that Genevieve Ouelet—had been lying to the Major all along. It wasn’t possible.

“I… was lying on a table,” Kuze went on, “listening to doctors talk about how my-my mind had not meshed with the shell that they had… built.” A shade of anger crept into his voice. “How Project 2571… had failed… and they had to move on… to you.”

The electrocution by his minions, the paralysis, these had been violation enough, but he was not finished. Kuze placed his fingers upon a set of contact points hidden beneath the synthetic flesh of the Major’s face and applied careful pressure. There was a wet click in her jaw and the seams of her cheek plating bubbled to the surface. He removed the left side of her faceplate, leaving the synthetic skull open from forehead to upper lip, exposing the complex circuitry, artificial musculature and alloy bones beneath that comprised the structure of her face.

The Major gasped, not because it hurt—she could not feel it at all—but because it was both so invasive and so intimate. And because Kuze looked neither disgusted nor clinical, the two emotions she’d seen in those few humans who’d seen inside her shell. What he saw inside her seemed to leave him… entranced.

“What a beauty you are,” Kuze said to the Major. He brought the disconnected cheek plate close to his face, as if it was a delicate flower and he wanted to bask in the scent. “They have improved us… so much… since they made me.” He paused. “They thought that we would be a part of their evolution, but… they have created us… to evolve alone…”

He reattached the section of the Major’s faceplate that he’d been holding. It snapped back into place easily, its joins undetectable. “…beyond them,” Kuze concluded.

So Kuze really thought he and the Major were some kind of new breed, superior to humans? “Evolution,” she taunted him, “that’s what you call killing everyone who made you?”

Kuze sounded frustrated. “You-you’re not… listening to me.”

The Major felt that she’d listened quite enough. “You’re a murderer.”

“They-they-they tried to kill me first.” The buzzing of his artificially generated voice grew louder. “It is… self-defense.” He slapped his own chest, indignant. “Defense of self!” He lowered his voice. “More will die… until they tell me what they took!” Enraged and despondent, he slapped his own head.

“I won’t let that happen.” The Major knew that Kuze could destroy her if he kept her paralyzed, but in his belief that they were connected he seemed unwilling to do so.

Kuze backed up this theory by making a sound of inarticulate anger, then running up and putting his face right up against the Major’s, yet making no move to harm her. “You want to kill me?” He studied her eyes for a reaction. “Like everyone else.” He looked resigned. “Do it then.”

And then Kuze astonished the Major by pressing his head against her chest and embracing her. “Do what you were programmed to do,” he murmured, a taunt of his own, implying that she had no free will, only thoughts that had been implanted in her mind.

Then he freed her, reaching up to her neck to disengage the neural shunt.

At once, all the cables let go of her. No longer suspended above the floor, the Major fell, gasping and shaken, slumping onto Kuze’s shoulder. Her body’s active cyber-systems suddenly flooded back into her control and it was like a hot wave engulfing her.

He gently lowered her to the ground. The Major immediately grabbed the pistol from his belt, then punched him clear across the room and fired at him repeatedly.

Kuze staggered to a stop. The gunshots had barely fazed him. The Major noticed something, stopped her attack, and approached him. Her attention was caught so completely that she was no longer worried what the killer might do next. “What is that?” she asked.

On his chest, Kuze bore a large blue-black tattoo of something the Major could not forget: rendered in delicate strokes, the pagoda from her visions.

She was so distressed that she slapped at the tattoo, as though the image on Kuze’s body had somehow caused the images in her mind. “What is that?”

“I c-can’t remember,” Kuze said, plaintive. “B-but I am haunted by it. Do you see it?”

She was staggered. Kuze saw the same glitches that she did. She could accept that there was something about the brain implantation process that caused glitches, but why the hell should it cause two different subjects to see exactly the same thing? What had happened to both of them?

Elsewhere in the warehouse, Batou and Togusa were chasing the Major’s signal as quickly as they could. It had been inactive for some while, but now it was on again and they intended to speed to her side—while fighting their way through the yakuza guards that kept springing into their path. Despite the fact that the Section Nine agents were better armed, better trained and a lot better prepared than their enemies, Batou was starting to have some concerns about how much ammo they had left.

And yet more yakuza poured into the hallway. “Togusa!” Batou yelled. Togusa sprang to the side to kick down a closed door, while Batou lay down a spray of covering fire for him, mowing down the men trying to kill them both.

The Major had stopped fighting Kuze and was listening to what he had to tell her. It was horrible, it turned her world upside down, but there was too much proof he was telling the truth.

“Don’t… take the medication… that they give you,” he warned her. “They use it to suppress your memories. Your shell belongs to them, but not your ghost. Your ghost is yours. Remember that, and maybe you… can remember it all.”

He might have said more, but a grenade blast tore one of the doors off its hinges. Batou and Togusa sprinted in through the roiling dust. Batou at once levelled his gun at Kuze. “Get away from her!” Batou shouted. “Get down on the ground… now!”

Kuze pulled two Uzis, firing them simultaneously at Batou and Togusa until the weapons clicked on empty. The two agents ducked for cover and returned fire, but no one was struck in the exchange. Kuze dropped the machine guns, turned and ran, vanishing into the surrounding darkness. Somewhere down the hall, a door slammed.

“Major!” Batou shouted.

He was relieved to see that she appeared unharmed—but she was staring at him with distrust. In disbelief, Batou watched as the Major turned and fled through the doorway. “Major!” he shouted again. He got no answer.