Ghost in the Shell: The Official Movie Novelization

11 FLASHBACK MEMORY

Aramaki was normally hard to read, but Batou and Togusa, summoned to his office, could tell the chief was extremely unhappy. His words were more curt and clipped than usual, and Cutter was there via hologram, which never improved the mood of anyone in Section Nine. Worse, while Cutter sounded convincing, the story he told didn’t jibe with the Major they all knew.

“I want to see her scan,” Aramaki told Cutter’s hologram.

“She killed Dr. Ouelet!” Cutter exclaimed. Even if that were true, and Batou didn’t believe it, they should be allowed to see what had gone wrong with the Major’s cerebral enhancements.

But Cutter did not want Section Nine anywhere near the Major. “You’re to have no further contact with her,” the Hanka CEO stated. “Hanka Security will hunt her from here.”

Batou spoke up without asking for permission. “And what are their orders?”

“To terminate on sight.” Cutter didn’t seem the least bit distressed by the prospect.

“You want to kill her?” Batou exclaimed. “You built her!” He moved angrily towards the hologram, as though Cutter were physically in Aramaki’s office and could therefore be punched in the face.

Cutter didn’t respond, but addressed Aramaki instead. “Have your sergeant stand down.”

“The Major would never harm Dr. Ouelet!” Batou said, trying to make the chief see reason.

Togusa put a restraining hand on Batou’s arm. “Come on.”

“She’s not the Major anymore!” Cutter sounded irritated that no one at Section Nine had grasped this. “We have a Section Nine operative under terrorist programming. This goes public, your unit goes down.”

So now Cutter was threatening to disband the entire Section Nine department should it prove an embarrassment to Hanka.

Aramaki inhaled, then said, “You kill her, you kill us.” Even if the whole business managed to stay secret, Section Nine would fall apart if one of their own were officially murdered. The team wouldn’t work for Cutter if he had the Major’s blood on his hands. Batou’s respect for the chief grew.

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Cutter said in a tone of false courtesy. Then his hologram cut out, dissolving into falling fragments of code that glittered before vanishing.

Batou turned to the chief. “So what now?”

Instead of speaking, Aramaki reached behind his desk, opened a drawer and took out an old-fashioned revolver. Its leather holster was embossed with the image of a samurai with his sword raised above his head, about to strike at an enemy.

The Avalon Apartments complex was arranged in a towering set of rings. At one time, the design plan had called for an atrium with majestic trees in the middle of the circular walkways that engirdled each floor, but that notion had fallen by the wayside as the place grew cheaper and dingier. Now it just looked like some kind of giant upended tube. Characterized by crumbling concrete, rusted railings and lines of laundry hanging from windows, the Avalon was home to those who didn’t have the means to get themselves off of New Port City’s bottom rungs and had reluctantly made their peace with it.

The residents went about their morning, and none of them spotted the lithe female figure loitering in the shadows. None of them saw her fingering the key in her hand, turning over the question of what it might represent in her thoughts.

She entered one of the buildings around the circular courtyard and took a rattling elevator up to the nineteenth floor. The Major could hear the tenants chatting or watching television through the poorly insulated walls.

On the walkway of the floor below, a mother and her toddler emerged from another elevator. The child said something and the mother answered. Her words were unclear but the affection in her tone wafted up to the Major. A comedian was doing a routine on TV in one of the apartments; his patter brought laughter and applause from his studio audience.

The Major found the apartment door of Unit 1912. She listened for a moment, holding her breath. Now she was here, she found herself frozen in a final moment of indecision. She truthfully had no idea what she would find on the other side of the door. It was ajar, and a cat ran out—a grey-and-black tabby with a blue collar, identical to the one in her glitch. The animal ran straight up to Major, winding around her legs, purring.

Instinctively, she picked up the cat. “Hey, hey.”

The tenant of 1912, presumably the cat’s owner, came hurrying out of the apartment. “Oh, the, Pum—Pumpkin!” she called to the cat.

Looking down at the walkway, where she expected the cat to be, the elderly woman almost collided with the Major. She was Japanese and looked to be in her sixties, slim, small, and well-kept. There was a proud and weary cast to her face. Unlike most people in the city, who wore muted, neutral colors, Hairi Kusanagi was clad in a stylish, if outdated, dress of deep greens, blues and purples arranged in a print that suggested elements of a folktale. Hairi was startled briefly by the woman holding her cat, but she straightened and smiled. “Oh, you surprised me.”

She had a strong Japanese accent, but spoke in English, perhaps assuming that the Caucasian Major might understand her better that way. Pumpkin, nestled in the Major’s arms, gave a contented meow. “Ooh,” Hairi chuckled, “she likes you.”

The Major didn’t know exactly how to respond to either the woman’s amiable manner or the cat’s placid acceptance. For that matter, she didn’t know how to explain what she was doing here. She couldn’t imagine they had ever met before—that would stretch coincidence to the breaking point—but the impression of the older woman seemed strangely potent, almost familiar, and the Major felt a flicker of confusion. Perhaps this woman was somehow famous and the Major had heard of her on the news? She also had an air of contained sorrow underlying her kindness. The Major began speaking before she’d determined what to say. “I was looking… for, um… ”

Hairi didn’t seem bothered by the stranger on her doorstep. She stuttered occasionally as she spoke. “No, co-come in.” She opened the door wider and beckoned. The Major was so surprised that she stood where she was. “No,” the older woman said, “come, come. Okay.”

The Major, still carrying Pumpkin, followed the woman into the apartment. It was small but neat, with artwork and photos on the wall.

“Okay,” Hairi said. She turned to the Major. “Can I offer you some tea?”

“Okay,” the Major replied.

The older woman nodded, as though that was the answer she wanted. “Uh-huh.” She headed into the kitchen where she lit the burner under the kettle. Unlike the Major’s apartment or the homes of the Hanka scientists, this place was thoroughly lived-in. The paint on the kitchen walls was fading, but there were green plants in pots on the sill by the window’s wooden frame, hangers on a line that stretched along the ceiling, and colourful mismatched cups on the draining board. In the main room, cheap chairs flanked a square table that held a basket of citrus fruit. Hairi Kusanagi might be old, and she looked like she had regrets, but she clearly had a life.

The Major set Pumpkin down. The cat promptly trotted through the open door of a bedroom. The Major looked inside, curious, and found that everything in the room was draped in plastic, to keep it exactly as it had been, so that neither dust nor the passage of time could harm it. The posters on the wall, the bedspread, the dolls on the shelf, the clothes in the closet all suggested that the room belonged to a teenage girl.

Hairi appeared just behind the Major. “That’s Motoko’s room.”

The Major stiffened at the name of the girl in her glitch visions.

The older woman, as if anticipating a question, said, “My daughter died a year ago.”

No wonder Hairi had an air of such grief about her. “I’m sorry,” the Major said, meaning it.

“She ran away,” Hairi said. “She was difficult. And, uh, we fought.” She managed a chuckle at the memory.

The cat was now on the bed, cleaning herself. The animal also seemed familiar to the Major, more familiar even than the glitch visions would explain.

The older woman looked philosophical as she added, “But I guess we all fight with our parents, right?”

The Major looked around and noticed a small bronze pagoda on a shelf in Motoko’s room. She stared at it. It, too, seemed very familiar.

“Uh, please come and sit, yeah?” Hairi gestured for the Major to come out of the bedroom and sit at the dining table. The Major sat politely as Hairi retrieved a teapot from the kitchen, then sat across the table from her. All around the living room were framed still photographs. Almost every one included the same young girl, as a child and as a teenager. None of the images showed her past that point, however. The resemblance to Hairi was striking. The girl must be Motoko. If these pictures of her were taken just before her death, she had died young.

The Major wasn’t sure how she ought to express her sympathies. She hoped the older woman would speak again. Hairi chuckled softly, but then smiled nervously and looked away.

An awkward silence fell. When it was clear Hairi wasn’t going to speak up, the Major did. “What happened to her?”

“Mmm, I don’t know.” The older woman’s chuckle this time was melancholy. “Um, the Ministry sent me her ashes, and they told me she took her own life. But Motoko…” She shook her head with certainty. “Ah, no, no, no.” Another chuckle, this one in recognition of the Ministry’s falsehood, one so obvious to her that it was bleakly amusing someone had dared to give it as an explanation. “I n-never believed them. Sh-she was happy… living in the lawless zone with her friends. She’d write her manifestos about how technology was d-destroying the world. Oh, then one day the police came… and they ran.” She paused. “It’s strange.”

In the kitchen, the kettle started to whistle. Hairi went to turn the burner off, continuing, “I see her in so many young women. On the street, in my dreams.” She returned from the kitchen with the kettle in hand, pouring water into the teapot, “As if she’s still here.” She sighed, fond nostalgia coloring her speech. “Ah, she was fearless! A-and wild. You remind me of her.” The nervous chuckle came again. “Sorry.”

The Major stood up. This was all very strange. “How do I remind you of her?”

“The way you look at me,” the woman told her. There was strong emotion in her tone and in her gaze, but there was curiosity as well. “Who are you?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” It was an admission of despair. The Major suddenly could not bear to be here any longer. She did not know where to go next, or what to do with what she had found, but she felt she had to go at once.

“Wait, wait,” Hairi called before the Major could reach the door. “Wait!”

The Major stopped and turned to face her.

“Will you come again to visit me?” the woman asked, hope in her voice.

The Major was flooded with contradictory emotions—she felt that she would come apart if she remained any longer, and yet she also felt a pang at leaving. “I will,” she promised, and then left before Hairi could see the tears falling from her eyes.

Aramaki sat at his desk in the semi-darkness of his office, loading bullets into his old-fashioned revolver.

Most of Section Nine had been deployed on individual search and sweep investigations, scouring the city for any sign of Major Mira Killian. A report from a police drone had turned up a possible sighting in the lower city, but it was a dead end. Aramaki was not surprised. The Major was one of the best operatives he had ever worked with, and he knew that if she wanted to vanish into the metropolitan sprawl and go unseen, then there was little they could do to find her. With a conventional fugitive, Aramaki could count on them, sooner or later, to make a mistake or overlook a crucial detail. The Major, on the other hand, simply wasn’t wired that way.

But he knew her well. He knew that she would not disappear, not like this. Not without making things clear first.

When she made contact, he was waiting for it.

“Aramaki.” The chief’s name echoed through the ghostly pseudo-telepathic space of the mind-comms link. The Major was walking on the bridge heading away from the apartment complex, her black coat flapping in the cold wind. It hadn’t started to rain yet, but thunderclouds were piling atop one another in the sky. “Listen to me. I was never in a terrorist bombing. My parents… everything was data they installed in my mind.” She took a breath. “And there were others. Runaways like me… considered disposable. Kuze was one of them. That’s why he’s coming. For Hanka.”

Aramaki rose and leant on his desk, forming the words sub-vocally to be transmitted into his encrypted neural implant. “Can you prove this?” Aramaki asked into the comm.

“Dr. Ouelet can,” the Major replied.

Aramaki was blunt. “Ouelet’s dead.”

The Major was too stunned to respond. Despite everything, Genevieve Ouelet had known the Major as she was now better than anyone alive, and she had saved her life in the end. The Major had thought Ouelet might get into trouble for engineering the escape, but she was sure the doctor was far too valuable to Hanka for her to be too severely punished.

Aramaki broke into her reverie. “Cutter says you killed her.”

She knew that Cutter was behind everything, behind the deaths of the runaways, the theft of the Major’s true identity, and now this. The Major told Aramaki, “Put me on the grid.” If she showed up on the computer networks, the help she needed would come to her. “I need Kuze to find me.”

Aramaki walked to his office door, put on his overcoat and picked up his briefcase. His two assistants opened the office double doors to facilitate his exit. “Cutter will see you, too,” he told the Major.

“I know,” the Major replied over the comm. “But I need to do this.”

Cutter was already monitoring the conversation from his office, listening in on the Major and Aramaki through a surveillance cable he had plugged into his quik-port. He was not surprised that the unstable Major would seek out the even more unstable terrorist Kuze, but he was disappointed in Aramaki. Cutter had always believed that the old man put duty above all else. Of course, Aramaki might see his duty as being dictated by a certain version of the facts, but Hanka was the underpinning of everything in this country. His loyalty should be to his employer, the corporation, even when that meant embracing changes. Since it wasn’t he would have to go too.

“I’m going to meet with the prime minister,” Aramaki told the Major over the comm. “Cutter will be held responsible for what he has done. He must be stopped.”

The conversation ended and Cutter removed the monitoring cable from his quik-port. He sighed and said aloud, “The virus has spread.”

Aramaki’s beat-up brown sedan was in its usual space in the open-air parking lot next to the building where the Section Nine office was housed. Someone of his rank could have easily requisitioned a new model, even a limousine with a driver, but Aramaki hated ostentation, and he hated waste even more. The engine was still in top shape. Also, he had found that driving alone was an excellent way to clear his mind so that he could concentrate on what mattered most.

He got into the driver’s seat, briefcase still in hand, and reached out to the Section Nine team over his mind-comm. He had little doubt that the link was no longer secure, but he had to risk making contact. Batou, Togusa and the others had to be warned. “All agents switch to mind-comms, now!” Tense, he shifted his briefcase to his right side as he awaited a response.

Before a reply had time to reach Aramaki, the passenger window blew inward, shards of glass flying. A team of three assassins, each wearing a black military jacket and dark trousers, faces hidden behind full tactical masks, opened fire on the chief’s car with machine guns. Aramaki slid to the floor, holding his briefcase above his head. The assassins completely riddled the vehicle with bullets.

When the machine guns at last stopped chattering and the car had more punctures than intact metal, the leader of the assassins took out his pistol and approached the vehicle. No one could have survived the barrage of gunfire, but it was necessary to check. The assassin reached for the door handle—

The door flew open, slamming the assassin in the head. Aramaki could hear the man scream from beneath his mask. He emerged from his ruined car, completely unharmed, and fired his old .357 Magnum at the assassin. The revolver was virtually an antique in this modern era, but it still possessed incredible stopping power—and at close range it shredded the assassin’s body armor, blasting him back off his feet and into a heap.

Aramaki had been put in command of Section Nine because of his clear strategic thinking, uncompromising work ethic and his seniority. Contrary to what people like Cutter might have thought, the chief had not been taken out of the field due to any fading of his abilities; age had not diminished him in the least.

Now he used his considerable marksmanship and experience to employ his briefcase as a shield while the two remaining assassins fired at him. Aramaki aimed at the second shooter, who was still reacting to the thunderous reports of the old Magnum. The second assassin fell.

Catching sight of his target, the third assassin opened fire, bullets clanking into the flank of the parked car. This time, Aramaki landed an aimed shot in the shooter’s chest, dropping him to his knees.

The first man he’d shot was still alive and trying to get away across the asphalt, coughing up blood and retching as he crawled. Aramaki kicked him over onto his back, as one might flip over a cockroach, and gazed at the wounded man with something almost, but not quite, like pity. “Don’t send a rabbit to kill a fox,” he advised. Then Aramaki shot the assassin in the head.

He snapped open the revolver’s cylinder and let the spent brass shell casings fall from his gun onto the dead assassin’s chest, then started walking at a casual pace toward the sidewalk. “We are burned,” he warned his team over the mind-comm. It wouldn’t count for much in a frontal assault, but at least they’d know not to walk into a Hanka trap and they’d know not to reveal anything over the comms that they didn’t want Cutter to hear. “I repeat. We are burned.”

Batou sat on the rooftop of the apartment building where he lived, enjoying the feel of the cool night air on his skin and the high view of the city around him. He’d brought the basset hound mix Gabriel home with him, and now the dog was thumping his tail at Batou’s side—until the dog smelled trouble and whined.

“Shh,” he told the dog. He could sense the approaching hitmen as well, but didn’t want them to know it before he was ready. Batou’s pistol was concealed in his lap.

Togusa was eating dinner in a noodle shop. He glanced up at an overhead mirror, reaching for a concealed weapon at his waist as he saw the reflection of an armed man coming up behind him. Suddenly he twisted in his seat and shot the gunman, then pivoted and shot another. Finally he leapt to his feet and shot a third approaching from directly ahead of him, a feat that gave him pride but scared the hell out of passing pedestrians, who scattered in shrieking panic. Togusa leant against a wall and emitted a sigh of relief.

Having taken care of the cadre on the rooftop, Batou pushed his car to its limits, stripping gears and sending other drivers spinning out of his way as he raced through the night.

In a place of safety, Kuze lay still while a geisha bot tended to his repairs, each of her actions controlled by his commands. He could simply have remained here forever, but even though he and the bot were similar in their physical composition, they were not the same. She did not have a ghost as he did, and that loneliness had become more than he could bear.

The Major was on a different road, back on the motorcycle she’d stolen from the Hanka parking lot. A billboard floated past her with the legend NIVOZEN.” She headed for the ramp labeled CENTRAL.

“Mr. Cutter.” The operative’s voice reached Cutter over the comm. He was in a Zen garden on the rooftop of Hanka. It was a place of peace, with large green plants and a rectangular lily pond. He summoned a large hologram that showed him the entire city, but he saw no need to be tense while observing the endgame from this safe distance. “We’ve located the Major on the grid,” the operative reported. “She’s in the lawless zone. Air support five minutes out.”

“Is the spider tank within range?” Cutter inquired into the comm. He manipulated the hologram so that it zeroed in on one section, now displaying in detail a large plaza in the lawless zone. In the plaza’s center was the pagoda from the Major’s visions, as well as a large banyan tree. Cutter sat on a garden bench facing the hologram, settling in for his inevitable victory.

“Yes, sir,” the operative replied over the comm. “Awaiting your orders, sir.”

The Major dismounted the motorcycle in the plaza. The place appeared to be completely abandoned, and had been that way for some time. She remembered what it had looked like, though. She wandered over the broken pavement until she came to the charred remnants of the pagoda, nestled in the roots of the banyan tree that had kept growing despite the fire damage. A flock of pigeons took wing at her approach, startled by the active life continuing amidst the destruction.

Another glitch unfolded as the Major looked up, though this one was both longer and much smoother than the ones that had come before. In it, a blinding searchlight shone down on the pagoda from a hycop. An officer in charge issued stern warnings through his megaphone. Flames were engulfing the little building. The soldiers who had set the fire were everywhere, rounding up the adolescents who had made their home in the pagoda. The teens were all yelling in anger and terror as they were being hauled out of the burning dwelling, then beaten to the ground. And Cutter had been there, standing to one side, keeping his expensive shirtcuffs and shoes clean as he watched the raid unfold.

The officer issued another warning. The girl Motoko sobbed and screamed as she was torn from Hideo’s arms, despite all his efforts to hold onto her.

“Motoko!” Hideo cried. Their voices echoed in the Major’s memory. Hideo’s despairing screams became harder to hear as he was dragged away in the other direction, but a soldier pulled Motoko along, straight toward the Major.

The elements of the glitch vanished one by one—the soldiers, the pagoda, the other teenagers, Hideo—until only Motoko remained. When the vision of Motoko reached her, it was as if the two figures—machine and girl—were merging. Then Motoko vanished as well, leaving the Major alone in the plaza.

She took a moment, then entered what was left of the pagoda. Around her were what remained of the runaways’ squat. Plant life had sprung up from the ashes, spreading green tendrils through the blackened remnants of the wooden-slat walls. The fire had spared a mosaic, some keys that had been made into a display and some handprints in the plaster along one wall. The Major reached out her own hand to stroke the prints, all that was left of the young people who had banded together and made a home here.

An electronic voice with a buzzing echo spoke up behind her. “It is real,” Kuze said. He entered the pagoda and stood behind the Major. He sounded more than a little awed. “This place.”

“I remember what they did to us,” the Major told him. “Cutter and his men. This is where they took us from.” She walked over to a niche and gestured at the ground where their bedrolls had been. “We used to sleep right here. We were like a family. All of us runaways. We had nothing… except each other. They took that from us.” Her voice was soft and bitter.

She saw some graffiti carved into the niche, names of some of those who’d stayed here: Minori, Hideo, Motoko, Miya, Reika. And now she knew who Kuze was. “Your name was Hideo.”

Kuze looked up, and spoke the Major’s real name. “Motoko.”

She couldn’t speak. For the second time that day, tears welled in her eyes.

“That was your name,” Kuze said tenderly. He approached her, and said her name again. “Motoko.”

They gazed at each other, memories overlapping who they were now. The Major wondered who they would be if they had been allowed to live their lives together uninterrupted. Hideo had wanted to be an artist, Motoko had aspired to be a poet, both bringing beauty to the world. Instead, they had been transformed. Vengeance, death, destruction. This was the art they made now.

“Come with me… into my network,” Kuze urged. The Major looked at him, not sure what he meant. “We will evolve beyond them. And together we can avenge what they have done to us.” His electronic voice buzzed. “Come… with me.” He was proposing that they exist together in a purely cyber world, from where they could strike out at humanity.

Before the Major could answer, a mortar blast hit the pagoda, hurling both the Major and Kuze out into the plaza. She hit hard and stayed down, while he bounced, sustaining greater injuries on his second landing.

In the Zen garden, Cutter wielded a virtual remote control, directing the real arsenal he had in place in the lawless zone. He watched the spider tank’s slow and steady advance. So much raw power, and it responded from so far away to his every gesture. This, truly, was the pinnacle of human achievement.

“I’ll take control from here,” he told his soldiers over the comm. The intricate hologram of the spider tank glowed red, at odds with the peace of the garden.

“Weapons system manual command,” the female operative’s voice confirmed. “Spider tank now active.”

The Major lay on her front. Parts of her artificial skin had been obliterated in the blast, leaving her inner workings open to the night air. A tremor went through the road, echoing up through her boots, followed by another and another. Turning toward the source, she looked up and saw something that seemed to have crawled out of a nightmare, a gigantic tank that scrabbled and stomped forward on six huge metal segmented legs, red triangular lights glowing above its turret gun like enraged eyes, motors grinding as it swung its turret around, tracking her. Pistons hissed as it moved and the machine began to advance on the plaza.

The Major got to her feet and ran to Kuze. Like her, he had been damaged by the mortar. Both of his legs were shattered. All that remained under his left thigh was part of a metal pole, which, until this attack, had been encased in sensors, artificial muscles and cyber-flesh.

“It’s Cutter! He’s found us!” The Major grabbed Kuze as the tank started firing. Its ordnance was not machine bullets, but explosive missiles three feet in length.

The Major dragged Kuze as quickly as she could into the cover provided by the banyan tree’s thick roots, then ran to her motorcycle and grabbed a machine gun from where she’d stashed it.

She darted out from cover so she could get a better shot at the gargantuan metal spider that spit bombs instead of poison. Another whoosh signaled a second incoming rocket. The Major rolled to evade the blast in time, taking cover behind one of the pillars supporting the walkway overhead that engirdled the plaza.

Shrapnel ricocheted off the stonework and the concrete pillar. The Major felt a razor of torn steel clip her arm, but she ignored it.

The tank continued to fire. The hologram wasn’t showing Cutter the Major’s present position, but that was all right. Time was on his side. He would, if necessary, raze the entire plaza until no two bits of concrete larger than his thumb remained intact and nothing organic or inorganic survived.

Cutter turned the tank’s muzzle toward the banyan tree where Kuze was concealed. The Major leapt away from her own hiding place to draw his aim away. She fired at the monstrous arachnid weapon, then ducked back behind the column as the tank blasted at her again.

The next rocket looped down at her, tracking her thermal signature, and slammed into the column. Concrete splintered as the pillar broke apart halfway up its length. Suddenly robbed of any support, a section of the elevated pedestrian pathway collapsed, smashing into pieces amid a cloud of choking grey dust. The spider tank maintained its barrage, destroying one pillar after another. The pedestrian bridge collapsed section by section.

The Major jumped onto the bridge, keeping ahead of its fall, and used it as a launch to get herself to the plaza’s second-story balcony. She took cover behind a V-shaped post. The tank’s next blast missed her body, but it blew the gun out of her hand, wounding her arm. She had to find a different approach, circle around, and get closer to the tank. If she couldn’t find a way to defeat the machine, this fight would be over in moments.

She sidled over into the shadows cast by what remained of the bridge so that she was more fully concealed, then inspected the damage in her arm. There was no time to do anything about it—the tank was again marching toward the banyan tree, closing in on Kuze’s position. The Major lunged out, seized her gun from where it had fallen, and began to reload.

Below her, the tank finally found Kuze. The machine aimed its multiple guns directly at his head. Kuze, ever defiant, pointed his finger as if it were a gun back at the tank and pretended to shoot. Cutter smiled at the futile gesture.

The Major sprang out into the open and fired at the spider tank. The tank turned from Kuze to resume its assault on the Major. She ran along the balcony, keeping ahead of it as the tank spun, exchanging fire with her as both of them moved.

Cutter watched the thermographic outline of the Major as it flashed between the cover of the pillars. He couldn’t figure out what she hoped to achieve. There was no way out now, surely she understood that.

The spider tank extended the scope for its mortar cannon and locked onto the Major. Over the tank’s speaker, a female voice announced, “Target acquired.”

The spider tank fired a missile at the Major, hitting the balcony. A second hit caused the balcony to collapse.

“No!” Kuze shouted. The single word echoed into the night.

The female voice announced placidly, “Target eliminated.”

Cutter exhaled in satisfaction. No experiment had ever been so vexing in its results, or so hard to eradicate, but now he and Hanka were done with 2571. The only task remaining was to get rid of Kuze. Using his VR control, Cutter aimed the spider tank. When Hanka had disposed of that failed prototype, even though it was in pieces, they should have made sure it was truly extinguished; they should never have assumed the Kuze iteration of the project would fail on its own and become inert. Instead, it had literally, if imperfectly, rebuilt itself and very nearly brought down the entire corporation out of an implacable need for vengeance. It was a mistake Cutter would ensure was never made on future projects. Although Kuze could not hear him, the Hanka CEO conceded, “You came close, you freak.”

Cutter manipulated the holographic controls, which caused a claw to extend from the spider tank. The huge mechanical appendage seized Kuze by the head, lifted him into the air and pressed him against the banyan tree’s trunk, where it began to crush him.

Kuze trembled as his cybernetic systems struggled through a kind of pain-shock, teetering on the edge of shutting down.

This would be death then, he thought. True death, not the moment of flawed rebirth that has made me what I am now. Regret washed over him. He would perish never knowing the full truth of who he had been. But at least he had found her before it had come to this.

The Major, the thermoptics on her suit engaged, rippled transparently in the light cast by the fires still burning from the explosions. She ran out from the rubble behind the tank and leapt up onto the back of the massive spider. As she landed, the thermoptics in her suit disengaged, leaving her fully visible again. The turret ground its gears and swiveled as the remote operator attempted to unseat the Major, but she was already moving.

She tried firing at the tank’s motor center, but there was no result whatsoever. The Major abandoned that tactic and tossed her gun aside. She crawled closer to the motor center. She knew how this tank was powered, whether from real experience or from the implantation of someone else’s memories, it didn’t matter now. She tried punching it repeatedly with her good fist. Then she grabbed the motor center with both hands and began pulling up on it with all her cyber-augmented strength, howling from the effort.

A camera rose from the tank’s upper regions to relay images of this attack back to Cutter. At first, he thought the Major had simply lost her mind. She had been built to be powerful, but she was no match for the components of the spider tank.

And then the operative’s voice informed him, “Motor center compromised.”

As Cutter watched with disbelief that became wrath, the Major continued to pull on the tank’s central power source.

Inside the Major’s eyes, a train of red warning icons cascaded down the side of her vision, malfunction alerts from the hits she had taken from the auto-cannon and the falling rubble. This would take all her remaining strength, and even then there was no guarantee that would be enough.

The usually invisible connections on her joints and epidermis began to reveal themselves and then come apart, a blue light from her core glowing through them. She felt the tank shudder and buck, trying to throw her off as it stumbled in a half-circle on sparking legs. Her fingers bit into the edges of motor casing and she felt it shift, dislodging but still not fully disconnected.

Redoubling her exertion, the Major gripped the armored casing and strained with all her might as the warning grew louder. Actuators and synthetic muscles in her arms went past the red line and beyond all tolerances, stressed to breaking point as the motor center creaked and distorted.

Then, with a sudden screeching crackle of breaking metal, the motor center ripped away from the tank. The force of the action was so powerful that the Major’s left forearm came off with the motor, jetting white fluid.

With nothing to power it, the tank’s pincers released Kuze, who slid to the ground just before the motor center exploded, enveloping Major in the resultant fireball. The tank gave a shuddering groan and shut down, its six segmented legs trapped beneath it as it collapsed against the stonework of the plaza. Unable to arrest her fall, the Major’s ruined body rolled down the face of the machine and clattered to the ground.

Her cyborg frame was a mess of critical damage, half-destroyed, shot through by heavy-caliber bullets and shrapnel. Pale silicate liquid pooled around her head in a shimmering white halo.

Kuze managed to extricate himself from the banyan tree’s roots. She watched as he slowly dragged himself over. He collapsed onto the ground next to her.

Both the Major and Kuze appeared near death, but Cutter was done underestimating his enemies. “Sniper team on site?” he asked into the comm.

The sniper team’s hycop was en route to the lawless zone. The door opened so that the two snipers could scope out their prey and ready their long-range gun, a weapon so large that it took two of them to wield it effectively.

“We’re approaching the targets now, sir,” the lead sniper replied into his comm.

Kuze lay beside the Major. “Come with me.” His voice was an echoing wheeze now, but his determination was as clear as it had ever been. There was an ugly gouge in his skull trickling with sparks. Despite the terrible, damage that had been done to him, he seemed almost serene. “There is no place for us here.”

She understood what he was offering. They could be together as they had been, Motoko and Hideo, escaping into the virtual so that no one could ever harm them, ever find them, because no one would know they were there. In their own world, they would be together and whole, and they could bend reality to whatever they wanted it to be, and it would last as long as they wanted it to last. No more lies, no more fighting, because there would be no one who needed her protection.

“No.” She hoped he could understand. “I’m not ready to leave.” She inhaled deeply, taking in as much of the night air as her bruised lungs would accept. “I belong here.”

Kuze looked at her with love. He would not force her, so instead he told her, “I will always be there with you… in your ghost.” Then the light went out in Kuze’s eyes and his consciousness fled.

Above, the snipers in the hycop took aim. “Target is in view,” the lead sniper said into the comm.

“What are you waiting for?” Cutter snapped. “Do it!”

The snipers fired the long-range gun. The shot hit Kuze’s head, destroying the human brain within.

“No!” the Major screamed. They couldn’t do this—he had wanted his ghost to continue, but now…

“Keep firing,” Cutter ordered into the comm.

Aramaki walked through the corridor of an expensively carpeted building, speaking over his mind-comm. “Saito, have you found Major? Is she safe?”

Saito, the best long-distance shot in the unit, lay on his belly on a rooftop. He had eyes on the Major. A sniper’s rifle was in his hands and he had an excellent view of both the lawless zone’s plaza and the hycop hovering above it. “She will be,” Saito told the chief over the mind-comm.

He fired a shot directly into the hycop’s rotor. The hycop spun out of control, crashing down to the plaza in a fireball that sent up chunks of the aircraft and rubble in equal measure. Saito ducked back behind the roof’s raised edge to avoid being hit by shrapnel, but had to admit to himself that it was quite a rush to bring down something so large and deadly with a single bullet.

Batou walked out of the darkness to the semiconscious Major and lifted her into his lap. “Hey.” He examined her. She looked godawful. Anybody else would die of such injuries, but the Major was the toughest person he knew. “Hey,” he repeated.

The Major turned her head to look up at him.

At least she was conscious. “Hey,” Batou said once more by way of greeting.

After thinking it over, the Major spoke. “Say something nice.” Repeating what Batou had told her back when she’d first seen his artificial eyes.

Instead of commenting on the ghastly injuries she’d sustained, Batou asked, “What’s your name? Aramaki told me you had a name… from before.”

“Motoko,” the Major confided. Her breathing was very weak.

Batou hoped she still identified as the compatriot he knew, the one he would gladly fight beside and die for. He didn’t try to hide his emotion. “Major is still in there, right?”

“I am,” the Major assured him.

He sighed in relief. All around them, the lawless zone burned, flames shooting and spreading in the wreckage and rubble. One of the hycop’s rotors had half-buried itself in the concrete, sticking up like a giant shark fin, a warning to any who might venture near.

Batou helped her to her feet. They stood looking at one another. The Major put her hand on Batou’s chest. Life wasn’t just about what had happened in the past. It was the people who were here for her now, and Batou was foremost among them.

The corridor led Aramaki to an elevator, which opened onto the Hanka building’s rooftop garden. No one was expecting the old man who ran Section Nine to show up, and before Cutter’s guards could consider what Aramaki might be doing there, he shot and killed them all.

Cutter’s horror at the Major’s survival was so absolute that at first he did not even react to the sound of nearby gunfire. Then he saw Aramaki approaching and deactivated the hologram of the plaza. The Hanka CEO had no wish to gaze on the visual report of his defeat any longer.

“Mr. Cutter.” Aramaki’s tone was formal. “I’ve come from the prime minister. You are charged with murder and crimes against the state.”

Cutter turned and started walking away around the rectangular perimeter of the lily pond. Aramaki followed, so the two men were circling each other.

The CEO had guessed that, if it came down to it, Aramaki would be the one to arrest him. “I thought that it might be you.” At least, Aramaki would be the one to try to arrest him.

Aramaki knew what Cutter would do next, but felt obliged to warn him against it. “It is unwise to resist.”

Cutter abruptly reached for his gun. It was a much more modern, sleek weapon, but Aramaki was much faster with his .357 and shot Cutter before he could fire. The defeated man dropped to the ground.

Aramaki walked over to the Hanka executive and kicked the gun out of his reach. His wound painful but not fatal, Cutter struggled to his feet and held his arms up in surrender. He was frightened now, whimpering, “Please.” After everything he had done, all the lives he had taken, Cutter didn’t want to die.

“Major?” Aramaki spoke into his comm.

In the plaza, the Major had some of her weight on Batou, but was managing to walk under her own power. “I’m with Cutter,” Aramaki announced into the mind-comm. Now that the moment of truth was here, he could only be its instrument. “Is there anything you’d like to say to him?”

Her reply came back to him over the wireless digital network, and he sensed her out there in the aftermath of the battle, broken but unbowed. “Tell him this is justice,” the Major replied. “It’s what I was built for.” She had been made to kill terrorists, and Cutter had proved himself to be the worst of them all.

“So,” Aramaki asked her, “do I have your consent?”

Despite her injuries, the Major stood straight. Whatever Hideo Kuze had hoped for her, she could never return to being who she had been, and Mira Killian was an illusion, constructed from falsehoods. And yet she was real, and she had a place in this world. “My name is Major, and I give my consent.”

Aramaki shot Cutter through the heart. He fell back into the lily pond, unable to keep his head from being submerged. His last sensation was of falling into dark water, just like the false memory he’d had implanted into the woman who had once been Motoko Kusanagi.