Ghost in the Shell: The Official Movie Novelization

3 INTERFACED

Everyone rose swiftly and stood at attention on Aramaki’s arrival. The chief did not bother with verbal greetings. Unlike most men commanding military units, Section Nine’s top officer did not shave or crop his hair. Instead, he wore it in a style that was wide on either side at the top and tapered in more closely to frame his lined and firm features, giving him the look of an old but still fierce lion that was for some reason inside an office building instead of out prowling the veldt. He perpetually wore the kind of stern expression that was better suited to some hard-ass schoolteacher or an unforgiving mob boss.

At the chief’s nod, everyone in the team sat down on the couches again. “I have been speaking with the prime minister,” Aramaki informed his subordinates. “He wants a full report. Togusa.” Aramaki indicated that the man should speak.

Togusa obediently activated a hidden control, and the room dimmed as a crimson-hued hologram display rose up out of the floor and swiftly sketched in a series of holograms showing three different people that the Major had never seen before. Aramaki sat now as well, concentrating, as Togusa summed up what they’d uncovered so far. “Following last night’s attack, three more Hanka scientists were murdered at the company’s central laboratory.” There had been several other recent Hanka deaths, but those had, until now, been chalked up to ill fortune with petty criminals and coincidence. No more—even without the attack in the banquet room, this proved a pattern.

“The first two were shot,” Togusa continued, inhaling softly as he indicated two of the holograms, “and the third was beaten to death by his own service robot.” He moved to indicate the third hologram, which displayed a dead scientist slumped over a desk that had fist-sized holes pounded into it. “All showed signs of cerebral hacking.” Togusa manipulated the hologram so that it now focused on the dead man’s quik-port.

“The same as the geisha did to Osmond,” Togusa added, even though his colleagues were well aware of this. “And all were senior figures in Hanka. Just like Osmond. A message was left at each of the crime scenes by someone identifying himself…”

Togusa brought up a new hologram. It was fuzzy and incomplete, but part of a face was clear, a young Caucasian man peering out from under a hood. Togusa finished, “…as Kuze.”

The same voice and the same warning the Major had heard in the banquet room now came from the hologram. “Collaborate with Hanka Robotics and be destroyed. Collaborate with Hanka Robotics and be destroyed.”

Section Nine had considered the possibility that the murders were anti-tech bio-purity militants or counter-capitalists targeting Hanka as part of their agenda, but those theories appeared increasingly unlikely. The attacks seemed designed to demonstrate that enhanced minds could be hacked, without consent, without control.

Batou felt his skin crawl a little, but he ignored it. It was the secret fear of everyone with a neural interface: no matter how good your firewall, there was a chance you could fall prey to a mind-hack. He made a mental note to check his interface barrier software for an update when the briefing was over, just to be on the safe side.

Aramaki spoke decisively. “Togusa. You and Ladriya go speak to Mr. Cutter, the CEO of Hanka. Major and Batou, get Dahlin’s report. Find out what she recovered from the geisha.”

Batou stood and bowed to his commander. “Aramaki.”

“Major!” Aramaki said, before the Major could follow. The chief stood, indicating she should follow him into his adjoining office as the rest of the agents exited the conference room by the opposite door.

Two female attendants shut the double doors behind the Major, then stood silently to either side. The Major had never heard either of them speak in the entire year she’d been with the Section. So far as she knew, both women were entirely human, but they’d had some sort of neural enhancement that allowed them to stand unmoving for hours.

The chief’s office brought together tradition and technology. There was a bonsai tree on a side table, which Aramaki had painstakingly cultivated himself. The furniture was a combination of dark carved wood and leather. One of the walls was green marble shot through with white. The desktop was made of the same marble, with a single plain teacup sitting on its surface. The wall behind the desk was alight with shimmering green circuitry. The Major waited, standing, as Aramaki sat down behind his desk, facing away from her and staring at the circuitry, as though it might give him insight into her rebellious actions.

Aramaki smacked his lips, then spoke. “I told you not to jump.”

“I had to, or more would have died,” the Major countered.

Aramaki’s tone made it clear he did not accept her explanation for the previous night’s exploits. “You are a member of my team, and my responsibility.”

The Major wanted to make it clear that she understood her own responsibility when it came to the terrorist Kuze. “I will find him, and I will kill him. It’s what I am built for, isn’t it?”

Aramaki at last turned in his chair to face the Major, then held her gaze as he spoke with uncharacteristic softness. “You are more than just a weapon. You have a soul… a ghost.” He paused for a moment, thinking how best to help the single-minded woman before him connect with her own humanity, no matter how violent her work. “When we see our uniqueness as a virtue, only then do we find peace.”

The Major bowed her head to him, in gratitude as well as formal farewell. It was more than kind of Aramaki to take time to speak to her so personally. She only wished she knew how to take his advice.

The streets were even busier, if that was possible, than they had been in the morning. The Major and Batou, both clad in jeans and jackets to blend in, adroitly made their way on foot through the pedestrians and peddlers heading in all directions. Many of the people were too distracted by their own tech to watch where they were going.

Above, one floating billboard for Locus Slocus depicted a doctor giving a flower to a child, “Safely reconfiguring your child’s genetic structure. Families: built better.”

Given all of the drama, real and fictional, based on men’s concerns about making sure their genes were passed down through successive generations, Batou wondered how that particular technology would fare with the public, but he had more important matters to discuss with the Major, starting with her strange reaction to the deactivated geisha bot. “What was going on with you at the hotel last night?”

“Nothing,” the Major declared, not looking at him. “I’m fine.”

A pair of beat cops hurried past, their uniforms flashing the word POLICE.

“You sure?” Batou pressed.

Before the Major could respond, a male street hustler emerged from the crowd, targeting the Major with his spiel. He wore a turquoise snakeskin jacket over a white t-shirt, and the entire left side of his face was covered in mech. He smelled as if he’d spent the last week without showering while he sampled his own product, which was likely the case. “Hey, sweetheart,” the hustler began, zeroing in on the Major.

“Move,” Batou said. He tried to get between the punk and the Major, but the idiot ignored him.

“You want an upgrade?” the hustler crooned.

Batou glared. Some street dealer offering illegal cyber-enhancement to the Major, of all people, might be comical if it wasn’t so annoying. “Move,” Batou repeated.

“I have anything you want,” the hustler promised.

Batou lost it. “Back off!” He gave the man a hard shove, sending him tumbling backwards. The dealer’s squawk of pain was drowned out by a loud male Japanese-speaking hologram and the giggles of two nearby girls, who were apparently amused by the altercation.

And still the Major didn’t react. She was hard to read at the best of times, but Batou thought she seemed unusually remote today.

They reached a marketplace full of food vendors. The smells and sounds were as varied as the languages. Sweet, sour, savory, salty—whatever anyone might want to eat, it was all here for the best prices in the city, as the vendors were quick to shout from their stalls.

Batou spotted a butcher he knew and called out, “Hey, Ming!”

“Hey, Batou!” the butcher called back, coming out of his stall. “I got your bones.” He handed over a bag filled with animal bones and scraps of meat, whatever leftovers he couldn’t sell for human consumption.

“Thanks, man.”

Ming gave him a nod that said Batou was entirely welcome. It certainly beat having the offal sitting in the booth’s garbage cans, attracting rats and stinking up the place until the weekly trash pick-up. Ming added, “See you soon.”

Batou saw the Major’s cocked eyebrow. He was pleased to see something had piqued her curiosity, even if it was something as mundane as the contents of the bag. “For the dogs,” he explained.

Batou turned down a dark, damp alley. The Major followed. “For someone who doesn’t like people, how come you care about dogs so much?” she said.

Batou shrugged, his bleached hair the one bright focal point in the alley’s dimness. “Don’t know. I just like strays, and they like me.”

“They like you ’cause you feed them,” the Major pointed out.

They passed a delivery man pounding for entry on a dingy metal door, despite the holographic sign proclaiming, CLOSED 11AM–4PM.

Batou hoped the noise wouldn’t scare off the dogs. “You got no heart,” he teased the Major. He didn’t mean it, and she knew that, but he did think there was more to stray dogs than simple hunger.

Sure enough, four dogs came out of the shadows, tails wagging. “Hey, girls!” Batou was happy to see them, and so far as he could tell, they were happy to see him. Two were large and black, their breeds unknown, and one was some kind of German Shepherd mix. Batou whistled and began feeding them before a smaller dog—a basset hound—trotted up to him. Batou made sure the little guy got his fair share. “Hey, Gabriel,” he said to the canine. “Meet Major.” Then he looked up. “Major, Gabriel.”

Gabriel wagged his tail and while the Major said nothing, she smiled down at the dog.

Later, the rain came down harder. Batou and the Major were in his car on one of the many downtown highways, where a holo billboard above touted, “With Digital Pharmacies, you can erase painful memories.” The vehicle was a modified Lotus that would have been at home on any racetrack in Europe. It was sleek, black with silver accents, low to the ground, with a roof that slanted downward over the front seat. Batou told everyone he’d bought the car for its speed and precise handling, but everyone knew as well as he did that its appearance had been a powerful factor in his purchase decision.

The Major had been silent since the alley. Batou thought she might talk about the investigation, or why she had been so troubled, but when she finally spoke, she said, “We used to have a dog.”

Batou looked over at her. “Seriously?” He chuckled, surprised. “I had you down as more of a cat person.”

Now the Major chuckled as well.

“You don’t talk about that stuff, huh?” Batou observed.

The Major frowned slightly, not sure what he meant. “What?”

“Your past.” He hoped the question wouldn’t cause her to shut him out again.

Her answer was honest. “Well, I don’t remember much. Just fragments. Bits and pieces.”

“What about family?” Batou asked.

The Major still couldn’t even find a sense of genuine sorrow, only regret that she could access neither the memories nor the feelings they ought to have caused. “My parents,” she told Batou, “they died bringing us to this country.” She remembered there had been a dissident crackdown in their homeland, that the authorities had been after her father, that it seemed too dangerous to stay. But she couldn’t remember their home clearly, or exactly what her father had done that put him at so much risk that they had to leave. She could not even remember whether she had seen her parents go into the water when the boat sank, or if they’d been somewhere else on the deck. She barely even remembered what they looked like. Ouelet had said that the memories would gradually come back, that she was still suffering psychologically from what had happened and that her mind was distancing itself from the events until she could emotionally deal with the trauma. The Major hoped that was true. She clearly remembered everything since waking up in the Hanka operating room well enough, but of course she had cybernetic memory upgrades to help with that. “Our boat sank in the harbor. I almost drowned. And it feels like…” The Major found that she wanted Batou to understand how things were for her, why she wasn’t better at being a friend to him, to anyone. “There’s always this thick fog over my memory and I can’t see through it.”

“You’re lucky,” Batou replied. “Every single day I get screwed by my memories.” That was putting it mildly. Batou inhaled. He wished he could forget what had happened, what had been done to him and, worst of all, what he had done. He thought it was a miracle he hadn’t lost his mind. “It’s better to be pure.” He exhaled. “Like you.”

The Major smiled in response and chuckled again, mostly at the suggestion that she was pure. She couldn’t recall her life before Section Nine, but she doubted what she’d done since joining the task force fit anyone’s definition of “pure,” even Batou’s.

She looked out the window, and for a moment saw something very strange. There, in the middle of the intersection, with vehicles driving all around it, was a small pagoda made of brown wood. She stared at it. And then it flashed, de-resolved and vanished. Just like the cat in her apartment this morning. Another glitch.

They made good time along the expressway and into the corporate sector, before Batou brought his car into a parking bay in the shadow of a huge glass office tower. The Major snapped off her seatbelt and climbed out, taking a breath of cool air.

Up here, in the sector of the city where wealth flowed freely, it was a world away from the habitat levels choked with people. Around them, elegantly-manicured lawns and abstract pieces of sculpture dotted a vast plaza of clean lines and steel arches. The headquarters of the big mega-corps rose out of the white stone and reached high into the sky, each of them like glassy fortresses emblazoned with company logos.

The Hanka Robotics tower was a place the Major was as familiar with as her own apartment. The building bore the company logo and had its own entrance plaza, decorated with early robotic prototypes. One silver replica of an antique robot loomed almost two stories high. Hanka was also famous for its weapons systems, and replicas of these were on display as well, including a small multilegged tank that looked like a giant artificial spider. A female voice wafted over the plaza’s public address system: “Welcome to Hanka Robotics.”

It felt odd to be here on public security business instead of for more personal reasons, but the Major pushed that thought away and followed Batou through the entry grid. The voice over the PA continued: “All visitors must display appropriate credentials at all times.”

In Ouelet’s operating room, the Major sat while delicate-looking instruments, attached to a semicircular arc, repaired the robotics within her injured left arm. The skin had been removed from her hand, leaving the metal fingers bare for easier access. The epidermis would be replaced when the work was completed. Her quik-port was attached to Ouelet’s small, flat computer so that the doctor could read the Major’s data, which scrolled down in cascading lines of gold text through the air, like rain on a windowpane.

“Open and close, please,” Ouelet directed.

The Major obediently flexed her skinless left hand.

“You have damaged internal systems,” Ouelet noted. With only minor surgery going on, the doctor still wore sterile slippers, but the red scrubs were gone. Instead, the doctor was clad in a translucent aqua lab coat over pale hospital garb.

The look suited Genevieve’s gentle nature, the Major thought. She grinned. “Maybe next time you can design me better.”

Ouelet replied with a soft chuckle as she smiled back. There was genuine warmth in her expression, and in her words as she asked, “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” the Major replied. It was true—it was annoying that the circuitry in her hand had been impacted by the bullet, but her wrist didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt. “I can’t feel anything.”

“No,” Ouelet persisted, “you. In there.” The doctor never let an opportunity pass to remind the Major that she still possessed a human brain and, therefore, according to Ouelet, a human soul.

“I’ve been having glitches.” The Major’s confession was reluctant. “But they’ll pass.”

Ouelet registered concern. “Have you been taking your medication?”

“Yeah. But these ones are still cycling.” Remembering both the cat and the pagoda, the Major added, “I had two this morning.”

“Sound or image?”

“Both.”

Ouelet picked up the portable computer terminal that was still plugged into the Major. A waterfall of complex data tumbled down the screen, the dense lines of neural patterning code that were Mira Killian’s higher brain functions. The doctor peered at the strings of information and nodded, indicating that the glitches were revealed in what she was reading. “I see it. Have you made any unencrypted downloads?”

The Major frowned slightly. “No.” Taking action when circumstances demanded, as she had in the banquet room, was one thing. Risky behavior for its own sake was something else entirely. Some people loved the thrill and the danger, but the Major would sooner drink from a sewer line than make an unencrypted download; the sewage wouldn’t do much harm to her synthetic organs, whereas the download could leave her vulnerable to hacks or even destroy her internal network. And Genevieve Ouelet, of all people, knew this. “Just delete them for me.”

Ouelet nodded. “Consent?” The question was a legal formality. Any cyber-enhancement user had to give their official consent to any manipulation of their data, including deletion of glitches.

The Major observed the formality in turn. “My name is Major Mira Killian, and I give my consent to delete this data.”

With a few practiced finger strokes, Ouelet deleted the glitches and put down the terminal. “It’s done.” Seeing that the Major still looked troubled, she added, “No big deal.” She unplugged the cables from the Major’s quik-port.

But the Major wanted more information about the glitches. “What are they?”

Ouelet inhaled, contemplating how to phrase her answer. She kept her voice light. “Sensory echoes from your mind. Shadows. Can’t be sure.”

The Major wasn’t satisfied. “Well, how do you know what’s a glitch and what’s me?” With so few memories from before she had been installed in the synthetic shell, she couldn’t be sure herself.

“The glitches have a different texture… to the rest of your code.” Ouelet swallowed uneasily, then smiled again. “I can see everything. All of your thoughts, your… decisions.”

Even when it was Genevieve scanning the data, the Major was perturbed by this absolute invasion of her thoughts. “I guess privacy is just for humans.”

“You are human.” There was an urgency in Ouelet’s voice now. She wanted the Major to believe as she believed. “People see you as human.”

The Major wondered how it was that Ouelet, even with data access to every thought and experience, still didn’t understand what it was like. “Everyone around me seems to fit. They seem connected to something. Something I am… not.” She paused, trying to find exactly what she wanted to say. “It’s like I have no past.”

“Of course you have a past.” Ouelet’s voice was reassuring, though she was turned to look at something else in the room. “And with time, you’ll feel more and more connected to it, and to them.”

Ouelet returned her attention to the Major’s arm. The equipment had finished making repairs and new unmarked skin covered the area, as though no injury had ever occurred.

“Open and close, please.”

The Major opened and closed her fist again. The fingers and wrist moved exactly as they should and the skin showed no signs of strain.

Ouelet smiled. “Ah.” She affectionately ran her hand over the healed forearm and returned to what was really bothering the Major. “We cling to memories as if they define us, but they really don’t.” Ouelet paused and put her hand on the Major’s shoulder, her gesture and words both offering comfort. “What we do is what defines us.”

Batou had waited with as much patience as he could muster outside Ouelet’s office. He’d called Ishikawa to send in some analytics techs to make sure he hadn’t missed something at the crime scene, but he was glad he was to be on the move again when the Major finally emerged.

As the two of them headed down yet another hallway in the endless maze that was Hanka Robotics, this one leading to the Forensics Department, a female voice announced, “You are entering a Hanka secure area. Authorized personnel only. Please disable communications enhancements.”

The Major and Batou disabled their internal comms and entered the forensics lab. The cybernetic morgue was a cross between a dystopian hospital and the inside of a machine shop. Unlike a regular morgue for humans, the data forensics lab was kept at uniformly blood-warm temperature—reportedly the optimal atmosphere for preserving magnetic bubble memory substrates, or something like that. Batou didn’t care about the reason, he just knew that being in here made him uncomfortable.

As he trailed after the Major into the main lab, he pulled at his collar and looked around. The geisha bot that had hacked its way into Paul Osmond’s grey matter was lying on a steel operating table, its mechanical innards open to the waist. Its faceplates were peeled back in their flower-like, open configuration, showing the gold-hued cyber skull beneath. The eye sockets were empty. Red, blue and black cables dangled out of the mouth like dead tentacles.

Bent over the slab in the center of the blue-tiled room was Dr. Sonia Dahlin. She had her light brown hair cut fashionably short and slicked back from her forehead, and her makeup was well applied to maximize her appeal in a non-showy way, but her manner was matter-of-fact to the point of brusqueness.

The lab’s window had an unexciting view of a row of unfinished bots, their female gender made evident by their bare metal breasts. A male bot in shapeless orange clothing stood inactive in the doorway.

The techno-pathologist had her hands deep inside the geisha bot’s torso. Dahlin didn’t look up, but her tone made it clear she didn’t appreciate having visitors. “I’m busy.”

Batou found the pathologist’s obvious desire for solitude just too tempting. “Dr. Daaahlin!” he drawled, as if he was overjoyed to be in her presence, and she likewise couldn’t wait to see him. He knew how irritated she’d be by his pretend familiarity. “Are you finished yet?” He also knew the insinuation that she worked too slowly would irritate her even more.

Dahlin still didn’t look up, but her tone suggested she wouldn’t mind if it was Batou on her slab instead of the bot. “If you hadn’t riddled the geisha with bullets, this would be much easier.”

Now Batou feigned hurt. “I didn’t shoot her.”

The Major kept it simple. “I did.”

Dahlin finally favored them both with a weary glance. She knew Section Nine needed results right away, but forensic scans and analysis of the sheer amount of data would take a while She sighed. “This is gonna take days. I need to run hundreds of potential simulations.”

“We don’t have the time,” said the Major, confirming Dahlin’s timeframe fears.

Dahlin tried to explain the complexity of the problem. “She was a Hanka companion bot. But she was reprogrammed for cerebral hacking.”

As the two women talked, Batou wandered over to another slab and, curious, pulled back the sheet. One of the dead gunmen from the banquet room massacre lay there, as lifeless as the geisha bot. The gunman’s torso and head were human, but his arms were robotic and there were wires protruding from his eye sockets.

“What was on her drives?” the Major asked.

“Nothing,” Dahlin replied. “The data was destroyed as it was transmitted. No sign what she was after.” Whatever had been stolen from Osmond’s brain was now in the hands of the terrorist who had engineered the hack. He had made sure nothing was left behind that could lead back to him or even suggest what he ultimately wanted. “The hardware was vandalized. They ripped her up.”

The Major briefly contemplated their options. She leaned in over the dead machine’s broken shell. “Then I have to do a Deep Dive.” This was the term for the complex process whereby one cyber-consciousness fully meshed with another for investigative purposes.

Dahlin, who as a scientist should have been on board with this, objected. “You can’t encrypt during a Deep Dive.”

“I know.” The irony of her earlier exchange with Ouelet about not downloading unencrypted data was not lost on the Major; a Deep Dive into a terrorist-corrupted bot would be infinitely more hazardous. But the investigation was in danger of stalling, and she didn’t want to wait for another Hanka Robotics executive to be murdered. What if the next body to drop was Genevieve Ouelet? She would never be able to forgive herself.

Dahlin took a soft, annoyed breath, pushed herself away from the slab, then rattled off the ugly possibilities. “They could have left traps in her. Mag pulses. Viruses.”

As Dahlin sat down behind a control console, Batou for once took the pathologist’s side. “Mm, she’s right.” The Major gave him a look but Batou was not deterred. “You’ll be exposing your mind to whoever hacked her. You’ll be wide open.”

He wasn’t saying anything that all of them didn’t already know. “I have to get inside her memory,” the Major replied. The geisha had had a functioning memory right up to the moment bullets had obliterated her cranial hardware. The Major removed her pistol, then began taking off her jacket. “It’s the fastest way to find Kuze.”

Dahlin put a cigarette to her lips, clicked a square lighter to get a flame and took a pull, trailing thin vapor. Never known for her humanitarian concern, she was still opposed to letting the Major take the risk. “It’s too dangerous. And highly irresponsible.”

The Major didn’t offer any further verbal argument. Instead, she sat on the empty slab next to the one holding the geisha.

Batou grabbed a cable and held it out to the Major. He was so worried that she could hear it in the way he breathed, but ultimately, he was always on her side. “Are you sure?” he asked.

The Major nodded. “You see any bad code headed my way, pull me out.” She knew Batou would stop the Deep Dive at the first sign of trouble.

He sighed, but guided a zeta-cable into the Major’s lower neck ports. He then ran the cable through an echo box splitter that routed the data to the pathologist’s command terminal. As the other woman connected the synthetic to the rig, the Major lay back, and regarded Batou’s grim expression.

She flashed a near-smile at him and joked, “How come you’re the one sweating?”

Batou didn’t smile back. Instead, he sighed again and turned to Dahlin, resigned. “Run it.”

Dahlin emitted her own sigh, expressing skepticism, and extinguished her cigarette into a glass of water full of floating butts. Then she raised a detachable section of her cyber-enhanced face, so that her eyes and temple appeared to be in front of her forehead, revealing the quik-ports installed in her eye sockets. She inserted a virtual-reality monitoring device into the quik-ports, so that she could maintain contact with the Major through the Dive.

Then Dahlin flicked a switch on the console and spoke formally into a data recorder pick-up, reciting the mandated legal jargon. “Cyber-mind connection to the Major now active and unencrypted. Consent required for data download.”

The Major, lying on the slab with her eyes closed, gave the mandated response. “My name is Major Mira Killian, and I give my consent.”

Dahlin input a command to execute the program and, in the real world, the Major twitched on the slab.

A split second later, the Major felt the zeta-cable in her neck go hot. The cable sparkled with amber data that bore her consciousness into the geisha bot, and the Dive began with a swooping, vertiginous sensation. She had done this before, but every time was different, each Dive a new shock to the system. She felt herself fall down through the slab, and then plummet down to the bottom of the sea. It was like her memories of drowning, except that instead of being pulled to safety, here she kept descending through the deep, inky waters, never to be found. And then she fell further, through the geisha bot’s broken face.

In the void between the ticks of the clock, the Major’s consciousness was projected into the non-space of the geisha’s synthetic mind. She saw a light. Streamers of broken, faltering code shot past her, falling meteorites of dying data that burned out as they became nothingness.

It was a continuous stream of motion-recall, and as she fell into it, suddenly she was seeing the recent past through the dead machine’s eyes. Beyond the flickering code was a three-dimensional space. The voice of a companion bot spoke, too close to come from anywhere but her own throat, and the Major understood that she was doing the talking, even though the ultra-feminine Japaneseaccented voice was nothing like her own. “Konnichiwa,” said the companion bot, uttering the Japanese word for “hello.” She expressed formal gratitude in both English and Japanese. “Thank you. Arigatou gozaimasu…”

The Major could see that she was in a contemporary nightclub. The hostesses, bartenders, gangster customers and companion bots crowding the place were all frozen in time, though a neon sign on the wall flickered. It read, “Sound Business.” The name suggested the owners were fond of puns, as it proclaimed both that the establishment was run prudently, and that the music pulsing from the club’s many speakers was one of its chief attractions.

The still images crumbled, data bytes dissolving like columns of ash, then resolved further along, showing the same people in new poses. The Major made her way through the unmoving patrons and waitresses, searching for the geisha bot. There were plenty of real women and companion bots here, but none were the one she sought. It unsettled the Major that she could hear running conversations around her, even though the people were statue-still. They also looked ghostly, as if they had all died yet remained upright.

“Thank you,” the companion bot repeated. Her words echoed slightly. “Arigatou gozaimasu.” This was followed by a burst of laughter from some of the customers, and rapid comments in Japanese.

The Major, the only moving figure in the room, found the red-robed geisha near the back of the club. She was surprised to find that this version looked more like a real woman in a geisha mask than a bot with a painted faceplate. Before the Major could begin to examine the geisha, the images in the nightclub moved, as though someone was shifting a series of life-sized photos or sculptures.

Suddenly, a burly thug grabbed the geisha, which uttered a frightened protest, but in a low voice. Her ingrained fear of disrupting the club’s patrons was greater than her fear of assault.

The thug ignored the geisha entirely and said, “Yes,” in Japanese.

The images crumbled again, and now the burly man was dragging the geisha through a back door.

The Major followed. She had lost sight of both the geisha and her abductor, but the geisha’s agonized shriek sent the Major running in the direction of the sound. She could also hear the thug’s cruel laughter and taunts as she went through the back door and down a long hallway. It was dark and grimy and smelled of chemicals.

The Major found herself in a large basement work room. She was presented with another frozen tableau, this one of a man in a dark cloak with the hood pulled up over his head. He was performing a hack on a supine geisha bot clad in white. This image, unlike the rest, did not crumble and give way. Even without seeing his face, the Major knew the cloaked figure was Kuze—and, unlike the rest of the individuals she’d seen so far in the Deep Dive, he was not motionless. Kuze turned and thrust out his arm like a magician casting a spell—

And the Major was flung back into darkness. She could just make out movement around her, and then she was surrounded by scores of black, decaying robots that were intent on tearing off the bioroid flesh from her synthetic bones. The machines crowded in, closer and closer…

In the forensics lab, Batou saw the Major trembling violently on the slab. Her shoulders shook and her back arched.

Batou could see she was in trouble. “Disconnect,” he ordered Dahlin. “Get her out.”

The Major grunted and twitched, imprisoned in the Dive’s code. “Get her out!” Batou shouted this time.

“I’m trying!” Dahlin snapped back. “But she’s being hacked.”

This only made the situation worse, as far as Batou was concerned. “Get her out now!”

In the Deep Dive, the Major yelled in desperation as the swarm of predatory, ruined robots closed in around her.

In the forensics lab, the Major convulsed.

Dahlin frantically typed commands into her instruments. Her hands weren’t free, so she called to Batou, “Now!”

Batou grabbed the cable and, with a grunt of effort, yanked it out of the Major’s quik-port, releasing her from the Deep Dive.

The zeta-cable was supposed to be removed from the quik-ports slowly and carefully, so when it was suddenly torn away, the Major sat bolt upright. Batou put his hands firmly on her shoulders so that she wouldn’t fall. Her eyes were wide and unfocused in terror. She shuddered and gasped, trying to get her bearings.

Batou was trying to catch his own breath. What had happened to the Major in there? Was she still herself? Did she know where she was now? Was there anything he could do to help her? He expressed all of this with, “Are you okay?”

The Major managed to control her breathing enough to speak. “I know where he is.”