Ghost in the Shell Read online

  She heard his footsteps come to a sudden halt—the gunman could not have missed the sound of her touchdown—and the crunch of his boots as he turned in place.

  Even when cerebral cyber-enhancements are hacked to add strength and endurance, a human body has limits. The Skinny Man had reached his. He turned off the thermoptic feature on his rain coat—a cheap unit, it had been sputtering for the length of his run—and looked around.

  He pivoted and saw no one, but fired his machine gun again, letting off a sustained, screaming arc of bullets that ripped through the air as he spun. He emptied the remainder of the snail-drum magazine into nothing, until the SMG’s slide locked open and the steaming barrel glowed cherry-red with heat. He stormed forward, looking for a way out of the too-open space.

  As if jerked away on an invisible cord, his gun was suddenly whipped out of his hand. It went spinning away to land in the water. From out of the air, or so it seemed, came a lightning-fast series of kicks and punches that cracked him across the face, drawing blood, and struck him across the chest and the back of the legs. He reeled backward, grabbing at nothing, before he fell to his knees and spat out a mouthful of thick, crimson-laced spittle. The Major, her own thermoptic suit engaged, shimmered like clear glass under water. She flipped Skinny Man into the air. He came crashing down onto his face in the shallow seawater.

  He cried out in pain, but somehow still kept moving. Pulling a knife from his clothes, he slashed at the air, trying to find the Major. Instead, the Major seized his arm and twisted it, forcing him to drop the knife. She flipped him into the air again, and once more, he landed in the water.

  The man was now greatly disoriented from the hack, by the blows delivered by the Major’s hands, and by his skull twice connecting with the concrete under the layer of seawater. The Major grabbed him a third time, dropped him on his feet and resumed hitting him. One punch sent Skinny Man flying back through the air to land a third time face-down in the water.

  Like a magic trick, the Major deactivated her thermoptic rig and was revealed, standing over him in full fury with her fists clenched. She struck out at him again in another blistering flurry of body blows and he went down hard, wheezing in pain.

  He tried struggling to his feet, but she kicked him and he went down into the water anew. The Major grabbed a fistful of his soaked collar, turned him onto his back and walloped him twice in the face.

  She let go of the man, but it was only to catch her breath for a moment. Then she pulled him up by the collar again. “Where’s Kuze?” the Major snarled.

  Skinny Man’s head rolled around and he blinked, trying to focus on her. An odd change passed over his face and he flinched, staring wide-eyed at her. Before, his gaze had seemed distant and clouded. Now he was confused and afraid, as if he was a sleepwalker that had just awakened from a trance.

  “Why does he want to kill Ouelet?” the Major demanded.

  “I… I don’t know anything!”

  The Major found this unacceptable. She heard Batou running up behind her, but she ignored his approach. All the conflicted emotion she had held in check earlier now came rocketing out in the form of pure rage. She towered over the cowering man and began punching him in the face until he couldn’t take any more and fell back into the water, on the verge of losing consciousness. The Major started to fish him out so she could hit him again.

  Batou ran up behind her and grabbed her before she could inflict more punishment. “Enough!”

  The Major glared at him.

  “Enough!” Batou repeated. She shoved him but he pushed her back and stated the obvious. “We need him alive.”

  The Major stalked away, still furious, and Batou fished the beaten man out of the water.

  * * *

  Secured on a lower level of the ops center, the cube rooms were used for interrogation of high-value targets and the kinds of enhanced criminals that the regular cops were not equipped to handle.

  Skinny Man didn’t think he could stand to answer the questions even one more time. “Please… I’ve been through this.” And he had. He’d been here for hours, in a large shatterproof glass box inside an interrogation room. The blank-walled space lacked the classic desk, chair and mirrored window décor that characterized most police interview rooms. Instead, there was just the cube. His arms were restrained by a yellow straitjacket that fastened in front and his quik-ports were wired to an echo box in the ceiling, where a camera-sensor pod was also mounted. His ankles were shackled to each other and those were connected to a zeta-cable that ran from his receptor port to an encryption box mounted on the floor. There was a heavy lock around his neck, one of his eyeballs was bloody, and his feet were bare on the grid floor, which pressed painfully into his soles. Bio-monitors tracked his skin conductivity, pupil dilation, blush response and a hundred other scan vectors, seeking signs of deception—but for the moment, all he appeared to be was terrified and confused.

  The woman who had battered him half to death was pacing circles around him, interrogating him over and over.

  “You have the wrong guy,” Skinny Man protested, blinking owlishly.

  “So tell us who we do have,” the Major rejoined.

  “My name is Lee Cunningham.”

  “Where’d you get the weapons?” the Major asked.

  “I don’t know,” Skinny Man said. The Major’s gaze flicked to the monitor readings, where a digital needle showed very small tremors over the time-base. She frowned. According to the readout, he thought he was telling the truth.

  Still, she pressed on. “Who loaded them onto the truck?”

  “I don’t know anything about weapons, all right?” Skinny Man exclaimed. “I told you. I was pickin’ up my daughter. She takes violin lessons.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Skinny Man was exhausted and nervous. It showed in his breathing.

  The Major held up a holographic portrait of Skinny Man and showed it to him. “Is this her?”

  “Yeah.” The suspect couldn’t even recognize himself, but the most alarming thing was that he thought he was looking at a child. “Isn’t she a little angel?” He beamed at the photo, as if it really did show a little girl he adored.

  The Major scanned his face for any sign of mockery. “This is your daughter?” the Major persisted.

  “Right,” Skinny Man agreed.

  Observing, Togusa drew in a whistling breath of incredulity. The poor guy had lost all connection to reality and didn’t know it.

  “Do you have kids?” Skinny Man asked the Major, trying to find common ground.

  The Major put the holo-portrait away and began circling again. “Where do you live?”

  “I can’t remember,” Skinny Man confessed. “I—I think, I—I think it’s a tall place.” He looked to her for confirmation, stammering in his growing misery. “Is, is it a tall building? It’s a tall place, right?”

  The Major skipped over that and went for the throat. “You don’t have a child.” Skinny Man stared at her in shock. “You don’t have a wife,” the Major continued. “You live alone. It’s just you.”

  “What?” Skinny Man was devastated. “No.”

  “We’ve been to your apartment. There’s nobody there.”

  “No!” Skinny Man shouted, refusing to believe it. Tears prickled at the corner of his eyes as a terrible sorrow welled up inside him.

  “You’ve lived there for ten years by yourself,” the Major said.

  He was weeping now, shaking his head, denying the Major’s words. “No!”

  Whatever was going on here, the Major was determined to find out. “So you’re just lying.”

  “I’m not lying!” the man howled. He was distraught. “I didn’t kill anyone. Why do you keep doin’ this to me?”

  It was clear that for now, at least, she wouldn’t get anything more from him. “Holo cube disconnect,” the Major commanded, and her solid-looking holographic image inside the cube disintegrated like falling sand. At a distance from the cube, the Major w
atched from where she’d been physically the entire time, observing the interrogation with Batou, Ladriya and Togusa.

  “Please!” Skinny Man begged, as though he thought the Major was still there with him. “I didn’t do anything. Why do you keep saying this to me?”

  Ladriya turned to Tagusa for an explanation. “I don’t understand. How can he not know?”

  Within the cube, Skinny Man kept on sobbing. “Why am I here?”

  Togusa sighed. “The hack must have created a vacuum. Kuze has wiped his memory and somehow installed a new reality.”

  Batou sounded philosophical. “At least he got to believe he had a kid. What’s the difference, huh?”

  Abruptly, Skinny Man stopped sobbing. His expression became calm and purposeful. The Major noticed, but Batou did not, and expounded on his theory. “Fantasy, reality. Dreams, memories. It’s all the same. Just noise.”

  The Major stood directly outside the cube. Such a monumental falsehood from a man like this suspect, an ordinary working-class citizen with absolutely no training in counter-interrogation techniques, should have blown up as a massive peak on the polygraph. Unless he was a sociopath, there was a far more disturbing possibility at work.

  The prisoner walked up to the glass separating them and stared out at her with an unreadable expression, but this was not the same person who had been hysterical with grief and confusion moments ago. His body language was much more controlled. Although this was a new guise, the Major recognized Kuze peering out through the man’s eyes. “It’s him,” she told the team. “He’s in there.”

  Togusa frowned. “This cube is secure. He can’t be, Major.”

  Ladriya looked at the readout. The waveform display had changed from a human-nominal series of tiny peaks and troughs to a completely flat line. There were no tremors at all, not even a hint of displacement. “Lie detector,” she realized. The suspect was connected to the polygraph, which was theoretically impregnable, but Kuze had already proved he could get past any firewall. “He must’ve hacked in that way. We should uplink to the machine, trace the code, get a lock on his location.”

  “Do it,” Togusa urged. Then he saw that the Major was heading for the entrance to the cube. It was one thing for her to put a projection of herself in the cube with the suspect, quite another for her to actually enter it. “Don’t go in there. It’s too dangerous!”

  Aramaki, who had been seated in the corner, silently observing, called out. His face was a mask of grave concern. “Major.”

  The Major turned to her commander.

  “We don’t know what else he’s capable of,” Aramaki cautioned her.

  The Major indicated that she understood the warning, and opened the entrance panel in the cube, going inside for the first time to stand face to face with the prisoner. The prisoner studied her with a kind of cold, alien curiosity. The panel closed.

  Outside the cube, Ladriya began connecting an echo box to the polygraph, tracing the extra code.

  “Signal’s unstable,” Togusa fretted. “Can you get a lock on it?”

  Ladriya was working as fast as she could, but the telemetry wasn’t cooperating. “I’m sorry.”

  “We gotta move fast,” Togusa said, just as though Ladriya didn’t know this already. “We’re losing it.”

  Ladriya made some adjustments to the echo box, then sighed in relief. “Connecting.”

  “Who are you?” the Major asked the prisoner.

  When the man spoke, it was with Kuze’s electronic voice. “Come here.”

  The Major took a step closer to him.

  “I am shy,” he softly inhaled. “I’m not beautiful like you.”

  The Major tried not to be disconcerted. Compliments on her appearance were the last thing she’d expected to hear during the interrogation. “Tell me who you are.”

  “I have been born more than once,” Kuze said through the hacked man’s mouth. “So I have more than one name.”

  “I’ll find you,” the Major vowed.

  “Not yet.” Kuze’s tone was gentle, but not pleasant. “I’m not done.”

  Outside the cube, Togusa spoke up. “The machine is tracing his location.” He turned to Batou. “We got a fix.”

  The Major heard, and so did Kuze, who immediately relinquished control of his bio-puppet. She saw the strange shift and change pass over the prisoner’s face once again. He looked up at her with watery, panic-stricken eyes, then started trembling and weeping. “I need to see her. Please.”

  The Major turned away. There was nothing she could do for him. Somehow, seeing him sob for a daughter he’d never had was just about unbearable. She opened the panel and exited the cube.

  Behind her, the man continued to beg, whimpering, “No, please. I know… where…”

  “We got him,” Batou told the Major.

  The cube panel shut with a click. Skinny Man leapt up into the air, pulling his legs up underneath him. The cable connecting him to the polygraph was attached to the cube ceiling. His action turned the cable into a noose, snapping his neck. The bio-detectors buzzed with the steady whine of brain and heart flatlining together as he died.

  The Major and Batou stared at the dead man through the glass. It had happened so fast, in a single instant, and it had been too late to do anything.

  Batou exhaled grimly. “Let’s go.”

  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.