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.”