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.