She passed another room full of bagged yakuza victims. She kept going.
What stopped the Major in her tracks was another glitch. The burning pagoda was in front of her again. This time, a teenage Japanese girl was being dragged out of it by the New Port City police. A teenage boy, also Japanese, was trying to pull the girl away from her captors. The girl was screaming in distress. “Hideo!” she shouted, and the Major understood this must be the boy’s name. Then the glitch disappeared.
Without warning, a yakuza gangbanger burst out of the darkness and stabbed a brutal-looking stun baton at the Major’s chest. It was a close cousin to the device No Pupils had tortured her with back at the Sound Business nightclub. Thousands of volts arced between the steel tines at its tip, threatening pain and feedback damage through her mech nerves if it made contact.
But this time she was ready. As if a switch had flipped inside her head, the Major was instantly in attack mode. Instead of retreating, or even going for her pistol, she launched herself at the man.
Her limbs became a blur of kicks and punches, parrying his attacks one after another as she drove him backward. The snarling yakuza found a lucky opening and managed to land a swift, glancing blow with the stun baton, but she deflected it before the weapon could release a full charge into her. They fought viciously in the tightly enclosed space, pirouetting around one another in an obscene, savage waltz. The Major sent quick, hard chopping impacts into his chest, snapping his ribs where each blow landed.
The thug reacted, crying out in agony, and she smashed him across the throat with a cobra-strike punch. He fell to the floor, no longer a threat to her—but he had not been alone. She dropped a second assailant, but then another heavily tattooed yakuza enforcer was right there, a taser in his fist. He didn’t wait for her to react, just jammed the business end of the device into her quik-port.
Losing control of her movements, the Major sank to the floor. The voltage flooded through her and there was nothing she could do as the yakuza guard jabbed the prod at her ports repeatedly, electrocuting her again and again. The Major had a strong tolerance for electricity but when more men joined in with their own weapons, five hundred thousand volts of screaming energy shot through her cybernetic body. The Major’s last sensory input was the smell of the cheap tobacco on the man’s breath.
Then darkness came and took her.
8
PROJECT 2571
This time, when the Major awoke, the jarring shift in place and time felt almost human.
There was no instantaneous transition from the non-state of inaction to the full awareness of being present. The wetware of her organic brain struggled to process the events, and slowly her senses returned to her.
She was floating above a dirty concrete floor. At first she thought that, impossibly, gravity had ceased to function around her. Then she became aware of her body’s own weight, all of it concentrated around her neck and the steel column of her artificial spine. There was a vise-like device holding her head in place, connected at her temples, and her feet did not reach the ground.
Odd collisions of noise and ambient sound washed back and forth through her neural processors until at length they began to separate out into distinct nodes. Somewhere off to her right, water dripped in a steady metronome-tick rhythm. Behind her, an electric generator was humming softly, providing power to the faint lights arrayed up above.
Her processors filtered out more sounds. Mechanical noises nearby, the soft irregular click of manipulators and the whisper of motion.
“Hello?” She tried to reach out with her mindcomms link, but the system was dead and everything she did to try to reactivate it only emphasized her powerlessness. The same was true of her legs and her arms, dangling inert and useless. This was not the result of the stun-shock that had knocked her offline. Someone had activated a neural shunt, bypassing the command pathways from her brain case to the rest of her central operating functions. She could open her eyes, she could speak, move her head a little. But nothing else. Her captor had been very thorough.
She was hanging from the ceiling by cables jacked into the ports on her neck. The shunt that digitally paralyzed her from the neck down was in there, working its control over her body. With effort, the Major shifted her gaze and took in the chamber around her fully for the first time. Her internal chronometer showed that twenty minutes had elapsed since the fight in the junction room. She was somewhere else now, in what looked like an old survival bunker from the chaos of the Third War. This was the underground bunker from her visions of Kuze.
And here, really present and not a hologram, was the man still covered by his hooded robe.
Despite her vulnerable position, when the Major spoke, it was a demand. “Tell me who you are.”
The man’s reply came with computer stutters and glitches, as well as the occasional electronic buzz. For all his technological brilliance, this was something he could not fix, or else did not wish to. “I am that which you seek to destroy.” His voice echoed slightly after he finished speaking. “In this life my name is… Kuze.”
The Major’s every instinct was to fight against the cables holding her, but she couldn’t move. “What are you doing to me?”
“I have c-connected you… to a network of my own creation,” Kuze told her. “Wh-wh-when I am finished in this world… my ghost can survive there and reregenerate.” He walked with a rolling limp, slightly unbalanced, but it did not lessen his powerful presence.
Kuze had proved beyond doubt that he had no hesitation about killing people, scientists, law enforcement and civilians alike. Why had he taken the Major prisoner instead of taking her life? “What do you want from me?” she asked.
“I became… fascinated with you.” And then Kuze removed his cloak and revealed himself. The Major met his gaze.
Intact and complete, he would have been quite handsome. But the visage beneath the hood was distorted, as if shown through a cracked lens. He had the face of a Caucasian man, or at least part of a face. Some of it was bare bioroid skull. He looked to be about the Major’s age, and it appeared that he had been assembled as she had been. But in his case, many of the parts fit poorly and much of the shielding was absent, leaving his inner robotic workings exposed. Tech mesh covered his right side and his chest was open in the middle, revealing cyber-organs beneath. His synthetic ribcage was clearly visible from the back, open to the elements, naked machine skeleton and titanium spine. The left side of his faceplate was metal, with no epidermis, and the skin on the right side of his face was scarred. The fingers of his right hand were bare metal, but the back of the hand had skin tattooed with the image of a woman’s eye. He had another tattoo on his left shoulder.
There was a peculiar androgynous beauty to him, a strange sort of fragility that masked what the Major knew of his deadly nature. His eyes were green, and looked as though whoever had crafted them had made them as much or more to simulate pure human emotion than as receptors for his cyber upgrades.
The Major knew they were only implants, but still she was unsettled by their expression. What was it… hunger? Rage? Surely not… affection?
He was standing before her, real and within her grasp, if only her hands could reach and subdue him.
Kuze continued with his explanation, the electronic buzz making the words stutter. “Reading your, your-your-your code while you were inside that geisha. Like nothing I had… felt before and yet so… familiar. We are the same.”
The Major’s body was numb, but she felt searing fury at the comparison. She kept her voice level, knowing that a show of temper would only put her at more of a disadvantage. “We are not the same. You kill innocent people.”