“Innocent, is that, th-th-that what you call them?” Through all the glitching and buzzing, Kuze still sounded wry. “I am as they… made me.”
The Major suddenly experienced a sinking sense of doubt, hoping she was wrong. “Who made you?”
He cocked his head, a wry smile playing over mismatched lips. “What have they told you? That you were the first? The first cerebral s-salvage?” The green eye implants shone with what appeared to be strong emotion and his voice grew rueful. “You were born ofof-of lessons they took from-from my failure.”
The Major did not want to believe what he was implying. “What are you talking about?”
For all the distortion in his voice, Kuze’s bitterness was clear. “I was conscious while they dismembered my body and discarded me… like garbage.”
She said nothing. She could not. He was saying that he was an earlier, failed prototype of the experimental process that had resulted in her new life. If it was the same process, it was the same scientists. Hanka scientists. He was saying that they had dismantled him after they determined that he was not a viable prototype. And that they—that Genevieve Ouelet—had been lying to the Major all along. It wasn’t possible.
“I… was lying on a table,” Kuze went on, “listening to doctors talk about how my-my mind had not meshed with the shell that they had… built.” A shade of anger crept into his voice. “How Project 2571… had failed… and they had to move on… to you.”
The electrocution by his minions, the paralysis, these had been violation enough, but he was not finished. Kuze placed his fingers upon a set of contact points hidden beneath the synthetic flesh of the Major’s face and applied careful pressure. There was a wet click in her jaw and the seams of her cheek plating bubbled to the surface. He removed the left side of her faceplate, leaving the synthetic skull open from forehead to upper lip, exposing the complex circuitry, artificial musculature and alloy bones beneath that comprised the structure of her face.
The Major gasped, not because it hurt—she could not feel it at all—but because it was both so invasive and so intimate. And because Kuze looked neither disgusted nor clinical, the two emotions she’d seen in those few humans who’d seen inside her shell. What he saw inside her seemed to leave him… entranced.
“What a beauty you are,” Kuze said to the Major. He brought the disconnected cheek plate close to his face, as if it was a delicate flower and he wanted to bask in the scent. “They have improved us… so much… since they made me.” He paused. “They thought that we would be a part of their evolution, but… they have created us… to evolve alone…”
He reattached the section of the Major’s faceplate that he’d been holding. It snapped back into place easily, its joins undetectable. “…beyond them,” Kuze concluded.
So Kuze really thought he and the Major were some kind of new breed, superior to humans? “Evolution,” she taunted him, “that’s what you call killing everyone who made you?”
Kuze sounded frustrated. “You-you’re not… listening to me.”
The Major felt that she’d listened quite enough. “You’re a murderer.”
“They-they-they tried to kill me first.” The buzzing of his artificially generated voice grew louder. “It is… self-defense.” He slapped his own chest, indignant. “Defense of self!” He lowered his voice. “More will die… until they tell me what they took!” Enraged and despondent, he slapped his own head.
“I won’t let that happen.” The Major knew that Kuze could destroy her if he kept her paralyzed, but in his belief that they were connected he seemed unwilling to do so.
Kuze backed up this theory by making a sound of inarticulate anger, then running up and putting his face right up against the Major’s, yet making no move to harm her. “You want to kill me?” He studied her eyes for a reaction. “Like everyone else.” He looked resigned. “Do it then.”
And then Kuze astonished the Major by pressing his head against her chest and embracing her. “Do what you were programmed to do,” he murmured, a taunt of his own, implying that she had no free will, only thoughts that had been implanted in her mind.
Then he freed her, reaching up to her neck to disengage the neural shunt.
At once, all the cables let go of her. No longer suspended above the floor, the Major fell, gasping and shaken, slumping onto Kuze’s shoulder. Her body’s active cyber-systems suddenly flooded back into her control and it was like a hot wave engulfing her.
He gently lowered her to the ground. The Major immediately grabbed the pistol from his belt, then punched him clear across the room and fired at him repeatedly.
Kuze staggered to a stop. The gunshots had barely fazed him. The Major noticed something, stopped her attack, and approached him. Her attention was caught so completely that she was no longer worried what the killer might do next. “What is that?” she asked.
On his chest, Kuze bore a large blue-black tattoo of something the Major could not forget: rendered in delicate strokes, the pagoda from her visions.
She was so distressed that she slapped at the tattoo, as though the image on Kuze’s body had somehow caused the images in her mind. “What is that?”
“I c-can’t remember,” Kuze said, plaintive. “B-but I am haunted by it. Do you see it?”
She was staggered. Kuze saw the same glitches that she did. She could accept that there was something about the brain implantation process that caused glitches, but why the hell should it cause two different subjects to see exactly the same thing? What had happened to both of them?
Elsewhere in the warehouse, Batou and Togusa were chasing the Major’s signal as quickly as they could. It had been inactive for some while, but now it was on again and they intended to speed to her side—while fighting their way through the yakuza guards that kept springing into their path. Despite the fact that the Section Nine agents were better armed, better trained and a lot better prepared than their enemies, Batou was starting to have some concerns about how much ammo they had left.
And yet more yakuza poured into the hallway. “Togusa!” Batou yelled. Togusa sprang to the side to kick down a closed door, while Batou lay down a spray of covering fire for him, mowing down the men trying to kill them both.
The Major had stopped fighting Kuze and was listening to what he had to tell her. It was horrible, it turned her world upside down, but there was too much proof he was telling the truth.
“Don’t… take the medication… that they give you,” he warned her. “They use it to suppress your memories. Your shell belongs to them, but not your ghost. Your ghost is yours. Remember that, and maybe you… can remember it all.”
He might have said more, but a grenade blast tore one of the doors off its hinges. Batou and Togusa sprinted in through the roiling dust. Batou at once levelled his gun at Kuze. “Get away from her!” Batou shouted. “Get down on the ground… now!”
Kuze pulled two Uzis, firing them simultaneously at Batou and Togusa until the weapons clicked on empty. The two agents ducked for cover and returned fire, but no one was struck in the exchange. Kuze dropped the machine guns, turned and ran, vanishing into the surrounding darkness. Somewhere down the hall, a door slammed.
“Major!” Batou shouted.
He was relieved to see that she appeared unharmed—but she was staring at him with distrust. In disbelief, Batou watched as the Major turned and fled through the doorway. “Major!” he shouted again. He got no answer.
9
