Despite the pollution that had killed a lot of life here, hardy thick kelp stretched up from the bottom and large, bioluminescent white jellyfish were all around. Unlike humans, the jellyfish were not taken in by the Major’s exterior. They sensed that she was mainly inorganic matter, which made her neither prey nor threat. When they brushed against her, their trailing poisonous tentacles did not sting.
The Major would not have cared if they had. This was her chosen place of contemplation, where she could think without distraction or disturbance. There were no lies here, no deceptions, no contradictions, only silence that had been much the same since the Earth had cooled eons ago. There was no data here, either, nothing that could have made the Major what she was. It was a world in which Ouelet, and Hanka, and all the rest had no place. Finally, she reached the muddy floor of the channel and let her body settle to the ground, causing clouds of disturbed sand to billow about her.
Her dark hair floated around her head in small tendrils, making her look a bit like some exotic marine creature, as she stood upright on the harbor floor, reaching inside herself for some fraction of serenity. Down here, she needed no apparatus to breathe. Down here, she did not need to pretend she was a normal human being.
Here and here alone, in the nothingness—at least for a time—she could be herself.
The Major recognized the shadow of a watercraft above her. She wore a wetsuit with diver’s flippers, and now she used them to paddle and push as she ascended. Dawn had not come yet. She surfaced next to the small boat bobbing in the harbor’s mild currents. Far off on shore, a dull rainbow glow came from the city’s lights and holograms, reflecting in the low waves. White lanterns on the boat’s sides provided more distinct illumination.
At one time, the little old-fashioned craft had been a tugboat. Batou had bought it on a whim, intending to take it out on fishing trips, but the choppy waters around the bay and the baseline toxicity in the local marine life disabused him of that idea. He had a line over the side nevertheless, but he mainly used the boat for drinking and generally getting away from people. From here, it seemed like the shore was one massive urban sprawl extending as far as the eye could see. An endless city, from horizon to horizon. Like the Major, he felt the need to leave it behind on occasion.
He saw her head emerge from the ink-black depths of the channel. She glared, looking annoyed to see him. He waited on the wooden deck while the Major pulled herself in over the side and landed gracefully on her feet. Her epidermis reacted to the cold and she shivered. “I didn’t ask you to come here,” she said.
“You never ask,” Batou replied. “But I always do.” There was no resentment in his words. He tossed her a towel, sat down next to a fishing pole and took a swig of beer from a can.
“Did they send you to bring me in?” the Major pressed.
Batou took another swallow of beer. “I’m just here to fish. Did you see any?”
The Major wasn’t having his casual act. “You’re a company man, you follow orders, so if they ordered you to kill me…”
Batou was hurt, but he tried to keep his tone light. “Stop saying shit like that. You’re gonna piss me off.”
He grabbed another can of beer. When he turned to offer it to her, she shook her head, so Batou tossed the beer can back into the cooler.
“What’s it like down there?” He’d always wanted to ask her, but somehow never had before.
“It’s cold and dark. Just a million miles away. No voices. No data streaming. Just… nothing.” She took a breath. “It scares me.”
“Then why do you do it?”
The Major did not respond at once. Batou took another swig of beer. Then she answered him. “It feels real.”
Batou had something more urgent he wanted to ask, about the Major’s unexpected reaction to Kuze. “Why didn’t you stop him?”
“I don’t know who to trust anymore.”
He felt saddened, and a little uneasy. “You trust me, right?” Batou had to ask.
The Major turned and studied him for a moment, then dipped her head in a nod. “Yeah, I do. I just don’t like it.”
Batou couldn’t help grinning. The Major was all business. Any emotion, even trust, was bound to vex her, but that was one of the things he liked about her. Any loyalties she had were hard-won, and true.
The Major stepped into the boat’s tiny cabin. It didn’t have a door, so she kept her back to Batou as she peeled off the dark blue wetsuit, then toweled herself dry. He turned in the opposite direction to give her privacy. It would be completely improper for him to ever think of the Major in a romantic sense. Even so, Batou was acutely aware of her appearance and the exceptional curves of her female form, and he would be mortified if he ever did anything to alert her to that awareness.
“I need you to take me back,” she told him. “There’s more I need to find out.”
“Sure.” Batou swallowed the last of his beer.
Ouelet felt even more miserable than she had before, in part because what had happened during the Major’s visit had had time to fully sink in, and in part because there were now two Hanka guards posted in her apartment, watching her every move as she communicated with Cutter over the comm.
Cutter was in his office. His holographic image perfectly conveyed exactly how angry he was. “Dr. Ouelet, what have you told her?”
He was asking both about Project 2571 overall and Kuze specifically. “She knows,” Ouelet replied into the comm. There was no point in trying to keep this from Cutter; he’d find out anyway.
“I’m bringing her in,” Cutter informed her.
Batou went forward to secure the bow line as the Major leapt off the boat. She reached for the vial of medication she kept with her, no matter where she was. It was time for her morning dose. She had the vial in her hand—and then remembered what Kuze had said about the medication’s true purpose. Right now, she was more inclined to believe him than the Hanka doctors. Instead of absorbing the medication via her quik-ports, she threw the full vial into the bay.
She heard a vehicle motor. Hard-earned reflexes made both the Major and Batou react. They were halfway toward reaching for their sidearms when a Hanka security team poured out of a jeepney. The private soldiers wore black ballistic armor and masks, and were armed with machine guns, which they pointed straight at the Major. She might have been able to take all of them on by herself. Had this been part of a mission, she certainly would have tried. But Batou would be caught in the crossfire, and if by some miracle he survived that, he’d be arrested for trying to help her.
The team leader spoke aloud into his comm. “Hanka Security to headquarters. We have the Major.”
10
DISCONNECT
Once more at Hanka Robotics, literally the last place she wanted to revisit, the Major was strapped to a gurney, being wheeled down a corridor by a red-gowned surgical team. She could do nothing except wonder if this would be like the last time it happened, when she’d been put under and awakened to a set of new, false memories.
Then she glitched. The two teenagers she’d seen in her vision of the burning pagoda were here, in a Hanka surgical prep room. Both of them were restrained at the waist, and tied down to separate gurneys. They reached for each other, hands just touching, but the contact was short-lived as the doctors pulled them apart.