The rest of the Section Nine team arrived in the street below beneath the massive purple sign identifying the Maciej. They raced under the exceptionally long entryway awning to the hotel’s front door, passing a trio of splindly, non-fleshed synthetic servants.
The Major fired at the spider-like geisha bot in the red kimono. The shots found their mark. The stricken bot released Osmond. The man fell to the floor, dead. He hadn’t been hit, but his brain was so traumatized by the bot’s hack that it had shut down even the most basic impulses governing his lungs and heartbeat. The bioroid collapsed onto its back beside him, its legs crumpled over its back, fluids pooling around it as its wrecked systems began to shut down. It reached out to the Major with an arm.
The Major wasn’t concerned—the bot was about to cease function at any moment. It couldn’t hurt her. And then the bot spoke in a child’s voice. “Help me. Please. Don’t let me die.”
The Major realized that the bioroid’s gesture was not a threat, but an entreaty. This made so little sense that the Major almost didn’t know how to respond. She stuck to her mission. “Who sent you?” she demanded.
The geisha spoke again, pleading. “Help me. Please.”
“Answer me!” the Major insisted.
Then a different voice came through the geisha’s speaker. It was male, both more and less mechanizedsounding that the geisha’s speech had been. It was—although the Major had no way of recognizing it—the same voice that had instructed the geisha to hack Osmond. Now it said, “Collaborate with Hanka Robotics and be destroyed.” The geisha opened the rest of its face, the cold metal petals folding outward to display the gold metal skull beneath.
The central cerebral processor module for Hanka’s geisha model was mounted in the head, just behind what would have been the nasal cavity of a human being. A high-velocity bullet through the center of the face would crack it in two, immediately rendering the machine inert.
The Major was seldom unnerved, seldom moved to unnecessary action, but the geisha’s pleas, followed by the terrorist threat, infuriated her. She emptied her pistol into the geisha’s head until the unit was no longer operable. The mechanical face closed, returning to a semblance of normality as it ceased all function.
The Major stared at it, allowing herself to exhale, even as she wondered what the hell had just happened.
She heard hard breathing nearby. One of the gunmen was bleeding out, but still alive. He pulled a grenade from within his once-elegant suit jacket.
A booted foot ground down on his wrist and the gunman groaned weakly. Batou had arrived. The big Scandinavian calmly concentrated his weight onto his prisoner until he heard bones crack. The gunman gasped in agony.
Batou shook his head reprovingly. “Uh-uh.” He ended the assassin’s pain by putting a round through the man’s skull. He scooped up the grenade, made sure the pin was securely in place, then went over to see how the Major was doing. “You okay?” He winced, inhaling softly as he got a better look at his colleague. “You’re injured.”
It took Batou’s words to bring the Major out of her reverie. She raised her left arm to see a big red-rimmed wound that ran from her wrist to mid-forearm, exposing the robotic parts within, dripping the same kind of white liquid that had splattered out of the geisha bots she had destroyed. She looked down again at the one that had spoken to her, begged her…
Batou, better at reading the Major than anyone else in the Section, sensed that she felt some sort of kinship—totally unwarranted, in his view—with the wrecked machine on the floor. “You’re not the same,” he assured her.
The Major turned and headed for the door.
“Hey. It’s just a robot!” Batou shouted after her.
The Major ignored Batou, heading outside as a squadron of local law enforcement, wearing vests that identified them as police, flooded into the room. She activated her thermoptic suit, becoming invisible once more. Some of the cops bumped into her, grunting in surprise at the unseen obstacle. She ignored them, too.
2
INNER UNIVERSE
There was no sense of transition for her, no moment of alteration from the dreaming world to her waking reality. Not anymore. It was just one of many tiny human things that she had lost, small details that no longer wove through her life.
At dawn, light filtered dimly in through the windows of the Major’s apartment. Outside, a giant holographic woman was smiling over the harbor. The Major was fully conscious, though not yet dressed to go outside. She had on her sleep wear, a dark blue undershirt and shorts, as she sat up on her single-tatami bed, silently examining the damage she had sustained the night before. Instead of a mattress, the space beneath her body was a series of illuminated glass coils, a platform containing hidden sensors to scan her for signs of damage, and electromagnetically stimulate the nano-mech elements in her artificial bloodstream should any be found. The coils also generated a low-level power field capable of contact-charging her body’s internal power supply while she was offline.
The bed could not repair the hole in her wrist, though. The bio-proxy skin had clotted around the edges of the ragged gouge in her flesh, but it hadn’t knitted closed. The circuit matrix beneath was still visible. She would need to get one of the Section Nine mech-techs to take a look at that for her, but for now the limb seemed to be functioning adequately despite the surface damage.
Seeing the tech inside her surface flesh reminded the Major of the dying—no, de-activating—geisha bot that had said it didn’t want to die. It had been fully mechanical, incapable of such sentiment. As a machine, it was also incapable of life in the first place, so it could not fear death. The begging must have been programmed by the terrorist who orchestrated the attack. And yet her own circuits did resemble those of the bot.
The Major knew there was no use in such thoughts. More important, there was no time for them. There was no day when her skills were not required by Section Nine. When she knew herself to be fully charged, she reached up to her neck to disengage the twin zeta-cables trailing from the ports there. The connectors came free with a metallic click and she let them drop away.
She stepped into what she thought of as the shower. It served the same function as a regular shower, though it only resembled one insofar as it was a stall. The Major hung suspended there while lights pulsed around her, emitting photosynthetic rays that cleaned detritus from her skin and refreshed the electrical impulses underneath.
When she was done, she dressed. Then she was startled by an organic noise that had no place in her sparsely furnished apartment: a meow.
The Major turned and saw, in a wall alcove, a grey-and-black striped tabby cat wearing a blue collar. The animal was up on her hind legs, reaching out with a front paw to bat at a bug. Then the cat momentarily broke into jagged video lines before vanishing completely.
She exhaled. It had been a glitch. The Major had been experiencing more of them lately. Nothing alarming, but she shouldn’t have them. And why a cat, of all things? Maybe she’d subconsciously noticed a fragment of holo-advertising and it had lodged in her memory somehow. The image did seem familiar.
The Major opened a small package containing vials of yellow medication that kept the glitches at bay. She plugged one vial into the quik-port in her neck. When it was empty, she unplugged it, grabbed her jacket and left the apartment.
In the sky over the street, the gigantic hologram of a woman promoted something in Japanese. Garbled audio made her pitch indistinct. Besides, she was competing for airspace with a giant sologram billboard, which proclaimed in both text and a female voiceover, “Your skin deserves the best, and so do you. Try our hand cream.”