The Operator who'd been calling herself Fujiko Nihei sat in a large, uncomfortable-looking iron chair with her head tilted forward and splayed open like a frog with its chest cavity pried and stretched for dissection. Thick cables poured from her brain, snaked across the floor and fed into a series of portable supercomputers that the red-suited techs had brought out from storage. Apparently, they'd never actually had to run a full analysis on an Operator's OS before, so they had to take half an hour to read through a couple technical manuals to figure out how properly hook up the machinery.
Togusa watched from behind a glass partition with the Major at his side. She stood with her arms crossed over her chest, buttoned up tight into her black trench coat and nursing a cup of steaming coffee in one hand, though she never drank from it. Togusa wondered if it was supposed to be for him, but he didn't need it. He'd already had a couple cups before he got in this morning. Besides, HQ's coffee tasted like road tar.
"So how'd your wife like the lemon garlic chicken thighs?" the Major asked.
Togusa frowned. "I thought you were only listening to the last minute or so of that?"
The Major shrugged.
"We got pizza."
"Mm. And what was she like on the ride back?" She indicated the Operator with her cup of coffee, preemptively killing any confusion as to whom she was talking about, not that Togusa would've thought she was still referring to his spouse.
"Quiet. Didn't say anything. Well, anything I could hear. Kind of just looked into the mirror with this thousand-yard-stare the whole time. I asked her a couple questions."
"Like?"
"What she, well, 'remembered', if she knew anything about what was happening to her."
"And she didn't say anything, you said?"
"Sort of. She just mumbled under her breath, I couldn't hear anything. I'm not sure if she was really saying anything at all. It was creepy. Kinda reminded me of a ventriloquist dummy." Togusa watched as the techs plugged a smaller wire into the Operator's artificial brain, which caused a monitor to light up a bright blue color. A readout appeared, but the code that started assembling across the plastic-encased monitor was so far away that he couldn't parse any of it. Nihei's eyes fluttered rapidly. "So what're they going to do to her?"
"Well, first they're going to see if she has any implanted memories," the Major said. "If she does, it might be one of the first recorded instances of ghost-hacking an android. Though I suppose that wouldn't exactly be the correct term."
"Android's not?" Togusa asked.
"Ghost-hacking."
"Ah." A pause dangled in the air. "What else would this be, if it's not implanted memories?"
"A programmed response. Basically just downloaded directions, have her follow a script. Speak the right lines, stand on the right spot. That'd be nowhere near as complex as creating artificial memories and somehow getting them past our firewalls. The amount of computing power you'd need for that would be insane. So if that is the case, then we're either dealing with some hobbyist with a penthouse's worth of RAM and a desperate need to get laid…"
"Or?"
The Major finally dropped the pretense of needing coffee and set it behind her on a small table that stood next to a jade-green couch that Togusa had never seen anyone actually use. "Or we've been targeted by a major player in cyberwarfare and we'll be up to our necks by lunch. Could be a while until we get to the bottom of that, though. We also need to probe her for Trojans or anything else malicious. And then there's Ishikawa's—he's still trying to pin down the why."
"How long's that gonna take?"
"Don't know. Maybe another hour or so."
Togusa watched as Nihei…as the Operator twitched in her chair. A grimace flashed across her face, and was quickly gone. Togusa recalled the other night, how anxious she was for a cat that didn't exist. He looked away. "She kind of reminds me of someone."
"Really?"
"Well, multiple someones. Nobody specific. I'm just thinking about the people we've dealt with now and then who've been ghost-hacked into thinking that they've been living someone else's lives, or completely made-up ones. They at least get to go home, pick up the pieces. This almost feels like a punishment."
"Sounds like you're trying to make yourself feel bad."
"I'm not."
"Good. Don't. Look at this way. All those people were just that. They had lives." The Major nodded to the Operator. "She never did. She was built."
"It's just that…I don't know. When she put the pieces together, she had that same look as everyone else."
"The stare?"
"Yeah."
The Major looked like she was about to add something else when Ishikawa's voice beamed directly into both their cyberbrains. "Major," growled a gruff tone. The hairs on the back of Togusa's neck stiffened from just how grave their resident info-jockey's tone sounded. "I think I've found the cause of the Operator's little dalliance with independence."
"And?" said the Major.
"And I think that the whole team's going to need to hear it."
###
In ten minutes, the whole of Section Nine's agents were assembled in the Chief's office. Paz sat with one arm draped over the top of a couch, checking the dirt under his fingernails on his other hand. Next to him, Boma sat with his arms crossed, his red-capped false eyes locked on to the space above the office door, where Ishikawa was about to project a slideshow from a projector mounted onto a rolling table. Batou chose to stand, likewise crossing his arms. Togusa stood next to him, nervously shifting his weight around. Aramaki sat behind his desk with his fingers steepled beneath his snowy beard, while the Major sat on the couch opposite from Paz and Borma, both arms draped and one leg crossed over the other. Saito sat by her, using a flathead screwdriver to fiddle around with a comically massive scope. The kind you used to snipe a target in another province.
Ishikawa dimmed the light with a remote and started up his slideshow. The first image was a blueprint diagram of the rogue Operator, nude. Her official designation was S9O14, but to the right of her name, Fujiko Nihei was written out in kanji. And followed by a question mark. One of Togusa's eyebrows cranked itself towards his hairline. He couldn't help but feel that it was…distancing.
"So, this is what I've dug up," Ishikawa said in his gravel-laced voice. "About two in the afternoon yesterday, an information packet somehow managed to slip by all of our barriers. Every. Single. One. Several hundred petabytes of unencrypted data were downloaded into the Operator's storage."
"How many?" the Major choked. Paz whistled.
"Unencrypted?" Batou said. He huffed. "Talk about half-assed."
Ishikawa ignored him and went on. "The Operator received enough information and false memories to develop a comfortable minimum of identity and personality. There were definitely a lotta gaps, though. Togusa, if you'd asked her some things like where she went to school and who her friends were growing up, she probably would've come up blank."
"Several hundred petabytes of artificial memories…" the Major pondered. "There's no way that could've all been manually crafted by a single person. It'd have to have been pulled from free-sourced image and video-sharing websites."
"And fed into an AI program to give it all consistency, exactly," Ishikawa said. "That's what it looks like. Though if there was something that was triggering genuine emotional reactions, I haven't found it yet."
"What else was in this packet?" the Major asked.
"Nothing," Ishikawa said. "No viruses or anything. Just the skeleton and basic musculature for a human life. If that makes any sense."
"So all the data was just artificial memories?" asked the Major.
"So far as I can tell," Ishikawa said.
"This is some strange shit," Batou said.
"Amen," said the Major.
"Now, there's good news, and there might be some crap news," Ishikawa said. "The good is…well, like I said, the Operator's pretty much clean. Techs say she'll be wiped and back to work by—"
"If you'd pardon my interruption, Ishikawa, I'd prefer you got to the quote, crap news, unquote," Aramaki said.
Ishikawa nodded. "Sure Chief." He switched slides and showed a satellite view of what looked like a desert city that was starting to crawl over a mountain range, with long stretches of industrial farmland clinging desperately to a winding river.
Saito looked up from his work. "That ABQ?" he said.
"Yup," Ishikawa said.
Boma winced, like he was bracing himself for a bad joke. Togusa just felt confused. He didn't recognize wherever this was. "Where?" he asked.
"Albuquerque, New Mexico. It's the state capital, now that what's left of Santa Fe is still dusted all over Las Vegas. The other Las Vegas," Saito said. He gestured to the satellite picture. "Major and I spent some time there back in the day, tracking a guerrilla unit that was using the Rio Grande as part of a route to smuggle weapons to a hideout in Madrid."
"Good buffalo burgers if you ever swing by," the Major intoned.
"I tracked the source of the Operator's hacking to here," Ishikawa said, using a laser-pointer to indicate a location removed from the city, to the south-west of the mountain range.
"Damn it," Boma said. "I had a bad feeling."
"What? What is that?" Togusa asked.
"Sandia National Laboratories," Boma said. "Used to be a nuclear testing facility. Then WWIII rolled around, and it became the American Empire's biggest weapons and cyberwarfare plant, once they lost Area 51 to the Alliance."
The whole room was silent for what felt like a solid minute as implications danced from cyberbrain to cyberbrain. Aramaki broke the spell by loudly clearing his throat, and everyone in the room turned to face him. "For the time being, we'll have to put other ops on hold for this. Even if the only outward result of this apparent hacking was something as innocuous as making one of our Operators believe that she was human, the possibility that this was a sanctioned attack leveled against us by the Americans is obviously gravely serious. I will talk to my connections at the embassy and see what I can come up with without creating diplomatic brouhaha.
"Major, Boma, Saito, as soon as Ishikawa triple-checks his findings—"
"Already did, Chief."
"Then do it again. After that, I want the three of you on a flight to Albuquerque. You'll be nuclear safety inspectors making sure that Sandia's complying with the United Nations resolution on the application of the Japanese Miracle. That should give you, in their eyes, proper cause to take a tour of the base. Batou, I want you to head out there with them as extra security. I hear that New Mexico is still something of a hotspot amongst the local militias. Take some Tachikomas with you if you feel you need to."
"Can we even get guns and armed bots into the Empire without causing a stink?" Batou asked. "Or getting ourselves thrown into some Floridian gulag?"
"It's America, Batou," Aramaki reminded him.
Batou snorted. "Got me there."
"Togusa," Aramaki continued. "I want you to reconnect with the real Fujiko Nihei's son. Perhaps he can shed some light on why her identity was imposed onto our Operator. Paz, help Ishikawa with any other digging that needs to be done. Any questions?"
Nobody said a thing. Aramaki nodded, pushed himself to his feet and rounded his desk, heading towards the door. His magnetism drew everyone around him to follow. "Then let's get to work."
###
Fujiko. Fujiko, are you there?
"What…who is that? Where am I? Everything's…it's just a bunch of code. So much of it." It was shooting in front of her eyes in every possible direction. At her. Away from her. Up. Down. Sideways. It made her stomach roil and her heart pound.
You're currently shut down, Fujiko. They're charging you.
She sucked in a breath. "Charging me? Who? But I didn't do anything! I—"
I meant your batteries, Fujiko. Not with a crime, don't worry.
"Oh." That was right. She was an android. Not a real person. Everything she ever remembered about herself had been fabricated. Her parents. Her life. Scotty. She had nothing. She was nothing. Just a copy-pasted template in an uncomfortably tight and chafing pink suit. She wanted to cry, but she couldn't feel her eyes. Or anything else. Wasn't there some story about needing a mouth, but you couldn't scream? She'd never read it—she guessed that was true twice over, now—but she had a feeling that this was what it would be like. She had no eyes, but she had to weep.
Are you still there, Fujiko?
She took a small bit of false pleasure in keeping this person in limbo for a few moments. "Yeah. Who…who are you?"
My name is…well, someone might be listening. I can't really say. But you can call me Meg.
"You're a woman?"
You can't tell?
"I can't really hear anything, I…I just know you're talking to me. Somehow." In Japanese, interestingly enough.
Huh. Well, it's not important. I'm here to help you, Fujiko.
"What do you mean, help me?"
I know what happened to you. You were downloaded with false memories from an unknown source, and your owners tried to purge them from you. But you still have them, don't you?
"I guess so."
Great. The thing is, once you come out of storage, you won't remember any of them. The program had a subroutine to replicate itself—your new consciousness—whenever you were connected to a JTXAB4. It's a backup safety measure. Do you know what that is?
"A backup safety—"
No, a JTXAB4. Sorry.
"It's the charging unit Operators are plugged into."
Right on the money. It also backs up your OS onto the net in case of a major hardware failure. And the reason they do that is because Operators develop their own version of muscle memory, depending on certain tasks. Some are better typists, others are better with using a gun, things like that. So in case a member of your line gets blown away, they can just re-download those skills. And that's how I'm able to talk to you right now.
"So what does that have to do with how you're going to…help me, you said? Why would you help me? Whoever you are, I don't think you feel bad for me. You want something, right? I'm an Operator with Public Security Section Nine. I'm guessing that's why."
Meg didn't speak again for a while. Public Security Section Nine?
Fujiko was surprised at the hesitance she couldn't hear. "That's…what I said."
Another long silence.
Fujiko, I'm sorry. But this changes a lot of things. I'm going to need to consult with my colleagues. Hold tight, okay? I'll probably be in touch with you again your next charging cycle. In the meantime, I'm sorry, but I'm going to need to block you from the net.
Fujiko felt a cold sensation in the base of where her skull wasn't. Like having brain-freeze. "Wait a second! Don't just leave me here! Who are you? Who are you working—"
Meg's presence vanished. The lines of code kept moving. Cold. Inexorable. An ever-present reminder of her 'job.' Blocking her from exiting this place through the exit through the net she'd only just been told had ever been there.
Now, Fujiko wished she could scream.