Disclaimer: Shirow Masamune has the rights to these characters. I just send them off in strange directions for my own perverse pleasure. Before anyone asks, Nizuki and Julian Blane are mine.

Chapter 6: Lost Dreams

A/N: Excerpt from Robert Frost's "Desert Places."

"Talking"
Thinking
(Cyberspeaking)
(Figure it out)

As I drove home, thoughts whirred through my head like the traffic on the streets. Since it wasn't after midnight, and the sky was cheerfully clear, every Tom, Dick, and Larry was out cruising the asphalt. The overhead lights glinted off the dashboard and sent tiny ocular impulses to my brain. I'd learned to tune them out years ago, like the thoughts running through my mind. However, the thoughts were sneaky and had a way of breaking through my firewalls.

So I'll admit I'm jealous of Togusa. I'm jealous of his house, I'm jealous of his progeny, I'm even jealous of his station wagon. But mostly I'm jealous of his Mrs. Togusa. Oh, I don't want Miki herself. I want a Mrs. Batou for my very own. A woman who would tuck me into bed and kiss my cheek when I've had too much to drink.

At one time I thought I might have been able to have that; but the fates wove other plans. Now I spend my time waiting on a sign from a higher being who has apparently forgotten I exist. Oh I'm not talking about God. He's up there all right, laughing at all of my antics and sighing at my wild musings.

But as Robert Frost wrote, 'I am too absent-spirited to count; the loneliness includes me unawares.' Strange how a man who died before the first cyborg was born, could so clearly pen our basic fears that we lose our souls to the machines the allow us to exist.

It was a lovely spring day and Nizuki was walking beside me on our way to an eiga, a movie. I always put her on the inside, away from the street. I had foolishly thought I could protect her better if I was closer to the road.

We'd met the summer before at the University. She was just finishing up her work in Tech Integration Studies and I'd been invited to speak at a seminar about the uses of cyberization in the public safety sector.

I'd met the professor, Julian Blane, during a security conference in the states. We'd kept in touch and when he'd been transferred to Tokyo as a 'modern topics' instructor, he'd looked me up to speak.

I was standing behind the podium, discussing the different options of cyberizing a human, when I looked up into wide brown eyes. In my work, seeing normal colored eyes is rare, so brown eyes always stand out to me. She took few notes, seeming to get more out of my talk by listening to me.

Although she wasn't extraordinary in body, the normal Japanese build and straight black hair, her eyes spoke volumes. They tightened in humor as something I said caught her attention. They widened in excitement as I described the process of transplanting machine into man. They even closed once. Not in sleep, as I'd assumed; but in contemplation.

After the conference, she came up to me and asked several well-thought questions. One was to ask if I had cyber implants myself. At my affirmative, she asked if she could see them, and I replied that would require us to be somewhere MUCH more private. As she blushed ten shades of red and started to walk off, I grabbed her hand.

"I was just kidding." I swept my long ponytail out of the way, exposing the back of my neck where I'd been cyberized. I'd like to say that I could feel the gentle touch of her fingers on my connections, but that area had no nerves, part of the cyberization process.

"Did it hurt?" She had removed her hand and was again focused on my eyes. The real ones, not these implants that make me look like Arnold Schwartzeneger dressed as John Lennon. I'm not sure, but I seem to remember they were grey.

"I don't remember. There are certain aspects to undergoing this process that are very nice. The ability to have my memories altered to exclude things like pain and suffering is one of them."

"Must be nice." Her eyes shimmered for one instant with sadness.

"Yeah, but in ways it dehumanizes me. I've become much more reckless because I know if I get hurt badly, I can just have my recovery wiped."

She shuddered. "I see what you mean. I'd rather experience the depths of agony so I could better enjoy the good times. I mean, regardless of how bad it is, at the click of fingers on a keyboard, you can start all over, never remembering how bad it was so you can have a reference to measure against the good."

And that is why I chose not to erase my memories of her. Because she understood more about life than I did although she was only twenty to my thirty-six.

That started the golden period of my life. "If I'd known it was going to be my only one, I would have held on tighter, filed every second away for minute inspection. A golden shrine to be taken out and gingerly handled before being polished carefully and put away until the next time." If only I'd known a terrorist bomb would end it before I had come to realize what we had.

Of course, I never would have met Kusanagi if it hadn't been for that explosion. She was the officer sent out to investigate the call. She was closer to the bomb, but the shrapnel missed her and hit us instead.

I remember waking up in a white room with lots of beeping noises and hushed talking. I'd always suspected Hell was run by a man in a white lab coat. Before the accident, I had no idea how close to the truth I'd been. I had a splitting headache and could swear my eyes were looking in two completely different directions.

"Doctor, I believe he's awake." One of Satan's more shapely minions was leaning over me, giving me a full frontal view of things I would never be allowed to touch at this level of Hell.

"Oh Good!" A bright light was shining in my eyes. "How do you feel?"

"Like a chameleon in Hell."

"Why's that?" He was writing in his book and not really paying attention to what I was saying.

"Because I'm looking in two different directions. Like a chameleon."

He snapped his tablet shut and leaned back over. "We'll, let's see if we can fix that." I heard something click in the back of my neck, and hands typing furiously on a keyboard. "Hmmm, might explain the headache, you're not aligned properly." A few more clicks and suddenly both of my eyes were looking at the same object, acting normally."

"What the hell happened to me?"

"Do you remember the explosion?"

Suddenly I knew.

"What about Nizuki?" I saw him look over at a nurse and her shake her head. Everything slowed down exponentially at that instant.

I remember shouting "NOOOOO!" at the same time a horrifying scream started in the next room over.

It wasn't until days later that I remembered the screaming and thought to ask about the other soul suffering in Hell with me. Much later I learned that she didn't have any recollection of the screaming; but that wasn't surprising. They would have wiped that memory without even asking permission. No one wants to remember the instant they learn they've lost their humanity.

A/N: I started to look up the backstory on Batou, but realized that in order to learn Batou's background, I'd have to spoil 2nd Gig for myself. Since I enjoy getting on the AS forum and shooting the breeze with other fans, I decided it was better to pull something out of my brain instead. So, if you've seen 2nd Gig and this doesn't match with it, PLEASE don't correct me. This fic is based on the movies anyways, so the series' backstory doesn't really matter.

Also, thank you to the folks that reviewed. I was really becoming worried that I was leaving little corpses all over the place with my writing. Glad to know that there are people out there who haven't died of boredom and are looking for updates. Take care all. -TK