Chapter 3:

A Day on the Town

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Somewhere on the outskirts of Tokyo, a skylight lifted open, and a black-clad figure climbed down into a darkened room. The air inside was stale, old; the tiny apartment hadn't been used in months. Every surface was coated with dust. What little furniture the room contained was now a uniform gray, unmarked by so much as a single fingerprint.

Satisfied, Zima nodded to himself and pulled off his netdiving glasses. So far as he could tell, the safehouse had remained unoccupied since its last use. Actually, he was a bit surprised; given that the place was situated in one of the seedier parts of town, he had half-expected it to have been broken into and robbed.

"Thank goodness for small favors," Zima said aloud. He walked over and switched on the single lamp in one corner of the room. This apartment was one of several small supply caches that he and Dita had established at various times, in case they ever needed special equipment but lacked the time to return to base. While their superiors had encouraged the combat persocoms to be resourceful, they had never asked where Zima and Dita had placed their supplies.

The only one who might remember where those safehouses were would be Dita herself, but considering how many they had established around the city, Zima doubted that even his counterpart would be able to guess which one he had picked. Once she told their superiors where each cache was located, the Syndicate would have to search them one by one, which would take a considerable length of time. When they finally found this apartment, Zima intended to be long gone, having moved everything in it to another place of his own choosing.

The fact that Dita had left him still stung somewhat, but really, Zima couldn't blame her. Even before they had been given the capacity to feel emotions, Dita had always been the voice of their masters, totally committed to carrying out their assignments with maximum efficiency. Even at times when Zima had brought up possible repercussions that would result from completing a task, Dita would usually discount them as irrelevant. Designed for intense combat, Dita favored quick action and a fast, efficient solution when faced with a problem. In many ways, her decision to have her emotions deleted was a perfect example of this. Faced with the challenge of dealing with her new feelings, she had chosen the fastest, simplest solution, and the one that their masters would most likely approve of: to get rid of her emotions immediately.

Zima, however, had been intended as a prototype field-commander unit, designed and programmed to analyze every situation, plan for every possible contingency, then determine the best course of action, even if doing so meant modifying or ignoring some of their instructions. Once he had realized that the program carried by Chii, Professor Mihara's surrogate daughter, was only meant to give persocoms free will and the ability to feel emotions, he had decided that the best thing would be to accept this gift and use it in whatever way would most benefit others. If that meant going against the Syndicate, whose judgment he had long questioned, then so be it; Zima now had the capacity to make his own decisions, and he was going to exercise it.

First, though, Zima needed to get his own affairs in order before he had an opportunity to help anyone else. Doffing his black cloak, Zima bent down and lifted several tatami mats off the floor, then lifted up a section of the floor itself, revealing a large compartment between the floor of his fourth-story apartment and the ceiling of the one below it. Inside was enough military hardware to make most third-world countries jealous, from assault rifles to a rocket launcher. The compartment also contained some less destructive materiel, including four suitcases full of clothes, a motorcycle meant for fast escapes and roughly half a million yen in cash.

Zima pulled out a small black box. While most persocoms featured large, clearly visible audio sensor/connection hub units on the sides of their heads, he and Dita had been designed to be capable of blending in with human beings. Opening the box, Zima pulled out a pair of latex prosthetic ears, then fitted them over his own audio sensors. The prosthetics muffled his hearing somewhat, but Zima knew that he could still hear better than most humans. After a quick look in the mirror, Zima nodded to himself, satisfied that his disguise would pass even close inspection. Then he went back for the suitcases, wondering what someone renting a moving truck might wear...

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Several hours later, a tall, dark-haired man strode down the street. In his red turtleneck, bluejeans and white sneakers, he looked for all the world like just another civilian running errands on a sunny Saturday morning. Even the pair of futuristic-looking sunglasses he wore did nothing to attract attention; while not exactly common, netdiving glasses weren't the most unusual accessories for computer-savvy people.

Zima had opted to wear the glasses so that he could monitor the apartment's security system during his trip. The last thing he needed was for the Syndicate to search the safehouse during his absence, discover that he was using it, and set a trap for him. If the system detected a break-in, Zima would abort picking up his rental truck and get out of the city as quickly as possible.

Consulting his internal clock function, Zima realized that he had some time to kill. According to the directions he had been given, the rental depot was only three miles from his current safehouse. When he had made arrangements to pay for and pick up the vehicle, the sales representative had advised him to come at around twelve in the afternoon. Since it was only nine o'clock and the trip would take roughly two hours at walking pace, Zima had an hour to spend. Rather than simply remaining at the safehouse, where he might easily be captured if the Syndicate dropped by, Zima chose to use his free hour out of the apartment, observing his surroundings.

As he strolled along, Zima caught sight of a brightly-colored sign which announced that the door beneath it led into a comic shop. Lacking anything better to do, Zima went in, doffing his glasses for the moment as his eyes adjusted to the indoor lighting. The store was filled with shelf upon shelf of magazines, books, mangas, and video discs. One, in particular, caught Zima's attention: a comic book featuring a costumed man clad in black and wearing a long, scalloped cape attached to a mask featuring two pointed protrusions on top. In his hand was a rope or cable, which the man was using to swing from one building to another through a huge cityscape. In many ways, the image reminded Zima of the way he and Dita usually jumped from rooftop to rooftop on missions.

Zima caught sight of a man wearing a nametag. "Excuse me," he said, "but could you tell me who this person is?"

"Dude," the shaggy-looking shopkeeper said, "That's Batman. He's all the rage in the United States, and he's got a pretty good following in Japan, too. Basically, he's this rich businessman during the day, but at night, he puts on that costume, then goes out and uses all his martial-arts skills and hi-tech gadgets to help innocent people in trouble."

"Why does he wear the mask?"

"'Cause in most comics, sometimes doing good means fighting people who do bad things. Since vigilantism is illegal, a lot of American superheroes wear masks to keep their identities a secret, unless they work for the government or something. Plus, having a secret identity means you can have a more-or-less normal life when you're not fighting crime."

Zima thought about this for a moment. Certainly, the idea of using one's unique abilities for the benefit of others struck a chord deep within him. The idea of having a secret civilian identity also appealed to Zima, since it meant that he would not have to return to being strictly a combat persocom again, allowing him to develop his new willpower and emotional capacity as a human being. "Where can I learn more about this Batman character?" he asked.

The clerk grinned, ushering Zima over to a rack filled with video discs. "There are a couple of movies based on the Batman comics. The fourth one pretty much sucks, but the rest are good. I really like the fifth one," he said, pulling out a black-and-orange case. "It pretty much explains why he becomes Batman and how he gets started as a superhero."

Zima accepted the disc gratefully. If he really did decide to become what the clerk called a "super hero," he was going to need some idea of how to go about it. Then he noticed another case on the same shelf, and the image on it nearly made his jaw hit the floor: A man in a black trenchcoat, carrying several weapons in a harness, a pair of black sunglasses on his face. On his left was a shorter man with a shaved head, and on his right was a short-haired woman in a tight-fitting black outfit with her own pair of dark sunglasses. Incredible! Zima thought, That man in the middle looks just like me! And the woman beside him is dressed like Dita! To the storeowner, he said, "Who are those people?"

"Dude, where've you been for the past twenty years? Uranus? That's Neo in the middle, and there's Cypher and Trinity. 'The Matrix' is, like, the biggest action movie of the century!"

Suddenly interested, Zima drank in every word the clerk spoke to him for the next hour. Clearly, there were some important things he could learn here...

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