Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
Memory Failure- ABERRATION, 4th Iteration

by Ironraven
edited by quiren

Section 9 and it's operatives aren't mine.

---

Tachikoma paused outside the garage. It was empty, but there would be security. He set the pack down, rummaging for a moment before taking out a small black box. He slid the datajack from his manipulator arm into the dummy barrier that was already wrapped around one of his legs, before putting the box between the barrier and the door. The lock breaker did it's job, shattering the weak, civilian barriers that protected the locks from those who might have wanted money.

The voices were telling him this wasn't right. They were telling him he had become a danger to people. The humans would never stop looking for him if he didn't give up.

The blue of his skin was too bright, too obvious. This body shop had what he needed. Inside was a simple service robot, built on a Jameson body; even better. It's weak mind was a little more robust than the locks had been, but he needed this one functional. Giving it orders, he selected his paints, two shades of black and a grey the color of concrete under moonlight, after making sure none of their ingredients would increase his radar reflectivity. Without the thermoptics, he would need to do it the old fashioned way.

He stood there, limbs outspread, planning his next move as the blocky machine executed it's appointed tasks. Through the roof of this building, he'd look like an automobile to a fast thermal scan. He'd picked it for that reason. It would take the robot half an hour to finish, then a half hour after that for the paint to be dry enough for him to move. It would still be slightly sticky, but he'd manage. He had to assume the enemy was aware of his maximum speed. They'd be spread out over a much larger area in an hour, their resources stretched thinner in their search. Longer than that, and the more methodical search that was undoubtedly moving behind the front wave would catch up him, but he'd taken steps to slow that.

It would give him time to find where the voices were coming from. They were telling him to give himself up. They were higher pitched than his, except for the one. The stranger had a firm voice, like the Major, but deeper. They were telling him they understood what he was doing, it but he needed to stop. If they understood, why didn't they help him?

---

The comm came up for all of them shortly after the tilt-rotor left Headquarters. The building was free of Tachikoma, inside and out. "We have identified the Tachikoma body used to house the prototype." The brunette robot rattled of a string of alpha-numeric characters.

Batou turned his mind inward for a moment. It wasn't the body of his friend; it was the gamer.

Even his simulation seemed to blanch as Togusa's eyes widened slightly. "That Tachikoma knew about my family, it had seen pictures of my home."

The Chief's image jiggled slightly. "Togasa, call your wife. Tell her that your employer is going to send someone to get her and the children, and that they will be there at best possible speed. Give her my description and Proto's, tell her that she needs to go with us to a safe location."

Aramaki hadn't gone into action himself in decades, but he hadn't forgot the bitter taste of fear in his mouth. He shot a message to the bioandroid who was his aid, to go to the parking garage. The limo had still been intact when the garage was swept. The old man reached the armoury after Proto, who was pulling on armour and a tactical harness. Aramaki squirmed on his own armoured jacket, before stuffing magazines full of 20mm high velocity grenades into empty pockets. He pulled a pair of submachineguns and a grenade launcher off the racks. The last time Aramaki had tasted fear this strong had been just before his raiding unit had walked into an ambush. The tanks then had been bigger then, but slower. That time he'd had a company of men, not himself and one other.

Proto already had a brace light antitank weapons slung over his shoulder. He'd done the math as soon as the nature of the offender was known. The four hundred gram warhead of the compact weapons had an eighty percent probability of rendering the Tachikoma unable to fight. That was assuming that it wasn't as fast as the Tachikoma he'd first met, which had proven able to dodge the much faster shells of a tank. The artifical man silently and automatically accepted and checked the automatic weapon his leader offered him, lost in probabilities and permutations of being ambushed.

---

Clinging to the side of a building by wads of webbing, the devices were content to watch the numbers change. The cool night air didn't bother them, nor the breeze. They certainly were not aware enough to be bothered by the height. Just so long as the numbers continued to change.

Unchanging numbers would make the devices unhappy.

The numbers stopped changing at "0".

Windows shattered, sending a rain of debris towards the street below. A 12 meter peice of I-beam twisted, and sagged, before following the glass. The limpet mines weren't intended to destroy the building. They had been designed to blow holes in the hulls of warships; the structure was similar in material and thickness. Despite being skinned of it's glass, the building stood.

The real target was the electrical transfer station 37 stories below. Blades of tempered glass cut cables and stabbed insulators, damaging the delicate structures below. The tons of steel crushed and shorted across transformers and switches, blacking out several square kilometers.

The detonation was 25 clicks away from the garage where Tachikoma was being camouflaged. It was closer to the site of the failed ambush in alley, but in the opposite direction from it than his current location.

---

Boma was safety harnessed to the structure of the tiltrotor, his feet dangling over the side. Despite the thermal imaging system built into the glue gun, he couldn't see any traces of the wayward automaton. Just fires in the electrical equipment below, and a collection of emergency services personnel. "I've got nothing."

Saito was meditating on the data gathered by his weapon's optical sight and that from his hawkseye link. From the door opposite Boma, his weapon bobbed and weaved as if scenting the air. "If it's here, Major, it had upgrades we weren't told about."

In the link, Kusanagi shook her head. "And the local cops haven't been shot at."

"Is that important?"

"I think so." On the ground, Batou growled in annoyance. "It attacked those cops at the alley, risking it's chance to escape to hit what it might have seen as enemy reenforcement rather than running. There's been nothing here."

"So you are thinking this was a distraction?"

Ishikawa pressed his forehead against the frame of his visor, tiredly. "I'd bet money on it. The police just reported that something with four feet just jumped on the hood a patrol car. Shots fired; the officers aren't responding to thier cybercoms or the to the car's terminal."

---

Batou looked at the bodies. Just like the first pair, a double tap to the head of each, the entry points nearly joined into one wound. This time, the shots had been through a windshield. The safety rated glass was angled and curved to resists impacts from road debris as well for aerodynamics. Those properties made a shot through a windshield notoriously tricky at the best of times. Who ever did this was able to compensate for the defraction of light and the angle and thickness of the glass. The four dents over the engine compartment were as good a finger print.

The Major had finished talking with the local cops. She looked around, her vision straining. Security cameras were getting smaller every year. There. She walked to the side of the apartment building, eyes on the camera posed to watch the doorway. It should have been able to catch the shooting. Jacking her barrier into the dataport by the door, Motoko shifted her consciousness. She slipped through the security barrier with practiced ease. She hammered the password that protected the visual record with the contents of her personal dictionary. The information was a common format.

"Ishakawa, Togusa, we need to get an advisory out to the various police departments. Tell them that this Tachikoma is probably hunting the cops."

"You're sure on this, Major?"

"Nearly positive." She fired the short movie of the rogue Tachikoma landing on the hood of the car, leaping away before the last of the metal cartridge cases was done bouncing.

Togusa began calling his contacts and friends with the police force. Within minutes, the image of a blue multiped executing the two officers was to every on-duty or cyberbrain-equipped law enforcement officer in Japan.

The Major had missed the scratches on the access panel. The kind that a being without fingernails might leave while opening the panel. The errors in the hacked datafile wouldn't be found for another four hours.

---

Author's notes:
Only unhappy bombs go off.

For those who might be interested, in my head the rogue Tachikoma uses Vic Mignogna's voice; he does the voice of Ed on the english language version of FMA. I know he doesn't say much in the story, but the rogue is an interesting character to have camping in my head.