1

His eyelids rose slowly.

He’d fallen asleep at some point. The new Italian sofa he’d imported last week was a bit too comfortable. Without getting up from the smooth leather surface, he glanced at the smartwatch on his left wrist.

2:12 AM.

He got up, stretched, and walked to the southern-facing wall. It was entirely made of smartglass, and its currently transparent surface afforded him a gaze of the waterfront from his executive room on the forty-third floor.

The port gleamed softly with the reflected light of the downtown skyscrapers. A number of large ships were stationed along the expansive harbor. But their angular, forceful silhouettes were not those of luxury cruise ships. They were battleships of the Third Fleet of the United States Navy under Pacific Command.

For many years, San Diego, the second-largest city in the state of California, had been a military town. It had stationed over twenty-five thousand military personnel and their families at a massive naval base that served as the city’s primary economic engine.

But in recent years, new industries had rapidly taken hold—high-tech sectors such as information, communications, and biotechnology.

Some companies straddled the boundary between military and tech. Most of them were private military contractors, or PMCs, that accepted contracts from the military and other large companies for protection, training, and even direct combat on the ground.

The chief tactical officer (CTO) of Glowgen Defense Systems, Gabriel Miller, gazed down upon the darkened port next to downtown San Diego and smiled without even realizing it.

He was still excited from the dream he’d had during his brief nap. It was a dream of the full-dive VR game event he’d participated in just a few days ago from this very executive suite.

Gabriel hardly ever dreamed, but when he did, it always replayed some scene from his past in minute detail. He could still feel the pleasant sensation of the blue-haired sniper struggling against his grip. Almost as though it were real and not a dream…

But it wasn’t real. That battle happened in the virtual world, not the real one.

Full-dive technology was a revolutionary invention, and its creator, Akihiko Kayaba, was worthy of respect. If he were still alive, Gabriel would have spent millions to recruit him. Even though he was the most infamous criminal of the century—in fact, especially because of that.

But the experience offered by the AmuSphere, as close as it came to providing truth, only made the fact that it wasn’t real that much more unfulfilling. Like salt water—never truly quenching his thirst, no matter how much he drank.

As Glowgen’s youngest officer and major shareholder, Gabriel led a life without any unfulfilled physical wants. Yet, his gnawing mental needs could never be satisfied with money.

“…Your soul will be so sweet…”

He repeated the words from his dream.

In fact, he wished he could have said those words in Japanese, which he’d been studying for the past three years. But because his player account was tagged as an American one, he didn’t want to give away any unnecessary details or make himself more memorable. They’d have a chance to speak more intimately someday. And he had many questions.

The little smile playing across his lips went away, and Gabriel used one of the touch sensors at various spots on the glass to lower the translucency of the surface. It turned into a darkened mirror instead, reflecting his image.

His blond hair was loosely pulled back, and his eyes were a piercing blue. On his six-foot-one frame, he wore a white dress shirt and dark-gray slacks. His shoes were custom-made cordovan leather. His image was almost embarrassingly white and white-collar, but Gabriel thought nothing of his personal appearance, instead favoring the essence held within. The flesh was nothing more than a shell that enveloped the soul, after all.

Soul.

Just about every religion contained the concept of the human soul. Christianity, of course, held that the soul was sent to either Heaven or Hell depending on your actions in life. But Gabriel’s belief in and fixation upon the soul had nothing to do with being Protestant or Catholic.

He knew it. He had seen and experienced it for himself.

He’d witnessed an indescribably beautiful collection of light particles leaving the forehead of a girl whose life was fading away as he held her in his arms.

Gabriel Miller was born in Pacific Palisades, a suburb of Los Angeles, in March of 1998.

He was an only child and grew up with every material and emotional expression of love from his wealthy parents. They lived in a huge mansion that provided him with many places to play, but young Gabriel’s favorite place of all was his father’s private collection room.

His father was the owner and manager of Glowgen Securities, the precursor to Glowgen Defense Systems, and he was an avid collector of insects. He had countless glass cases arranged in the large collection room packed with the little things. When Gabriel had time, he hid in there, magnifying glass in hand, gazing at the colorful bugs as he sat on the sofa in the center of the room, daydreaming.

Sitting in that tall, dim room all by himself, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of silent, unmoving insects, young Gabriel sometimes experienced the strangest sensation.

Until a certain moment, all those insects had once been alive. They’d been on the plains of Africa or in the deserts of the Middle East or the jungles of South America, contentedly building their nests and foraging for food.

And then, a collector came along and caught them, treated them with lethal chemicals, sold them through a series of transactions, until at last they wound up lined in tidy little rows in the Miller household. This was not just a room for displaying a large insect collection. It was a massive mausoleum housing thousands and thousands of defiled corpses…

Gabriel would close his eyes and imagine what would happen if all the insects around him suddenly came back to life.

Six legs, scrabbling in the air for freedom, feelers and wings vibrating and twitching. Skitter-skitter, skitter-skitter—individually faint but multiplied times infinity—a wave of scraping and scratching noises that engulfed and bowled him over.

Skitter-skitter, skitter-skitter.

His eyes flew open. He thought he saw one green beetle’s leg twitching in a corner of a case directly across from him. He leaped up from the sofa and rushed eagerly to examine the case, but the insect was just a lifeless display sample again.

The emerald-green shell, which gleamed like metal; the legs with sharp little spikes; the compound eyes with their lattice of incredibly tiny photoreceptors. What kind of power had once operated these precise little machines?

His father told him that insects did not have a brain, like humans did. “So how do they think?” he asked. His father showed him a video.

It depicted praying mantises mating. The smaller male held down the much larger, rounded female from behind and pressed the end of its abdomen against hers. The female did not move for a while, until abruptly, without any warning, she grabbed the male’s upper half with her forearms and began the unforgettable display of devouring his head. To Gabriel’s shock, the male even continued mating, only disengaging once its entire head was gone. Then, when the female released her grasp, she fled the scene.

But despite having no head anymore, the male mantis crawled across the grass, climbed branches, and nimbly continued its escape. Gabriel’s father pointed this out and said, “The entire nervous system of insects like the mantis is kind of like their brain. Losing their heads is only the loss of sensory organs. They can still live for a while.”

For several days after seeing that video, Gabriel wondered where a praying mantis’s soul was. If they could live on even after their heads had been eaten, then losing all their legs probably wouldn’t stop them, either. Was it in the abdomen? The thorax? But the insects would still wriggle and writhe, whether you crushed their soft stomachs or pierced them with a pin.

If no part of their body caused instant death when destroyed, then praying mantises’ souls must be spread throughout their entire being. This was eight- or nine-year-old Gabriel’s conclusion, after he had undertaken numerous experiments on bugs he caught around his home.

Insects ran on a mysterious power that operated their machine-like bodies—a soul that stubbornly clung to its vessel even as parts of it were destroyed. But at a certain moment, it would give up and leave that body behind.

Gabriel eagerly wanted to witness that soul leaving for himself, perhaps even catch it. But no matter how hard he stared through the magnifying glass, no matter how careful his experiments, he never caught or even saw any thing leaving an insect’s body. He spent long hours and expended immeasurable enthusiasm in his secret lab deep in the woods behind his house, but he never found the slightest bit of success for his trouble.

Even young Gabriel had an instinctual feeling that his parents would not welcome this interest of his. So after the incident with the mantis video, he never asked his father about it again, and he never told anyone about his experiments. But the more he hid it, the deeper his obsession became.

Around that time, Gabriel had a very close friend his age.

Alicia Clingerman was the daughter of the corporate board member who lived next door to Gabriel’s family. The children went to the same elementary school, and their families got to know each other. She was shy and quiet and preferred staying inside and reading or watching videos, rather than going out and playing in the mud.

Gabriel, of course, kept his experiments a secret from her and never once spoke about insects or souls. But he never stopped thinking about them. When he gazed at Alicia’s face, smiling angelically as she read her stories, Gabriel pondered where exactly her soul was.

Insects and humans are different. Humans cannot live without a head. So the human soul must be in the head, he thought. In the brain.

But Gabriel already knew, from browsing the Internet on his father’s computer, that brain damage did not necessarily lead to loss of life. There were construction workers who survived despite being pierced from chin to crown with a steel pipe. Some doctors had succeeded in rehabilitating patients with mental illnesses by removing a part of their brain.

So it has to be a specific part of the brain, Gabriel thought as he stared at Alicia’s forehead, which was framed by wispy golden locks. Somewhere past her smooth skin, hard skull, and soft brain matter, her soul was hidden.

In his youthful naïveté, Gabriel assumed he would end up married to Alicia. Perhaps one day, he’d actually get to see her soul for himself. Given how angelic she was, it was certain to be the most indescribably beautiful thing.

Gabriel’s wish would come true much sooner than he realized, but only half of it.

In September 2008, a major bank collapse triggered a worldwide financial crisis.

The resulting recession engulfed Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, too. Several of the mansions around them were sold, and the number of luxury cars on the street visibly dwindled.

Glowgen Securities’s cautious business model paid off, and they were able to keep the damage to a minimum, but the Clingermans’ real estate investment company suffered huge losses. By the following April, the family had lost all its assets, including the mansion, and was going to move to Kansas City in the Midwest to rely on some farm-owning relatives.

Gabriel was sad. He was wise for a ten-year-old boy and understood that there was no way he could actually help Alicia. He could easily imagine the hardships that awaited her in the future.

All his privileges—a large home kept safe by perfect security systems, every meal prepared by experienced cooks, schools full of other rich white children—would become things of the past for Alicia, replaced by poverty and hard labor. Worst of all, Alicia’s pure soul, which was supposed to be his one day, would now be tarnished by someone else, some stranger—and that was the hardest thing of all for Gabriel to bear.

So he decided to kill her.

On Alicia’s last day of school, after she said her good-byes, Gabriel invited her to go into the woods behind their houses when they got off the school bus. He guided her there along his secret route, skillfully evading all the security cameras along the roads and fences, ensuring that no one saw them, walking over fallen leaves to hide their tracks, until they reached his secret laboratory, which was hidden in an especially dense area of shrubs.

When Gabriel put his arms around her fragile body, she returned his embrace, having no idea of the countless insects that had perished in this space. The girl sobbed and hiccuped, telling him she didn’t want to go anywhere, that she wanted to stay there in that city with Gabe forever.

In his mind, he silently reassured her that he’d make that come true. He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out the tool he’d prepared: his father’s four-inch steel needle with a wooden handle, used for killing insects.

He stuck the sharp end into Alicia’s left ear, pressed his other hand against her right, then rammed the implement all the way in to its base.

Alicia blinked in wonder, not realizing what had just happened, and then her body abruptly went into violent spasms. A few seconds later, her blue eyes lost their focus.

And then, Gabriel saw it happen.

Something luminescent, like a tiny gleaming cloud, emerged from Alicia’s forehead. It floated gently toward him, right between his eyes, and passed without sensation directly into his head.

The soft sunlight of the spring afternoon around them vanished. Instead, powerful beams of light shot down through the branches of the trees directly overhead. There was even the faint sound of bells.

Gabriel’s eyes welled up with tears of unfettered joy. He was viewing Alicia’s soul…and not only that, he understood that he was seeing what her soul was seeing.

The tiny glowing cloud, over a few seconds that seemed like an eternity, passed through Gabriel’s head and rose, higher and higher, guided by the light of Heaven, until it disappeared. The spring sunlight and the chirping of the birds returned.

As he sat there, cradling Alicia’s lifeless and soulless body in his arms, Gabriel wondered whether what he’d just experienced was true or merely a hallucination brought about by his extreme excitement. But whichever the answer, he knew that for the rest of his life, he would be seeking that experience again.

He took Alicia’s body to an oak tree he’d found with a deep, gaping pit beneath its roots and tossed her body down into it. Then he examined himself very carefully, plucked two long golden hairs from his body, and dropped them into the hole, too. After carefully washing the needle, he returned it to his father’s tool kit.

The local police never succeeded in finding any clues to Alicia Clingerman’s disappearance, and the case went cold.

Twenty-eight-year-old Gabriel Miller awoke from this brief but deep reverie. He pulled away from the reflective-mirror glass and headed to his work desk on the western wall of the room. The instant he sat in the Norwegian reclining chair, a phone icon began to blink on the thirty-inch display panel embedded into the desk’s glass surface.

He tapped the icon, which brought up the face of his secretary, who began to speak.

“I apologize for disturbing you, Mr. Miller. Mr. Ferguson, the company COO, would like to have dinner with you tomorrow. Shall I make the arrangements?”

“Tell him my schedule’s full,” Gabriel immediately replied. His usually implacable secretary looked a bit startled by this. The chief operating officer was the vice president of the company, the number two man at Glowgen DS. Gabriel was just one of ten executives, and he wasn’t important enough to turn down an invitation—under typical circumstances.

But the secretary’s expression faded in a second, and she said, “I understand. I will let him know.”

The call ended. Gabriel sank back into his chair and crossed his legs.

He had an idea of what Ferguson wanted. He was going to try to convince Gabriel not to participate in a particular exercise that was on the schedule. But secretly, the COO’s intention was the exact opposite. The wily old badger was hoping he would venture into danger and wind up on the KIA list. After all, Gabriel was the son of the previous CEO and was the company’s biggest shareholder.

For his part, Gabriel understood how stupid it was for a corporate executive to take part in a live-combat scenario with actual gunfire being traded. Even if he had combat experience of his own, the CTO’s job was to draw up overall tactical plans from the safety of the company office. There was zero need to expose himself to the danger of the battlefield.

But for the sake of his top-secret master plan, he couldn’t sit back and miss out. This was a strategy that directly linked to the life goal Gabriel had had since the day he saw Alicia’s soul leave her body.

The client in this case was not their primary partner, the Department of Defense. Instead, it was the National Security Agency, a department they’d never dealt with.

When two NSA agents visited this very office last month, they succeeded on multiple fronts in stunning Gabriel, who did not experience normal emotions as others did.

For one thing, the operation would be extralegal, completely off the books. This made sense, as the plan was to send Glowgen’s combat team on a naval submarine and attack a ship belonging to an allied nation, Japan. And if casualties resulted on the other side because of combat, so be it.

The point of the operation was to steal technology.

When he heard the details, Gabriel was so stunned—or perhaps elated—that he gasped. Fortunately, the agents didn’t notice.

It was called Soul Translation technology. A stunning machine, developed by a tiny arm of the Japan Self-Defense Force named Rath, that could scan and read the human soul.

As a devout seeker of the soul, Gabriel had been keenly fascinated by the full-dive tech coming out of Japan. It was what drove him to play against Japanese players in Gun Gale Online and study the Japanese language. He even spent tens of thousands of dollars to get his hands on one of those hellish devices that were supposed to have been destroyed: the NerveGear. But not so he could wear it, of course.

After the controversy over that deadly game, Gabriel expected that continuing development in full dive would taper off. But no, they’d continued clandestine research, and now they were on the verge of unlocking the secrets of the soul.

To Gabriel, this NSA offer was as good as fate.

For one thing, Glowgen DS was big but still just a PMC. There was no way they could spurn an offer from the NSA, which was more powerful than the CIA at this point. They convened a quick board meeting and chose to accept the contract by a margin of two votes. To maintain the secrecy of the mission, they chose operatives with dirty pasts and expertise in wet work whom they could lean on for the combat team.

And Gabriel nominated himself to be CO.

Naturally, they would hide Gabriel’s role as company executive from the combat team. They were the types of people who, if they found out his identity, would take him hostage and demand ransom from the company instead.

And Gabriel had to undertake this risk in order to go.

The NSA agents told him that not only had Rath’s STL tech succeeded at reading the human soul, they could even make clones of it. Once the artificial intelligence code-named A.L.I.C.E. was complete, its soul would be loaded onto Japanese drones that would overturn the balance of military power in East Asia.

He didn’t care about war in Asia—or anywhere in the world, for that matter. But the moment he heard the name Alice, Gabriel’s mind was made up.

She would be his.

He would do whatever it took to get the soul contained in that tiny medium called a lightcube.

“Alice…Alicia…,” he murmured, leaning back into his chair. That faint smile had returned to his lips.

When Gabriel’s grandfather founded Glowgen, he intended it to mean “generating glow.” He thought of it as the glow of prosperity and happiness, but to Gabriel, his heir, it conjured only the image of that golden glow emerging from Alicia’s forehead as she died.

What generated that glow? The soul, obviously.

It was all fate at work.

A week later, Gabriel and eleven squad members flew to Guam, then took a nuclear submarine from the local naval base into Japan’s territorial waters. Right before the operation began, they switched to a tiny ASDS submarine that ferried them to their assault on the Ocean Turtle, a massive marine research craft.

He didn’t know whether they’d take the vessel bloodlessly or whether one side—or both—would suffer losses. But Gabriel was certain that Alice and the STL tech would be his. He could give the NSA some random lightcube and a copy of their research.

Soon…very soon. He’d done his experiments on a number of people since Alicia, and he never got any closer to the true nature of the soul—but it would be in his grasp before long.

He would get to see that beautiful cloud of light once again.

“…Your soul…will be so sweet…”

This time, as he closed his eyes, Gabriel said the phrase in perfect Japanese.