Soliloquy by Yoshinobu Akita

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The setting sun shone in over the slanted penumbra at an equal angle as though bearing down on it.

There was nothing special about the park. It was a normative affair, dutifully positioned according to the city’s legally mandated ratio, and in that same petty bourgeois way, unassuming and indifferent. At the entrance an iron railing to keep bicycles out stood like bad teeth; the clay field where no weeds grew was cleanly set apart from the managed flowerbed where wilting was forbidden; the diagonal rays of the setting sun separated light from shadow. In an orderly manner, everything was partitioned, from something else. The only ambiguous thing here was time.

How many seconds until dusk turned into night? A computation based on data would yield a precise answer, and it would be almost unconscious. But she couldn’t carry it out…There was no reply when she consulted her prosthesis. Even the most insignificant part should have had the time at least.

Motoko felt less fretful than uncertain at the disconnect. All she perceived was the park. It wasn’t that she was there. It wasn’t that she was seeing it. Just purely, simply, oddly…it was just the park.

Something wasn’t right, but she couldn’t figure out what right away.

What she realized first was that she wasn’t blinking. When a prosthetic reacted to an unforeseen event on its own, the brain couldn’t keep up and registered it after the fact. From a little while ago, Motoko’s had ceased to bother with any “play.” Her mechanized prosthesis was calibrated to perform human gestures automatically in normal mode, but in emergencies it omitted such waste.

In other words, she was in combat now—or so she thought before judging that she was jumping to conclusions. It wasn’t only her blinking. She couldn’t move her limbs. Not because she was restrained, but because she couldn’t even try to move them.

She couldn’t even take a breath and study the situation. There was nothing. Her prosthesis, to begin with, wasn’t in observation range. Naturally, the same went for the brain shell that it held.

That meant she wasn’t there.

And the “there” itself was bizarre.

That is, the scenery that she was seeing. Not a single person graced it, true, but it was also devoid of all motion. No wind blew. The clouds in the sky didn’t change shape one bit. It was as though time itself had stopped.

She suddenly wondered how long she’d been this way. She had no idea. Perhaps it was just for a moment, perhaps it was for a billion years. No, that couldn’t be, if only because brain shells had expiration dates…Yet she couldn’t even tell if she still was in hers.

An out-of-the-body experience?

The term had an awkward standing on this planet, as electronically enmeshed as it was at varying thicknesses. The cyberbrain could leave the body and do anything, or so it seemed. Gathering info, shopping, crime, even leading a second life just in case.

But could humans live away from their brain shells? That was the question that anyone who experienced a cyberbrain bumped into. Did the sense of omnipotence mean you could cast off your body? Might you chip away at it and confirm where you began and ended? Humans were at a stage where they could live as a brain. The experiment was quite feasible, in fact. The concept had changed the meaning of life a long time ago. Or rather, returned it to its most elementary place.

The ghost, in a word—and it whispered:

Is the soul immortal? Did someone not promise that it is? Or…are promises made to be broken?

“Let there be light.”

When words made their entry, Motoko froze.

Not that she had any body to brace, but she searched for the voice’s source. It didn’t exist, and that irked her. There had been no sound, at least not in the physical sense. Why would there be a voice in a park where no wind blew, where even the dust was static?

Mere words. Pure data, if you would. But it wasn’t exactly emotionless and inorganic, betraying her expectations again. The voice—which wasn’t even a voice—sounded familiar.

It was a woman’s. The voice that always issued from the speaker buried in her epiglottis. The one voice that felt both intimate and disorienting for her.

Motoko’s own.

“Where there is light, there is shadow. But it’s funny, because no one sees light itself, just the shape of shadows. So then, what is light?”

Asked this in her own voice, Motoko pondered almost reflexively: What is light?

Both a wave and a particle, united as the photon through some curious magic. It moved in a straight line, and reflected, and refracted. It was a picture, and a word, and therefore a narrative.

Ah, she realized.

This place she was had no light. What she was seeing was an image. She was in a perfectly still image. It was as though she’d been locked up in a photograph or painting.

Grasping that it wasn’t scenery but an image, she modified her views. She wasn’t in a space. The 3-D computations that her prosthesis should be replaying in her brain shell had halted, and a lone piece of image data was all that she perceived. It wasn’t that Motoko wasn’t there. She simply wasn’t registering any particulars. Normally, the brain processed info acquired by a pair of eyeballs into a three-dimensional image, and that was how people knew their location and status. She wasn’t managing to do that. Unable to obtain data from her prosthesis, Motoko’s brain shell was assembling a fantasy deprived of context and based on error.

To wit…she was dreaming.

That awareness put an end to her uncertainty and discomfort. She might even be able to stand in this place that had no space. A dream…just a dream…wish it…and it’d be granted.

Motoko alighted upon the park.

She felt that way because she understood herself to have been floating. That was strange, too, since she hadn’t existed in this place before. Her brain had come up with the illusion to paper over things. It was to maintain people’s sanity that many an illusion arose, to keep them from noticing things whose mere sight would obliterate reason.

The park remained somewhat unnatural but had transformed enough to lend itself to a videogame level of reality. She could at least stand and walk on the ground and gauge, at a glance, her distance to the monkey bars. But there was no guarantee that heading straight to a destination would actually get her there. She was in a dream, after all.

Something else had also appeared; more than one pair of feet had touched down. Another person. Motoko didn’t fret and turned around.

It was a woman.

Motoko immediately felt offended. The woman was her spitting image.

She looked similar but was different. Motoko swallowed her distaste. Meeting someone who looked just like you could happen in reality, too, and would hardly have bothered her there. It was even to be expected if you used an identical model of prosthesis by the same designer.

She looked similar, but was different. In fact, she was so different that Motoko finding her similar for a moment was what was odd. The woman before her had better curves and wore a cheerful expression. Her voice also…seemed different. Raising her hand against the setting sun, the woman spoke, her tone rather pointed and mocking.

“Even if the crust has become a teeny bit electronic and bombs have ravaged it all over, I guess this is still the same light as when mammoths lived.”

Motoko calmly objected, “The atmosphere’s state is different. Plus, this scene is digitally processed, and the capacity of prosthetic receptors is fundamentally different from an organism’s. Human memories aren’t as precise.”

“B-o-r-r-ring! Nincompoop.” The woman gave an exaggerated shrug. “Why not just say, ‘You’re right, but your eyes are what’s eternal.’ You’re so uncool.”

“I’d say invading someone’s dream is a lot less cool.”

Motoko’s hand roamed to her waist out of habit. But there was no gun. Not that it would have meant anything.

Even so, she made a display of her alert stance and challenged, “Who are you? Is this a ghost-hack?”

“If it is, why let you catch on to it?”

“It would depend on your goal.”

“Sure. Then could it be well-intentioned?”

“Anything but that.”

“Why not?”

“There are realms you just don’t invade.”

“You’re denying the very basis of the Shell Force.”

“…Sec 9 is a necessary evil. But I never thought of it as well-intentioned.”

“You say that like you do it just for your paycheck.”

As the woman continued to mouth blithe responses, Motoko pulled out a gun.

She stared straight at the woman past the sights.

This was a dream. Whatever you wished for came true. Yet, the woman alone seemed to be distinct from her surroundings.

Setting the exchange back on track, Motoko interrogated, “Are you a thrill seeker?”

“This isn’t much fun, though. So far.” The woman waved her hand in front of the muzzle. “I wouldn’t. An imaginary gun is useless. There’s nothing you can do. I came to tell you that.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Motoko without lowering the gun, though she knew it wasn’t suppressing her—disgustingly correct—opponent.

The woman laughed. It was an odd thing to feel about someone with the same face, but she had a charming smile.

The words that the woman uttered, however, were ungenerous. “Normally, people don’t want to do anything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just what I said. How can you not get it?”

“Who are you?”

“It’s impossible to forget me. So why don’t you ask yourself?”

“Your point eludes me.”

“What’s eluding you isn’t my point, but what you ought to be asking.”

“It’s the same thing.”

Even as they traded questions, the woman’s posture shifted. Without any preliminary motions, she easily leapt and flitted from the horizontal bar to the monkey bars to the top of the slide.

Motoko bothered to continue to aim at her until the woman casually straddled the tip of the gun, at which point Motoko, fed up, drew back her arm. The woman didn’t even fall to the ground and instead jumped to her original position.

And she said, “I don’t think so. Even though you know whom to ask and, ultimately, already know the right answer, you understand nothing because you don’t have the appropriate question ready…That sounds funny, but living is a string of such encounters.”

“Can’t I talk to you without being lectured at every turn?”

While aware that she was being knocked off-tune by the woman’s jesting, Motoko was having trouble recovering.

The woman knew it, too.

“Right. That’s my role.”

“Your role?” asked Motoko.

“The thing you lack right now, being out of order.”

“I suffer no defects.”

“You think so, that’s all.”

The woman put a hand to her ear as though to listen to the wind.

The gesture was as meaningless as a handgun. All you needed to do was to raise your sound collection device’s sensitivity. Not that Motoko could access her own at the moment.

Her lookalike who was also decisively different sighed…let out the SE of a sigh, and muttered, “Can’t you hear it? The ghost whispers.”

Pfft, the woman blurted like it was a joke only she understood.

Motoko didn’t see what was so funny, but hesitated to ask even that much. She didn’t want to give the impression that she’d accepted the woman. What tickled her so was probably spouting the trademark line to Motoko herself.

The woman righted her posture and started in on the situation. “It’s true that you’re out of order. Fatally so. The danger level is, let’s see, nine on a scale of ten.”

In Motoko’s view, a nine meant being shot at and the bullet, sure to hit, simply not having struck yet. Even as she thought this, she felt irritated that she was accepting, so meekly, the possibility that her standard of judgment and the woman’s might coincide.

The woman went on with an innocuous look. “The Locked-in State…might be similar. Relax. It’s not a stroke. But your cognitive functions aren’t working, so you could say it’s more critical.”

Once the woman got to it, her explanation was straightforward.

Motoko was familiar with the syndrome, and the woman rephrased it in a nutshell.

“ ‘Body Lost.’ Your brain can’t recognize your prosthesis as your body.”

“So I’m cut off from the net, too…”

“Of course you are. Unless you’re able to connect telepathically—wanna give it a try?”

To be precise, the network link was operative. It was the connection between the prosthesis and the brain that had been lost. Her self-awareness was failing to restore it. That meant either the brain functions being in a panic state or a simple mechanical failure.

The issue was…

Motoko glanced around. This park, this dream, perhaps this alone was maintaining her sense of self.

“With my five senses cut off, my brain can’t stay sane.”

“It won’t last long. But you’re still okay. Or maybe you’ve already gone nuts?” the woman said like it wasn’t any of her concern.

But perhaps it wasn’t. The woman didn’t really exist to begin with. Motoko tasted the irony on her tongue. She felt as though it was the first flavor in a while that hadn’t come through a sensor. Even if it was just a fantasy.

“Where am I.”

Not a question, she ended up voicing a thought she’d meant to keep to herself. It was difficult to keep your mouth shut in this place, she realized at that point. She felt like she was talking far too much but couldn’t protect herself with silence here.

She needed to go on the offensive, then. Probably.

It was the woman who asked back first, “You don’t remember?”

“It must be in my memory. Otherwise, it wouldn’t appear in my fantasy.”

“Come on, why can’t you just say, ‘I forgot, tee-hee’?” Indicating her surroundings, the woman continued, “It’s your initial Body Lost site.”

Now that she’d been told, Motoko remembered.

It was a long time ago that she’d come to this park. Just once. There was no reason to visit again, and she didn’t, but even if she wanted to, she wouldn’t have been able to. A few years later, the whole residential block had been bought up for government construction and been rebuilt.

Motoko hadn’t even checked how it might have changed. All she needed to do was connect to the net, but something that was second nature suddenly becoming inaccessible gave her the chills like the touch of the dead.

If “Body Lost” was what this was, then she was nearing death, both figuratively and literally. How much leeway did she have left, a few more minutes, hours, or days? She couldn’t even register the passage of time. Several years might have elapsed as she had this dream.

Yet it wasn’t the imminent crisis but the faraway recollection that tugged at Motoko’s consciousness. The events of a distant past—so ancient she wouldn’t find it strange if there were mammoths. She was, indeed, seeing the setting sun from back then now.

She heard footsteps. She walked lurching clumsily on her unfamiliar prosthetic legs. Someone’s gait was making a grating noise. It was the sound she’d heard that day: her own footsteps.

Motoko looked around but couldn’t find her old self trudging and dragging that noise. No wonder. She hadn’t seen herself at the time but merely heard her own footsteps. What she’d focused on was the scenery, and…

“My shadow.”

She glanced down at her feet. Motoko wasn’t moving, but a shadow shifted on its own. It was of a small, young figure. At a steady rhythm, like some rudimentary machine tool lacking the tech or capacity to modify its stride, it performed its awkward ambulation.

As she stared, the woman’s commentary entered her ears.

“Equipped with your prosthesis, undergoing your rehabilitation, you were finally able to walk. So you wanted to. You snuck out of the center and walked around outside…How far did you go? You got scared all of a sudden. The reason?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t remember. Then I’ll tell you, once again. Noticing that your body wasn’t getting tired no matter how much you walked, you felt terrified. Immediately, you rejected your prosthesis. That was here.”

Soon the shadow reverted in form. To Motoko’s shadow.

No, perhaps it wasn’t hers but the shadow of the woman she was talking to. There was no way to tell from the shadow.

Motoko lifted her face, glared at the woman, and asked, “Was I saved?”

“What a stupid question.” It may very well have been one, but the woman’s tone wasn’t all that mocking.

“Why do I not remember…”

The woman’s reply to Motoko’s mutter was downright kindly. “After you regained consciousness, it took half a month for you to reclaim your sanity. Your rehabilitation continued, and that wasn’t even the worst thing that happened.”

“Why is it ‘Lost’ this time?”

“Due to circumstances that aren’t nearly as sentimental. Mechanical damage. An HV round punched through a bad spot. Not that there are any good spots.”

Clearly teasing now, the woman made a pistol shape with her fingers and aimed it at her interlocutor.

Folding her arms, Motoko let out a groan. “So even if I’m maintaining my sanity, I’m knocked out and under the sway of hostiles.”

“You must look pretty dead, so if you’re lucky, they’ll leave you alone.”

“If that’s true, then I got gunned down by some hopeless doofus.”

“How negative can you get? Do you just endlessly count the bad?”

As the appalled woman cradled her head, Motoko answered without a hint of a smile, “Numbers are endless. Basic math.”

She’d come by a general grasp of the situation. It meant that she had no measure against the greatest threat, though. At any rate, discerning an opportunity, Motoko stepped forward to interrogate:

“I understand you’re a product of my fantasy, but who are you? You’re like me, but not me.”

That was what she found odd.

This wasn’t some nightmarishly distorted version of her. It was one that she wasn’t acquainted with and couldn’t imagine on her own, she felt. Yet this was her dream.

The woman smirked like she’d been waiting for the question. “If you’re going to talk math, approach the issue from both directions.”

“I am like you, but not you?”

“Or I am not you, but like you.”

“What would you be as a result?”

It was sophistry.

The other party alone seemed quite satisfied. The woman pointed at her own head and then at Motoko’s before responding.

“Are you hung up on appearances? But I’m inside your brain. It’s your brain that’s picturing me. Even if I looked like a female gorilla or a Martian, the answer would be the same.”

“Meaning you’re me, after all? But you’re different from me.”

“Was the you who got scared of the prosthesis and withdrew not you?”

“So there’s more than one ‘me’?”

“A whole lot of Motoko Kusanagis. The more the merrier. Just like a puppet show. Too bad we couldn’t make this a reunion. We could’ve used another, short-haired me.”

While the woman spoke sunnily, Motoko didn’t relish the thought. In reply, she just managed to croak, “It’s like SF, no…a soap opera.”

“Or maybe an ordinary human being,” appended the woman, who started at it again. “It’s true of everyone. Isn’t it? There is no firm, absolute self. People tailor their words to suit others, and the stage influences the role. The same light will cast different shadows.”

“Then where is the light?”

“But that’s been obvious from the outset.”

“You’re the one who’s been trying to confuse me.”

“Liar. I told the truth, first thing. Light isn’t something that you see.” After a pause, the woman added as if she’d had the brightest idea, “Wanna try?”

The woman’s body lurched.

She hadn’t fallen. She was still standing. But the ground vanished, along with all sense of balance.

The entire park was gone. Was “darkness” the word? Since the woman’s form was still visible, this wasn’t what Buddhism called the natural absence of light. To indicate that all was lost, had it been painted over with nothingness, as an effect?

There was nothing. Only nothingness. It was a supernatural vista where only nothingness was.

Change, time, and space didn’t exist inside of the loop. The woman lurched…turned, now sideways, but there was no telling when relativity was moot.

Yet the dialogue didn’t end. Gracefully spreading her arms, the woman intoned as if to divulge a magic trick, “The more clutter that’s made to vanish like this, the less well you see. That’s why it’s necessary. This universe, this world, this…stage.”

“Bring it back. You’ll destabilize my personality.”

When Motoko told her this, the woman didn’t object and clapped her hands. In an instant they found themselves in the park again.

The world had disappeared and reappeared, but their conversation continued.

“Be that as it may, if the tale is eternal, the actors’ turns go on,” the woman said.

“I’m not being performed by an actor. I’m alive,” Motoko shot back.

“People used to believe that this world is a shadow thrown by God’s light, didn’t they? Even when they awakened from that dream, physicists insisted that the universe might be a phantasmal projection, after all.”

“That’s not a funny joke when your brain is trapped in a fantasy.”

“If they were joking, it might have been funny.”

“How does deriding a mix of fiction and fact even pass the laugh test?”

“But so many people spilled tears over it. In reality.”

“The reign of capital has people weeping as much as religious strife ever did.”

“How is that a refutation?”

“I’m saying that one way or another, you’ll have people crying.”

“Where’s the anger? No righteous fury at the exploitation of the weak and consumerist society?”

“I fight crime.”

Mouthing those words now, they felt no different from the woman grandstanding about this overblown “tale” of hers. But there was no other way to put it.

The woman abruptly wore an earnest look and asked, “Addressing wrongdoing, have you been able to make the world a better place?”

“It’s not as simple as debugging.”

“…Right. Not freezing due to an error even when it’s faulty might be the misfortune of this world.”

With programs, that wouldn’t be the case. A bug was identified as one.

Had this world been crafted, then, to be okay with people committing crimes? It all came together better when you thought so. That endless chaos was everything.

The reason it wasn’t so clear-cut was that warmth undeniably exists. In other words, why is it that—

“The ghost whispers?”

It wasn’t Motoko but the woman who traced the thought and muttered the words. The woman shrugged her shoulders at her dumbfounded counterpart in the way of an apology.

“We think alike, after all.”

Or maybe it was that in a brain lacking a barrier, Motoko’s memories and thinking had been taken over.

But if she were to be vigilant, the dream itself could be a genuine fiction planted from outside. The character called Motoko and her recollections might be fabrications as well. Five minutes ago, perhaps the universe didn’t exist, and it had been created, deftly, to seem primordial.

When doubts spiraled out of control, they easily undermined your sanity. Thus you had to rely on a steadfast reality most of the time. It was just like evidence when you came under suspicion. Your selfhood required something outside you that you couldn’t revise even if you wanted to, a stern other.

Cyberbrain diving, as a skill, put that in grievous peril. Offensive barriers weren’t the only danger.

The woman, of course, paid no heed to Motoko’s growing alarm and continued.

“Humanity felt wounded at every turn. Like it was allergic to the truth, as the secrets of the world were exposed one after another. For instance, when it became clear that in the end, the religious experiences of great sages could be reproduced with electrodes or this or that chemical substance.”

“Or when they learned that a mighty empire could fall to a single Parabellum round?”

“ ‘If you want peace…’ Oh. For the first time, you weren’t attempting a rebuttal,” the woman swallowed the aphorism midway, her eyes opening wide in surprise.

“I was being sarcastic.”

“Don’t be on edge. We’re in your territory, okay?”

As the woman indicated it with her arm, Motoko looked around the park.

It was still just the same. Even the setting sun refused to budge from its starting spot.

“Territory” was quite apt. The place was as close to Motoko as it could be…At the very least, it was inside the fundamental apparatus that was Motoko, and a false image born of it.

She muttered at the transient space, “Being here is the ultimate wasted effort.”

“Though cyberbrains are supposed to have opened a direct channel between here and the world.”

“You said there’s nothing to be done. Until my life maintenance system fails, am I going to have to trade questions with you like this?”

“Does a busted prosthesis heal naturally? That’s as improbable as telepathy. If no one rescues you, right, it’s over.”

“I can’t recall the final circumstances…” Motoko pressed her head lightly and focused her consciousness but couldn’t arrive at the data she sought.

In a quiet voice the woman said, “You must have been scared.”

“Scared? Me?” moaned Motoko, taken completely unawares.

The woman was directing a soft gaze at her. “This is death, after all.”

Maternally. Also like the Grim Reaper. The woman held forth.

“Emotions don’t go away just because you don’t show them. If it were me, I’d be howling and crying. Sure, you’re preoccupied while you’re risking your life, but dying…you know?”

“If I can’t remember, then I can’t cry.”

“Better not remember. This’ll turn into a nightmare.”

“Still, I need to grasp the situation.”

“Only to find out that it sucks?”

“Because it sucks.”

“Just calm down. Think of it as a vacation.”

“You don’t die on an off-day,” Motoko growled, stepping toward the woman for being frivolous even at this stage.

“But that’s so uncool. You don’t play at anything that could kill you?”

Motoko halted when she noticed that approaching the woman wasn’t shrinking their distance.

The park didn’t look any larger, and the woman didn’t move. Meanwhile, Motoko was moving. The virtual space was warped. Was its reality crumbling?

Was she dying at last?

The penumbra neared in as though to transition from dusk to night. Yet what appeared there was not night, but nothingness. Her vision wasn’t keeping pace with the mounting contradictions, and the virtual space was becoming untenable.

Glancing down at her body, she realized that she couldn’t even do that. She wasn’t there. She seemed to be back where she’d started.

Amidst it all, the woman alone stood untouched. Not letting up, the woman pointed at her own prosthetic chest.

“Me, I chose this job seeking thrills. How about you?”

I haven’t got the time for life stories, Motoko was about to yell at her.

Sinking deep below a watery surface, she noticed a buoyant force gripping her body. Not yet. She wasn’t ready to disappear yet. Even if she couldn’t find herself, there, where the woman stared…in the place reflected in her eyes, Motoko was.

She’d get ahold of it. To that end, she offered a reply.

“Who knows? I can’t say that I’m bored.”

“I’ll bet that I…that we’ll arrive at the same place despite everything.”

“The same?”

It did feel strange. She might be losing her selfhood, but was relaxed and engaging in this banter.

Sure enough, continuing the conversation had stabilized her. The park was gone now. All that remained was nothingness, and a woman who looked a lot like her. But at the other end of the woman’s dialogue was Motoko, too.

Discussing where to go, when there was nothing, and vanishing even from there—that was strange as well.

“The same place,” the woman answered. “Narrowly speaking, Sec 9. Broadly speaking, this universe.”

“Can you ever not arrive at the universe?”

“You saw it just now, the nothingness.”

“So if you get locked in, you can.”

“Can or cannot. Chance or necessity. Free will or fate,” the woman set down like a cramped street vendor. “It’s easy to divide this world in half. Telling them apart afterward is what’s difficult. The mirror and yourself. They ought to be different, but you can no longer tell how.”

“The left and right are different.”

“How do you tell left from right?”

“You just look at the point of symmetry.”

“Where is that point? Are you taking your knapsack and finding it on a journey? Even your own self seemed like an absolute at first but can’t be told apart. There are two of us right now, aren’t there? And there could be more. You don’t know about the Puppeteer, do you?”

“What’s that?”

Motoko couldn’t let it pass.

It dissolved, as though corroded by acid, into chaos.

Whether the word she’d clung to was a lifeline or the noose immediately grew unclear.

“It’s contradictory for you to know something that I don’t. Is this a ghost-hack, after all?”

“You want to think I’m your enemy. You have to settle things one way or another even when you’re down.”

Nothing.

Other than this exchange, there was nothing. The nothingness was crushing her.

“It beats staying powerless.”

Nothing.

“You can’t fight if there’s no one to fight?”

Nothing.

“I’m talking about an actual crisis.”

Nothing.

Nothing, nothing.

She was able to make sense of just this exchange. But the self that was making sense of it was disappearing.

Even then.

“You…I have to bring down. I can’t let you escape!”

Contacting Motoko and making her think it was a dream after nimbly encroaching on her ghost—this was one formidable hacker. Moreover, of a clearly criminal bent: a deep-rooted, latent sociopath whose word and deed succored revolutionary disorder. Left to her own devices, what might she not—

Was “at that instant” the right expression?

It was certainly then, though time may not have been in business.

“Yes. That’s the way we are.”

The woman clasped the hand that Motoko reached out.

Her self was present. The woman was there, too. The rest was still nothing.

Stable again, Motoko locked eyes with the woman. What was reflected in them became evident as Motoko brought in her face. The woman was looking at her, but that wasn’t all. They were facing mirrors, showing countless Motokos to each other.

“You didn’t hesitate for a moment,” the woman said. “About fighting. Doesn’t the opposite ever occur to you?”

“Flight? No.”

“Because…it would make Batou sad?”

“Why mention him?”

“It’s not as if I ran away, either. But this world…is too vast if you’re searching for something important.”

No rhyme or reason. True, it was like that from the beginning.

Still, Motoko felt that she understood, for the first time. “You speak of things that aren’t. So is this really just a dream?”

Not a hack.

This was no man-made trap.

It was mere, uncontrived fantasy, or—

Can it be…?

Before the words could take shape and etch themselves in her brain, the woman’s voice muffled them.

“Yes. It’s all a dream and nonsense. But no one knows why we dream, nor remembers…”

Their clasped hands melted into each other, and their locked eyes ceded to a muddled view, and Motoko could no longer tell if the voice was her own or the woman’s.

“Human ingenuity might conquer the universe and obtain omniscient answers, but in the end this is where it arrives. To the greatest mystery that was supposed to be the simplest: ‘Now, what was the question again?’ ”

“To keep searching for it…over and over…forever and ever…”

Gone.

No, that wasn’t it.

She saw light.

She awakened.

Her vision connected.

What entered her view first was the white ceiling.

It looked preternaturally white not just because the ceiling was white; she’d been staring at the lights. She must have slept with her eyes open. On the heels of her vision, the pressure sensitivity circuits on her skin transmitted the feel of the soft sheets and pillow.

It was a hospital room—and a fairly decent private room. There were no windows, but the interior included a flower vase and treated the occupant like a human being at least to that extent. Motoko lay on the only bed. As her prosthetic body began connecting, certifications and a busy hum of reboots crowded her brain shell.

She had recovered. The status of the prosthesis was all clear. Though unharmed, it wasn’t the one she was accustomed to, but rather a general-use, economy-grade item. She must have been moved to a tentative body for the time being.

“Such a leisurely awakening, our dear princess.”

Right around when her hearing connected as well, a colleague’s familiar invocation entered her ears.

It was Batou. It seemed like he’d been here for a while. Large frame, large head, large hands—just by standing up he added color to the bland white room. The colors weren’t vivid, but they had warm hues.

“What an awful face. Well, I mean your prosthetic mug.”

Motoko touched her face when he said this. Not only did it have plain features, its all-purpose setting only accommodated standard emotional expressions. “Rental spec?”

“Well, we needed to hitch up the brain shell asap. It had to connect just like that.”

“I’d say it was appropriate.”

Batou did things right—actually, not entirely, but right enough that one could leave it at that.

She asked Batou, who sat down in a chair he brought to her bedside, “Why am I in a hospital?”

“We had a surprise gunfight. You got shot and were damaged. How much of it do you recall?”

Getting the story just to be sure backed up what she more or less knew. Still, Motoko quietly listened to Batou.

“Switching out your prosthesis didn’t restore your consciousness. We came to a hospital because the condition could be medical. Plus—”

Motoko preempted what he was about to say. “In a hospital, as long as you’re alive, you won’t be scrapped even if you never wake up from a coma?”

“Pretty much.”

Batou cheerfully wrinkled his face.

Motoko’s expression didn’t change, and she found his use of a preset fake smile quite unnecessary.

“So, I took a very long nap.”

“Yeah, four full days. It’s a miraculous recovery. The doctors had given up on you.”

Batou made a praying gesture with his hands as though moved.

Glancing at him, Motoko muttered, “It wasn’t luck. I had a contingency plan.”

“Yeah?”

“Maintaining my sanity by having a lucid dream.”

“You had one prepped?”

“It’s not an electronic measure, but a form of hypnotic therapy.”

She’d let the cat out of the bag, but Batou slapped his forehead, all the more impressed. “Even reduced to your brain shell, you weren’t helpless? You’re something else.”

“When I was still unused to my prosthesis, I suffered the same syndrome. My physician at the time administered it to guard against a relapse. It couldn’t hurt. I didn’t think it’d work, and I’d forgotten.”

“That’s like leaving one last bullet in the chamber. There’s no guarantee, but survivors have that foresight.”

“I’d say only the result matters. What happened to the guy who shot me?”

It all came back to her. It was a chance encounter as Batou said, an unscheduled run-in with hostile forces in an alley the first thing after setting out. The other party hadn’t expected it, either, and maneuvered to avoid a collision, but one of their bewildered greenhorns took a wrong turn in retreating and came out right in front of Motoko. A submachine gun loaded with cyborg-penetrating ammo hanging from his neck.

“He was lying in the same spot. Mutual destruction. Well…he died instantly, so I guess you won.”

“Victory, huh…”

If she had gotten killed, it would have been a fool’s death.

The tenderfoot had met one there.

Motoko fell silent, thinking, or not knowing what to. It defied thought, indeed. After she meditated on it for a dozen seconds or so, the deceased youngster was fast fading from her mind. She’d been trained to shrug off killing. Her mood aside, her body obeyed her training.

Giving thought to the mind-body relationship was certainly ironic given this body of hers.

Motoko opened her mouth. “Perhaps, this is all some fiction and—”

“Oh, give me a break,” Batou cut in, appalled. “Someone who had a near-death experience delivering a sermon is already a terrible joke. So goddamn clichéd.”

Still, Motoko didn’t stop. She’d have smiled in her usual prosthetic body. “Maybe we’re always dying.”

“What the hell? I’m not having a cyborg sob story, not from you. You’re gonna jinx us.”

What’s he talking about, Motoko thought, but Batou seemed frightened for real, so she rephrased herself. “Not what I meant. Even in a human body, every time you sleep, you die.”

She lifted her hand and placed it on her chest. She had no heart.

Even if she did, a pump for cycling blood was all that it’d be. A heart offered as little proof of life per se than a prosthetic mechanism.

Yet she wanted to feel it, along with her words.

“And every morning, we come back to life. Rebooting over and over. For the sake of the mission.”

“What mission?”

“Who knows…I did, when I was dead.”

“Best we never learn, in that case.”

“Right.”

Waiting for the ghost’s call in order to live our reality.

Waking up time and time again. Always…always seeking that light.

Like sunshine filtering through far too large a tree.