Her Cacophony

"Living with My Ghost — NIGHTFALL"
Osaka, Nukekubi Japan, 2036

. . .

Before 2045. Recollection One. Nine years from sea change...

Her whole life—masked in cacophony.

For Kusanagi Motoko, terrible events commenced with the cacophony of bitter rain and storm. Lightning strikes brilliant enough to scorch her skin. Thunder so loud, the vibrations deafened the sound of impact. Kusanagi learned to associated such moments of fierce noise and light with white, hot pain from an early age.

What early age—she could not say.

She was much too young to remember losing her parents; she couldn’t recall their faces, or much of anything at all. The plane crash jumbled her memory, not to mention the consequences of her “surgery.” She remember little even of the crash or the cause. Blurs of color were all that came to mind even as they too faded away. Instead, Kusanagi had only sparse witness testimony and circumstantial accounts to fill the gaps to her life story. For an accident which destroyed her world and remade anew, she knew very little of it herself.

But one thing stuck with her, regardless of real or fiction formed from an overactive imagination. The violent sensations. Her roaring storm. The girl who survived after had nothing left of her previous life. No memories and no relics to reclaim from the past. She barely remembered concepts like “girl” or “herself.” All Kusanagi had was lightning and thunder, and the long silence following. The silence was dark and lonely, empty of people and things but never wanting for she knew little of the world before or after.

Like being born again, a clean slate.

“The subject has come to...”

Darkness was her oyster. Awareness came as a surprise. A painful one in fact, as her piecemeal brain attempted to synchronize with fresh artificial nerves. Her new form felt constrictive and dull, lacking the process capacity to enjoy the world as a flesh-and-blood human would. Kusanagi absorbed the world through two camera lenses with a horrible degree of tunnel vision. Her limbs moved through the environment with the grace of a drugged octopus. Her spatial awareness seemed cripplingly flat.

“The wheelchair is only temporary. Soon your body will remember to walk, easy as pie!”

This was the consequence. To save a young Kusanagi’s life, emergency responders fought a losing battle with her body. Sometimes just for pieces of organs as her health declined at a disastrous pace. The battle to save a single life eventually came down to a fight over individual neuron clusters.

Why anyone in any age would go so far to save or resuscitate the near-dead was baffling. She found out eventually but the doubt followed her on through her limited life. She was a curiosity and an experiment. There was genuine care and mission to save her, but none expected her to survive. In the end, Kusanagi did make it through. But did an existence dominated by 98 percent circuitry constitute “living?”

“What do you remember?”

“I... ‘member?”

A sense of entrapment fell over the young Kusanagi as she found difficulty expressing her thoughts across a synthesized rubber tongue through synthetic lips of similar construction. She struggled through her learning, building her person up from scratch. Her emotions grew from colors to words. The darkness became a small room. Nurses dragged her through clinical test after test, forcing her slow acclimation to her new body.

“You’re so pretty, just like your doll. Aren’t you a cute one?”

A look in the mirror revealed glassy maroon eyes and fine hair colored dull purple. Kusanagi looked like a doll. She was a doll. Even after decades of Japanese artisan engineering in pursuit of the human form. She was more of a human caricature than a flesh-and-blood being.

Her given name was a paint over to mask her nature as a Yamada Hanako. The English placeholder equivalent of a Jane Doe, a Nanashi no Gombei—a no-name. A missing person, a ghost in the world.

A name despised, a name she forgot. Kusanagi was just the university hospital’s plastic and lithium flower. It would take time for her to adjust her own mind to the uncanny valley of her own reflection, more so than everyone else looking at her from the outside.

They tried to label her experience—this life of a human blurred with a machine. They argued the dysmorphia Kusanagi felt was a sign of her humanity reclaimed. The doctors found particular interest asking about those experiences which made her different from fellow humans.

“Who is the girl in the mirror? What do you see, and feel?”

“Me. Mirror.”

Dread hung on Kusanagi’s words. Dread looking at the Pinocchio staring back at her.

“This is me?”

The caretakers made an effort to treat her as normal, she realized in later years. However, the effort manifested as certain concern and perceived fragility. Not like a regular child, but no child is regular. Rather Kusanagi was different, much more different. They treated her as unique, and therefore, alone. Singular, not human. Only human alike. Forced to fit into a human figurine.

Kusanagi didn’t enjoy the reverberating pain every time she fell from the parallel walking bars. She disliked the minutes it took for her to get back up, assisted or otherwise. She hated the sensation of buckling knees when encouraged to stand on her own. Especially the rush of wind as she crumpled to the floor. But this was the world she knew.

The nurses spoke so sweet, only adding to the frustration like audible poison to her sensitive rubber ears. Supportive, yet unnoticed as demeaning.

“Great job, Mira. You’ve made it so far this time!”

“Four steps! Soon you’ll be walking all on your own.”

Despite her mechanical body, the young cyborg girl couldn’t extend her mind beyond her form. Her first cybernetic shell didn’t have the hardware. She received no hint to a wider world waiting beyond her bed, four walls, and obfuscating window. But wasn’t long before she shattered the tiny illusion.

From the very first moment she had something called memory, Kusanagi lived the life of a cybernetic life form. She was a creature of the Internet. Sooner rather than later, she would break the confines of her pastel-white cage and spread her wings to never look back. From the moment she arouse out of the darkness, the Net became her home even before she knew its existence.

Kusanagi remembered — the seventeenth night resuming life among the life among the living but hooked up to medical and neurological monitors. Within the wires, she found a tiny hole in her perfect cage. An improper-calibrated, intranet access point furnished for clinical purposes with an unsecured network plug. She was supposed to be asleep, but poking around revealed so much!

Digging deeper revealed a pathway of accidental ports left open to the extended hospital network. Somewhat archaic and outdated but also relatively safe, it was akin to a cyber world reef. A shelter for a young girl, a view port out to the waiting world. Beyond it lay the vast and wide-open Internet, a sea of information.

Every day from then on, Kusanagi swam further and further from the safe harbor. The hospital staff never caught her. She got better at covering her tracks. She became a creature of the Net, and Pandora’s Box was open. No one could put the little girl back in the cage.

As Kusanagi got older, she grew suspicious that maybe one of the doctors or engineers left the misconfigured access point for her. She tried checking back but she could never prove for certain...

\ \ Virtual single-session browser [ open ] ... >

\ \ Establish connection [ Deep Web \ \ TOR ] ... >

\ \ Login, [ Chroma#Ac3sf472CDjsfF29q ... ] .onion ... >

She soon blossomed and soared, and left the hospital behind. Kusanagi’s able-body experiences became habit, her new normal. Her cyberbrain dives became a fixture of her everyday life. She joined the rest of society. She became... Happy. She never returned to the tiny cage, even as she left behind regrets.

“I’m going to practice making origami cranes so I can fold them for you someday, okay?”

A little boy with a single functional arm, who loved origami cranes, and survived the plane crash just like her. Two lonely survivors, someone she might have known. He didn’t recognize her. But how could he?

She was a doll of plastic and metal. She didn’t recognize him either. She didn’t know him. But they somehow made it where many others did not. They spent a little time together, but she ran away. Kusanagi never returned to show him her improved origami cranes. Her first terrible shame.

She had a chance to apologize for her cowardice but she couldn’t overcome it as a child. She embarrassed herself with unique childish fear and regretted it soon after. She barely remembered the reason why. Or reasons. Was she trying to save him then? Did the young girl not think herself worthy of a friend? Was she not good enough to save him? Or was she scared he would join in her cursed fate?

Maybe she was scared he wouldn’t make it through. The doctors never believed she would survive.

By the time her origami skills and maturity were past her sense of disgrace, the boy left his nest for the world beyond. Kusanagi didn’t cry for she lacked the ability to produce tears. She didn’t cry because she knew it was her fault. She was the one who was afraid. By the time she wasn’t, he conquered his fear and soared. He left her behind.

Motoko was not the cyborg girl’s name then. It was never her real name, but it didn’t matter. It became her name when she was ready. She left the nest too, offering few glances back. She became someone else entirely, someone powerful. The woman called Kusanagi Motoko. A major in the Japanese Self-Defense Force. A special forces military hacker, and a field commander of Japan’s premier cyber-offensive police tactical unit, charged with the security of the Prime Minister and investigating the most pressing of national security threats.

Kusanagi didn’t think much on her past as she lived many lives and many identities in her time. She lived through two world wars, survived global nuclear fallout, and reached the doorstep of the emerging transhumanist future.

2032 came and went.

Kusanagi found the boy again, now a mature man. Or maybe he found the lost Motoko, now a grown woman. He replaced his natural brown hair for locks of synthetic off-white, matted in mud and dirt. Kuze Hideo. He looked nothing like the boy from the hospital but his presence and charisma felt familiar. His life story was an uncanny fossil of Kusanagi’s buried past. She somehow recovered her first friend in the world. And then, just as she could touch his presence and confirm her reality—he died.

“Kuze? Do you know how to fold origami cranes?”

“Cranes?”

“Yeah. And only with your left hand?”

“Can you do that?”

“I can now.”

Kuze. The former JGSDF mechanized infantry officer. Second Korean War veteran. Pacifist. Individual Eleven ideology hack victim and survivor. Charismatic leader and revolutionary who took up the refugee self-determination revolution on Dejima Island. He who sought martyrdom. A fellow and kindred survivor to Kusanagi, her rare equal. Soon gone, like smoke.

“I’ll go ahead now, Major.”

Kuze’s death shattered his revolution, saving Japan from the specter of a changing world. And broke Kusanagi’s phantom heart. The Major retreated into the Net, leaving her work at Public Security Section Nine to mourn and find herself again. The fleeting weakness stripped back her armor to reveal the scared, lost girl within. She tried to remake herself, find something different. She became a mercenary hacker, chasing her own ego and whim hoping she could create some good in the world unique to her capabilities.

Kusanagi didn’t know if she succeeded after two years. But nothing could fill the fresh hole in her proverb heart. Eventually she found her way back and returned to the work and life she found meaning in most. For all her diving and running, Section Nine was home, there was nowhere else.

Seven years passed by with many more ups and downs. The government around her bent and shifted under public pressure, gasps from Kuze’s revolution and runaway machinations of the political mastermind Gouda Kazundo evolved into something brand new. The passing time made into a great beast of excitement and violence. Time as an agent of dangerous, evolving, persistent change.

From the 2032 Individual Eleven event, Prime Minister Kayabuki Yoko reneged political influences by the American Empire and other world powers, defusing the coup attempt by Chief Cabinet Secretary Takakura and his rogue Cabinet Intelligence Service led by Gouda. In 2034, Section Nine unfurled a runaway management AI and mass wealth-redistribution corruption scheme at the Ministry of Health, called the Solid State Society involving the kidnapping and jingoistic cyber-indoctrination of children.

Underneath the complex crises faced by cyberization-obsessed Japan, new and newer patterns emerged. Socioeconomic and geopolitical movements. Nongovernmental structures of power. Strange forces Kusanagi and her team put down again and again, only to reemerge elsewhere in some other form. A lesson emerged for Kusanagi: try all you want, you can’t defeat culture.

The citizens continued to ostracize. The refugees continued to struggle. Well laid, earnest plans fell aside to blind rage ignited in the masses. People wanted to become martyrs.

For the average Japanese citizen, the Kayabuki years were shaping into a period of disorientation and division. No one could objectively declare the failings of the government in this era lay with any specific factor or faction, or any others. But Kayabuki drove the nation as the figurehead, the ages of emperors was long past, buried in the irradiated ruins of Old Tokyo. The troubles fell and stayed Kayabuki’s feet like clay, the curse of an elected leader.

At some point the general public started calling the decade of struggle “Kayabuki Theater,” a parody of traditional Japanese theater. Even as an ally of the Prime Minister, Kusanagi could see the valid genius and destitute humor of the fed up masses. It was a mystical wonder sometimes as her Prime Minister continued to win elections and retain the conservative coalition’s control of the house elections.

But such was life in the political arena. It failed to reflect everyday, normal life, until it slammed into everyone, without preference, all at once.

2036 arrived.