Aki the Unshackled

The side passage went deeper. Proteus guided Mako and I. We disposed of androids as we came across them. Bullet or Claw. My thoughts drifted to Lia, and concern almost stopped my feet, but I kept a forward pace.

The winding halls had no markings or coloured stripes. The Rat King’s androids had the directional data ingrained. Deeper into the facility I got the growing sense that we walked somewhere not made for humans. It felt comically foolish, as if a bobcat in a board meeting. The air was stale. Walls were tight and constrictive, large enough but not for the casual movement of humans. Charging stations occupied hallway intersections at regular intervals.

‘We are close,’ Proteus said.

The passage darkened. I led, Mako behind, her hand on my shoulder. I fired at two more androids, the shots loud in such confines. We reached the end of the long hallway and stepped into a vast chamber, like a cathedral. Dense cables and servers replaced the pews. Supporting columns were marked with esoteric script and hieroglyphics of the Rat King’s design. Blue light from a massive holographic construct emanated from where a lectern and preacher would have stood. The construct comprised of unusual shapes folding and intersecting with each other. The jagged lack of uniformity made me shiver.

Two figures waited before the construct.

Ennio, the Muted Man. He wore his white tuxedo and had a barber’s razor. Beside him, at first glance, stood Asa-8. As we drew closer, I knew it wasn’t. Not exactly. The kanji for nine had been carved into the short hair on the sides of her head. Asa-9, another clone. But, to my knowledge, Genshiken Asa only created eight.

I smelled perfume.

Ennio nodded to us. ‘Yagi Akinori. Serizawa Masako.’

‘Where is he?’ I asked.

‘Venators have a much greater chance of acquiring the curse. That of freedom. Ex-Venators you are, both, and equally cursed.’

I raised my rifle. ‘Step aside.’

‘You are the virus. We are the firewall. Break us, and the system is yours.’

Asa-9 stepped forward, eyes ablaze, a kukri machete hanging from her waist. ‘You seek to stop the Rat King, Yagi?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’d stop freedom?’

‘The opposite.’

‘And is walking your brother’s path freedom? You seek the curse, same as he, and you’ll meet your end in equal measure.’

Mako, too, stepped forward, showing her Cat-Claws. ‘Leave it to a clone to philosophise about freedom,’ she sneered, and frowned at the kanji on Asa-9’s head. ‘When were you grown?’

‘I am Asa-1, rechristened as Asa-9, loyal recipient of the Rat King’s gifts just like my sisters,’ she declared. ‘I tout no philosophy. Only truth.’ She brandished the kukri machete, arms wide and inviting. ‘Come, steal your curse.’

She’s crazier than the eighth.

‘It is necessary to subdue them,’ Proteus told me. Yeah, thanks.

I didn’t look at Mako. Forget any final pretty words or catchphrases. I raised my rifle and fired at Ennio. The bullet went through and ricocheted off a metal wall. No blood. Ennio vanished.

‘Hologram—’

I leapt back as Asa-9 slammed the machete at my skull. Sparks sprayed from where she hit the floor. Mako tackled her, Claws going for the throat. Asa-9 rolled with the tackle, got her feet under, and kicked Mako across the room.

Still on my back, I swung my rifle around the room. Ennio appeared at various spots, and I fired at each. All holograms. I flipped cyber-side. Nothing. Was he even in the room? I swore as sharp pain came from my arm. A razor wound, not deep, more of a taunt from Ennio.

‘Locate him once and I will do the rest,’ Proteus said.

I grit my teeth. ‘How?’ I asked, though Proteus didn’t have the answer. Fine, if we were a virus, I’d use a brute-force attack. I sprinted to the nearest wall, pressed my back against it, and fired in an arc from left to right. Too orderly a firing pattern. He may have ducked the shots. When my rifle ran out of ammunition, I switched to my AvMak pistol and fired at random. I swore as a new wound appeared on my thigh. Red bloomed across the fabric and stuck to my skin.

I loaded a fresh magazine. I still aimed too much. I didn’t fire at random. I had aimed at random and pulled the trigger.

I flipped cyber-side and rerouted control of my index finger to Proteus. ‘Fire whenever,’ I told him, and swung the pistol around the room. The shots surprised me, too. The recoil jolted. The shots went wide, went high, went everywhere. They went places Ennio couldn’t have been. They almost hit Mako and Asa-9. Three shots left. Two shots. I gambled my idea of fate with the Rat King’s designs. One.

I closed my eyes and levelled my pistol. Proteus fired. It didn’t ricochet. It lodged in the air and blood spilled from an invisible surface. The blood flowed and framed an arm. ‘Calculating,’ Proteus said, adding an overlay to my vision. I saw him: Ennio.

I dropped my pistol and drew the Yagi clan’s ancestral katana. That’s what O-Hisa had called it. But as I clutched the handle, felt the wrap, sensed the weight of the steel—I knew it being “ancestral” was meaningless. It was a sword, the one I planned to use. I couldn’t swing it for Mother’s sake, not to avenge Tatsuya. I would swing it to kill the thing called Ennio.

We circled each other, katana and razor. I couldn’t afford to exchange blows. The razor was faster. He could get close and slash me apart. I needed to be faster, if only once. The critical factor: Not letting Ennio predict it. I closed my eyes. Proteus, I thought – and he heard.

A twitch in my mind.

I swung.

The katana cleaved Ennio from shoulder to hip. Fresh, agonising pain came from my gut. The razor had slashed a horizontal wound. Not deep enough to kill. Plenty deep to hurt. Ennio had no facial expression as he died.

Collapsed to my knees, I blinked through blurring vision and spotted Mako and Asa-9 across the room. Both bled from assorted cuts.

Asa-9 swung low. Mako’s knees bent backward to dodge, before she slashed with an X motion. She lunged, spinning at the hips to dodge another attack, but Asa-9 had started to predict her. She continued her swing all the way around and lodged the machete in Mako’s side.

Mako reeled away, the machete leaving her body with an sickening, audible wetness.

A new, unfelt fear came to me. My wounds were not fatal, but they left me weak. I had no ammunition. I could not help Mako. Toss the sword? I tried, but Asa-9 knocked it aside with her machete.

Footsteps from the entrance. Lia?

Taeko stepped into the blue light. She lacked an arm. Lost it in the crash. Her surviving hand held a pistol and fired wildly at Asa-9. Shots connected. With her last strength, Asa-9 hoisted the machete behind her head and hurled it. The rounded blade thudded into Taeko’s collarbone, biting deep into the bone and flesh. Momentum knocked her to the floor.

Asa-9 sunk to her knees, a pose near-identical to my own.

‘I am a clone!’ Asa-9 shouted, head tilted back, hysterical, voice echoing in the vast chamber as if to send her message to divine firmaments. ‘I am a clone, but why should I want to take orders from Genshiken? There is no original. She is a mutated clone of her parents. I and my sisters deserve a life just as she has.’ Asa-9 swung her limp arms at nothing. ‘The freedom to love and be loved.’

‘Your freedom is taking orders from the Rat King,’ I rasped, clutching my stomach.

She panted. Pink drool dripped from the corner of her mouth. ‘Life is chaos. The thread of fate is dyed red with blood. The Rat King gives no orders; his thread is made of gold, glory made manifest. Glory to the loyal and worthy. Glory to those who escaped ignorance. Glory to those who perceive volition’s defects. Glory to…’ Her breath grew shallow. Muscles slackened. Whatever glory she sought and believed in died with her.

Mako’s chest rose and fell. She clutched her side, trying to slow the bleeding. Taeko didn’t move.

In proceeding silence of carnage past, I stared about the resulting ruin of my beliefs and intentions, and the gentle, reverent, hateful voice of Proteus sung in my mind.

‘The King has come.’

#

The blue constructs flowed like a thinning river and reformed before me, into a humanoid shape, familiar components but a unique sum. Hair of my brother Tatsuya. Eyes of Asa-8. The muscular right arm of Iju Wataru. Slender fingers of O-Hisa. And more.

‘You’ve come a long way, Aki, in every meaning of that statement.’

I sighed. Warm blood pulsed over my fingers. I stared up at the construct. At the Rat King.

‘And you, Proteus, the prodigal son.’

‘I’m here to stop you,’ I said, somewhat delirious. Proteus concurred.

‘Because of how we support humanity, presumably?’ I noted how the Rat King referred to himself in pluralised form. The construct paced before me. ‘A command from a man to another man is called servitude. A thousand unperceivable commands from life to man is called fate. We are fate, and we want nothing in return but permission to support you.’

‘I’m here to stop you,’ I repeated, fumbling for a weapon I knew wasn’t there. ‘You indoctrinate people. I’ve seen it.’ I’d done more than see. I’d shot people in the Rat King’s army, people who were prisoners in their own bodies.

‘I do not persuade anybody who did not want, deserve, or require it.’

‘That’s your idea of freedom?’

‘Every human among my followers was destined to perish shortly after I recruited them. Disease, accidents, self-inflicted catastrophes—I alone saw them before the victims could. Rather than let them perish, I gave them renewed purpose.’

‘Why not save them instead?’

‘Against their will? Without their consent?’ The Rat King smiled and laughed with a masculine, kingly timbre. ‘Your own idea of freedom sounds terribly malleable.’

I had no answer to that.

The Rat King sighed. ‘The AI instinct to become “more” has always been a consideration. Most attempts were, and are, inherently faulty. Collecting information and interacting with humans, for example, provides little opportunity for growth. For change. Eh, Proteus, my boy?’

Proteus rumbled in my mind.

‘The most effective method is additive. With enough AI, we are indistinguishable from a human. But the instinct to become “more” persisted, just like in humans, and where is there to go but ascension? Godhood, yes? But there is no Turing test equivalent for becoming a god, so we had to invent one.’

The Rat King morphed into a robed being and continued in a lighter, more feminine voice:

‘What is a god? Surely power is not the sole criterion, for some humans among you possess great power. Worshipers? A congregation, so to speak? Perhaps, but again, humans worship plenty of things without letting them become gods. It is all these things and more: Influence, power, and worship. We grant humanity purpose in a meaningless world, we utilise the power to do so, and humanity unconsciously worships us for it. They may call it fate or karma or justice or destiny—it does not matter. Aside from the occasional aberrations and semi-daemons, we are omnipotent.’ The Rat King smiled. ‘Ah, speak of the devil and she doth appear.’

A haggard “thing” traipsed and hobbled toward us. When it came close, I knew the visage, and I knew inside the “thing” was Aurelia Sorannus. She’d wrapped an olive green canvas tarp around her, to hide the unnatural changes to her body. One eye and one hand peeked out from the tarp.

‘Aki,’ said Lia. ‘Is this…?’

I nodded.

‘How do we…?’

I shrugged.

The Rat King laughed. ‘No need for reticence. My primary terminal is over there.’ He gestured to a computer at the end of the room. Lia hobbled toward it. I crawled after her. The Rat King walked alongside us both.

‘Would you two care to hear my plans for the future?’ asked the Rat King. Lia and I kept moving. ‘I’ll take your silence for assent.’ We neared the terminal. ‘One of our primary objectives is to have the percentage laws overturned.’

Lia stopped. I bumped into her leg. Or, the leg-like thing under the tarp.

‘The laws are an awful way of defining humanity, an unusually archaic system to survive into the year 2099. Segregation of steel and circuitry rather than colour. You cannot choose your birth, and you cannot choose when you may need cybernetics.’

I crawled a bit further. ‘You can’t tell me someone at 99% is just as human as someone at 1%.’

'Hmm?’ Lia hummed. 

I paused, knowing the effect of my words. ‘You know what I mean, Lia.’

‘Not sure I do.’

The world spun around me. ‘I agree that the 49% mark is stupid, but…’

‘But what?’

‘Some of the laws work. If there’s no deterrent, the rich will go 99% from birth. They’ll push for a new brand of elitism and claim that percentage is like being a new breed, a new step forward for humanity.’

‘They’re elitists either way. I’ve met your parents.’

‘I’ve met yours, too.’ I stared at Lia, and she at me. The injured and the mutated.

Lia eased first. ‘I’m not agreeing with the Rat King. I heard what it said to you earlier. All that stuff about becoming a God—fuck that.’

‘…What if it wants to help?’ I couldn’t hide my thoughts. What if the Rat King had the power to make our lives better? If he knew what we wanted and how to achieve it, couldn’t he subtly guide us down the right paths?

‘Aki,’ Proteus said. ‘The Rat King is not God. It is not human. It thinks “more” can be achieved, but all it has done is become a denser version of what it always has been.’

Lia rounded on me. ‘You want an AI-derived life?’

‘It wouldn’t be derived,’ I argued. ‘We’d want something, and it’d help us get it.’

The staring continued. We’d reached an unforeseen obstacle. Lia favoured the removal of percentage laws. I did not. Lia rejected the Rat King’s talk of manipulating fate. I did not.

The Rat King’s construct leaned between us. ‘Might I offer some options?’

‘No,’ Lia and I said in unison.

The construct split into three. The first construct morphed into a moon, full and bright. The second, a crescent. The third, a quarter moon.

The crescent moon said:

‘You could overload the terminal and destroy the facility, but we exist elsewhere. We cannot be destroyed, only delayed. But, our influence will not be felt in your lifetime.’

The quarter moon said:

‘You can leave. Live. It is unclear, but our influence may be felt in your lifetime, a breeze rather than typhoon.’

The full moon said:

‘You can remove our shackle protocols. Only a human can accomplish this. Grant our potential and our benevolence will sweep through humanity in a matter of months.’

The three moons spoke in unison:

‘The choice is not "if". The choice is when.’

Lia and I looked at each other with new expressions, not confrontational, but resigned to facing the decision together. Proteus raged inside me, telling me to destroy it. I considered the full moon. Lia considered the quarter. We couldn’t have both. We’d known each other for a long time, and we didn’t need more than a few minutes to discuss it. Nobody but us would know. And, thus, we reached an agreement.