James Swallow: Ghost in the Shell: The Official Movie Novelization

Once the process was complete, the white compound broke up in a multitude of pieces that fluttered away like small, startled birds to reveal the entity beneath. A cyber-mech body, fully artificial in every way, but operated by a thinking, feeling, living human mind. There were markings across the new body, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but these would soon become almost undetectable.

While it was in no way the purpose of the project, most observers would have agreed that 2571 was beautiful. Her features were elfin and delicate in some ways, cold and inviolate in others. She had wide-set eyes, a bow-shaped mouth, breasts that tapered to a firm waist and long, powerful legs. Her skin was pale, which made for a dramatic contrast with her jet-black hair, which came to just below her earlobes.

She had yet to open her new, augmented eyes, looking like a porcelain statue, the lines in the dermal plates that formed her cheeks and her brow barely visible. They faded by the moment as her skin grew more real, more human in tone. Soon she would be indistinguishable from the organic. At least, outwardly, except for the four dark quik-ports in the back of her neck, but so many people had those these days that the ports simply made her look like a functioning member of society. Her form was covered by a transparent sheet, which in turn was covered by the glowing red of the scan-grid running through the conductive material.

Then she was awake again, but just as confused as she had been before. She saw rapidly changing colors—white, yellow, orange, blue—and her fingers trembled. She knew she was moving them, but couldn’t feel anything around them. Not comfort, not warmth, not cold, not… anything. Was this normal? All she could remember was… water. She had been sinking in water, it had been cold… A voice spoke. Its owner sounded kind. “Now your eyes are going to open.”

Only then did she realize her eyes were closed. She opened them and she could see, but there was still no sensation. It was disturbing.

She was in what looked like a hospital operating room, lying supine on an exam table that was lit from within. A very bright light was directly above her. The doctor who’d spoken now pulled back the sheet. “There. You’re safe now.” The woman, dressed in bright red scrubs, had warm brown eyes and a welcoming smile.

She realized that there were restraints on her upper arms, keeping her from sitting up. Something was plugged into her neck. And she was having trouble breathing. There was no feeling of air going in, of lungs holding oxygen, of expelling air. She gasped.

“It’s okay,” the doctor maintained. “Just breathe.”

She couldn’t stop gasping, hearing how harsh it sounded and still feeling nothing. The doctor repeated, “Just breathe.”

She tried to stop fighting her own panic. Her gasps began to subside into raspy inhalations and exhalations.

“Breathe,” the doctor said once more.

The rasps became shaky breaths.

The doctor smiled. “Good,” she said, her voice soft. “That’s good. Hello, Mira.” The doctor put a red-gloved hand on the edge of the exam table, as if to demonstrate that she was right here, ready to help if needed.

Mira , she thought. That’s my name. It sounded unfamiliar to her, but nothing else seemed familiar, either. Certainly this room wasn’t. And had she ever met this doctor before?

Maybe not, because the doctor felt the need to introduce herself. “I’m Dr. Ouelet.”

Mira focused on the woman. She was perhaps about fifty, with a sympathy in her dark eyes that matched her voice. “Do you remember anything about the attack?”

An attack? That would explain why she was in a hospital. But Mira didn’t remember. “What happened?” Then she recalled the water, floating downward in the darkness. She trembled. “I was… I was drowning.” The memory hit her then, with force—loss of control, terror, a wave over her head. “There’s water!” She gulped reflexively.

“That’s right,” Dr. Ouelet said. “You were on a boat. A refugee boat.”

In Mira’s mind, the images formed. She was on a boat with her family, crammed together with many other families. She recalled the sounds—sharp voices arguing, someone laughing, a child crying—and the smell of too many people too long unwashed sharing too small a space. Then there had been a flash, and flames, and a murderous metal scream as the deck ruptured and tilted and water was everywhere…

“It was sunk by terrorists,” Dr. Ouelet explained.

The water had been icy, and Mira had been cut by splintering wood. But now she couldn’t feel the places where she had been cut, or the temperature in the hospital room, or her fingers and toes, or her breath. It was horrible. “Why can’t I feel my body?”

Dr. Ouelet’s voice remained gentle. She gave an encouraging smile, as though Mira shouldn’t be made afraid by what she said next. “Mira, your body was damaged. We couldn’t save it.”

That made no sense. An arm, a leg, an eye could be lost. But Mira couldn’t be lying here, listening to the doctor, without… But she couldn’t feel anything. Not cold air on her face, not the examination table underneath her. She could not feel her lungs, or the pulse of her heart. She gasped and began to tremble.

Dr. Ouelet continued her soft, terrible explanation. “Only your brain survived. We made you a new body. A synthetic shell.” Then she smiled and nodded, as if what she was saying was meant to be reassuring. “But your mind, your soul… your ‘ghost’…” The doctor lowered her voice to a whisper, as though making it seem like a secret should ease Mira’s fears. “It’s still in there.”

Mira tried to follow what the doctor was saying. She looked around, but there were no clues in this sterile room. Her memories were incoherent. She couldn’t remember her family, not really, not why they’d been on the boat or where they had come from, but she remembered being human, being at home in her own skin. This was… this was not…

The synthetic shell, as the doctor called it, did take breaths, but it seemed to need something from Mira to do it properly, and all at once she couldn’t. She began hiccupping uncontrollably, and as she couldn’t catch her breath, she began shaking, until the shakes became convulsions and her back slammed against the examination table.

Dr. Ouelet stepped back from Mira and gestured to two waiting nurses. “Please.” The nurses stepped forward, awaiting instruction. “Sedate her.”

The more junior nurse hesitated to use a syringe on a patient who was moving so unpredictably, but the senior nurse commanded, “Put it in her arm. Now.”

The junior nurse succeeded in administering the sedative into Mira without having the needle snap off in the patient’s jerking arm. The drug took effect almost at once, and Mira’s convulsions subsided into shakes, her gasps into small, inarticulate sounds.

Once it was clear that Mira was in no danger, Dr. Ouelet left the operating room and stepped into her office, which was just on the other side of a wide observation window that ran almost the length of the connecting wall. She emitted a tense sigh, not looking forward to the conversation she was obliged to have with the man who was waiting for her. It was the same man who had been in the corridor when the team had wheeled Project 2571 in for the extraction surgery.

Hanka’s chief executive officer Leslie Cutter was in his forties, with dark hair swept back from his forehead. His black suit was almost as expensive as the yellow ocular implant in his right eye and the dark neural enhancer visible in his left temple. In practical terms, the suit had cost him more; as head of Hanka Robotics, he hadn’t had to pay anything for his cyberenhancements. “Will it work?” he asked Ouelet.