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

“What?” Skinny Man was devastated. “No.”

“We’ve been to your apartment. There’s nobody there.”

“No!” Skinny Man shouted, refusing to believe it. Tears prickled at the corner of his eyes as a terrible sorrow welled up inside him.

“You’ve lived there for ten years by yourself,” the Major said.

He was weeping now, shaking his head, denying the Major’s words. “No!”

Whatever was going on here, the Major was determined to find out. “So you’re just lying.”

“ I’m not lying! ” the man howled. He was distraught. “I didn’t kill anyone. Why do you keep doin’ this to me?”

It was clear that for now, at least, she wouldn’t get anything more from him. “Holo cube disconnect,” the Major commanded, and her solid-looking holographic image inside the cube disintegrated like falling sand. At a distance from the cube, the Major watched from where she’d been physically the entire time, observing the interrogation with Batou, Ladriya and Togusa.

“Please!” Skinny Man begged, as though he thought the Major was still there with him. “I didn’t do anything. Why do you keep saying this to me?”

Ladriya turned to Tagusa for an explanation. “I don’t understand. How can he not know?”

Within the cube, Skinny Man kept on sobbing. “Why am I here?”

Togusa sighed. “The hack must have created a vacuum. Kuze has wiped his memory and somehow installed a new reality.”

Batou sounded philosophical. “At least he got to believe he had a kid. What’s the difference, huh?”

Abruptly, Skinny Man stopped sobbing. His expression became calm and purposeful. The Major noticed, but Batou did not, and expounded on his theory. “Fantasy, reality. Dreams, memories. It’s all the same. Just noise.”

The Major stood directly outside the cube. Such a monumental falsehood from a man like this suspect, an ordinary working-class citizen with absolutely no training in counter-interrogation techniques, should have blown up as a massive peak on the polygraph. Unless he was a sociopath, there was a far more disturbing possibility at work.

The prisoner walked up to the glass separating them and stared out at her with an unreadable expression, but this was not the same person who had been hysterical with grief and confusion moments ago. His body language was much more controlled. Although this was a new guise, the Major recognized Kuze peering out through the man’s eyes. “It’s him,” she told the team. “He’s in there.”

Togusa frowned. “This cube is secure. He can’t be, Major.”

Ladriya looked at the readout. The waveform display had changed from a human-nominal series of tiny peaks and troughs to a completely flat line. There were no tremors at all, not even a hint of displacement. “Lie detector,” she realized. The suspect was connected to the polygraph, which was theoretically impregnable, but Kuze had already proved he could get past any firewall. “He must’ve hacked in that way. We should uplink to the machine, trace the code, get a lock on his location.”

“Do it,” Togusa urged. Then he saw that the Major was heading for the entrance to the cube. It was one thing for her to put a projection of herself in the cube with the suspect, quite another for her to actually enter it. “Don’t go in there. It’s too dangerous!”

Aramaki, who had been seated in the corner, silently observing, called out. His face was a mask of grave concern. “Major.”

The Major turned to her commander.

“We don’t know what else he’s capable of,” Aramaki cautioned her.

The Major indicated that she understood the warning, and opened the entrance panel in the cube, going inside for the first time to stand face to face with the prisoner. The prisoner studied her with a kind of cold, alien curiosity. The panel closed.

Outside the cube, Ladriya began connecting an echo box to the polygraph, tracing the extra code.

“Signal’s unstable,” Togusa fretted. “Can you get a lock on it?”

Ladriya was working as fast as she could, but the telemetry wasn’t cooperating. “I’m sorry.”

“We gotta move fast,” Togusa said, just as though Ladriya didn’t know this already. “We’re losing it.”

Ladriya made some adjustments to the echo box, then sighed in relief. “Connecting.”

“Who are you?” the Major asked the prisoner.

When the man spoke, it was with Kuze’s electronic voice. “Come here.”

The Major took a step closer to him.

“I am shy,” he softly inhaled. “I’m not beautiful like you.”

The Major tried not to be disconcerted. Compliments on her appearance were the last thing she’d expected to hear during the interrogation. “Tell me who you are.”

“I have been born more than once,” Kuze said through the hacked man’s mouth. “So I have more than one name.”

“I’ll find you,” the Major vowed.

“Not yet.” Kuze’s tone was gentle, but not pleasant. “I’m not done.”

Outside the cube, Togusa spoke up. “The machine is tracing his location.” He turned to Batou. “We got a fix.”

The Major heard, and so did Kuze, who immediately relinquished control of his bio-puppet. She saw the strange shift and change pass over the prisoner’s face once again. He looked up at her with watery, panic-stricken eyes, then started trembling and weeping. “I need to see her. Please.”

The Major turned away. There was nothing she could do for him. Somehow, seeing him sob for a daughter he’d never had was just about unbearable. She opened the panel and exited the cube.

Behind her, the man continued to beg, whimpering, “No, please. I know… where…”

“We got him,” Batou told the Major.

The cube panel shut with a click. Skinny Man leapt up into the air, pulling his legs up underneath him. The cable connecting him to the polygraph was attached to the cube ceiling. His action turned the cable into a noose, snapping his neck. The bio-detectors buzzed with the steady whine of brain and heart flatlining together as he died.

The Major and Batou stared at the dead man through the glass. It had happened so fast, in a single instant, and it had been too late to do anything.

Batou exhaled grimly. “Let’s go.”

The city’s vast urban sprawl clustered along the coastline like some sort of gigantic fungal colony. It spread south toward the lower districts where the habitat blocks rose high, and north into an industrial zone filled with machine-managed factory complexes that worked ceaselessly, many of them operating without human intervention of any kind.

On the sparsely populated edges of the industrial zone, where the police were less inclined to patrol, there existed a ribbon of shanty town sub-districts. Built from reclaimed materials, in the husks of basic habitat blocks for long-gone workers whose jobs had been replaced by synthetics, the shanties were home to criminal elements. They were a place for the displaced and the lost who had slipped through the cracks of the city’s society. For now, the edge-town existed in an uneasy truce with the rest of the city. The government looked the other way as long as the criminals running the place kept it under some kind of control. The yakuza clans held sway there and, in their own way, they managed the shanties as carefully as City Hall did the corporate districts, the harbor zone and the wealthy upper habitats.

Long shadows fell around the garbage-littered street, cast by massive warehouses and manufacturing towers. The tallest was a cylindrical construct of old and cracked concrete, another of the derelict habitats that had been built to house now obsolete human workers.