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

Then she glitched. The two teenagers she’d seen in her vision of the burning pagoda were here, in a Hanka surgical prep room. Both of them were restrained at the waist, and tied down to separate gurneys. They reached for each other, hands just touching, but the contact was short-lived as the doctors pulled them apart.

“Motoko!” Hideo cried out.

The girl sobbed. She and Hideo had been so happy, and then—why had they been taken? Why were they here? The Major was only observing the glitch, but she knew what was in Motoko’s soul.

“Motoko!” Hideo cried again. He reached for her.

She tried to reach for him. “Hideo!” She was disconsolate.

“Let’s go,” a male doctor said. Hideo’s thrashing, grasping arm was pulled back. The glitch ended. The Major didn’t feel as sure of Hideo’s emotions as she had Motoko’s, but she still empathized with how the young man in her vision had felt. She was alone in Ouelet’s operating room for the moment, but at least she was sitting up in the exam chair rather than lying flat. The Major was sedated, woozy from the drugs and restrained by a device clamped around the upper portion of her skull. She tried to crane her neck for a look through the observation window into Ouelet’s office, but the angle was wrong, and besides, the apparatus around her head made it difficult to bend her neck. The sedatives made her feel as though her body and limbs had been filled with cement.

Snatching a few hours of troubled, turbulent sleep had not helped Genevieve Ouelet to salve her conscience, so she turned back to the single thing that could give her peace—the work.

Returning to her lab in the pre-dawn hours, she had set to processing the analysis of a new neural substrate software model, but even this could not stop her focus from drifting. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw Mira Killian’s face, filled with raw hurt and accusation.

Ouelet had been troubled by rumors around the building, talk among the security staff that Mira had been suspended from her duties at Section Nine and was now being considered a flight risk… even a potential threat .

She didn’t want to believe that. She didn’t want to consider that she had been responsible in some way.

The scientist kept replaying their last conversation over and over in her mind, wondering if there was something else she could have said, some way she could have handled things differently so that Mira would not have vanished into the night.

Cutter was watching the Major through the large observation window separating Ouelet’s office from the operating room. The doctor entered her workplace and joined the executive by the window.

Cutter noted the small-scale model of Project 2571’s unadorned shell on her desk. There was also a humanoid skull and a little vial of yellow medication. Ouelet wasn’t one for decoration, so clearly the shell and the skull had deep meaning for her. The medication was no doubt because Ouelet didn’t yet understand what was going to happen.

“Why is she sedated?” Ouelet asked.

Cutter gave her a patronizing look. “She’s been turned by a terrorist. But you know that already.”

Ouelet said nothing. Instead, she sat down at her desk and looked away.

“You should’ve called the first time she came to see you,” Cutter continued. His tone was acid. “Instead, you gave her information.”

Ouelet’s temper flared. This connard had seriously expected her to betray Mira to him? “What makes you think you have the right to tell me what to do and what—”

Cutter spoke right over her. “2571 took us close.” Ouelet know that what he meant was not her definition of success—a perfect meld of human and synthetic—but rather a creation that would be totally loyal to Hanka. “It’s time to move on to the next iteration.”

The color drained from Ouelet’s face, horrified at the implication in Cutter’s words. “2571 is not a failure. I’ll delete all the data and reprogram her. She won’t remember him at all.”

But Cutter had made up his mind. “No. No, no, no, no, no. You download all the data on the terrorist, and then I order you to terminate.”

Ouelet was stunned. She knew that she had heard Cutter correctly, though she desperately wished that she hadn’t. She felt close to tears. “What?” She felt sick, hollowed out by what Cutter was demanding from her.

“You’ll build one that’s better,” Cutter assured her.

She tried to bargain with him. “I’ll delete everything.”

Cutter knew as well as Ouelet did that even a total memory wipe didn’t guarantee that rebellion wouldn’t form in the subject’s brain all over again. “You’ve deleted before.”

Mira was Ouelet’s creation. Cutter was overstepping his authority here. “She’s mine,” the doctor countered.

“No,” Cutter said. “She’s a contract. With me.”

Mira was more than an experiment that had come to fruition; she was a living being. Ouelet would not kill her. As head of Hanka Robotics, Cutter shouldn’t want this either. “We succeeded,” she told him.

Cutter inhaled angrily, mustering another retort.

“She’s more than human,” Ouelet continued. “And more than AI. We changed her entire identity. But her ghost survived!”

“Her ghost is what failed us,” Cutter spat back. “We cannot control her. She’s no longer a viable asset.”

Cutter took a vial of red liquid from his pocket. Ouelet knew exactly what the substance was. Applied to a quik-port, it would cause all functions to cease, both biological and cybernetic. He placed the vial on Ouelet’s desk. “You should be the one to do it.”

Ouelet entered the operating room and began working at the computer terminal attached to the Major’s head.

The Major held on to a kernel of cold fury at the indignity of her treatment. Her life and her freedom had been removed as cleanly as the flesh of the old, human body she didn’t remember, and there was nothing she could do to prevent it. She wondered what Section Nine had been told about her. Had Cutter convinced them that she had been suborned by Kuze, that she was now as much a threat as he was? Were they ready to shoot her on sight? Not Batou, never Batou, but the others… What did Aramaki believe?

Ouelet was behind her, so the Major couldn’t make eye contact, but maybe that was just as well. “What are you doing to me?” Her words were slurred from the sedation.

The doctor’s voice was soft and reassuring. “I’ll run the standard synaptic, upload your data on the raid. Find out exactly what Kuze told you.”

“You know what he told me,” the Major retorted. She might be drugged, but she wasn’t so out of it that she wasn’t infuriated that Ouelet was still keeping up the pretense that the Major was mistaken. “The truth.”

From the office, Cutter observed the interaction through the window. Why was Ouelet prolonging the inevitable? Guilt? Wanting to spend a little more time with her prized specimen before starting over?

Ouelet typed more commands into the computer.

“You’re deleting everything, aren’t you?” the Major said. She wondered what memories would be implanted this time. The same ones about the terrorist attack in the harbor, or some new scenario? It didn’t matter. Whoever she was now would be gone.

“No,” Ouelet said.

This time, the Major hoped Ouelet was lying. If not… “Make it so I don’t remember… you.”

Ouelet winced, glad that Mira could not see how that struck home. Not that the doctor blamed her patient. Ouelet inserted a small tool into a hidden pin hole socket concealed within the Major’s black hair at the back of her head. With a high-pitched click, the tool rotated and the back of the Major’s skull opened like a flower, petals of artificial skin and polymer-ceramic skull plates peeling back to expose the dark titanium brain case beneath. Within the case, sheathed in a complex web of molecule-thin connectors, the Major’s organic brain was suspended in a bath of processing fluids and support nutrients.