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

Hairi appeared just behind the Major. “That’s Motoko’s room.”

The Major stiffened at the name of the girl in her glitch visions.

The older woman, as if anticipating a question, said, “My daughter died a year ago.”

No wonder Hairi had an air of such grief about her. “I’m sorry,” the Major said, meaning it.

“She ran away,” Hairi said. “She was difficult. And, uh, we fought.” She managed a chuckle at the memory.

The cat was now on the bed, cleaning herself. The animal also seemed familiar to the Major, more familiar even than the glitch visions would explain.

The older woman looked philosophical as she added, “But I guess we all fight with our parents, right?”

The Major looked around and noticed a small bronze pagoda on a shelf in Motoko’s room. She stared at it. It, too, seemed very familiar.

“Uh, please come and sit, yeah?” Hairi gestured for the Major to come out of the bedroom and sit at the dining table. The Major sat politely as Hairi retrieved a teapot from the kitchen, then sat across the table from her. All around the living room were framed still photographs. Almost every one included the same young girl, as a child and as a teenager. None of the images showed her past that point, however. The resemblance to Hairi was striking. The girl must be Motoko. If these pictures of her were taken just before her death, she had died young.

The Major wasn’t sure how she ought to express her sympathies. She hoped the older woman would speak again. Hairi chuckled softly, but then smiled nervously and looked away.

An awkward silence fell. When it was clear Hairi wasn’t going to speak up, the Major did. “What happened to her?”

“Mmm, I don’t know.” The older woman’s chuckle this time was melancholy. “Um, the Ministry sent me her ashes, and they told me she took her own life. But Motoko…” She shook her head with certainty. “Ah, no, no, no.” Another chuckle, this one in recognition of the Ministry’s falsehood, one so obvious to her that it was bleakly amusing someone had dared to give it as an explanation. “I n-never believed them. Sh-she was happy … living in the lawless zone with her friends. She’d write her manifestos about how technology was d-destroying the world. Oh, then one day the police came… and they ran.” She paused. “It’s strange.”

In the kitchen, the kettle started to whistle. Hairi went to turn the burner off, continuing, “I see her in so many young women. On the street, in my dreams.” She returned from the kitchen with the kettle in hand, pouring water into the teapot, “As if she’s still here.” She sighed, fond nostalgia coloring her speech. “Ah, she was fearless! A-and wild. You remind me of her.” The nervous chuckle came again. “Sorry.”

The Major stood up. This was all very strange. “How do I remind you of her?”

“The way you look at me,” the woman told her. There was strong emotion in her tone and in her gaze, but there was curiosity as well. “Who are you?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” It was an admission of despair. The Major suddenly could not bear to be here any longer. She did not know where to go next, or what to do with what she had found, but she felt she had to go at once.

“Wait, wait,” Hairi called before the Major could reach the door. “Wait!”

The Major stopped and turned to face her.

“Will you come again to visit me?” the woman asked, hope in her voice.

The Major was flooded with contradictory emotions—she felt that she would come apart if she remained any longer, and yet she also felt a pang at leaving. “I will,” she promised, and then left before Hairi could see the tears falling from her eyes.

Aramaki sat at his desk in the semi-darkness of his office, loading bullets into his old-fashioned revolver.

Most of Section Nine had been deployed on individual search and sweep investigations, scouring the city for any sign of Major Mira Killian. A report from a police drone had turned up a possible sighting in the lower city, but it was a dead end. Aramaki was not surprised. The Major was one of the best operatives he had ever worked with, and he knew that if she wanted to vanish into the metropolitan sprawl and go unseen, then there was little they could do to find her. With a conventional fugitive, Aramaki could count on them, sooner or later, to make a mistake or overlook a crucial detail. The Major, on the other hand, simply wasn’t wired that way.

But he knew her well. He knew that she would not disappear, not like this. Not without making things clear first.

When she made contact, he was waiting for it.

“ Aramaki. ” The chief’s name echoed through the ghostly pseudo-telepathic space of the mind-comms link. The Major was walking on the bridge heading away from the apartment complex, her black coat flapping in the cold wind. It hadn’t started to rain yet, but thunderclouds were piling atop one another in the sky. “ Listen to me. I was never in a terrorist bombing. My parents… everything was data they installed in my mind. ” She took a breath. “ And there were others. Runaways like me… considered disposable. Kuze was one of them. That’s why he’s coming. For Hanka .”

Aramaki rose and leant on his desk, forming the words sub-vocally to be transmitted into his encrypted neural implant. “ Can you prove this? ” Aramaki asked into the comm.

“ Dr. Ouelet can ,” the Major replied.

Aramaki was blunt. “ Ouelet’s dead .”

The Major was too stunned to respond. Despite everything, Genevieve Ouelet had known the Major as she was now better than anyone alive, and she had saved her life in the end. The Major had thought Ouelet might get into trouble for engineering the escape, but she was sure the doctor was far too valuable to Hanka for her to be too severely punished.

Aramaki broke into her reverie. “ Cutter says you killed her .”

She knew that Cutter was behind everything, behind the deaths of the runaways, the theft of the Major’s true identity, and now this. The Major told Aramaki, “ Put me on the grid. ” If she showed up on the computer networks, the help she needed would come to her. “ I need Kuze to find me. ”

Aramaki walked to his office door, put on his overcoat and picked up his briefcase. His two assistants opened the office double doors to facilitate his exit. “ Cutter will see you, too, ” he told the Major.

“ I know ,” the Major replied over the comm. “ But I need to do this. ”

Cutter was already monitoring the conversation from his office, listening in on the Major and Aramaki through a surveillance cable he had plugged into his quik-port. He was not surprised that the unstable Major would seek out the even more unstable terrorist Kuze, but he was disappointed in Aramaki. Cutter had always believed that the old man put duty above all else. Of course, Aramaki might see his duty as being dictated by a certain version of the facts, but Hanka was the underpinning of everything in this country. His loyalty should be to his employer, the corporation, even when that meant embracing changes. Since it wasn’t he would have to go too.

“ I’m going to meet with the prime minister, ” Aramaki told the Major over the comm. “ Cutter will be held responsible for what he has done. He must be stopped. ”

The conversation ended and Cutter removed the monitoring cable from his quik-port. He sighed and said aloud, “The virus has spread.”

Aramaki’s beat-up brown sedan was in its usual space in the open-air parking lot next to the building where the Section Nine office was housed. Someone of his rank could have easily requisitioned a new model, even a limousine with a driver, but Aramaki hated ostentation, and he hated waste even more. The engine was still in top shape. Also, he had found that driving alone was an excellent way to clear his mind so that he could concentrate on what mattered most.