The Ghost in the Shell Read online

  Koukaku Kidoutai Shousetsu Ansoroji © 2017 SHIROW MASAMUNE / TOH ENJOE, GAKUTO MIKUMO, KAFKA ASAGIRI, YOSHINOBU AKITA, TOW UBUKATA / KODANSHA LTD. All rights reserved. Publication rights for this English edition arranged through Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo.

  Published by Vertical, Inc., New York, 2017

  Originally published in Japanese as Koukaku Kidoutai Shousetsu Ansoroji in 2017

  eISBN 9781945054907

  First Edition

  Vertical, Inc.

  451 Park Avenue South, 7th Floor

  New York, NY 10016

  www.vertical-inc.com

  v4.1

  a

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  SHADOW.NET

   by TOH ENJOE

  HETEROCHROMIA

   by GAKUTO MIKUMO

  SOFT AND WHITE

   by KAFKA ASAGIRI

  SOLILOQUY

   by YOSHINOBU AKITA

  SPRINGER

   by TOW UBUKATA

  About the Authors

  01

  I am an eyeball. No, two eyeballs, I should say. Or maybe three.

  The eyeball that I am is currently capturing a car slowly advancing in a line of vehicles on an avenue—bird’s-eye view. Flitting around the entire visual field are squares drawn in green lines. They’re facial recognition markers. In a semi-transparent window in one corner scrolls the reference log, already too fast for the naked eye to follow. Most of the log is censored and masked anyway. The markers’ movements undulate and dance like a school of sardines or spiraling manta rays or hammerhead sharks. What’s clear is that rather than some intention, something that’s too big to grasp exists there. You get the feeling that the school is just a part of something even bigger.

  The behemoth formed by the crowd of markers turns in its sleep, and like some phase change the movement shifts into a column of swarming mosquitoes, then a flock of fleeing sparrows, then a formation of geese, altering its shape. Scattering, gathering, collecting, unifying, it searches the objects in the visual field efficiently. The movements evinced by a search algorithm born from research on animals and insects’ herd motion has this kind of power to enchant the viewer. Just when you think you’ve grasped the pattern, it switches to an unexpected motion. It’s not an incomprehensible motion but rather one whose various parts are all familiar. It’s just a combination of simple movements like stretching, shrinking, and rotating, but their diversity is dizzying. You might end up with such a scene if the mimic octopus, which impersonates a variety of organisms, ever herded together.

  The markers flit, ignoring the facial pics on posters, ignoring the lives depicted with blinking pixels on the surface of gigantic displays in street corners. They leap, estimating the position of the original from silhouettes reflected in walls of glass. When they enclose a human face, the green of the square frame turns red, immediately stops, and transmits data. The data are referred to server instances, and the reference log scrolls at the edge of my vision. To me, it’s beginning to look like markers and faces mating. The outputted reference data are the offspring, so to speak. Or maybe it’s like watching a crowd of people being attacked by vampire bats. Most of the faces enclosed in markers look foggy and out of focus, uniform, generic.

  We live in times when the mere act of seeing is regulated. Without the concerned party’s permission or a special waiver, mechanically analyzing someone’s face as an image is forbidden. At least publicly, even though you’re allowed to save it. There are legal strictures against publicly and mechanically mass-processing data showing someone in a manner amenable to human eyes. These days, the facial recognition mechanism of snap cameras not only clicks a photo in response to the subject’s smile but also busily masks the faces of passersby who entered the frame. The manufacturer equips the function purely in accordance with social mores. Erasing the sound of the shutter snapping is a technical possibility, but why would you want to erase it unless you’re up to no good, the thinking goes, with the upshot that even a noiseless electronic shutter has to be accompanied by the sound.

  I am watching this scene now as part of a surveillance network that Public Security is testing. It’s not mistaken to say that I am a part, an organ of this system whose design I’m involved in. When plans for a large-scale surveillance system using drones first came up, a difficult question arose: how to structure a system to handle data masked out of privacy concerns.

  The answer, or one of the desperate solutions, is me.

  In my memory, I’m sitting up in a hospital bed, my bandaged face downcast, and am hearing out the doctor’s explanation. I listen as the parts of my brain that I lost in an accident are listed one after the other. I understand what’s being said. I find it strange that I understand what I’ve lost and am doubtful that I really do understand.

  “A misapprehension of countenances has been observed,” the doctor says.

  “You mean, I can’t tell apart people’s faces?” I ask.

  “That would be it,” the doctor replies, his aloof expression hard to read.

  I am a part of this system, but you could also say that this system is a part of my visual system. I see a black car among the line of vehicles on the avenue laid across my visual field. A red marker pasted on the backseat window is capturing the face of a man looking this way. Naturally, the face is foggy, but by checking the log in the corner of my vision, I can tell that it is Chief Aramaki from Public Security. The text-data log tells me that his line of sight is directed my way.

  My viewpoint is that of an experimental drone. A trio of them forms a team and floats in the skies above the target domain and monitors the designated area. You can think of it as an autonomously functioning surveillance camera mounted on a miniature helicopter; something similar saw action in the world war. Whether or not it’s operable as a public resource is still under fierce debate. The use of mechanical face recognition has been accepted for immigration inspections, and so has the installation of surveillance cameras in street corners, but installing cameras with a face recognition function in street corners is a different issue.

  Aerial photography belongs to the realm of hobbies, but if you’re sending up a drone to peep into a public bathhouse, then it’s a crime. Surveillance cameras ought to be installed in banks, but putting them in a locker room is out of the question. By now, border control via immigration inspections is difficult without mechanical face recognition. Banning home-use digital cameras with face recognition capabilities is hardly feasible. That’s partly because they’re widespread, but there’s also the fundamental issue that the human visual system itself is, in a way, just a camera with a recognition function. The visual system of a fully prosthetic cyborg is, of course, industrial machinery. On that point, there’s really nothing to distinguish it from a robot’s. The presence of biological parts doesn’t mean that a cyborg with a face recognition function taking a walk is any different from a camera with a face recognition function roaming around on rotors. The signal transmission capabilities of cybernetic humans far surpass those of fossil-age radios.

  The difference, then, is the presence of a brain. Past the pupils of a cyborg there exists, or at least there is said to exist, an organ called the brain, and behind this surveillance network sits the brain called me. In principle, unlike a system made up of mass-produced brainless drones, it’s no different from a human being monitoring a display showing a massive amount of info.

  So perhaps it can be said that seeing is a right that is granted to the structure called the brain. The right to see is engendered by the fact that brains cannot be manufactured industrially, by their inability to be mass-produced. Because it’s not possible to manufacture a brain thus and transpose extant information, mine has yet to be fully healed. This system has been positioned as an experiment to augment my lost cerebral functions. Humanitarian research, in other words. That’s what it is on the surface. My artificial eyes just happen to be lodged in drones rather than my ocular cavities.

  Let’s say some field of the brain is open to mechanical substitution. As well as some other portion. And yet another portion. How much mechanical substitution can you have before the brain becomes a machine? Where does the forest begin if you keep planting trees, and when does gray turn into white?

  My vision abruptly wavers, and the video switches to a different drone’s.

  I am an eyeball, and as a human am accustomed to using two, but the drone formation is a trio and I am three-eyed, while as a processing system called the brain I am two-eyed and outfitted to grasp one visual field at a time.

  I can’t help but cover my eyes at the sight of a drone, held aloft on three sets of rotors, attempting to ram another drone (the one that was providing my visual field until just now) for a second time. There ought to have been an approach-and-contact warning, but I don’t see it in the log. Shaking my head, I recognize that I’ve been dealt a shock akin to a game character under my control falling off a cliff or my bended knee straightening out as I dream. You might feel the same way if a door slammed shut on your imaginary limb. An eyeball that comprises me is charging another eyeball, and I’m watching them collide in midair as if I were a stranger. I run my eyes over the attitude-control monitoring log to search for a countermeasure, but the number of parameters keeping the drones up in the sky easily exceeds my processing capability. Humans can’t get a full grasp on the signals controlling their prostheses, or even their biological bodies, so this is i
nevitable.

  Retracing past logs, I consult anew the record of the chief’s expression beyond the bulletproof glass from when the two drones collided. The chief was staring at the collision of my two eyeballs, the two drones. His expression is stiff, but not exactly surprised. His right hand goes up and presses his right ear. His mouth moves. Reading lips isn’t as reliable a skill as it is commonly believed to be, but the basic data of the chief’s facial muscles is on record, so I can tell what he is saying.

  “The Major, eh?” he is calling into the mic.

  02

  “Spam?” asks the man in the passenger’s seat.

  “Yup, by my daughter’s cell,” the man behind the wheel answers. “Happens a lot these days.”

  Displays reading “Batou” and “Togusa” sidle up to the man in the passenger’s seat and the man behind the wheel, respectively.

  “There’s a filtering service for kids, isn’t there?” the man marked Batou says. He points out that they can’t be “military grade” attacks.

  “You know how frequently recent barriers refresh,” Togusa replies.

  Still looking out the window, Batou shrugs his shoulders in the cramped car. “Ah, you mentioned love letters from advanced AI.”

  “Yup,” Togusa answers curtly.

  “It’s just a correspondence program, isn’t it?” says Batou. “Someone who’ll only say things you want to hear. You don’t need AI for that. There are people like that. A lot of demand, too.”

  “My daughter still can’t tell a flattery-prone AI from a human being who cares about her.”

  “You say that like you or I can. Do you know how many fake 911 calls there were last year?” reminds Batou. “A serial fake caller program. Instead of writing a novel, they concoct these deluded murder cases and report them. Since the hassle was automated, the processing got automated too, and it became an issue when actual reports got filtered out.”

  “You mean where warnings from old-type surveillance cameras were judged to be too ‘mechanical’ and bounced by the relay server,” recalls Togusa.

  “I dealt with a few, in the way of moonlighting,” Batou shares. Turning both his palms upwards, he pretends to grab something. “Crushing spam bots. The chief was into it, after what happened.”

  “The Puppeteer,” Togusa responds after a brief pause, and Batou goes on.

  “—And the follow-up hunt for stray AI. Once you start looking for them, they’re all over the place. None of them had the Puppeteer’s ego, but many of them surpassed him when it came to distributed processing. Well, just think about it. Which is smarter, committing a series of flashy crimes and getting caught, or sticking to real gains and avoiding arrest?”

  “The Puppeteer had his reasons.”

  “What do I know about a machine’s reasons?” Batou says. “Who knows if humans could even understand them? Anyway, there were tons of these AIs. Beyond the old Great Firewall, beyond the Urals, heaps of them. They normally don’t cause trouble, so there’s no incentive to investigate them, and they don’t get caught because we don’t investigate them. You know what they said? ‘Only fools commit crimes that can get you arrested.’ ”

  “Botnet,” Togusa mutters. He’s referring to a distributed processing system formed by computers infected with viruses connecting to each other after they’ve turned into bots and zombies.

  “A ghostnet.” Batou doesn’t sound particularly amused. “True, it’s empty past the ghost line. A cluster of auto-reply programs for whom infection and expansion is everything. When I asked why they chose to develop their ability to reply in human languages, the answer I got was, ‘Survival rates improve when you beg for your life.’ ”

  “The war?” prompts Togusa, and Batou takes it from there.

  “Remnants, some of them. A happy family of advanced tactical AIs and such led by a guerilla-warfare strategic AI. These guys gave up their attachment to bodies long ago. Their hobby’s pretending to be, say, love letters, and coming across as harmless so they can transmit and spread and secure computational resources by exchanging messages. ‘Would you like to be my friend?’ That stuff. Existing has become an end in itself for them, and they don’t have functions like guilt. No tall tale is beneath them.”

  Steering the wheel, Togusa chimes in, “ ‘I’m a life form, born in a sea of information.’ ”

  Batou finally swivels his neck, studies Togusa’s expression, almost says something but swallows his words, and answers, “Yeah. Your daughter’s pen pal must be one of those. They use their abundant computing resources to keep sending letters asserting that they’re alive and request more computing resources, in a fierce, seesawing battle with filters and barriers.”

  Togusa gives a nod in the driver’s seat.

  “And?” Batou asks monosyllabically.

  Togusa glances at the rearview mirror. “What, weren’t you listening?”

  Batou laughs. “It’s no different from peering into a rearview mirror when you don’t need to. Call it an echo of elegant, sentimental interpersonal exchanges. It’s just more like it when you’re issued orders in an actual voice.”

  Of course, the man called Batou has to be privy to the directive Togusa just got from the chief. Judging that his partner received it too, Batou’s cyberbrain interface must have put the chief’s orders on hold before they could be conveyed to his consciousness. The log that reached it must have said: “The chief has called, but the same content has been transmitted to Togusa, it is not an urgent directive, and there is more than enough time to have it delivered verbally by Togusa.”

  “I can’t believe you actually felt like implementing such a cumbersome procedure,” Togusa remarks.

  “Every day is a cyber battle,” Batou says in a teacherly tone. “Didn’t they teach you in school to constantly better and update yourself?”

  Looking away from Togusa, who has plunged into silence, Batou speaks again.

  “In order to stay human.”

  03

  The hall looks like it can hold three hundred people, the front is an elevated stage, and at the end hangs a large screen. The lights have been dimmed, and a presenter is visible at the lectern on the right edge of the stage. It’s the person in question, according to the log, but the face is as featureless as ever and indistinguishable from others.

  Equations and unfamiliar diagrams keep popping up on the screen, and I lack the ability to decipher the symbols. The lecture itself also passes me by as if it’s in a foreign language.

  “So this,” an amplified male voice sounds from speakers positioned around the hall, “is the communication protocol used by a large-scale botnet discovered last year. The method is well known, but never before has it been executed at such a scale. The botnet found on the continent after the war was an autonomous network of several hundred thousand infected computers, but it had merely adapted to the ecology on the other side of the Great Firewall.

  “Meanwhile, this recent one is a network enabled by the postwar standardization of formats, and its special characteristic is that by and large it ignores geographical constraints. That is why it took so long to discover—or rather, for us to grasp its full extent. The Great Firewall itself used to be just a layer of walls enveloping nation-states along their borders. It is not an overstatement to say that we now live in the era of a double net, of a superimposed net. Or one might say that a postal system established by a nation-state of bots inhabiting the net is about to be born. This postal system expands in scale by riding the mail that it sends out. Being infected by this net allows you to participate in the postal system, in fact coerces you to do so. Hence it is not what we customarily call a network. Let me put it this way.”

  The man inserts a practiced pause and continues.

  “A third hand, from which you were separated at birth, has been lying somewhere on Earth this whole time. You don’t know about its existence. Yet the moment you access the hand, you know that it is yours, and though physically alien, you know that it is a part of your body. That differs from our understanding of a network, which is premised on mutual exchanges.”

  The sign at the hall’s entrance that reads “21st Meeting of the Institute of Distributed Communications Engineers” is a makeshift affair of A4 sheets. Once the audience has streamed out the door and the ones in the hall continuing their discussions have thinned out, the markers that were gently flying about turn red. A short man displayed as Aramaki steps forth and quietly stands next to a man who has just exited the hall and who appears to be the earlier presenter. The red markers wobble and follow. I shift my line of sight to find another marker awaiting at the end of the hallway and displaying the man’s bodyguard.