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The water fragments. At this depth, the light from Batou’s boat is barely even a shimmer across the surface, spider-webbed light too far away to give off any sense of warmth or comfort. She’s nearing depth-limit: much further, and oxygen toxicity will become a real possibility, but it’s time to surface anyway. The cold’s set into her circuits, into her ghost, even, a familiar sense of fear and loss that’s the opposite of ghost-diving or connecting to the net, compression instead of expansion, the distillation of the self into something that fears and flails and is at peace. You are alive, the water tells her as it crushes her. You are alive.
She thumbs the release catch on the buoyancy pack, begins to rise. Up through darkness, until the light of the boat merges with the more distant lights of the city. This is what being born must feel like.
They haven’t gone too far out into the harbor, so when she surfaces she just drifts for a while, regaining equilibrium, listening to the distant blare of cargo ships going out, coming in, the city a string of lights at the water’s edge. The night is quiet. The water laps gently against her ears, buoying her up.
Major, look what I found!
The voice of one of the Tachikomas flares up sudden in her ear, the viewing window swinging in over the night sky. Idly, she reaches to swipe at one eye. I thought I told you I was off the clock. Is it an emergency?
Um, no. Sorry…. It sounds contrite, but bounces back just as quickly. But look! Wasn't she your previous commander?
An article from that day’s paper has begun scrolling across her field of vision, moving as quickly as she tracks it. Kurutsu’s dead. Killed under undisclosed circumstances—obviously during a mission, but the obituary doesn’t mention 501 at all. The funeral, she notes, is being held this weekend, but Kurutsu is listed as a civilian, as no one important or meaningful. Just another death. Just like Mamoru.
But she’s learned her lesson about revenge, and anyway she has no way or desire to access the information now. Section 9 might be special police, but outside people don’t even know 501 exists, and even her previous connection to the organization won’t open any doors for her. Especially not now that Kurutsu’s gone. Maybe it’s the lingering effects of decompression, the weird high that surfacing gives her sometimes, but she feels regret. Even, blinking up at the sky, a warm slide of sorrow.
“Hey, you okay?"
She rolls over in the water, turning finally back toward the boat. Batou’s sprawled on the opposite bench when she pulls herself up onto the deck; he’s holding a beer but she notes the balance of it between his fingers, and it’s only half empty.
"Yeah. The Tachikomas just gave me some bad news, that's all."
He grimaces. “Shit. We gotta head back in?”
“No. It’s something personal.”
“Oh.” He tilts his beer a little. “Do you… wanna talk about it?”
She shakes her head, and he doesn’t press, just watches her pull the mask off, shrug the buoyancy pack off onto the deck, begin to strip. The dive suit peels off like rubber, close and cool; underneath it, she’s only wearing her underthings, but she has a jacket in the bag, along with her boots and a pair of pants. As she steps into her clothes, she notices, again, a skitter of unease along her spine. It’s nothing foreboding, just uneasiness. Diving helps her ignore it, crushing all other emotions into a kernel of loneliness and isolation, but now that she’s surfaced, it’s back. Maybe the news of Kurutsu’s death has something to do with it as well—her ghost has always been sensitive.
She is beginning to feel ill at ease in her body. It is hers now, irrevocably, but it doesn't quite fit anymore; when she wakes in the morning she sometimes feels as though she could step out of it entirely. Not into the net, or another plane of existence, just… out. Into something new? Maybe. She hasn’t quite figured it out yet.
When she’s done changing, there’s another beer in Batou’s hand and he’s holding it toward her.
“Thanks.” With her alcohol filters off it tastes the way it should: a little bitter, a little sweet. Batou’s staring out at the city, now, at the lights laid out like trace code along the coast. “Do you ever feel like… your skin itches?” she asks him. “Not your physical skin, but you in it?”
He sips at his beer. “Maybe it's time for a new body.”
She raises an eyebrow, but he only shrugs.
"You were cyberized pretty young, so you've obviously done it before. I mean, you’ve had this body as long as I’ve known you and—well, how old are you, anyway?”
“Batou. It's impolite to ask a lady her age.” She drops the flippers on the top of the pile, curls a hand through her hair. “How old do you think I am?”
He grins, childish and smug. “One of the great things about full-body cyberization is that, when you get right down to it, age stops meaning anything. You remember Gakuto Kamui? He’s probably almost seventy now, but he looks the same as he did when he was thirty. So even if I guessed right, what would it matter?”
She smiles, angles her mouth into something that feels rueful, even fond. “I suppose you’re right.” She finishes ruffling her hair dry with a towel, and tosses it onto the bench with the rest of her gear. She’ll pack it into the trunk of her car when they get to the harbor, dry everything out once she gets home. She tips her head toward land, toward the glittering slew of lights. “Take us back in?”
He crushes his empty can in one hand, easy as anything, then levers himself to his feet. “Sure.”
Lieutenant Colonel Kurutsu’s face looks the same. But her white uniform shirt is buttoned all the way up, which looks strange to Motoko, standing over the body. Her credentials with Section 9 had gotten her through the door; if they bother checking with Aramaki he might back her up or he might not, but that’s alright. She doesn’t need long here.
“It’s funny, isn’t it,” she says to Kurutsu’s face, “that we still bother with such prehistoric rituals as cremations in this day and age. Our bodies, even more than non-cyberized individuals, are nothing more than shells for our ghosts.”
Her hand twitches at her side. She wants to reach for something, but there’s nothing there. “Batou thinks I should swap bodies. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I’m too old for this one.” She doesn’t know if that’s it, if this slight body with its angular hips, its sharp elbows and knees, legs thin as a spiders’, is no longer capable of holding her. It’s only titanium and copper, rubber and other synthetics. Nothing remarkable, except for what it contains. Except for what she hopes it contains. But it seems false, somehow, to force growth, to slow it or speed it up, to decide, arbitrarily, today I am too old for my face, it’s time for a new one. And yet. And yet. Isn’t it the only way, now? For people like her?
“Was anything left of her cyberbrain?”
Her question echoes a little in the enclosed space. The technician leans out from the other room.
“Some. Whatever got her caused system-wide damage, but it’s actually blood loss that killed her. She was heavily cyberized, but not where it mattered. Ironically. What division did you say you were from, again?”
“Section 9. Public Security.” She pulls a connection cord from her own neck, slipping one hand under Kurutsu’s and plugging it in. The world descends into color, and then into blackness, and then into light.
Ghost-diving is always a little unnerving. It is stepping outside yourself, into something bigger that your self has nonetheless expanded into, filling all the cracks and creases, the dark corners of someone else’s ghost. But diving a damaged cyberbrain is a different experience altogether. She has to wriggle in through collapsed pathways, and the hysterical patterns of light are red, threads snarled and tangled, running into dead ends and blind alleys and self-repeating loops that fragment into error codes. It’s stifling, claustrophobic. This is not the limitless expansion of the net or a healthy ghost, but a warren of narrow passageways she can’t break free of, a compression of self into this one pathway, this single data stream, this one way forward. Still, she finds what she's looking for, and gives the order to copy the files.
Is this what maturing feels like? Is it a choice you make, to step out, to become something new? The files finish downloading, and she withdraws, one hand on Kurutsu’s shoulder. Even if these bodies are nothing more than shells, does it then follow that they're meaningless? It is a choice, after all, to remain female. To retain her hair color, her slim wrists, the chance of catching an enemy off guard. In order to expand one must first be compressed. She pulls the cord free of Kurutsu’s neck, giving it a brief tug to activate the retraction mechanism that pulls it back into the casing at her neck. It feels suitably like a tribute, what she’s doing. If Mamoru was like a father to her then Kurutsu was as much of a mother as Motoko ever had. She pulls up the link to her external memory, shifts the files over from her temporary storage platform. “Rename file. Voice Template 003.” She looks down at Kurutsu. “You won’t need it now anyway.”
Batou.
Major? What is it?
Are you busy this weekend? I need a witness for a body swap.
She hears the short rush of his laughter, like a bird taking off from her shoulder. I think I can find room in my schedule. Just lemme know the time and place, and I’ll be there. You got one picked out yet?
I’m just sorting that out now. Thank you.
Anytime.
She lifts a hand to the technician on her way out, boots clicking softly against the tile. The garage is quiet and dim, her car waiting for her just as she steps out of the elevator. She’d traded her bike in almost a year ago, now; a car more practical, when she sometimes has to take passengers along, when she occasionally acts as Aramaki’s driver for events or meetings they both need to be present for. She is getting older. She can feel the coolness settling into her ghost, can feel herself becoming more responsible, in the realization that there are lives depending on her, now, as a leader and investigator, the weight of them hooked into her mind even when she sleeps.
As she turns out of the garage the world sinks into darkness, the lights of the city, the lights of cars on the road. This is another kind of net, she thinks, watching the city rise up over the bridge. All these people living their lives, an infinitely stable and unstable system of bodies and ghosts, lives and dreams, and her going into it. She flexes her fingers against the wheel. She’ll have to go through the stock body options before the weekend, pick out something that appeals to her. Female, still, she thinks. Purple hair. Slender wrists.
Beyond that, the possibilities are endless.