were baking a cake: the plasma cutter had finished its work, and swinging beneath the undercarriage, her magnetic palm pulled free a thick steel circle the size of a serving platter, molten edges glowing yellowwhite. Meanwhile several of the spiders had attached to her legs, and rather than wait for them to explode, she simply detached her lower limbs as she hauled her upper body in through the portal she’d made, pulling the steel plate back in place behind her and immediately slapping another small robotic arc welder down onto the seam. The bots or their controllers would figure it out in a second, but they did not immediately open the door of the container to destroy her, probably wary of damaging its contents. And here it was: a gleaming silver box seamed with copper inlay. The device had an interface panel, and with arms only she secured her torso and head before it. Her body locked on, plugging into several key interfaces. “I’m in,” she announced. “Are we still online?” “Affirmative,” answered her assistant. “But Nishiki has traced the signal and is working to isolate it. We may have only— ” The AI’s voice cut off mid-sentence. “Ika?” Nao said. “Nao,” someone said, from inside the container. Had she been physically present, she would have jumped. A man in a loose black suit had appeared in the corner of the shipping container, near the still-locked entrance. He had thin gray hair swept back, a mustache and goatee, and a scattering of moles on his gentle face. It was her father — her father, who had died along with her mother in a sabotaged helicopter two years ago, nearly to the day. “Nao,” he said again, standing up from a seat built into the corner. “You’re not real,” she said immediately. “Is any of this real?” he replied. “All your sensory input is simulated.” “Some of it is more real than others.” He was almost certainly some kind of intrusion by the Nishiki AI guardians. In which case Ika was probably disabled or destroyed. But in that case, how did she still have a connection? “I suppose that’s true. But if so, this is the realest thing of all, what I’m about to say: People are going to get hurt, Nao. People like you, like me, like your mother. Even if you do believe this is all a kind of dream, then it’s a dream of pain, of pointless anger, of suffering. Why go down that road?” Because it’s the only way I can feel anything! “You could dwell in paradise,” he continued. “A kind of heaven, the true realm of the mind. Why not?” “If it’s all a dream,” she replied, “then when I tear it apart it will still be a dream. If it’s not a dream, then how else can I fight the monsters that did this to us?” He paused before answering. “Do you still like the ume rice cakes from Family Mart?” She was stung. The truth was that Ikaonryo, who simulated all her sensations as she lay immobile in long-term care, couldn’t well simulate taste. The flavor of the small, delicate pink cakes that used to be her favorite snack was lost to her. Tears came to her eyes. There was another explanation for her father’s presence here, of course: That this was a genuine hallucination, a figment of the truly deranged mind of a locked-in invalid who had never been very mentally stable. “I’m not crazy,” she said bitterly. “And you’re not real.” Nao turned the android’s head a hundred and eighty degrees, back to the fabricator. The program Ika had created had finished its work, and the feed stocks stored in the android’s body — cartridges of elements in powdered forms — had been delivered to the machine. A high humming rose within the shipping container. The doors behind her slammed open and spiders leapt inside, tearing apart her temporary body. But it was too late. A swarm of writhing tentacles, obsidian, irregular, saw-edged, exploded out of the fabricator’s shielding, tearing it apart. The tentacles stabbed toward the spiders, which fought, but hopelessly. Whatever they shattered reformed anew, the nanobots magnetically reforming before they each touched the ground to attack anew. It was like fighting a storm of black dust, if dust was stronger than spinning saw blades. There was a reason nanotech fabricators were kept under such close guard. The fabricator kept humming as the weapon tore apart the rest of the convoy and swarmed hissing up another building, where Nao stood in a new and undamaged android body, Ikaonryo having triumphed in whatever shadowy battle it had been fighting with its Nishiki counterparts. It had started to rain. In the near distance she could see the amber lights of the port, the mantis arms of the giant cranes hanging over the dark water. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, not to herself but to the ghost of her father, raindrops streaming down her gleaming plastic visage. No. 120
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