Archive of Our Own

Her body had never really been hers.

The memories from before the fateful plane crash were hazy at best, and nonexistent at worst; she could barely remember vague impressions of her mother and father, and she couldn’t remember any siblings she might’ve had. Only a few vague ideas, fragments, of something that might’ve been her first day at primary school and a place that could have been her childhood home, a cold night sitting around the kotatsu.... but she couldn’t even be sure that these were real memories, and not some delusions she’d acquired by happenstance while surfing the endless expanses of the Net. Things that normal people remembered from their childhoods, that had implanted themselves into her cyberbrain over time like grains of sand in an oyster that served as the kernels of future pearls. Hence, she couldn’t even be sure that she had had a childhood, as such. If memories defined a person, she had probably started existing as soon as her brain had been extracted from her mangled body and placed carefully into a first- or second-generation production-model child’s full-prosthetic body.

A body which, by rights, should’ve belonged to a boy.

Of course, she hadn’t really known it at the time. She had had no idea what to call it, that feeling of disconnection from one’s physical self; she had just thought it was part of being a full-body cyborg. The feeling that her body was just a mobile suit, like from those old cartoons, that she piloted but did not fully inhabit, was something that the doctors had at first attributed to the fact that she was still integrating her cyberised nervous system into the body-mind interface. She was still learning to control and process feedback from a prosthetic body that was only five or six years removed from its cutting-edge prototype forebears – the forebears that had been developed for soldiers who’d suffered majorly debilitating injuries yet who, with the assistance of cybernetics, could be shunted back out onto the battlefield to fight in proxy-conflicts and partitioned wars for the benefit of the military-industrial complex. At least she wasn’t a soldier.... yet. She’d get to that part of her life later. For now, she was just a kid who’d been the lucky recipient of a life-saving procedure.

And it wasn’t the doctors’ fault that they’d seen the Y-chromosome in her instant karyotype (since her old body had apparently been too badly burnt and lacerated to visually confirm the sex of), and determined that an eight-year-old boy’s prosthetic body would be suitable. They were just relying on statistics, after all. Maybe one percent of the population at the absolute most would have been in her shoes. They couldn’t possibly have known that she would end up taking on a form that bore no resemblance to that which they’d so generously given her.

But it chafed all the same. And for quite a while, she couldn’t figure out why.

As she grew older, and each successive prosthetic body was replaced by a newer, bigger, “better” model, she never quite got used to the feeling of living with — or perhaps through — them. She did eventually learn to control those bodies with an ease and facility surpassing most of the other kids her age with prosthetic bodies that she had met, not that she ever really met very many. Full-body cyborgs were still relatively new, and so a lot of other people hadn’t met one before. As a result, the almost unnaturally smooth skin, glassy eyes, and general uncanniness of the cybernetic bodies that she and others like her used could often be a turn-off for those unaccustomed to the realities of living alongside this technology. She quickly realised that she’d be seen as robotic, even inhuman, by those around her, if she didn’t make every effort to appear normal and act just like a flesh-and-blood human being would. Slightly inconsistent motions, blinking irregularly, mastery of the subtlest shades of facial expressions for every situation…. it was all necessary to offset that bizarre feeling of disconnection from the other people she went to school with and lived alongside.

But that feeling of disconnection wasn’t going to go away easily. Her classmates were still unnerved by her speed and stamina in gym class, her teachers still talked about how they thought “Hirakawa-kun” was such a good student but that it was as if “his” head was up in the clouds whenever class was in session, and her adoptive parents were still getting used to the idea of their child needing constant mechanical maintenance, as if a human being were an antique vehicle on the verge of breaking down.

And so, feeling alienated and estranged from concrete life, she turned to the Net. It was at the age of ten that she first made an account on an XBBS service’s web page, and first lurked in an old-fashioned text chat room surrounded by the dregs of society who’d taken up metaphorical residence online as a refuge or escape from the harshness of their life. It was at the age of eleven that she took her first crack at teaching herself some programming languages, and by the time she was twelve-and-a-half, she had become a regular resident of three different programming forums, soaking up as much knowledge as she could, and finding solace in an anonymised, amorphous community of like-minded would-be-hacker denizens in a little corner of cyberspace.

At first, she’d had no avatar, no way (or desire, for that matter) to leave a visual impression on others who would interact with her on the Net — but after seeing a few particularly charming and cool hacker-types with memorably well-designed avatars, she took it upon herself to learn how to make one. She didn’t know why she gravitated towards representing herself online in the form of a pink-haired woman with a white cape and a purple-and-gold bodysuit; it just seemed cool. In the moment, she thought nothing of it.

But as she took to the field of hacking like a duck to water, and plunged into the vast expanses of the Net for fun, pleasure, monetary reward, and a little bit of social validation, she found herself wishing that she could live like this all the time. Later on, she would come to understand that it wasn’t the experience of being surrounded by the Net itself that she wanted to be permanent, but rather…. having a body that she actually liked. Something she could feel proud of, because she had made it herself, because other denizens of cyberspace thought it was cool. And sexy. They viewed her as a mysterious badass lady hacker who could do practically anything and crack into any system she could get her hands on.

Well, at least those that didn’t subscribe to the depressingly common maxim that “every girl online is a guy in real life”. It was regrettable that she played into that trope to a tee, that when it came down to it, she was just a shut-in teenage prodigy boy who rarely left the outmoded Net-diving rig that she’d somehow convinced her adoptive parents to get for her fourteenth birthday. She didn’t wash herself very often — never mind that she didn’t like looking at her naked form in the shower. And she could barely say that she had any real-life friends either — never mind that she preferred the idea of hanging out with girls, but they all seemed to avoid her because of the weird, closed-off vibe she gave off.

The utter sense of liberation that cyberspace gave her only intensified the feeling of discomfort with her physical manifestation. By the time she was fifteen years old (or thereabouts, since she still didn’t know her real birthday), she was spending nearly every waking hour she could spare plugged into the Net, learning everything she could get her hands on regarding modern network security, cryptography, computer hardware, semiconductor manufacturing, homebrew cybernetic modifications, and a host of other topics that interested her. She tried cracking an insurance corporation’s backdoor and copying over their sensitive personnel files, and she was elated to find that she had completed the risky hack without anyone in the system being the wiser. Surfing the waves of information that came gushing from every possible corner of the Net was an exhilarating experience, yet only served to make her days at school all the more interminably boring, and her time spent with her adoptive parents all the more suffocating.

They had been gently suggesting to her for a while now that she should think about pursuing university as an option, to get a good, stable job and find a girlfriend that she might think about settling down with one day. She knew they didn’t mean any harm by it, but they were insufferably traditional in that respect, and she just didn’t think that such a life would be for her. For one, becoming a salaryman on the grind would require her to cease her hacking activity — just about the only thing that eased her sense of alienation from the surrounding world. And for another, well…. she didn’t want to think about it. It was silly, honestly, the idea of her next cybernetic body transfer being into something closer to what Chroma looked like. It wasn’t realistic, given the expectations that her parents had for her. But she desperately wished it could happen someday, deep down.

She knew of the existence of newhalfs and transsexuals, but that was just for the red-light districts of the big cities, and nothing she really wanted to aspire to. She just wished that the doctors had ended up making a mistake when they had performed the initial cyberisation on her back when she was eight, that they hadn’t karyotyped her remaining somatic cells, and that they had given her a prosthetic body meant for a girl. That way, she wouldn’t have been on the family register as “Hirakawa Motomu”. But again, she pondered, such a thing wasn’t realistic to think about. The past was the past now and she had to play the cards she’d been dealt.

In her second year of high school, a fellow hacker in an encrypted VR chatroom that she frequented had posed the question: was it possible to hack the military? She had thought about it, and had replied that it was theoretically possible, given enough computing power. Two people, both with cyberbrains, could each jack into their systems simultaneously and form the equivalent of a LAN, except using their brains as additional processing cores and RAM for the cryptographic cracking process, assuming it needed brute-force and couldn’t be phished or scammed out of someone “manually”. The hacker who’d posed the question had considered this idea to be somewhat insane, if not impossible, but another person in the VR chatroom had expressed a desire to try it out with her.

She’d pulled that other person off to the side, metaphorically speaking, into a private message channel and asked whether they were serious about this. They’d replied that yes, they were wholly serious about the idea, and that they wanted to make sure that she was too. She had replied that she had to think about it to make sure she had the right setup, and that she wasn’t thinking of trying anything actually dangerous, just snooping around a military base’s servers and nabbing a few files just to prove that it was possible. It would be a feather in her cap as a hacker to prove that she could crack the iron hull of the JSDF network security system.

Two weeks later, she found herself at her diving rig again, skipping school — a rare occurrence, since for as much as she found her classmates to be irritating, she did have to pass her exams eventually in order to graduate. She logged onto the chat server to coordinate the cyberbrain linkup with the other person, loaded her decryption programme onto the virtual server that the other person had rigged up for the task, and took the plunge.

Being in someone else’s cyberbrain was a disorienting experience, even for someone with as much intensive experience diving the Net as her. While simultaneously conscious of her presence as Chroma, the online avatar, she was deluged with the memories and consciousness of an entire other human being. The delegation of cryptographic calculations would take place over this cyborg-to-cyborg LAN, coordinated by her custom decryption programme and performed using the very neurons of each of their cyberbrains. The ocean of virtual sensation enveloped her, producing a sort of warped dual consciousness, but it was startlingly easy to keep her sense of self from being subsumed by the other hacker’s — because whoever they were, their brain felt off.

Why did this feel so viscerally wrong? She was used to facing the torrents of data and being utterly unaffected psychologically…. was it the feeling of being inside someone else’s mind? She knew that she had to keep her Ghost line distinct from other people’s, at all costs. That was the first rule of diving; she’d learnt it when she was eleven and just getting into the world of hacking. But she was unprepared for just how uncomfortable the feeling of being inside someone else’s consciousness made her. The other hacker was evidently a man, or at least he conceived of himself that way on the Net. The firewalls he’d set up protected his real-life memories from leaking into her own, but for what she could tell, the hacker had to be at least thirty years old, with a cocksure, macho attitude and a whole lot of sordid sexual fantasies to match. Why was all of that getting blasted into her cyberbrain? He wants to fuck me, and he wants to know if I’m fuckable in real life.

With a horrible jolt, she realised that her own firewalls were not nearly as strong as she had thought — and that meant that she was screwed. She shut down the decryption programme, severed all the data connections between herself and the other hacker, ejected herself from the LAN, and then physically pulled out the jacks connecting her to the diving rig.

She felt violated. Taken advantage of. And she hadn’t even gotten to fucking crack the military server yet! The stunt had been an utter failure….

She flopped down on her bed and shut her eyes. What an absolute bust. Maybe I shouldn’t use Chroma as an avatar at all, if I’m going to attract that kind of attention. Maybe I should just go ahead and make something more masculine, more suitable for someone like me…. but why did that feel so wrong to her? Why couldn’t she countenance the idea of revealing to her fellow hackers that she was just a guy in real life? 

Why did it make her feel gross inside?

Again she thought about the kind of people who’d change their bodies to match how they felt on the inside. She half-wished that she had the guts to do that. But in the end, it would just alienate her from society, and it wouldn’t solve the problem of men being unable to control their lusts and desires when it came to women. Or perhaps not even real women in her case, just a sad, pathetic, lonely okama.

After that, she didn’t go back to that VR chatroom. She didn’t try hacking anything at all for a while — undoubtedly, her erstwhile hacking partner would have spread around the information that he had gained from her, and she needed to lie low.

Which meant she couldn’t be Chroma.

It was a necessary precaution, at least until things got safer and less risky. She’d made a foolish mistake, an elementary oversight: make sure your firewalls are airtight, and monitor them at all times in case of back-hacks. She resolved to never be that reckless again…. even if she wanted to prove something to another person. When she did that in the future, she would only do so on her own terms. She wished that life as a whole could be met on her own terms, but that wasn’t how the world worked.

Barely six months later, she was studying for university entrance exams when a knock came at the door to her home. Her adoptive mother answered it, and called up to her bedroom that there was someone who’d arrived to see her.

She went downstairs, puzzled. Who in the world would come to see her? She couldn’t think of any classmates who’d do so — they were all probably either studying for exams themselves or partaking in the seishun joys of youth while they still could.

At the door, she found a short, curly-haired, black-suited man who looked like he’d just stepped out of the national stock exchange. “Hirakawa Motomu-kun?” he said, looking up at her.

“Yes,” she replied, tersely but trying to be respectful to this total stranger.

“I’m a recruiter with a prominent organisation, and I’ve come here because we’ve been made aware of your high potential — in both the academic realm and the physical realm.”

….What? She could hardly believe that last part. Sure, she regularly made top five in her class, but it wasn’t like she played any sports. She hated the idea of going into the locker rooms and changing with the other boys, and she had little interest in competing in anything if it didn’t have a tangible, concrete goal. And she sure wasn’t looking to make a career out of being a professional sports player — not that she even could, with her prosthetic body.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t quite understand.”

“Oh, this is wonderful, Motomu!” her mother interjected. Then, to the…. recruiter, or whoever this man really was, came the question: “Would you like some tea?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t impose,” said the man, but her mother was already heating the electric kettle for some sencha.

Raising his eyebrows, the man came through the doorway, slipped off his fancy leather shoes, and put on the spare pair of house slippers that were meant for guests. He took a seat in the living room; as she was wondering what true purpose the man had here, he looked up at the teenager from the sofa and spoke. “Hirakawa-kun?”

She couldn’t tell what his steely gaze portended, but she took a seat across from him. What kind of organisation would have a use for the “physical potential” of someone who clearly bore a cybernetic body? Wait…. of course! I should have suspected.

“Yes, sir?”

“Inoue Toshihiko, JSDF recruitment office, Nagoya branch.” He produced a business card from the inside of his jacket and handed it to her. “We’ve been keeping track of promising young people of your age, particularly those who are full-body cyborgs such as yourself, in order to open to them the possibility of joining our nation’s self-defence forces. You’re clearly a very intelligent young man, and an extremely adaptable and resourceful one at that. You’ve compensated unusually well for the constraints of your prosthetic body, likely owing to your very early transfer.”

“I’m sorry — Inoue-san? I appreciate your offer of recruitment, but —”

Inoue cut her off. “If you do choose to enlist in one of the branches of the JSDF, you will be guaranteed a monthly salary well in excess of what you’d be making as an entry-level information-security trainee at, say, Kurosaki or NDG, with generous paid time off, full cybernetic insurance coverage, and…. a choice of whatever adult-model prosthetic body you prefer, with transfers absolutely free of charge for as long as you are in service. I see you still inhabit a late-adolescent type; surely you’d like to truly become a man?”

She nearly let a grimace show on her features, but changed it to a pondering frown at the last second. As if. But…. what was that about information security? Surely they couldn’t guess what I’m up to? It must be about my classes.

“Sir, I’m honoured to receive your generous offer. That being said, I must consider it longer before I can reach a final decision. I am currently studying for the university entrance exams, after all.” As if I’d want to fight in some senseless proxy war with the Chinese or the Americans, enriching the profiteers on either side….

At that moment, her mother came in with a tray of tea, along with a couple of almond biscuits. “I’m sorry I don’t have much; please make yourself at home.”

Inoue took his eyes off the teenager across from him to glance warmly towards her mother. “Thank you, madam.” He then returned to staring intently at the former, but continued to speak to her mother: “Would you mind terribly if I discussed something with your son in private?”

In private? she mused, as her mother acquiesced to the stranger’s demand and left the room. What could…. oh no. Oh no.

“I’m sure you have many options available to you, Hirakawa-kun, university being one of them. No doubt you could get into Waseda or Sapporo with your class ranking. But that’s not why I’m here, you see.” Inoue leaned forward slightly and lowered his voice. “Does the name ‘Chroma’ mean anything to you?”

Oh, shit.

She didn’t allow herself to display any facial expression, but her silence of a few moments seemed to have given Inoue the answer he had been looking for.

“You know, I assume, that if such an entity were to exist, their actions would be highly illegal and prosecutable?”

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, sir,” she replied, but internally she knew that she was trapped. That bastard hacker with the military base crack, he had to have been an informant!

Inoue continued. “Well, let’s just say that there’s someone out there on the Net, who possesses an incredibly clever mind and a lot of potential to help out our nation, but who is using that brilliance to try to break into highly sensitive areas and sniff around for information that they have no right to. What a waste of talent and skill; surely you would agree?”

“Of course, sir.” She was fuming on the inside. How much do they know?

“Such a person would do much better in the employ of an organisation that knows how to use such talent. Particularly if the real-life person behind such an avatar also possessed…. physical potential, in addition to their mental acuity and drive.”

There was no denying it. This was a threat. She swallowed, and spoke.

“What would happen if such a person refused to join?”

“They would almost certainly face prosecution for unlawful attempt to access state secrets, conspiracy to commit said unlawful attempt, and possibly even treason. That would be in addition to a potential case brought against them by a certain insurance firm.”

They even know about that??

“But if such a person did join the JSDF and used their talents in a more legitimate arena, they’d be lucky enough to have all those exploits officially forgotten about and wiped from police files. Along with all the benefits I mentioned earlier.”

She remembered something that Inoue had said earlier. “Sir, you mentioned the possibility of any cyberised individual who entered the service being able to choose a prosthetic body according to their preference.”

“I did indeed say that, you would be right.” A smile appeared on Inoue’s face.

Well, if I’m screwed, I might as well get all the benefit I can out of it.

———

Batou unloaded his clip into the cardboard target, which was erratically moving back and forth fifteen metres away from where he stood. He quickly changed out the magazine on his handgun, but paused, as the woman standing a few metres to his left was still firing her rounds accurately and precisely into her own cardboard target. He was dissatisfied with his own performance; perhaps it was just an off day for him, but he made a mental note to get the servos in his cybernetic right arm checked out.

The purple-haired woman seemed to be having no trouble whatsoever as she blasted the last few rounds of her clip directly into the forehead of the human-shaped target. She was like a woman possessed by the goddess of war, utterly confident in her prodigious skills and efficient with her motions. Clearly, Batou thought, she had had years of experience before he had ever met her back in their special unit days in Central and South America…. but come to think of it, he still didn’t know all that much about her background.

Not that he was one to pry, of course. Batou knew that if the Major wanted to share anything about her background, she would do so on her own terms. She was a fiercely private individual, and Batou could respect that; a soldier’s tale was their own to tell, when and how they wished. But he was still curious….

“Major…. apologies if this question oversteps at all. But I’ve always wondered, how old are you? It’s difficult to really tell with that body; for all I know, you could be sixty-five years old.” Batou stepped back from the shooting window, having taken off his ear protection, and glanced at his colleague.

Motoko’s lips quirked into the barest hint of a smirk, as she met Batou’s inquiring gaze. “Twenty-eight.”

Batou blinked — or rather, he would have, if he had been capable of blinking. His brow furrowed. “Seems like you surprise me every time we talk. I would have thought….”

“That I was much older? I suppose a lot of people do,” she replied. “But no, I’m about as old as this body looks. Strange, I know.”

Usually, the safest guess of a full-body cyborg’s age was fifteen to twenty years older than their prosthetic body appeared to be. Batou had come to know such things from experience, dealing with fellow soldiers who appeared to be beautiful muscle-bound specimens of cybernetic youth despite having lived longer than Batou himself had. The tendency for human vanity continued long after the flesh had been stripped away by injury. Batou himself, though, was perhaps a bit old-fashioned, preferring the rugged, battle-scarred look with his stress-whitened hair — one of the only biological parts of him left, besides his left lung, his heart, and most of his upper respiratory system. The whole ensemble gave him an intimidatingly weathered look, despite his relatively scant forty-seven years.

“Well, if you’re really twenty-eight, and you’re not just pulling my leg, then I would’ve already been a special commando when you were a little girl,” Batou said. “It’s a bit strange to imagine. Most of all, imagining you as a little girl, still innocent of the ways of the world.”

He stepped up to the shooting window, pushed a few buttons to summon a faster-moving cardboard target this time, and put his ear protection back on. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Motoko do the same.

After decimating the chest, neck, and head areas of the pathetic cardboard humans, the two Section 9 operatives stepped back, unloaded their spent magazines, and removed their ear protection. Batou sat down on a nearby bench and took a swig of water. Despite his cybernetic digestive system, he was thirsty, and his organic vocal cords needed a bit of moisture to keep from failing him at an inopportune moment.

A moment passed, and then another. The Major sat down on the bench beside him, disassembling her handgun and reassembling it with the trained efficiency of a longtime military woman, though she barely looked at what her hands were doing. It was slightly scary to Batou that such a young person was the de facto leader of Section 9 — even though, by all measures, she merited the position on sheer skill and temperament alone. What experiences had she had in the field to give her such an iron will and such complete confidence in her abilities? Batou now realised that he had met Motoko when the latter had been only twenty-one. How had she gone from child to extraordinarily-mature adult in the space of only a few years?

“To tell you the truth, I have a hard time imagining myself as a little girl.” Motoko’s voice pulled Batou out of his thoughts. She was now polishing her handgun with a microfibre cloth. “On a purely technical level, I never was one.”

More cryptic pronouncements from Motoko — what else is new? mused Batou. I’m not sure I understand what she means, but I should be glad she’s talking about her past at all.

“You remember Amemiya, from our unit in Guatemala?”

“…. yes, what of him?”

“Do you remember what he told us about his past?”

“Honestly, not much.” Why would she bring up a random former colleague?

“I’m surprised, Batou. You seem to have an eidetic memory when it comes to our old service days.”

“Only when it comes to the battles we fought and the skills of each member of our unit. I can’t say I’ve retained much of anything when it comes to people’s backstories. And in any case, it’s their prerogative to tell or not to tell, not mine.”

Motoko smiled. “Well, if you did remember — not that it matters much anymore, since I doubt we’ll ever see him again, ever since he retired — he was transgender. He’d grown up with everyone around him thinking he was a girl, but when he became an adult he made the choice to live as a man.”

Batou cocked his head slightly and pondered this information. “And this is relevant how, exactly?”

“I’m the same way.”

“What?”

“In reverse, that is.”

“….hm. That certainly explains your bizarre turn of phrase earlier.”

“That I never was a little girl?”

“Yeah. But…. then again, I suppose everyone becomes a different person when they reach adulthood. Can’t say I understand your situation fully, but I’m flattered you chose to reveal a little bit about your mysterious past to me today.”

Batou headed to his locker and took his leather jacket out of it, donning it with the grace of a grizzled warrior. “And for what it’s worth, regardless of where you came from, I think you’re a damn fine woman and a phenomenal soldier.”

Motoko nearly snorted. “Don’t lay it on too thick. I’m going to get a bit more practice in, but I’ll be out by nine o’clock at the latest.” She switched out her now-pristine handgun for a larger semiautomatic, and took her place at the window once again.

“Motoko?”

“Yes?”

“I’ll be in the canteen.”

“Roger that.”

Batou gave her a two-finger salute and headed out the door; as soon as it clicked shut behind him, a barrage of muffled shots rang out.

God, what an enigma she is. I know more about her now than I used to, certainly, but every answered question just raises more questions of its own….

———

It had been an odd feeling, impersonating the Laughing Man. Or at least impersonating the kid, Aoi, for the purpose of extracting a confession from the empty suit from Serano Genomics. Motoko had barely needed to do anything besides mimic the kid’s voice and let her instincts do the rest, because there had been something strikingly familiar about Aoi. Something that resonated with many old memories of her younger self, from before she had joined the military and adopted a new name and face….

And, what was more, the little chat she had in the library with Aoi only increased that feeling of familiarity. Sure, there were obvious differences between the two — the kid was mostly organic still, and Motoko had never made a public hack where everyone could see it in the vein of the first Laughing Man incident — but Aoi was, like Motoko had been, simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic. The softer aspects of his worldview hadn’t yet hardened into cynicism, as had happened to Motoko after years of military service, bearing witness to (and sometimes causing) sheer brutality.

Aoi was a disaffected young person who felt estranged from the world around him; he was a shut-in, just like a younger Motoko, isolated from his peers, seeking connection and fulfilment through traversing the Net. He was also incredibly bright and immensely resourceful, and possessed a degree of insight and talent as a hacker that few could rival, save for Motoko herself. He was, in many respects, an astonishingly close mirror of the young “man” that she had been, before everything had changed for her. 

And…. there was no real rationale for suspecting such a thing, but…. a small part of her wondered if Aoi also felt similar things to what she had felt. The sense of alienation from one’s society and culture, the desire to escape into the Net, the little habits and cues that she picked up on — or thought that she picked up on, there was no way to be sure — perhaps even the seeming lack of desire for traditionally masculine presentation…. She couldn’t help but wonder, was Aoi like her in that way, too?

But then she had to stop herself. Such things were not to be speculated about — such things were a private and highly personal journey, and it would be rather rude and intrusive of her to make such judgement calls herself.

Then again, wasn’t she rude and intrusive all the time? It was her job to intrude on potential lawbreakers without their knowledge, to gather as much information as possible in order to piece it all together: she was in the habit of thinking like this. She couldn’t help it if her intuition was tingling, if she felt a whisper from her Ghost that perhaps there was a kindred spirit around.

And…. she wanted a kindred spirit. Someone who was like her, someone who’d instinctively understand what she had been through, how she saw life, what kind of things she thought about. There was, even though she would never admit it out loud, a yearning deep down inside of her to feel kinship with another. Something to break the isolation she’d felt all her life.

But just because she thought she saw a pattern didn’t mean that one existed. Just because she wanted something, she knew, didn’t necessarily mean that she was capable of making it happen.

One shouldn’t count one’s chickens (or eggs, she supposed) before they hatched.

———

The lights were off, but the turquoise glow of the digital clock on the nightstand illuminated — just barely — the forms of the women sprawled across the queen-size bed next to Motoko. A head with light brown hair was tucked into the crook of Motoko’s neck. She could feel Kurutan’s breath on her clavicle, and her arm stretched across Motoko’s belly in a one-sided hug.

On the other side of Kurutan lay Ran, who was on her back, her head turned to gaze sleepily at her two paramours. Her own dark brown hair was splayed out across the pillow, and she, too, took long, slow breaths as she gently stroked Kurutan’s hip.

There was a light sheen of sweat on both women, visible only to Motoko’s cybernetic eyes thanks to their increased low-light sensitivity — and whose absence on her own skin she was unfortunately conscious of. Her prosthetic body didn’t need to sweat, as its internal cooling system usually obviated the need for a perspiration mechanism, but it was another reminder of her marked physical difference from the two beautiful women who lay beside her.

Ran’s voice drifted to her ears, tired but seemingly satisfied. “That…. was really nice.”

Motoko hummed an affirmation, and replied, “It was.”

“Kurutan, you feeling better? You said your day was….”

Kurutan spoke up, but her voice was muffled by the warm synthetic skin of Motoko’s neck. “Yeah, I’m doing alright now. Thanks to you two, mostly.”

“Always glad to help,” Motoko responded, smiling — not that Kurutan would be able to see it, but still. The other woman had had a long and stressful day at work, and had come back to the apartment that she and Ran shared in a state of near-burnout and exhaustion. Ran had immediately contacted Motoko, who had thankfully had a rather light and uneventful work day, and had already returned home; the latter had then jumped on her motorcycle and come to her friends’ apartment as soon as she had heard the news.

She had arrived roughly four hours ago — it was already past midnight now — Ran had been cooking dinner for Kurutan by the time she got there. Motoko had then gone out to a konbini for a tub of ice cream, which the three of them had all shared, even though Motoko’s artificial taste buds couldn’t glean much enjoyment from the sugary treat. Kurutan had then pulled both other women into the bedroom, and things had escalated from there.

“What about you two?” Kurutan asked, turning her head a little so she could be heard more clearly. “I know I wasn’t much help — the last thing I’d want to do is cause more of a bother….”

“I’m fine, Kurutan. It was fun, and you weren’t a bother,” said Ran.

“Moto-chan?”

Motoko had been gently stroking Kurutan’s hair; she stopped, and after a long pause, she said, “It was fun.” Her mind had been elsewhere while she and Ran had been attending to their girlfriend’s needs, and even as the latter had reciprocated her physical affections, Motoko had still found herself thinking about other things.

“You’re out of it again,” Kurutan said, paradoxically blunt and gentle at the same time.

Motoko nearly protested, but she knew Kurutan was right. She sighed. “I know. Sorry.”

Ran reached over to cup Motoko’s cheek. “Don’t apologise, okay? You don’t need to.”

The warmth of her girlfriend’s hand on her face was a reassurance, but again, it reminded her of just how much she differed from non-cyborgs. She would never be warm to the touch in quite the same way, and human skin had a texture that remained very difficult to replicate exactly. 

And sex only made the differences more viscerally apparent to her. She could ignore them easily enough in daily life, and she had spent well over two decades growing accustomed to living in a prosthetic body, but up-close and personal like this — as much as she loved it, as much as she did relish the way her body was shaped like it should be, as much as she was proud of her womanly curves and her perfectly sculpted form, she was nonetheless very aware of the artifice of it all.

“What are you thinking about?”

Kurutan’s question wasn’t surprising; she often asked such things of Motoko in quiet moments. But only recently had Motoko begun to open up in response.

“I suppose it’s just the differences between us. Cyborgs are more accepted in society these days, and you’ve grown used to having us around, but there are still visible markers — and for full-body cyborgs such as me, we inevitably stand out all the more, because full realism hasn’t yet been achieved. I may look like an organic woman from a distance of several metres, but up close like this, you can see the synthetic skin, the glassy eyes…. you felt my tongue. It’s not like an organic human’s, it’s made of silicone and artificial muscle fibres.”

“You’ve brought this up before, Motoko, and I told you then: it doesn’t matter,” said Ran. “I love you, both of us love you, for who you are. It’s not like we haven’t met other full-body cyborgs before.”

“I know I’ve mentioned it before…. but you did ask what was on my mind.” Motoko closed her eyes. “Regardless of whether I’ve gained answers that should be satisfactory on a rational level, my thoughts keep circling back to it all. Possibly…. because the feeling of having a physical body at all is sometimes alien and limiting. Perhaps I’ve spent too much of my waking life on the Net, dissociating from my physical presence, to ever truly feel comfortable in my own skin.”

“I can’t say I relate to that,” said Kurutan, “but I think I get what you mean…. maybe.” She hugged Motoko tighter.

The feeling was quite nice, of someone she liked clinging to her. She stroked the back of Kurutan’s head, gently rubbing behind her ear like one would with a cat.

“I don’t know if it’s the same for non-cyborgs — or at least for those who aren’t full-body cyborgs like I am. But I sometimes feel that I’ll never quite understand what being at home in one’s body feels like.”

“That isn’t unique to full-body cyborgs, I can tell you that much,” Ran said. “Even full organics can feel alienated or separated from their body at times. Dissociation through trauma, out-of-body experiences; you know more about that than I do, though.” This last bit was directed at Kurutan.

“Not really,” replied Kurutan. “Not in the medical sense; I’m not really trained in the specifics of those sorts of…. psychological conditions. But I can definitely corroborate the fact that it’s not just a cyborg thing.”

She lifted her head, shifted her body up onto her elbow, and kissed Motoko. It was gentle, and Motoko accepted it silently but willingly. Kurutan’s lips moved against her own, and a combination of gravity and tongue movement on Kurutan’s part transferred some of her saliva into the cyborg’s mouth. Yet again, something that wasn’t the same.

She wished she could forget about it and just enjoy the moment.

“What’s wrong?”

Kurutan’s question made Motoko realise that she had frozen up. She relaxed the muscles that had tensed, but turned away from Kurutan.

After a silence, she said, “It seems that…. I’m not getting what I want out of this, the way that you got what you wanted out of it. Apologies for ruining the mood, I guess.”

Kurutan exhaled. “Well…. what do you want, Moto-chan?” she asked softly.

“I suppose I wish that this could’ve been a grounding influence, something that would bring me back to myself again, like it was for you — that is, what it seems like it was for you,” said Motoko. “But, and this isn’t the first time it’s happened, I’ve ended up becoming far too aware of my own physical manifestation as a result of the sex, and I…. went elsewhere. Retreated into my shell, or rather, out of it.”

She paused for a moment, and continued. “I do rather like my body, for all its limitations, and it does have capacities in some respects that organic bodies simply can’t match. But sometimes it feels too confining, too much like a cage, and only diving in the Net seems to be able to relieve that sensation. Either that, or otherwise distracting myself with some other complicated task, but Net diving gives me a sense of near-complete freedom. When I jack in, I feel infinite. It’s exhilarating, weightless, boundless…. endless, formless, it’s so easy to lose your shape.”

“You can’t do that forever,” Ran interjected. “Otherwise you become one of those NEETs whose entire existence gets uploaded to the Net.”

“I know,” said Motoko. “It can become a living death — a state of purgatory. It’s not an existence I’d want to embrace permanently.”

“Maybe a body is necessary? Even if it’s a cage sometimes, or a prison, it still grounds you in the world of material things.” Kurutan had positioned herself fully atop Motoko, and her head was cradled between Motoko’s breasts. It looked somewhat silly, but the weight and warmth of the other woman on top of her was somehow comforting to Motoko. “I don’t know if you can really exist without a body, since what we call the mind is an outgrowth of the activity of the brain.”

You can, Motoko thought, but I wouldn’t really call it an existence. And in any case, it’s also dependent on the physical presence of the data infrastructure that makes up the Net….

Not that she’d be able to tell either of her girlfriends that. What had transpired last year wasn’t exactly something she could reveal to civilians; all the two women knew of Motoko’s line of work was that she was an analyst for a security firm. Which…. wasn’t entirely untrue.

“A body might ground someone in the world, but it’s a form that doesn’t really change,” said Motoko. “It’s incapable of manifesting all the facets and variations of the ideal self, whereas a Net avatar can change just as often as one’s self-conception or mood does.”

“I think you can still get close enough to your ideal self in a physical form,” replied Ran, scooting closer to Motoko and Kurutan, and taking up the latter’s vacated warm spot on the mattress. “Clothing, makeup, hairstyles, the way you present yourself to the world in how you act and how you talk; it’s not like you can’t change those from day to day.”

Kurutan raised her head and said, “That’s true, but it’s not like a full-body cyborg like Moto-chan can ever get a transfer into a fully-organic body.”

Motoko frowned slightly. “Way to be blunt, Kurutan. And I feel obliged to defend prosthetic bodies from your implications: they’re more durable against blunt force and can be repaired more readily, they don’t develop lactic acid cramps from overexertion of the muscles, and they’re quite customisable. But they do have their limits and foibles, you are right.”

“But if you ever feel like you want a totally new look, you know, stuff that can’t be achieved with just makeup and fashion and hair styling, you can just transfer your cyberbrain into a new prosthetic body,” Kurutan replied. “Not that I’m complaining about you keeping your current model — you look gorgeous — but you could change it entirely if you wanted a whole new look. I’m surprised you haven’t done that yet.”

“Not in the time that you’ve known me, no.”

“You’ve done it before?” Ran gave her a curious look.

Motoko paused. “Well,” she said, “if I hadn’t become a full-body cyborg, I would probably have ended up changing my body anyway, through other means. I was perhaps lucky that I got the chance to be transferred into a prosthetic body that matched what I wanted to look like…. gender-wise.”

Ran’s eyebrows furrowed, then her eyes widened almost imperceptibly. Kurutan seemed to freeze for a moment, but she blinked a few times as if she understood finally.

Was it a mistake to tell them? Motoko wondered. It’s not as if it’s relevant to anything…. but I want them to understand me more. At least, the parts that aren’t classified information.

She decided to wait until one of the other two women spoke, staring up at the ceiling.

Ran broke the silence. “You mean you used to—“

“Ran-chan!” chided Kurutan. “Don’t.” She put her finger to Ran’s lips and continued, “We need to be respectful of Moto-chan’s feelings on this.”

Ran sighed softly and said, “Sorry. I…. I should know better — with Natsuki-san and all, it’s not as if the concept is foreign to me. It’s just hard to believe; someone as effortlessly feminine as you, Motoko, you’re…. trans? I honestly never would’ve guessed.”

“Well, nobody ever would. The prosthetic body helps on that front,” Motoko said, rolling her eyes. Nonetheless, a smirk was perched on her lips. “But yes, I am. Does it matter to you?”

After a brief silence, Ran replied. “No. It doesn’t.”

“Good. Because it shouldn’t. I trust you, and…. I don’t want to feel like I’ve misplaced that trust.”

Ran’s face softened. “Oh, honey, I didn’t mean to give you pause. I love you — and, well, I know you’re very reserved and private, and I get why. But it doesn’t change a single thing about our relationship.”

Kurutan had gone back to laying her head across Motoko’s chest, but she concurred. “It doesn’t matter at all. You’re a wonderful woman and we love having you in our lives, Moto-chan. I hope that doesn’t change.”

“Agreed.” Ran gave Motoko a warm look.

Motoko was nearly put out by the awful sappiness of it all, and yet she felt…. safe. Perhaps not physically safe: an attacker could burst into the apartment at any time and Motoko wasn’t exactly packing heat at the moment, but, she realised, she was emotionally safe.

If she were capable of blushing, she would have. Thank goodness for the benefits of prosthetic bodies.

“You want to go another round?” Kurutan asked softly.

“I think I’ll sit this one out,” said Motoko. She leaned forward to give Kurutan a kiss on the forehead, though.

Ran piped up. “I’m down.”

“Of course you are, Ran-chan,” said Kurutan, shifting herself over to her long-haired girlfriend’s side of the bed and starting a chain of little kisses up her belly.

Ran’s hand suddenly found Motoko’s, and she gave it a long yet gentle squeeze. She turned slightly to face Motoko, a softly radiant smile on her face.

Motoko closed her eyes, felt the warmth of Ran’s hand in hers, and breathed deeply.

———

A knock came on the door, and Aramaki Daisuke looked up.

“Come in.”

The door to his office opened, and in walked the woman he had sent for. Kusanagi Motoko stood there in her black leather jacket, thrown over what appeared to be a lavender tank top, complemented with slim blue jeans and brown leather boots. She saluted casually and quickly, but a characteristic steely look was in her eyes.

Aramaki spoke. “I understand you’ve submitted an official discharge request.”

“I have.”

“And you’ve submitted all the attendant paperwork, I trust?” As if he really needed to ask. The Major had always been an extremely fastidious and detail-oriented individual, which had made her an obvious pick for what was essentially squad leader of Section 9.

“I have.”

Her face betrayed no apparent emotion, either positive or negative. Aramaki was certain that there had to be some sort of emotion underneath the surface — she was leaving Section 9, after all — but, ever the perfect soldier, the woman kept it under lock and key.

“I’m sure you understand that this is just procedure. But there are a couple of things we must discuss. You’re aware, I assume, of the necessity of surrendering all government property once you become a civilian?”

“I am, and I’ve already fulfilled that obligation.”

“Even the KZ-11s you keep in your apartment?”

“Yes.” Kusanagi’s face was impassive. “Even those. You should know me by now, Chief.”

“I do, which is precisely why I’m hammering this point home. It’s a highly prosecutable offence to retain Public Safety Bureau equipment, especially arms, beyond one’s employment with them. And you, Major, have a predilection for getting away with stuff you shouldn’t.”

The Major raised her eyebrows, but said nothing.

“And…. in the case of full-body cyborgs in active-duty employ of the PSB, it’s common practice to require a transfer to a new prosthetic body once PSB employment ends, since in most cases such bodies are provided and paid for by the government.” Aramaki could have sworn he saw a flicker of frustration flit across the Major’s face, but it was gone in an instant, if it had been there at all. “However, that usually only applies to individuals with military-grade prosthetic bodies, and as you currently inhabit a fairly standard civilian-model body — to my knowledge, at least…. I may be able to write it off as part of your discharge. In particular, your history of highly commendable service to the JSDF and the Public Safety Bureau would be a mitigating factor.”

The Major was silent for a moment, then briefly lowered her head and said, “Thank you.”

It was altogether quite a sizeable loss to Section 9 for Kusanagi Motoko to leave; the unit had been built around her as a nucleus, and despite the skills of the other members, she was by far the most capable and versatile soldier of the team. In fact, Aramaki thought, she might be among the most capable soldiers he had ever encountered. Ishikawa was a damn fine computer systems expert, but the Major was better. Batou was an extremely competent and resourceful field operative, but the Major often surpassed him even there. 

And to think she had barely been twenty-six years old when he had first encountered her and thought about recruiting her to be part of a new Section within the PSB…. 

From what Aramaki had read of her history, she’d been recruited into the JSDF straight out of high school, before she’d even reached 20 years old. Evidently, the military had seen great promise in her, and her skills and resolve had been honed in the brutal environment of the South American wars. But it hadn’t been in those wars that she had become a full-body cyborg: after Aramaki had done some digging, he found out that she’d been a relatively early recipient of the procedure at only (roughly) eight years old. No wonder she seemed so utterly and completely in control of her physical abilities: she had had most of a lifetime to get accustomed to her prosthetic body.

Yet this didn’t explain the astonishing maturity, sense of strategy, or resourcefulness of the young Major that he had seen when he had first met her, and which had only grown more and more evident over the past four years. Perhaps she had just been a natural talent, a good seed with a whole lot of raw potential that had been shaped and refined by her military experience, forming her into the ideal soldier — albeit one with a highly independent streak and a fierce sense of privacy. He wouldn’t totally miss her more maverick tendencies, but he would regret the loss of a singularly effective asset to Section 9 — a team which had been moulded around her, now without its central driving force. Aramaki now had the task ahead of him of thinking about how to fill that massive gap.

It wasn’t just her exemplary service, though, that caused Aramaki to feel that he had grounds for letting Kusanagi keep her government-issued prosthetic body: while he’d been digging, he had learnt just how much her life and physical existence had been circumscribed by the military, in a way that was largely beyond her control. Apparently, the JSDF recruiters had blackmailed her into joining, on the basis of a (wildly ambitious) hack she’d attempted as a teenager. And while she’d emerged from the crucible of the military in one piece, honed to a startling sharpness — and with a new name and a new gender at that! — for the last twelve years of her life, her cybernetic body had been government property. Even the series of child and adolescent prosthetic bodies that she’d inhabited beforehand had apparently been granted to her by a state fund, as had been the case back before so-called “consumer model” prosthetic bodies had become common.

In other words, she’d never really had a shell to call her own. 

Aramaki was not usually one for generous gestures — his reputation as a crotchety old hardass was well-known — but this could be a rare exception, he thought. A parting gift to a valuable soldier whom he hoped would return eventually, but probably wouldn’t do so anytime soon. And frankly, with how disastrously things had gone down with Gohda and Kuze and the Americans, he didn’t blame her.

“Alright,” he continued, “I’m sure you know that by next Monday, your RFID and encrypted channel won’t work anymore. Any attempt to influence or interfere with the activities of Section 9 from then on can potentially constitute criminal acts against public safety, so I’d advise you to refrain from that if you value your autonomy.”

“Understood.” The Major nodded sharply, saluted (more properly this time), and turned to leave.

“Kusanagi-dono?”

She turned around to face Aramaki. “Yes, Chief?”

“I hope you’ll allow me to indulge a bit of curiosity as to why you’ve made the decision to leave Section 9.”

Kusanagi Motoko paused, blinked a couple of times, then said, “I realised that I wasn’t getting out of it what I’d thought I was.”

Aramaki frowned slightly, then nodded. That’s probably the most I’ll ever get out of the woman herself, he thought. Exhaling shortly, he said, “Well — I regret to see you go. But good luck.”

“Thank you,” said the Major, and she left Aramaki’s office.

———

It was all grey around her, cold and wet and loud. She was on a little fishing boat, adrift in the middle of the ocean, being tossed about on successive waves that grew higher and higher each time as the boat rocked back and forth. The rain pounded down in torrents, and she struggled to keep the boat in an upright position, let alone moving forward in any meaningful way.

A wave, higher and stronger than all the other waves, came. It snuck underneath the tiny vessel and threw it up into the air, flipping it like a coin. Motoko was thrown overboard, and crashed deep down into the water, dark and endless. She was a full-body cyborg, and she couldn’t swim or float without special equipment, since she was too heavy and dense. She would drown — she would die.

Motoko sank down deeper and deeper into the bottomless abyss. But just when she thought she was about to lose consciousness for lack of oxygen, she started floating upwards.

She found herself slowly rising through the water, which was no longer oppressively cold, but had become comfortably cool and pleasant. The sea had calmed, and her surroundings were bathed in a growing orangish glow. Bubbles exited her nose and preceded her towards the surface of the water.

As she drew nearer and nearer to the underside of the water’s surface, she could see her own reflection in it, just as one might see one’s reflection when looking at a body of water from above. It came into clearer and clearer focus as she approached it — and then she blinked.

Her reflection had changed. Now, someone with a pale, chiselled face and shaggy white hair looked back at her: Kuze Hideo.

She blinked again, and the reflected face came into sharper focus. Kuze’s visage still stared back at her, but it was softer than it had been when she last saw the man — rounder, not as sharply angular, yet still with those striking eyes. The white hair was slightly longer than she remembered, the neck slightly slenderer…. an altogether feminine countenance that was still not her own.

As she was nearly about to break the surface of the water, Motoko blinked for a third time and suddenly realised that her own body had become that of Kuze’s, yet, like the reflection she had just seen, as if Kuze had been a woman. She looked down at herself, pulled a strand of white hair in front of her eyes…. it was indeed what she had just seen before her.

But the reflection itself had changed, too. It was her own familiar face that gazed upon her, with the purple hair and crimson eyes. She was the mirror, and the mirror’s reflection had become her. The mirror had been turned around.

Suddenly, she found herself standing on a grey volcanic beach, still in the familiar-yet-altered body, facing herself again. Motoko saw her own figure striding towards her, drawing a gun smoothly and with purpose, aiming for her belly, firing — a thump and a weird dull pain reverberated through her bones, and she looked down to see a wound in her abdomen.

Blood, warm red human blood, spilled out of it.

And then she was standing on the opposite side of the beach, a gun in her hands. She fell to her knees, dropping the gun to the sand, and began to heave; a moment later, a near-torrent of vomit exited her mouth, leaving an ugly taste in it. What is this? Why is this happening?

Motoko sat back exhaustedly, shaky, nearly falling over. She felt something warm and wet on her cheeks: tears.

I shouldn’t be able to do this. I’m a cyborg; I can’t throw up or cry tears.

She keeled over onto her side on the sand, unable to keep even halfway upright; opening her eyes somewhat, she could see two figures approaching her, walking slowly towards where she lay on the ground.

There was very little she could make out of their faces, but in other respects they looked very much like her adoptive parents, the Hirakawas. Yet something about them was smeared and blurry, and she had the bizarre feeling that somehow these people were also her birth parents — the parents she had forgotten about, who had died in the plane crash, who she couldn’t be sure even existed.

Tears continued to flow down her cheeks, but they had turned cold —

Motoko opened her eyes.

She was in bed, as usual, lying on her side with her hands splayed out in front of her. Running a sleepy diagnostic check of herself: yes, she was in a cybernetic full-prosthetic body. She was incapable of shedding tears or vomiting or bleeding warm red blood from a gunshot wound in her belly.

What had that dream been? Already, it was slipping away; she tried to grab onto something, a constellation of meaning and symbols and signs, scrambling for semiotic purchase, but none came.

She went back to sleep.

———

Kusanagi Motoko stood in front of a house — a rather average Western-style house, nestled in a quiet neighbourhood in an outer ward of Niihama, painted a pale teal with white trim around the windows. An overall entirely normal single-family dwelling, for an entirely normal family.

The family — and the house — were both those of the man who stood beside her, Togusa. Her colleague in Section 9 once again, she supposed, once all the paperwork had been properly filed for her re-entry into the team. He had invited her over for dinner as thanks for saving his daughter’s life, after she’d been kidnapped by the machinations of the Solid State Society and the Puppeteer.

Motoko had initially declined the offer. But after talking it over with Ran and Kurutan, she had come to realise that what she’d done had meant a lot to Togusa, and he wanted to repay her. And in any case, Ran had emphasised, the normally antisocial Motoko could stand to interact with others more. So, feeling slightly awkward, she had shot an email to Togusa asking if the offer still stood — and indeed it still stood.

Togusa walked through the gate, and Motoko followed behind him, to the front door of his house. Unlocking the door, he stepped inside and bent down to take off his shoes, calling out, “I’m home!”

Motoko hesitantly stepped indoors and removed her own boots as the distant reply of “Welcome back!” rang out, putting on the pair of guest slippers that Togusa offered her.

Closing the door gently behind her, she looked up to see a brown-haired woman coming towards the two of them — Togusa’s wife, who had been the one to respond just then. Togusa himself greeted her with a kiss on the cheek, the perfect picture of domesticity. “Hi, sweetie. Did your day go alright?”

“Ahhh… mostly. Had a few errands to run, a few issues that got resolved. Atchan was being stubborn again earlier, but she’s doing fine now. Maaya got home from the kindergarten a few hours ago; she’s in the living room drawing,” said Togusa’s wife. Her eyes fell on Motoko, and she took in the sight of the full-body cyborg. “Ah, you must be Hidekatsu’s colleague — the one who saved Maaya-chan from those kidnappers.”

It was distinctly bizarre hearing Togusa’s given name, even though she had known it for a while now, since everyone called him by just his surname at work. Motoko bowed slightly as Togusa introduced her. “Yes, this is, um…. the Major. Major Kusanagi.”

Togusa’s wife leaned forward and took Motoko’s hand in both of her own. “Pleased to meet you, Ms. Major; I’m Togusa Sakiko.”

“Likewise,” responded Motoko.

“I…. I don’t know how to thank you enough for doing what you did for our daughter. It could have been so much worse. I feel — we feel honoured to have you as a guest.”

Motoko felt slightly embarrassed, but she gave a small smile. “Please think nothing of it; I appreciate the invitation.”

“I hope you don’t mind waiting a little bit for dinner,” Sakiko said. “It’s chicken katsu with curry, and it’ll probably be another ten or fifteen minutes until it’s done. In the meantime, make yourself at home.”

Motoko thanked her, and she and Togusa entered the living room. A little girl kneeled at the low glass table, drawing something with coloured markers. She looked up at the two people who had come in, exclaiming, “Daddy! And…. you’re that lady!”

“Hi, Maaya-chan,” Togusa said, moving towards the couch and sitting down not far from his elder daughter. “What are you drawing?”

“It’s a picture of a cat in a garden,” said the girl. “She’s a calico cat, see? And the garden has roses and sunflowers and lilies and wisteria vines.” She pointed to each part of the picture in turn.

“Did you learn all these different flowers today?”

“No, I learnt them last week.”

Motoko, who had remained standing, leaned back slightly against the wall and folded her arms. This felt like an intrusion into an idyllic family life, something private that she wasn’t supposed to see. Not that she hadn’t seen things like this before — surveilling many a criminal and malefactor had often given her windows into their domestic lives; a lot of corrupt government officials had children they doted on. But this was different: maybe it was because Togusa was someone she knew professionally, someone she had some degree of respect for.

As Togusa asked little Maaya what she had done that day, and the girl answered that the day had been rather boring except for an annoying boy stealing a bit of her lunch, Motoko realised that, perhaps, it was also that she had never had such an experience herself. Not that she remembered, anyway. Her first (presumably loving) family had been ripped away from her in the wreckage of that downed plane, and her second family had never fully succeeded in looking past Motoko’s “special” cyborg status to see the lonely, isolated kid underneath. And they never would, since Motoko hadn’t contacted them at all since joining the military fourteen years ago.

It had seemed like the safest option, to let them think she’d just up and disappeared. She’d kept tabs on them ever since, though, and they never seemed to have fully gotten over the loss of their “son”. Perhaps it was somewhat cruel, but at the time, she’d been afraid of what their response would be if she had come home in a totally new prosthetic body, with a new face and a new voice and a new name and a new (well, not really new) gender. And nearly a decade and a half down the line, she didn’t have the slightest clue how the Hirakawas would take the revelation that their adopted child was actually alive.

Maaya-chan looked up from her position at the low table, and her eyes met Motoko’s. “Excuse me,” she said, “um…. you saved me from the guys who came and took me away to that building. What’s your name?”

Motoko glanced at Togusa, who hesitated, then said, “You can call her the Major. That’s what I call her.”

“You were…. you were really cool, Ms. Major. You’re really strong and fast, and — and your hair is very pretty,” Maaya said. “I want to be like you when I grow up.”

A second or two passed before Motoko fully processed what had been said to her. This…. this kid? She wanted to be like her when she grew up? Does she not see my prosthetic body for what it is?

Maybe it was just that she was bad with kids — maybe it was just that she didn’t know how to deal with how different they were from adults. Motoko couldn’t think of how to answer, because nobody had ever said something quite like that to her before, because adults usually had a filter. And those that didn’t have a filter usually had very different reasons for admiring Motoko’s body: ugly, animalistic, hormonally-driven reasons. But what Maaya had said to her didn’t fall into any of the categories she was familiar with.

It was the pure, untainted admiration of a child, a simple desire to become strong and fast and pretty and cool just like her, without any sort of ulterior motive. 

“….thank you, Maaya-chan. I…. I hope you do.”

Togusa’s mind was no doubt churning with confusion (or possibly hilarity?) at the normally-unflappable Major getting flustered by a kid’s statement. The look he gave her only confirmed her suspicions, but he smiled at his daughter and said, “She’s one of the strongest and best people I know.”

“Do you work with Daddy?” the girl asked.

“I do, yeah,” Motoko replied. “He’s very good at his job himself, although sometimes he gets too passionate in the heat of things.” Togusa gave her a resigned look.

“Passionate?”

“It’s a word that means he feels stuff strongly.”

Togusa chimed in. “Like when you really want to do something, or you really don’t want to. It means it’s hard to control yourself.”

A wry smile came over Motoko’s visage. It seemed that Togusa didn’t take himself too seriously when he was around his daughter — he seemed to understand kids quite a bit better than she herself did. Or at least, it felt that way. Maybe it was because he had two children of his own, and therefore had had far more direct experience and practice, whereas Motoko, owing to her cybernetic body, was incapable of bearing any children. Not that she wanted children of her own at all; she had enough going on in her life, and thinking about being a mother…. a mother — god, now that was a weird feeling. She couldn’t imagine herself raising kids of her own.

But in a way, maybe she already had children, after a fashion: the Tachikomas. They learnt from her, modelled themselves after her, looked up to and respected her (well, sometimes — they could be cheeky and troublesome too)…. she was already a mother of sorts.

Sakiko came to stand beside her, watching her husband and elder daughter with a warm, gentle smile on her lips. “She’s a good kid, isn’t she? She can be a handful at times, but she’s so smart.”

“You’ve raised her well,” Motoko said.

“Thanks — we try,” said Sakiko. “And Hidekatsu is so good with them. I don’t know where he gets it from, but I’m so glad I found him. He’s such a catch.” She paused, and then continued, “I — sorry, I’m being terribly rude. I wouldn’t have ever seen my daughter again without you, and here I am, bragging about my family….”

“I don’t mind at all. Your husband is a very good colleague and a hard worker, and most people would be proud to have married someone like him. And…. your daughter is very bright for her age. Although, to be honest, I can’t say that I have a lot of experience with children.”

“You don’t?”

“No,” Motoko replied. “I don’t have a family of my own, and my work doesn’t usually lead me to be around kids a lot. When I do encounter them, they can sometimes seem strange and foreign to me — but not in a bad way.” She hoped she hadn’t offended the other woman.

Thankfully, it seemed that Sakiko took no offence. “I suppose that’s fair. But you were a kid too once, after all; we all were. I like to think of dealing with children as being like empathising with your younger self.”

“That’s…. an interesting way of looking at it.”

“I know Maaya-chan takes after me in certain ways, so I can see bits of my child self in her. Our two-year-old Atchan — Atsuko — is still a bit too young for us to determine who she’ll take after, but her stubbornness and tenacity reminds me a little of Hidekatsu.” Sakiko smiled once again, but was interrupted by the beeping of what sounded like a rice cooker in the kitchen. “Oh! Looks like dinner is ready. Are you okay with eating it? I…. can tell you’re a cyborg, and I don’t know if I’ve been insensitive by not factoring that into account. I confess I don’t actually know a lot of cyborgs personally.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” Motoko said. “I can still eat standard food, it just doesn’t digest as efficiently for people like us. But I’m sure it’ll be delicious.” She turned towards Togusa and Maaya-chan, who had noticed the beeping as well and were getting up from their positions at the low table. Sakiko had rushed into the kitchen, presumably to put all the food into serving bowls and set the table, and Maaya followed after her.

Togusa, who had been slower to rise from his seated position, approached Motoko and said softly, “Maaya seems to really like you. I hope she hasn’t been too annoying.”

“She hasn’t. And besides, even if she were, I’ve dealt with a lot of annoyances in my life.” Motoko paused for a moment, and then said, “She’s a good kid. Make sure she doesn’t end up joining the military when she gets older.”

Togusa frowned slightly, but replied, “If you say so. She’s still got a lot of time to decide what she wants to do — she’s still only five. That said, though, if she does want to be like you when she grows up….”

“There are other ways besides signing your existence away to the state. Don’t let Aramaki catch you repeating that, though. And in any case,” she said, heading towards the dining table where Togusa’s two daughters were already seated, “she’s lucky she has a father like you. She’ll probably end up better than the both of us.”

Taking a seat at the table between Togusa and Maaya-chan, she watched as Sakiko brought out a steaming bowl of curry and set it on the table beside the chicken katsu and a little ramekin of fukujinzuke. Sakiko sat down, said “itadakimasu!”, and served herself a modest helping of everything on the table; the rest of the family plus Motoko followed suit.

This…. this was a peek into a life she had lacked for so, so long. It was another’s family, in an unfamiliar house, but it felt more normal than her childhood and adolescence had ever been. She felt welcome: not shut out, not set apart as a curiosity, but rather a perfectly normal guest partaking in the hospitality of a trusted colleague.

It was oddly comfortable, and she thought she could get used to it.