âThe Taishu-kai are still powerful, and can never be trusted. Mira, my darling, be-â
These were the last known words of Uda Tsuritsu, my mother, whispered to me through the mesh late one night in Nytrondheim. All of nine years old, I remember clinging to those words, letting them sink deep into my mind, knowing that Master Kioko would never let me keep the waves themselves.Â
For generations, the our family had lived a servile life at the foot of the Taishu-kai ladder, dutifully serving the yakuza on Mars as we had on Earth; we had always been obedient, hard-working, and docile, as Master Kioko told me one day.Â
âDormant, more like,â Uda had said.Â
I was nine years old, newly motherless, when I found myself falling into line in the service of the Taishu-kai. SutorÄŤtoratto, they called me. I had to run from safehouse to safehouse, delivering messages, packages, and offering my services to the different families, returning home late each night to Nytrondheim, and to the harsh tutilage of Master Kioko.Â
When I was eleven, I was taught how to fight. Iâve never cared for violence, but my place was as hohei, born to serve, born to fight, born to die. I felt the wrath of my Masters too many times to count as I tried, and failed, to learn the ways of our wars. Donât let me be mistaken, mistreated though I was, I was still keen to serve, but I was repeatedly beaten and starved for my failures as a warrior.Â
At least I wasnât the only one.Â
Tadashi Umesaka, then the sum of twelve years of Taishu-kai violence, another poor soul orphaned by dishonour, became my constant companion in punishment. He lacked the physical capacity to win, given a sleeve wracked with respiratory problems and atrophy, and so try as he might he could never escape the lashings of failure.Â
âWe seem destined for scars over marks, Mira,â Tadashi choked out through tears one evening, blood flowing freely down both our backs as we starved in the cages for our failings.Â
âThese are the irezumi we have been given, Tadashi,â I said, holding back tsunamis crashing from my eyes.Â
âHonourable or not, I will always wear them with pride.âÂ
When I turned thirteen, Master Kioko took me into her study. Torso wrapped tightly with make-shift bandages from the clothes Iâd torn at training the night before, I steeled myself ahead of the fresh beating I was surely about to receive. While I struggled to recall what I had done between sleeping and waking that morning to justify such abuse, by now I had come to expect nothing but cruelty from Master Kioko.Â
âFrom tomorrow, you will have two new sensei. Master Yamagata has taken a liking to your shrewdness, and wishes for you to learn his ways.âÂ
Master Yamagata was renowned for his skills within the mesh, taking advantage of god-given and morph-driven natural intelligence to tread the many fine lines that made up New Shanghai. To train under Hiroshi, as I came to call him, was a dream come true. And yetâŚ
âAnd my other sensei, Kioko-san?âÂ
âMistress Kyouka will take on the rest of your trianing,â she had said with a sneer across her face. Kyouka-san was similarly renowned for her skills, instead using natural charm and a selection of high-end morphs to take advantage of the weaknesses of the flesh.Â
It made sense, after earning all the scars Iâd gotten from Kyoko-san, that I would have the rest carved into my heart and soul instead.Â
As I had come to learn distaste for violence I soon came to find disgust in the face of Mistress Kyuokaâs teachings. To take advantage of the appetittes of egotists, the powerful, and the perverted, had been pitched to me as âartâ, but even the basics left me gagging at the thought of it.Â
âYouâre coming along, Mira. Soon youâll be an Ätisuto like me,â I recall Kyuoka-san saying after one particularly soul-sucking session. Breathless and revulsed, I choked on my own words, swallowing them too as I gathered myself, bowed, and left the Mistressâ chambers.Â
I have only ever felt like a baishunpu in bed since.
On the other hand, Hiroshi was a charming sensei, full of wisdom, grace, and patience as I worked my way through his challenges. Whereas teaching under Kyuoka-san was intense, forced, and soul-sucking, listening to Hiroshi talk about the mesh was a pleasure.Â
âBefore the networks of Earth-that-was became the mesh we know today, all connections were sacred,â he told me. âYou could trace each line between each mote, each host, each server, and with tender fingertips unravel their secrets.âÂ
âYou could never hope to trace all those lines today, but you must learn to try. To know the soft touches and keystrokes to unlock the universe, you must learn.âÂ
From then onwards, day after day, I would push myself through Kyuoka-sanâs teachings, pass her tests, fuck her whores, learn to influence men, charm women, just so I could leave that godforsaken room and march myself to Hiroshiâs study for class.Â
I learned to use the tools at my disposal, sniffers, spoofers, to find data, to take it, to make it mine. Each week, Hiroshi would set up a new test server for me to crack, changing the security each time, making it more and more difficult to crack. It wasnât long before I had owned them all.
Then, I was taught to master brute-force cracking, how to tweak & deploy exploit hunters to get the data I needed.Â
âIs this the tenderness you speak of, sensei?â I asked one day, finally realising that the soft touches and keystrokes Yamagata-san had spoken of were absent in these lessons.Â
âNo, Mira. These are the monsters we show to all to keep our deftness hidden.âÂ
For once, Mistress Kyuokaâs teachings seemed to ring true. While the mesh was a battlefield far removed from the bedroom, it held that we must keep our enemies focused on our fronts, so that they will not see the daggers which we hold behind our backs.Â
It was not the only time that Kyuoka-sanâs teachings would merge with Hiroshiâs. When I had learned to crack every test server Yamagata-san could throw at me, he gave me one last hurdle to surpass.Â
âThis server is not connected to the mesh,â he told me, pulling up a map in AR. âYou will need to go to this room, at the end of the corridor, and crack it manually.â
âHai, sensei. I will be back within the hour,â my overconfidence bringing a wry smile to Hiroshiâs face. With my head held high, an easy target in my crosshairs, I marched along the corridors of the safehouse, thinking of all the different ways in which I could pull data from the server through my DNI, so caught up in my inevitable success that I nearly ran head-first into my true challenge.
âIâm sorry, Tsuritsu-san, but you cannot go in there.â
Standing before me was a burly Olympian, irezumi rippling across the surface of muscles I could scarcely fit into my gaze.Â
âOf course not. My apologies,â I said, giving a low bow as I backed away, and ran back down the corridor.Â
âWhere is your data, Tsuritsu-san?â came Hiroshiâs voice as I slunk back into his study, my heartbeat all but deafening me to his words.Â
âI could not get into the room, sensei. Forgive me, but I am not allowed, nor am I strong enough to fight the guard who-â
Whack, Hiroshiâs gentle veneer faded as his open palm struck hard against the table. âNonsense! You do not need to fight your way past someone to get through a door! You donât need permission!âÂ
âYamagata-san, I donât see how I can get past somebody I cannot fight! If I could just-âÂ
âI am disappointed, Tsuritsu-san. I thought perhaps you had learned something from your time with Mistress Kyuoka.
My heart sunk. It had been weeks since I had heard her name, recalled her classes, so accustomed now to dissociation in her presence I had become.Â
That night I cried myself to sleep, for the first time in a long while, and the next day I dressed up and made my way back to that corridor, and walked up to that gentle guardâŚ
The rest of that night is blanked for me now, but Iâve kept a copy elsewhere, and I still remember sending off the data to Hiroshi along with a two-word message:
His one word response? âOkay.â
One day, shortly after I had turned fifteen, Yamagata-san said that he had a gift for me; he was going to pair me up with another student of his. He politely hummed his way through all of my questions, my nerves boiling over all morning, until the door finally opened and I nearly fell out of my chair.Â
âUmesaka-san!â I exclaimed, running into the arms of Tadashi, bearing a familiar face and battered body.Â
âTsuritsu-san! It has been awhile, hasnât it Mira?â When I play it back I can still hear the smile in his voice, and see that tiny glimmer of hope in the corner of his eye.Â
I turned to Hiroshi, and thanked him with a low bow, before asking him that simple question, the one I wish Iâd never uttered, for fear that it may have brought my fate down upon me.Â
âWhy are we being paired, Master Yamagata?âÂ
âBecause itâs time for you to finally begin your service to the Taishu-kai.âÂ
Whereas I had found myself learning at the mercy of Mistress Kyuoka, it transpired that Tadashi had not been cast out, as I had once feared, for his weaknesses. Instead, Master Tetsuyuki had taken up his brusied and bleeding body one day and claimed him for his own. Ida-san helped Tadashi to become fluent in shinjun, to become one with the shadows, to disappear in daylight.Â
It was a skill set that Tadashi was all too happy to show off. I quickly lost count of the number of times he would appear behind me, in locked rooms, in the dead of night, even on the few occasions that I found myself leaving the safehouse for my own purposes, something I had finally been afforded the privilege of doing. Somehow, amidst a coming of age marred by terror, I ceased to be sutorÄŤtoratto. Somehow I had become honmono no hito - somehow I had become real.Â
I received a few short lessons in more general social manipulation from Amari, a friend of Mistress Kyuokaâs, and practiced them at length. Social engineering was far prettier and more useful than the skills of sultry sluts, and got me far further in my training than I could have hoped for. Besides, it was far easier to pretend to be a disinterested payroll AI than to pretend to enjoy sex.Â
After a week or two it became clear that Tadashi and I worked well together; Iâd engage with the target, confusing and disorienting them, sniffing data where I could, while Tadashi snooped around the data centres, jacking in and taking the motherlode. Occasionally weâd even change roles - weâd learned a thing or two from each other, and itâs remarkably easy to snoop around when youâve already enginnered a decent scrap of access for yourself. An honest-to-god ecto and high-vis AR displays can get you further than youâd thinkâŚ
After a few small-fish jobs, scraping small businesses to see what kind of payment plans Taishu-kai should consider for protection, Hiroshi called us into his study for a meeting. Walking in together, we were both surprised to see Nakama Kome herself sitting behind Yagamata-sanâs desk.
Nakama-san, leader of the Taishu-kai in Valles-New Shanghai, in the flesh, elegance and grace and an almost grandmotherly face hiding what Tsuritsuâs like me knew to be decades of violence, torture, ruthlessness, and tyranny. How odd to think that somebody so vicious could look so innocent.Â
âTsuritsu-san, Umesaka-san, a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance,â sheâd said in barely more than a whisper.Â
âHai, Nakama-san, the pleasure is ours,â I said, hoping a nose-scraping bow would hide my own disgust. Beside me, Tadashi followed suit, his face betraying none of what I assumed was a seething anger burning through his chest.Â
âYagamata-san tells me that you two are his best and brightest, and that is what I have come for today. You see, we have a problem which needs solvingâŚâÂ
The job which Nakama-san went on to describe was multi-faceted, dangerous, and above all, highly unlikely to succeed. Our rivals in the Matsuba-kai had grown reckless in recent weeks, drawing the attention of the Rangers in a way that threatened not only their own businesses, but ours also.Â
Our dear leaders in their infinite wisdom had decided amongst themselves that even the most power-hungry and determined of our enemies would not act so boldly without just cause. Tadashi and I were to be just one part of a wider plan to discover what had emboldened the Matsuba-kai.
Like many of the yakuza on Mars, we outsourced our data security. We made more than enough money to invest in server space in the corporate data centres, and enough on top of that to keep the spiders out. Between us both it took nearly three days of careful probing and social engineering to find our window.Â
I was going to get access as a prospective client, looking for server space for rent, and Tadashi would follow up with a more clandestine intrusion in the evening. With any luck, Iâd get close enough to the Matsuba-kai server to tag it for Tadashi, and meanwhile leave a little gift for the AA-corp.Â
Walking through the server clusters I felt something Iâve yet to come close to recapturing - a sense of absolute awe and wonder. The darkness of the racks, interspersed with the twinkling of uptime LEDs and status displays, painted a beautiful picture. Afterwards, my muse tsuki would tell me that my heart rate lowered a solid 10 BPM while I was wandering through the clusters⌠This must have been what it was like for the first of us to reach out towards the stars.
I left my âgiftâ in a server rack on the other side of the centre from the Matsuba-kai cluster, and signed a contract under a fake ID for just enough server space to avoid arousing suspicion. Now it was up to TadashiâŚ
I sat in an all-night cafe around the corner from the centre, just opposite where Tadashi would be coming out. A couple of Taishu-kai enforcers had come along for the ride, and once theyâd given us the all-clear I had tsuki start counting. From the plans weâd gotten yesterday, Tadashi had 30 seconds to the server floor, 15 seconds to the Matsuba-kai cluster, and another 45 seconds from the first alarm to get out. Weâd spent hours in simulspace crafting a few specialist programs, perfecting them for the job at handâŚ
45 seconds after the all-clear, I remotely opened my present. Konton.ali unfurled from lines of compressed code and began to brute-force any and every server it could find, while triggering every alarm it could worm its exploits into. 30 seconds later, the tac-net came alive. 5 seconds after that, everything went blackâŚ
I came to strapped to a chair, arms behind my back, blood trickling down the side of my face. A figure stood over me, shock baton in hand, the electricity arcing as they inched it closer to my face. I tried to look into their eyes, and saw a face I still canât remember.Â
Drugged, clearly, dazed and disoriented, I was asked who I was. I declined to answer. I was asked who I was working for. I declined to answer. I was asked if I was alone. I declined to answer.Â
My next memory, left untainted by the psychosurgeon at my request, was of coming to, clothes torn, legs sore, thighs bruised, the taste of blood mixing with something unfamiliar in my mouth...Â
The memory after that was two weeks later, sitting down to tea with Nakama-san. Tadashi was there, staring into nothing while we were thanked for what weâd done. What weâd endured. To my left, a young woman I now know as Kirigaya Maru, kept glancing from side to side, eyes never resting on a single spot for long.Â
â⌠The Matsuba-kai are no longer a concern. Your hard work, and great sacrifices, have ensured the Taishu-kaiâs survival, and we owe you greatly,â Nakama-san intoned. âFrom dishonourable beginnings youâve both come, and look at you nowâŚâ
We were the spitting image of survivors, complete with the mental pain and emotional anguish. If I had a soul, it had been lost long ago, and now even the memory of it was gone.Â
âEphemira, Tadashi, Maru, I would like to offer you three an opportunity⌠to strike out on your own. We are looking to expand our operations beyond Valles-New Shanghai, and we think you three would make excellent so-honbucho. So, what do you say?âÂ
âHai, Namaka-san,â our voices an echoing harmony. We finished our tea and left, awaiting news of where weâd get to go, and what weâd get to do.Â
Tadashi held my hand and led me back to his room, where he and I broke down, our heaving sobs like earthquakes causing tsunamis in the oceans of our eyes.Â
âW-When we see the psychosurgeons in the morning, we should remove this too, right Mira? We must be professional,â Tadashi said, wiping the last of his tears from his face.Â
âHai.â We gripped each other tight. He kissed me on the forehead, and then my lips, and then, and then⌠despite my best intentions, and a complete dissociation, Mistress Kyuokaâs lessons came to life under the tender touches of Tadashiâs mesh-trained fingertips.Â
When we both emerged from the psychosurgeons, we met for tea, and celebrated our newfound success and station like true professionals. Tadashi will never remember the closest thing to love Iâve felt, but I quietly made sure that I will never forget.Â
I will always remember the night that we two fumeiyona brought a silent shame upon our family by lifting each other up into the stars.Â