The team returned to Section 9 with a battle maid, an ex-boxer, and the body of an engineer in their van, and put them into separate rooms for interrogations. Except the body, of course, which was put in the small morgue that they had in the forensics lab. They decided to start with the interrogations, and the first on the list was Yaguchi Sanji. Togusa and Batou were in the room with him, with the rest observing through the cameras.
"Listen, I didn't do nothing," Sanji tried to deny the accusations. "When cops show at your door, you run, that's how my momma taught me. Last I checked, it wasn't a crime to climb out of your own window."
"It is not," Togusa confirmed. "What is a crime though, is hacking millions of robots, causing property damage, injuries, and a dozen deaths."
"Deaths?" Sanji exclaimed as he started getting pale. "What deaths?"
Togusa pulled a paper file with a few photos and showed it to Sanji. "15 people died."
"Listen, I didn't think that this would happen!" He started pleading.
"What did you think would happen then?" Batou asked.
"I just wanted to scare him, but the software is too hard to control, this was an accident, I swear."
"Right. An accident," Togusa said. "Let's go from the top, tell us what happened."
Sanji was very pale at this point. "I wanted to scare Tadakoro Koichi into admitting to his crimes," he finally said.
"From the Ministry of Residential Control?"
Sanji nodded. "He was responsible for the reconstruction of Tokyo in my area. Everyone knew around the neighborhood that he embellished the reconstruction funds and instead of hiring qualified workers, he hired undocumented immigrants without the needed qualifications."
"That's pretty bad, but no reason to take justice into your own hands..."
Sanji shook his head. "Around three months ago one of the workers he employed overloaded the crane when I was nearby. The load fell and crushed my arm. I got into debt to get a prosthetic and lost my career as a boxer. All I wanted was some compensation from the Ministry, but they blamed everything on the poor guy."
"Let's imagine you had a motive to get back to Security-General Tadakoro, how did you cause a robot uprising?"
"I didn't want to get back at him! I wanted to scare him off and make him confess his crimes. When I was looking at how to do it, I was approached by someone online. He told me that Tadakoro had surgery scheduled and that I could use the robot in his hospital room to get to him when he was the most vulnerable. He sent me a bunch of programs to do it, but very little explanations..."
"So you just decided to trust a stranger from the internet and run some random programs?"
"Listen, I'm not a hacker! He said it was easy, I would be able to control the bot, get a recording of his confession, send it to police, try something at least," he hesitated. "But I think I screwed up... Probably pressed something wrong. You have to believe me, I didn't want anyone to get hurt, even Tadakoro Koichi!"
"What can you tell us about the one who approached you?"
"He called himself 'Waterfall', that's basically it. I asked why he helped me, and he just said that he wanted to make Japan a better place. I believed him. I wanted to see my neighborhood flourish, I was on the way to get to the national level, to bring attention to still recovering parts of Tokyo, and now..." He lowered his head in resignation.
They left Yaguchi Sanji alone and moved to the maid, trying to piece the whole picture together before making any decisions. This time Batou and Major were the ones talking. Batou sat across from "the maid", who tried to be as still as possible. Despite her very artificial look that people with cyberbodies didn't usually go for, like smooth and untextured, almost porcelain-like skin, or seams on her neck and hands, she wasn't fooling anyone who knew what to look for. Micro-movements and facial expressions, eyes sometimes darting around the room, staying for a fraction of a second on everyone present or the cameras and other objects, tension in the body that couldn't get tired. All of it revealed a human inhabiting the body. Watching the maid made Purin think about what she has lost along with her Ghost, and if it was important or not, but her thoughts were interrupted by Batou.
"Well," he started. "This is the moment you start talking, miss maid."
"The maid" tried to be as monotone as possible in her response. "I don't understand what you mean. Please return me to my owner."
"Oh well," Batou stood up. "If you're just a robot, then you won't care if we send you to scrap..." He said and turned to the exit.
"Wait, wait!" The maid broke her composure. "I'll talk..." She said in a resigned voice.
Batou sat back and continued the interrogation. "Why don't you start from your so-called 'suicide', Asato Shion-san."
"The maid" flinched, and then sighed. "I guess my plan failed, hasn't it..." Shion paused to get the thoughts in order and continued. "I saw the news about the robots going berserk, and understood immediately that I'll be in trouble for that." They looked down at their hands. "I decided to run away, but there was no way they would just let me go! So I swapped my cyberbrain with one of my maids and staged the suicide. Except you arrived before I could escape, and started tearing my house apart!"
"And you just happened to have a battle maid capable of supporting a human cyberbrain?" Batou asked with a raised eyebrow.
Shion blushed and hesitated with the response. "This body is... purpose-made for this."
"If I had 100 Yen every time someone swapped their cyberbrains with a sexbot, I'd be very rich," Major smirked.
"This is not a sex thing!" the maid protested and blushed an even deeper red.
Major shrugged in response. "I don't care what you do in your free time, unless that's cyber crimes, and you seem to have committed a few of those too. Continue. What did you do, and who are 'they' you were planning to hide from?"
Shion got tense. "The CIA."
"You're on the run from the CIA?! Why?" Batou asked in surprise.
"Twelve years ago, back when Haruka Robotics was just a small startup, and I was a junior engineer, I got into a serious debt," Shion started explaining, looking at the table with shame on their face. "I was contacted by someone from the CIA. They offered me a lot of money, more than what I owed. They wanted me to build a backdoor in the Haruka's software. They said it's for global security, that it will only ever be used to gather intelligence in counter-terrorism investigations. I needed money and I didn't see the problem, they're our allies after all. And we were a really small company back then, I didn't know that our robots would be everywhere in a few years! So I agreed."
Batou got angry after hearing that. "Damn Americans with their long hands. I'm not sure who I'm mad at more, you or them."
"I tried to back off out of the deal after we got big," Shion continued. "But they started blackmailing and threatening me. I was genuinely afraid for my life, so I got enhanced security, and prepared an escape plan..."
"A security detail of battle maids, and an escape plan as a robot maid..." Batou raised an eyebrow again.
Shion just glared at Batou in response, but then became pensive again. "When I heard what happened, I knew that my code was the problem. And that there was a high chance that either I'd get arrested and then disappeared, or I'd get disappeared without the arrest. Except I was expecting the police, and not... whatever you are."
"Section 9, we investigate cyber threats."
"Ah. That makes sense..." the maid paused indecisively. "What will happen to me now?"
Batou shrugged. "Let's see..." He started counting fingers on his hands. "Corporate sabotage, treason, accessory to manslaughter, criminal negligence, that's just to name a few."
As he counted, the maid's face drained of all color and it became even more pale than porcelain. "I-I-I..." Shion stuttered. "I can't go to prison, please understand! They will come for me! And also my body..." They looked down at themselves.
"I'm sure you can afford a new one before the trial."
"I'm... Still! I won't last long in there, they will stage it way better than I did, and the media will just smear my name all over the news."
Batou stood up. "For now, you're staying here. We will decide when we're done with this case."
Batou started leaving, but Major asked the last question. "Are you familiar with someone under the name 'Waterfall'?"
The maid looked at Major and shook their head. "Never heard of them."
After these brief confessions, they gathered in Chief Aramaki's office. They still had Asato Shion's servers to decrypt, but they weren't expecting to find anything valuable to the case on them.
"Asato Shion or even Yaguchi Sanji are definitely not our biggest problems right now," the Chief said after listening to the report. "The question is not who made the backdoor or why, though I believe someone would have to answer for this. And not who used it. I'm more interested in the one who was working behind the scenes and is still at large."
"Esaki," Major address Purin. "Do you have any leads on the drone?"
Purin shook her head and opened a map of Tokyo on the projection table. "The drone crashed in the middle of Tokyo. The culprit likely figured out that I followed it. Tracing the connection didn't give anything either, it goes to the series of proxies."
"So we have no lead on how the backdoor got into Yaguchi Sanji's hands, as well as who was spying on us while we were capturing them both. We need to figure out who this 'Waterfall' is."
"I believe I can answer this question," a voice was heard from the door of the office.
"Do you fucking live at our door or what?" Batou jumped on his feet and shouted at the interrupting man.
Chief Aramaki waved to Batou to stop, and everyone else turned to glare at John Smith. Everyone in the room got tense and hostile, Batou looked like he was ready to tear the man apart. John Smith adjusted his tie, trying his best not to show his fear in the face of danger. Major in her usual demeanor crossed her arms over her chest and sat on an arm of a couch.
"You owe us a few explanations, John Smith," she said.
John Smith stepped forward, looked over everyone in the room, hovering his gaze on Major for the longest moment, and started. "What I'm about to tell you is incredibly dangerous. I ask that you don't record it and don't store it in your cyberbrain. Just remember it."
That was an impossible request from someone like Esaki Purin, who didn't have another way to store memories besides recording them. She gave Major a questioning look. Major noticed it and replied with a barely perceptible shrug, which Purin interpreted as "It's fine, do what you want."
After not seeing any protests, John Smith started his story. "Vincent Floyd, the man you generously helped us catch, stole Pandora's Box."
Everyone made confused faces directed to him, except Major, who just pinched the bridge of her nose in exasperation.
"You need to add more context to this," said Batou as he sat back on the couch. "For your naming that could be either something useless like a sex tape with your president, or something absurdly dangerous that you shouldn't have had in the first place."
"Sadly, it's the latter," he started explaining. "Pandora's Box is the storage of all cybernetic tools that every agency in America uses."
"Why would you have something like that in one place?"
John Smith sighed. "The idea was that every agency would store them in one place and only borrow as needed. It was meant to provide accountability and protection from any of the tools getting to the wrong hands."
"Except that's exactly what happened," Major said. "How did Vincent steal it?"
"He was an IT technician working on a nearby project when he discovered a vulnerability in the infrastructure surrounding Pandora's Box. Instead of reporting it, he opened it and found what it was. He then made a copy of its contents, something that the whole concept was made to prevent in the first place, and left the country as soon as he could."
"I assume the virus that he used was from this Box?"
"Correct."
"I have a suspicion, but still, please tell the whole class, how is it connected to the current case?" Batou asked. "Tell us what happened with the contents of the Box."
"After interrogating Vincent we found a few important things."
"Did you waterboard him?" Batou interrupted.
"I'm not from the CIA," John Smith glared at Batou in offense. "What's important is his goal. He is an idealist, and he wanted to expose the whole thing by provoking unrest and conflict between America and Japan, at least according to him. That's why when he realized that he'd get caught, he dumped the contents of the Box on the network."
"He did what?!" Batou shouted.
"That isn't the biggest problem still. As soon as we learned about it, we tried to clean up the mess and delete as much as we could. Except someone beat us to it."
"I assume you have a suspicion about who?" Major asked.
"Indeed." John Smith pulled a folder from behind his back with a physical paper and handed it to Major. "We learned that Vincent Floyd had an accomplice. A woman named Mizukane Suzuka."
Major handed the paper to others and it made its way around to Purin as well. It contained a file on Mizukane Suzuka. In her photo she looked like a young woman with black hair tied in a ponytail, with red eyes, and red glasses, giving off a "strict young teacher" vibe.
"As far as we could find, she used to serve in the Japanese Defense Forces for 7 years as an intelligence officer, before retiring two years ago after a joint operation of Japan and America in Chile," John Smith continued. "A lot of the information about her was scraped from the network, our theory is that she used some of the tools in Pandora's Box to do it."
"So she was the one who helped Sanji with his revenge, she is 'Waterfall'?" Togusa interjected.
"We believe so," John Smith nodded.
"Why would she do that?"
"We don't know. She may have the same goals as Vincent Floyd, or she may not. Either way, she is a problem. And on behalf of the American government, I ask for your cooperation in her capture."
"You made a mess and now you want us to deal with it?" Batou got angry at him.
"I'm not asking it for free. The request comes from the American president and is approved by Prime Minister Tate."
"Let's assume we make Mizukane Suzuka our prime target," Major said. "We need to know what she's capable of. What was in Pandora's Box?"
"The truth is that I don't know," John Smith said. "The whole idea was that only the agencies that made the tools would know, and only on a need-to-know basis. Basically, no one knows what's in there. Or was in there, some of the contents were deleted when Vincent stole it."
"That's a whole lot of nothing," Batou said. "At least give us something!"
"Viruses for different targets, backdoors to whatever any agency could get their hands on, passwords and databases from hacked systems, cracking algorithms, search algorithms, surveillance information and tools, data analysis tools, botnets credentials, the list goes on forever. If you could imagine a tool to exploit a digital system, there is a high chance it's there."
"You're idiots..."
"I..." John Smith hesitated. "I agree that this was not a good system in hindsight. And we're doing our best to make a better solution for the future, but the problem already exists, and it's not good for anyone that someone possesses it."
"I ran a quick facial recognition scan over the Tokyo cameras and couldn't find anyone matching her description," Purin finally said.
"One of the tools she has may let her passively hack all cameras around her and erase or obfuscate her presence," John Smith replied.
"Great, so we have another invisible person..." Major said.
"You would think, at this point, we would get back to film cameras with how easy these things to crack," Ishikawa said.
