Post-Human: A Short Story

Post-Human – Manifested psychosis in cyberized individuals following recovery from mysterious illness resulting in dissociative tendencies, prodigal cyberwarfare skills, and abnormal goal-oriented traits.

Cybernetic-induced mental conditions are not a new phenomenon within contemporary cybernetic-saturated society. Some are of inherent risks: brain damage, subsequent brain injury from cyborg-transition, or personality changes born of post-surgery chemical imbalances.

Not all the volatile developments were cyberization-born, rather, some came systemic – matters from living as a cyberized individual, from society or the self. Sometimes it manifested as new mental hardships, and sometimes it grew into severe cyber-psychosis.

It's not easy being a new lifeform – when the new frontier is the body and soul rather than the spaces beyond Mankind's reach.

Stress. Tension. Struggle. The difficulty of being not quite human, but not quite a machine is well-documented, sometimes inducing dissociation with organics or machines. But how those difficulties manifest is the mystery, no cyborg – no human adapts to their new condition the same.

. . .

"How long has he been like this?"

The dishevel-bearded Japanese man stood over the hospital cot, examining the slumbering boy with a pair of calculated, prosthetic eyes. The open windows carried in a humid draft, tickling the aged curtains with a breeze. A tear-drained mother sat nearby, only half-processing the transpiring conversation in a foreign tongue. A doctor stood by the door as a pair of nurses watched from the hallway.

"Four days now," the doctor explained hesitantly, still unsure if this encounter was going as he hoped. "He fell ill during lunch. Classmates had to carry him two miles from the school building to get him here. He was already weak when he got in, by the time we put him in the bed – he was unresponsive."

"So why did you call for a soldier? I'm not quite understanding the situation you're in – Doctor Sanchez, was it?"

"Yes – Mister Ishikawa, I was driven in with the previous Peacekeepers convoy before yours came into town. The local doctor feared a pandemic but lacked means to diagnose or properly quarantine since the civil war began. Except this… 'sickness' isn't contagious, it seems."

"What do you make of his sickness?"

"He's seemingly comatose, however, it's not quite a coma. His EKG is abnormal, more akin to restless sleep, or a bad nightmare. Or even severe physical, mental exertion. He has an extreme fever of forty Celsius and he sweats but the fever refuses to break. His breathing and heart rate are stable, there's no sign of flu-like symptoms or respiratory issues. Light bruising but his classmates explained that as from his falling when he got sick."

Ishikawa turned to Sanchez, scratching his chin in thought. "That's everything?"

"As far as I could tell with the medical equipment available, I was lucky to even have the equipment to check his EKG – apparently it came with him."

Ishikawa tilted his head in confusion, "Came with him?"

The doctor gestured to a brain-scan machine cart set in the corner of the room. An unassuming box with extending wires colored red, blue, and black, coiled in a neat, hospital manner.

"His mother brought it with her family when they escaped the first fighting in the urban areas, up north near the Capital. The boy was cyberized at a young age – three or four according to the mother. She's had the necessary monitoring equipment ever since."

Ishikawa blinked, suddenly putting the puzzle pieces together. Upon even closer scrutiny, he could begin to make out raised sections in the youth's hairy scalp. Lightened purple-white lines spiderwebbed across his skull and just out of the sight, hidden in the shade of pillows, blankets, and his neck.

The boy's face was slightly marred by even lighter, brown bruises – one particular to the temple and another on the chin. Apparently from the fall.

"Ma'am? Is this true, your son is cyberized?" Ishikawa asked, attempting to garner more information from the drained parent.

"Y-yes. He-we had little Paulo undergo surgery when he was four years old. My husband and I hoped at the time that receiving a cyberbrain early would give him a better chance at success in his future. He was all so small then, we just wanted what was best for him. Maybe a chance to move out of the country."

"That's a big risk for a child so young, but not unheard of. I assume you moved to the countryside when the fighting got worse?"

"…that is correct."

"Do you remember the cybernetics provider that performed the surgery and installation?"

"No, or at least I don't remember well. We got it done at one of those international clinics, the ones in the port cities before the war started. They also provided the monitoring device there…"

The woman gestured weakly towards the EKG machine; her shaking wrist born of sleepless nights. Ishikawa's eyes followed, his feet soon after as he went about examining the medical cart.

The device was aged, its surface dimpled and sanded down by jungle conditions and poor maintenance but the manufacturer logo was still there, barely. As damaged as the country Ishikawa found himself in.

It was an older icon, one from a few decades before the public interest explosion in cybernetics – right before. The pale-blue trident remained, belonging to the most powerful Japanese micromachines conglomerate of the twenty-first century.

"Poseidon Industrial, they're a household name in my home country. That's good news actually."

"Why is that?" The mother asked meekly, still shy of this foreigner playing Twenty Questions with the doctor and her, regarding her sickly son.

"Parts compatibility. At the very least, I'm familiar with his cyberware which will make it easier to diagnose whatever may be going on with him."

Ishikawa walked back to the child's bedside and gently lifted his head, checking the base of his neck for port connections. Instead, his touch only found bare skin and more surgical scarring. Pressing a tad harder, the boy involuntarily twitched a tad.

Everyone but Ishikawa flinched then, surprised, and immediately on edge around the strange Japanese soldier. Ishikawa set the child down slowly, giving the mother his most-reassuring smile.

"Ma'am, do you mind telling me where his port is?"

The doctor stepped in then, volunteering the information readily. "Left wrist."

The mother remained suspicious, "Why would you want to know that?"

Ishikawa turned away from the woman and rolled down the back of his jacket collar, revealing his neck cybernetic ports. "Because I'm a cyborg too."

There was a small gasp from the woman's throat – surprise. These cultures, unfamiliar with the fullest extent of contemporary technology in the developed nations, sometimes struggled with imagining societies where cyberization was the norm.

Ishikawa raised the boy's left wrist and turned it over, revealing a beige-colored port coupling embedded into the grafted false-skin patch. He secured a connection wire and jacked it into the base of his neck; he prepared to do the same with the boy's wrist but paused to make a SQUADCOM call.

"Major, I got a cyborg kid here in a coma. I'll be doing a dive, see if I can figure out what's wrong with him. I may be a bit late getting back to the unit."

A female voice replied over the neural bridge. "Understood. The Canadian team supposed to relieve us got held up by heavy rains, they're waiting for the flooding to clear before advancing so it might be another day before the turnover."

Ishikawa nodded, taking the information in stride. "Lodging then?"

"The mayor says we can lodge as guests in some of the locals' homes, but I don't like the looks I'm getting."

"I'd imagine the trucks will be fine, wouldn't want to antagonize our hosts too much. The civil war already agitated them enough with the presence of foreign interests and the tribalism between the rural rebels, cartels, and local military government."

"Take care of the child."

"I'll do my best," Ishikawa finished, closing the networked conversation.

He turned back to the mother and the doctor. "I'm going to attempt to connect with Paulo, 'dive' his mind and see if I can diagnose or even shake him out of his slumber."

"Can you do that? Help my boy?"

Ishikawa paused, catching an uncertain breath in his throat. "I'll try my best."

He placed a back palm to the boy's forehead, sensing the burning fever through the touch. Not just warm, but seemingly scolding. A tactile temperature-check over a cyber-widget reported as high as forty Celsius, inhumanely warm. Curious, Ishikawa ran the hand across the rest of the boy's cranium, particularly along the ridges and bumps where the cyberbrain sat closest to the skin-made surface. Warm all over, with a fever variance only by a degree.

The Japanese man watched the boy for a moment more, watching the sweat precipitate down his cheeks and how steady his breathing carried, calm inhales and exhales. His eyes darted back and forth beneath closed eyelids, another telltale sign of deep, dreamful sleep.

"Before I go in, I need to ask – has your son received any other cybernetic implants?"

"No… No."

Ishikawa nodded to the mother, glanced at the doctor then plugged the wire jack into the child's wrist. His vision swam, distorting out of priority as his essence retreated into his cyberbrain and the new electronic corridor with Paulo carried over the wire.

He began the dive – a descent down the shared connection tunnel, sensing as data poured in both directions. For every connection made, there was a transaction – some information given and taken. From a sensory perception, Ishikawa would describe Paulo's cyberbrain activity to be choppy, in a sense of water surface tension. A hint of the storm boiling below.

Ishikawa reached in further, tuning his cyberspace awareness to the typical networking ocean known as 'The Net' in shorthand. Unlike saturated network spaces like Japanese cities where the space was chockful of encrypted and unencrypted radio and laser frequency lines, here the saturation was minimal – short, uninteresting signals from the occasional home computers and wireless phone devices with security and capabilities more accustom to technology from two or three decades ago.

Rural cyberspace was dark, more data streams seemed to echo off the digital phantoms of traveling military vehicles and personnel rather than the archaic home networks of the remote village. The cybernetic troops like Ishikawa shined brightly in the darkness, but even then, they could not compare to the blinding streams coming off the village's data cluster centerfold. It wasn't a town data center, a modern automated vehicle, or a personal computer – it was a person's signature. Paulo.

The child sat as a roaring torrent within his representative cyberbrain datasphere, hooked together like a diploid relation to Ishikawa's own, appearing like two stars colliding in deep space.

Ishikawa reached out, attempting a virtual handshake query but immediately pulled back, retreating behind his attack barriers as the alien tendrils of the child jumped out at his approach – defensive and burning like spears tipped with oil fires.

He tried again, reaching out verbally across the connection. "Paulo, hey you in there? My name is Ishikawa."

The words entered the stream and traveled into the boy's cluster but seemed to shift and distort on contact – the response blurred by the continued volatility in the boy's cyberbrain activity.

"Paulo. I'm a cyborg, like you. Your mother is worried about you, you're very sick right now and in the hospital. Are you okay? Can you hear me?"

The distortion continued, muddling any sign that the messages got through. It seemed almost like the boy's cluster transformed its very nature into a barrier, an impenetrable shield underneath the original security programs.

Nervously, Ishikawa reached out again – this time attempting to test the boy's defenses. They jolted and jumped at his guarded approach, refusing to allow him entry but the systematic activities didn't necessarily mean the armor was wholistic. The boy didn't retreat into a closed shell, rather his external data activities seemed to behave like volatile programs – rapidly packaging and unpackaging injectable virus streams. Trails of data seeped into other nearby systems, unguarded computers, and local cellular phones.

Holes rapidly formed in between the rapid assembly-disassembly partitions, leaving gaps in the ad hoc armor layer, and giving peeks into the boy's unknown affairs.

Sound bites of gunfire. Images of burning buildings and dust-covered civilians. File system signatures dating the events to almost a decade ago. The digital hints painted a picture little by little, tastes of the horrors deep within the boy's mind reaching out across Ishikawa's data line.

Ishikawa reached in further, pressing into the boy's space and digging up more transitioning files from the brewing digital storm within. He winced figuratively as the haze of interference and static tickled his cyberbrain.

Assembling the pieces on his end, Ishikawa put together what was evidently streams of memory on a playback loop. The boy was in a dream alright, a nightmare. After collecting sufficient information, he began to play them out on his end – isolated and safe from the volatile digital storm roaring in the boy's brain.

If Ishikawa proved unable to free the boy, he'd try to find out the cause, and possibly the solution in that manner. He let the footage play in full, already expecting to find a bloody battlefield within.

. . .

It was dark but never quiet. From the perspective of a child, huddled under bedding covers – he made out the distant and close sounds of war. Gunfire, artillery, shouts of soldiers, and screams of civilians. In Paulo's lucid dreaming state, everything was vivid and emotional – raw. A nightmare that the boy, and thus Ishikawa, could not escape. All they could do was watch.

The boy shivered, still unfamiliar to his cybernetics – clutched and itched at the plastic mold embedded in his left wrist. Light flashed outside the bedroom window, passing through comforter's privacy, and giving the boy quite a jolt.

The boy screamed.

"Mama," he called out as tears rolled down his scrunched, terrified cheeks. The boy's ears rang out, disturbed by the sounds of continued artillery. No one came though, the screams of people outside continued – no mother came. The boy was alone.

He tried again, emotionally frozen by the approaching dreaded decision. "Mama!"

Still, no one came.

Paulo had a decision to make – leave the comfort of his bed to seek out his missing mother or stay where it seemed safe. But being with Mama was safe. But staying in bed was safe too. Right? Nobody could hurt him if he were in bed, or with Mama.

The boy reached for the edge of his comforter and gingerly pulled it aside – exposing his head to a dusty room with cracks running along the walls, visible even in the near darkness of the bedroom. Paulo coughed, recognizing the chalky scent tickling his nose and throat. He reached around and grabbed his pillow, clutching it close like a stuffed animal.

Paulo lifted himself gingerly off the mattress and planted his feet, toes first, against the cold tiles beneath his feet. The floor, while disturbed with patterned dust across its surface and colored by outside explosions, remained unmarred with rubble and debris – for now. The boy took one step, then two. He began running, slipping a tee-shirt over his head and sandals over his feet from the computer chair in the corner. The aged desktop in the corner, like many room appliances were dead as the rest of the neighborhood.

This was the first night the fighting arrived in Paulo's neighborhood, but his family endured without power for three days now. Jets roared overhead, screaming off into the distance as they left their fuel bombs behind, once more exploding in the distance. The boy pulled the pillow over his head, covering his ears to squeeze out the noises of battle. It didn't work, the explosions continued – the ringing continued.

Paulo scrambled, tunnel vision taking control. He needed to run, he needed to hide. Back to the bed? The largest explosion yet crackled outside, rumbling through the floor, and signifying the growing nearness of the fighting.

No, the bed would not do. The little boy scrambled, pillow still clenched to his head, and raced into the dark hallway beyond his bedroom. Uncertain but desperate, he dashed for the stairwell only to pause upon stepping before the bottomless abyss that awaited him, a descent into the seemingly eternal dark.

The power was out of course but no amount of light quantity adjustment could make the stepped descent any less imposing. Fear coursed through the boy from head to toe as he collapsed at the top step. He called out again, hoping his salvation would hear him over the thunder and screams. "Mama… Mama!"

No reply came. He waited. No footsteps came. He waited. Nobody came.

"Mama…" Paulo cried out again, desperation turning fear into action. He scrambled forward into the blackness, not knowing how many awkward footfalls lay between him and ground level. It felt like descending into the Underworld, a place of fear and death. The screams of scared civilians – adults and children transformed, becoming distant and ghoulish. Fearful cries from battle became the taunts of monsters. Battle roared like lightning and thunder, flashing, and cracking ever closer.

"Make it stop… Make it stop… Mama."

Paulo stopped along the stairs, still unsure how many steps awaited him before he reached safety. Here he was not safe, but now, even more so. Leaving the bed proved a mistake. Between the falling bombs and monstrous screams born of Humanity's most vile, oldest tradition, he was now accompanied by the threat of himself. He could just as much die from a falling bomb as he could from tripping and falling down the remaining steps that awaited him.

He could not see the bottom, maybe one did not exist. Here was not safe, but was anywhere else? His bed, his safe space layout of reach, and no hero, no salvation approached. His mother wasn't coming.

A new scream roared above the rest, all unnatural and man-made. A great flash sprouted, illuminating the house, shattering the undamaged windows, and blinded everyone that dared look. The last thing Paulo registered was the steps that awaited him. In the explosion's intense light – one step, one more step and he would have touched even ground.

He screamed without articulation, uncovering a dozen unnamed emotions at once. A few reaching his mind as he worked them out of his system: fear, desperation, pity, hatred, confusion, rage, disgust. Aimed at the world, aimed at himself.

The light stole everything, sucking away the stairs and the house and the sounds of battle. It lasted seconds or minutes or days – Paulo did not know but it eventually faded. The light became a ball, the Sun above – warmly illuminating the yard behind the schoolhouse and the benches where children chattered and enjoyed their lunch.

Paulo crowd-watched his classmates, seated at tables set feet away. His own space was sparse, a simple sandwich clutched in his tiny hands. The other children were off in their own little worlds, characterized by laughter and handheld phones, playing games with their tablemates. They all looked busy, but Paulo knew the truth – the dozens of eyes were pointed at him, occasionally shifting between screens and food to the pale child eating food alone.

Paulo the Pale. Paulo the Cheater. Paulo the Machine. Paulo the Robot. War Machine Paulo.

The titles ran through his mind, remembering the times his classmates descended upon him, intruding on what little solitude he could claim in a village of a thousand people. The children took his juice pouch when it was their favorite flavor. The children liked to challenge themselves, playing Paulo-Tag and chasing after the weird pale child from the warzones beyond.

He didn't ask to be Paulo the Pale. The Cheater. The Machine. He just wanted to be Paulo. But they didn't see that, nobody saw Paulo. Only the creature brought to their shores by a far off war.

The children came again this time, demanding the fresh cheese in his sandwich bun. Paulo held on dearly as the meal his mother prepared him slipped from his fingers into countless pieces, dribbling to the floor. The children shouted, jeered, and laughed.

Paulo the Robot did not cry. Paulo the Machine did not shout. Paulo the Pale did not frown. Paulo the Pale just stood there, taking in the sight of those who kept pushing and pushing.

The ringing returned. The sounds of battle, like thunder, roared in his ears. He saw the soldiers running in from the hills, the fighter jets descending from the skies, the cannons firing over the horizon. The war machines came to destroy the children, the attackers. War Machine Paulo stared, he twitched – his armies amassed at the ready, preparing to let loose the onslaught upon these little monsters.

They took his peace, his safety, his solitude. The children – the killers took his home. They were the ones that destroyed this country, his country. He would kill them all. He could already taste their blood on his lips, could see the future fear in their eyes. They would run like the fearful civilians as the bombs and jets approached.

He could taste it. He could smell it and hear it. Paulo could feel their deaths in his bones, in his soul. They would die.

Paulo didn't register the fist that connected with his face as someone jeered out "Paulo the Ghost." The boy didn't register the second one that connected with his temple, he didn't recognize the moment his head hit the ground and not when the shoe that landed against his head.

One moment he dripped in the blood of his attackers, the next he was back in the darkroom. Bombs descended in the distance.

Paulo wasn't alone. He turned to the far wall where a bearded cyberized man stood, leaning against a wall with his arm outstretched. He was gasping, overwhelmed by the emotional onslaught.

The boy called to the man, "You are not Mama."

"Kid," Ishikawa stammered out. "What are you—"

The sentence hitched in his throat as he felt the room shrink in size, taking the oxygen with it. Paulo grew, a shadow obscured by the safety of his draped comforter and clutched pillow. His eyes gleamed with the roar of battle outside the claustrophobic room, large and unblinking. White teeth barred, sharpened with the qualities of a determined predator.

The screams of escaping civilians warped again into ghoulish shouts aimed not at Paulo but Ishikawa. The bombs became thunder and lightning, bright and approaching quickly.

"You are the Enemy; I am your Destroyer."

Ishikawa wasn't sure what happened next, but the boy's form seemed to shift into an elongated shadow like a serpent and lean towards the Japanese man. But the face grew even more bestial, like a wolf or dog. The seasoned military cyborg attempted to retreat into his own data cluster and to level several more security measures against the boy's vivid…imagination?

Nothing came up, the creature-formerly-Paulo leaned ever closer, jaws unhinging as Ishikawa grew smaller in the space. It reached out and swallowed him into even deeper darkness. It chomped down and then, just static.

Ishikawa physically flinched back, feeling the jittering sensation cross not just his mind but his entire body, real and synthetic muscles clenching in real space as the seemingly real sensation of being eaten overwhelmed him.

He made out one more word, then everything went black.

"Xolotl…"

Ishikawa registered vaguely that the connection with the boy was severed. He felt a whooshing wind like sensation follows by a hollow-thump-like noise. Pain shot up his back as he deduced, he toppled over. He registered the pain but not his muscles responding to his mind's commands.

Get up. Nothing happened. Stand. No response, no twitch.

Ishikawa couldn't see or feel anything, but he could vaguely make out, through the static, the confused and shocked voices of nurses, doctors, and Paulo's mother moving around and demanding to know what was wrong.

Apparently, his ears still worked a little.

The Japanese cyborg came to regret that thought as the next thing that occurred was a shrill, mechanical noise pounding at octaves higher than the sound of gunfire. A loud, long screech as if nails-on-chalkboard were turned into an extended industrial process.

It screeched for an indeterminate period droning into his brain like a drill. Ishikawa lacked control of his systems, blocked by an unknown force from selectively tuning out noise or retreating into his cyberbrain. The screech continued until it was all he knew, then he knew nothing.

. . .

"Ishikawa, wake up."

With a spark and a start, Ishikawa jolted upright into a sitting position. Processing dull pain and a sensation akin to an alcohol-induced hangover. His processes came back little by little, his cyberbrain rebooting after the abrupt shutdown.

The hearing came first – birds chirped outside and a breezed whistled through an open window, dull sparking of electronics. Touch returned next – someone clutched at Ishikawa, cradling his head to prevent him from toppling over again. Smell and taste came all at once as he winced at the sensations of dried saliva and something vaguely bile-like. Once sight return, the Japanese soldier processed the scene.

A purple-haired woman, Kusanagi was leaning over him – crouched and perplexed by her subordinate's predicament. Doctor Sanchez and a Japanese Self-Defense Army medic held him up, away from the cold tile floor.

Ishikawa groaned, "Morning Major…"

"What happened?" She demanded, focusing intently on her fellow countryman with her unblinking reddish pupils.

Ishikawa looked around without a word, still processing what happened himself. He leaned out of the grip of Sanchez and the medic, sitting up under his own power but training his eyes to the room. The damage was bad, unexpected. Light fixtures in the ceiling sparked and where light panels once sat in sockets, revealing exposed wiring and empty bulb sockets. Glass shards sprinkled over the hospital rack and floor, remnants of the destroyed lights. Electronic equipment throughout the room also sparked, damaged by some sort of mass short-circuiting event.

The mother's chair was empty now, Paulo – the boy – had vanished from his bed. Nurses were seen slipping between other rooms in the adjacent corridor. Frantic shouts echoed through the clinic and outside the building as well.

"How long was I out?" Ishikawa asked, eyeing Sanchez and Kusanagi with uncertainty.

The doctor spoke up, "Twenty minutes – I don't know what you did but I think you turned this place into a frenzy."

"What do you mean?"

"You tell us, Ishikawa," Kusanagi responded hesitantly. "Nothing was happening, then suddenly every electronic device in the village started screaming or even exploded. A couple of trucks and radios are fragged – we're still trying to figure out the damage."

Doctor Sanchez added, "You connected to the boy and didn't say anything for a good ten minutes, suddenly you disengaged your wire with him, and you just collapsed. The boy, he got up and started yelling or something – I couldn't make out what he was saying because every device in the room started screeching. Gave his mother a great fright."

"What happened to Paulo?" Ishikawa asked, glancing over to where the boy previously lay.

"Gone – I don't know where, why, or even how. He just ran. A couple of nurses tried to grab him when he sprinted through the screeching room but as soon as they reached out, he broke their hands. I have three nurses with broken fingers and wrists and bruised grip marks on their arms and necks. It's hard to believe the boy was responsible."

"But he did it? You're certain?" Ishikawa asked, eyes widening in a mix of concern and shock.

"I saw it myself – I carried one of the nurses to the infirmary as soon as the screeching subsided and the electronics stopped exploding," Doctor Sanchez expanded. "The entire village has gone dark – no power anywhere except for off and non-connected devices. Anything off the Grid was left untouched."

"Ishikawa. Whatever happened, the boy and you were at the center of it all. I talked with the Unit, everyone said they felt a presence entered their cyberbrains during the screeching – I'm almost inclined to call it a mass cyberattack." Kusanagi added.

"I don't know what happened. I connected with the boy – he was in distress, volatile – he managed to rapidly convert and transform partitioned parts of his cyberbrain into strange security programs – I want to say they were like barrier mazes but… I'm not sure."

"You lost me…" Doctor Sanchez commented, failing to grasp the extent of the security jargon.

"Did you get a good look?" Kusanagi asked while gesturing for the Japanese Army medic to let Ishikawa rise on his own accord. The said medic handed Ishikawa a water canteen wordlessly.

"Thanks," Ishikawa spoke dryly, taking the much-needed bottle and taking a swig for himself. "I managed to intercept some transaction bits from whatever sleep cycle he was dealing with in his head. Memories by the looks of it, but not quite."

"What did you see?"

Ishikawa took another gulp of water, swallowing before responding to the feminine Japanese cyborg. "I think I saw him revisiting his childhood memories from the civil war, the fighting in the cities. The kid was in bed and then moving around his house while bombs were going off outside, then it suddenly jumped to him at school. He was attacked by his classmates."

"Attacked, by his classmates? Are you sure, I thought he fell?" Doctor Sanchez asked.

"I think so, the kids hit him in the head a few times – I believe in the places he suffered the bruises. I don't know what happened quite after, but I could tell he was angry, the boy has a vivid imagination and I think he was preparing to hurt his classmates."

The UN doctor hummed in thought, considering the new information in private.

Footsteps approached from the doorway, drawing the attention of the soldiers. The mother stood in the doorway, breathing hard and staring down at Ishikawa with a hard glare. "That's not true, he would never have done that. Paulo is a sweet boy."

"I—" Ishikawa tried, still processing the events he witnessed.

"Did you find him?" Kusanagi butted in, looking back at the mother.

"No! I can't find Paulo anywhere, he ran away," she looked around frantically – in the room and the corridor before looking back at Ishikawa's entourage. "This is your fault – you all caused this. Your man hurt my boy!"

Before anyone could argue more, she looked away and sprinted off – tears still dripping from her eyelids in frantic haste to find her child once more.

"He's gone…" Ishikawa muttered.

"I've got some of our people out looking for him now, we'll find him," Kusanagi explained as she stood up and dusted loose glass shards from her knees. "Whatever happened, the boy is dangerous – we need to find out what he did to you, and the rest of us."

"You were affected too Major?"

She glanced down at Ishikawa and offered a hand. "Yeah, he tapped me too. I don't know how but whatever he used or did, it went right passed by my security apparatus. Disabled me and a lot of others."

Kusanagi explained further, gesturing to the medic who simply nodded in acknowledgment. "Nakamura can't even talk right now, whatever the attack did to him fragged his brain-cyberbrain connections and he can't form words with his mouth."

"We'll have to check everyone, see how bad everyone is. Check for viruses. Maybe the boy was a trap – a plant by a rebel group or cartel possibly?" Ishikawa theorized on the spot.

"It's possible," Kusanagi concurred but withheld any confirmation. "We won't know until we've diagnosed and corrected whatever happened. And we need to find the child too."

"The jungle out there is a big place Major," Ishikawa pointed out. "A lot of hiding places."

"He's cyberized, and just a child. We'll find him."

Even as Kusanagi said it, Ishikawa held his doubts in private. Whatever he encountered in there wasn't what he'd describe as a child. More like a monster or something. The boy called himself something, Xolotl. What did it mean?

Ishikawa took the woman's outstretched hand and hoisted himself up, Nakamura keeping an arm in reach if need be. Ishikawa groaned quietly, still trying to deal through the discomfort to his skull. Whatever the boy did – it did a number on Ishikawa in a manner unlike any cyberattack he ever witnessed, that was for certain.

The boy was something else.

. . .

Ultimately, the boy named Paulo disappeared. More days and more units were called in to help with the search to find him once Ishikawa's convoy managed to repair their cyberware and equipment. Still, they came up empty-handed, and eventually, they were chased out by the locales.

Whatever went down between the Japanese Peacekeepers and the child left its mark – the villagers had enough of outsiders and asked them to leave and never return. On the other hand, the civil war eventually ended, and a lasting though fragile stability eventually settled in the country.

Ishikawa didn't bother lamenting on the events too much after, too busy with the military duties and assignments that continued to pile on his post while on peacekeeping duties, and again when he returned to Japan.

It wasn't until years later that he encountered that term again. In a bloody photo from a news report out of Latin America, from a low-intensity conflict. The letters were scrawled out in the blood of dead cartel fighters, discovered by police after reports of gunfire from a local warlord's estate.

Xolotl, and once more – Ishikawa was reminded of the strange, comatose boy he discovered in a rural jungle village so many years before.