Sometimes I don’t know if we’re really benefiting from this thing called technology. When you’re doing police work, for example. I have some serious doubts. I mean, everything we use, the most injurious guys can, too. In fact, I often wonder if they don’t put it to better use. The case from the other day really drives it home. But I guess there’s no going back. That’s the thing with technology. Once it’s developed, you can’t backtrack.

Okay, this last case. I don’t know how to put it, but it was exhausting. It made me question to what extent the police ought to bother with what these types get up to. Well, I understand that a detective shouldn’t say that. Huh? The entirety of this exchange is on the record? Come on, I know that.

What, you don’t like my attitude? Hey, I’d usually care about Internal Affairs people and act like a true cop, but I just can’t get into the mood. Yeah, my buddy must feel the same way. He’s been quiet this whole time and won’t even meet your eyes. Stop kidding? Do I look like I’m kidding?

Oh, I’m coming across as insubordinate? Impossible. I wasn’t betraying any such tendency. Why would I? I’m too old to rebel just because. Well, it might be that I’m not on any sort of promotion track. Frankly, it’s high time I quit. I would’ve a long time ago if it weren’t for my buddy.

Ah, the case. You’ve read the investigation progress report, haven’t you? No, I had a robot input them. Even we police have lots of those things these days. Huh? The usual term is “bodies”? Uh, I don’t know if I could get used to that. It just sounds so raw. Not that “people” would do. Something like “pups” would be even worse, like we’re making fun of them. They actually do scare me, you know. Like they’re multiplying on their own. Yeah, the robots. I can’t help but picture the precinct overflowing with ones that you can’t tell apart from us. Maybe humans will be in the minority soon.

Yup, I gave a dictation to one of those things, or bodies. The robot’s serial number is right there in the report, so go ahead and search its cyberbrain. Huh? It’s not called a “cyberbrain” if they’re robots? What should I call it, then? Oh, a neurochip processor. An NP, eh? Non-Player. That’s kinda old-fashioned. Nah, don’t mind me. Back when I was a kid, programmed characters used to be called that. In games. Gone out of fashion, though.

Uh huh. I’ll discuss the investigation. The précis of this case is, first, a murder attended with robbery. At least that’s how the investigation began. Second, the theft of a special-use prosthetic body. Third, irregular corporate accounting.

We weren’t sure whether or not to add serial murder. We said forget about it because that’s what the CIS chief told us, too. I mean, right? A murder is a murder, but the issue is the murderer.

The first victim was Kozo Iriyama. Seventy-nine years old. User of a full-body prosthesis for the elderly, had the outer appearance of someone in his thirties. The third CEO of the sporting goods manufacturer Signet, he was found dead at the company’s factory. Shot with a high-caliber bullet from behind, his brain shell was smashed, and he was identified as Mr. Iriyama via blood obtained from the artificial spine. It was obviously murder.

Four prosthetic bodies intended for sporting use had vanished from the factory before being shipped out, all of them female models. They were for Olympic athletes—two for figure skating, two for track and field. Incredibly expensive and ferociously high-performance.

The order was from the Prosthetic Meet Club, and an insurance investigation organization affiliated with the Olympics is managing the funds. The selected women athletes that the products were meant for lodged a complaint that they couldn’t compete without the right prosthesis.

As usual, we and the media shared info, scratching each other’s backs. It seems to have been all over the news. No, I didn’t watch any of it. My doing so would have changed nothing. Too bad for the athletes who’d been training for the Olympics, but I assumed the prostheses had already been disassembled and sold off in the black market.

My buddy and I pursued sales routes for the stolen prostheses. Special ones that merit insurance claims have multiple tracking functions in case they’re stolen. Electronic tracking devices get disarmed if the thief has the know-how, but there are other ways.

Yup, colors, sounds, odors. They trigger when the product is taken out of the factory before the safety is unlocked. For instance, giving off sounds and smells that humans can’t detect. Sometimes it’s a transparent marking liquid leaking out. It becomes visible when it’s illuminated with filtered light, and once it gets on you, you can’t get it off without a dedicated specialist.

My buddy and I focused on the odors. We dropped by the homes of the black-market guys and all.

As you can see, both my buddy and I are cyborgs, too. Don’t tell me you didn’t check out the files on us, too. Ah, why is the make five years old? I tried out some of the police-use prosthetics. I even ran a simulation using the newest model. I didn’t think it’d be any good even against a pickpocketing brat, so I told maintenance that I’d make do with my current body. My buddy didn’t seem to be taking to the new one, either.

Right. Our eyes, ears, and nose are special-duty. I use my eyes, this guy his ears and nose, for tracking. That’s how Hound Team operates. We parcel out the five senses.

That’s because the enemy lays traps. Purposely scattering inks and scent trails that resemble tracking material just to mess up the investigation. We don’t want to get suckered by their lame tactics, so we maintain separate perspectives in pursuing the enemy. If my buddy and I feel inclined to go off in different directions, then there’s a possibility that they’re messing with us.

But this time we were misled in a new way. The details are in the report, but we couldn’t even find a trace of the stolen prostheses after hitting all the black-market dealers.

I wondered if they were sealed up and transported whole to somewhere overseas. Yeah, it’s rare. Of course it’s safer to fence it domestically. Who’d want to go through customs carrying not just one but four prosthetic bodies?

But these products were special ones for the Olympics, so I did suspect that a foreign broker might be involved. Turned out the involved party wasn’t any broker, but mercs. A quartet of men had been hired to rub out Mr. Iriyama. These professional thugs want to make a living killing people even though the war’s over, and one of them was found dead harbor-side.

How was the scene? Well, “fucked up” doesn’t begin to describe it. It was a boathouse by the containers sector, but you couldn’t tell which bits were boathouse and which were corpse. The murder victim had worn a buffed-up full-body prosthesis. Still, the forensics people were at a total loss despite their small mountain of analytic robots. It was that fucked up. The scene was god-awful.

No, it wasn’t explosives, though we thought so at first, too. A boat engine did explode, but that was just like the topping. The forensic investigation revealed that the ugliness was thanks to cyborg-on-cyborg combat.

And the same investigation also turned up a scent trail. The kind emitted by a stolen prosthesis. A scent, and also one of those special marking fluids.

That’s why my buddy and I were called to check out the harbor, and boy, was I surprised. One of the stolen prostheses showed up on the harbor area’s surveillance footage. Not because the dead merc was transporting it. The thing was dressed and walking on its own. They’d put some clothes on it prior to shipment, and it was still wearing them.

You know, this was one beautiful prosthetic body. The ones made for pro sports do look pretty, if you don’t mind my saying. They catch your eyes and are certainly easy on them. But this was something else. It was frighteningly beautiful. What was in it must be the reason why I felt that way. Anyway, it was otherworldly.

Uh huh. Speaking of which, the very fact that it was moving was otherworldly, too. I mean, a supposedly empty prosthesis was walking around on its own. That’s not all. The forensics people’s investigation concluded that the merc had been killed by that prosthesis.

Isn’t it confusing? We thought we were investigating a murder attended with robbery. My buddy and I were chasing after the stolen goods. But the stolen goods had killed the killers. As though to avenge the CEO—which was actually the truth of it.

The question was whose brain the prosthesis contained. This was an Olympic model, okay? Average people can’t handle one. With prostheses, high performance isn’t always good. My brainpower, for example, wouldn’t be up to it.

But whoever it was had exercised its full potential and tore apart, with bare hands, a feller in a tuned-up prosthesis who killed people for a living.

You bet I was wary. Imagining who might be in it sent chills up my spine. ’Cause my buddy and I, we had to go after this individual.

Well, we actually found the first one without having to risk our skins. It was abandoned in a garbage dump in the old city not far from the crime scene. A neighbor reported it. Right, there was no brain. Empty.

Then the next killing happened. This time, two of that quartet got offed. The crime scene was even more gruesome than the first, like they went on a rampage or just nuts. The apartment building is in a seedy part of the old city and was being rented from some gangster. It was as if someone had thrown the whole room into a jet turbine. The forensics analysis revealed that it was another prosthetics fight. They also found a second scent trail. From a stolen prosthesis—the previous one had been for figure skating, while this baby was for track meets.

Thanks to one of the hard drives in the room, we learned that the mercs had been hired to kill the CEO. We didn’t know who had hired them, but they’d gotten their hands on the factory layout map to plan out the murder. I mean of the factory where Mr. Iriyama’s corpse was found.

The prosthesis was found on the same day. It was the second stolen product, and empty again. The smart money would’ve been on someone switching out prostheses to go around avenging the murdered CEO, but no amount of reasoning could explain the oddness of it. I had a sick feeling that something weird was going on.

Anyone could tell that this wasn’t just a murder attended by robbery. My buddy and I kept chasing after the prostheses, but by that point the very nature of the investigation was totally different.

We needed to dig deeper for info on Mr. Iriyama, the CEO, to identify who had hired the mercs and who had killed them. All the other detectives with us joined the investigation. The CIS chief even got in touch with the Ministry of Defense because it might be classified as anti-corporate terrorism. Plus, it could have an adverse effect on the Olympics, so even though the only victims were the CEO and the hit men, the case got bigger and bigger.

But you know, my buddy and I, we had a hunch what this might be. That’s why we broke off from following the stolen prosthesis’ scent trail and started looking into the company.

These firms that develop and manufacture prostheses tend to be up to other stuff, you see. Once we looked into it, what would you know—well, no direct dealings in illegal items. They were subtler than that. They did business that was on the borderline of the law.

The question was the purpose of the money they earned that way. Tons of foreign corporations still try to profit from war, right? No compunctions at all about infringing on international law. That’s where the money was being channeled. They were handing not just cash but prosthetic tech they’d developed to folks our country tells us not to do any business with, so it was clearly criminal. It violates national protection statutes and you could even be accused of treason. Who’s that desperate to become a billionaire? I guess you get a little greedy and then find that you can’t back out and end up going all the way. A chump like me can only imagine.

Actually, it wasn’t that the CEO was steeped in crime. Not that he was squeaky clean. The bad apple, though, was the company’s financial manager. The CEO caught on to it and chose an effective means of ridding his firm of dangerous elements—a merger with a foreign firm. There’d be a third-party audit, and the financial manager must have panicked. So he contracted mercenaries to kill the CEO, hoping the merger would get scrapped.

Why would he bother to hire mercs? Well, because the CEO was the same breed. Diversifying as he did during the war and growing the company to that size, he’d had a few scrapes and spent a fortune on personal security. No street thug was gonna bring him down. That’s why the financial manager tried to kill him by contracting top-drawer assassins.

The business the CEO did during the war? There were a few, but developing animal cyberbrains and prosthetics, for instance. It became an issue after the war, didn’t it? Nowadays, some families turn even their pet dogs into cyborgs, but those were legitimate weapons during the war. Besides, if you don’t do a massive number of tests on animals before you try it on people, I suppose you’re never going to churn out a lineup of these high-performance prostheses. Hey, if you want to know more, email an animal rights website and ask for their brochure or something.

You’re asking me if they developed anything worse? This was wartime. Heaps of stupid shit—in terms of what the CEO trafficked in, you have converting animal brain afflictions into a cyberbrain program and installing it on humans. Some dogs have this innate cerebral defect where they can’t manage their anger, for example.

It’s called the Springer Rage Syndrome. They named it that because the condition was first observed in that particular breed of dogs. It’s not like all springers fly off the handle. A few of them suffer from the illness, that’s all.

It’s a form of epilepsy, and they suddenly exhibit aggressive behavior after something sets them off. Dogs actually don’t attack that easily. They do try to warn and intimidate. The ones who’ve got this sickness, though, aren’t even aware that they’re attacking. It’s a brain affliction, you see. After going insane and attacking indiscriminately, they go into a daze and don’t remember what they’ve done.

You turn this sickness into a cybernetic program and use it on people. It’s a kind of cyberbrain virus. I heard it saw some action during the war. Say you stream it into your target’s family member, or their cyborg dog, as a matter of fact. Goodbye, peaceful dinner table, hello, site of a gruesome massacre. What’s more, the poor sod you fed the virus to can’t explain his behavior. You weren’t manipulating his ghost. His cyberbrain got sick, so it’s literally a virus.

How did I find out? Well, I asked one of their animal prosthetics engineers. He said he was the oldest face at the company. Elderly type, pretty rare these days. Right, it wasn’t his biological body. He preferred to come across as an old man. Me too, I thought it was just his taste in prosthetics.

It was that man who told me. He told me all sorts of stuff. Like about the CEO’s pet dog. And right beside him was this ridiculously large canine cyborg. One of the company’s old research models, apparently. It was bigger than my buddy.

He also went on about some weird shit. I’m just gonna repeat what he said: The ghost of the murdered CEO is drifting on the net, even now, and taking revenge by possessing prostheses that his company developed. Yeah, go ahead and laugh. When I heard it, I almost burst out laughing, too. It’s nothing but a joke.

You’ve heard of the third world, haven’t you? I mean in the sense of a world of data existing apart from both humans and things. I suppose you could call it occult talk. Our society used to be just the world of humans and the world of things. Man versus nature—by creating civilization, humans established a world of their own and treated nature like things, I think that’s how it goes. The idea is that in the same way, these things called data might grow and in time become independent of humans in turn to craft their own world.

It’s idle gossip, but some folks believe it. I guess it’s like religion. There are people who copy their ghosts onto the net before they die. Sure, the net is teeming with programs we have no idea who made for what reason, and sometimes they affect each other and morph into some other bizarreness. As it gets more complex, who’s to say something distinct from humans won’t be born?

Now. Damned if I know what to think about that.

At any rate, we had a pretty good handle on the side that wanted to kill the CEO. We needed to find the remaining pair of stolen prostheses before the last merc was slaughtered so we could shine the light on the perp who was executing the revenge. By then, various sections were on the move, and honestly I couldn’t tell which organizations were partaking in the investigation, there was so much crisscrossing info, but my buddy and I’s task, in any case, was to get on the scent trail of the stolen prostheses.

It’s a shame because we were on the right track. We even figured out where the last merc was holed up. Also where the financial manager had fled. It took all eight members of Hound Team, but we were too late in the merc’s case. The scene was even more atrocious than the first two. The merc had called on a couple of pals for some protection, and the three of them died like chums. Yeah. Very chummy. You couldn’t tell which bit belonged to whom. I’d rather not say more. Consult the 3D data that the forensics robots compiled, will ya?

Half a day later, at night, we found the third stolen prosthesis. It’d been dumped in a canal. My buddy and I were the ones who found it. A beautiful female prosthetic body that might have won a gold medal was sticking its head in a drain like a mannequin, and the sight was so strangely unreal. The tracking ink that it emitted had leaked out, and the canal shined green when I turned my light on it. I was reminded of that occult talk about the third world. Like if the canal, shining a funny color, was connected to the net, and whoever in the prosthesis passed from the canal to the net.

Personnel from our team got to the financial manager and took him into custody, but sometimes I think we ought to have left him out there instead of protecting him. No, it’s not just me. Because that thing appeared where we secured him, and there were casualties on our side.

When I saw it, I realized what I’d imagined was true. A frighteningly beautiful prosthetic body, dark hair neatly trimmed at the shoulders. It was wearing its close-fitting shipping clothes, a sort of skin suit. It came walking straight at us, barefoot, its movements odd but somehow stately. Like it clearly wasn’t human despite its human form. A carnivore’s gait is the best way I can put it. The whole time it was running amok, it was growling. Yup. A beastly growl. Werewolf! Something like that.

Of course I fired. I felt like I’d be a goner if I didn’t shoot it dead. But soon I found myself too stymied. To fire, I mean. Couldn’t even get my sights on it. If I just sprayed bullets, I might hit my teammates. I’d never once found the targeting program of police-use prostheses to be useless until then. That thing was just so fast, and it was like shooting at a shadow. If not for my buddy here, who knows how I’d have come out of it. Yeah. It was reacting to my buddy—to the hounds’ voices, rather than to us. That’s when I became convinced. It was a total joke, but there was no other possibility.

As you know, the financial manager made it. It was his good fortune that the prosthesis could only rage for so long. I don’t know if it’s the program’s setup or something about the brain that was in there. Springer Rage Syndrome—what was in there was a cyberbrain loaded with the virus. I’m glad I never ran into that stuff during the war. I’m glad there weren’t any on my side, not just the enemy’s. Friend or foe, hang out with such a thing, and it’ll turn on you soon enough. It was the essence of indiscriminate aggression. Maybe it was programmed to scram once the drive abated. It ran away, never slowing down. That nightmare’s gonna come back to me every time I see an Olympic prosthesis, I’m afraid.

Oh, right. The ghost lock didn’t work at all. The ones we have were no good against it. What’s in there isn’t a human being, you see. You need a designated one.

The fourth prosthesis hasn’t been found. It was a foregone conclusion that we’d be receiving another visit. So our buddy and I went to catch not it but the guy who’d tuned it. Whoever kept transposing a brain mounted with a rage program into four prosthetic bodies.

Yup. That engineer, the old face who knew the murdered CEO well—as the report says, he turned out to be the CEO. In other words, the murdered CEO was a remote-controlled prosthesis. The engineer was just one of the prosthetic bodies, I might add. They’re using far-out tech in the private sector more and more these days, I thought. I find it more scary than impressive.

What tipped me off? Must have been the longwinded occult talk he inflicted on me and my buddy. I guess he meant to say that he was still alive. Or he didn’t mean to say anything but simply couldn’t keep his mouth shut. The moment I really caught on, though, was when I saw that prosthesis.

The CEO hadn’t been installing himself in the stolen goods. Mr. Iriyama’s cyberbrain was in the canine prosthesis that the engineer had with him. There’s no way a human brain could make that thing move, so it’d been on semi-robotic mode. How the hell would I know how it felt? Ensconced in a dog’s body the whole time, he was being the CEO, an elderly engineer, and whatever, in turn. He couldn’t control that many bodies at once, so he switched it out by the day. I know he always needed to be on guard, but you have to give it to the guy for going that far.

Then who was in the stolen prostheses? Like I said in the report, it was the brain of the CEO’s pet dog. Figuring that he’d get murdered, he brought sporting-use prostheses to his hidden private lab to set them up as instant guards. I’m sure he’d have loved to sign up outside people, but funny expenditures are taboo when a merger is underway. Instead he deposited his pet’s brain in his own company’s product and injected a cybervirus, as a retaliatory mechanism. The prostheses had vanished prior to the CEO’s murder, you see. It’s been confirmed that he tampered with a few forms without alerting anybody.

I know it’s hard to believe—a canine brain being able to walk itself in a humanoid prosthesis. But it’s true.

And this case isn’t over yet. That escaped prosthesis is still on the prowl. According to the engineer, meaning the CEO, it eventually stopped listening to him. His intention wasn’t to wipe out those mercs but to safeguard his own person, he says, but whenever he let his pooch out of sight, it went out and killed someone, forcing him to swap out the body every time. You find that weird? Same here. He should have gone ahead and revealed that he was alive. He’d made too many enemies, I suppose. Not knowing who might be after him, he became too scared to leave that canine prosthesis.

A cyberized animal brain managing a humanoid prosthetic body has no precedent? Yeah, I know. Yet it’s possible, as it turns out. I don’t know what program the CEO developed. We’re still looking into it, but the man insists that it emerged on the net, which is why he’s come to believe in the third world.

Uh huh. A program that no one is known to have developed suddenly popped up and made the impossible possible. That’s the gist of it. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard. I don’t know what the truth is. Not because the last stolen prosthesis hasn’t been recovered yet. I suspect that even after it is, we won’t know.

So, you think you people can find it all right?

Hey, drop the act. The Internal Affairs guys, their probing is way more sinister. You people haven’t tried to cast my very disposition as a detective into doubt. Who are you really?

If I have any questions, I should ask Public Security Section Nine? Uh huh, I get it. I was thinking how big this is getting to be, but it’s shot all the way up to the national security level, huh? Looks like my buddy and I will be humbly handing things over to you.

No, I don’t mind. You know, I’m not in the mood to be pissed off because someone snatched a case from right under our noses. Not when we’re dealing with a monster. If anything, you have my sympathy.

My buddy? Ah, he’s not a springer. A Labrador. Must be hard to tell since he went the prosthetic route after he got old. No springer serves as a K-9. Regulations, always been that way. I haven’t heard of any even for part-time commissions.

What? Do I believe in the third world? Like I said, I don’t know. If the net, the world of data, really gave birth to something, and it began to exert something like a will, I bet it’d stay away from humans. At least, from humans who’d escape into a canine prosthesis and put a dog’s brain into a human prosthesis to take revenge. Maybe that’s true of you and me, too. It wouldn’t find us any safer.

My buddy and I have been together for the longest time. In the beginning, I felt like I had to teach him. The rules. Not just for living in society, but for contributing to it. But I think I’ve come to owe him more than he owes me. You could say he’s been yanked out of nature by human hands, but he’s been good enough to live in fealty to our society. Meanwhile, we treat nature like shit. Calling it the world of things, for starters. I don’t know if technology will give rise to a world of data, but if it does and starts to treat the human world like shit, do we have any right to complain? No, I haven’t thought through it, and I hope I never have to. It just puts me in that kinda mood, okay?

I do have a gut feeling about where we’re headed. What we think is convenient is going to be using us for its convenience. Bought and paid for, with our own money. I don’t mean to lambaste technology. It’s just that we’ll learn a lesson that in the end it’s about the worth of the person using it.

The mass media are up in arms about how we ever let it happen. I don’t think that’s what this is about. Law enforcement being useless, corporations being unaccountable, rampant war profiteering for big bucks, that whole critique also applied in the past, and I’m not raising my eyebrows about it at this late stage.

I’ve stayed in this line of work because I feel like I owe my buddy, and I know I’ll only end up deeper in his debt but can’t figure out any other way to feel like I’m doing the right thing, that’s the honest truth of it. The right thing, it’s important. Without it, I’d be like a mad dog that can’t even explain to myself what is it that I’ve done.

Uh huh, I pray you’ll find it all right. Whatever’s in that prosthesis, do it a favor and stop it. I don’t think it can on its own anymore. A lot of criminals are that way, but I don’t think it wanted to become what it is. Well, probably no one ever does, but at least with humans, we need to pretend like our actions reflect our desires.