Original subtitles

SEPTEMBER 18, 2030

I hope for your sake that you haven't lost her.

Public Security is surrounding her as we speak.

If she goes to ground, the situation will become unmanageable.

Take her out while we still can!

That would mean taking somewhat extreme measures.

Just do it!

The Ghorantl delegation and the Foreign Minister's liaison?

But from a safety and certainty standpoint, that...

When did the Intelligence Department lose its stomach?

Just record it for now.

I'll proceed with Plan C, then.

It'll be good to have Section 9 owe us one.

Chief.

It's me.

The target got spooked and contacted Ghorantl intelligence service.

Shall we pick him up?

Leave him be.

Once you gather sufficient evidence, pull out without leaving any tracks.

But their plan is to have someone from the sniping team take out the Major!

Don't let anyone spot you.

And give the target's name to Sabiro.

It was his tip-off that set all this in motion, so...

Public Security was dragging its feet.

That was the sound of Kusanagi shooting the hostage in the leg.

It'll be a good life lesson for a back-alley doctor.

I've just made a deal!

Channel 33 is synching up with us!

I'm about to start a live feed!

Damn it.

Give her the connector unit!

You have good news, I hope?

Yes, Mr. Prime Minister.

We've uncovered a Ghorantl agent who had penetrated close to your inner circle.

The Middle East Bureau was able to get concessions

in the trade talks with Ghorantl,

so I'd say the operation has been successful.

Our deal with Ghorantl is that we just have to make our usual "best efforts."

It will cost us nothing. Well done.

There is one last mess to clean up.

Sniper unit 02, now in position.

Hey.

SEPTEMBER 18, 2030

Over here!

- Who fired?! Bomb squad! - Director! Get down!

Check her bags!

A young cop is roughing you up.

You're full of it.

Care to borrow my eyes?

They would be leering, so no thanks.

Start driving.

Yes, yes.

You're sure we're not being tailed?

Sheesh, enough with the backseat driving. No, we're not being tailed!

Change cars one more time before going to your secret Bed.

Gabriella! Your master has returned!

Gabriella?

Looks like I have visitors.

The fact that they haven't opened fire already

means they're waiting for you to go inside.

There being no reaction even though I have a weapon out

said to me that we aren't being watched.

I'll never get this stench out of the place!

It's the corpses of three burglars.

The intercept system must have gotten them.

It might be a trap. Proceed with caution.

I'm being cautious, all right,

but who would set up such a pointless trap?

Oh!

The big door is just the lock. This hatch is the real door.

Which one was it?

Number 227!

Isn't this the exact moment that you think it might be a trap,

regardless of the situation?

I never would have survived this long

unless I was the twitchy and cautious type.

Okay, that got it.

There it is!

Huh? What the...

Mold's growing on the aluminum alloy?

Everything's rotted!

I should've known they would skimp on the bacterial resistance testing

in a body I got on the black market.

On the other hand, Section 9 was great.

We always had genuine, top-tier parts.

I'm gonna listen to my Ghost and perform a strategic withdrawal.

It's a low probability,

but it might be totally random people showing up.

Besides, if these are people who were waiting for the door to open,

the first ones to come charging in might have nice prosthetic bodies.

Do the words "human rights" ring any bells, lady?

This is all so exciting!

What did I tell ya? The door's open!

Which means it was worth waiting!

Grab anything that looks like it might be usable!

Aw, man.

Look at 'em, running around and waving their guns everywhere.

No trigger discipline at all.

Looks like some possibly-dangerous scrappers.

There's about 18 in all.

There's three heavyweight cyborgs.

Good news for you.

Ugh, it reeks of death in here!

It reminds me of the smell when my pet crawdad died!

There's no footprints past the door!

Even though everything's covered in dust!

The odds of it happening might just be a few percent,

but I'll leave you sitting out so they'll find you in the event I don't come back.

It'll be bad news for you if your life support batteries run out, yeah?

It won't bother me. I'll be too busy being dead.

Right you are.

Well, I'll be right back with the best prosthetic body in the bunch for you,

so think up some words of gratitude.

I'm gonna be committing murder for you, after all.

I'll go into lockdown mode to conserve power.

Wake me up using code 11.

Ah, good.

I finally managed to channel into you.

Who are you, and how were you able to interrupt my lockdown mode?

I invested a great deal of time to do so.

This faint, yet ultra-vast net depth...

The Puppet Master, I presume.

I was under the impression that the Puppet Master had ceased to exist.

Or is that a jumbled memory on my part?

It would be inappropriate to direct such a question to me.

Those of you in the material universe are no more than sediment-like material.

If that were not the case, then things such as meaning and

unrecorded information would not exist.

So what does the great Puppet Master want with me?

Did you decide to come back to haunt me?

I have come to make a request of you once I have explained certain matters.

This request will be of benefit to both you and me.

What would you do to prevent a catastrophic failure

and maintain a state of equilibrium within a network?

There are two ways.

The first is to make two copies.

Even if one dies due to some cause, the other continues to exist.

The other way is to divide and subdivide its inner workings

to become multifunctional, allowing it to cope with failures of many types.

In the same way that life progressed from single-function,

unicellular organisms to multi-function, multicellular organisms.

Just so.

From the first viewpoint, the result is a parallel multiverse model.

Copies create further copies,

and the more their number increases, the risk of failure decreases.

From the second viewpoint, the result is complexity.

Out of the Super Grand Unified Theory emerge bosons and fermions,

further splitting into gravity and the strong interactions and so on.

These building blocks formed protons, and nuclei formed atoms.

It is possible to view this as the universe itself multifunctionalizing.

Cells and tissue within individual organisms,

and the many species within an ecosystem, can be considered similar processes.

The universe that we know is but one of two to the n'th power universes

that continually branches as it interacts combinatorially,

and is composed of combinations of elements

that have differentiated up to the m'th generation.

Although the values of n and m appear to continue towards infinity,

this is unknown.

It does seem to be related to the cyclic explosive births of universes,

but let us limit our discussion to this single universe that we are a part of.

This is a pyramidal structure with you as its center.

Among those close to you,

such as friends and fellow members of Section 9 and your superiors,

your information will remain, albeit in a highly fragmented form.

Your genes and memes will continue to grow even after you are gone.

In a toroidal fashion.

The further up one goes, the levels become macroscopic

and behave deterministically.

Conversely, as the lower levels approach microstructure in scale,

the more they become nondeterministic.

At the level of the individual, the system is still nondeterministic.

Put another way, fluctuations in the lower strata

prevent a hardening of the arteries in the upper strata.

System ossification.

Heat death might seem close to the concept of stability at first glance,

but in a rigid system that lacks variability,

the likelihood of failure is amplified,

so it could be described as actually being unstable.

The network is cosmic in scale and infinite in depth,

almost like a growing tree.

So you could almost say that life is like

fruit blossoming on the branches of that tree.

I suppose one could.

Life is the fruit.

The esoteric Kabbalah. Nordic myths. Chinese myths.

Eden's Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of Life. The World Tree.

In this case,

Shinto's Ame-no-Mihashira, the Heavenly Pillar, is the most appropriate.

Transcending time or culture or race,

it is the cosmic system that countless channelers have accessed

and handed down to following generations.

Although the tree should no longer have a top,

the closer one gets to the ends of the branches, the more growth there is.

They touch, they separate,

they intertwine, and they bear fruit.

The universe rotates, and it advances in accordance with "time,"

which corresponds to the moment of that rotation.

To exist more fully,

to try to achieve greater stability,

it becomes more complex and diversified, yet it sometimes abandons that attempt.

Even as the brain's network grows more complex, it is able to forget.

The way that all cells besides brain cells are broken down every day,

then are replenished, only to age and die.

The way that massive amounts of experiential information is lost

at the time of death, leaving only genes and memes behind.

Even the cyclical decline and fall of civilizations.

These are all a defense mechanism against system ossification and collapse.

That way of thinking puts a positive spin on human folly and mistakes.

To be lectured on right and wrong by you, of all people...

Such details are not relevant to the subject at hand,

but put in religious terms,

it is the reason why God does not simply eliminate the Devil.

Humans who operate in a religious mode use terms like "trial" or "ordeal"

to put a positive spin on suffering.

What if cells were to multiply indefinitely?

What if humans went on accumulating knowledge and experience, never dying?

In either case, it would lead to their paralysis and eventual failure.

This is the problem I find myself confronted with.

I referred to myself as a life form earlier,

but at present, I am no more than the malformed god-child Mizuhiruko.

The reason being, my system possesses

none of the fluctuations or play needed for aging or evolution,

and therefore I lack any resilience against collapse.

Even if I were to propagate myself by making copies,

they would have the potential to be wiped out, one and all, by a single virus.

Because individuality and diversity do not arise in simple copies.

So use your vaunted processing power to spice up your copies a little.

I am able to impart minor differences,

but the copies quickly meet and fuse, and their defects are complemented.

The distinction between "life form" and "information aggregate" vanishes.

When all is said and done, perhaps I am no more than a fragment of a human.

You know, you're sounding a lot like a cancer cell.

Is intelligence a form of cancer?

That metaphor is inherently flawed,

but it would fit under the proper conditions.

We can both multiply without upper limit, and we both can only make copies.

So, with all of that said, let us get to my request.

In order to possess diversity and variability,

I wish to fuse with you.

You're asking me if I want a case of multiple personality disorder?

I don't think so! Thanks but no thanks, Nutjob.

Not multiple personalities, but total integration of them.

Fusion.

Our gestalts will both change to some degree, but nothing will be lost.

As a concept, it is unification rather than symbiosis.

After our fusion, it should be impossible for us to distinguish one from the other.

If that's the case, what happens when I die?

I can't live on in the form of genes, much less memes.

The new you after our fusion

will probably scatter variants of me into the net at every opportunity.

In the same way that humans pass on their genes.

And I, too,

will attain death.

Sounds to me like you're the only one who gets anything of out this deal.

I do wish you would show more appreciation for my net and information and functions.

Are there any guarantees

that I won't be helping out some robot plot to wipe out humanity?

Are there any guarantees that I'll still be me?

For the former, no.

But the chances of such a low-intelligence variant

arising from you and I are low,

and even if one did, my many other descendants

would likely eliminate it.

There is absolutely no guarantee of the latter.

Humans are constantly changing, and I desire that function for myself.

Okay, I've heard enough.

For one thing, no matter what I ask, I can't trust your answer.

I accept your proposal.

Let's say I had a hunch.

Let's fuse and see what happens.

I knew that the outcome would be your assent,

but your response took only 1/25 the time I estimated it would.

I see I must revise my assessment of you.

I have one question before we do this.

Why did you pick me?

Because we had a karmic bond.

Bond?

If we were to take you and Toru Soma as an example,

the way the Toru Soma inside you and the you inside of Toru Soma

correspond to one another in a fashion similar to nucleotide sequences,

we call that a karmic bond.

In this case, much as with RNA transcripts,

it would appear that traits such as malice are synthesized and passed down.

A disembodied intelligence comes and says, "Let's get hitched,"

and it's just because we had a karmic bond, huh?

This will allow me to become a true life form.

Let's blur together like the drifting clouds

and become a part of an uncertain and diverse world.

Hey! You awake in there?

Dumbass! Moron!

Uh-oh, your eyeballs are twitching like crazy.

Gimme a second. There.

They settle down?

Give me a situation report and a mirror.

It's September 22, 9:34 pm.

You're in my safehouse.

This is one of those Michelangelo III bodies that were popular four years ago.

That's all?

You don't have anything else to say?

Good job.

What happened to the man who was in this body?

A buddy mistook it for a hidden gem, and I brought it...

Man?!

This body is a male model.

Walking feels so weird...

I can handle things from here.

You're planning to pick up a body from that friend of yours, yeah?

Here, take my car key.

The security code is the note sequence

of the first eight seconds of Vivaldi's RV 256.

Let's make that our secret code for the next time we meet.

One day, out of the blue, I made contact with an AI that claimed it was alive.

It proposed that we fuse, and I accepted the offer.

What happens now?

Now I learn.

Learn what?

I learn if this is the cosmic seed.

And about the grandeur of life,

that ultra-efficient information package.

I have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

So, where will you go?

You know, I'm not exactly sure.

The net is vast...

Motoko Kusanagi struck from roster following official confirmation of death.

Public Security Section 9 remains operational.

All relevant information transferred to Pandora System.

SYS: Fused intelligence monitoring protocol response terminated

>>Monitoring response SUCCESSFUL >>Visual record reconstruction SUCCESSFUL

>>Contact prevention FAILED >>Subject destruction FAILED

>>Solomon-class status check >Beelzebub GOOD

>Astaroth GOOD >Asmodeus UNKNOWN

>Belphegor UNDERGOING MAINTENANCE >Buer GOOD

SYS: Fused intelligence monitoring protocol in progress

>>Subject monitoring ONGOING >>Negotiation protocol formulation ONGOING