Obvious disclaimer: I don't own Ghost In The Shell or any characters from it. GITS is a manga by Shirow Masamune.
Esaki Purin woke up in an unfamiliar place. She lay on a hard table in a dark room barely lit by the blinking lights of different machines. The table felt cold by her naked body, but it didn't bother her at the moment.
"What happened? Where am I?"
The glass walls of the table slid down with a soft hiss and Purin stood up from the table. She scanned the room but didn't recognize it or any of the complicated machines that were around her. She tried to go online to figure out what was going on, but realized that she couldn't - her cyberbrain only returned an Offline status. She reached out to touch the back of her neck but didn't find the lock she expected to find there. It looked like her cyberbrain's operating system was wiped clean and didn't have any communication software or public keys to access the wireless networks.
"Someone messed with me? Was I kidnapped?" She asked out loud and tried to remember what happened, but nothing important came to mind. She could recall in perfect clarity her day at the Ministry of Defense University, how she finished her classes, said her goodbyes to a few friends, and went home. After that - nothing. The kidnapping theory started sounding more reasonable with every minute. Purin decided that she needed to escape, and went straight to the door.
She opened the door and looked around. Only empty corridors with bare minimum lights met her. She picked a random direction to go, trying to find the exit. The corridors didn't look like some kidnapper's layer, but more like a hospital by the cleanliness of everything, or a factory, with multiple rooms filled with different machines that she passed by. She passed by a room with a glass window and looked at her reflection. Everything as she remembered, a girl with pink hair and eyes, 165 cm in height, with an exposed lithe body with only glasses as her wear. No signs of bruises or other trauma that would suggest she was physically forced to be here. While looking at herself, the insides of the room caught her attention when she saw an expansive terminal through the window.
Purin went inside, sat at the terminal, and booted it up. It asked for credentials that she obviously didn't have.
"Megatech Body?" She read the title of the login screen. "Well, let's see what you're hiding." She smiled, pulled the connection wire from the console, and plugged it into the back of her neck.
What met her wasn't something she expected to see, she even gasped in surprise. It wasn't the first hack in Esaki Purin's life. In fact, she had a lot of experience in getting into places that others didn't want her to get in, and she was quite good at it, in her humble opinion. So when instead of a mental-visual representation of the machine's firewall that she was so used to, she was met with extremely detailed patterns of data flow and data banks that she had never seen before, she stopped in her tracks and pulled her attention out of the cyberspace.
"What is that? Wait a second..." Purin looked at herself and examined her body. "A cyber body." She held her head in her hands. "And no brain... Impossible."
With trembling hands she started typing search queries in the now unlocked terminal, pulling up news articles and other relevant information. She read one of the first articles with a shocked expression.
"In the 12th attack on government officials in the last two months, a suspect, Ministry of Defense University student Esaki Purin, 22 years old, was killed by security. The police are investigating these attacks as an act of terrorism from an unknown group."
"Killed..." Purin touched her wet cheek in shock.
She dove inside her cybermind to see for herself, and once again saw what she had seen before, but never expected to see inside her own mind. Instead of a normal mess of memories, connections, and layers of a normal cyberbrain, she was met with rows and rows of memories, neatly arranged and sorted like in a database.
"This is... my memory backup from a cold storage." She dove deeper to her core - a virtual sphere representing her brain and personality. "No ghost line... So I really... died..." She returned her attention to the real world, took off her glasses, and started wiping the tears that kept pouring. "I'm a copy without a Ghost. A robot made to look like Esaki Purin." She was full-blown crying at this point. "But why am I so sad then?"
It took Purin a few more minutes to calm down, she stopped crying and lightly slapped her face with both hands.
"Okay. I died, I can't change it. I can only move on." She remembered why she was in the University in the first place. "Even like this, I still can protect the people in need, just like Batou-san. I need to figure out what happened, but that's a question for later."
Purin quickly downloaded missing programs and authorization keys into her fresh cyberbrain to be able to connect to the network and decided not to stick around Megatech Body any longer. She needed to move before anyone returned and started asking questions about why a naked girl was running around a military robot facility. Luckily, the exit wasn't far and she was able to get outside without any hindrance, most of the facility's protections were meant to stop people from getting in, not getting out. Despite being completely naked, cold night Tokyo air didn't bother her at all, a perk of a high-quality cyberbody. That didn't mean that she could just walk around the streets in what she was born. Or made, as she corrected herself with a tingle of pain inside.
She reached the locked gates at the edge of the factory. Three-meter tall steel gate and an equally intimidating wall separated her from the outside. She could try to hack the gates to force them to open but decided to give her new body a try. She jumped up and caught the top of the gate with one hand. Easily pulling 240 kg of her own weight with one hand, she vaulted over the gate and landed carefully on the other side.
"That's so unfair I can't believe military cyberbodies are legal. I should probably sneak towards my home to get some clothing."
She started stealthily walking down the street towards her home, but she didn't pass even a dozen meters when an armored van's wheels screeched to a stop near her. Purin jumped with an "eep" and immediately saw that two men were in the front of the van, one of them pointing a semi-automatic handgun at her. She raised her hands and her heart would've been beating extremely fast if she had one. A couple seconds later a huge man with an automatic rifle and tactical cybernetic eyes ran from behind the van, and lowered to one knee, pointing the rifle at her.
"Public Security, don't do anything stupid and get into the van." He shouted.
*Batou-san?* She almost said it out loud but stopped herself in time. Instead, she started slowly walking to the back of the van under the watchful gaze and aim of the men around her. *Ah, I would've been embarrassed being naked like this, if not for the guns pointed at me!*
"Ouch!" She screamed as Batou held her from behind and put a cyberbrain lock in the ports at the back of her neck. With a crack of electricity, she lost the connection to the wireless network.
It took them ten minutes to get to their destination. Thankfully, on the way, Batou at least provided a large blanket to Purin to cover her body. When they arrived, she was led to a brightly lit white room with a table and a few chairs. There were simple pants, a shirt, and a mug of warm tea waiting for her on the table.
"Wear this for now," Batou said to her.
Purin hesitated for a moment, but when she realized that Batou wouldn't take an eye off of her, she resigned to dressing in front of him. *It's not like he hasn't seen everything already...* She hung the blanket on the back of the chair and quickly put on the provided clothes. She sat at the table and picked up the tea mug. Despite not being bothered by the cold before, a hot mug felt nice in her hands like it used to when she was still human.
She sipped the tea and was hit by sensations like it was her first time drinking tea. Which it was in a sense. The feeling of warmth and her associations with the flavor brought up pleasant memories, and at the same time, analysis and breakdown of the chemical composition and aromatic compounds filled her mind. Even simple green tea contained hundreds of different molecules, and it was overwhelming for her at first. But by the third sip, she figured out how to filter out the unnecessary information and managed to enjoy the tea. At that moment she was at least glad that her new body could enjoy simple human things like this.
After a couple more quiet minutes, the door to the room slid open and an average-looking middle-aged man with a mullet of light brown hair in a light suit came in. The door slid closed behind him as he pulled up a chair and sat across Esaki Purin. Batou kept standing in a corner watching her closely with his arms crossed over his chest.
"My name is Togusa. I'm a detective from Public Security." The new man introduced himself. "Are you Esaki Purin?" Purin replied with a short nod while still holding and looking intently at an empty tea mug.
Togusa pulled out a folder with some files and laid it on the table. It contained multiple photos and their code representations. Purin quickly scanned them and pressed her hands harder around the mug. The photos showed her dead body. Her dead human body. Including a scene of a crime with multiple bullet holes in her chest, a coroner's report, and a cremation log.
"Two months ago Esaki Purin finished her day in Tokyo's Ministry of Defense University, got into a train towards the municipality building, and on the stairs of it opened fire at the minister of defense with an illegally acquired gun. Luckily, minister wasn't harmed. But Esaki Purin was shot dead by the minister's security detail. The cyberbrain couldn't be saved and was cremated alongside the body."
Purin was shaking inside. It was one thing to read news articles and know what happened, but it was a different thing to see photos of her being dead.
"I'll ask you again. Who are you?" Togusa insisted.
*I need to come up with some believable lie. But if he's with Batou, they're likely from Section 9, so they will figure out everything anyway. Except even I don't know what happened!* "Esaki... Purin." She managed to answer quietly.
"Then how would you explain this?" He pointed to the pictures. "I was personally at the scene of the crime, and I can assure you, Esaki Purin is dead."
With a loud crack, the mug in Purin's hands shattered into pieces from the tension. Immediately, Togusa jumped away from the table, pulled out his revolver, and pointed it at her. At the same time, Batou jumped towards her and caught her hand. After a second of tension, everyone realized that there was no attack, and both Batou and Togusa started to relax. Purin though started to feel her eyes getting wet again.
A moment later the door opened again and a woman walked in. She had purple short hair, red eyes, and a weird uniform with open arms and part of her thighs exposed. She had an air of authority and confidence around her, which matched her commanding tone.
"Batou, Togusa, leave us alone." She commanded the two men.
"But Major..." Batou started to argue with her.
"I can handle myself against one girl, Batou."
"Suit yourself," he shrugged, and both men left the room, closing the door behind them.
The woman who Batou called Major sat at the table completely relaxed like she was in the safety of her own home.
"The cameras aren't recording," was the first thing that she said, which surprised Purin. "I know who you are."
Purin looked the woman in the eyes. "How could you know, when I don't?"
"Let's say that I had a hand in your... resurrection." She said with a smirk.
