Fukami

Fukami presents as a brown-haired male cyborg whose plain, workaday look suits a long-serving officer, letting him blend into the National Police Department without drawing notice.

At work Fukami seems an amiable, capable colleague, courteous and pleasant enough that Togusa counted him a friend. That easy manner hides a deep loyalty to his nation and its citizens. Determined to drag official corruption into the open, he gave up life and limb for the cause, yet his thin grasp of medicine kept the effort from paying off. The failure soured him, and by the time he takes Mr. Serano's life he does so out of a rigid conviction of being right.

The two men once served as close police partners before Togusa transferred to Section 9, until Fukami broke away to chase the Laughing Man conspiracy on his own. Its aim was to reveal how officials had pushed Serano Genomics' faulty vaccines onto the public to give the local economy a boost, but his trail went cold once the Laughing Man dropped out of sight. The case flares back to life in 2030, when Fukami passes Togusa the tip that reopens everything and then runs a hidden operation of his own beside it. He convinces a Serano programmer, Nanao Ei, that the man is himself the genuine Laughing Man, then slips into the hideout and murders him, leaving behind a corpse Togusa rightly reads as a fake. While Motoko, Aramaki and their team weather the government's Umibozu hit squad and lay the scandal bare, a fallen Fukami kills company head Mr. Serano. A string of details marks him as the first Laughing Man, and his example moves the student Aoi to assume that role, giving rise to the earliest true Stand Alone Complex.