Gary Harts

Ginger hair and a matching beard framed Harts during his years of service. A severe fever bleached every strand of that color to stark white and left his irises a flat black. His body carried heavy mutilation by the time Section 9 encountered him: a botched raid on a nuclear silo had cost him the arm and leg on his right side, together with the upper left portion of his skull, leaving a stretch of brain uncovered.

Before the fever, Harts held a respected standing as a career officer, a family man who retired to a quiet suburban life with a wife and children. What emerged afterward barely resembled that man. He turned cold and wordless, gunning down his own wife when she tried to stop him from leaving. In captivity he moved with an unsettling, mechanical precision, folding a single paper aircraft and launching it over and over without a single miss.

Section 9 first learns of Harts inside a subterranean lab, where the intelligence contact John presents him to the Major, Batou, Ishikawa, Saito, Togusa, and Chief Aramaki as the first Post-human ever captured. Confined to a sealed cell and bedridden, Harts busies himself endlessly with one paper airplane. John explains that the specimen's cerebral wounds render him useless for meaningful study. A stream of algorithmic code flickers across the cell's monitor, and the visitors copy it, told it may be a communication cipher too degraded to decode.

The Major spots that Harts's attending nurse carries no cyberbrain, a deliberate safeguard so he cannot hijack her mind. Were he able to breach the facility's network, John warns, everyone present would fall under his control. John then recounts the man's descent: a fever left him catatonic for a week and turned his hair white, and though he recovered, his wife sensed something wrong. When she confronted his silent departure, he killed her. Days later he appeared at a missile base and tried to launch a warhead aimed at Moscow before guards brought him down and locked him away.

The visit turns lethal when Harts seizes the nurse in a chokehold, then transmits more cryptic data that corrupts the lab's systems. The Major realizes the cipher was a virus primed to seize control the moment an emergency switch tripped. Sentry robots under Harts's command storm in to free him, and Batou ends the threat by crushing his head. John later cites Harts to the reformed Section 9 as a foundational case study in Post-human behavior.