Kazundo Gouda

Gouda's most striking feature is a badly scarred, bald head that he pointedly declines to fix, even though prosthetic replacements are cheap and easy to obtain. He favors black attire: a dark suit and matching leather gloves, sometimes finished with a fedora, sunglasses, and a long trench coat that lend him an urbane, faintly theatrical air. His eyes do not match, the right a pale blue and the left brown. In manner he stays composed, speaking with deliberate professionalism.

Outwardly Gouda is courteous and articulate, but the polish conceals a manipulative, amoral core. He is smug and condescending, forever raising himself up by belittling those around him, which quickly earns the distrust of Section 9 and Batou in particular. Beneath the sophistication is a man who was unremarkable before power ever found him, and that buried inferiority swells into a grandiose delusion in which he casts himself as a near-divine deliverer of his country.

The confidence, however, is brittle. He is thin-skinned and quick to rage, and he lashes out when Batou taunts him that Kuze, supposedly his puppet, has become deadlier than the man who made him. So sure of his own genius, he even threads his personality into the Individual Eleven virus, arranging to act through a proxy he deems more capable while keeping the credit for himself.

A field accident forced cybernetic reconstruction on Gouda and left him badly disfigured, yet he refused the simple prosthetic repairs that could have restored his face. Installed as head aide to the Strategic Influence Investigatory Committee within the Cabinet Intelligence Service, he first approaches Aramaki with a strategy to safeguard the residents of the refugee district. The post grants him broad reach and a useful ally in Chief Cabinet Secretary Takakura, who backs him to advance his own ambitions. Before long, Section 9 marks Gouda as the prime suspect behind the Individual Eleven affair.

He is the architect of that entire crisis. Exploiting the raw tension surrounding Japan's postwar refugees, he sets out to manufacture the upheaval that will topple the standing order. He circulates a forged eleventh essay credited to the invented philosopher Patrick Sylvestre, a text laced with a cyberbrain virus that drives each reader through a fixed terrorist script: killing the refugee idol and cyber-rapper Densetsu, moving against Prime Minister Yoko Kayabuki, and finally dying together at the Selecon Tower. Twelve of the strongest infected complete the scenario, each convinced he acts on his own conviction. The virus is tuned to take hold in virgins, and Gouda picks his intended hero by forcing the candidates to fight to the death, leaving the combat cyborg Hideo Kuze as the lone survivor.

The design calls for Kuze to inflame the refugee cause, and he does, rallying Dejima behind him, though out of a genuine belief that predates the virus rather than anything Gouda planted. Gouda quietly assists, cutting Nagasaki's power so Kuze can slip a naval blockade, while making sure the promised weapons-grade plutonium never actually reaches the refugees. His true aim is to push the conflict until public fury shatters the government, clearing a path for an administration friendly to the American Empire, fresh Cold War tension in the region, and a compliant Japan stripped of autonomy. He very nearly wins: Kayabuki is briefly ousted and a coup stirs as the military storms Dejima. What he fails to foresee is the sheer unpredictability of Kuze, Motoko, and the Tachikomas, whose sacrifice and rescue of the refugees halt the assault. Cornered, Gouda bargains for asylum with the American Empire and tries to exploit a loophole that lets a confessed criminal leave the country. Section 9 counters with written authority from Kayabuki empowering them to keep his talents out of foreign hands. Certain they are bluffing, he waves them off, and Motoko puts a round through his head.