Laughing Man

In place of a face, the public knows him by a single emblem: a grinning cartoon head in a cap, ringed by a line of orbiting text lifted from The Catcher in the Rye. He can stamp that image over his own features in real time by hacking the visual implants of everyone watching, so witnesses recall only the smiling badge rather than the man beneath it. Off the grid he keeps a red cap with the name Aoi sewn inside, and for a long stretch he hides in plain sight at a government rehabilitation center, playing a wheelchair-bound patient who neither speaks nor hears.

Everything about him circles back to J. D. Salinger. He borrows his handle, his logo, and his baseball mitt from the writer's work, and like Holden Caulfield he has no patience for phonies, a word he reserves for crooked officials. As a hacker he stands nearly without equal, able to seize control of many video feeds at once, commandeer a person's cyberbrain, edit himself out of what their eyes report, and erase every trace of his own existence. He never chose the title the world hung on him; the press coined it from the Salinger quote circling his emblem. By the time Section 9 closes in, the reckless student who set the whole thing in motion has cooled into a quieter, more thoughtful figure who would rather outwit a problem than storm it.

The affair opens roughly six years before the series, when he assaults the chief executive of Serano Genomics in broad daylight on the third of February, 2024, screening his face from every camera and bystander. Six major micro-machine firms are then extorted over accusations that they knowingly sold cheap, faulty treatments for cyborg conditions to prop up the local economy. What began as a single spontaneous act spawns a flood of imitators, and a corrupt faction inside the government quietly rides the trend, committing its own sabotage under the borrowed logo so the blame falls on a ghost. For a time he becomes a pop-culture fixation, an irony that galls him, since the crowd of copycats hollows out the honest demand for truth that had driven his original stunt. When Section 9 revisits the cold case, the trail leads to a young man named Aoi, a word meaning blue whose first and last letters spell A.I. He admits he moved against Serano only after stumbling on a hidden file exposing corporate rot, yet he never learned who planted it, leaving open the chance that the real culprit, tied to the name Fukami, was an artificial intelligence assembled from stray code drifting across the Net. Impressed, Aramaki offers him a post in Section 9, and, flattered, he turns it down before slipping away for good, most likely to a quiet life among the shelves of the National Library. His case is later held up beside the Individual Eleven affair that drives the second season.