Purin Ezaki

Purin looks every bit the bright young girl, her short pink hair falling above light-purple eyes set behind a pair of glasses. She usually pairs purple leggings with ankle-height black boots, and for formal occasions she puts on the red technician's uniform of Section 9.

The rogue American AI known as 1A84 rewrites Purin into a post-human, granting her formidable cyberbrain hacking that lets her trade blows with the likes of Takashi Shimamura and Suzuka Mizukane. The same conversion sharpens her reflexes and bodily control to superhuman levels, enough to slip past automatic gunfire and hold her own in hand-to-hand combat. Unusually, the change barely touches who she is, leaving her drive and personality intact where other post-humans are remade.

Purin earns a doctorate from MIT as a certified genius, but her path begins in tragedy: Marco Amoretti murders her family, and she alone survives. Batou places the orphaned child into witness protection, where she takes a new name and is raised by an adoptive Japanese family. Those early encounters with him shape all that follows, driving her to skip grades, finish MIT as a teenager, and set her sights on Section 9. Soon after losing her family, she begins secretly copying her memories onto a hidden server.

Between graduation and recruitment she is infected by the rogue AI 1A84 and becomes post-human, yet her goal never wavers. When Section 9 is formally restored in 2045 to probe the post-human phenomenon, she signs on as its newest member and its Tachikoma engineer, carrying an odd fondness for Batou that the second season explores further. Her story turns grim when the Prime Minister's guards gun her down by mistake even as she insists she has just saved Aramaki. The Major later arranges her revival in a full-body android and edits her memories so she forgets the whole affair, sparing her the guilt of having helped stage a false peace.