Afternoon of the Machines

With Section 9's Tachikoma fleet pulled offline for routine servicing, the think-tanks drift into a philosophical exchange while the technicians work them over. Their talk about the Individual Eleven case and its motives gradually turns inward, toward the nature of the self and the odd feeling they have had of gazing down on their own bodies. Elsewhere, the Major, Batou, Togusa, and Batou's personal unit report to Spring 8 to collect the evidence that staff had gathered from the eleven dead members of the Individual Eleven.

A blast tears through the facility, and Batou, Togusa, and the Tachikoma rush toward the source. Told that a man named Asuda may have been inside, the team boards a tiltrotor bound for Niihama Airport. Along the way, the Major reveals that Asuda invented the Tachikoma AI and appears to be defecting to North America, chasing patent rights denied to him at home as a state-funded scientist.

Asuda is taken into custody in the airport lobby, and during the flight back to Niihama he shares a crucial secret about where the Tachikoma AI truly originated before forming a bond with Batou's personal machine. His revelation finally accounts for the units' out-of-body sensation: the current fleet's AI and central server sit aboard a satellite in orbit. He also admits to having slipped in a hidden program so the Tachikomas would instinctively recall him, a quiet bid to see his achievements recognized.

This fifteenth episode of 2nd GIG was directed by Kenichi Takeshita and written by Yoshiki Sakurai and Kenji Kamiyama. It aired in Japan on August 7, 2004, and in English on March 11, 2006, sitting between Beware the Left Eye and The Fact of Being There.