Born in Heaven

With John Smith sealed inside a cryogenic chamber for his scheming and his attempt on Prime Minister Tate, the Major, Batou, and Saito rejoin the rest of Section 9. Tate announces that an inquiry into Purin has opened and orders the team onto standby, insisting a neutral outsider should handle a matter this delicate. Ishikawa and Boma confirm what their analysis shows, that Purin is a Post-human. Aramaki nonetheless doubts she answers to the American Empire, since a trusted friend had recommended her to him in the first place.

While Purin rests in the medical bay, three Tachikoma set out to reconstruct her past. Canvassing her neighborhood and probing her connected devices turns up nothing, and her apartment stands bare. The Section 9 archives reveal that she moved to MIT during middle school, graduated with honors, and later shifted to Teito University. A facial scan identifies Akina Murase as her guardian, and an interview fills in more: Purin lost her parents young, chose Teito to qualify for the Ministry of Home Affairs, and had been courted by the CIA during her stay in America. Digging further back, the machines find her earliest records deliberately wiped, leaving only one photo of Purin and another of a girl thought to be her sister, both linked to a March 2030 police file about a family slaughtered in Niihama.

At the scene the Tachikoma tie the killings to Marco Armaretti, a former CIA operative unhinged by an initiative called Project Sunset, and conclude Purin likely entered witness protection after surviving the massacre. Inside her frozen refrigerator they discover hidden servers holding her memories, including one where a young Purin wakes to Batou carrying her, then quietly eats a pudding cup as he confirms her family is gone and promises her a new identity. Moved to tears, the machines learn that fresh evidence has cleared her, and they realize the whole Section 9 team has been watching the entire time. They preserve her by building a virtual personality with AI Code 1A84, upload her memories into it, and then erase their own recollection of everything they found.