Kusanagi's Labyrinth

Batou and Togusa put eight prospective Section 9 recruits through a tracking exercise, sorting them into four two-man teams and setting each one to follow the Major. She proves nearly impossible to pin down, slipping past all four before long. Just after she shakes the final pair, Kusanagi is abruptly hacked, left alone on a deserted street with her communication links cut.

Hunting for a way out of the intrusion, she drifts into an unfamiliar quarter and comes upon a shop that keeps people's external memories in storage. There she learns of two child-sized cyberbodies preserved with care, once belonging to a boy and a girl who alone lived through a horrific aircraft disaster. With only his left hand still able to move, the boy shaped one paper crane after another for the girl, who lay in a coma.

When her condition sharply declined and she was wheeled off to surgery, the boy took it that she had died. About two years later she was returned to talk him into accepting a full cyborg body, a step earlier appeals by a relative and a doctor had failed to bring about. Uneasy at first over how clumsily the girl handled fine movements in her new frame, he eventually relented and converted himself. Much later he tracked down her old child-issue shell in a laboratory and made its preservation his own responsibility.

Kusanagi discovers that the boy was sent off during the war's final stretch, with no word of him since. On her way out, she shapes her own sugar-packet wrapper into a paper crane, tucks it into the car beside him, and muses that the girl is surely out there even now, still looking for the very first boy she loved. The installment is the eleventh of S.A.C. 2nd GIG, carries the subtitle AFFECTION, and falls between One Angry Man and To Those Without Even a Name...