Human Liberation Front

Cybernetic augmentation turned ordinary in the years after World War III, and in response a scattered grassroots cause took shape across the world. Its preachers warned that the danger was not conquest by force but a quieter erasure, machines swallowing humanity by remaking people in their own image. To the movement's thinking, anyone who swaps living tissue for a cyberbrain has already stopped being human, since a mere ghost cannot make up for the memory, mortality, and flesh being traded away. Membership swelled once Cyberbrain Sclerosis emerged.

The group read the disease as a punishment sent from God upon those who defy the natural order, and before long the authorities branded the front a terrorist outfit. Among its earliest strikes was the abduction of the young daughter of Tokura Electronics' chief executive, the first person ever fitted with extensive cyberbrain prosthetics. A larger assault soon followed against the headquarters of the Megatech Body research and development arm, an operation that handed Section 9 one of its first major cases. Even now the front launches attacks from concealed bases, still resisting both the march of cyberization and the stranglehold of the Internet.

For most of the organization's run its leadership belonged to a figure identified only as Zebra 27. He directed both the Tokura kidnapping and the Megatech raid, and he is believed to have died when the nuclear threat surrounding Aeropolis II reached its end.