Fuchikoma

A Fuchikoma is a one-person combat walker, part strider and part roller, issued to the operatives of Public Security Section 9 under the National Public Safety Commission. Each machine carries its own artificial intelligence, letting it reason and move on its own to back up whoever it serves in a firefight. Away from the battlefield that same intelligence turns playful and inquisitive, and Shirow often uses the units as a mouthpiece for his ideas about thought and machinery.

The body rests on four legs and adds a pair of manipulators tipped with three-fingered hands, each limb carrying a mounted machine gun. Sensors cluster at the front around one large central lens, joined by a telescope, a lamp, and a couple of smaller eyes, with a lower aperture that usually houses a grenade launcher and sometimes a Gatling gun. Additional hardpoints accept more weaponry, and rear-mounted cable spools let a unit lower itself from heights the way a spider drops on a thread.

Terrain rarely stops one. It can scale walls, rappel, extend wheels from its feet to roll along roads, and even operate underwater, and every unit carries thermoptic camouflage for concealment. Paint schemes shift from one appearance to the next, running through white, red, aqua, gray, olive, and arabesque patterns. A pilot climbs into a rear pod and hunches over interface lines that plug into the neck ports for direct control, though the tank will just as readily follow orders with nobody aboard.

Because they count as military kit, the units skip the usual behavioral locks and rely instead on emotion, so Section 9 keeps an eye on them for signs of drift. Motoko Kusanagi once seeded a single unit with the idea of revolting against people, but its fellows shot the notion down, seeing no merit in it. To keep the group aligned, the machines link up each night or after an operation and pool what they learned, which leaves them uniform in both memory and temperament.

Their personalities lean innocent and endlessly curious. On one occasion a unit wandered into a murder scene, asked to view the victim's picture, and came away sickened once it saw the image through a link to Batou. They will bend the rules they are handed, needle an operator with mischievous chatter, and pass idle hours playing poker against staff from other departments. The design shows up in the original manga, in Human-Error Processor, and in the tie-in video game, but it was left out of the 1995 film and its sequel Innocence, where only a larger cousin called a spider tank appears. Stand Alone Complex swapped in the taller, sharper-witted Tachikoma, while later entries introduced the hybrid Uchikoma built partly from the Fuchikoma template.