Major Motoko Kusanagi leads Public Security Section 9, an elite counter-cyberterrorism unit working in a 2030 Japan where cybernetic bodies are commonplace. Her team puts the ex-ranger Batou, the detective Togusa and the tactician Aramaki on standalone cybercrimes. Beneath those cases runs a longer thread: the Laughing Man, a hacker who six years earlier kidnapped a micromachine-corporation CEO on live television and then vanished. The logo he left behind keeps resurfacing in the hands of unconnected copycats, a pattern Section 9 comes to call a Stand Alone Complex.