Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

Major Kusanagi and Section 9 are called in to resolve a hostage crisis at a Geisha house staffed by an android Geisha.

A heavy-assault multiped tank runs amok under the control of an unknown hijacker.

A series of android suicides prompts Section 9 to investigate the manufacturer.

An old friend of Togusa's named Yamaguchi is murdered after sending him pictures concerning an unsolved case involving a hacker known as The Laughing Man.

Section 9 suspects that the police investigators handling the Laughing Man case are using their primary suspect, a former Serano Genomics, Inc. programmer with a shady anti-corporate past as a decoy to hide some form of higher-level corruption.

Things go fairly haywire as Kusanagi suspects that The Laughing Man has inserted a virus into the police units guarding the Superintendent General.

It has come to the attention of the Minister of Home Affairs that Jenoma revolutionary leader Marcelo Jarti has been visiting Japan regularly every five months.

Kurutan, a friend of Kusanagi's, calls the Major to the hospital where she works to look into the source of a young girl's heart transplant.

Kusanagi enters a chat room dedicated to The Laughing Man. Various crackpot (and a few plausible) theories are passed around JFK-style as the chat room members view various bits of evidence from The Laughing Man case.

Marco Amereti, a former American Imperial Navy Petty Officer turned serial killer, has arrived in Japan and for the last two months has murdered several women by slicing the skin off their torsos in the form of a t-shirt.

The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare has been hacked into and classified material from their database has been stolen.

Early in the morning, Baton's Tachikoma self activates and leaves the Tachikoma storage bay to explore the outer world.

Sixteen years ago Aka Turkuro, the daughter of a pioneering cyber company CEO, was kidnapped by a group opposed to cyberization.

Acting on a tip, Section 9 breaks up a cabal of thieves hell bent on wrecking a Japanese financial institution.

Kusanagi's reservations regarding Section 9's Tachikoma units comes to a head.

Sensitive information has been stolen from a U.S. Navy base and the primary suspect is a former Olympic silver medalist named Zaitsev.

Major Kusanagi and Chief Aramaki are visiting London for an anti-terrorism conference.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Kanzaki's daughter has been abducted, and Section 9 is called in to investigate her disappearance.

After the events of PORTRAITZ, Togusa uses J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye as a starting point and develops a theory that The Laughing Man is after something published on paper.