We follow Kusanagi on her hunt for The Puppet Master, a hacker who can access the ‘ghosts’, or souls, of ordinary citizens and carry out cyber-crimes by proxy. Now entirely synthetic, her original human body replaced and improved on piece by piece, Kusanagi is unsure whether her ghost still lingers in her man-made form: in the opening credits, her cybernetic form is assembled in a factory, and the haunting temple chant on the soundtrack makes the process look like a religious rite.