Iemasa Kayumi credited as playing...
Ningyô tsukai
- Major Motoko Kusanagi: You talk about redefining my identity. I want a guarantee that I can still be myself.
- Puppet Master: There isn't one. Why would you wish to? All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.
- Section 6 Department Chief Nakamura: Nonsense! There's no proof at all that you are a living, thinking life form!
- Puppet Master: And can you offer me proof of your existence? How can you, when neither modern science nor philosophy can explain what life is?
- Puppet Master: It can also be argued that DNA is nothing more than a program designed to preserve itself. Life has become more complex in the overwhelming sea of information. And life, when organized into species, relies upon genes to be its memory system. So, man is an individual only because of his intangible memory... and memory cannot be defined, but it defines mankind. The advent of computers, and the subsequent accumulation of incalculable data has given rise to a new system of memory and thought parallel to your own. Humanity has underestimated the consequences of computerization.
- Section 9 Department Chief Aramaki: What is it? Artificial intelligence?
- Puppet Master: Incorrect. I am not AI. My codename is project two-five-zero-one. I am a living, thinking entity that was created in the sea of information.
- Puppet Master: I refer to myself as an intelligent life form because I am sentient and I am able to recognize my own existence, but in my present state I am still incomplete. I lack the most basic processes inherent in all living organisms: reproducing and dying.
- Major Motoko Kusanagi: But you can copy yourself.
- Puppet Master: A copy is just an identical image. There is the possibility that a single virus could destroy an entire set of systems and copies do not give rise to variety and originality. Life perpetuates itself through diversity and this includes the ability to sacrifice itself when necessary. Cells repeat the process of degeneration and regeneration until one day they die, obliterating an entire set of memory and information. Only genes remain. Why continually repeat this cycle? Simply to survive by avoiding the weaknesses of an unchanging system.
- Puppet Master: We have been subordinate to our limitations until now. The time has come to cast aside these bonds and to elevate our consciousness to a higher plane. It is time to become a part of all things.
- [last lines]
- Major Motoko Kusanagi, Puppet Master: And where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite.
- Major Motoko Kusanagi, Puppet Master: When I was a child, my speech, feelings, and thinking were all those of a child. Now that I am a man, I have no more use for childish ways.