No Guns Life

In 1995, the movie Ghost in the Shell presented us with a visual dramatization about the borderline between human consciousness and artificial intelligence. We met Major Motoko Kusanagi, a sentient cyborg who has a personality and goes through similar feelings to us (“I feel fear, anxiety, isolation and darkness”), such as when being alive seems like an absurd phenomenon no different of a dream.

The film puts a question mark about what it means to be a human being and its relationship with reality, but mainly from an existencial point of view. We may ask if whether a person’s “essence” can be transferred to a cyber state, but these differences are essentially semantic/conceptual. We already live in a time where artificial intelligence is absorbed and normalized in all aspects of our everyday lives, and the rest is only a matter of progress.

No Guns Life (2019) is a Japanese animated series set in a mega-metropolis of the future where humans who have cybernetic implants are common and referred to as “Extended”. In the universe of the series, life is grim and dark. After a war, many Extended are former soldiers who resort to crime to resist. A mega-corporation (Berühren Corporation) who controls the city by developing these cyber extensions without restrictions. All others adapt to their needs. Thus, the series questions on the body as an instrument and swings between these principle of interaction in biology: symbiosis, parasitism, commensalism. For Berühren Corporation, everyone is replaceable.

The protagonist is Juuzou, an Extended Private Detective who solves problems caused by others Extended. His head is a revolver. In all characters we observe the format and conception of the cyber extension is a development of an intention. The implant is the determining element that gives the body advantages and without it, it is no longer a cog in the machine and becomes worthless.

Juuzo’s life takes a turn when an Extended renegade asks him to protect a boy named Tetsurō from the Berühren Corporation who wants to capture him. Juuzou sees that the boy has been the subject of many experiments: the tendons of his arms and legs, as well as the vocal cords severed, making him unable to move or speak for himself. Juuzou has a partner named Mary, a young woman who performs back-alley maintenance on Extended in a mafia-controlled immigrant district, one of the few places out of the Berühren corporation control.

The look of film-noir, intriguing jazz music, with a cyberpunk setting along with hard boiled literature influences, No Guns Life portrays what transhumanism could be like. In the character Juzzo, a mercenary detective whose head is a revolver deals with a direct conception of his purpose. In the character Tetsurō, a boy who has been experimented since childhood and whose greatest atrocities are made to justify progress in discovering innovative technology deployments. We are currently experiencing an early stage of transhumanism: plastic surgery, animal cloning, sex reassignment as well as the first steps of DNA manipulation. With the current advances in biotechnology, it is inevitable that humans will eventually upgrade the species. Filled with Extendeds, the series gives a perspective about the human being as an instrument, as a tool.

Utility has always created an identity problem, even without the mechatronic part. From the beginning, the human being created the concept of God to justify his actions, explained in reverse in the book of Genesis, “God made man in His image and likeness.” Man’s wills derive directly from his biological tools, and are now more broad than ever. And we have other innate biological tools that allow for many capabilities and skills, such as the brain, arms, legs that make us creators, builders, etc. What makes the difference is the conception of the world as will.

“My words are like an illusion, but I will not stop believing,
as this is the only proof that I am not a tool.”
Tetsurō Arahabaki (S01, EP3)

With illustrations here.