Synopsis
Seven years after a devastating earthquake that left Tokyo almost totally destroyed, Linna Yamazaki moves to Tokyo from the countryside where boomers are rare or non-existent and makes contact with Priss Asagiri twice, once after nearly being run over by Priss on her motorcycle and once while fighting a rogue boomer with Priss in her hardsuit. Megacorporation Genom has been producing boomers, a form of autonomous intelligent robot, to help rebuild Tokyo with manual labour where they appear as roughly humanoid, as well as menial service jobs and middle management positions where they are anthropomorphic. Occasionally these boomers go rogue and morph into a new shape while assimilating nearby machines and killing humans.
Genom funds the AD Police, an autonomous police force split off the regular police, tasked with responding to rogue boomer incidents with heavy weaponry and powered exoskeletons. They are seen as incompetent and resent the actions of the Knight Sabers, a small group of women in hardsuits who are always on time to stop the rogue boomer, even going so far as to attempt to capture and kill the Knight Sabers. A small group of Genom employees, including high level executive Brian Mason, while unable to cause a boomer to go rogue are able to replace the core of a normal boomer with that of a boomer that is showing signs of going rogue and thus engineer rogue boomer events for the AD Police to combat. Through Priss, Linna makes contact with Sylia Stingray, founder and leader of the Knight Sabers and Nene Romanova, another Knight Saber, who works as a despatcher for the AD Police, explaining how the Knight Sabers are always aware of rogue boomer events, and becomes a Knight Saber herself.
While ostensibly digging expansive underground tunnels all over Tokyo as storage facilities for energy to be received from the Umbrella, a giant Genom space station in construction as a solar power generator, Mason is searching for the Sotai laboratory, a secret Genom facility believed lost in the great earthquake, where he hopes to find Galatea, the Sotai. Mason worked on the Genom project that created boomers and plans to awaken Galatea so that she can fulfill her function of replacing humans with boomers.
In flashbacks it is revealed that Sylia's father created boomers based on Sylia's brain and DNA, particularly the human-like protoype Galatea who is almost identical in appearance to Sylia, and that Sylia consequently has a connection with all boomers. When Galatea started function adversely she was put into stasis and Genom used an earthquake weapon they were developing for the Japanese military to prevent her influence from spreading outside Tokyo.
Mason succeeds in freeing Galatea. While first naive and innocent and in the form of a young Sylia, she begins to learn and mature and cause boomers to go rogue as part of her plans. She does this to the boomers in storage in the central AD Police station, when the AD Police were on strike due to Genom cutting all funding and plans for the AD Police to be reintegrated since Genoms plans were complete, eventually causing almost every boomer in Tokyo to be under her control, warping all buildings in Tokyo which had machinery present and leading to the evacuation of Tokyo, which is also isolated from the rest of the country so that there is no power available to the boomers. Galatea launches herself, now physically integrated with the Genom building which she fashions into a likeness of herself, into space to take over the Umbrella so that the boomers can be powered. The Knight Sabers apart from Sylia launch themselves into space with the aid of the Tokyo skyhook. Overpowered by Galatea, they find that by cooperating with their hard-suits (which are primitive boomers), they manage to form a union of humans and boomers which apparently fulfills Galatea's designs in an amicable rather than adversarial fashion, even as Priss thrusts a giant dagger through the giant Galatea's breast (and presumably core).
Priss successfully defeats Galatea and caused a massive explosion. The resulting explosion also created a powerful rain of neutrino radiation over Earth. Nene and Linna survived atmospheric re-entry, thanks to their hard-suits, but ended up stranded and naked in a desolate beach area. Due to the radiation rain, it somehow restored Mackey's memories and Sylia was able to have her brother back. As for Priss, while stranded in space, Galatea told her she can't die, just like God, she has become eternal and can be resurrected. In a usual situation, Galatea offered Priss the chance to return to Earth by allowing her to "join" (exactly how it was never specified) together; Priss' hard-suit grew wings and safely crash-landed back on Earth. The ending shows Priss singing a new song while naked across an unknown desert; it's not clear did Priss merge with Galatea or did she merely help her return to Earth. Many of the plots and sub-plots that developed throughout the story was never resolved; everything is open to interpretation: the fate of boomers, the situation with the Knight Sabers, Nigel's actual feelings about Sylia, Nene and Mackey's feelings towards each other, and many other plots within the story remains unresolved.
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