The Major says it in Section 9's apartment: her ghost is continuous, unchanged, even though her entire body is prosthetic.

This isn't reassurance—it's desperation masquerading as philosophy.

In 1995 Tokyo, Japan had already lived through the collapse of asset value. The Nikkei crash had erased trillions in nominal wealth that looked permanent weeks before, and the anime doesn't allegorize that collapse—it literalizes it.

Uniqueness is the plot. Scarcity is the drama.

A consciousness that can be perfectly uploaded, copied, backed up, restored, and distributed across multiple shells has the same problem as a stock certificate after a market correction: there's too much of it and no reason to believe one instance matters more than another. Watch the scene where the Major pursues the Puppet Master. She doesn't hunt him to stop a crime—she hunts him because he claims he's unique, the only sentient AI, and the moment he suggests there's only one of him, he becomes the only thing worth pursuing.

Every other character in the film—the Section 9 operatives, the politicians, the corporate interests—they're all infinitely reproducible, which means they're all worthless. The film's production design reinforces this through identical high-rises, modular architecture, standardized prosthetics, and geometric repetition, because there is nothing handmade, nothing singular. Japan in 1995 wasn't wrestling with AI consciousness—it was recognizing that it had already become the first culture to lose faith in the irreplaceability of human beings, and that digital technology would only make that worthlessness official.