List of Blame! characters

The universe of the manga Blame! created by Tsutomu Nihei is home to the following fictional characters and locations:

Main characters

Killy as seen in Blame!
Looking to be in his early to mid-20s, he is a glum-looking person, never smiling (except madly when shooting on occasion) and has a slight slouch in his normal standing position, he isn't afraid to fight, and readily shoots the GBE. He also often shows superhuman strength and endurance, being thrown through solid walls and floors before standing right back up with no apparent injuries. The GBE is so powerful that he is flung backwards by its sheer power, often into walls and the ground, but he always gets up. Even in its lowest power, his arm jerks up and back from the force of it. During the encounter with the giant Safeguard outside Toha Heavy Industries, he fires at the Safeguard with the GBE at Level 4 Extra power level. The recoil from the GBE is so powerful that he is thrown back a considerable distance, his right arm badly broken and exposing bone and tissue. He heals very quickly, as well, recovering from more serious injuries much more rapidly than an average human. In the times when it's quiet, he injects drugs into himself in the forehead, and when he is low on power, he may inject it straight into his hand.
He has an electronic connector to create signals to stop Builders and to transmit information from one person to himself, and vice versa. He also has no memory of his past, or how he obtained the GBE. Killy distrusts Silicon Creatures on sight, and destroys them whenever possible; whether they are or are not hostile towards him or his objectives does not bear any weight on his judgement. In Blame!², however, he rescues Pcell (part of a new, relatively peaceful generation of Silicon Life) from the Safeguard, indicating either that his priorities have changed or that he no longer considers Silicon Creatures to be a serious threat.
Cibo in Blame! Volume 2.
Killy's first encounter with Cibo is in the lower levels of the Corporation in The Capitol, where she has been imprisoned for attempting to access the Net Sphere with an artificially created version of Net Terminal Genes. Her failed attempt to access the Net Sphere led to the appearance of the Safeguard, which destroyed the entire lab facility that Cibo was conducting the experiment in. The death and destruction resulting from Cibo's failed experiment led the governing body of the Corporation to convict and imprison her.
Cibo's first form is the decaying upper torso of a woman kept alive by machinery inserted into her body. She convinces Killy to take her with him by stating that he needs her hacking skills to access the files he is looking for. Afterwards, she transfers herself to a replacement body and aids Killy in destroying the Corporation's President. Following that, Cibo leaves the Corporation to travel with Killy.
She has a subtle connection with the Netsphere, but even if she were able to make a direct connection to it, the Safeguard would be invoked immediately.
Later in the manga, Cibo's physical body is killed by the Safeguard, but her mind takes over Sanakan's body. However, Sanakan's consciousness still remains in the body, forcing the two women to share it. Cibo is able to suppress Sanakan's mind, preventing it from gaining control, although on several occasions the Safeguard managed to take over.
After the encounter with the Silicon Life, Mensab and Seu, Killy is teleported to an alternate reality, where he meets Cibo in her old form. Both versions of Cibo face one another and wish to return to the original reality. During the attempt, the alternate Cibo is killed by a Silicon Life creature, while the original Cibo is severely damaged and Sanakan's mind uses the opportunity to resurface. When Sanakan discards away Cibo's genetic information (or mind), it is absorbed by the dead body of the Cibo from the alternate reality, leading to her revival in that body.
After Sanakan's transfer to the Governing Agency, a Level 9 Safeguard (the highest level) was illegally downloaded into Cibo, resulting in her ultimate transformation into the Level 9 Safeguard and the newly-bred Net Terminal Gene. The sphere that she stores in her lower abdomen carries the gene that can save the city if it's taken to its very edge where it can grow uncontaminated by the megastructure and its inhabitants. Sanakan mentions that the "child" is a product of hers and Cibo's combined DNA. Cibo is heavily weakened by Killy's GBE shortly after her transformation, reverting to a childlike state and eventually falling into the hands of the Silicon Creatures despite Sanakan's efforts to find and protect her. Sanakan asks for a return to the Base Reality without backup data, driven by a desire to protect her child and mate. She tears through Silicon Creatures to reach Cibo, and then encounters a First Class Exterminator. Killy destroys the Exterminator and recovers the orb, though the Exterminator destroys Cibo and Sanakan during the battle.

Other characters

Safeguard

The Safeguard are a program independent of the netsphere. The netsphere was designed as a means of providing service to those who could log on. However, the netsphere was thrown into chaos (the actual reason is not exactly known, but the prequel manga NOiSE implies that a small group of humans is at fault) and the Safeguard changed their modus operandi from preventing unauthorized users from entering the netsphere to killing off anyone who does not possess Net Terminal Genes. The Safeguard have nine levels of hierarchy, Level 9 being the most powerful. However, their Exterminator (originally the lowest level safeguard) system has a different form of hierarchy where "First Class" is the most powerful.

Sana-Kan in Safeguard Mode
Killy later discovers her true nature and she reveals herself as a level 6 Safeguard with a GBE similar to Killy's. At first, Sana-Kan behaves like any Safeguard intent on annihilating all humans without the Net Terminal Gene. This changes however, when she becomes a representative of the Governing Agency with the task of retrieving Cibo, who at that time becomes the illegal level 9 Safeguard unit. At this point, she adapts a more protective role.
Sana-Kan's physical body was destroyed twice in the line of duty; First in order to destroy the Toha Heavy Industries' Central AI and for the second time while protecting Cibo from Silicon Creatures. She finally dies when she sacrifices herself in order to save Killy and the globe that Cibo carried from an Exterminator. Sana-Kan has been the second "mother" of the child with the net terminal genes, along with Cibo, who was carrying the globe with the embryo. There is, however, a popular theory pieced together from fan forums that Susono Musubi from NOiSE is somehow closely associated with Sana-Kan.
Susono Musubi was a human during NetSphere's Beta phase, she was then captured and modified into a Silicon Life-form. The transformation was issued by the NetSphere officials (later the powerless Governing Body) thus the technologies were complete and superior in comparison to the Silicon creatures' knowledge from hacking the NetSphere archives. This is evident in both appearance and functionality. NetSphere body modifications enable the manifestation to maintain the outer appearance of human and self-repairing capabilities while illegitimate Silicon creatures do not.
Susono was one of the first original Safe Guards deployed by the NetSphere to stop hacking attempts and annihilate illegal Silicon Creatures made from stolen NetSphere technologies. The NetSphere was originally designed to be a dream-realisation machine for the good of mankind, as it grants the registered End-User access to God-like privileges, but it was perverted by the Society Elites who thirst for more power and longevity. Later overwhelmed by hacking attempts from rebel groups, activists and profit-oriented criminals, the NetSphere crashed and went into Self-protective overdrive, that rejected its terminal authentication and stopped issuing new End-user licenses altogether.
Susono's profile withheld in the NetSphere library became the Template that materialised into Sana-Kan, a sleeper type Safe Guard placed close to Toha Heavy Industries in order to sabotage the truce treaty Toha signed with the NetSphere. Since Susono was a Safe Guard before the NetSphere-crash, her digitized data was not categorized under normal Safe Guard groups. This is why Sana-Kan is the only Safe Guard within the NetSphere that the Governing Body had the administrative power to overwrite her old orders and assign her the new mission to protect Cibo. This could explain the sudden shift in Sana-kan's stance.
The Template theory also made sense of Cibo and Sana-Kan's NetSphere accessible embryo. Susono's DNA data from the NetSphere Archive is the only profile with an End-User license, combined with access privileges provided by Lv9 Safe Guard Cibo to by-pass NetSphere firewalls, their embryo could potentially connect to the NetSphere and order The City to stop expanding and reset the NetSphere Alarm Status.

Silicon Life (Cyborgs)

Humans

Minor characters

Factions or groups of note

Safeguard Exterminators seem to run on a different protocol of command than the higher level of Safeguard such as Sanakan and/or Dhomochevsky (though Dhomo did have a contingent of them assigned to him before Schiff destroyed them). At one point, the Exterminator Class One even targets Sanakan as it deems her a threat or obstacle, but does not decide to kill her. It is up to speculation as to why - perhaps either it no longer saw her as a threat, or perhaps it was because she too was a Safeguard.

Structures

The City, and the Builders, were controlled by the Netsphere and the Authority but they have since lost the power to control the expansion of The City due to the chaotic and insecure manner of its growth. Without intervention by a user with Net Terminal Genes, they cannot reestablish control over The City nor the Safeguards, whose original job was to eliminate any humans who try to access the Netsphere without Net Terminal Genes. The Safeguard now attempts to destroy all humans without the Net Terminal Gene as the degradation of The City has corrupted their true goals.
It has been suggested by Tsutomu Nihei himself in his artbook Blame! And So On that The City is actually a growing Dyson sphere of gargantuan proportions. Its spherical circumference is speculated to be roughly the size of Jupiter's planetary orbit (32.675 AU).[1] No evidence contradicts this speculation, and the prequel to Blame!, NOiSE, even states that the structure has passed the orbit of the moon. In the last chapter of NOiSE, it is stated "At one point even the moon which used to be in the sky above, was integrated into The City's structure". In Volume 9 of Blame!, a room is even revealed to have a diameter roughly the size of Jupiter itself, reinforcing the speculation on the sheer size of the Megastructure.

Plot devices

Notes and references

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