Battle Angel Alita: Last Order

Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, known in Japan as Gunnm: Last Order (銃夢Last Order), is the continuation of the manga series Battle Angel Alita. It is created by Yukito Kishiro and tells the story of Alita (or Gally in the original Japanese version) continuing her quest to uncover her mysterious past.

Sequel or alternative story?
Last Order continues the story of Battle Angel Alita's ninth volume, but diverges from the original ending. It ignores the transformation of Ketheres into a nanotechnological space flower, Alita's subsequent transformation into a flesh-and-blood human girl and her reunion with Figure. Instead it takes place after Alita is killed by a doll bomb in the final volume of Battle Angel Alita.

According to author Yukito Kishiro, he was sick at the time of making Battle Angel Alita and was forced to cut it short with an ending he wasn't satisfied with. After working on other projects and the manga Aqua Knight, he decided to go back to Alita's story in 2000. Originally, the story was planned to follow that of the PlayStation game Gunnm: Martian Memory, but its story is only used partially and sparingly, as Yukito Kishiro expanded and changed the story.

Story


Last Order begins when Alita is resurrected by Desty Nova's nanotechnology in the floating city of Tiphares. The city's dark secrets are brutally exposed, but it turns out to be a small part of a complex world. Going into space with new and old companions alike, to look for her lost friend Lou Collins and to find out more about her forgotten past, Alita is caught up in an interplanetary struggle between the major powers of the colonized solar system. Along the way, she forms an alliance with three of the Alita Replicas who have now begun to think for themselves, an unsavory superhacker, and Nova himself when she enters the Zenith of Things Tournament (Z.O.T.T.), a fighting competition held every ten years. During the course of the story, more background about the setting of Battle Angel Alita that was not disclosed in the prior series is revealed, such as how the Earth emerged from a cataclysmic impact winter that wiped out most of the population.

Setting
Earth is a wasteland after a cataclysmic solar flare and asteroid impact, which created a long impact winter and nearly made humans extinct. Some managed to survive and, with the help of a mysterious quantum computer, rebuild civilization to what it is in Last Order. The colonization of the solar system and complex politics between the now independent colonies have left the Earth surface cut off and underdeveloped. The Scrapyard and Tiphares are found in what was once the USA (specifically the area of what is now Kansas City). Tiphares is now a big laboratory for its much more glorious sister city in space - Ketheres.

Tiphares is a futuristic utopian city that is suspended several thousand feet above the Scrapyard. Originally, Tiphares was designed to be a prototype society that was intended to test candidates for the rigors of space travel. However, after the Cam Ranh calamity, Tiphares lost communication with both the surface and its sister city Ketheres. Now, Tiphares is mainly a source of living human brains that are integrated into Ketheres' quantum computing network known as Melchizedek. Ketheres is Tiphares' sister city in space, connected to each other through an intertially balanced orbital elevator. It is also connected to an orbital ring, which is balanced by a similar orbital elevator and space city on the opposite side. Ketheres is somewhat of a utopian human society. However, the peace that is enjoyed there is actually a result of a system of mind-controling computer chip brain implants and a ubiquitous system known as Unanimous. In order to be granted citizenship in Ketheres, individuals must have these implants.

Leviathan 1 was once one of five interstellar colony ships, but is the only one remaining after the Cam Ranh calamity caused by Alita's past self Yoko. It's now docked in Earth's second Lagrange point, serving as a space colony. The central hub with artificial gravity houses a whole city and vast war game areas, where people made immortal by nanotechnology pay to fight for fun.

Mars, the first planet to be colonized by Earth, is currently under a four-way civil war with almost every side secretly being backed by one of the major powers of the Solar System.

Venus is being terraformed with the help of a gigantic mirror in orbit, blocking most of the sun and cooling the boiling surface. A number of orbital cities form the République Vénus (Venus Republic) and provide homes for a race of transhuman people with grotesque physiques and a liking of vile debauchery such as cannibalism.

Jupiter is now almost completely covered by an incomplete Dyson Sphere. It is in this sphere where the Jovians, who have given up their human bodies in exchange for robotic box-like bodies, now live. The materials needed for the completion of the sphere come from Saturn's moons and the asteroid belt — the same moons and asteroids where Venus gets materials for its own terraforming projects, which leads to tensions between Jupiter and Venus.