Motoko

Motoko may refer to two notable uses in fiction and technology: Motoko Kusanagi, a fictional character from the Ghost in the Shell franchise, and the Motoko programming language for the Internet Computer.

Motoko Kusanagi, commonly known as The Major, is a cybernetically enhanced officer of Public Security Section 9 in Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell manga and its anime adaptations. She is portrayed as a highly skilled strategist and combatant with a powerful cyborg body and advanced cognitive capabilities. The character appears across films, television series, and novels, and is central to themes of identity, consciousness, and the relationship between humans and machines.

Motoko is a high-level, statically typed programming language developed by the DFINITY Foundation for building canisters on the Internet Computer. It supports an actor-based model and asynchronous programming, includes a strong type system with options and variants, and compiles to WebAssembly. Motoko aims to provide safe, productive development for decentralized applications and services running on the Internet Computer.

In usage, Motoko thus denotes either a fictional character in a major cyberpunk franchise or a practical programming language for decentralized computing, depending on context.