The Megastructure is extremely durable, with only a direct blast from a Gravitational Beam Emitter being able to drill through it. These layers compose the supporting scaffold of the City, known as the Megastructure. Without specific instructions, the Builders began to build chaotically and indefinitely, while the Safeguards' programming degraded into killing all humans without the Net Terminal Gene whether they wanted to access the Netsphere or not.īy the time of the events of the manga, the City has basically become a series of layered, concentric Dyson spheres filled with haphazard architecture, largely devoid of life. Eventually however, a terrorist cult known as 'the Order' released a virus that made all humans lose their Net Terminal Genes, thus cutting off their access to the Netsphere and their control over the Builders. Any humans without the gene who attempted to access the Netsphere were exterminated by a special task force known as the Safeguards.

Humanity controlled the Builders through the Netsphere, a hyper-developed version of the Internet accessible only to those with an identificatory genetic marker known as the Net Terminal Gene. In the manga, this is also suggested by Killy crossing an empty, spherical room roughly the size of Jupiter, suggesting that the planet had been there but was disassembled as the City grew.Īs revealed in the prequel NOiSE, the City began as a much smaller structure on Earth, created by humans with the aid of the robotic 'Builders'. Its exact size is unknown, but Tsutomu Nihei suggested its diameter to be at least that of Jupiter's orbit, or about 1.6 billion kilometers. An anime film adaptation by Polygon Pictures was released as a Netflix original in May 2017.īlame! is set in what is simply known as 'The City', a gigantic megastructure now occupying much of what used to be the Solar System. A six-part original net animation was produced in 2003, with a seventh episode included on the DVD release. It was published by Kodansha in the seinen manga magazine Monthly Afternoon from 1997 to 2003, with its chapters collected in ten tankōbon volumes.

Blame! (stylized as BLAME!) is a Japanese science fiction manga series written and illustrated by Tsutomu Nihei.

Blame!, Vol. 2 by Tsutomu Nihei