Takashi "Joe" Takagami is a Japanese computer genius living in Silicon Valley, where he works for the benevolent Rockford Corporation and waits for a Nobel Prize. One day, however, his girlfriend Judy doesn't recognize him and claims to be someone else. Decided to unveil the mystery, Joe hacks into a top secret computer system in the Pentagon, in which he finds out that things about both his lover and him are not as innocent as they seem, nor the Rockford is either. When bionic hitmen start showing up and dismantling his life, Joe discovers the awful truth: he is actually a sleeper android of mass destruction with an entire lifetime of Fake Memories. An one-man war against the corporation has started.
The series received a two-part OVA adaptation in 1991, a year after Takeshima's death.
This series contains examples of:
- Artificial Human: They are produced by Rockford, with Joe being one of them.
- Ax-Crazy: Joe's awakening is traumatic enough for him to become a wild beast for some time, attacking and raping a random woman in the road just because. He has no memory of it afterwards.
- Clothing Damage: Joe destroys his shirt the first time he hulks up.
- Cowboy Cop: Rudy Bochwits, the small police station cop that saves Joe from the first mooks, goes to protect him against superior orders upon realizing there is something suspicions on the matter. Unsurprisingly, he's quickly and gruesomely killed.
- Fake Memories: It turns out Joe's entire life is a lie implanted on his mind.
- False Friend: Lloyd Gardner, Joe's best friend, is revealed as his secret watcher.
- Growing Muscles Sequence: Joe's awakening as a superpowered android is marked by his body turning suddenly bodybuilder-like.
- MegaCorp: Rockford Corporation, a gigantic conglomerate of informatic and bionic business. Later into the series, the Hiura Corporation appears too as a third party.
- Nerd Glasses: Joe wears them at the beginning of the story.
- Projected Man: Joe's personal AI, Rose, once projects a naked hologram of Judy on top of him.
- Psychic Powers: Aya Rose, a girl experimented on by Rockford, develops those.
- Really Was Born Yesterday: Being an Artificial Human, Joe is literally one year old.
- Wrestler in All of Us: The Ax-Crazy Joe kills one of the enemy androids with an Argentine backbreaker rack.
