Imagine that you've been given the opportunity to design the plot for a "hard sci-fi" (meaning: realistic) Ghost in the Shell live-action film.

Everyone here can collaborate.

These are the guidelines:

1. The story is set in Niihama City ("Newport City"), Japan.

For the sake of continuity, since the 1996 anime was set in Niihama City, which is a fictional city in future Japan.

2. The characters are Japanese people.

For the sake of realism. Japan is currently:

Japanese 98.5%, Koreans 0.5%, Chinese 0.4%, other 0.6% [source]

• There are practically no non-Japanese living in Japan (~1.5 percent), mainly because of deeply discriminatory immigration policies. It’s not only that Japanese people like being Japanese — Japan actively excludes non-Japanese.

• Japan would rather spend billions to construct robots (that look like photorealistic Japanese people) than invite immigration to ease the looming population crisis. [source]

In a realistic future, it makes sense that Japan could create cybernetic gynoids like Kusanagi Motoko, and that she would be a person of Japanese nationality. An elite government espionage force in such a nationalistic country would almost certainly not admit outsiders to handle its secret affairs, so Kusanagi's teammates are naturally also Japanese.

Aside from that, your imagination can take the storylines, concepts, and characters from the GitS canon and invent a new story.

Using the guidelines above, we can imagine a new, hard sci-fi Ghost in the Shell -- the story for a film that, one day, might become real life.