"Lord Saburo, the integrity test for the Relic technology was a success!"
On the moon, within a private recuperation room in the subterranean Arasaka Base, Saburo Arasaka slowly opened his eyes.
An Arasaka senior agent in an Arasaka suit was looking at Saburo, the joy on his face barely concealed.
Even upon hearing such good news, Saburo Arasaka's wrinkled face remained impassive. He merely gave a slight nod, his voice a bit hoarse. "Understood. Inform me when the results of the repeatability tests are out."
"Miss Hanako has also sent you a new message." The Arasaka special agent bowed slightly, then continued, "The lunar network has experienced multiple fluctuations recently. As for NUSA, Myers is still in Night City and has not left. We have not yet received any clear deets."
Saburo Arasaka slowly sat up from his sleep pod. The high-tech pod not only ensured the quality of his sleep but also did its utmost to slow the aging of his decrepit body.
The Arasaka special agent respectfully placed the medicine and water he needed to take daily beside him. Saburo Arasaka, however, unhurriedly got up first, and the agent instinctively helped him into his kimono.
"Understood."
Saburo Arasaka swallowed his daily regimen of various medications with warm water, feeling a familiar sense of disgust for his current life for what was not the first time.
To prolong his life, Saburo Arasaka, now over a hundred years old, had to spend the better part of each year in various recuperation facilities. Among them, Arasaka's lunar base was one of the places he now stayed the longest each year.
Taking medicine daily, undergoing regular check-ups, and even maintaining his vital signs by injecting various drugs and replacing artificial organs, such an existence could hardly be said to have any quality of life.
But Saburo Arasaka's mood today was unexpectedly good. After taking his medicine, he even had breakfast for the first time in a long while. Afterward, he sat down on the sofa, picked up a tablet, and dialed a familiar number.
"Hanako."
"Father."
Over the call, Hanako Arasaka's voice was filled with reverence.
"How is the situation with Yorinobu?"
"Everything is normal. None of the things we anticipated have occurred," Hanako Arasaka said cautiously. "Our spies in NetWatch have not provided any valuable deets either."
"Timid and hesitant, indecisive and overcautious, foolish and naive. That is what's most disappointing about Yorinobu," Saburo Arasaka commented on Yorinobu Arasaka without reservation. Then, he asked with a hint of interest, "Myers is still in Dogtown?"
"Yes." Hanako Arasaka's tone carried a trace of guilt. "Our agents have made multiple attempts to infiltrate or monitor Dogtown through other means, but that place has become extremely difficult to penetrate since Mercer took over..."
"Even Takemura can't do anything?" Saburo Arasaka raised his teacup and took a light sip.
"Correct. Dogtown is currently almost blanketed with various unmanned devices, suspected to be under the dynamic defense of a highly intelligent AI. There are virtually no blind spots for surveillance..."
After Hanako finished, Saburo Arasaka simply shook his head and said, "Let's not worry about that for now... Have you heard the news about the successful Relic experiment in Tokyo?"
"Yes, Father. I have already urged them to conduct repeatability tests. As long as we can verify the integrity of this technology and observe the subject's condition afterward to confirm there are no side effects, your rebirth can be put on the schedule."
After speaking, Hanako Arasaka paused and asked, "How are you feeling today? When can you come home?"
"That's enough. Do your job well; you don't need to worry about me." Saburo Arasaka was tight-lipped on the matter, only saying, "Today is the day for memory synchronization. Same as always, you are to watch over it for me personally."
"Yes, Father." Hanako Arasaka's voice trailed off as she bowed slightly on the video call. "I will be waiting for your instructions in Mikoshi on time."
Just from speaking a few sentences, Saburo Arasaka felt a bit weary. He ended the video call, took a few sips of tea, then leaned back in his chair and began reviewing the Arasaka Corporation's various business briefings and intelligence reports.
Unlike companies such as Militech and Biotechnica, Arasaka, while called a corporation, was essentially structured like a feudal empire. Arasaka was the family head, the emperor; everyone else was merely a minister, an aide.
Like an emperor reviewing memorials, Saburo Arasaka would inspect, approve, and review the company's various operations and progress every day. Just handling these basic official duties would take up his entire morning.
And he had been accustomed to this high-intensity work for nearly a century.
Only after dealing with his basic work did a tired Saburo Arasaka press the button next to his desk.
Before long, professional medical staff and special agents arrived to prepare him for his afternoon nap, which included providing lunch and conducting medical check-ups.
"Prepare the rocket for me. I've been on this moon for some time now. It's time to go back and have a look."
After Saburo Arasaka gave his order, the others immediately nodded and said, "Yes, sir!"
"Oh, right, I also have a memory backup today. Schedule the time reasonably." After Saburo Arasaka finished speaking, the others immediately began to act according to his instructions.
Today, the Arasaka lunar base seemed as calm and uneventful as any other day.
However, within this seemingly peaceful atmosphere, the silent terror created by the Blacklight virus was spreading quietly.
—--
"Hey, Koizumi, what the hell is wrong with you? Why was today's equipment check ten minutes later than usual?"
At the entrance of the Arasaka Base, the team leader in charge of maintaining and inspecting the external facilities was frowning at the Arasaka employee in front of him, who was clad in a fully enclosed spacesuit and hadn't said a word for a long time.
Koizumi turned his head with a slightly stiff motion. Beneath the thick helmet of the spacesuit, his expression was unclear. He could only be seen pointing a finger at his own head.
"What do you mean? Alright, hurry up and change out of that suit first, then explain yourself clearly. There's a rocket launch scheduled at the base today, and we need to do an extra check of the launch station. Don't waste time..."
Before the equipment team leader could finish, he suddenly saw the employee named Koizumi walking toward him with somewhat stiff steps.
At the same time, he received a message on his network communication device.
[Koizumi: Chief, my suit is stuck. You have to help me. By the way, here's a recording of the equipment check. I think there might be a problem with this piece of equipment. Could you please confirm for me?]
"Dammit! If you find a problem, you report it on the spot! Why wait until now? Hell, are you mute?"
The team leader berated him while turning his head to look at the other team members.
"What's going on with you all?"
At this moment, the team of employees who had gone out to inspect the equipment looked exactly like Koizumi, they hadn't said a word since returning, as if they were possessed.
The team leader suddenly felt a chill run down his spine.
But the team members just glanced at each other, then turned in unison and walked toward the changing room.
Their perfectly synchronized movements... were strangely like those of bots.
The team leader's brow furrowed tightly. Hesitantly, he opened the video Koizumi had sent, all he could see was the pitch-black starry expanse of space.
What the hell did he even record?
Before the team leader could react, his body suddenly began to tremble as if struck by lightning. After just a few seconds, he abruptly lost all his strength and collapsed to his knees.
Then, like a bot rebooting, he slowly adapted to his limbs, gradually climbing up from the ground and standing up stiffly.
Afterward, he turned and walked straight back to his workstation, sat down, and with a numb expression, extended a hand to connect a data cable to his computer.
Before long, the maintenance door of the Arasaka Base was silently opened.
Two figures in individual combat armor, wearing oxygen backpacks, leaped down from above the base. Under the influence of the moon's gravity, they landed lightly, then strode brazenly through the maintenance door and into the base's interior.
"This Blacklight of yours is seriously messed up..."
V's muttering made Mercer find it a little funny. "How many times have you muttered that?"
"No matter how many times, it's still messed up... This thing of yours is scarier than the viruses in zombie movies. Those guys are like your puppets on a string!"
V emphasized, inexplicably feeling a chill down her back.
Mercer, however, spoke in a serious tone, "Strictly speaking, it's not me controlling them, but the Blacklight program's AI itself... I'm just giving the AI commands."
"Tsk, tsk... No wonder you had to come and supervise it yourself. If I had developed something this terrifying, I wouldn't dare let it run wild on its own either."
V now finally understood the terrifying nature of the Blacklight virus.
They entered the base openly through the Arasaka Base's maintenance door, passed through a decontamination gate, and then through a pressurized airlock.
This was to allow the room to slowly transition from the lunar environment to an Earth-like one, helping people acclimatize while also ensuring the balance between indoor and outdoor air pressure.
When the next door opened, the oxygen backpacks on Mercer and V's backs began to automatically make hissing, compressing sounds, they were auto-refilling with oxygen.
Appearing before V and Mercer was a massive maintenance workshop, filled with all sorts of tools and equipment, and of course, no shortage of bots and employees in Arasaka uniforms.
However, at this moment, those employees were either standing stock-still, sitting in their seats, or walking around aimlessly with stiff gaits like zombies, looking entirely unlike living people.
"It's like walking onto the set of a zombie horror movie..."
V was still muttering. Mercer got it now. The girl is a little scared. This scene has a bit of a horror movie vibe.
She can kill without batting an eye, but I never expected she'd be afraid of ghosts!
Ha, Mercer had no intention of exposing this secret right now.
"Hold on, I'm connecting the Skynet system. The Skynet system can adapt to Blacklight, and it can also have Morning Star help me keep an eye on Blacklight's AI..."
Mercer walked to an employee's computer. A data cable popped out from the mech's wrist. He unplugged the existing one, connected his own, and for the first time in a long while, personally hacked into the Arasaka system.
"They really haven't made any progress," Mercer complained. "The Arasaka system I hacked a few years ago was pretty much this same setup..."
"Is Saburo Arasaka here?" V wandered around the maintenance workshop on her own, feeling that the style of these lunar bases was more or less the same.
"He is... Hmm, found him." Through the connected Skynet system and with the powerful processing support of Morning Star, Mercer seized control of the workshop's connected work server with almost no effort.
Then, he unscrupulously allowed the Blacklight program to spread. In Mercer's cyberoptic vision, red dots were increasing at a visible rate within a slowly rotating 3D model of the building.
Each red dot signified that the Blacklight virus had successfully entered a human or a device.
Of course, this didn't mean the Blacklight program was already active; rather, it was in a dormant state, ready to be activated at any moment.
As for why he was doing this?
It was, of course, due to the Blacklight program's despicable infection strategy, the current Blacklight couldn't instantly modify human consciousness code. It could only hijack it, which meant blocking the data from the human brain.
It issued commands directly to the human body through the neural link, causing the person to enter a state similar to a coma, or even further, brain death, thereby replacing the human's thoughts and controlling their body's movements.
And this state would look off to anyone.
But if the Blacklight virus was in its dormant period, then even the person themselves wouldn't realize they had been infected. As they went about their network activities, Blacklight would silently use them as an anchor to spread further.
So, what Mercer needed to do now was wait patiently.
Wait for Blacklight to forge a safe path for him.
"This thing of yours is way more potent than any poison gas. It's terrifying. If this thing had an outbreak on the Old Net like Bartmoss's virus, I reckon humanity would be extinct by now."
V said, then sat down next to Mercer, resting her arm on the chair and crossing her legs. "So, is it waiting time again?"
"Uh-huh," Mercer replied, then shared the surveillance footage with V so she could see some of the progress.
"So boring..." V had more or less gotten used to the feeling of being surrounded by "walking dead." At this moment, she just felt a surge of adrenaline with nowhere to go.
This was completely different from the assassinations she was used to.
"Don't get bored too early. No matter how powerful the Blacklight virus is, it still has to be able to hack in... If we encounter some devices running completely locally, or senior agents, we'll still have to deal with them manually."
Mercer finished, then paused and added, "Of course, if we're lucky, they'll all be connected to a single server or an internal network. Then we just need to drop a Blacklight into their network and it's solved."
"Ugh, I was just saying. If we can stay bored until the mission's over, that'd be great too..."
V had just finished speaking when she suddenly saw a familiar figure in the surveillance footage Mercer had shared with her.
"That guy is... Adam Smasher!?" She shot up, her eyes filled with a cold light, her fists clenching unconsciously. "Ha, didn't expect this dumbass to be here too. Perfect. Old grudges and new, we'll settle them all in one go!"
"Don't get excited..." Mercer narrowed his eyes, then tapped the table with a slightly serious expression.
The surveillance feed in his cyberoptics began to zoom in frame by frame. Soon, Mercer came to a conclusion. "It's a clone."
"A clone? Didn't you say that not even Biotechnica can guarantee biological strength, so clones... Crap, I get it! That dumbass barely has any flesh on him, so cloning him is actually convenient!"
V immediately understood what Mercer meant.
Mercer, meanwhile, observed and said, "Judging from the cyberware on this Adam Smasher, it's likely a replica of Adam Smasher's body from around 2075. Compared to the one currently in Night City, this one's a bit lacking."
"Don't you dare 'Blacklight' this dumbass. I'm going to personally rip his head off!" The moment V saw Adam Smasher, she felt an inexplicable surge of anger.
That bastard had made them suffer a huge loss back then, launching a sneak attack and acting all high and mighty. It had infuriated her. She had sworn then and there that sooner or later, she would rip his head off in a fair fight and show him who the strongest merc really was!
"You're this worked up over a replica?" Mercer said with a smile.
"I'll just use him for a warm-up. Sooner or later, I'm gonna twist the real Adam Smasher's head off too!" V said, cracking her knuckles.
After a brief observation, Mercer gave V some exciting news.
"Alright, it seems your wish can be granted. This Adam Smasher is in offline mode, and the advanced ICE he has is difficult to hack with other Blacklight carriers... Your chance has come."
After speaking, Mercer, relying on the Skynet and Blacklight systems, had almost taken control of the entire first floor's surveillance of the lunar base.
But aside from the dense security, he surprisingly couldn't find Saburo Arasaka.
He's not here?
Mercer dismissed the thought in an instant. After Morning Star quickly analyzed the data using the Skynet system, a crude 3D model of an underground base was quickly constructed.
"A rat in a sewer... Let's go, V. We have to go downstairs. It's the classic two separate servers again. We'll have to go down and find him ourselves."
Mercer stood up and extended a hand to V.
V, sitting in the chair, grabbed his hand and shot up, her eyes gleaming with impatience. "What about that Adam Smasher?"
"He's guarding the elevator entrance... Remember, make it quick."
At Mercer's command, V eagerly strode forward.
"Five seconds! If I don't dismantle this old-model Smasher in five seconds, I'll write my name backward from now on!"
With this bold declaration, V strode toward the deeper parts of the base.
"I'll leave the small fry on the way to you!" She waved her hand, exuding the air of a great general.
Mercer just smiled.
When the door from the maintenance workshop to the deeper parts of the base opened.
In the corridor, only numb Arasaka employees stood in place with vacant eyes, wandering aimlessly throughout the base like zombies.
These humans, infected by the Blacklight virus, now had only one goal left in their lives, to infect as many other people and devices as possible.
"Alright then, I'll do it... Blacklight, no need for stealthy infiltration anymore... Make your move." The moment Mercer's words fell.
The Arasaka employees, who had been wandering or lying dormant with the unexposed Blacklight virus, abruptly froze in place.
The next moment, a crimson, bloody light flared in their eyes.
If Blacklight were just a simple virus that could control humans and devices, why would Mercer be so concerned about its destructive potential?
And so, in V's line of sight, a scene far more terrifying than any zombie movie unfolded.
An Arasaka special agent with blood-red eyes suddenly activated his Berserk OS. To the astonishment and horror of a nearby researcher, he violently tackled him to the ground.
Amidst the other's screams, the agent smashed the arm that tried to resist with a single punch. Then, under the researcher's terrified gaze, he pulled out the data cable from his own wrist, aimed it at the man's neural link, and plunged it in.
"Join us..."
"Join..."
"Blacklight..."