"The situation isn't optimistic. His neural pathways are severely burned." A tired female voice spoke near his ear.
"Just give me the result," a cold male voice replied, laced with impatience.
"Fine… Even if he wakes up, there's a high probability he'll end up brain-damaged—either severely impaired or suffering major memory loss. His neural tissue is so fragile now that even a minor network fluctuation could leave him unable to stand upright." The woman ended with a quiet sigh.
"Understood… Has the tech division's assessment come back? Rogue AI or Blackwall breach?" The man turned to address someone else.
"Unable to confirm, but most likely a rogue AI. If it had been the Blackwall itself, it wouldn't have been so… restrained. Only one casualty."
At that moment, another cold female voice cut in.
"When he regains consciousness, run a full evaluation. If he's a write-off, follow standard procedure. I have a meeting. I'm leaving."
"Understood."
Footsteps faded. Two soft clicks signaled the automatic door sealing shut. The room fell silent again, broken only by the slow, rhythmic drip of an unseen medical apparatus—once every ten seconds or so.
Mercer fought to open his eyes wider, but no matter how hard he tried, the world remained black.
He tried to lift his arms. Nothing. It felt as though they had vanished; only his torso twisted weakly against the restraints.
*Click.*
The door hissed open again.
"Don't move," a calm female voice instructed. "Listen carefully. You can't see anything, can't move your arms, feel dizzy, nauseated, and want to throw up. All of that is normal. Most of your cybernetic implants have been surgically disconnected."
"The blindness is because your optical cyberware was forcibly powered down. We'll recalibrate it shortly."
"I'm going to reactivate your cybernetic eyes now. Stay calm."
Mercer managed only a muffled grunt.
Fingers tapped rapidly on a screen. Moments later, light exploded behind his eyelids.
**[Arasaka Seed.3 optical cyberware restarting.]**
**[Recalibrating…]**
"Just like the first time they were installed—take slow, deep breaths. The blur will clear soon."
He obeyed. After roughly ten seconds, the myopic haze sharpened into crisp focus.
He scanned the room: sterile white walls, bright overhead lights, medical monitors. A woman in a crisp lab coat stood nearby, eyes fixed on scrolling data.
Typical corporate operating theater—bed, doctor, machines.
He glanced down. Both arms were still attached. The immobility came from severed neural links. Incisions along his forearms exposed raw flesh and gleaming chrome interfaces, all pinned open by cold surgical clamps.
"Excellent. Optical sync data is stable. Looks like you're not entirely useless after all."
The doctor's tone carried faint relief. "Stay alert. We're going to gradually test your current cyberware capacity limits. Report any headache, nausea, disorientation, or mental fog immediately."
"Okay…" Mercer rasped. The stabbing pain in his skull had dulled to a throbbing ache, but every few seconds a spasm still made his whole body shudder.
"Do you understand your current condition?"
She tapped the screen again. From his angle he could see only her profile—East Asian features, middle-aged but impeccably preserved, exuding quiet elegance.
"I caught some of it."
He hesitated, then asked, "What does 'follow procedure' mean? Termination of employment?"
"Most likely." She turned fully, expression neutral, studying his face. "If I were in your position, I'd be more concerned with how to report this incident to the company before worrying about being fired."
"This is the first confirmed rogue AI server intrusion at the facility. All operations are suspended. The supervisor is already under review. The scale of this breach far exceeds what you seem to grasp. In the worst case, the entire program gets axed, dozens lose their positions or get reassigned—and as the direct trigger, termination would be the *kindest* outcome you could hope for."
Mercer's mouth twitched. Classic Arasaka. Classic Cyberpunk megacorp logic.
They throw ignorant child netrunners into the Old Net to scrape data—where rogue AIs lurk at every turn—and when something inevitably goes wrong, they scapegoat the disposable kids.
He thought quickly. He could *not* let them pin this on him. Once he became a liability with no further value, Arasaka "assets" would quietly eliminate him under some clause about protecting corporate interests.
"It wasn't my fault."
He spoke firmly. "It was Tony's."
Tony—the boy in the adjacent chair whose brain had fried instantly, blood pouring from every orifice.
Though he hadn't fully assimilated the original Mercer's memories yet, they sat ready in his mind like cached files, accessible with a thought.
"Tony and I were mining in the same sector when a tall, red female construct appeared. Its signature matched the ultra-high-threat profile in the company tutorial… Alt. Alt Cunningham."
The lie came smoothly, almost too easily. "Tony got grazed by her touch—his personal ICE shattered instantly. The second I recognized her, I initiated emergency logout per protocol. I made it back across the Blackwall and disconnected in time, but she had already locked onto me and attempted to force a crossing."
"Luckily the Blackwall held and blocked a direct breach, but the spillover data surge still nearly killed me."
"A very tidy explanation," the doctor said dryly. "If I were you, I might add that the company firewall also failed spectacularly. Unfortunately, I'm just the attending physician. Your story means nothing to me."
She turned back to her console. "Thinking remains clear. Memory appears intact… Anything else unusual to report?"
"…Nothing yet."
"Then we're done for now. Your brainwave activity has spiked significantly. Rest for twenty-four hours while we monitor neural degradation. After that we'll begin phased re-implantation of your cyberware and test whether you can still function as a netrunner."
She glanced at his arms. "I'll reattach your hand interfaces first and observe. Any anomaly—call me immediately. Contact details are already in your HUD. If verbal interface fails, press the red emergency pad by the bed."
A contact card materialized in his vision—standard chat-app style.
**Junko Oda**
He saved it.
The doctor raised her right hand. Her index finger smoothly morphed into a hypo-injector. With her left, she loaded a sedative cartridge.
"Sleep. Your hands will be reconnected when you wake."
No room for argument. The needle pierced his neck. Consciousness faded in under fifteen seconds.
When he opened his eyes again, sensation had returned to his fingers.
**[Data link established.]**
**[Arasaka biomonitoring online.]**
**[Arasaka Monowire (Corporate V2.03) connected.]**
**[Hand neural circuit integrity: nominal.]**
The operating theater was empty. Cold. Silent.
Finally alone, Mercer exhaled slowly and—painfully—pushed himself upright. Faint phantom limb sensations prickled across his body.
Strangely, the discomfort didn't overwhelm him. The headache no longer clouded thought. If anything, his mind felt… sharper. Faster.
It wasn't an illusion.
With a single focused thought, the original Mercer's memories streamed past at accelerated speed—like scrubbing through a video at 10×, then 100×.
First puppet virus coded at age six… scolding from his adoptive mother… the greedy gleam in his adoptive father's eyes when Arasaka's recruiters arrived with a fifty-thousand-euro contract… years of brutal "elite education" at the facility…
Not just memories—skills, too. Netrunning techniques, ICE construction, corporate etiquette, social engineering basics—all of it flooded in and integrated seamlessly.
A few hours ago he'd been an ordinary guy replaying a video game. Now, lying in a surgical bed, he had fully absorbed—and arguably surpassed—the expertise of a prodigy netrunner in under twenty minutes.
He massaged his temples. The high-speed cognition was taxing his still-fragile neural tissue.
To give his brain a break, he shifted to lighter questions.
Like the voices he'd heard right before blacking out.
He was certain they weren't hallucinations.
*Code: FF:06:B5 operation successful.*
*Operation Code: Ragnarök.*
FF:06:B5—hex color code for magenta.
Codename: Magenta?
Odd.
Ragnarök—Twilight of the Gods.
Chilling.
Both terms, plus the voices, almost certainly tied back to rogue AIs beyond the Blackwall. With so little data, he couldn't narrow it further.
One thing was clear: his transmigration—and this sudden cognitive enhancement—were almost certainly the work of one or more rogue AIs.
To uncover the truth, he would eventually have to deal with them.
Problem was, the Old Net wasn't home to just one or two godlike entities.
Dozens. Hundreds.
Diving in blindly to hunt for answers might lead him to the friendly (or at least interested) one that sent him here… or straight into the grasp of something that would fry his brain like poor Tony's without even noticing.
In cyberspace, humans versus AIs were infants versus tanks.
Until he had real defensive capability—real power—he would not cross the Blackwall looking for confrontations.
He shook off the existential questions. Survival came first.
Survive the investigation. Avoid becoming the scapegoat.
Then—escape this Arasaka "netrunner academy" hellhole.
Staying was suicide. They treated the children like disposable mining drones, tossing them into the Old Net for data scraps. Even the Voodoo Boys weren't that reckless.
From Lucy's memories in *Edgerunners*, only one kid from her entire batch survived: Lucy herself. Everyone else died—either burned out by AIs during mining runs or killed during failed escape attempts.
Which proved one crucial fact: escape *was* possible.
*Click.*
The door opened.
A small figure stepped in hesitantly.
Not Lucy, as he'd half-expected—but a petite girl with bright red twin pigtails.
"…Kyoko?"
The name surfaced instantly.
**Kyoko Nishimura.**
Osaka-born prodigy. Sent here two years earlier. Currently eleven—the youngest in the facility.
She froze at his voice, watching him nervously. When he only looked puzzled, she didn't speak.
Instead she edged closer, golden light flickering in her irises—scanning.
After a long silence she asked softly, "Mercer… are you okay?"
"Still breathing. For now." He studied her anxious expression.
"Um…" She switched to Japanese. Thanks to mandatory language training, he understood perfectly—no translator needed.
Most kids here were Japanese or of Japanese descent. Arasaka preferred orphans from its own welfare centers in Japan.
Mercer himself was mixed—East Asian dominant, from what he could tell—but the original Mercer had been an orphan too. Adopted young by terrible foster parents who sold him to Arasaka the moment his talent surfaced.
Kyoko stared at his face, searching for something. Finally she whispered, "If you need help… please contact me. We're still friends… right?"
Mercer met her gaze calmly, then smiled. "Yeah. We're still friends."
Relief washed over her features. She scanned the room once more, then leaned in.
"When you're discharged… let's talk. Just me, Lucy, Daichi, and Leon for now. Want to come? It's just… a small get-together."
"Hm." He nodded, then narrowed his eyes meaningfully. "If I make it out of this alive. Rogue AI server breach? I'm not sure what happens next. Termination of contract? Reassignment? Or worse."
He sighed. "Company's going to be digging deep for a while. Not the best time for meetups."
Kyoko's eyes widened. She hadn't even explained the purpose yet!
"I—I'll tell them! Rest well, Mercer!" She turned to leave, hesitated, then spun back.
"Mercer… I… I actually saw it."
She blurted the words, immediately looked like she regretted them, and hurried to add, "Anyway… I believe you!"
Then she fled in a panic.
Saw it?
Mercer's eyes narrowed.
Saw *what*?
In the space of a heartbeat, a wild possibility flashed through his mind.
Could she… have seen the AIs?