Jessica yanked out the data cable in her hand and exited the door's operating system.
As the door creaked open, a blinding light poured in from outside.
She raised a hand to shield her eyes, squinting at the silhouettes beyond.
Her gaze fixed on a massive figure, and her heart sank.
Unable to see clearly, she mistook Jackie for that lunatic Joseph.
Without hesitation, she shut her eyes and hurled herself headfirst into the wall like a startled deer.
Arthur smirked as the girl kicked and thrashed in his grip.
She might not be the sharpest, but she was still better than those little street pickpockets.
He casually tossed her to Jackie. She wasn't heavy, but this kind of thing was clearly Jackie's department.
Lifted, tossed, and then caught in a burly arm, Jessica's stomach churned.
She thought they were toying with her—humiliating her.
Snapping her teeth shut, she bit down hard.
A large hand grabbed her collar again, yanking her up.
Jackie gave her a shake, his voice puzzled.
"Why the hell are you biting people?"
"A little girl, trapped in this hellhole… it's a wonder she hasn't gone mad already."
Dangling in Jackie's grip, Jessica caught most of their exchange.
She cracked her eyes open just enough to see—the man holding her wasn't Joseph.
They really had come to save her.
Tears streamed down her face, relief flooding her like sunlight breaking through storm clouds.
Her legs shifted weakly until her feet touched the ground. Her voice shook with sobs.
"Put me down."
"Calm down and stick close. Lose yourself again, and we won't come looking."
Arthur studied the girl through her curtain of tears as he warned her.
Her frame was slender, her hair a tangled mess, her face streaked with mud and tears until her features were unrecognizable.
Her clothes hung in tatters—evidence of three days of suffering.
But even with a timid, weepy girl trailing behind, Arthur and Jackie showed no mercy.
Every staff member they encountered took a bullet—resistant or begging, it made no difference. None survived.
At last, they reached the end of the lab: a vast hall.
Rows of terminals curved before a wall of monitors.
Behind them slumped a middle-aged man, lifeless.
He had put a bullet through his skull. At his feet lay a Militech Lexington—a compact pistol, weak but convenient.
Clearly, this was the chief himself—Dr. Bain.
Jackie lunged, ready to kick the corpse. For someone as even-tempered as Jackie to be enraged without ever meeting the man… that alone spoke volumes of Dr. Bain's infamy.
Arthur caught his arm and pointed at the ring on Bain's finger.
Up close, a nearly invisible filament looped around it.
The sight cooled Jackie's anger. He spat,
"Las bestias son inferiores… dying like this is too good for him."
"Let's see what these corp dogs did to earn such wrath."
Arthur moved to the terminals.
But the data was deliberately corrupted—the massive screen before them showed nothing but gibberish.
Jackie checked several others, all the same.
"Looks like all we're walking away with is that hundred thousand eddies."
Arthur's eyes lingered on the results, his mind already plotting the next step.
Then, a timid voice spoke up behind them—the little shadow that had followed them all this way.
"I… I can restore the data."
Facing the sharp gazes of the two killers, Jessica swallowed hard and added,
"At least… some of it."
Arthur stepped aside, intrigued.
"Then give it a try."
Truth was, neither he nor Jackie knew the first thing about netrunning.
Jessica crept forward, pulled a black data cable from somewhere, and plugged it into the terminal.
Her eyes glazed over, flooded with cascading code.
"Looks like they didn't have much time to scramble it. There are still traces to follow…"
She murmured as the gibberish began to reassemble.
The first restored data was from Lab One.
Arthur's chest tightened as he read; it was as if he could hear the screams of countless tormented souls.
One by one, the files came back. Nearly every experiment was recovered.
Over two hundred test subjects—slaughtered.
Arthur realized every project here revolved around the nervous system.
He himself had been injected with something targeting his own nerves.
That couldn't be coincidence.
Yet, despite the vast records, none of it tied together.
Nowhere did it describe a molecule that could trick cells and slip into neurons by endocytosis.
"Find anything?" Jackie asked.
Arthur shook his head. Jackie clapped his shoulder.
"It's been this long without a problem. Don't sweat it."
"I've got something. A hidden database. But the clearance is high—I'll need time to break it."
Jessica's voice jumped in surprise. She waved to the two men.
"You're sure it's safe? You're worth a hundred thousand eddies to us, remember."
Arthur smirked. He didn't know netrunning, but even he knew diving blind into a system could kill.
"Your call."
Jessica ignored him and pressed on.
Arthur watched her go rigid, unease gnawing at him.
They'd only just met, but the thought of a girl this innocent paying the price for his mission unsettled him.
Time crawled. Steam began to rise from her body—the telltale sign of Overheat when a netrunner pushed themselves to the brink.
"Hah—"
Like a diver breaking the surface, Jessica exhaled sharply.
Her face was ghostly pale, but she ignored her burning body and turned to them.
"You have to see this. The database was buried deep… and it's about Dr. Bain."
She glanced at the corpse. Despite the fever heat boiling her skin, a shiver ran down her spine.
...
What appeared was grotesque.
On the massive screen, two rows of brain scans pulsed.
The top row showed frontal views, the bottom row, reverse angles.
They rippled, like frames in a transformation sequence.
The first images looked normal.
But as they moved along, a creeping chill stabbed into Arthur and Jackie's skulls.
In one mid-sequence frame, a thin blue filament appeared inside the brain.
It thickened, multiplied, spreading outward.
From the hippocampus, it crept relentlessly:
frontal lobe, prefrontal cortex, amygdala, thalamus…
Like a blue jellyfish crawling through a human skull.
"What the fuck is that?" Jackie blurted.
Arthur scanned the data around the images—and froze.
At the top of the page was the name: Dr. Bain.
"Jessica!" Arthur bellowed.
"Disconnect!"
They had stumbled on something monumental—something deadly.
Only when the girl pulled the cable from her wrist did Arthur finally exhale.
His eyes stayed fixed on the screen.
"Looks like our mad scientist had something very strange living inside his head."
...
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