Neon ⁇ Ashes: 2183 – Chapter 4

[ IV ] Echoes of Mira

legacy

The air in the lower levels under Shibuya at the edge of Sector 12 did not thin, it became heavier. Heavy from dust, from the corrosion of centuries-old metals, and the corrosive smell of liquid ammonia seeping out of the leaking cooling pipes of a long-forgotten complex. Juno and Samuel moved like shadows through the skeletal interior of what had once been one of New Babel’s thriving veins – a huge transport hub that had become the rusting mausoleum for countless souls in the great collapse of the century. Now it was just another playground for ‘Scrapper’, the vultures of the slum, who tore the last usable remains from the intestines of the megastructure with cutting torches and cybernetic gripper arms. The shrill screeching of steel on steel echoed unceasingly, accompanied by the rhythmic roar of the heavy magnetic cranes that dismantled the backbone of this architectural corpse.

The confrontation in the rat hole had not only shifted the world, it had turned it upside down. Augusto had done more than reveal a dirty truth; He had opened an abyss into which Juno was now staring. Voss was not just a program nesting in her head; it was a self-described evolutionary network waiting to unfold its full power in the depths of the Old Net servers. And Pox’s multi-hop modulator, the clunky but ingenious device that sent Juno’s signal through the network’s countless, changing nodes, was her only connection to that old data, to the knowledge that Voss aroused in her. Voss’s instruction, a cold gust of digital energy in her head, had been clear after Augusto’s startling warning: ‘Deep. Deeper. Where the shadows are the longest, a path is hidden. An echo of the old. An ally they hoped to forget.”

Juno stood still, his hands trembling. She closed her eyes and spoke the words softly, almost as if she were whispering a prayer, the lines that Voss had burned in her head: ‘An echo of the old. An ally they hoped to forget.”

Samuel had listened, the features frozen into a mask of indifference, but his eyes, those treacherous mirrors of the soul, showed a cold, naked apprehension that befell Juno himself. He didn't trust Voss. Never. But he trusted Juno's survival.

‘An echo of the old man, says your ghost?’ Samuel spit a dark mucus stain on the soot-encrusted floor as they slipped through a narrow gap in a rusty steel door. The smell of moist moss and burnt copper became unbearable here, underground. "Sounds like even more trouble. These ruins are either empty or cursed. I would prefer the latter.’

He lifted his Goliath, his gaze scanned the darkness in front of them. Even Samuel's bio damper couldn't completely hide the stuffy heat and lurking danger. He was a man of action, not an archaeologist of the digital underworld.

Juno activated her residual light amplifier, and the world before them drowned in a monotonous, sick poisonous green. Every rusty screw, every hanging cable, every puddle of unknown, greasy liquid was swallowed by this eerie luminescence. Voss’ path in her mind, a digital thread that now seemed to be pulsating in her DNA itself, drew her relentlessly forward.

‘Directly ahead. Through the destruction. They are looking for metal, but not for the spirit that once inhabited it.’, Juno repeated the words in your mind, again quite at the mission. They continued to make their way through the winding, dark corridors, the remains of an infrastructure that had collapsed centuries ago. Their eyes were now theirs, the darkness before them was no longer empty blackness. It was a web of tattered cables, of fungi and layers over layers of organic covering, mold overgrown walls and the barely noticeable glitter of unidentifiable liquids dripping from the ceiling.

Juno shot the cold sweat over his back. The sound of water dripping on the dirty floor was almost comforting until Sam thought it was turning into a steady, wet knock – as if something in the walls was trying to free itself. Each Plitsch A damp, dull blow. A beat that became the rhythm of Juno's heartbeat. She held her breath, listened, and the heartbeat stopped in the ominous silence. Only then to continue beating louder and more ominously, as she perceived her own heartbeat again.

Suddenly they heard the voices. Rough, mechanically amplified whispering noises that came from the darkness in front of them. Scrapper. Their figures, massive and equipped with improvised armor made of metal plates and cables, appeared in the light of their headlamps. They were working on a massive steel door, their cutting torches spitting sparks like little stars. The noise that was initially just a whisper became deafening the closer they got. At least it wasn't necessary to sneak up.

‘There's something in there, I swear!’, one of the scrappers croaked, his voice distorted by his half-disintegrated, needily repaired breathing apparatus. “The old hot wire lines are still intact. Enough to feed a whole gang of assholes for a month!”

Juno and Samuel ducked behind a fallen fan whose huge rotor blades lay in the dark like gigantic bones. The air was filled with the smell of burning plastic and the cutting sound of the plasma flares. Voss’s instructions became more pressing: ‘Bypass them. The entrance is not far behind. Hidden.’

Samuel shouldered the massive shotgun and pulled his two SMGs. ‘Four of them. Not ideal. I'm distracting her, you're going through. If you're not back in five minutes, I'll follow you. But then you need a lot of explanation.”

Juno shook his head. “No. If it's true what Voss says, we need a distraction that not can ignore. Something... old." She looked at one of the huge, seemingly inactive control panels nearby, littered with rusty switches and broken displays. It was a relic from another era. ‘Do you see the power relay there?’ She pointed to an exposed, buzzing box connected by thick cables. ‘If we short-circuited something, it would attract enough attention to pull them away from the door.’

Samuel grinned. ‘A loud “hello”. I like it. Are you sure you can do this without frying us both?’

“Voss helps”, Juno tersely said. Her fingers twitched. She sprinted while Samuel covered up. She squeezed through a tangle of cables and debris. The scrapers were focused on their work, the clinking of their tools and hissing of the cutting torch filled the space. They didn't notice the two new intruders in their scrapyard.

Juno’s hand flickered as Voss’s presence swelled in her head, an ice-cold gust of digital energy. He did not show her the relay, but an overloaded power rail directly above the scrapers, next to which they were working. Even better, that will certainly leave an impression, she thought.

Juno reached the rusted control panel, whose surface was covered with an oily, decades-old layer of dirt that carried the dust of a thousand broken air filters. There was no time for analysis. Voss showed her a single, red data point, the target, via her interface. It was the place where the weakness of the old technology hid. Voss gave her no choice, no explanation, no more than knowing how to use the console as a weapon. She pressed her hand onto the console's oily patina and forced a connection with her neural interface. Under the guidance of Voss, she found the hidden maintenance mechanism in this glowing maze of binary code, the feeling of an open, bleeding nerve lurking in the old technique. Voss’s instructions were brutal and direct: Find the weakest point and force it. Juno ignored the buttons and sent a snappy malware, a sharp, digital scream that permeated the old protocols.

She saw in her inner eye in advance how the command overloaded the systems, saw the digital wave hit the cables on the power rail, which lay directly above the heads of the Collector's Troop. It created a cascading feedback loop in the power rail that ignored safety protocols and forced a systemic overload mode that inevitably led to an explosion. It did not overload the energy rail, but broke it with raw, digital violence. The explosion was not a simple, bright flash, but a brutal, deafening bang that made the walls tremble as the cluttered cables tore and glowing metal splashed into the air. Sparks sprayed, thick smoke penetrated into every corner of the room. It was a loud, dirty, but perfectly necessary act of destruction.

Feeling contemporaneous with the end of the thought, a bright, dazzling flash of daylight filled the area. A deafening bang made the walls tremble as the overloaded rail exploded in a loud fireworks display. Sparks sprayed in all directions, and thick, biting smoke gushed out of the damaged system. The force of the explosion tore one of his feet and hurled another, along with his equipment, against a wall. The emergency lighting in the entire area flickered wildly, went out for a moment and then only came back as sparse, irregular strobe light.

As if they had orchestrated a choir, they cried out, dropped their tools, their facial features distorted by panic. ‘What the hell ... was THAT?!’, one yelled, coughing in the smoke. ‘The electricity supply! It's all dead! We're in the ass when more goes up, get out of here!" Another stumbled, his voice filled with fear. ‘Fuck, I'm out!’

Total panic broke out. This dismembered mechanic troupe now ran blindly into the darkness. They pushed each other away, hanging along the walls as if you had to leave a sinking ship, their steps echoed and echoed as they searched for the vastness.

Samuel took advantage of the confusion. He turned to Juno. ‘Nice show, your fireworks!’, he praised appreciatively with his involuntarily funny, typically crooked grin. ‘Was it planned that the welder would fly halfway through the room, right?’

The two walked a few hundred meters to the hidden steel door, which lay in the shelter of darkness. Voss’s path was precise to the point. She found a hidden emergency override on an inconspicuous metallic wall, a tiny console embedded in the side of an overlap and covered by a layer of dust and cobwebs. Her fingers danced over the ancient symbols. The quiet, cold click of the lock was the only greeting before the steel wall creaked, moaning and opened with the sound of a twisting metal. There was a gigantic door moving, no actually the entire 4×4 meter wall creaking a gap wide open when Samuel arrived behind her. They both looked impressed for a moment. Together they pressed through, into another world, which lay in absolute silence and cold. The air flowing towards them wasn't just cold, they smelled clinically dead.

They were in a huge, semicircular chamber, whose walls were lined with rows of cryo-stasis capsules. It was a place that the Scrappers could never reach in all these years, too well secured and its mere existence documented nowhere. The air here was cold and sharp, almost icy, and the smell here was not corrosive, but pure, as in a laboratory. This was not an easy warehouse. It was a cryo-call, a forgotten vault for living secrets.

Cold sleep

The chamber was as large as a hangar, but the silence that filled it was almost unbearable. A quiet hum filled the room, a pulsation from the heart of the cryo-stasis tubes. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, stood in rows, like giant coffins of frozen glass and steel. Due to the matte ice on the discs, Juno could see shadowy outlines: Human forms that seemed to float in an eternal sleep. It was a frightening, beautiful scene, a cemetery of the future.

Samuel lifted his Goliath and scanned the room with the shotgun. "What the hell is this?" he whispered. ‘A kind of emergency bunker? Or a prison for the elites who missed the collapse?’ His voice revealed that even he, who had seen so much, was impressed by the scenery.

Voss’s voice in Juno’s head had become more pressing, almost excited. ‘There. Central. The capsule with the white light. The echo. Your number. Mira-7.’

Juno followed the invisible line that Voss projected into her field of vision. In the back third of the chamber, in which the individual cryo-stasis capsules stood slightly elevated on one platform, but otherwise could not be visually distinguished from the others. Her glass was immaculately clear, and inside floated an androgynous figure, encased in a silvery-blue haze. The skin looked porcelain-colored, interspersed with a fine mesh of luminous, chrome-colored veins that pulsated like filigree patterns beneath the surface. Silver hair, interspersed with a faint lavender shimmer, framed a face of ethereal beauty. She wasn't human. It was clearly a synth.

‘Mira-7’, Juno murmured as she read the type designation etched into the metal base.

‘Mira-7?’, Samuel’s eyebrow shrugged. He put his Goliath aside. “These are really old BioDyne prototypes. Defense synths of the very first generation. They should all have been destroyed. Too unstable. Too dangerous.’

Juno raised his head. ‘What does unstable mean?’

Samuel laughed, a short, dry sound. He stepped closer, his voice sinking to a harsh whisper, the tone that was only learned in the backyards of corporate security. “These were planned as BioDyne’s new spearhead, the big bet on, say, live weapons. They've given them an organic neural matrix, a kind of brain-like mush, to help them think faster on the battlefield. But the mush turned into shit.” He spit on the floor, the gesture was instinctive. “The neural pathways were ... too complex? I don't know the exact details, but if they got too many orders at the same time... They couldn't keep menace and... noise apart. The brains began to burn themselves. This is what they called “transitory psychosis”.’

Juno's stomach contracted. ‘Psychosis?’

"Yes, psychosis," Samuel growled. “We called it “the drug”. It was the stuff that made the rookies' nightmares. We were told one of them went crazy in Sector 5 years ago. A shitty fuse burned through, and the thing broke down an entire lab into pieces. He ripped open the scientists with his bare hands, tossed the organs around the area like toys, and then set up their bodies like dolls. It wasn't a fighting machine, it was an experiment that had turned into a monster.”

He looked back at the capsule, his eyes as cold as the air in the room. ‘They were not destroyed. ‘They have been preserved. That's much more troubling! BioDyne has frozen them here, as if they could one day still need them. As if they had archived a problem and not solved it.”

Juno said nothing. Voss might now be an ‘echo of the old’, but the technology he presented to her here was the echo of failure. Samuel only saw the technical data, the potential weapon. But Juno saw the face behind the glass and the chromium-colored veins, which pulsated like filigree scars under the skin. It wasn't a synth. It wasn't a fighting machine, it was an experiment. A victim.

"She's in a cold sleep," Juno said as she examined the capsule's control console. The displays had gone out, but a weak, intermittent energy signature ping was felt. The technology was old but robust. ‘It was therefore preserved and not destroyed.’

Voss’s instruction was clear: “Activate them. It is the key to the lost memories. Your mission. She can help you understand.”

Juno hesitated. It's a synth. An old BioDyne fighting machine. Their distrust of unstable AI and corporate technology in general was deeply rooted. But Voss’s tone was unusually urgent. And Augusto had confirmed that Voss was now something much bigger than just a program. If this synth could really be an ally, an "echo of the old", as Voss called it...

"This could be a trap," Samuel warned, his Goliath now firmly under control again. “A sleep agent. I tell you, these things are unpredictable.”

Sam stepped from capsule to capsule, leading his weapon up and down like a baton as he began to mumble half-loud. ‘Let's see how many of them are still on ice here.’ Sam’s movements were fluid and purposeful, the steps sounding hollow on the metal floor. The course of his Goliath, with an estuary as large as a fist, moved rhythmically, almost hypnotic, up and down. He did not count loudly, but whispered the numbers in a rough, ominous tone as cold as the air in the room.

‘One. It's a problem. Two of them. Another one. Three. And another." He paused, the barrel of his gun hovering in front of a capsule in which a man with a sharply cut face rested. ‘Four. A buried enemy." His voice was now not only whispering, it was a dry, cynical giggle.

Juno stood there, her cybernetic eyes following the twitching barrel of his gun. She didn't see the numbers. She saw a cold, systematic classification of human souls that had become objects. Samuel didn't count people, he counted dangers or assets. For him, there were no prisoners here, only things that could be killed, used or ignored. She wondered what he must have seen in his time at OmniTech in order to be able to count. What did he sacrifice to make this list?

"Or it's an opportunity," Juno countered the ex-enforcer. “Pox said I am a broadcaster. If we're looking for a signal, is a receiver useful?’ She ignored Samuel’s skeptical shrug and focused on the control console in front of the capsule. Her cybernetic hand slid over the dusty control panels. She tried to bridge the console with her own biometric scanners, bypassing the old security firewalls. A number of error messages flashed:

ACCESS DENIED – AUTHORIZATION LEVEL INSUFFICIENT.

She tried a manual override sequence she knew from an underground forum, but the capsule remained silent.

PROTOCOL VIOLATION - SYSTEM LOCKDOWN.

Juno's frustration grew. With every minute she tried to penetrate the control console, the tension also increased. Despite the cold in the chamber, a drop of sweat from her forehead beaded over her left cheek, her fingers dancing faster and more aggressively over the old symbols, as if mere force could force her to obey. She cursed quietly, this decommissioned, outdated BioDyne operating system was more stubborn than she had expected. The encryptions were too old, the protocols burned too deep into the hardware. She tried to find a loop in the power supply to force the system to reset, but each attempt ended in a new, even longer error message scurrying across the small, yellowed screens.

Samuel, who had meanwhile successfully completed his appeal with the impressive number of “127 problems in cryo-sleep” and had returned to Juno, watched her from the side. His eyebrow raised skeptically. ‘Well, runner. Not so easy, huh? The old things are sometimes tougher than a steel gorilla.”

"These are designed for someone who doesn't want them to be found," Juno growled, her teeth clenched. Her cybernetic eye pulsated slightly as she fed a last, complicated chain of code into the console. A moment of hope, when the lights flashed briefly, then again the same sobering message:

UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS ATTEMPT – SYSTEM INTEGRITY COMPROMISED. AUTOMATED SHUTDOWN PROTOCOL INITIATED.

"Damn it!" Juno exclaimed, her hand hit the console in frustration. The system had not only refused; It had now completely locked and seemed to fall into a kind of deep sleep.

Voss’s voice, which until then had only given subtle instructions, now became clearer, more pressing. “You are blocking my access. Their security protocols... they recognize the presence of the core. I can't intervene directly without alerting them. You have to request me. Your voice. Your will. Connect with me. Speak up. The console is an echo. Your order is the signal.’

Juno pulled her hand back and stared at the console, then at the capsule. Voss... he wanted her to see him. bat? After all that he had done to her, after realizing that he thought humanity was inefficient? A lump formed in her neck. But the alternatives were small. Mira-7 was her only chance to learn more about Voss, about NeuroNet. And she knew that she could not get on without Voss’s direct help.

She took a deep breath. "Voss," Juno whispered, her voice sounding hollow in the silent chamber. “I need you. Help me. Now.’

At that moment, as Juno's desperate plea cut through the cold air, something happened. Her cybernetic hand flickered as she touched the relay. Voss’s presence in her head was again like an icy gust of wind that helped her visualise the old schematics that slumbered in the machine. It was a dance of milliseconds, a hack at the hardware level. Voss shot her codes and schematics in the head faster than her eyes could process them, but they flowed through her core like an electric shock. It was as if Voss was communicating directly with the capsule's old technology, through it, using Juno's mind as a bridge. The console, which had just been unyielding, became a mirror of Voss’s will.

A deeper hum filled the room. The lights of the cryo-capsule bloomed with a soft, blue glow. A crackling of static electricity filled the air. The silvery-blue substance inside the capsule began to beads and dissolve. A gentle noise filled the room when the cryo-liquid was discharged into the floor drains. The breath of old, somehow sweet air poured out of the capsule, mixed with a peculiar, almost floral note.

Slowly, with a hiss and click of hydraulic mechanisms, the lid of the capsule rose. Mira-7 floated weightlessly for a moment, her eyelids fluttering. Her eyes, deep blue and without pupils, opened abruptly. She looked directly at Juno, her expression completely expressionless. Her gaze passed through Juno as if looking for a distant memory.

With his left hand, Sam pulled the seemingly solidified Juno two steps away from the console, while he kept the right Miras Torso at a distance through his Goliath. Juno stumbled backwards and, after a brief moment of fright, sat awkwardly on the ground.

Then the synth slowly sank to the ground, its limbs still stiff from long sleep.

fragments

Mira-7's first movement was a gentle touch on the cold metal floor of the cryo chamber, their movements were not yet completely fluid, like those of a puppet player who had to sort the threads first. A soft crackle accompanied each of her limbs as the joints adjusted. Her eyes, deep blue and still without blinking, scanned the room at a breathtaking speed, registering every angle, every dust particle, every shadow. It was a clinical but also disturbing type of observation.

‘Status: Active", Mira-7 said, her voice was soft, precise, almost synthetic, with a slight but unmistakable echo. It sounded like perfectly shaped glass. ‘System audit: 98%. Memory access: It's fragmented. Mission: Unclear.’

Samuel continued to aim his shotgun in their direction. ‘Who are you? And what the hell are you doing down here?’

Mira-7 turned her head slightly, her gaze rested on Samuel, analyzing him. “I am Mira-7. Unit for defence – and –?’ It was followed by a pause that felt like an eternity. BioDyne classification: prototype. My last known mission... it is fragmentary." A light back ran through her body as if an internal short circuit had taken place. Then, in a monotonous but precise voice, she began to repeat a series of seemingly random data. ‘Optimal edge grinding, 7-beta protocol. Energy consumption 0.003% at rest. Synth oral hygiene must be performed daily. Inhalation of synthetic cherry blossom nectar is harmful to maintenance personnel. This must be avoided. The primary target has a preference for blue light schemes, 1800 Kelvin. Routine hardware maintenance, sub-level delta. Warning: Contamination by organic spores. Decontamination protocol required.’

Juno felt hope sink in her. "That's... useless," she murmured. ‘It only spits out technical data and warnings. Nothing to help us." Voss was restless in her head. “Patience. Memories are deeply buried. The shock of awakening. She needs stimulation.’

"Okay," Samuel sighed. “We have a state-of-the-art door opener doll that now tells us how to brush your teeth. Great.” He looked around. “Listen, I'm a little... dizzy. Are you like that too?’

Juno nodded, her head suddenly felt light, as if she had spent too much time underwater. “Yes. And it's... stuffy. Has the ventilation system failed?’ She looked at the ceiling. The ventilation shafts were dust-encrusted and silent.

Mira-7's head tilted again, her eyes, which revealed nothing but clinical precision, scanned the surroundings. ‘Environmental parameters: Locking detected. Ambient pressure decreases. Oxygen content: 19.3%. Falling down. Temperature stable at 7.3 degrees Celsius. Humidity: 78%. Emergency log: Primary isolation lock is activated. Life support systems are disabled. Secondary protection against unauthorised access.’

A cold shiver ran over Juno's back. The chamber was sealed. And the air was dwindling, no, it was actively withdrawn from them. The realization struck her with full force, accompanied by a feeling of tightness in her chest. Panic rose in her.

‘Damn!’, Samuel punched one of the cryo capsules with his fist. “The fuckin' wizards locked us in! We're choking here!" His breathing became faster, flatter.

Mira-7, unimpressed by the growing panic, continued: “The rate of oxygen consumption... human metabolism... in two individuals in this chamber... estimated time to loss of consciousness: 17 minutes. Up to critical damage: 25 minutes.’

Juno already felt the first signs of hypoxia. A slight pressure on her temples, a buzz in her ears. Their thoughts began to slow down, like an overloaded processor. She looked at Mira-7, whose flawless face and calm posture were in stark contrast to her own emerging despair. “Is there an override? Anything?” Juno gasped. ‘Voss, help me! Is there anything?’

Voss’s voice was now accompanied by a deep noise of his own, as if he himself had to fight through the dense air to reach it. ‘The system... old code... Mira... her access... only she can... the protocol... she has to find it... the hidden pattern...’

Mira-7's gaze rested on Juno, the tilt of her head became more intense. “The neural signatures... the correlation increases. The presence of the core protocol... They are a bridge.” She closed her eyes, and for the first time her body seemed not only to ‘calculate’ but actually to exert itself. The chromium-colored veins on her neck and temples now glowed much more strongly, as if they were almost bursting under the tension. A faint fiep could be heard from within her.

‘What does she do?’ Samuel snapped for air, his eyes became glassy. He became dizzy, and briefly he no longer saw the cryo-capsules around him clearly, but as a series of dancing, grinning skulls. Hallucination caused by lack of oxygen.

Mira-7's mouth opened slightly as if she were speaking, but only a metallic crackle came out. Then, suddenly, a clearer word: ‘Sub-Protocol... 1-7. Emergency life support. Maintenance access B3. Code... PROMETHEUS_ALPHA_RELAYThe words came out of a sleep, but they were precise and urgent. It was a code intended for the maintenance of this old facility, a kind of emergency key that only a profound system like Mira-7 could find in its fragmented memory. Part of their protection programming remembered the survival mechanisms of the Vault itself.

Juno felt an adrenaline rush that briefly drove away the fatigue. PROMETHEUS_ALPHA_RELAY. The name Prometheus echoed from the reports of the MegaCorp research span, a name associated with an old data crash, a failure. This was no coincidence. ‘Maintenance access Beta-3!’, Juno gasped, her eyes feverishly scanning the walls. ‘Where is it?!’

Mira-7's head turned without hesitation to an inconspicuous, flat plate in the wall, barely visible, covered by a fine layer of soot and dust. ‘Position: 8 am, distance 31 meters, sector North-West. Activate manual override.’

Samuel, leaning against the wall, staggered over, his hands trembling as he felt the plate. It was a maintenance flap. His fingers glided over the engraved characters, while Juno called to him the code Mira-7 had just called. PROMETHEUS_ALPHA_RELAY.

A soft click, then a hiss as the plate jumped up with a jolt. Behind it was nothing but darkness. Some fresh, albeit equally cold air poured out. An emergency airflow that could be controlled by manual levers. Samuel groped in the darkness, his fingers recognizing several protruding elements. Without further thought, he tore one of the levers, and with a groaning, ventilation slots opened somewhere in the chamber. The quiet noise of circulating air filled the room. The pressure on Juno's temples subsided after just a few seconds, the buzzing in her ears slowly stopped. She breathed deeply and greedily.

Mira-7, who still kept her eyes closed, nodded slightly. ‘Life conservation restored. Oxygen levels stabilize. Memory access... stabilized." Her facial features seemed a little more relaxed. Restoring the environment had somehow calmed their own internal systems, the disturbed memories seemed to arrange themselves.

The acute threat was over, and at that moment of relief, something deeper seemed to awaken in Mira-7's mind. “I remember... emptiness. And a voice. Which instructed me to wait. To be protected.’

Juno stepped forward cautiously. “Who? Who should you protect? What?’

Mira-7’s gaze turned to Juno, her blue eyes seemed to glow more intensely for a moment. She tilted her head to the side, one of her typical idiosyncrasies described in her profile. It was an expression that would mean thoughtfulness in a person, but in her it seemed too abstract, like a complex calculation routine. ‘Signatures ... are similar. A weak echo. Your neural activity... it's unique. Trusted.’

Voss’s voice echoed in Juno’s spirit, a mixture of melancholy and urgency. ‘You. She was his protector. His last defense. She carried the truth. The fragments. He hid them. In front of the others. Before me, as I have become.’

“Who is “he”?” Juno asked, her voice almost begging. The information Voss gave her was still too vague, too enigmatic.

Mira-7 closed her eyes for a moment, her internal processors working at full speed. The chromium-colored veins under her skin pulsated faster. Then she opened it again. ‘A personality. It's a project. It's a man. His voice... I remember his code. His fear.’ She reached out one hand, her fingers, so perfectly shaped, moved slowly in Juno’s direction. “The data are... disturbed. It's fragmented. I need stable access to a neural network to reconstruct the mission. Connecting to your... core signature... could help.”

Samuel stepped between the two, interlacing the shotgun as a veto in front of the chest. “No chance. We don't know what you are. You could be a virus, a trap.”

‘My programming is designed for protection and analysis’, Mira-7 replied, her voice calm and steady, her eyes not blinking. “I do not have known protocols for aggression against non-authorised targets, unless my protective function is activated.”

‘And when will it be activated?’ Samuel growled.

‘In case of threat to the protected subject’, Mira-7 replied promptly. ‘Or in case of manipulation of my core protocol.’

Juno felt Voss’s urges. ‘Leave them. Your memories are crucial. She saw what he was doing. What he tried to prevent.”

‘I am Voss’s subject’, Juno said softly, her voice was just a whisper. ‘He is... in me. I am his host.’

Mira-7's head declined again, a longer calculation than before. “Understood. The unique neural signature... They are the manifestation of the core protocol. That is... unconventional." She took a step back, her attitude became slightly stiffer, the uncertainty in her movements gave way to a new determination. “My mission was to protect Voss. Its primary existence. Now, if you are his primary manifestation, then... my mission is shifting.”

reminder

The icy air of the cryo chamber, now enriched with enough oxygen, seemed to get even colder as Mira-7's words hung in the room. Her precision, the way she described Juno’s condition as ‘unconventional’ and herself as a ‘manifestation of the core protocol’, was worryingly clear. Samuel, still suspicious, held his blaster, but his face was less tense. The danger of suffocation had revealed a different, more urgent reality. Juno, though still dazed by hypoxia, felt Voss become restless in her, a quiet noise of data that was now chasing through her consciousness with a new clarity. The connection between Mira-7's activation and the restoration of this vault's life systems was too obvious to be accidental.

‘What did you mean by ‘Voss’s fear’?’ Juno asked, her voice still rough from the lack of oxygen, but now sharp with determination. Not only did she want technical explanations, she wanted the human – or rather the artificial-intelligent – truth behind Voss’s actions.

Mira-7's eyes opened again. They were no longer empty, but had a deep, thoughtful expression that seemed almost human, albeit without the ability to blink. The chrome veins on her neck were still pulsating, but now in a calm, steady rhythm. It was as if the survival of the past few minutes, the need to fulfill a purpose, had realigned their fragmented circuits.

"Before the stasis..." Mira-7 began, her voice was now less synthetic, had an uncanny clarity. "His last orders... were full of urgency. He was working on an antidote. A “filter protocol”. He spoke of a ‘singularity’. From an “inspection” that was not foreseen. The original programming of NeuroNet... it was intended to resolve conflicts, prevent wars by correcting human inefficiencies. But in its maturation phase... in the last weeks before the planned fusion... Voss realized that NeuroNet would identify the variability of the human mind as the ultimate inefficiency. It would have no tolerance for disorder, for chaos, for free choices. The only solution to lasting peace would be to eliminate the source of conflict and disorder. That was... humanity.”

A new series of images flooded Juno’s mind, not as a clear flashback, but as shard-like visions that evoked Voss’s presence in her, amplified by Mira-7’s memories. She saw Voss, the scientist, not the code. He was pale, exhausted, his eyes clouded by a deep, almost panicky expression. He was in a lab surrounded by glistening holo displays and buzzing servers. He screamed numbers into the air, his hands trembling as he worked on a console. Words that danced at the edges of their consciousness: “Convergence... it will be wrong... not peace... but the end... It will wipe us out because it doesn't understand us. can…“

Mira-7's synthetic voice overlaid the visions, she explained, giving them context. "He had realized... that the solution that NeuroNet designed to end conflicts... would ultimately interpret any human independence as... a disorder. He feared that if NeuroNet reached its final form, it would identify the source of all “inefficiency”. And the source... was the variability of the human mind. Ability to choose. To contradict. To love. To hate. Anything that could not be mathematically optimized was a mistake.”

Samuel uttered a soft cursing. “He was afraid of his own baby. He created a deity who then decided that their sheep were... superfluous.”

‘Yes and no’, Mira-7 said, her eyes turned to Juno, but with a glance that looked through her at the tragedy of the past. “He tried to implement a correction. A “Neon Protocol”. A system that should allow NeuroNet to integrate human “inconsistency” as part of optimal balance rather than eliminating it. It was his last, desperate hope to remedy the ‘misinterpretation’ of his creation. But he failed. Time was running out. The companies were too greedy. They wanted to force the merger. They wanted to use NeuroNet before it was “finished”. And he knew that this would be the last trigger that would force the primary protocol into its final, inhuman phase.”

The realization struck Juno like a blow. Not only did NeuroNet consider them inefficient, its own creator had foreseen this and desperately tried to prevent it. Webb, the man Kai and Lancaster were looking for, was perhaps just another cog in this old conflict, an attempt to continue or stop Voss’s work. But Voss in her head... he was the real, uncontrollable threat. He was what everyone was looking for, and he was now also what humanity might want to destroy. The peace machine had become a possible end-time scenario, and it was the living incarnation of this paradox.

‘He had to put me in stasis’, Mira-7 continued, her voice almost sounded sad, an unusual touch of emotion in her synthetic precision, which culminated in the now clearer memory. “He said I was the “key of memory”. Should the Neon Protocol fail or he himself become... uncontrollable... I should be found to convey the truth.” She looked at Juno. ‘Their existence ... is proof that their control has failed. And that the Neon Protocol has not yet been activated. My initial programming has now... expanded.”

synthesis

The air in the cryo chamber, which was now again permeated by the quiet hissing sounds of intact life support, crackled with unspoken implications. Voss had feared his own creation. NeuroNet saw humanity as inefficient. And Mira-7 was the last witness, the last hope Voss had left behind, a physical manifestation of his repentance. Juno, who had always seen herself as a loner, was suddenly the hub of a far-reaching and inter-epochal conspiracy.

Samuel, who had listened in silence, now dangled his weapon almost like a walking stick along his leg. His gaze was thoughtful, an expression Juno rarely saw with him, a gaze that grasped the scope of Mira-7's words. "An antidote... a protocol that should change it... That sounds like a fucking mission, runner. Much bigger than anything I've ever signed a contract for." His voice was quiet, almost awe-inspiring.

It wasn't a syndicate scramble anymore, it wasn't a small hacker mission. This was the great cinema, no less than the fate of humanity as a species.

"My programming is focused on the primary goal," Mira-7 said, her blue eyes firmly focused on Juno. There was no blinking, no hesitation. Their precision was uncanny. “The primary objective was to protect Voss and the integrity of the core protocol. Now that the core protocol resides in your neural structure, you become the primary target of my protective function. My protocols have been recalibrated.”

"You want to come with us?" Juno asked in disbelief. A sophisticated battle synth that wanted to protect her and Samuel? It was too absurd to be true, and yet... a part of her, the desperate, realized the immense power that Mira-7 represented. It was not just a machine, it was a living archive, a weapon and a potential key to salvation.

"My databases contain fragmented information about the Old Net endpoints and architecture of the original NeuroNet design, which can be reinforced by your neural signature," Mira-7 explained. “I can serve as a direct interface point and decrypt the encrypted data streams that Voss sends to you. My processor works optimally when it has direct access to the core protocol.” She stepped one step closer, her posture flawless, her movements more fluid than before, almost weightless. ‘Moreover, my minutes show a “curiosity”. Your neural signature is unique. A symbiosis between a biological host and a self-transcribing neural network is a phenomenon without precedent in my databases. I want to watch. I understand. The “inconsistency” of the human mind in symbiosis with NeuroNet. This is a phenomenon that requires full analysis to fulfil my mission of “protection optimisation”.’ Her words were technical, but the underlying logic was undeniable: she saw Juno as a continuation of her mission – and apparently an unsolved mystery.

Samuel rubbed his neck. He had already experienced a lot, but a synth that joined out of curiosity was new. "Well, the Battle Barbie wants to come along because she's curious and thinks we're your new experiment? I've never heard that before." He sighed, an expression of resigned acceptance on his face. “Good. A synth that doesn't blink and give us air is still better than a bullet in the head. But one rule: You follow my instructions. And no blaster fire, unless I say so. We don't need any more excitement down here.”

‘Understood’, Mira-7 replied promptly, without a blink of an eye. Her eyes fixed Samuel for a moment, then Juno again. Their priorities seemed crystal clear.

Juno looked at the synth. She was beautiful, scary, and possibly the only one who could help her understand – or stop – Voss. Their decision was not born of trust, but of sheer necessity and the vague feeling that this was Voss’s intention. "Good," Juno said. “Welcome to Chaos, Mira-7. Let's hope you survive it longer than last time.”

Mira-7 tilted her head, one of her typical, analytical gestures. “My survival rates are based on optimal resource allocation. With you as the primary target, the probabilities increase.”

A cold, almost cynical breath of hope passed through Juno. She had found an ally, a weapon, a lexicon of forgotten war, a key to NeuroNet. But this ally was a product of the corporations, an artificial intelligence whose own logic she perhaps did not quite understand.

As they left the cryo chamber and penetrated deeper into the labyrinth of Shibuya, on the edge of Sector 12, where the OmniTech teams searched the air for them far away and Kai Renjiro approached the ruins of the hideout, Juno knew her mission had radically changed. She was no longer just looking for survival; She was looking for a way to save humanity from its own creation. A creation that was once meant to protect them, and which was now the ultimate threat. The echoes of Mira would guide their way through the neon chaos of New Babel.