The Brainiac gang only had three people—
and all three of them had unknown backgrounds.
In other developed regions, that'd be a big problem.
In Night City, it was just another Tuesday.
NCPD did keep population stats, using two methods. One was active cooperation from residents—door-to-door surveys, voluntary registration, that sort of thing.
The other was passive: city surveillance cameras, public service networks, any public assets managed by Night City's municipal authorities, and any corporate systems contractually obliged to cooperate with investigations—all of that fed into NCPD's resident database.
But in Night City, there was no true ruler.
So there was no truly complete database, either.
By the time Leo found them, the three were already charred through by high-voltage arcs.
Tesla weapons attacked via high-voltage arcs, but it was obvious what killed them wasn't a Tesla gun, but the result of a massive, accidental arc event.
Leo had seen Tesla weapons before. To burn three people through like this, a Tesla platform would need to be custom-built and not exactly small.
But none of that was the main problem. These three could be dealt with later.
The real problem right now was the more than two hundred "cyber-zombies" still in the server room—
and how to handle this "mainframe."
Or rather, the real Brainiac.
"Choomba… is my mom… is there any way to save her?"
Joestar lay on a cyber-surgery table, his body literally only half there.
But that remaining half was something else—loaded with materials even Leo didn't recognize.
In the access pod, Joestar's mother convulsed wildly like she was in the throes of an epileptic fit. Leo watched her for a moment, then looked back at Joestar.
"Thirty-two."
"Choomba, you're… you're counting—?"
"One."
"Ugh!"
Joestar suddenly began shaking violently as well!
Distorted hallucinations swallowed every sense. Then came full-body spasms and uncontrollable movements…
No doubt about it—this was white-matter psychosis. One look at his mom's appearance was enough to know—
No normal human had brain matter leaking out of the skull.
After about seven or eight seconds of tremors, Joestar came back to reality. The pain was nearly enough to smash his mental defenses to bits, but he still hadn't gotten an answer:
"Cho… choomba…"
Half-dead, Joestar forced his hand up. His cyber-eyes flashed wildly—
The Fire-Eye Golden Gaze had been removed. The current eyes were eerily normal, almost certainly Kiroshi-grade—
looked just like human eyes.
Top-shelf.
Leo pulled a biliverdin-based immunosuppressant from the case at his waist and jammed it into the injection port on Joestar's neck.
That would significantly dampen the concentrated immune response in dense neural tissue and reduce inflammation, massively easing his pain.
Pain stripped people of judgment and the capacity to think.
"What did you see?"
Joestar ground his teeth. "I—I saw my mom… saw her go to Brainiac. Brainiac said they had work for them… chips for them to pick up…"
"Brainiac used them for experiments. She… it hurts… fuck, it hurts…"
Leo frowned. That wasn't just inflammatory pain anymore.
That was pure pain.
"Shit…" Dum-Dum muttered, chilled by Joestar's voice.
The kid was one of the toughest in Maelstrom. During internal wars, he'd been the one piloting a Centaur rig, and he'd enjoyed the same "head removal" treatment as the boss—full-body cyber-conversion.
If he hurt this bad, how twisted did this have to be?
Dum-Dum pointed cautiously at the cable linking Joestar's brain to his mother's. "Can't we… I dunno, just pull that out first?"
Leo shook his head. "No."
If Joestar really couldn't take it, they could sever the link.
But if that was his mom, and he still wanted to save her, that was a different story.
Once cut, it would be almost impossible to reconnect.
Joestar's mother was Brainiac's super-database for skill-chip integration—
a true "human AI."
Massive amounts of data were stored in her brain, then retrieved, recombined, and compiled according to Brainiac's needs.
Full-body prosthesis operations and skill-chip manufacture clearly all came from this "mainframe."
And memory… was scrambled into that vast dataset too.
"…Listen up, kid," Leo said to Joestar. "Your mom's been stuffed with way too much skill-chip data. I don't know how she's even still in there."
Joestar suddenly screamed, his voice warping into a woman's:
"I wanted to make money so I could buy Hiroichi a new chip!"
Leo's brow furrowed. He hit Joestar with another dose of immunosuppressant, then added a neuro-activator to keep his mind from being crushed under the hallucinations.
The moment the two shots hit, Joestar's brain snapped into sharp clarity—
and the pain became even sharper.
"Listen, little bro. If you still want to save your mom, you keep your head clear and listen to me."
"Skill-chips are a kind of motor memory. But once you push beyond their safety threshold, the line between them and declarative memory starts to blur."
"In other words, her memories of what she's lived through are already fuzzy. Her personal identity and the skill-chip data have all been mixed into this huge external storage system."
"I can try to sever her connection to the arrays. But I don't know which of her memories have already been offloaded to the external storage. And even if the cut goes perfectly—"
"Her brain is already shot."
"What do you mean? She'll forget me?"
With the activator in him, Joestar's mind was painfully clear. He latched onto the key point instantly.
Leo paused. "What do you think?"
Agony blurred Joestar's vision. Hallucinations spun up, giving him the illusion that he was on the operating table.
In reality, if his mom hadn't confused her "work subject" with her son, how could she possibly have installed all this cyberware into her own kid?
She hadn't even wanted him to get a tattoo.
He was lost.
Immersed in the hallucination, Joestar could feel exactly what his mother felt. He could sense the love he'd ignored.
It was precisely that unique love that had turned his mother into this true "Brainiac."
But in the face of the colossal, cold, chaotic torrent of data, that love was nothing—a whisper in a hurricane.
He couldn't accept it:
if his mom forgot him, did that mean—
That the one person in this city who truly loved him…
wouldn't remember him at all?
"But I've got a second option," Leo said, seeing Joestar settle into a strange, fragile equilibrium. "We reinforce your link. Filter your overlapping memories. Cut the external hardware in sync. Then maintain her white-matter integrity."
"Maybe one day you can pull your mom back out of there. Or else…"
"I'll take the second one!"
"…Or else you and her both die trapped in a dream, two white-matter-psychotic vegetables."
"I'll take the second one!!!"
Joestar practically roared it.
Szz—
The octo-arm swept all the surgical manipulators off the table. Leo yanked a cable from the mainframe pod and raised it toward his own neural jack—
"Hold it." V grabbed his hand. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Neural bridge. This job needs a hacker with a brain developed enough and enough raw compute upstairs to operate in real time. Plus, we'll need an AI to assist."
"You…" V clicked her tongue. "Don't screw this up."
Leo shrugged.
He was probably the only one in this world who could pull this off.
[Little Octopus: Boss, I'm ready!]
[ Little Octopus: ('-')]
"Wait up, choomba!" Dum-Dum raised a big hand. "Count me in on this neural bridge shit."
"What are you butting in for?"
"I can't go back and tell everyone I just got kidnapped and your little bro soloed Brainiac, can I?"
Dum-Dum hopped over on his bad leg. "If I don't plug in, I lose all face. Let me hook up—at least I'll feel like I did something."
Click.
The neural jack plugged in. Dum-Dum dropped to the floor on the spot, convulsing.