The isolation field had a runtime. He did not know exactly how long. Long enough for a surgical procedure, apparently, because that was what it had been designed to support, and surgical procedures in this facility were not the sort of thing that happened quickly.

He did not know how many procedures were assumed to run at once. He chose to assume one, because assuming more would be a kindness he had not earned.

He sat at the workstation and started talking.

"Come on Proxy, you got this." he said.

The room was empty of anyone conscious enough to listen, which made it, in a practical sense, a fine audience. "The compliance device is two independent components. A monitoring piece, locator, biometric relay and a detonator. They have separate activation signals in the firmware. They run together, but they do not have to."

He navigated into the installation records.

The firmware came up in the chair’s interface. It was readable. It was navigable. He had dealt with worse, which was not praise so much as a confession about his life.

"If the detonator goes inactive and the locator stays live."

He continued speaking aloud, "The monitoring component keeps reporting. The corporation sees a device working just fine."

He found the entry structure he wanted. "The verification system will run periodic integrity checks on the detonator. So I need a logged fake test showing it’s fine. Timestamped to this event. The field’s own timestamp becomes my alibi."

He checked the time estimate on the field’s runtime.

He stopped looking at it after that, because looking at it twice would not make it longer.

He went to Nyx.

She was on her side on the floor, her left hand still open from the moment the tool had left it. He crouched beside her.

She was breathing at the even pace of deep unconsciousness, the neural interface reboot state, orderly, the brain handling recovery with the patience of a system that had been through this protocol before and knew the steps.

She looked, from here, entirely unbothered.

He moved her to the chair with the care he applied to everything involving her body, which was different from the care he applied to other things, though he had long since stopped asking why.

He put her down gently, fitted the port connectors to the interface points at the base of her skull and both forearms, and confirmed that the chair’s system had made contact.

The compliance device appeared in the system. He could see it clearly, the dual-component format, the surveillance steady, the detonator sitting dormant. Not inactive. There was a difference. Dormant meant armed and waiting.

He was going to make it inactive, then make the log insist it had been dormant all along, which was the sort of lie systems trusted because systems respected logs more than truth.

He located the detonator. He set it to inactive.

He opened the log editor and wrote the false verification entry, a standard test-cycle record, timestamped to forty seconds before the field event, confirming detonator function within normal parameters.

The format matched the existing entries exactly, because he had read the existing entries exactly.

He reviewed the entry once.

Once was enough. Reviewing it twice would look like uncertainty, and the people who caught false log entries did it by hunting hesitation in timestamps and revision markers.

Revision markers appeared when you went back and changed something, and going back was the thing he was not going to do.

He committed the entry. He disconnected the port connectors. He moved her back to the floor and checked her position against where she had been.

He took the extra three seconds to get it right, because three seconds was not the difference between making the timer or not, and an unconscious person landing differently from how she had fallen was exactly the kind of detail that invited questions.

It matched.

He sat in the chair.

"Right."

He said, to himself, because the alternative was silence, and silence in a room like this had become suspicious. "This is gonna be interesting."

The chair’s interface was designed for an operator working on a patient. It assumed two separate systems, the tool and the object.

What he was doing now was running the tool through the object in order to operate on the object, which was the sort of feedback loop that worked in theory and had a very specific practical limitation, one he was already acquainted with.

He fitted the port connectors to his own interface points. The chair’s system logged him and asked for surgical confirmation, which it was designed to do precisely because no one was supposed to do this to themselves.

He confirmed.

The compliance device in his own skull came up in the system.

Seeing your own hardware from the outside of your own neural interface was not an experience one needed to savor philosophically, because the timer was running and philosophy was not what was keeping anyone alive.

He located his detonator. He set it to inactive. He wrote the false verification entry, matched format, timestamp two seconds after Nyx’s entry, the test cycle running sequentially, the way a system would run it when checking multiple devices in the same procedure window.

He reviewed the entry once.

The readback had a ceiling. He knew that. When the tool and the object were the same system, the tool’s report of its own work could only be trusted as far as the tool could verify, which was not infinitely far. He checked what he could check. The rest he committed to.

He committed. He disconnected.

He looked at Jinx on the floor near the instrument rack.

He looked at the field’s estimated runtime.

He looked at the number of steps remaining between him and the end of the procedure, erasing the port session logs, writing the false field-deployment narrative, getting himself into position, and he looked at Jinx again.

"That’s a no," he said.

He moved back to the terminal.

The session log showed the surgery sessions clearly, two entries, each one timestamped and logged with the chair’s system identification.

He deleted both entries.

He replaced the isolation field trigger event with a new record.

The field had discharged automatically as a security countermeasure in response to the unauthorized network intrusion, a programmed defensive response to external cyberware access, no manual input required. The system had detected the intrusion and responded according to its installed protocols.

This was the story the building knew how to tell.

The security had been built anticipating exactly this scenario, a netrunner attempting to access a secured surgical facility. The building had a plan for that. He had simply borrowed the building’s plan and signed it with the building’s own credentials, which felt less like forging a record than like exploiting a bureaucratic vanity.

He reviewed the false narrative once. The timestamps were internally consistent. The event chain was logical. The idea of the building’s security system deploying an isolation field in response to a network intrusion was not only plausible, it was expected behavior.

He set it.

He closed the session.

The field’s runtime was close to its end. He moved back to the position he had occupied when the field deployed, beside the terminal, roughly a meter from the workstation.

He sat against the wall.

His cyberware was shielded and still active. When the field expired, the cyberware in the room would begin its reboot sequence. Nyx’s systems would come back online.

His cyberware needed to be in the same state, rebooting, not obviously having remained active the whole time. If her systems came back and his were already warm and humming, the discrepancy would not be nothing.

He pushed the cyberware output past the safe operating threshold.

The neural interface took the excess energy and did what it was built to do when load exceeded parameters.

It initiated an emergency shutdown to protect the hardware, which meant suspending the processes generating the excess load, which included consciousness.

He had a few seconds.

He used them to confirm that the false flag narrative would survive a standard verification pass, because that was what he had been thinking about since the terminal and it was still not fully resolved in his mind.

It would be good enough. It had to.

The overdrive pulled him down before he finished deciding whether to keep reviewing it.

He was already on the floor, which, inconveniently, was where he needed to be.