The archival room was a vast floor of the NAB’s building decorated with tall server towers from the floor to the ceiling. The entire room had a harmonized hum of computers at work running through it. Ryo was bent over at one of the terminal’s screens, tinkering away.

“Our physical archives are actually quite small—since our work focuses on the digital world, it ends up in the form of observation logs and back-up files like this. There aren’t many papers that are relevant to network investigation.”

Ryūji knew, too. His entire career was collected on his P-COM.

“I really appreciate you doing this for me, Misaki.”

“Don’t worry about it. Somehow, I feel like I can trust you.”

Another nervous chuckle from Ryūji.

Ryo pulled out a thumb drive from the server.

“Here it is. The problem is, this is an R:2-compatible file. In other words, we can only load it into a snapshot of R:2—considering how corrupt this thing is, it’ll be rough. Using any regular PC would be almost impossible.”

“It’s a good thing I don’t have just any regular PC.”

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