"Cyberspace... how I have missed you," Michael said to himself, admiring his features.
His body seemed to be made of billions of lines of green code, rapidly sliding across his invisible frame.
He stood in a vast expanse of nothingness, a pure white canvas ready to paint your wildest imagination.
"This isn't the time to admire myself. I need to hurry, or I'll get brain-fried," he thought to himself.
The scenery changed; towering walls of multi-colored lines of code materialized out of the nothingness.
He slowly walked through the passageways between the towering cuboids of code, his digital eyes darting around, seemingly searching for something.
"Found you," he smiled, stopping at a massive red cuboid of revolving code.
He stepped into it, no, more like merged as his body seemed to disintegrate upon coming in contact with it.
He became part of the very code that made up the tower.
Time passed, yet nothing happened.
The towering lines of code moved as they always did, revolving in their usual direction.
A couple more seconds into the silence, the red codes froze, glitchy, as if they wanted to weave out of existence.
Seemingly furious, the lines of code pushed out Michael's figure, his body disfigured, arms broken, only left with hanging threads of code, half of his head missing.
"This is difficult..." Michael clicked his tongue as he watched the revolving codes resume their pattern, his efforts seemingly in vain.
"But it's not impossible," he smiled, remembering the momentary halt he had caused.
He had to try again, his life was danger after all, and 'this time' he could actually do something about it.
He struggled to his feet, weakly walking toward the tower of code, and once again, he sank into it.
Time passed, a minute at most and finally, the lines of code began to budge.
Once again, they froze, glitching intermittently.
But unlike before, Michael was not spat out.
The red codes changed direction, the lines of code now flowing in reverse.
Finally achieving his goal, Michael walked out of the tower of code, his body still disfigured, but this time he didn't mind, he had accomplished his goal.
Reversing the flow of the neuro-transfer.
Something that should have been impossible: the cyberware made such that it would flow as it should, yet he changed the programme, now the equipments functioning in exact opposites
Now Ironbeard's memories would be transferred to him, not the other way around.
"Got you," he smiled, unconsciously echoing his words in the real world.
In the real world, Ironbeard had strapped himself to the neuro-chair, unaware of his prey's smile.
He had underestimated him.
The machinery automatically activated, neon lights blinking intermittently, the transfer seconds away.
The transfer began, the unconscious Ironbeard unaware that his memories were the ones being transferred.
The process, a slow, painless one for the sedated Ironbeard, but for Michael, who was still conscious, the process was an excruciating one.
The neural link mapped the neuro-pathways of Ironbeard onto his own, the cellular laser hitting with precision, each strike sending waves of excruciating pain.
" Argh "
Michael screamed in agony, drifting in and out of consciousness.
"I wasn't expecting this..." He could barely form coherent thoughts but still tried to figure out why he felt so much pain.
The process shouldn't have been painful.
He forgot he had tampered with it.
It was never supposed to move in reverse, and thus there were sure to be side effects.
"D... d... did I miscalculate?" he thought, gritting his teeth, his already bleeding gums unable to handle it.
If this continued, he might die.
All his preparation, for naught.
"I have to check what's going on." He slipped back into cyberspace, unaware of the trembling of the Lucy, unaware of the chaos outside, as he had a chaos of his own to tend to.
In cyberspace, his digital body materialized whole.
The white expanse was already filled with towering lines of code, all in red.
"What the f*ck," he cursed, noticing that something was wrong.
Forcefully changing the direction had caused a mishap.
Instead of transferring memories as it should, it was taking everything.
Memories, habits, emotions, personality, even consciousness.
He was stripping ironbeard of everything he had, everything he was.
"What the f*ck..." Michael noticed the anomaly, his digital pupils dilating in panic.
"I'm going to die at this rate." He rushed toward the closest tower, only to be bounced back, the lines of code rejecting him.
The process had begun, and nothing could stop it.
"No!! No!! No!! No!!" Michael panicked.
He would surely die if this continued.
The transfer of consciousness into another had never been tried, and it was theoretically impossible for two consciousnesses to co-exist in the same body.
One had to die or worse, both.
Michael, an A+ student, was aware of this fact.
Even the transfer of memories caused brain damage; transferring a whole person guaranteed death.
His digital pupils shrank in fear as he tried over and over again, jumping into tower after tower, only to be bounced back each time.
His digital body slowly disintegrating, not from the strain of cyberspace, nor even the rejection by the towers of code, but by the slipping of his life force.
His life force was slowly fading, which meant his mental strength was rapidly dwindling.
His digital form broke apart like dandelions drifting in the wind.
"Am I going to die this way..." He sat down, seemingly accepting his fate.
"No... I can't give up that easily. Not in my field of expertise ," he rose to his feet, his rapidly disintegrating body slowing down.
He might be in pain, even an arm's reach from death, but as long as his mental fortitude was strong, he could hold on a while longer.
Once again, he began moving from tower to tower, not having the leisure to sit and think of which one was the right one.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the Nullnut had just torn through the Lucy's defenses.
Blackout.
Before Michael couldn't find the right one, the entire cyberspace blacked out, the white vastness now a black abyss with nothing in sight.
Michael's digital avatar wiped with it.
...
Several minutes later, he awoke in the real world, his bloodshot eyes looking up at the pitch-black screen of the neuro-transfer headset.
"What's going on?" he weakly removed the headset.
The room was illuminated by neon red lights, the emergency lights for power outage.
"The C.C.!" Panicked, he rose to his feet, eyes darting around, searching for something, and that's when they landed on Ironbeard's form.
"Is that... my body?"