Purin found herself being dragged through the Section 9 building on an impromptu tour by a couple of very excited tachikomas. The tour was primarily focused on the parts they found fun, so they skipped most of the things. One of the tachikoma drove Purin around an underground test track where members of Section 9 usually train, and then they led her to one of the spacious labs that was functioning as a tachikoma maintenance facility.

The facility was overseen by a pair of technicians in red uniforms. Purin introduced herself to them, and they seemed to be very amused by the tachikomas' excitement.

"And here is where we play games! Let's play this game, Purin-san!" To Purin's surprise and amusement, tachikomas had a full fleet of ancient game consoles connected to a big monitor, with shelves of different media full of games. One of the tachikomas was very carefully holding in its clawed hand a small cartridge with a racing game that was almost twice as old as she was.

*How would they even use the controllers with their claws? Oh, they're just holding them but controlling the game wirelessly...*

They played a few tracks with different tachikomas winning at different times, often picking very unconventional strategies and trying to sabotage each other in the game. Purin didn't win a single round, which she suspected was the combination of the robots' prior experience with the game, and a very unresponsive, comparatively to others, controller. She thought for a moment to use the same method of control that tachikomas used but decided it was against the spirit, and that winning isn't necessary to have fun.

"Unfair!" One of them shouted after another match. "You cheated!" It started accusing the most recent winner.

"Wha-a-a~ I don't know what you mean!" The winner feigned ignorance in response.

"You blocked my controller, that's cheating!"

"He-he~ Don't you know that these old wireless systems are very unreliable? This was just a chance."

"Then why are you so happy, hm?"

Their friendly arguing was interrupted by Purin's laughter. *Wow, they're very lively for robots.*

"You're amazing, you know it?" She told them while still laughing.

"Yay!" They cheered in response.

"He-he-he! Good job at winning," the first tachikoma gave up on its arguments. "But next time we're playing fair!"

"Okay~" the second replied.

At that moment Purin received a message from Ishikawa to Section 9's group communications channel. "We have found and isolated a virus from the dark net group that Esaki told us about. It's big and encrypted, this will take time to analyze."

The response came from Major. "Good job. Go rest now. In the morning, start the analysis with Borma. Esaki, join them. I hope I don't need to remind you to be careful."

She got a bunch of affirmative responses from the team, and the chat ended. Meanwhile, the technicians sent tachikomas for an overnight charge, and Purin's surroundings quieted once again. She decided to also head home and rest.

A 10-minute ride in an automated taxi later, Esaki Purin opened the door to her apartment. Her new ID that Major provided was already registered in the apartment's security system. Her home looked exactly like she left it two months ago, save for a layer of dust on most of the surfaces. Even her two houseplants were automatically watered and in perfect health. She walked around the living room checking everything, and then went into her bedroom. There she opened an unassuming closet that was hiding stacks of servers with blinking lights and fan noises. Purin pulled a wire from one of the servers and connected it to the back of her neck, entered a complicated password, and unlocked her memory backup vault.

*It's all as I remember, pun intended.* She thought to herself looking over the stored data. *This thing saved me. I should continue using it. Maybe I should even back up my... personality.*

Purin sighed and sat on the floor, leaning with her back to the vault. *This nails it, isn't it... I don't want to sleep, I'm not tired, not even mentally, after all that happened in the last 24 hours. And now I'm talking about a personality backup... Like I'm some sort of computer that can just be copied when needed...*

She sighed again. *I guess I am, there is no getting around it. Maybe it's not so bad. Everyone seems to like Tachikomas, and they're robots. Even Batou-san has a soft spot for them. Maybe they can like and trust me too. No use sulking around! I just need to do something instead!*

Purin stood up from the floor, downloaded new remote authorization keys from the memory vault, and set up the synchronization again. After disconnecting from the vault, she opened a nearby door to a walk-in closet full of her clothes. After looking at her choices and contemplating for a bit, she started changing out of the clothes provided to her by Section 9.

*Hmmm. What should I put on? All the men in Section 9 dress so plainly. In their contrast, Major's outfit is pretty weird but stylish and not out of place in most settings. I think I should get a hint from her, especially with my pink hair.*

Purin ended up with a dark lilac tinted suit jacket on top, and comfortable but stylish gray shorts over similarly dark lilac tights. She tried to put one of her favorite pairs of boots on a short heel but quickly found out that she would have to wear reinforced boots now when it was crushed by the weight of her new body. So instead she went for the only leather boots without a heel that she owned. *I guess there is no need to look 5 cm taller when you can knock out a man in one punch.* She also found out that she didn't need her glasses, in fact, they weren't even prescription glasses to begin with. She left them on because they were something she was used to at this point, and she thought that they looked nice on her.

After her short mental breakdown and makeover were over, Purin decided to go back to Section 9 and see what she could busy herself with there.

Section 9 building felt eerily empty at that time of night. Halls filled with industrial noise that permeated everything in the city and no living beings. Purin made her way to the lab to find something interesting there. What she found was a box on a workbench - an isolated storage connected to an isolated set of terminals, systems, and firewalls. A box for the virus that Ishikawa found, she guessed. A virus that led to her untimely death already. But her curiosity was way stronger than her fear.

At least her caution was even stronger still. She was literally studying cyber security and this thing got to her without her noticing. Even in an isolated and dormant state, exploring an unknown virus is dangerous. She needed help, so she went to another lab where tachikomas were charging. She moved carefully almost like if she made too much noise everyone would wake up and catch her at something. This was of course silly. She wasn't doing anything wrong, and tachikomas had enough sensors to hit a mosquito with an armor-penetrating bullet by only using sound. Still, Purin got to one of the charging tachikomas and poked it into the side.

"Beep!" The robot 'woke up'. "Purin-san? What are you doing here?" It asked her in its usual loud voice.

"Sh-h-h!" Purin shushed it with a finger to her lips. "Don't wake up the rest. I need your help, follow me."

"Wha-a~!" the tachikoma exclaimed in a hushed tone way more quietly as it started rolling towards Purin out of the room. "The rest will be so envious of me, he-he~ They will definitely demand that we synchronize the experience!"

“You can synchronize experiences with each other? That's really cool."

"Yeah! But the technicians get mad at us for this..." It replied somewhat dejected.

While they were talking, they reached the lab with the virus.

"What are we going to do here?" Tachikoma asked.

"I want to try and analyze the virus in this box." Purin pointed to the box on the workbench. "I need you to spot me and act as a sandbox and firewall just in case. I'll be very careful, but it's always better to have someone watching over."

"That sounds fun, let's go!"

"Okay," Purin nodded and started connecting them. One wire from the workbench terminal to the tachikoma, another from the tachikoma to the back of her neck. A moment later, both of them were inside the virtual environment of the terminal.

The virtual environment was built specifically for software analysis and debugging. In front of them was the visual representation of the virus they were trying to decipher. It usually looked like a ball made of different circles with data, each circle representing a part of software, a data array, a database, or an entry point. In there, the operator could visually and spatially analyze the data, move it around, and follow the connections between them to find what they were looking for. At least that's how it usually was. What Purin and tachikoma saw was a jumbled mess of circles overlapping each other, with broken connections, seemingly corrupted data, and encryption over encryption. *This will take time...*

"Purin-san?" Tachikoma interrupted Purin's thinking process. "Are you an AI?" It asked in its usual excited tone.

"What? Why do you ask?" Purin got startled.

"You're way too fast!" Tachikoma waved its claw and a clock appeared in front of them showing current time in seconds and milliseconds. Purin looked with confusion at the slow increment of the millisecond part of the clock.

"Oh. Eh-h... Something like that? I guess?"

"Whoa~ the others are not gonna believe me!"

"Ah but please-please keep it a secret!" Purin started waving her hands. "I guess you can share with other tachikomas, but please don't tell the rest! I swear it's fine, Major knows everything, you can ask her!"

"Oh, a secret! I know the best way to keep a secret, I will delete it from my memory when we're done here!"

"That feels excessive..."

"We do that all the time, Purin-san! At least I think we do, since I can't remember obviously, he-he~"

"O-okay... Let's start on it then?"

Normal software analysis is usually not dangerous. It's a lot like reading a book, except instead of a linear story it's a lot of smaller parts joined together in non-linear ways and more than half of the book is references that you also need to read to understand what's going on and make the whole picture. But it's often pretty easy to find what you're looking for if you have a lot of experience.

That gets harder when the author of the software doesn't want anyone to read it. And authors of viruses more than anything don't want someone to read them. That's why viruses are usually both encrypted and obfuscated. That doesn't just make it hard to understand what's going on, but it also makes it incredibly dangerous to even try to. Back in the old days, you could run the virus in a sandbox or on an isolated computer where it couldn't do any harm and just let it decrypt itself and then analyze its behavior or memory. The problem was that a cyberbrain virus was made for a specific kind of computer - a cyberbrain. And it's very obvious to anyone that they should not try to run a virus on their cyberbrain.

That's why Purin and tachikoma needed to isolate decryption algorithms and keys, decrypt parts of the code separately, and analyze them without actually running the virus. That was a very intensive process, and still not without the risk. They quickly found out that the virus's author employed everything they could to prevent its analysis, including traps in decryption algorithms themselves that could do damage to a careless analyst. With tachikomas help, they were able to execute them safely, and the process moved on.

*It's not surprising that this thing could hack me, or honestly anyone else...* Purin thought after looking around the neatly unpacked and sorted piece of software a few hours later.

"That was really fun, Purin-san!" Tachikoma said.

"Yup! Good job, and thank you for the help."

Right after they were done and were cleaning up, Purin got a morning group message from Major.

*"Everyone, Togusa compiled the list of potentially exposed victims. Pazu, Batou, try to find them and see if you find anything suspicious. Ishikawa, start on the virus, we need to know what it does."*

*"Actually, Major..."* Purin started a non-confident response. *"I have done the virus analysis and it will be better if you all see what I found."*

Purin in her work clothes, art from SAC_2045 is under the spoiler: