Blame! - Chapter 48

This is one of the most complex chapters. Let me know if you interpret it differently.

Cibo and Iko enter a room with the tiny cyborgs in it. (We saw these little guys earlier when they were refining the DNA.) Cibo zaps them with an electric baton. One tries to run out the door, but Iko closes the door on his head. Cibo and Iko find a terminal and discover that Davinel (the cyborg leader) is already connecting to the netsphere, but the connection is going strangely slowly.

There’s a bridge which is like an arm. Cibo and Iko are inside it, and steer it up to the tower with the cyborgs inside. To unlock the door, Iko connects to its terminal, where he is manifested as his full body, floating. (He started out as a child-looking safeguard, but got mostly destroyed and just exists as a cloud now.) Well, he is connected to the terminal, but is attacked by (the mind of) a giant cyborg in there. His ghost-form disappears.

Dhomo and Killy take the same arm-bridge and walk up the top of it, while Cibo and Iko are inside it. Dhomo tells Iko to open the door, but Iko doesn’t respond. Instead, Cibo hooks herself into the terminal and opens the door.

Dhomo and Killy see Davinel hooked up to the terminal and try to shoot him immediately. Dhomo misses because he is tackled by cyborgs. Killy and Dhomo fight back against the cyborgs. Killy’s arm is suddenly chopped off. Pcell (that superstrong cyborg from earlier) shows up and starts slicing at them. Dhomo headshots her, but she slices him in half. She then reforms behind him. He shoots her off the ledge, but collapses.

Iko is floating in cyberspace, having defeated the cyborg he fought. (All cyberspace is depicted as this kind of dreamy physical realm, but not all cyberspace is the netsphere that everyone’s trying to get into; this is like a minor local network.) Iko sees Cibo floating close to something mysterious and dangerous, and tries to warn her away. He is then ejected from the cyberspace and floats off in his ghostly form.

Davinel (the cyborg leader) continues crossing the (simulated) river to the netsphere, and is almost there. (He shows up as a human here because he is using human DNA (actually Seu’s DNA) to gain access.) He taunts the guardian, saying he’s almost there, but it tells him that it slowed down his network connection, so a lot more time has been passing than he thought.

Dhomo uses his last strength to shoot a beam of electricity from his hand, which headshots Davinel. In the beam of electricity is an X, which appears on Davinel’s head on his real body as well as in the netsphere. I guess this is tainting him or marking him as “denied”, so that he can’t enter the netsphere.

We see Cibo absorbing streams of energy from the thing she was approaching in the cyberspace.

Davinel collapses, but manages to reach his hand into the netsphere for a moment (which shows his true cyborg form.) He is flushed down into the river.

But in the next panel, the avatar he was using reappears in the same place… This isn’t Davinel, but Cibo, also using the provisional connection. Cibo says she just wants to see the Netsphere. She reaches her hand into the netsphere, but instead of getting flushed, her hand starts to dissolve. The guardian tells her that Davinel was able to steal the data of a highest-level safeguard when he reached into the netsphere, and that it is taking over her body in the real world. But she continues dissolving instead of falling into the river, indicating that she was accepted into the netsphere.

The last panel is Iko watching Cibo’s body metamorphize into a safeguard.