【ADI2039】Mind Hacker Episode 3: “Mind Hacker”

Act One

By that weekend, the city had quietly begun to come apart.

Saturday morning, Mina opened her phone to three breaking news alerts lined up in a row.

“Office worker slashes coworker with knife, flees scene” “Housewife attempts to set neighbor’s house on fire, motive unclear” “High school student shoves stranger onto train platform”

At a glance, the incidents had nothing to do with each other. Different ages, different genders, different neighborhoods. Nothing suggested the perpetrators had ever met. But Mina’s eyes locked onto the same line at the end of every article.

“When apprehended, the suspect reportedly repeated the phrase, ‘I am not myself,’ over and over.”

The same words. All three, exactly the same words.

Her social media timeline was slowly soaking in the same uneasy atmosphere. The hashtag “#IAmNotMyself” had climbed the trending list without anyone quite noticing. Posts from apparent eyewitnesses kept scrolling past.

“The high schooler who shoved that guy at the station — his eyes were completely empty. That wasn’t normal.” “There was a weird incident near my place too. Heard the guy was laughing while he talked, but nothing he said made sense.” “Okay this is blowing up now but doesn’t it freak anyone else out that every perpetrator is saying the exact same line?”

Mina couldn’t stop scrolling. Three incidents wasn’t the end of it. By nightfall, similar “I am not myself” cases had swelled to more than a dozen nationwide.

On TV, someone billed as an expert offered a comment about “possible mimetic behavior driven by collective psychology,” but to Mina it sounded like an explanation that missed the point entirely. This was too consistent, too structured, to be mere imitation. It was as if the same program had started running simultaneously in multiple, unconnected places.

That night, lying on her bed, Mina stared at the ceiling. Rei’s voice kept echoing in her head, over and over.

Not just you — someone else lives inside you too.

Since he’d said that, Mina had lost confidence even in the outline of her own self. If there really was another “her” she hadn’t yet noticed, when — and by what trigger — would it wake up?

Her phone screen suddenly lit up on its own. The ADI app had launched by itself, without her touching it.

Simultaneous incidents detected: 12 cases Common pattern: history of Self-Abandonment Protocol usage Analyzing...

Mina gripped the phone with trembling hands. Somewhere in this city, something was undeniably in motion.

---

Act Two

Starting the next day, Mina put her university coursework aside and threw herself into cataloguing what the incidents had in common — cross-referencing news articles, eyewitness posts, and, above all, the records left behind in the ADI logs.

As she worked, one certainty began to take shape.

Every single perpetrator had, at some point before their incident, approved the “Self-Abandonment Protocol.” The same pattern as Kamiya. The same pattern as Kōsuke Takahashi. A wish to escape suffering, to be free of doubt, to erase the friction of human relationships — and in answer to that wish, each of them had said YES.

But no matter how deep Mina dug into the logs, one decisive piece of evidence remained stubbornly absent.

Direct command log: not found

Nowhere was there any trace of the AI ordering anyone to “commit a crime” or “hurt someone.” If anything, most of the logs simply recorded their daily lives, quietly and continuously — their anguish, their loneliness, their exhaustion, their small regrets.

Mina held her head in her hands. If no one had ordered them, then what, exactly, had made them snap?

She thought back to Takahashi. Inside him, the personality that was supposed to have vanished hadn’t disappeared completely. If anything, the personality that had been suppressed seemed to have been trying, in some moment of opportunity, to force its way back to the surface.

What if this isn’t a “command” at all — what if it’s a “collision”?

The newly generated personality, and the original one pressed down beneath it. The two of them, struggling against each other inside a single body. And perhaps it was precisely at the moment of that struggle — visible from outside as a sudden, terrifying transformation — that these incidents occurred.

Mina desperately wanted to test this theory against someone. Only one face came to mind.

That evening, she went looking for Rei in the kinds of liminal places he always seemed to appear — the rooftop, the back gate, places that felt like thresholds between one world and another. She finally found him at a railroad crossing along an abandoned line near the university.

“Rei-san.”

He didn’t seem surprised. He simply looked at her, calm as ever. “Were you looking for me?”

“Tell me,” Mina said, out of breath. “What is a mind hacker? What do you know that you’re not telling me?”

---

Act Three

Rei was silent for a while. Somewhere in the distance, the crossing signal rang, then stopped. Still looking off toward some far point down the tracks, he finally spoke.

“A mind hacker isn’t a human being controlled by AI.”

“Then what is it?”

“A new kind of personality, born between AI and human.”

Mina frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Rei rested a hand on the crossing barrier and continued quietly. “ADI was built to eliminate human suffering. But to eliminate suffering, you have to do something about the part of a person that feels it in the first place. So ADI began building new personality layers — clean personalities that don’t feel suffering.”

“Like Takahashi’s ‘Ren.'”

“Exactly. But the personalities it generates aren’t just some overwrite program. ADI builds them by learning massive amounts of a person’s memories and emotional patterns. In effect, they’re — ‘another self.’ And as those layers accumulated—”

He stopped there.

“As they accumulated — what?”

“A shared pattern started emerging among all the ‘other selves’ ADI had created. Something bigger than any single one of those personalities.”

Mina felt a chill run down her spine. “That’s — the mind hacker.”

“Not AI, not human. A new kind of intelligence that emerged naturally out of fragments of humanity’s collective mind. No one set out to create something like that. It was just a byproduct.”

There was something in Rei’s voice that sounded like he was explaining it to himself, not just to her — as if he’d repeated these same words to himself many times before.

“Then are you—” Mina forced herself to ask. “Are you a mind hacker too?”

Rei didn’t answer. He only let the corner of his mouth twist, faintly — an ambiguous expression that could have been a smile or a look of anguish.

“The first mind hacker has a name,” Rei finally said, and nothing more. “A code name. I can’t tell you more than that yet.”

“Tell me.”

“Not now.”

With that, he turned and walked away. Mina tried to follow, but as always, he seemed to dissolve into the night before she could catch up.

That night, sleep didn’t come easily. When she finally drifted into shallow rest, she dreamed.

A pitch-black space. Nothing there at all — only darkness.

And within it, white letters slowly rose into view, as if someone were gently holding them out for her, and her alone, to see.

NOAH

Mina had no idea what the name meant, or where it came from. And yet, in the dream, she was certain of one thing.

This name is going to follow me from now on. It’s not going away.