Vanished Medication

Building on the aftermath of the pupae case, Togusa reads J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and reasons that the Laughing Man is chasing something that exists only on printed paper rather than in the net. Acting on the hunch, he secures clearance to comb through a health ministry records facility and finds that a specific document has quietly disappeared: the register of Cyberbrain Sclerosis sufferers who received a covert vaccine.

Following the gap in the archive, he reaches an organization known as the Sunflower Society and uncovers an ugly secret. Several prominent citizens have been treated in silence with an experimental sclerosis medication, and the whole arrangement conceals the fact that the nanomachine therapy simply does not work. The suppressed list is the thread that could unravel it all.

Meanwhile, the chief of the nation's drug enforcement unit sends the Narcotics Suppression Squad to wipe out the Sunflower Society and reclaim the missing register. The squad storms the building while Togusa is still inside, and he is swept up in the killing. He fights his way out alive but leaves gravely wounded.

Togusa's literary instinct reframes the entire investigation around physical media, a lead that separates him from the rest of the team. The vanished register exposes that the celebrated cure for cyberbrain sclerosis is a hollow promise, and that powerful people have been quietly enrolled in a failing experimental program. The DEA chief's decision to erase the Sunflower Society turns a records search into a massacre, and Togusa's narrow escape leaves him critically hurt.

The episode carries the on-screen subtitle RE-VIEW and belongs to the season's core conspiracy arc rather than a standalone case. Its threads reach into the Murai Vaccine and the wider truth about the sclerosis epidemic. It aired in Japan on February 18, 2003, and in English on March 27, 2005.