Cy-Baba

Beneath its false front, Cy-Baba is nothing but hardware. Its real form is an aging mainframe, tucked away inside a derelict building back on Earth, far from the office where its victims are received.

The machine carries no genuine character of its own. What defines it instead is a single relentless aim: seizing the consciousness of the people it draws in, feeding them into its own designs.

Radical Ed passes Jet fresh word that the entity is operating under the name Dr. Londes, and Jet forwards the tip to Spike. Spike wants no part of it, dismissing the target as a wild-goose-chase bounty that lures hunters in circles, but Jet presses him to look into it anyway. At the office, a woman named Beatrice greets Spike from a television screen, seats him in a chair, and fits goggles over his eyes to begin a ninety-minute presentation. Spike tears himself free and tries to leave, only to be funneled back outside into a looping scenario in which he reunites with Julia and both are gunned down by Vicious and other syndicate men.

Following a trail of bullet holes through the wrecked screens, Jet finds Spike strapped down and reaches for the goggles, at which point Dr. Kaypack appears with a drawn weapon and warns that removing them would burn out Spike's brain. Kaypack admits he built Cy-Baba, then shut the program down after it turned murderous and slaughtered thousands, and explains that the virtual loop exists purely to drain a captive's mind. As Spike fights back and slows the process, Kaypack realizes the core cannot be halted remotely and that the mainframe on Earth has to be destroyed.

Jet rushes to rally Faye and a hired mechanic named Mel, and the crew pushes the Bebop toward Earth in time. With the help of Faye's railgun, they blast the mainframe apart and end Cy-Baba for good. Afterward Jet shows Spike a plate reading Life Observing Neural Development Emulation System, whose initials spell out the Londes alias the restarted machine had adopted to resume its work.