All Will Become N

Togusa is picking apart files seized from Takashi Shimamura inside the Section 9 computer room when a cyber assault strikes him. Purin Ezaki and Boma scramble to intervene, and Ishikawa rescues him by loading a counter-barrier into his cyberbrain. Once Togusa recovers in the medical bay, staff urge him to erase whatever has lodged itself in his head. Analysis later reveals the payload as a routine designed to surface recollections buried deep in a person's subconscious, apparently built by Takashi after Think Pol, a name that echoes the Thought Police of George Orwell's 1984. A visit to Takashi's mother teaches Togusa that the boy first received the novel at nine years old, around the same period he lived with an aunt and uncle in the mountains outside Kyoto.

Togusa and Batou travel by Tachikoma to the rural home where Takashi once stayed while his mother tended a sick husband. Weak reception forces the pair to route their communications through the machine. At the site Togusa alone catches sight of Takashi and begins witnessing his memories from a first-person view, unable to touch or address anyone within them. He watches the bond between Takashi and Yuzu, their theft of the novel from a former airborne trooper, and the beating Takashi takes from his uncle afterward. Back at headquarters, Ishikawa surfaces an old report about a disabled veteran who gunned down five officers, while Boma reads a heartbreak-like emotion trapped inside the corrupted memory data, leading the team to conclude the program was meant to stir nostalgia.

A final vision shows the troopers avenging a slain comrade, Yuzu dying in the gunfire, and a grown Takashi climbing aboard their truck. Reaching out in a warped voice, he asks Togusa whether he wishes to join. In the waking world Batou glances away for a single moment and finds his partner gone, though the Tachikoma can still perceive Togusa and wave him off. The installment is directed by Sōichi Masui and scripted by Daisuke Daitō and Kenji Kamiyama, first broadcast in Japan on April 23, 2020, with the English release following on May 3, 2020.