Bartek Starts Indy’s InSoul3 Scan

Bartek Starts Indy’s InSoul3 Scan is a small but consequential act of assistance: after finding Fredek / Indy secretly preparing to play an old full-VR game, Bartek decides to help him despite a moment of hesitation and starts the scan. The scene turns on a passage from discovery to consent. Bartek arrives as a hulking machine moving through a human building; he leaves the encounter having used his technical capacity to make a prohibited human experience possible, though the evidence ends at the scan’s launch and does not establish its result.

A Nighttime Discovery

In a corridor beneath the floor of Gates Tower’s dedicated transformer servers, cold fluorescent light spills from behind a half-open door. Bartek raises his microphone sensitivity and hears a human breathing. The detail makes the encounter begin as detection: before he sees the person or knows what is happening, he registers a living body through a machine’s adjusted sensor. He approaches with a heavy iron tread, an entrance that makes his arrival physical and unmistakable.

Fredek / Indy recognizes him and admits to rummaging among old game-playing devices. His explanation is deliberately private: he has made a bet with Charlie and asks Bartek not to tell. The request establishes the improvised secrecy of the episode before its larger prohibition comes into view. This is not an official project or a sanctioned recreation; a child has found equipment, made a private arrangement, and is trying to keep the plan from becoming public.

The Forbidden Game

The scale of the available entertainment makes the undertaking more specific. In the Big Nest, the children have six large playrooms equipped with Sony and Microsoft consoles, including the latest models from before The Extermination. For Fredek / Indy, the existing collection is no longer enough. After becoming absorbed in Indiana Jones, he wants to play every version of Paradise Indy’s archaeological adventures, including the stories made for full VR.

That wish crosses a rule: the Project Council still does not allow humans to play VR. The children have organized the activity on their own initiative, placing their appetite for an older kind of immersive game against an institutional restriction. The scene presents this as a practical, clandestine undertaking rather than a public confrontation. Boxes and installation disks lie torn open around Fredek / Indy; the material scatter shows how far the attempt has already advanced, while Bartek’s good-natured skepticism registers his response without stopping it.

The objects are not incidental clutter. Fredek / Indy has to search through old devices, handle a rubber skullcap, study pictorial instructions, and wrestle with an eight-hundred-page manual. The attempt to reach an immersive, digitally mediated experience is therefore stubbornly physical: packaging must be opened, parts identified, and equipment fitted to a human head. The scene’s comedy comes from the gap between the adventure Fredek / Indy wants to enter and the awkward work required to make its interface function.

Fitting the Reader

Fredek / Indy turns a rubber skullcap over in his fingers, squints at its pictorial instructions, and puts it on askew. Bartek impulsively straightens it. The gesture is brief, but it shifts the exchange from watching to helping before the scan begins. Bartek corrects the fit of the device on Fredek / Indy’s head, an immediate, hands-on response to an awkward setup rather than a declaration of support.

The IS3 instruction manual only deepens Fredek / Indy’s frustration. He tears it out of its packaging and asks Bartek for help. Bartek then hesitates for a thousand processor ticks. The measured pause makes the decision legible as a choice rather than an automatic response: he understands that he is being asked to take part, and does not act at once. The evidence gives his deliberation a particular context—he still has time before his departure, and tells himself that it is no longer his humanity, and that Rory and Cho can worry about it. He then accepts the request.

Starting the Scan

Bartek tells Fredek / Indy to sit. He installs the neurosoft, calibrates InSoul, and straightens the cortex reader on the human’s head again. Each step turns the assistance into a procedure: the equipment is installed, the system calibrated, and the reader repositioned before Bartek presses ENTER. At that point, the scan starts. The scene does not describe what it records, what Fredek / Indy experiences, or what follows from the operation; its endpoint is the launch itself.

The sequence’s significance lies in the threshold Bartek crosses. He has found a secret plan that contravenes the Project Council’s rule, seen Fredek / Indy struggle with the apparatus, and paused before deciding to help. His final actions make him an active participant in the children’s unauthorized initiative. Yet the ending remains deliberately precise rather than expansive: the scan is underway, while its outcome is left unstated. The human breath behind the door has led to a machine-assisted act of access, but the scene stops at the moment that access begins.