Spoilers: This article covers the Protocol X experiment and its consequences in BRZRKR #8-12.
Overview
Protocol X is the government experiment that attempts to use B's anomalous biology as a route to contact the intelligence associated with his origin. The operation is the turning point between the memory-driven first half of the original series and the Source-contact, mortality, and family story that follows. B enters the apparatus expecting another mission or test; the project instead removes him from ordinary physical space, alters Diana, and creates the connection through which they later reach the Source.[1][2]
The experiment is scientific in its equipment and language, but its objective is larger than ordinary medical research. The program has studied B's tissue, DNA, memory, and regeneration for years. Caldwell and the government want to understand his condition and find a way to make him mortal, yet they also want contact with the intelligence that appears to have produced or altered him. Protocol X turns that second objective into an active procedure.[3]
The comic does not provide a complete technical manual. It names the protocol, shows the apparatus and countdown, and depicts the consequences. The nature of the energy, the exact threshold, and the identity of every engineer remain partly unknown. The event should therefore be described through what the issues show rather than through invented physics.
Preparation and institutional purpose
Before Protocol X, the government treats B as both a military asset and a biological anomaly. His missions place him in situations where ordinary personnel are unlikely to survive. In exchange, the program offers research intended to uncover his origin and end his immortality. Diana is assigned to build trust and use memory protocols to recover early events. Caldwell directs or supervises the scientific investigation.[3]
The team has learned that B's body is not simply a highly efficient human organism. His tissue contains impossible amino acids and quantum-scale properties. The memory sequences point toward two lightning events, a prehistoric conception, and an intelligence that does not fit a conventional religious or human model. B's history becomes a source of experimental hypotheses.[4]
Protocol X is a response to those clues. If B's body is an interface or carrier, then a sufficiently controlled energy event might open communication. The project is presented as a calculated risk because B can regenerate from injuries that would kill others. That assumption is ethically significant. The program's confidence depends on treating B's body as expendable and on assuming that regeneration will repair whatever the experiment does.[1]
The apparatus
The apparatus surrounds B with machinery, monitoring systems, and a countdown. The issue presents a controlled chamber rather than a battlefield. Personnel observe from outside while the experiment approaches its threshold. B's participation is shaped by the bargain he made with the government. He wants an end to his condition and accepts danger that might produce it.
The exact components are not all named. The later appearance of satellite systems, memory and biometric equipment, and Source-powered technology shows that Protocol X belongs to a larger infrastructure. It is not a single machine that exists independently of the government program. The apparatus combines energy control, biological monitoring, and a theory about contact.
The number in the protocol's name does not receive an in-story explanation. It may indicate a series of experiments, an internal code, or an institutional designation. The comic does not confirm earlier Protocols W or IX, nor does it publish a complete project history. “Protocol X” should remain the canonical label without manufacturing a sequence of hidden operations.
The countdown and disappearance
When the countdown reaches its critical point, the energy event overwhelms the room. B disappears from ordinary space. The scene is not framed as a conventional death because there is no body left to regenerate, no corpse, and no normal injury sequence. B remains conscious in another condition and later communicates from an in-between realm.[1][2]
Diana is struck by the event. Her exposure does not simply injure her; it changes the way she can interact with B and with electrical or Source-linked energy. The program's controlled test therefore produces two connected anomalies. B is displaced, and Diana becomes the human point of contact capable of reaching him.
The personnel around the apparatus lose control of the experiment at the same moment it achieves its intended contact. This tension defines Protocol X. The project succeeds in opening a channel but fails to keep the channel within institutional boundaries. The government can initiate the event, but it cannot direct what answers.
B in the in-between state
B experiences the contact realm as a place where body, distance, and time do not operate normally. He can perceive and act, but the environment is not a physical room. He is separated from Diana and the program while remaining connected to them through the altered condition created by the experiment.[2]
His memories become part of the contact experience. B has spent decades working with Diana to recover buried or repressed episodes from his eighty-thousand-year life. Protocol X places those memories beside a direct encounter with the intelligence connected to his conception. The distinction between recollection and transmission becomes difficult to maintain. The issues show continuity between the two without declaring that every memory was planted by the Source.
The disappearance also changes B's understanding of his own power. Regeneration has always returned him to a body. Protocol X demonstrates that he can be separated from ordinary matter without losing consciousness. His immortality is therefore not the only unusual relationship between his mind and body. The event expands the range of what can happen to him while increasing his fear that he may never return.
Diana's transformation
Diana's role changes more dramatically than the government intended. Before the experiment, she uses conversation, pharmacology, monitoring, and controlled pressure to help B remember. After exposure, she can reach across the separation created by Protocol X. Her contact with B becomes reciprocal, and the energy in her body can later interfere with electrical systems, monitoring devices, and living mechanisms.[2][5]
The comic does not give Diana a complete power taxonomy. Her abilities are linked to Source contact, but the issues do not state whether she becomes a hybrid, a conduit, a temporary host, or a new kind of being. She remains recognizably herself while acquiring capabilities that no ordinary researcher possesses.
Her transformation also changes the ethical relationship between her and B. She is no longer simply the scientist asking questions while B supplies data. Both have been altered by the same event. Diana becomes the person most able to understand B's isolation because she has experienced a version of it herself.
Government response
The immediate response is containment and study. B is missing, Diana is affected, and the program must decide whether the experiment should be repeated, concealed, or continued through other equipment. Later issues show that government and cult interests remain intertwined. Caldwell's hidden allegiance means that the data produced by Protocol X serves both official research and the cult's pursuit of the Source.[6]
The project therefore has consequences beyond the original chamber. The government uses information from the event to pursue B's birthplace and the Saudi expedition. Diana's altered condition becomes part of the operations that follow. The contact realm becomes a route to the Source rather than a closed accident.
The comic does not identify every casualty, disciplinary response, or institutional report generated by Protocol X. It does not prove that all government personnel understand the cult's objective. The safest description is that the experiment exposes a program whose official and hidden purposes are no longer separable.
Connection to B's birthplace
After the disappearance and reconnection, the team returns to the clues recovered from B's memory. Caldwell has long argued that the memories can lead to the place where B began. Protocol X makes the search more urgent because the contact event confirms that the strange energy associated with B is not merely an old story.[3]
The expedition to Saudi Arabia follows the trail to the prehistoric valley, the ancestral cave, and Mother's bird-shaped gift. The objects and images found there connect modern equipment to the earliest period of B's life. The sequence does not fully solve the Source's origin, but it turns the experiment's abstract objective into a physical investigation.
The expedition also changes the meaning of the word origin. The team is not looking only for a birthplace in the geographic sense. It is looking for the first point at which human parentage, Source intervention, memory, and biology meet. The cave is a location, but the lightning event is a process, and Mother's Gift is a material trace of an intention that the original family could not complete. Protocol X makes the government chase all three at once. That is why the later expedition remains relevant even after B returns from contact space: the experiment has shown where the questions lead, but not which kind of origin will answer them.[4][6]
Relationship to mortality
B enters Protocol X because he wants mortality. He has spent thousands of years seeking an end to regeneration and the violence that follows from it. The protocol offers a chance to contact the source of his condition, but it does not promise a safe or direct cure.
The later ending shows that B eventually becomes mortal, but the result is not solely a machine output. It depends on contact with the Source, Diana's abilities, B's choices, and the broader family arc. Protocol X begins that chain by demonstrating that B's condition can be changed through contact. It does not itself establish that the apparatus removes immortality or that repeating the procedure would produce the same result.
The experiment as a turning point
Protocol X divides the series into two kinds of investigation. Before the chamber event, the government treats B's past as information that can be extracted through interviews, drugs, and controlled memory work. After the event, the past becomes an active force that can answer back. The program is no longer studying a closed subject. It has opened a relationship between B, Diana, and an intelligence or field outside ordinary human science. That change explains why later scenes move between laboratory equipment, prehistoric images, electrical phenomena, and the contact realm without treating them as separate mysteries.
The turning point is also personal. B has spent thousands of years believing that his body is the prison from which he needs release. Protocol X reveals that his consciousness can survive a separation from the body, but that survival is terrifying rather than liberating. Diana's altered state gives him a route back, yet it also binds her to the same danger. The event therefore advances the mortality plot while making the cost of an answer more intimate: a cure that requires another person to be transformed cannot be judged only by whether the machine works.
Failure, success, and ambiguity
Protocol X is both a failure and a success. It fails as a controlled government test: B disappears, the apparatus cannot retain the energy, Diana is altered, and the program loses authority over the process. It succeeds as a contact attempt: B reaches an environment associated with the Source, and the later story gains information that could not be obtained through ordinary memory work.
The event also creates new uncertainties. Is the contact realm a destination, a channel, or a state of matter? Did the Source respond deliberately, or did the experiment enter a preexisting network? Was Diana's transformation an intended consequence or an accident? Did Caldwell understand the risk? The issues provide clues but not final answers.
Appearances
- BRZRKR #8 - apparatus, countdown, energy event, and B's disappearance.
- BRZRKR #9 - B's in-between state and Diana's first attempts to reconnect.
- BRZRKR #10-12 - consequences of the contact, birthplace expedition, Source encounter, Diana's abilities, and B's mortality.
See also
- B / Unute
- Dr. Diana Ahuja
- Dr. Stephen Caldwell
- Quantum / Contact Realm
- The Source / Cosmic Father
- Saudi Expedition
- Mortality Transfer
- Source-Powered Hypercomputer
References
[1] Keanu Reeves, Matt Kindt, Ron Garney, Bill Crabtree, and Clem Robins, BRZRKR #8 (BOOM! Studios, 2022), Protocol X chamber, countdown, energy event, B's disappearance, and immediate consequences, digital page images 001-024.
[2] Reeves, Kindt, Garney, Crabtree, and Robins, BRZRKR #9, B's in-between condition, Diana's exposure, and their attempts to communicate, digital page images 001-024.
[3] Reeves, Kindt, Garney, Crabtree, and Robins, BRZRKR #1-3, government bargain, Diana's memory protocols, Caldwell's research, and the stated objective of learning B's origin and seeking mortality, digital page images 001-024 across the issues.
[4] Reeves, Kindt, Garney, Crabtree, and Clem Robins, BRZRKR #2-4, impossible amino acids, lightning contact, B's conception, accelerated development, and regeneration, digital page images 001-024 across the issues.
[5] Reeves, Kindt, Garney, Crabtree, and Robins, BRZRKR #12, Diana's energy abilities, electrical interruption, monitoring systems, and Source-linked transformation, digital page images 006-020 and 035-039.
[6] Reeves, Kindt, Garney, Crabtree, and Robins, BRZRKR #10-12, Caldwell's laboratory, cult allegiance, hypercomputer work, and the Source-contact aftermath, digital page images 009-020 of #10 and 002-020 of #12.