Spoilers: This article discusses B's First World War memory, the separated body fragment, Caldwell's historical research, and the proposal that becomes Protocol X.
BRZRKR #7 connects B's ancient past to the modern experiment that will eventually tear him out of ordinary space. The issue opens in the First World War, where B serves as a weapon inside another human conflict, and moves toward a present-day plan built around a fragment of his body. The battlefield memory gives the government an object it can study. Caldwell turns the object into a theory. Protocol X begins as the promise that science can reach the source of B's condition and ends as the most dangerous experiment of the original series.
The issue is about fragments in several senses. A piece of B is separated from the whole. A historical scene offers only part of the truth about how he has been used. Caldwell reveals enough of his research to earn B's cooperation while concealing the purpose that will later make the experiment a betrayal. The reader sees how a partial truth can be more powerful than an obvious lie.
B in the First World War
The historical sequence places B inside the machinery of industrial warfare. Artillery, trenches, wire, mud, and firearms create a battlefield in which individual bodies are easy to lose. B's regenerative condition makes him unusually valuable to commanders who need a soldier capable of crossing spaces that would kill everyone else. Yet the modern weapons also make the cost of using him visible. His body can be torn apart by forces designed to erase entire formations.
B does not enter the war as a free agent. He serves under a handler and is directed toward objectives that treat his survival as an answer to the battlefield's deadlock. The setting is historically specific, but the relationship is ancient. A ruler or government sees B, calculates what his body can withstand, and sends him where ordinary soldiers cannot be spared. The uniforms and weapons change; the bargain remains.
The body fragment
During the operation, a piece of B's body is separated from him and left behind. The fragment is not a clean sample taken in a laboratory. It is the residue of violence, an accidental object created by a battle in which B is treated as expendable. The issue's later science depends on the fragment precisely because it preserves something that ordinary tissue cannot: a connection to the regenerative pattern that lets B return.
The fragment changes the meaning of B's immortality. Until this point, the body has been experienced as a single continuing self. The separated piece suggests that part of the condition may persist outside B's conscious control. The government can recover it, store it, and ask whether its properties can be transferred. What B experiences as a wound becomes, to researchers, a resource.
A modern historical investigation
Caldwell presents the First World War material as part of a longer investigation into B's past. He has gathered fragments from different eras, connected recurring names and objects, and studied the memories recovered through Diana's sessions. His research is persuasive because it produces real connections. He knows that B's history is not a collection of unrelated legends. The same body, or the same identity, appears across thousands of years.
The problem is not that Caldwell's facts are false. It is that his purpose is hidden. He speaks as though the investigation exists to find B's origin and solve his immortality. B accepts the possibility because mortality is worth the risk of being studied. The issue makes the agreement plausible while planting the suspicion that Caldwell wants more than a cure.
History as a weapon
Caldwell's research gives the government leverage over B. If memories can locate a place, identify a relic, or explain a biological event, then the past becomes intelligence. B's own experiences are turned into coordinates and experimental variables. Diana's memory work is therefore part of the same apparatus that will later use the fragment. She is trying to help B remember, but the institution around her is preparing to convert remembrance into control.
The issue also shows why B's perfect memory is dangerous to the people who have used him. He can recognize details that expose a false account. He remembers the difference between a real object and an imitation, between a battlefield story and the conditions in which it was created. The government wants that precision while assuming it can control the person who possesses it.
The proposal called Protocol X
By the present-day sections, Caldwell and the program have moved from studying B to designing a test. Protocol X is intended to reproduce or trigger the phenomenon associated with B's origin. The fragment, the historical memories, and the evidence of unusual amino acids or quantum properties are treated as parts of one chain. If the researchers can place B inside a controlled apparatus and reach the relevant threshold, they may contact the intelligence responsible for his existence or discover a path to mortality.
The proposal is presented as science, but the issue keeps the spiritual and emotional stakes visible. B is being asked to enter another cave, only this time the cave is a modern facility filled with machinery and observers. His mother's prayer sought protection. Caldwell's experiment seeks access. The similarity is unsettling. Both depend on an extraordinary force answering a human request, and both risk turning B into the object of someone else's desire.
B's consent
B agrees to the experiment because he wants to die. The issue does not depict him as tricked into participation by a hidden clause. He understands that the government wants to learn from his body and that the experiment may be dangerous. What he does not know is the full extent of Caldwell's cultic purpose and the degree to which the program has selected people and procedures to reach the Source.
This partial consent is one of the issue's central ethical tensions. B chooses, but he chooses inside an information imbalance. The government controls the equipment, the research, and the interpretation of the results. B controls only whether he will enter the apparatus. The choice is real and compromised at the same time. Later betrayal does not erase his decision; it reveals how much of the decision was made without the knowledge he would have needed to refuse.
The handler and the subject
The issue gives the modern program a face through the people who prepare B for Protocol X. Some staff treat the process as a military operation, some as a scientific experiment, and some as an opportunity to observe a phenomenon no human institution has measured before. Their different motives produce a common result: B is placed at the center of a procedure in which his body is both participant and material.
Diana's position is especially difficult. She has spent months building enough trust to access memories and knows that B's willingness to cooperate depends on believing that she is not simply another handler. The program depends on that trust even when it does not admit that it does. The issue therefore makes the later revelation about Diana's selection more painful. Her ability to understand B is genuine, but it is also part of a plan designed by people who intend to use the relationship.
The First World War and the present
The transition between the war memory and the modern facility is more than a change of setting. The First World War represents an older form of industrial use: commanders place B where the machinery of war is most destructive. Protocol X represents a newer form in which laboratories and computers replace trenches, but the body at the center remains expendable. The issue asks whether scientific language has truly changed the relationship or merely made it easier to defend.
B's answer is practical. He is willing to be used if use can purchase an ending. The tragedy is that the arrangement makes his body even more valuable once the experiment succeeds. A human institution that believes it has found a route to the Source will not automatically release the person who opened it.
The fragment and the self
The separated body part also introduces a philosophical problem that later becomes explicit in Franken-B. If B's biology can persist in fragments, where does B end? The issue does not say that every piece possesses consciousness or that a fragment is a complete person. It shows only that tissue can remain active and scientifically meaningful outside the whole body.
That uncertainty matters because B's identity is already divided among names and roles. Unute, Berserker, soldier, monster, and subject are all versions imposed by other people. The fragment is a physical version of the same problem. A piece of B can be held by an institution and treated as evidence while B himself remains alive somewhere else. The body is one; the uses made of it are many.
Why Caldwell's plan is dangerous
Caldwell's plan becomes dangerous before the apparatus is activated. He believes that the mystery of B can be solved by pushing through every boundary: historical, biological, ethical, and cosmic. His confidence comes from genuine discoveries, but the discoveries reinforce his certainty that access is a right. The issue shows how easily research can become a form of possession when the researcher believes knowledge justifies the method.
The later cult revelation does not invalidate the science in #7. It changes its meaning. Caldwell is not a fraud who invented the evidence. He is a believer who uses accurate evidence in service of a purpose B did not consent to. That combination makes him more dangerous than an ordinary liar and explains why B continues to trust parts of the investigation even after the betrayal becomes clear.
Place in the series
BRZRKR #7 is the bridge from the intimate first half of the series to the cosmic final arc. The memory of the First World War provides the fragment. The fragment gives the program a material route into B's biology. Caldwell's research turns the route into Protocol X. Diana's trust makes B willing to step inside. The chain is logical, but each link contains a moral compromise.
The issue ends with the promise of an experiment that might answer the question B has carried since childhood. It also prepares the reader to understand why the answer cannot be clean. The modern facility is built from the same assumption as the prehistoric village: an extraordinary body exists to solve a problem. B is about to discover whether the force that made him can be contacted without becoming another institution that claims him.
A fragment that outlives the battle
The First World War fragment gives the issue a quiet horror after the battlefield has ended. A war creates millions of remnants—shells, ruins, bones, and memories—but B's fragment is different because it remains active. It is a piece of a living pattern that refuses to become ordinary remains. The people who recover it can hold a physical clue to B while B himself continues elsewhere, unaware of the uses being imagined for the piece.
That separation lets the story ask whether scientific access creates moral access. The researchers can possess the fragment, but possession does not give them the right to decide what B's body means. The question returns when Caldwell tries to transfer the power, when Franken-B is assembled, and when a later one-shot creates a new being from B's protoplasm. #7 is where the series first makes the problem impossible to ignore.
References
[1] Keanu Reeves, Matt Kindt, Ron Garney, Bill Crabtree, and Clem Robins, BRZRKR #7 (BOOM! Studios, 2022), First World War memory, handler, separated body fragment, and the modern investigation.
[2] Reeves, Kindt, Garney, Crabtree, and Robins, BRZRKR #8-12, Protocol X, Source contact, Caldwell's betrayal, and the mortality transfer that follows.