Eighteen months later, Rand escaped from the institution and formed a terrorist organization dedicated to answering Raven's appeal for help, called the Project for Intertemporal Communication (PIC). During their research, the PIC discovered that everyone in Perfect is engaged in a type of virtual reality MMORPG in which they have no choice but to endlessly battle each other for rank and survival. Those engaged in this MMORPG are known as rithms, and when a rithm is "killed", the human controlling it often goes into a potentially fatal state of shock. The silent protagonist of "Immercenary" is the latest of five PIC operatives sent into Perfect's core (called the Garden) in a mission to shut down the operating system, Perfect1.