Hm, this seems like its not actually bricked.
Did you tamper with DHCP settings, by any chance?
It does report to pings to 192.168.0.1 during booting, normally.
Also there is redboot access at 192.168.0.1:7000 via telnet, where you can do emergency flashing, for instance.
I’ve gone trigger hapy with DHCP once and that left the slug in a weird state too, without an IP address. So i had to flash via redboot. worked like a charm, but the timing is really really really really hard.