“i came looking for answers, but… i didn’t expect this.”
[Systems restored…]
[Awakening…]
Gently blue eyelids slid open. His eyes illuminating briefly before adjusting to the light source coming from the room. Quite unfortunate his first operation turned out like this.
Did this constitute as a failure?
Did her knowledge of his existence mean he had failed?
“Few things are as we expect them.” He finally answered. His voice matched the one he was modeled after and without even meaning too it came out as a simple and undisturbed statement.
“Takeba Yukari.” Images, scenery, a smell of strawberries. It all came to him as his memory searched the copious amounts of data dumped into his very creation. Yet he felt disconnected from all that. He knew none of that belonged to him truly. It was just something he inherited after all, but did this also mean that he was a failure? He could not connect to these things and wasn’t that what he was supposed to do?
Perhaps it’s no wonder why the Director had been hesitant to put him on the field, especially so close to home.
“I’m sure this is pretty jarring for you. I’m the Operator, the Director sometimes calls me Oper for short. I appreciate your assistance. I was…incapable of realizing that the reports about shadow activity were off. I exerted my energy inefficiently. I will remember that, so it does not happen again.”
Eyelids opened with a flash of light before dulling to a blue-grey eye color. The curious eyes scanned the white room he found himself in as he stepped off the tilted table he had been laying on.
“Operator? Can you hear me?” A voice came through static into the room from speakers the android notes both corners on the far side of the room.
“I can.” He responded stepping forward.
“Good that means systems should be up and running. Today we’re going to test your combat abilities which will include the summoning of your Persona. It will be dangerous and the enemies we put before you will try to destroy you. You must terminate them. This is what we’ve been preparing for. Do you understand?”
“Understood.” The android’s eyes narrowed at the door now beginning to creak as the metal parted and led into a large circular room with black mists of energy starting to solidify on the ground into misshapen creatures.
“First we’ll check basic close quarters combat, then weaponry, and finally the Persona test.”
“Affirmative.” Wasting no times the android’s eyes illuminated, vision becoming enhanced and crowded with information and targeting before he pushed off the floor sprinting at almost an almost inhuman speed towards the shadows now growling with malice as they moved to meet him.
Immediately dodging the swing of a large bladed arm O-per drove his arm through the creature’s lower body before using his own momentum to swing himself upward, using his leg to take off another’s shadow’s head. Images pushed themselves to the front of his processing with similar creatures burning up in an inferno.
But reacting quickly the android twisted his arm out and leaped back from the approach of more hostiles. “Testing weaponry!”
A section of his arm opened up and a small black handle stuck out. The Operator grabbed hold of it pulling a small blade from his body which unfolded and then locked in place until it was a full sword.
A side step away from a large swipe from a hulking creature, a leap away from a combustion of fire from another. O-per ran to the side in an arch, coming back toward the approaching enemies with his blade buzzing with energy. A single swipe cuts away the spell casting shadow and after another vault over the hulking one’s arm, the sword came down hard on its chest ending that one as well.
Now the shadow’s numbers were increasing all around him, completely surrounding the android. “Testing Persona activation!”
His eyes shut now as they drew closer. No readings of information, no systems clouded his processing now. No. His mind. All there was, was darkness.
And then a small light within it. He reached out to it unsure of what to do. There was no direction for this. He had been warned but… something that wasn’t a part of his system. Something different from him was still… scary.
“Come to me Persona!” A blue light exploded from O-per’s body as a large entity began to materialize above him, cloaked in white and empathetic in the face with signs of black death chained to him. He rose.
The director’s cigarette dropped from his mouth as he placed his hand against the thick glass window he watched from. “It worked…” He whispered quietly as the room became buzzing with talking and phones ringing.
“We call it the Operator. But I call it O-per for short.” The man leaned back in his chair lighting a cigarette not showing as much interest as the Kirijo Group Supervisor. Two years of almost limitless resources to do one simple job had made him particularly acclimated to the atmosphere surrounding it.
“It looks… human.” The man spoke taking off his glasses as he stared through the thick window. The creation could look just like a sleeping young man, had it not been for the visible separation of panels where it was put together. The outer layer of “skin” only breaking up with the occasional line in the skin, hiding all the in-human parts underneath.
“Well we used the old idea for the anti-shadow weapons. Though this one is much more updated and has a few key differences. But I assure you it fits well within the task we were given, though broad as it were the idea was the best we could come up with. Have you read the file on Arisato Minato?”
“Yes of course. Hard to believe a kid could do something like that, it’s also clear you made it in his image.”
“Well, the power he had was the goal. To fight back against another threat like Nyx. But given what we know about Personas I hypothesized it would be just about impossible to simply “replicate” that power. It’s tied to ones subconscious after all and we have no idea if it was a single thing in his mind that created. The puzzle pieces were just too many to figure out in our lifetime. So we wanted to recreate his consciousness.”
“Is that possible? That would be like playing God wouldn’t it? Ms. Kirijo doesn’t care for a Frankenstein project.”
“I don’t look at is as playing God anymore than we do with every birth. It isn’t him and I’m positive O-per is well aware of that. We took all we could from the data we had on him but it’s not like he spoke aloud everything he was ever thinking on camera. We had the top psych guys analyze. The best we could do in the end was infer… but the data included his death.”
“So if I’m not mistaken you don’t even know if this will work?”
“There are a lot of controversial questions that come from this type of project. And a lot of it is still beyond human understanding and calculation. He hasn’t seen any field experience yet but he has a love for humanity. Arisato Minato died to save this world. O-per’s power will be immense even if it won’t meet that level completely. But humans have been known to achieve great things in their most trying times. It ends up becoming their Finest Hour.”
“But it isn’t human.”
“There is no limiters on it.”
“What?! That’s insane it could go haywire!”
“Limiters would inhibit what Arisato Minato was as a person. You have to believe in what he used to be. That’s why I trust this project. Arisato Minato was the world’s savior and he died for it and he’ll never be known for it. That’s the kind of person he seemed to be.”
The supervisor paused as he pushed his glasses back up his nose. “…I’ll deliver the report to Ms. Kirijo. She thanks you for your work as always Director.”
