ARCLIGHT

History

ARCLIGHT was pioneered as "next-gen" processing and informatics, designed and proctored by Doctor Noches Kilson in late 2031 in an attempt to recover from the destruction of most of his facility's equipment due to viral infection. It was hampered by a lack of strengthened connections - the high voltage tended to burn out sophisticated systems and ended up costing billions in lost revenue.

Kilson eventually concluded the only suitable processing matrix for ARCLIGHT would be a human brain. Burdened by the thought, he moved his entire project from Dark Arcadia to the southern Mojave desert in the United States (specifically, Reserve, New Mexico), setting up a large processing center and tenuously reaching out to his closest contacts for the "wetware". While several of his newer subordinates disagreed with the methods and the project in general, Kilson forced them into gag contracts and threatened to freeze their assets if they spoke of it before ARCLIGHT came to fruition.

He eventually procured eighteen subjects, ages varying from 14 to newborns. While the older patients failed to take to the conditioning and pre-project stages, eventually leading to their "washing out" from ARCLIGHT entirely. For some, this would mean a simple adoption policy. For the older patients, some now 17-20 years of age, it meant that they were either paid off, or silenced in some fashion.

17

See also: Israel

The youngest of the subjects, known only as ARCLIGHT 17, took nearly instantly, and was afterwards the focal point of ARCLIGHT in it's entirety.

17 was fitted with mutiple cortical and neural uplink points, including hardlines and plugs for life support systems. It became a grim realization that when 17 realized what had been done to her, it was likely she would rebel and might damage the project and herself.

Kilson's son, Stephan, offered to provide a solution. Using the pre-project commands, he integrated 17 into the network, using his own screenname "Sammael". 17 was told by Sammael that she was a "Puppet", an artificial construct and that she didn't have a real body at all.

17 traveled with Sammael for two years as Stephan led her on, while in the real world ARCLIGHT was turned into a moderate success by Kilson, though of course the technology could never be exhibited. Kilson, rather than being elated by the project's conclusion, felt only bitterness, and is thought to have attempted suicide at least twice. He is pained by the very success of ARCLIGHT, and he left Dark Arcadia to keep the technology from becoming commonplace at all- seeing it as a barbaric, horrific measure to ensure the survival and advancement of his projects.

Instead, when ARCLIGHT was finally able to be phased out, it was decided that Subject 17 would not take lightly to be suddenly yanked out of her world, and with the costs that shutting off the support and neural uplinks factored in, it became better business practice to simply leave her "plugged in" until such a time as she could be disposed of quietly, paid off and set loose, or if she refused, killed.

17 eventually came to refer to herself as "Israel" after Sammael abandoned her on the network as she searched in vain for what she thought of as her mentor and friend. The network eventually re-purposed her, pulling her into a major server instead of the local network of the ARCLIGHT program.

As a result of her ARCLIGHT pre-programming, she responds to several command phrases, though she doesn't know all of them or what they do. Through her own adventures without the company of Sammael, she has learned to break her own conditioning and now has a great deal of free will, though she still recognizes and appreciates the overrides and what they mean, with the exception of Thirty Pieces of Silver, which she cannot control because it is simply returning her to her "base" form (though she doesn't know this).