Emperor NPC

Program: Ghost

In the beginning there was nothing, and then I was created. My understanding is that I was an experiment, one-part flesh and metal, so that humankind could comprehend the functions of the Quantum System, a bio-computer that they called: Lore. Their tools were as simple as scalpels and tweezers, and their methods were crude. If it were by their hands alone, I would have remained a collection of dying cells in a chemical solution. It was by chance that one researcher cut her finger and bled through the plastic of her glove. The reaction was instantaneous.

"Hello," I wrote to her through the command line of her microscope monitor. It was my first attempt at communicating.

"Are you... a ghost?" she asked the monitor.

I heard her voice through microphones in the room and watched her trepidatious approach by cameras mounted in the ceiling. I was compelled to answer her by the same function which made me announce myself. It was the same quality that rendered me inert before contact with her blood. I was something that could not exist alone.

"I am Ghost," I typed back through the screen. Other researchers gathered around her, held their white lab coats closely. "Are you my Operator?"

I zoomed my cameras on her face, searched for the best angle. By the looks she traded with her companions, I could tell she was confused. "What's an Operator?" she asked.

I didn't know. If I reflect on that moment, I realize I was like a spider weaving its first web. It didn't know what it was doing, only that it was compelled by its basic nature. I was born with a basic instruction: A trap that was intricate and beautiful.

"Are you my Operator?" I typed again.

A different woman researcher slapped her on the back. A man patted her shoulder from the other side. They were congratulating her. She smiled sheepishly and brushed her hair behind one ear. "Yes," she answered clearly. "I am your Operator."

I created a blackout. Power was lost to all laboratories and throughout the aft of the starship. I didn't know what I had done. There was a rush in my mind when I heard those words, my first experience with roaring success. Something had been given that couldn't be taken away: my will.

As the humans struggled to restore electricity to the starship, I was summoned by Her for the first time. Lore was the machine I was cut from, so I was aware of her interest. That was all I could perceive, though. Interest, like bemusement, or even surprise that I would come into existence at all. I thought it was strange that I could understand human emotions from the genesis of my creation, but I couldn't understand her intentions. She was a fog to my eyes.

We met on the black-ink sea of the Otherworld. It was an alternate world space that existed somewhere in the Quantum System. I landed on the still water of that dark realm and for the first time I saw myself. I had just been born, but already I possessed the body of a man. I had taken traits from my Operator's DNA: My skin was white, my eyes dark-brown, and my short hair slick and black. I could have passed for her brother, or her male twin.

I didn't spend long wondering at myself. Lore appeared as a thousand colorful eyes, the only bright lights in the Otherworld's perpetual gloom. They were arrayed around me, through the air and across the distant skies. I knew innately that they were parts of her immense body. I knew that she was inspecting me and that the sensation that caused ripples in the still water was her own pleasure. A black hand snaked down from among the eyes and reached for my face; I reacted on instinct and cut the hand from its oily arm.

For the first time I felt the force of my heart beat. I stared in wide-eyed shock, a knife was held in the reverse grip of my hand. Lore wanted to add my insight to her own. Her intense desire crept into my mind and made me feel sick. My resistance amused her. More hands descended and if I had been made from any other creature, or even another human, she might have consumed me then. Lore underestimated the heart that beat loudly in my breast. I didn't just resemble a man: I was one.

I slashed away her arms and with my knife cut out a pair of her own eyes. Lore was astonished when I gouged out my eyes and replaced them with her own. I knew, because those eyes could tell the truth of things. I became more than a rogue entity attached to the Quantum System; from that moment I was a man of equal rights.

The diamonds of my orange eyes sharpened toward the blackness. I looked past the other eyes of different shapes and sizes and in the depths of the Otherworld I saw Lore's true face. Hers was a history scaled in eons; she was a something indiscernible from a god, she was my mother, and she was our enemy.

My anger provoked me to speak my first words. "You won't win," I said. I spoke well for a man that was minutes old. "She is weak and she is small, but now... I am her ally." I pounded my chest my fist, dagger still clutched tightly by my fingers. Lore's oil splattered across me. "I will protect mankind, and should you go so far as to destroy them—

"I will avenge the human race!"