Toshiko
Toshiko was a former member of The Brotherhood who had a troublesome tendency to attack other members. To Toshiko’s way of thinking, she was just checking her clan-mates’ strength against her own. So what if they were surprise attacks? It’s not like the enemy would announce their presence and fight fair. Toshiko felt she was doing the clan a great service, but the leadership disagreed. Attacking fellow Brotherhood members was forbidden, and Toshiko knew it. Placed on probation, she started spending more time at the barracks working on her mech’s operating system.
One day, she was checking the firewalls when an unidentified AI breached security and began accessing vital information. Thinking fast, she managed to isolate the AI into a cyber-labyrinth whose only exit was the hard drive of her mech. Toshiko quickly sealed off the exits and isolated the program once the AI was inside it.
She spent a month unraveling the AI, learning everything about its core code. The more she learned, the more fascinated she became with its complexities and versatility. Through wifi she could literally interact with any system, and these interactions were completely untraceable. The AI was totally undetectable if you were not directly accessing the files where its source code was located, and even then you had to be highly trained to spot it moving through the system.
Could she replicate the AI? If she could build her own version, what would she use it for? She began the process of re-creating the AI. Weeks passed before her masterpiece was ready for field testing. What would be a good test? Her clan mates, of course. She could test both the effectiveness of her new AI and also the preparedness of her clan-mates for such an attack.
So she started simple, fire alarms, sudden raid alarms, malfunctions around the barracks. For the most part her clan performed with precision and she was quite pleased at herself for keeping them in tip-top shape and ever-vigilant.
She was just trying to help the clan, but then there was the war. Her mech malfunctioned catastrophically as she entered a Gateway and she was stranded on the far side of the Shogunate with no way to get back; she missed the war entirely. The leaders were livid--a few errant attacks on clan members was one thing, but leaving her brothers to fight a war without her help was quite another. Failing to fight alongside one’s brothers was considered the highest form of treason, and Toshiko was summarily dismissed from her service to The Brotherhood.
Toshiko plead her case, feeling that she was let go unjustifiably, but her objections fell on deaf ears. So, clan less and disillusioned, she took a job as a security consultant for Alpha Corporation. Things were dull there and her employers didn't appreciate her irritating habit of testing their security all the time.
Out of boredom, she toyed with her AI, seeing what systems she could access and manipulate. But everything was too easy, and she needed a challenge.
Why not something the original AI was good at infiltrating? Mechs! Yes, that would be how she would test the AI's real potential. And while she was at it, she could get revenge on those who had spurned her talents.
If a mech had a human pilot jacked in, their neuro-circuit interface would always override the AI. But empty mechs could be marched around like toy soldiers.
The initial tests proved successful, controlling targeting systems, shutting down mechs, remote controlling them to wherever she wanted like toys. As long as the mechs did not have a pilot in place to override the AI, she could take control of almost any mech connected to a network. This was so much fun! With her AI she could commandeer and control a whole army of empty mechs, making them do whatever she wanted. So, what did she want?
Power. She could be Empress of the Shogunate. All she had to do was take control over the entire empire with their own mechs. There was no one who could stop her.
So there you have it the in game scoop on the new baddy, sound wicked and fierce to you? Me either...
Submitted by Pat Willis#224534