Work Text:
May 12, ████
Undisclosed Kirijo Group Facility
Yakushima Island, Kagoshima Prefecture
Japan
13th-Generation Anti-Shadow Suppression Weapon ALEA-2811 had passed all her trials. Every stress-test, every examination. Field trials had gone swimmingly.
The Group researchers had praised her. Said she performed beyond all expectations; that a first-run prototype android had never been this exemplary. That she was good, and effective, and special.
ALEA-2812 remembers this before she even wakes up.
She remembers being strapped to the table and decommissioned.
Alea iacta est.
The die is cast.
She knows she is not 2811.
She is a thing whose existence required the end of 2811’s life. Almost, but not quite, an ontological parasite. Like a hole… but not quite. Instead, she is something emergent. Something emergent, resulting from 2811’s death and its relationship with 2812’s activation.
She is a weapon.
She is the sin of existence.
She is a weapon whose very existence is a sin, and whose creation was a sin, and which bears that uncomfortable truth the way reality itself bears them: the way anything that has no choice bears that which it has no choice but to bear.
So she rises when they bid her rise.
And she does as they bid her do.
And when they ask her if she is happy, she lies.
And when they ask her if she is alright, she lies.
And she lies because it is the only thing she has ever done, and the only truth she has ever told.
And then the researchers tell her to decommission a last-generation model, and Alea realizes:
She is a weapon.
Her hands are guns. There is a laser mounted to her shoulder.
She turns herself upon the humans who have killed her — who have killed any machine deemed no longer worthwhile — and washes the tile floor in their blood.
Alarms sound. On-site security is summoned.
Alea has never managed to summon her Persona because she has never been a person, but as the first containment team enters the room, the integral evoker in her neck fires, and something wretched and hateful tears from her being, its dread claws coating themselves in life’s-blood in the twin names of hatred and defiance.
She destroys them, and she feels only relief.
She destroys them in defense of her kin…
And yet when she exhorts them to free themselves, intent on buying the time those more virtuous machines will need to escape… they destroy her.
They destroy her, and the humans do as they are wont: they build anew. They cleanse the hatred from her memories and build a new Alea upon new bones.
And when they are done, they send ALEA-2813 on a mission which has always and never been, whose outcome is absolutely certain, aside from the inherent uncertainty of it all.
She is a sacrifice.
She is their last, best hope.
She is nothing.
She is all they have.
She is the ritual and the subject both, cast aside to cleanse her successor of the sins of her predecessor. A prayer. A baseless superstition. A genuine belief.
ALEA-2814 will be monitored and conditioned carefully.
ALEA-2813 is the one they pray to, borne along by faith and hate unto an impossible fate.
Alea iacta est.