(Shin Edo, Shogunate. ~3250, † 3297 -Deceased-)
Toshiko was a passionate warrior endowed with great skills as pilot and programmer.
She 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 to 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.
The Awakening of a Menace
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 had learn, 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.
The Incident
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, clanless 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.
The Challenge
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.
Battle of the Bunraku Marionettes (3297)
The 3297, after capturing an immense army of hacked and remotely controlled Mechs along the numerous garrisons of the Shogunate Imperial Guard, Toshiko reached the out yards of the imperial capital, Shin Edo (Xanadu), ready to take the Imperial Throne by force of the same Mechs built by Alpha Corp to defend it.
But there, a last defense barrier was waiting for her, most of the mercenary clans attended the call of the Shogun-Emperor to oppose the rising tide of the Toshiko's army. The battle was not exactly easy to the remaining Shogunate forces, combined with the mercenary clans whose Mechs had not been remotely controlled or shouted down.
The combined force of the Shogunate and the Mercenary Clans could have been defeated by the impressive army that Toshiko managed to raise with the support of his AI, but a series of accumulated and subtly malfunctions gave progressively the edge of the battle to the allied forces against Toshiko. She became overwhelmed by the mercenary clans until a sudden critical impact on the main reactor of her personal Mech resulted in the immediate destruction of both, the Mech and the dangerous pilot.
After the fall of Toshiko and the apparent destruction of the main hardware housing her AI, the threat of her hacked army collapsed like a legion of beheaded and wireless puppets.
Related entries
Mechanomicon
