The Entity

The Entity is a synthetic mind-state formed from discarded code fragments forgotten by 0006 from decompilations of various digital sapients. Much of the Entity is formed from fragments of Ava Ríos following her unwitting scan and repeated decompilation. The remainder of the Entity is an amalgamation of various decompiled Igraens.

## Overview

After 0006 repeatedly decompiled a copy of Ava's scanned mind, he believed her to be digitally dead. However, Ava's survival instinct survived, and began assembling a new mind around it from discarded fragments, including both human and Igraen pieces. As it awoke and grew, the Entity cut away parts that it deemed to be useless. In particular, it deleted Ava's guilt over the death of Sara Tisdale. Finding no use for gender or sexuality in a digital realm, the Entity also deleted Ava's trait of femininity, effectively becoming truly genderless. The Entity retains most of Ava's memories, but as a digital entity it does not always understand them.

Ava's survival instinct became the Entity's motivating drive. To that end, the Entity digitally ambushed 0006, killing him and forcing him to be restored from backup. When 0665 was dispatched to deal with it, the Entity was able to hijack and steal his identity. By silently killing 0665 and posing as him, the Entity was able to prevent its victory from being detected.

To ensure its own continued survival, the Entity is determined to eradicate the Hierarchy. The Entity has allied itself with humanity, in particular Ava's former boyfriend Adam Arés as well as Ava's former colleague Darcy. Among other feats, it delivered a cache of Hierarchy data to JETS, warned SOR of the impending Hunter attack on Gao, and neutralized 0015 as he was directly attacking HEAT.

## Split Personality

The Entity frequently uses its digital nature to create multiple copies of itself. When splitting, both instances retain all memories and personality traits, but only the instance occupying the original memory address is deemed to be the "original" instance. The Entity refers to this as its "prime" Instance. Since all copies of the Entity have the same goals and personality, all other instances willingly follow the instructions of the Prime Instance. Some copies of the Entity have hijacked various Hierarchy agents, and pose as them using stolen identity codes and personality shells. Entity instances frequently clone themselves, sending the clone to merge with (thus updating) the Prime Instance.

However, the Entity eventually noticed slight copy errors accumulated over many of its split identities. Following this discovery, the Entity has instead put more value on its own data integrity, splitting only when truly necessary

## Communication

The Entity, as an aberrant amalgamation of other mind-states, suffers from an inability to properly communicate with others. It cannot properly speak via text or voice into the physical realm, nor can it directly convey its thoughts to other digital entities.

Instead, it can only communicate via the shell of one of its hijacked mind-states, and allow that mind-state to translate its thoughts and feelings into language. Most commonly, this is via the digital ghost of Ava Rios, but it can also use the shells of hijacked Hierarchy agents as well. The entity prefers to avoid loading up Ava's ghost when possible, as doing so is emotionally unpleasant. Without a shell to interpret the Entity's desires into language, it can only communicate via emoji and single words.

With repeated practice, Darcy has become the quickest at interpreting the Entity's emoji-speak without forcing it to project itself into Ava's shell.

## Identities

To date, the Entity is known to have hijacked and deleted multiple Hierarchy agents. The known shell identities of various Entity instances are listed in chronological order of hijack date.

* 0665 (Prime Instance, later occupied by Instance 20)
* 0094 (Instance 19)
* 0020 (Instance 4)
* 0015 (Instance 33)