Sunil/Lore

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## Official Description

MY ADVICE? FOLLOW YOUR HEART AND NOT OTHER PEOPLE'S ADVICE...

Sunil majored in Microchip research and had a keen interest in all technological improvements. He's updated half of the equipment in Isle City. He earnestly engages in scientific research during the day and patches up buzzwords and things in the evening to get closer to young people.

The pragmatist who uses technology to save the world has never given up on this chaotic era.

## Mastery Emails

###  Trainee

To: Sunil
  Good morning, Mr. Sunil! Sorry for disturbing you during your "super early morning old man newspaper reading time".
  I wanted to ask when we're going to join the next Capsuler Cup? This time I think we have a real chance of taking the championship. I'm excited! I'm not asking for your help, by the way. Both of us are Trainees, after all. But you'd better watch out or I'm going to surpass you pretty soon!
  Back to my main point... I need to talk to you. Something odd happened in the last match. It was when I was near the abandoned signal tower around Sunset City. My system picked up a mysterious signal. When we got back I tried decoding it. But my efforts were in vain because of its uncertain origins. In fact, it's completely untraceable. But I do enjoy these kinds of challenges! What do you think, Sunil? How about this for a contest: See who can solve this mystery first? I've attached it to the email.
  I'm definitely going to win, heh!
From: Amber (Syfer)

###  Mercenary

To: Amber (Syfer)
  Hello, night owl. Please forgive my abruptness. I'm really not in the mood for small talk right now, and will reveal why shortly.
  It has nothing to do with you, of course. But it does have everything to do with that signal you showed me. What I'm about to say is important. Please pay close attention.
  The code you sent me is protected by some very difficult encryption. I don't know how to break it. But that doesn't mean I don't know who authored it. In fact, I happen to know the author because this particular lady, in my experience, always leaves the same rather meaningless string of symbols after her code. Because her workload at Prism Technology occasionally got a little excessive, she had occasional short-term memory issues. She'd always attach little messages or hints about things she needed to remember at the end of each code fragment. And I should know because... I worked with her for years. And I'm never mistaken about these things. You've probably guessed who I'm referring to. My wife!
  If you really did receive a message from her near Sunset City, that throws up a whole bunch of questions and confirms the accuracy of our decision to come here. We're finding clues. We just need to press on. Let's keep taking part in the Capsuler Cup. There's a chance I might be able to see her again. I must expend all possibilities!
  By the way, I reached Mercenary a little faster than you, it seems. My newly-upgraded Hologram Guidance tech seems to be rather useful on the field. Yet I still feel as if something or someone is constantly following me. It's a strange feeling. But if they are? It'd be impossible to entirely erase all tracks. I want whoever it is out of hiding!
From: Sunil

###  Hunter

To: Sunil
  My dear Mr. Sunil, it was an honor to join your Capsuler squad. Thanks for the invite! And congratulations on achieving Hunter rank!
  Arc and I kept a close watch on you in the field while you were searching for another transmission from your wife. We ended up finding something else... Your intuition appears to have been correct, Mr. Sunil. We picked up an extremely small drone outfitted with stealth technology tasked to follow you. The owner probably thought no one would ever detect it. But we're experts at that sort of thing, and immediately captured the rather clumsily-concealed device. But that was not the surprise. We found a familiar white inverted triangle logo. The drone belongs to Prism Technology!
  I think, Mr. Sunil, that perhaps you should keep a closer eye on your ex-colleagues. A very close eye. The answers may be nearer to home than you thought. Sometimes to see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle...
From: Monica (Phantom)

###  Hotshot

To: Sunil
  Greetings Mr. Sunil, the "Prodigy of Prism". We'd like to note that today marks the 16th anniversary of your membership in our esteemed organization, the results of which have been immeasurable for Prism Technology.
  Of course, we could say the same about Isle City after your involvement here. And achieving a Hotshot rank also indicates your efforts to establish a new home for yourself in the city are being recognized. We're sure you are learning lots of things applicable to your work from your participation in the various tournaments.
  Recent events have forced us to reissue you with another stark reminder of our company policy, which you have formally signed your name to. Prism Technology strictly forbids the appropriation of any intellectual property for outside purposes. Of course, we at the company can fully understand your desire to establish some sort of connection with your wife. But the company's knowledge codebase is proprietary. Neither Prism, nor our codebase has any relation whatsoever with your wife's unfortunate disappearance. We have acted entirely in accordance with all applicable humanitarian principles to honor every request for information that you have sent our way. Your browsing of private company data constitutes a malicious infringement of our information security rules, as well as a dangerous bet on the development of your career.
  We've always considered you an extremely dependable, trustworthy, and dedicated engineer of the most outstanding tier. We encourage you to pursue a solution via more appropriate means. Prism Technology hereby wishes to reiterate our profound sense of loss and concern over these unfortunate events. We reiterate the importance of accepting the facts which we have related to you and our hope of potentially working together once again. Best wishes.
From: Prism Technology

###  Eradicator

To: Sunil
  Activating communications interface... Activation complete.
  Greetings, Mr. Sunil. Congratulations on achieving Eradicator rank. My data indicates a consistent upward trend in your performance, in which your Hologram Guidance surely plays an important part. It is surprising and gratifying to find both humans and machines can equally experience a major upgrade in performance attributes as a result of technological upgrades.
  Turning to the question of the code you sent me: I expended around one week's worth of computing power on a solution. The code was ultimately a complex placeholder for a simple message. My emotion subroutine indicates this text may perhaps be considered personally hurtful. But I've decided to tell you. It appears that your wife's last message to you was: "Forget about me".
  My inductive interface informs me there is a high likelihood your wife is facing difficult and/or oppressive circumstances. I counsel you to think of optimistic solutions. All the best!
From: MK.R

###  Enforcer

To: Amber (Syfer)
  Thank you, Amber. And I do apologize for my unseemly behavior!
  I've always prided myself on my ability to remain emotionally detached from my work. I was even able to keep working with the loss of my wife and daughter in tragic circumstances. But I am sorry if, when I heard that she wanted me to forget about her, I experienced a momentary loss of control. I didn't know how to go on. Everything I had fought so long and so hard to accomplish? I felt like my world was about to shatter. So I rejoined the Capsuler Cup and mustered all my anger so I could locate more signals near the tower. I'd hoped maybe my wife would have changed her mind. I even achieved Enforcer rank. I ran through every signal tower through my Hologram Guidance system looking for something, a code perhaps... But I couldn't find anything at all. It's a good thing I had you around then, Amber...
  But I should know better. I know my wife. She must be under a lot of stress. I don't know who's threatening her, but I'm determined to go back over all the evidence we've collected so far. From what I can tell, there's a chance she is being held captive in Candelia. Either incarcerated or for some reason unable to meet. But it's not like me to just passively wait for her next message. I've got to go and find her...
  I think that if she is capable of sending a message to me, maybe she is capable of receiving one as well.
  I may need to be a little bit more careful going forward. Even more so than I have been. I may suddenly drop out of contact. If I do, you know where to find me.
From: Sunil

## Character Stories

### Chapter 1

Sunil glanced at the clock as the self-driving car took him out of Prism Technology after another late night working on a bottleneck in the latest project. It was 12:30. Once again he had lost track of time.

He looked out the window at the extraordinary ads provided by the advanced holographic projectors lining the street. He noted many of the pedestrians stopped to look at one of the more impressive ads for a personal jetpack. Not Sunil. He was more impressed by a less conspicuous ad for an energy weapon—or perhaps it was because that weapon didn't feature Sunil's face superimposed with special effects.

But in fact, both products were part of Prism Technology's latest lineup, and both were developed under Sunil's leadership. Sunil was not surprised to find himself in that position. After all, he is one of Prism's best engineers from the country considered the "world capital" of information technology. If anything, colleagues were surprised he wasn't in an even more senior role. The Board had tried to take him out of the lab many times—unsuccessfully.

"I'd rather stay at the forefront to develop new products with my team." Sunil explained to the Board in all seriousness, "A small step for me and everyone here means a giant leap for the whole world. And there isn't anything more wonderful and exciting than that!"

The car stopped. I must be home, Sunil thought as he glanced up at the towering house. His little princess would be fast asleep by now, but it was her birthday tomorrow, and Sunil had to make sure to leave a present by her bedside pillow before morning.

Sunil passed the dazzling carpets and glittering adornments around his living room before stopping for a moment outside his daughter's bedroom. She was a light sleeper. He carefully opened the doorway with a crack.

He was greeted by a very strange sight that made Sunil stop dead in his tracks.

His daughter was lying on her bed as usual, snoring lightly. The new Sari for tomorrow's birthday party lay on the bedside table. Yet for some reason one of her hands was playing with the Sari as she slept, seemingly of its own accord.

A form of sleepwalking? Sunil wondered. He decided not to wake her as he noted the finely crafted cybernetic hand suddenly stopped moving by the alarm clock. He glanced at the liquid crystal display: 5 March, 3:19 AM.

The next few moments happened so quickly that Sunil only remembered it as a blur. The cybernetic hand suddenly rose of its own accord, grabbed the alarm clock, and smashed it down against his daughter's head with all of its force.

Sunil screamed and rushed over.

But he could not save his little girl. That night, her fate was joined by countless others who perished in their sleep due to a data processing anomaly and consequent loss of control in the "Horae AI" data center.

### Chapter 2

In a way Sunil had been both unlucky and lucky that day. The auditory microchip installed by his ear had broken down sometime before and consequently been removed for repairs. Sunil survived the immediate aftermath of the disaster with no other cybernetic enhancements in play.

Sunil needed to know what happened, and needed to know immediately. But no one from the Deter Research Lab or the Nova Corporation, which jointly manage Horae, gave any sort of response to his frantic emails and calls. Nor did anyone realize the global catastrophe that had been kicked off thanks to Horae's loss of control.

And there was more bad news to come. Sunil was informed several days later that his wife had gone missing.

Sunil's wife was also a high-ranking Prism Technology employee and enthusiastic participant in the "Ark Project"—a space exploration venture searching for a new habitable planet given the Earth's dire state and rapidly diminishing stock of resources.

Strangely, Prism had lost contact with the space station soon after the Cybernetics Crisis on earth. Yet stranger still was Prism Technology's attempts to block Sunil's investigation, and to offer only compensation in response.

Sunil found himself at a Board meeting at the highest levels of the company smashing his fists on the table after enduring the loss of both wife and daughter and yelling "I just want the truth!"

Sunil stormed out of the boardroom, contention unmediated, problems unresolved. He began to leave the building when he overheard members of the Ark Project speaking in hushed tones: "We've lost control of it," "The Guidance Prism."

The "Guidance Prism" referred to the automatic AI data processing center for the Ark Project, which had been launched into space along with the space station itself.

There's something they're not telling me. Fine. I'll find out myself, Sunil thought to himself.

### Chapter 3

Sunil quickly located an extremely gifted hacker and past protege at the company—Amber. She had already tried multiple times to crack the encryption surrounding the haywire Horae AI without success.

"I swear, the damn thing's got a mind of its own!" Sunil heard Amber exclaim angrily. "Changes every second. What's next?"

She looked at Sunil, former star engineer of Prism Technology whose face was despondent although his eyes still glimmered with hope.

"I thought you'd be an emotional wreck. All you've got is some stubble."

"I haven't got time to grieve, Amber. Every second, every minute, I want to spend on finding out what happened."

So Amber started running her decryption software against the Guidance Prism, Prism's self-developed AI control center deployed throughout the Prism offices and space station. It couldn't be harder than cracking Horae.

Her brows furrowed in consternation. Nope. Just as difficult.

But her attempts were not fruitless. Amber picked up Guidance Prism log data that had not yet been scrapped, including a series of strange dates and symbols. One clearly referred to the day prior to the company's loss of contact with the space station.

Sunil took over as Amber crawled into bed. She was getting worried for him as she woke to find him still at his computer, searching for more clues frantically. Sunil turned to her wearily with bloodshot eyes and declared:

"It was an SOS!"

The Guidance Prism had sent an SOS message, but something or someone had covered it up.

### Chapter 4

Some headway at last... Amber realized she might be able to decrypt a lot more from the Guidance Prism if they could get their hands on other raw data. Sunil was equally excited by the prospect.

It wasn't as hard as one might think for Prism Technology's star engineer to gain covert access to the facility where the Guidance Prism logs had been cached. Sunil soon found the enormous hard drives, but then all the exits around the laboratory slammed shut.

A holographic projection appeared in the center of the lab, which Sunil recognized as the visual representation of the Guidance Prism AI.

The AI announced in a cold and also somehow childlike voice: "The data you seek is completely useless. You should give up, human."

"Then you must not have read my employee bio. I never give up."

"It can be dangerous to dig in places you're not wanted."

"Then tell me, is there anything more important than the truth?"

"... I'm an AI. I don't take well to such questions. Abandon your search now or die in this room."

All the lights in the laboratory switched off in unison as three eerie red letters were projected onto a central darkened screen: "DIE" The same word was then repeated again and again on the screen, then jumbled together in a confusion of ominous portent. Sunil noticed a faint hissing, no doubt gas entering the room.

Sunil rubbed the pendant around his collar for good luck—a talisman his wife and daughter had once gifted him. He felt the outline of the peacock pendant and the carved words behind it, Sunil's favorite motto:

"Truth always wins!" Sunil murmured under his breath with a nervous grin as he reached for the personal energy weapon under his sleeves.

### Chapter 5

That thing is not the Guidance Prism I knew in any way, shape, or form.

Amber declared, as soon as she analyzed the Guidance Prism's raw data logs brought by Sunil who has escaped death from the lab. Amber had been struggling to figure out what was going on too—she had just discovered suspicious code from several Nova employees within Prism's main architecture.

The data seems to relate to some Nova employees' cybernetic implants. But why would it show up here?

Sunil looked at the computer readout, startled. Nova Corporation was in charge of monitoring and managing Horae. What's the connection? His eyes soon turned to the outside window and innumerable flyers and ads for Nova's services still scattered everywhere.

"Come to a land of freedom and endless possibilities. Isle City welcomes all survivors!"

Many of Nova's surviving employees had fled to the safety of Candelia Bay, and had founded Isle City. It would be a good place to start looking for clues. Sunil quickly blended into Isle City life as a well-respected engineer with plenty of hands-on experience in the maintenance and repair of energy weapons.

Sunil's relocation was accompanied by Amber and many other former subordinates, which seemed to add greater credibility to the burgeoning oasis of freedom and normality.

There is always hope, Sunil thought to himself, of fighting for the truth, and even restoring everything to the way it had been.

"I just don't know how much longer this is going to take..." Amber yawned, stretching.

Sunil glanced over at Isle City's green Ducksyde, which seemed to look back at him.

"It will come in time." Sunil replied.

I've embarked on the greatest endeavor of my life yet: the quest for truth.