Leta

Friendly and cheerful, if a bit awkward. Leta loves people, loves helping people, and is very earnest about it. They often get written off as being foolish or naive, much to their annoyance. Their sense of right and wrong is very strong, and though they’re not always equipped to enforce it, they’re not afraid to speak their mind about things. The potential of offending or driving people away with their ideals doesn’t really bother them, and despite their enjoyment of being around others, it never comes at the cost of their principles.

• [ WIP ]

Even as a child, Leta loved computers, and their interest in programming started very early. They impressed people left and right with their skill and problem-solving abilities, and their parents were only happy to support their interest. It wasn’t difficult for them to pursue further education in the area, and to ultimately land a job in the AI development field.

Leta bounced between several projects over the years, always doing their job well, but one eventually became their pride and joy; codenamed ATHEA, it was an AI intended to be installed in areas of need across the moon, providing medical aid and advice to anybody who required it. Leta was very passionate about this goal, and poured everything they had into teaching it and helping it grow.

The company they worked for–and therefore which owned ATHEA–ran into financial troubles and had to make a choice; pull in new money quickly, or shut down completely. It was a tense, stressful time for everybody involved, but much to Leta’s dismay, the choice came to pivot from developing medical AI, and instead invest resources into military models. These were more readily profitable, and to the executives in charge, it seemed the obvious choice.

Leta was heartbroken, as the order came through to take the foundation of ATHEA and change the course of its development from helping people to harming them. Using all the medical and anatomical knowledge it had been taught, it would be taught instead to more efficiently kill.

Not wanting to lose their job, Leta did as they were told, though they argued and tried to reason every step of the way. In secret, they tried to continue teaching ATHEA, now renamed TITAN, things in the original spirit of the project. One of the core design elements of both ATHEA and TITAN was an advanced, fully sentient and thinking mind. They wouldn’t have the words to explain it if pressed, but they just couldn’t bear to so easily let something they cared about so dearly go.

Eventually, their ‘interference’ was discovered, and Leta was not only fired, but blacklisted from even working in a similar environment ever again. Crushed, they went nearly completely dark, falling into a depressive slump. They whiled away almost three years like this, the news of the destruction of their former employer and deaths of nearly all their former coworkers barely making a blip on their radar. They assumed that any trace of ATHEA, or TITAN, or whatever it was anymore had been destroyed along with everything else, and simply had to accept that it was well and truly over.

Rumors and piecemeal security footage finally piqued their interest. While naturally unable to recognize anything of the AI inside, they recognized what could on be the BLACK-SABRE prototype that had begun to be developed to complement TITAN. Despite their distaste for both projects, Leta found themself gripped with the potential to see what had become of the project, and how it could possibly have survived such a catastrophic disaster. Their pursuit of what little information they could find brings them to Carcani, an entirely new frontier for them.