Rath

«Rath» (ラース) is a mysterious company affiliated with the Japanese government and Japan Self Defense Forces (JSDF). The main goal of the company is to develop Japan's own weapons technology to become independent from other countries in the field and to improve Japan's outdated defense technology. The name of the company comes from a creature in Jabberwocky, a nonsense poem in Lewis Caroll's novel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. The Mome Raths within the story are said to look like a mix of a pig and a turtle. Rath has two known bases: the Ocean Turtle, a turtle-pig shaped mega-float that is a reference to the Mome Raths and Rath's name as their main base as well as a secondary research facility in Roppongi.

To achieve its goal, the company hired Kirigaya Kazuto to test a 4th generation FullDive machine, called the «Soul Translator» (STL). Unlike all other FullDive machines that came before, the STL connects to a user's Fluctlight (a quantum field that can be regarded as a human's soul), instead of the brain. Although it can be used for entering a special VR world, Rath created the machine to create the first «bottom-up» Artificial Intelligence, which could be used to pilot unmanned weapons.

Development
The company's main project, called Project Alicization, was dedicated to creating the world's first bottom-up, highly adaptive artificial intelligence (AI), which the JSDF could use to pilot unmanned weapons. In order to develop such an advanced artificial intelligence, Rath created a fourth generation FullDive machine, called the Soul Translator, which was capable of connecting to a human's Fluctlight. By using this device, Rath succeeded in copying a human Fluctlight, thus creating an artificial intelligence based on the structure of a human mind. At first, it was attempted to clone the Fluctlights of grown people, but it turned out that a clone of a person could only last three minutes before mentally breaking down due to the shock of realizing that they were clones. Suppressing the memories of a cloned Fluctlight to reduce the chance of the clone breaking down also turned out to be a failure, as memories are linked to a person's abilities and removing certain memories led to the loss of the respective ability. In order to resolve this issue, it was decided to attempt cloning the Fluctlights of newborn babies, which had not yet developed any memories. This plan proved itself successful, as it was discovered that Fluctlights only depended on the environment in which they were raised in, rather than a person's genes. This meant that the Fluctlights of newborn babies were barely different from each other and could be used to form a «Soul Archetype», which could be used to create new artificial Fluctlights indefinitely.

Employees

 * Kikuoka Seijirou
 * Higa Takeru
 * First Lieutenant Nakanishi
 * Kirigaya Kazuto (part-time)

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