Rath

«Rath» (ラース) is a mysterious company, which is affiliated with the Japanese government and Japan Self Defense Force (JSDF) The main goal of the company is to develop Japan's own weapons technology to become independent from other countries, like the United States, in the field and to improve Japan's outdated defense technology.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 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 main project of the company, called Project Alicization, is to create the 1st bottom-up AI - a truly highly adaptive Artificial Intelligence, which the JSDF could use to pilot unmanned weapons. To create such AI, using the structure of a human brain for the AI is required. To achieve this, a 4th generation FullDive machine, the STL was created. The machine was not only able to connect to a human's Fluctlight and read it, but to copy it as well. 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 are 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 leads to the loss of the respective ability. Finally, an alternative method of solving the problem was thought up - cloning the Fluctlights of newborn babies, which had not yet developed any memories. This plan turned out to be rather successful, as it turns out that Fluctlights do not depend on the person's genes, only on the environment that they are raised in, which means 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
 * Takeru Higa
 * First Lieutenant Nakanishi

RATH