What It Means To Be "Human."
A/N A quick piece of prose in order to drop an idea on Penny. So, uh…here's my two cents. My thoughts for (a) Penny. I'm gonna stop now.
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What does it mean to be human? To be able to live, to breathe? No. Sentience. Cognition. The ability to adapt and learn consciously and form one's own thoughts, and to be aware. To be aware of what memories—what sweet, sour, or bitter memories—are stored in the brain. They aren't a part of, but certainly shape, the soul.
To know what it's like to watch your child tumble about in a meadow with a long green dress and fiery locks bobbing in the to let her be a child and play Huntress, swinging plastic butter knives around as if they were swords. Or to let her revel in the archaic entertainment that a puppetry show offers. How manipulating a single thread can bring about so much difference.
To know how fleeting life is, and that the Silver Monster had managed to preserve a single golden thread once. To keep it from being cut by the delivery truck barreling down the street. To cry at the sight of her in the hospital bed. Or to make the tough choices. To allow a dash of Silver to corrupt the purity of gold and to have a soul reaped—not by the Collector, no—but by a machine.
Does it make a difference? That a soul be placed in a body not its own. Is she any less human? I love that soul. I've sacrificed for it, so that it can continue living, fueled by Dust and contained in a machine. To have the dreams of that soul fulfilled in a new body. To keep a secret for her sanity.
What does it mean to be human? To let a man in a uniform make your child unnatural? To let him take a brain-dead human and reap her soul so that she could be placed in a mechanical bottle? To hide all of this from her—is it for her sake, or mine? Am I the real monster?
What does it mean to be human?
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"Penny, it's time to go," Ruby Rose calls from down the hallway. When she comes into the doorway, the sight is a surprise. Here, in a burned out Ironwood Facility, targeted by the mysterious forces that Ozpin still won't divulge the details of, there lies a robotic girl, on her knees with her head bent low. In her somehow trembling hands are an aging slip of paper and a piece of cardstock. "Penny?"
"Oh. Hi, Ruby," Penny's back straightens up upon the realization that her best friend is right behind her. Peering over her shoulder, silver eyes catch the documents that had fluttered to the ground quite a while ago, surrounding the Puppeteer. Documents revealing…everything. The method of transferring a soul from one location to the next, of building an android. Of paying for it all. The specific details of the offer Ironwood had extended. Small specifications of design. An image in one hand, and a letter in the other. It looked like a poem. And a picture: Of a family. Of a middle-aged man and women smiling at the camera, a ginger toddler beaming in between them.
"Ruy," Penny's eyes dart up to her friend. Shaky. Searching, for anything. Some sign of an answer or comfort. "You said once that I am as human as anyone else. What…what does it mean—to be human?"
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A/N Aaaand that's that. This probably comes across as shit because I made this up in approximately ten minutes, but I just needed to get the idea out there. Basically:
Ironwood and "Father" are referred to as two separate individuals by Penny, so it stands to reason that Father is either the engineer that keeps Penny in good condition and built her, or he could be an actual father
Ironwood's mentions of his Aura projects to Pyrhha spoke more of harnessing and transferring Aura than anything else—definitely not anything about synthesizing one. Penny's capable of generating an Aura, but how? I think that Penny's Aura/soul was transferred from another person.
In thinking of a soul as a personality, memory isn't always connected. Hence, Penny only remembers what's new, not what the soul had experienced prior, if memory is stored in the brain.
I just used the idea of a truck hitting child/human Penny because of the parallel it would've garnered from Season 2. No actual evidence of this. Same goes for Ironwood extending the offer to save the Aura/soul to Penny's father. For all we know, if this is true, it could actually be an already-working-for-Ironwood engineer who went and started this on his own after the tragedy (and subsequently had to forfeit the technology to Ironwood due to copyright constraints, and Ironwood weapon'd her up because he could use it in the future as good advertising for Atlas tech, and then Father doesn't like Penny eventually being dehumanized by Ironwood and used strictly as a weapon so he starts a coup d'etat in order to get his android-daughter back, and blah blah that's an entirely different story idea).