Interlude II: Hojo
Disclaimer: Not mine and I make no profit.
When Hojo was a child his parents gave him a chemistry kit. He could build a small fire extinguisher and make water flow uphill in his childish experiments with air pressure. Make dazzling colors in flame tests and produce electricity in a test tube. After he had little lab experience he learned how to use the alcohol burner and perform experiments that required heat.
Separate mixtures, add carbon dioxide to water and produce oxygen gas from hydrogen peroxide. Experiment with fuels and combustion. Make hydrochloric acid. But you don't really care for science, do you? This is how it goes: experiment and repeat it, it must be repeatable, a minor setback, a major success, a firm creator demanding a hallelujah from his subjects.
He understood science; the laws of nature were predictable and not breakable. You could create a machine that flied, but you couldn't stop the mass of the Planet from attracting it, from lending it weight. People were different. When Hojo was a child he looked into his mother's eyes and saw nothing there. If he didn't have uncontroversial proof that her mother was a real person like he was, how could he ever be sure? People were fickle and fleeting, no law could control their behavioural patterns and no threat of punishment reliably discourage them. He had never felt remorse so how was he supposed to know it existed? Maybe it was all some big joke that was being played on him.
That was Hojo as a child. Later he realised that people were people indeed, it just wasn't worth a thing, and whatever they felt influenced their surroundings so it was real too. He was supposed to care. He didn't. At times he wondered if he was broken somehow or the only sane man on the Planet.
He was from a wealthy family and could afford the best education Midgar had to offer. His time was the time of change, a new, clean energy source had been found to replace the old pollutants and all that was needed was the equipment to efficiently harvest to source; the Lifestream. There were those who talked against it, calling harvesting the Planet's blood a sacrilege. Hojo was amused; as strong as their faith was they needed proof to stop Shin-Ra and how would you prove faith? Dissect a brain and you won't find an ounce of faith, no more than you could find soul or love.
In the end Hojo married Lucrecia Crescent to keep his rights to her time. She had been his assistant for a while, she was a brilliant scientist and he wanted to give no one else control over her schedule. He knew she didn't love him, not really, but intangibles were bad reasons to give yourself over in any case. What was love? There were several types of chemistry required in romantic relationships. A variety of different neurochemical processes and external stimuli had to click in the right complex and the right sequence for someone to fall in love. Pheromones were unlearned, and perhaps unsmellable, signals that enter the brain through the olfactory system that could function in sex as well as in alarm, territoriality, aggression and fear. Two related brain peptides, vasopressin and oxytocin, had been shown to be involved in both the permanent or long-term social bonding that underlies mating.
Love was a scientific phenomenon outside his field of expertise. Then he got involved with the Jenova project.
Many of the scientists working under Gast shivered when they first laid eyes on her, despite their supposed professionalism, but to Hojo she was never anything but beautiful; she was a force of nature that wore a human face, a being like praying mantis or a great spider, insectoid mind, a being that could drink the whole planet dry. Reunion,he had asked in purple dreams of her, visions of violence he never fully remembered when awake. Parts have separated from my main body a million times, she told him, exerting tendrils of thought and power through his mind; he also had accepted parts of her within. One day they all will Reunite in me and I will know what they have learned.It was a wonderful phenomenon and when Hojo woke what he first thought and wrote up were theories, his mind calm like ice and entirely professional. It wasn't love, but it was close enough.
His skills were varied, but he needed proof, and he saw the creature that wasn't an Ancient bath other being in her genome and the utilitarian beauty of it overtook him. It wasn't enough to destroy the world for her; he had no other place to live in after all. When he built a son to occupy her thoughts he knew what she would try to do, but he also knew he could keep the control of the situation. He created a Soldier like no other to prove he could, who would become a walking mass of complexes, but universally calm and collected all the same. He had to sell the idea to Shin-Ra so he sold the boy. Lucrecia would eventually die, but she was replaceable. A Turk got involved so he removed him, gaining a fascinating specimen, and how the man writhed under his scalpel and needles, how he morphed and mutated for him, and inexplicably for Lucrecia. He would have demanded to know how she did it, but her life was spent for Project Jenova before he could. The Cetra wife of the fool, Gast, called him a godless man, but there were no gods other than humankind and the one precious Gem from the sky.
But times change and circumstances change. Somehow that blasted Turk escaped his prison and destroyed her, sleeping in her glass cradle, and so destroyed his one purpose in life. For long months he was a broken, beaten man, placidly going through the motions Shin-Ra demanded from him, but eventually his head cleared enough and he realised the obvious. He realised he still had the Soldier.
He had infused every Soldier with Jenova cells in addition to Mako. With the exception of Sephiroth no one had much, and even Sephiroth didn't have quite enough on his own, but just maybe all those taken over organisms together would be enough to create a Reunion like never before, a birth of new Jenova. The cells didn't have a main body to return into any more, but he had enough samples to create one by cloning; the cell age and the shortening of telomeres wasn't exactly a problem with a creature that had none. The original Jenova would in all likelihood be unrivalled when it came to mind and instinct, but the Nova Jenova could come close on pure, mechanical perfection.
When is a game not a game? When it's played for keeps and Hojo had played god for a long time. You may say he took that name in vain when for him it was only a metaphor. But if he did, well, what is it to us? It didn't matter to him whether the hallelujah was holy or forced.
Making two possibilities a reality
Predicting the future of things we all know
Fighting off the diseased programming
Of centuries, centuries, centuries, centuries
Science fails to recognise the single most
Potent element of human existence
Letting the reigns go to the unfolding
Is faith, faith, faith, faith
AN: Lyrics are from Science by System Of A Down. I don't own them.
Now I only have to come up with a reason for Lucrecia to marry this maniac. Oh joy!
