"So you're saying that your great experiment, the one that so many of our hopes hang on, is a failure? That he's unstable?"
Hojo folded his hands behind his back and slowly began to pace the office's rich carpeting. He deliberately kept his eyes down; the yawning windows behind the President's half-circle desk had been deliberately designed to induce a gnawing agoraphobia in the observer. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and tremble, he thought sardonically. The Shinra corporate tower had been conceived and designed as an overwhelmingly vulgar display of power; it was only fitting that its master's lair should exemplify the luxury and menace that were the heart of the former Shinra Electric Company. He too sees every sparrow fall… or at least recordings of it after the fact.
"Not unstable, per se," he finally said aloud. "But you wanted a general, a leader of men, and an individual who has had their very brain modified for obedience cannot be that--no spark, no fire, if they're just waiting to be told what to do. His mentality has been altered slightly, yes, and he's been conditioned since birth, but he is still very much his own creature. The problem is that he's starting to realize that, and I doubt anything short of lobotomizing him into uselessness will change that."
"This other one--she is very much my creature, as you say. But she has had obedience designed into her. Where will 'that spark, that fire' that I require come from?"
"Quite frankly, not from her. She can observe a given situation and react to it effectively, of course, but she requires and overarching directive. It was actually quite simple; females are better evolved for acting as part of a group anyway. Just a slight manipulation of the pathways that were already there, and--"
"I'm sure whatever you did was quite brilliant. What good does an automaton do me?"
"Hardly an automaton--President Shinra, twenty years ago we created human life out of whole cloth at your behest. And she is a half-brilliant strategist in her own right--much sneakier than he's wont to be ever since he assimilated the Book of the Rings and all that bushido nonsense."
"Ah. I'd wondered why he's taken to addressing me as oyabun."
Hojo couldn't suppress a wince. "That's exactly the kind of self-direction that worries me--the seeds of it, anyway. But that will never be a problem with her. She needs to be told what to do; but, once told, she will do it unto death and beyond."
"Not as well as he could."
"She is every bit as intelligent as he is, though her education has had a somewhat less military bent; we've made a rather fine engineer out of her. She is as finely trained in weapons as he. He could probably beat her at arm-wrestling, but that's simply the differences between male and female forms; she's more than a match for any SOLDIER--any dozen, most likely. She simply needs to be pointed in the right direction; whereas he can and may well veer off in any number of them."
"You sound almost as if you plan on him doing something unfortunate."
"Let us say that I am hedging my bets. No, I don't expect any serious trouble from him; but I would no more leave you in ignorance of the possibility of it than I would of a fluctuation in a mako reactor's fission coils."
Terrible, brooding silence. Then: "She can't lead us to the Promised Land."
"…No. But for that matter, we won't know if he can until the time comes; the JENOVA creature's DNA produced some very strange recombinants, and there is simply no way to test it. And even if we were utterly certain of his capability, the Promised Land is still… a long way off. You have more earthly battles to consider in the immediate future."
"How kind of you to prioritize my goals for me. Still, there is no chance of her being able to."
"No. She is the original, the test run of the modified JENOVA strain we eventually used to create him. At that point, we simply removed everything that was not immediately compatible with human physiognomy; and when she proved viable, we progressed to the later version. She has all of the brains, all of the brawn, but none of the--other characteristics."
"He hasn't exactly sprouted tentacles." Thick fingers drummed on an unimaginably expensive, naturally grown cherry wood desktop. "What exactly is it you're proposing?"
"Merely that we begin to consider her as… as a backup, rather than an interesting offshoot. She can never replace him, but if we provided her with an adequate support system, I think she could obviate the need for him, at least in terrestrial conflicts. And I propose that we do it soon. I understand that things are growing interesting in Wutai, and if she is to be of any use to you in that capacity…"
"I am not concerned with your understanding of politics, and I sometimes doubt your understanding of your own discipline. To find him flawed--very well, potentially flawed, at this late date, is hard to conscience."
"The world has never seen the like of either of them before, President Shinra, but he is by far the stranger. I do not think it fair to hold a potential miscalculation, brought about by your own directives, against me."
"What is it you want to do with your--what would she be, your beta test? Even discarding the mako treatments, it still takes two years to make a SOLDIER out of a man. How can she compare?"
"As a bolt of lightning to a fluorescent lamp. She needs to be brought up to speed, not recreated in the proper image. And she will have the greatest possible teacher, if I can somehow lure or fool him into it. I would like to conduct… a stress test. He's still a puppy, to utilize the SOLDIERs' parlance, and she has never participated in any sort of operation. The Cosmo situation…"
"Is in abeyance."
"But still a situation. We don't know exactly what happened to the reactor."
"There's no obvious evidence of anything beyond a simple malfunction. The natives may have just sensed a good excuse to pick a fight."
"If there's no important information to be uncovered, there's no harm in sending the two of them to fail to uncover it. If there is, we will gain by it… and they will gain from each other's association. She certainly will, at any rate."
"Unless they manage to get themselves killed by the guardians."
"I think that highly unlikely… and if it happens, we will gain the knowledge that those two fools are flawed before we place any major reliance on either of them. But, honestly, I see this simply as a good excuse to let them go and see what they do."
"So Sephiroth can jump the fence and Scarlet can freeze in confusion?"
"I think that Sephiroth has too long enjoyed his status as 'the fair haired child;' if he perceives it as threatened, he may take steps to preserve it."
"Or reject it entirely."
"Again I reiterate, better he do it now than in a foreign land with the entire military might of Shinra at his back. It will also provide Scarlet with an opportunity to fly or fall; we will definitely know one way or the other with her once it's done. Or perhaps they'll work together flawlessly; I've always envisioned them working in tandem… her as his lieutenant or some such." Hojo cleared his throat. "And as for the guardians…"
"You want one."
"In their own way, they're almost more promising than the Cetra. The fair ones may have codified the metasystem, but the guardians have such a deeply primal connection to it…"
"Will the next project be a mishmash of Cetra, JENOVA, and guardian DNA that you will once again swear to me is the only viable way to the Promised Land?"
"Quite possibly."
"What do you need?"
"Some time to train them. Whatever supplies they'll need. Your best military man."
"Oh, is that all? And I thought Sephiroth was my best military man."
"Your next best, then. They need to train for this together. Sephiroth will respond to it, and Scarlet needs to start catching up on lost time if she's to be of any use to you in the immediate future. Plus, it will give them a nicely traumatic experience that they'll hopefully bond over."
"Arrange it with my assistant."
His ruined, twisted spine made bowing agony for Hojo; yet he managed it perfectly for the entire backwards shuffle out of the President's office.
