Disclaimer: Final Fantasy VII is not mine. Cait Sith is not mine, nor is Reeve. Clever disclaimers have been done before and are not this.
Note: I mention Cait Sith having rudimentary AI this is not to the point of the robot being capable of true impendent thought. He has and needs an operator for any type of true social behavior but is capable of piloting himself through combat and simple, oft repeated actions.
I'm sure that
there must be other Cait Sith creation stories out there; however
this is my own take on the subject. Enjoy.
Cait Sith had never been meant to be more then a simple project. A project more to stretch his abilities rather than anything more thought out. It had really boiled down to building a toy. It had been a great concept that he hadn't been able to resist playing with, playing being the key word.
A walking, talking robot. Of course, at the beginning giving it any kind of artificial intelligence had been completely out of the question; that would have been far too hard.
But after he'd managed to build the silly thing, with the full range of motions available, he realized that for convenience he should add a simple interpreter such that he didn't have to control every movement every time. That had been a fun challenge, especially since every time he finished one action he realized that the cat (for he had decided that he wanted it to be a cat), needed at least two more. It was a great fun and pushed back the next step for nearly half a year.
But finally he became fed up with it not having a voice and installed the radio receiver that had spawned the whole thing.
That was probably the point when the project became an obsession to him. Now he could take it out of the laboratory to test it and still have it function at a decently operational level. It was beyond exhilarating to have his little cat friend walk around the house. Less then twenty-four hours later he realized that Cait Sith sounded completely wrong with his voice. Two hours after that he had finished installing a voice synthesizer.
He collapsed then. It was the first time he fell asleep on his work bench working on Cait Sith. It wasn't to be his last.
He had a couple busy weeks with work about then; he could remember them quite clearly later. The frustration of not being able to get back to his Cat was barely tolerable. However he had always had a strong work ethic and finished everything up perfectly before allowing himself to return to his project.
The break had probably been one of the best things for Cait Sith's future. During that stressful time it occurred to the executive that the cat needed to be able to walk around on its own.
It was amazing how hard programming visual functionality into the robot was. Merely translating a visual reference so that the robot could understand and recognize objects was next to impossible. It took longer than the entirety of the work he had done on Cait Sith up to this point.
The moment he could take the cat out on 'walks' and have the robot pilot itself around without his intervention was the proudest moment of his life.
However, soon he found that there was a problem. Cait Sith could now walk around by himself, in theory. In reality, it wouldn't work; the cat had no way to protect himself. Midgar, indeed the whole world, was just crawling with random things that would love to tear him apart piece by piece.
The cat needed to be able to defend himself. It wasn't hard to figure out that the cat just wasn't built able to hit with enough force. Thus he had to build him a friend. It was far easier to build the moogle then it had been to build Cait Sith; most of the necessary functions had already been designed and the moogle really didn't need all the abilities Cait Sith had. As fun as it had been the first time, he really didn't want to have to program the ability to 'see' again. So he cheated… While Cait Sith was riding the moogle then they both worked off of the cat's ability to see.
If he had thought about it, the moogle was more an add-on rather then a friend to Cait Sith. He never thought of it.
Once he had designed the Moogle and gotten rid of most of the little operational kinks, he could get back to what it had been made for: the ability to fight. It was surprisingly easy. Less then two weeks later he was ready to take them around the city to see if the upgrades had worked.
It was during this sequence of testing that he was caught. By Tseng, which was surprising merely because of how busy the other man tended to be. If Tseng wasn't one of the few people in ShinRa Co. who was consistently busier than Reeve himself, then Tseng probably would have been his first guess as to the person most likely to catch him.
Tseng was surprisingly quiet during the encounter. He merely gave Cait Sith a long look, before giving him a nod and walking off. It gave him a horrible case of nerves. Turks never just ignored someone as useful as Cait Sith was becoming.
Aside from this, the tests were mostly successful. The cat was quite able to protect himself with Moogle's help. However he wasn't sure that Cait Sith could take much more powerful opponents without the ability to do more damage.
However the ability to do that took too much mass, leaving him with the more elaborate option of customizing Moogle's attack pattern for each enemy; it was how sentient life improved. However building a computer capable of self-analysis and self-improvement was not merely a daunting task, it was one that required more computing power then he could assess, much less build into Cait Sith.
Not going to be defeated, he started building databases of enemy weaknesses and attack patterns that Cait Sith could use. In a flight of whimsy he decided to hide the disks in megaphones that the cat could wave wildly during combat.
In an effort to make sure that Cait Sith could be taken anywhere he started going on walks around Midgar, cataloging data on the nearby monsters. He'd try little things in combat, pushing Cait Sith and Moogle's abilities to the maximum; always striving to find ways for them to defeat even monsters that they hadn't encountered yet. A simple little game, but vital if he wanted Cait Sith to be able to travel.
Then the Plate fell, and it wasn't a game any longer.