Moonscape
Who is Lumine?
The moon was a place of silence in its natural state. One could hear in its faint atmosphere, but there was nothing about to make noise. Except him. The scuff of his boots against the dusty surface we unnoticeable on Earth, terribly loud here on the moon. Even the faint machinery that worked inside him could be heard, a soft hum that rose and fall, which could sometimes be mistaken for a human breathing. But a human would not be able to walk out here like he was, without highly specialized protective armor.
It was all white, gray, and black around him. The crater spread for miles around, some ancient scar that did not heal. Walking a familiar route, Lumine did not bother to be highly alert. Anyone sneaking after him would be unmistakable in the silent moonscape. And there weren't many places to hide either. That was an advantage to this place. But a disadvantage was that the silence encouraged thoughts, especially those that made him uneasy. Like one that never really went away.
Who is Lumine?
He wasn't an impressive reploid, at least not on the surface. He had a slender build, for one. for another, he had a non-threatening appearance, with lavender hair and a youthful face. That was just the surface though. Beyond that, he wasn't quite sure who he was. His self was like the moon, in a way, silent to him.
Compounding his lack of self identity was that he had the information on hundreds of other reploids in his mind. Lumine knew their identities, personalities, and quirks. With his copy chip, he could shift his mind, energy, and powers into any one of those reploids too. He could limit himself to the most narrow-minded of mining overseers or expand himself to the hyper calculating and planning of the best reploid tacticians. He could know water's flow intuitively like an oceanic researcher, or know a wildfire's path like an expert firefighter, or know the automatic processes that made the best swordfighters so graceful. Never all at once, though.
He had no information on himself.
Who is Lumine?
He was the leader of the Jakob Orbital Elevator center. Located at the Galapagos Islands, it was a more efficient and now safer mode of transport off the planet. These days, it was used primarily by humans. They wished to leave the world they had ravaged behind. That was the reasoning, although the excuse was mainly to escape the periodic wars and continual uprising of Maverick reploids. While much of the moon was still vast empty wasteland like the crater Lumine walked in, it would surely grow to be covered in human habitations.
At times, Lumine was amused at the thought that they were using his elevator to escape reploid wars, but they had staffed the elevator exclusively with reploids. They could afford some confidence. Lumine and his peers were all the newest generation of reploids, ones built expressly to resist the psychotic virus that changed the programming and personality of older reploids. Still, that may not be enough.
He had to be careful with such thoughts, he reminded himself. They came primarily when he was shifted into certain minds. Like Sigma's. It was just as absurd as the all-reploid elevator staff, but his copy chip included information on the leader of the maverick reploids. And other highly violent reploids who gave interesting variations to the darker thoughts in Lumine's mind. If he even had his own mind.
Who? Is? Lumine?
He often found it tempting to blame his human creators for failing to give him a proper identity. And that amusement at the absurdity of human behavior, that often served to lighten his mood. Yes, he knew it was wrong to think that way. But it was wrong by human standards and humans were absurd about many things. Even their own standards? That could very well be, based on how contradictory they could be.
Hearing another hum besides his own systems, he looked over to see the transmission device he had come to perform maintenance on. This was part of the Jakob elevator too, the guidance system that confirmed the relations between the moon, the Earth, and the elevator's counterweight. It allowed for safe trips between the two astral bodies. Taking off one of the panels, Lumine began the routine maintenance. The guidance computer asked the very same thing he was asking himself all along.
Who is Lumine?
He gave his password, which was acceptable by the lesser computer's standards. But that wasn't acceptable to him. An identity wasn't as simple as a password, as a unique energy signature. An identity was what explained what one did, what one was doing, and what one would do.
Then, what had he done? He had taken control of the Jakob Orbital Elevator project as planned. He had been given extensive information on how it worked and extensive processing capacity to not only run the whole complex almost single-handedly, but to also manage the massive backlog of data on the hundreds of reploids that had formed the basis of his generation of reploids. From talking with the others, he knew he was the only one given all that data; the rest just had the routines and personality bases. And in talking to others, he was patient as he knew that he was highly unlikely to meet anyone with an intelligence that could compare to his.
Lumine's past was quite bland, made of lots of connected and disconnected data.
What was he doing? He was running the Jakob Orbital Elevator. Not single-handedly, but he could do so with at a moment's notice. He carried out work not only on Earth, but at the counterweight station and here on the moon. When on his own, he liked working in the wastelands of the moon best, even if it gave rise to troubling thoughts. He was still patient with others, liking the moment when they finally got it.
But then, he also liked to imagine darker things, like driving a screwdriver into the head of the next person that came up and asked him another stupid question about the safety of his life's work. He had gotten to be able to anticipate such questions and answer them before they came up. That relieved some of his irritation at such things. But that was wrong by human standards, which he wasn't quite sure he trusted anymore. They couldn't give him an identity, after all.
Lumine's present was still bland, at least on the surface.
What would he do?
Interesting question, one to add to the other. Who is Lumine? What would he do?
The maintenance was done and everything came up fine. As to be expected. Gripping the smooth cold metal panel, Lumine wondered for a moment what it would be like to snap that panel in two. He could do it, if he put himself into the program set of a strong enough reploid. It had the promise to be immediately satisfying. But he held off on that for now. Even on the silent moon, there was a chance for contaminants to get into the guidance computer, which would mess up his flawless record.
In another moment, he wondered what it would be like to offset the computer just slightly. It would only take a few small tweaks to the calculations, nudging the time syncing off by seconds. But if he did it carefully, it would end up with an elevator launched vessel crashing into the humans' safety bubble, exposing them to the dangerous solar radiation and extremely low atmosphere. Everyone could die, even reploids if he made some other tweaks here and there…
But no. No. That was much too obvious. Since Lumine did much of the maintenance work, he would be immediately held under suspicion. It could be amusing for a time, but then they would cut off any opportunity for him to do something else. And once he set a plan like that in action, he felt that he wouldn't be satisfied to leave it at just one 'accident'.
As he reattached the panel, he realized with annoyance that his future, as it seemed now, was most likely to be just as bland as everything else in his life. According to that identity examination, Lumine was an intelligent, dutiful, patient, informative, and absolutely bland reploid. He did not like that. He could deal with being the first four; being intelligent, dutiful, patient, and informative led to excellent results. But being bland? He did not want to be known for being bland.
There were much more exciting mindsets in his database, reploids who would be called anything but bland. Reploids who had realized the absurdity of humans and did something about it. He felt like he would like to be one of those. However, he didn't want himself lumped with those failures, with the viral Mavericks who supposedly had no control over what they did. Lumine felt it was a case of history being written by the victors. Perhaps more than just a few of the old Mavericks were more than ordinary basketcases. Maybe they were revolutionaries who never achieved their end goals.
Setting back off across the empty moonscape, Lumine reflected on his viral immunity. If he were to revolt against mankind, it could not be blamed on some mindless virus. He would want to make a grand show of that, though. He would want to show mankind the true potential of what it had created, to see their horror in that he could choose to be a 'Maverick' without suffering any mental deterioration as a result. That would take a great deal of cunning and planning.
Who is Lumine?
"Someone they have trusted far too much," he said to the silent moonscape.
I was challenged to cover Lumine... and I mean challenged. I haven't played X8! Hehe. But I found some dialogue, pictures, discussion, and of course the Megaman wikia. So how'd I do?