"So far, so good…" Kokonoe whispered as she rubbed her tired eyes. Sweets could only fuel her body and mind so much until she hit her limits, but an end was finally within sight.
Her latest project lay inside a containment pod by her side. Everything appeared to be in shape, parameters carefully arranged and ready to go. Only a single step remained before it reached completion, but she must not rush. Before launching the simulation for the testing phase, she needed to have a cursory look at the memory data—just in case.
With the press of a button here and there, the system she had set up beforehand switched on. Sensors in the pod connected to the computer began the scanning process. As it did its work, she gleaned over the footage. What was displayed on her screen didn't contain anything of note until static distorted the images. "Shit, it's here too?" The same problem had also shown up in her backup self's memory replay, making some parts of the data indecipherable.
Yet she was certain that the result of this memory scan showed her something of importance. Despite the static interference, the graphs from the system monitoring emotional response displayed large spikes that lasted right up to the end of the record. So although she couldn't know what was being obfuscated from her, the emotional response from the playback meant he could perceive it. She had to make good use of this.
Still, Kokonoe frowned. As useful as this phenomenon was for her other goals, she had to focus on her current one. In fact, the sign that pointed at the new discovery was counterintuitive to it. Intense emotions lent itself to instability, not something she wanted. To increase the likelihood of successful compatibility, the host matrix needed to be non-combative at the very least. She knew that all too well from a past salvage work.
Now aware of the issue she faced, she decided to purge the memories causing the worst of the instability. Though it would be more efficient to erase everything tied to the static, trimming too much would lead to the opposite of what she was after. With that in mind, Kokonoe got to work by selecting the parts set for deletion. Using the readings from the system as a reference made it a simple task.
A few moments after pressing the confirmation key, however, she was met with an error message stating a failure to complete the task. "What?" How could it possibly fail, she asked herself. When she had launched the system to execute the command, it showed signs of going through the deletion process as normal. Her computer had nothing wrong with it, and something else was to blame. She had to check.
Returning to the other screen used by the monitoring system linked to the containment pod, Kokonoe ordered it to scan through the memory data again. She only had to look at the results to see what had gone wrong. "Tsk, just great…" There was an anomaly present—not in her systems, but in the readings. As if she hadn't tampered with it at all, everything seemed to be intact. She attempted to delete the same set of memories once more, but the same thing happened.
Frustration growing, she closed her eyes for a bit. Since it had helped her many times before, Kokonoe recalled what she had found in the Embryo's dataset in hopes of finding the answer there. "..." Her 'other self' had encountered certain individuals who were unaffected by the Embryo's distortions upon being transported inside of it, something that could resist change.
As she came to a conclusion, she sat up straight in her chair. "Total erasure is a no-go, huh." It appeared that the rules she had to work with prevented her from taking the most straightforward route. So if direct manipulation would never work, then perhaps some kind of 'blindfold' will.