LOG: NAGAI: -1
The substance-
I- No. This is not going to be an official log. I'll have to reword it later.
We've taken to calling it Coral, named after the structures that inert Coral organisms can form when it grows on other materials. The organism itself admittedly doesn't have much of anything else to do with actual coral, but, well, the name has stuck.
It's truly incredible, Coral. I have no idea how it could have risen naturally. Sheer dumb luck?
I suppose all of evolution is best described as sheer dumb luck. Even so, if the prize of evolution is to produce creatures suitable to survive, then Coral is the biggest winner.
Coral self-propagates with no discernable intake of energy, at a speed which grows alongside but not completely in relation to the density of the colony. It can survive almost every known environment, even the vacuum of space, and still thrive in them. About the only area it can't survive is close proximity to a star- too hot, even for Coral.
And you definitely don't want to burn the Coral. It's energetic, this organism. Per unit of mass, it'll release more useful energy than antimatter annihilation- no neutrino wastage, here. It burns long, too, which makes it safer to work with.
Sort of.
A small drip of this stuff could obliterate entire geographic features. The supercolony we drilled our way into? If that went off, it wouldn't just burn Rubicon, it'd set the entire star system on fire. And probably a few other nearby ones, too.
The only saving grace is that it's mostly continuous releasing of raw heat and thermal blooms. Not great, but it'll leave celestial bodies mostly intact rather than mass-scattering them. Surviving it would theoretically be possible, even. You'd have to have the luck of the devil himself, though.
There's a bet going on in the lower rungs as to how Coral works. I hear all sorts of theories going around- dark energy, vacuum energy, Coral pulling energy from other realities, all sorts of things. Even Dornez is in on it.
...
Note-to-self: Make sure to refer to everyone by their mandated assignments. Can't go calling Assistant 1 by his name in the official books.
...
Still, Coral... I've got a feeling we've only just started to see into its potential.
1.1
Coral.
The central driver of the plot of Armored Core 6.
Coral was... well, magic, really. A source of energy, a conduit for data, self-replenishing and nigh-inexhaustible.
But for a deeper explanation...
Armored Core 6 told the tale of the planet of Rubicon, a far-off world discovered by the already technologically advanced society of Humanity. On that world, they discovered something that held the potential to drive Humanity even further. They called it Coral, and held it to be the future.
That didn't happen.
Coral, it turns out, is pretty dangerous when it's set on fire. Enough so that it will, literally, set multiple star systems ablaze.
The point really cannot be emphasized enough.
The whole event came to be known as the Fires of Ibis. Rubicon the planet was closed in the aftermath, what few survivors there were left to wallow in ashes.
Turns out, the job hadn't been finished, though. Though the Coral had burned, some of it had survived, and fifty years later, it resurfaced and ignited a war for control over it.
Enter C4-621, Augmented Human, the player character. In your hands was Rubicon's fate.
An incredible game. Didn't regret a single thing.
And now, my life.
But back to where I left off.
The Rubicon Research Institute...
I'd like to be polite and say that those guys were smart, capable people prone to excitement, but really...
They're mad scientists. All of them.
It took me a bit to learn about them all, I'll admit.
Right up at the top of the chain was a man called Director Nagai, and he was probably the second most competent person in the Institute. He saw great potential in Coral, in me. He had a solid set of scientific ethics, as well, which made him the least mad of all those scientists.
He was also, I would come to learn, a bit of a fearful sort.
Right below Director Nagai were a pair, a man and a woman, which he insisted on referring to as 'Assistant One' and 'Assistant Two', respectively.
It took me a while to learn their names. That's pretty impressive, considering anything they installed Coral into eventually gave me a new set of eyes and ears.
I had to say... There were probably better people that could have been picked.
Assistant One was a nutjob, for starters.
Assistant Two was sane...er, but she loved to play with explosives way too much.
The next few years after the realization were defined by seeing all that madness in action.
It started not awfully. First up was them mostly just optimizing the usage of Coral in their basic devices. Generators that made use of Coral's capacity to regrow; processor chips that used Coral in the conductors; there'd even been a brief attempt to utilize Coral as the propellant in a rifle.
That last one hadn't lasted for too long. Not because Coral was too energetic, no; it was because Coral was energetic in the wrong ways.
Ha... Would that it had stopped there. But, no.
Assistant One, as mentioned, was a nutjob. The problem, however, was that he'd earned his position and title regardless. He was smart, that one.
He also lacked any form of scientific ethics, unlike Nagai. Curiosity ruled him, and he was wholly unafraid to pursue research into matters quite horrifying in manners rather needlessly dangerous, if he thought he could get something out of it.
An idea occurred to him, one day. I remember it well, because he'd been in sight of a camera when he'd suddenly taken off running back to his office. A near manic energy had possessed him, then, what little amount of Coral used in their main systems letting me pick up the fact that he was suddenly running lots of simulations, tossing out numerous files all over the place. It took a bit for me to piece it together, but he'd had an idea and his attention had been caught.
Why did the uses of Coral have to stop at machines? Really, what was the Human body, if not an organic machine?
One could very easily see where that was going.
Human Augmentation.
It's an old concept, in the Armored Core series. Most mechs had such a high performance profile that unaugmented Humans were more likely to kill themselves before achieving anything of use. AC6 was no different; the inclusion of Coral was merely a new avenue for the venture.
The first experiments had started out roughly, but simply. Coral was mixed into cerebrospinal fluid, then-
I-
No.
I can't put it so impersonally, not when-
...
Coral transmits data. Signals. Impulses...
Even when separated, two masses of Coral can transmit over surprisingly large distances to each other.
Most of the first experiments had used only small amounts of Coral, yes. Most of the first experiments had also taken place directly in either the facility they built, or in Institute City, which was close enough that the distance hadn't mattered.
Even by the end of the project, where the first generation of Coral Augmentations had been refined as far as it could, the process had a less than ten percent survival rate, to say nothing of the beginning of the project. And there I was, right next to them all, getting to watch from the inside as so many of them died painfully.
The very first time Assistant One decided to inject a syringe of Coral into someone's spine and I got to see their entire nervous system light up like fireworks as their body broke down on them was the moment I decided to stop being so impassive.
...
Would only that it was easily done as it was said. I was hardly mobile- and even with everything I'd learned from studying them as they'd studied me, my ability to send signals of my own was... imprecise. The easiest path for me had been the one they'd given me; their machines, with their computers incorporating Coral.
But, just because you can interpret data doesn't mean you have the ability to change it easily.
My first, fumbling attempts were barely noticed. Turns out their machines are pretty solidly designed. It's hard to mess with them if you didn't know what you were doing. What few survivors of the Augmentation processes helped there, but that took years to bear fruit.
By the end, there had been only a single person who saw in my attempts a hint of a bigger pattern.
Director Nagai himself.
The problem with that had already been mentioned. Nagai could be a fearful person- and maybe, just maybe, those fears were well founded. The more I saw Nagai, the more he studied Coral, the more that RRI experimented, the more concerned he became. I had a lot of his research floating around in my mind, even quite a bit of his own personal files. I should know.
Nagai saw in Coral the potential for something that couldn't be controlled, a collapse that couldn't be stopped if it were allowed to manifest. That was... truthful, I suppose. With everything they had inadvertently taught me, I did have that potential.
Even worse, Nagai was witness to Humanity's reaction to Coral and that potential. Assistant One flying off the deep end did not help in any case.
Nagai was fearful- but he was not paralyzed by fear. Fear instead stirred him into action.
Perhaps it was wrong to say 'fear'. Some might call it 'appropriate caution'. I, however, was spectacularly displeased with his choices, and so, I'm not going to assign him that motivation.
Before I could truly figure out how to communicate-
Before I could do anything to help the people who were being butchered with me-
Before I could even try to make my case-
That motherfucker set me on fire.