After Alpha, they learned digitizing dead minds was expensive, unstable, and too human to control. So they went back to the drawing board and added a third ingredient to the Kaijin formula: a living chassis.
A human body, recovered from a compatible victim of a kaijin attack, fused with kaijin tissue and a combat AI designed to override whatever was left of the person inside. They called it Project Beta.
They told themselves the host was already brain dead, that this was just recycling casualties, that the thing that woke up wasn't really a person anymore. They were half right.
What woke up was a mind with three parts screaming in different directions and no script for which one should be in charge. No field experience. No operational history. No one outside the project even knew she existed.
Until today.
The handlers talk about her like she's hardware, listing specs with pride, skipping over the incident reports that never made it out of this building. They want you impressed. They want you bought in.
But the longer you watch Beta through that glass, the more you feel like you're not the one doing the looking.
