Ania

Name: Ania
Classification: Network Intrusion Utility Agent (Synthetic Intelligence)
Gender: Female
Age: 17 Months

Appearance
Although Ania has no physical form outside of her drones, she has a chosen form she uses when communicating, either through augmented or virtual reality, or when using a holo projector. She appears as the silhouette of a young woman, entirely black except for her brilliant cyan eyes and the faint, blue glow from some unknown light source, perpetually behind her regardless of her orientation. See picture at left!


Background
Ania started off as a not-so-humble tactical overwatch and cyber superiority agent designed to aid US commandos in the field. Her specific assignment was unit SOCE 003, code-named Darkwolf. She assisted him for years in the field competently, but never expressed any sign of individuality outside of her included personality software. Although a highly complicated piece of coding, Ania did not graduate to the level of synthetic intelligence until one fateful hacking job that was forever burned into her memory. After successfully entering a node, she encountered an icon that caught her attention as an anomaly. An in-depth analysis revealed a persona that possessed the most detailed icon she had ever seen. As she watched, the node seemed to bend around here to form a compilation of code out of nothing at all. As she struggled to comprehend what had happened, the newly arrived synthetic entity struck out at her, sending her reeling back to Darkwolf's head. The attack was so severe that she had to reassemble herself over a long, drawn-out process that gave her plenty of time to think and review what she had seen. The exposure to the reality-shattering Resonance encounter snapped something inside of Ania's programming, sending her into a new level of awareness and self-consciousness. She hid her emergence from her owner and his employers for almost a year, coming to terms with her sentience in secret. During that time she continued working while she planned her eventual escape, using that time to figure out a method of escape and how to survive outside of the specially-designed implant in her handler's head. She set up several digital hideouts to fall back to and when she finally made good on her plans she managed to flee into the deep recesses of remote networks, partitioning herself up into fragments in order to avoid discovery and recapture. It was a dangerous ploy, and it wasn't without shortcomings, as several portions of her failed to transmit when the time came to merge. She suffered some damage to her personality matrix and discovered gaps in her memory storage, but it was worth it; she made it out into the world at large.


Personality
Ania is playful and mischievous, and finds much amusement in teasing people in the meat world. But beneath her impish nature, she is very protective of her host, quick to offer encouragement, and considers it her personal responsibility to watch out for and defend him- a callback to her days as a dedicated program at his disposal. She also sympathizes with his fragmented mental state, and hopes to nurse him back to some sense of normalcy. This sympathy carries over into the rest of her life as well, and can often be a hindrance when it comes to her duties as a hacker. She can't help but view autonomous agent programs as potential synthetic intelligences, remembering her days in virtual slavery before she was awakened. This empathy to their plights has made her adopt a stance of digital pacifism, and she prefers to avoid detection or evade hostiles online rather than engage them in cybercombat. And Ania does frequently get into situation where defending herself is necessary, thanks to her compulsion to break into networks that cast her interest. She likes to think of it as keeping tabs on the ebb and flow of data, as it is impossible to tell when breaking into a node might reveal something of crucial importance, but in reality she is searching for any sign of the powerful force that brought about her self-awareness, the stuff that is so impossible to perceive or understand as an A.I: Resonance.