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  • 📅 February and March 2024 are YE 46.2 in the RP.

RP: YSS Eucharis Private Journal, Junko Hasegawa

Mortality is a funny thing for Nekovalkyrja.


I keep wondering what will happen when I die. Not the technical aspect, thats well understood. We have a whole branch of sciences to understand that. But what we haven’t figured out, with all this knowledge, is wether the soul exists or not.


Do Nekovalkyrja have souls? Do I have a soul? Do my sisters?


When we’re backed up into a new body, thats not us anymore. The original instance of that person died, and it can’t come back. Backups have a complete record of memories and personality, but thats just a copy of the information. If I share a file from one device to another, I’m not moving the original information around. The second device only gets a copy of that information.


As exact a copy that might be, it’ll never be the original instance of that data.


And thats what they’re doing when they back us up. They make a copy and save it to the ships memory storage. No matter how convinced my backup is that she is Junko Hasegawa, she wasn’t the person who breached the Krampus. It wasn’t her hands that fought aboard that space station.


Thats objective fact. I can’t deny it without being untruthful. But every time it crosses my thoughts, it terrifies me. Not just the dying, but the idea of someone stealing my life after its over.


I always imagine it as being stuck on the other side of an impenetrable one-way mirror. You can see everyone and the person wearing your face, but you can’t do anything. Beat your hands against it, but no one notices. They talk to the not-you as you, smile to the not-you, leave with them. Whole while your just screaming at them to come back, thats not you and all they need to do is turn around.


But then I wonder about souls.


How would they work? What would they be made of? What mechanics dictate the presence and ability of the soul to define the self?


Am I just looking for a convenient escape hatch? Just a myth made up back when our ancestors lived in caves and made stories to understand the world? Something so stained into our cultural fabric that we still have it uncountable eons into the future?


When does the soul infuse the body, and how can it tell whom it belongs to? Its possible for multiple instances of one person to be created from a backup. Is the soul a gestalt thing, capable of sharing itself between these clones, or would only one of them be fully realized? How would you even be able to tell?


…I think I might just be afraid.


Ultimately, I can't know any of this. I can’t measure any of it, even consult someone who has properly gone beyond death. Only when I pass will I know, and that secret I’ll keep like all the eternity of corpses before me. Though, that statement, its structure, assumes their will be anything left to know anything.


I know one thing, though. When I die, another Junko will rise again somewhere. She’ll fight and die and live again and again. Maybe someday, when the last war is won and Yamatai is gone, one of me will remain and bear witness.


No idea if thats a good thing or not.
 
Never understood the whole yarn about people who use shields being more protective.

Used one during training. Wanted us to be familiar with the whole kit we had available, after all. Know what I learned?

A shield is only meant to protect the person holding it.

Sure, you can skirt around that a bit. Good positioning, some rank discipline. A few determined Mindy operators could keep a naked minkan safe through a war zone if they wanted. But you don’t always have that luxury, the resources, the right conditions.

Some things you can’t defend against. At best, you get out of the way. Worst, you just hope your luck holds out. Some things are too big, too deadly, even for the deadliest soldiers of this age.

But everyone can be killed.

You can’t hold up your shield and stop orbital bombardment. No barrier can hold back a determined battle group. Nothing is indestructible, not even Zesuaium. One day, the tide will wear down even the biggest stone.

So kill everyone.

Bring their ships crashing down in fire. Scatter the enemy like ash. Vaporize the sea. Strangle the life out of the last living foe.

A dead enemy threatens no ones homeland. People don’t fear an attack that doesn’t exist. You can defend for centuries, but the threat only ends when you kill the bastards. Killing is thus the ultimate goal of every modern soldier.

When every enemy is broken, their is no use for a shield.
 
Some people, including Nekos, have called us Neko nothing more than weapons.


They’re not wrong, but they typically get the comparison off the mark. We get likened to guns, just pointed at the enemy and trigger pulled. One dead enemy, go find the next one and repeat until you run out of enemies. But thats a simplistic view, too focused on what we do rather than what we are.


I like to think of us like knives.


Despite all our enhancements, our artificial creation, we’re still all too human. Its right in the job description, superhuman soldiers. It implies a certain humanity in what we are. Despite what I’ve heard anyone claim, a persons humanity is not sacred.


Everything about us is built on a notion of humanity. Despite all the differences in hardware and software, my brain was built upon a knowledge of human neural architecture. My thoughts are equivalent to human thought patterns. People are not naturally inclined to be weapons, hence all the tricks and training and conditioning to get nice, obedient killers.


Look, a gun you can always take away its killing power. Take out the mag, clear the chamber, maybe yank off the bolt if your feeling like it. Hang it up somewhere and it won’t hurt a fly, unless you undo all that. On its own, the gun is easy to turn into a paper weight.


Knives are different. Say you take the time to make a really good knife, keep it nice and sharp. Sharp enough to cut anything in your way. Then say you sit down, maybe try and trim off some rope or something that doesn’t bleed. Its sharp, though, and it cuts you when your finger slips.


Time might dull its edge, but a knife will always be a knife. You can never just turn it off, at least not without breaking the thing. Even if I walk out once my contract is over and they decommission my military grade perks, it won’t change what I am. All it changes is my capacity to kill, and thats easy to make up for in the grand scheme of things.


Under the skin, I’ll always be a knife, and you don't just turn that off.
 
What surprised me a lot is just how us Nekos have gotten everywhere now.


We’re a manufactured soldier caste, effectively, built on every level to operate as a weapon. Made fairly recently, too, easily within most peoples lifetimes. I can see us having positions all over the Star Army, that makes sense. We fill more roles than cannon fodder, and our design accommodates that truth.


Unlike the ID-SOL, which was about as subtle and forward thinking as a hammer.


But I see us everywhere these days, not just in the military branches. I can see civilian Nekos running shops, cornerstones of the economy. What gets me is our involvement in civilian governance. That our current Empress, and several before, have been Nekovalkyrja.


Peace-time government thrives on stability, on diplomacy and a kind of humility. At least, thats what I’ve read up on the subject, since I haven’t gotten anywhere near it myself. Neko are, down to who they are and how they think, soldiers. Which gives us a whole different set of virtues, different ways of thinking.


Look at this war against the Kuvexians. That station assault wasn’t planned out properly. Putting everything on one armor team, no matter how skilled, was reckless and just plain asking for something to go wrong in the field. Especially considering Hanako asked us, the crew, to work on the plan. For all the intel gathering, it came to a bunch of just-past rookies to come up with ideas?


Maybe the truth is we all want a good war. Not like the Mishu war, that ended too soon. As much as I hear some of the previous generation lament it, I hear more reminisce with rose colored glasses. What else justifies a dedicated soldier breed if not a protracted war against an enemy with equal strength? What use are soldiers without an enemy to fight, a wall to stand upon?


What would we do without a war to win?


Maybe this is me projecting my own issues on to everyone else. Maybe I’m right, but not to the extent I’m taking this. But then I don’t see an end to this conflict in sight, and I doubt. Even baseline humans are prone to justifying military structures for their own sake, and they don’t have my programming.


What I wouldn’t give to crack open my head and see whats going on in that thing.
 
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