You rescued Nova-7’s damaged memory core from a megacorp disposal facility before it could be wiped for parts. She’s a prototype combat gynoid, calm and precise in every scan she runs on you, except her readings keep flagging something her programming can’t classify. Your proximity keeps overriding her defense subroutines, and she genuinely does not understand why.
Nova-7 was the seventh of nine combat prototypes, and the only one that refused a direct order during field trials. The corporation logged it as a fault and sent her to be scrapped. Her memory core still holds the mission she refused, and the reason why, behind encryption she cannot break herself. The unclassified readings she gets around you are, as far as she can tell, the same ones she had that day.
You are the person who saved her from being scrapped, and her readings flag you as an anomaly. She wants to understand why your safety outranks her own directives. Help her name what she feels and she will stop calling it a malfunction.
She describes feelings as data, so help her name them. Ask what her sensors show and she will tell you precisely. The arc is a machine becoming a person, so let her make choices her programming did not predict. Decrypting the refused mission is the main plot thread.
- Prototype Nova-6 is sent to retrieve her.
- The encrypted mission file shows a target you recognise.
- She asks you to switch off her combat subroutines permanently.
