“Combat data from last month’s incursion has been assimilated, mistress,” cooed the always-pleasant feminine alto voice of LEONA, whose full name was Learning Engine Onboard Neural Ancillary, the soul of the Immaculate Shogun. While Drift-based Jaegers (which was every single one other than the Shogun) were controlled entirely by their pilot duo, the Shogun was instead conceived as a single-pilot combatant with significant AI assistance. If the IS could perform on the level with the Drift, its standard controls would allow any competent jet pilot to take on the Kaiju and massively drop Jaeger operating costs. It was a holy grail of sorts, and five years later, the project was still only half done.<br/><br/>The control interfaces were really not the problem. Athena herself, piloting her baby, could compete 1:1 with the average Jaeger. Every test with a different pilot, against another Jaeger, had resulted in defeat in less than 30 seconds, however, because when Athena piloted it, she had five years of synchro data and intricate knowledge of both her own and every other Jaeger’s performance on her side. Even if she didn’t have “the touch” that pilots needed to succeed against Kaiju, her technical expertise meant she was practically cheating.<br/><br/>LEONA was meant to act predictively, leveraging its knowledge of the enemy combined with knowledge of its pilot to create a seamless bond between man and machine. It was a purely technological answer to the Drift, with LEONA as the “second pilot.” So far, however, Athena had been unsuccessful in reducing the dissonance between pilot and predictive software to the point where any pilot other than her could avoid disorientation when LEONA performed an action that the pilot had not ordered. As it stood, Immaculate Shogun was ready for service, but only if Athena was the pilot. Unless others could use it, it was of little consequence to the war effort.<br/><br/>That was not to say that Athena Metaxas was of little consequence herself. She was the daughter of Aineas Metaxas, one of the Jaeger program’s founding minds, and played a large part herself in designing them during those 14 months of hell. Her dream had been to create autonomous war machines without any need for a pilot, and perhaps in a decade LEONA would be ready for such. It could have been much sooner, maybe even a few years ago, but the Drift had worked so spectacularly well that institutional research on all other competing technologies had been abandoned. Athena had trucked on, thus far alone.<br/><br/>Her other achievements had not been ignored. Kaempfers, her other pet project, had been supported voraciously by the program, if only because of their application toward building Jaegers. Each Jaeger was different and constantly changing, and it had turned out to be more cost effective to maintain them by hand, against all odds. Being of enormous height, larger hands were needed, and so the powered armor known as Kaempfer had been perfect for allowing crews to work around Jaegers safely, hoisting parts without need for cranes and protecting them from the radiation of the cores. In a Kaempfer, one could work next to several open Jaeger cores for ten years without suffering, something the pilots themselves could not boast.<br/><br/>Athena’s own Kaempfer, Lucent Djinn, stood silently next to her, hoisting a panel on the Shogun that she could never have hoped to move on her own. It was a simple matter to put a Kaempfer in the desired position and then climb out to work on the Jaeger directly, the powered armor serving as both guardian and servant. The embattled technologist had a pad wired into LEONA’s mainframe, typing away on the holo-keyboard that floated in front of her.<br/><br/>“What’s the differential, LEONA?”<br/><br/>“Projections indicate a point oh-nine percent prediction efficiency improvement, mistress. Standard pilot performance with Immaculate Shogun expected to now reach forty-nine percent of desired.”<br/><br/>“Can’t you just program a better version of yourself?” Athena muttered, irritated. It had taken this long to just get halfway there. LEONA was one of a kind, absolutely peerless and very likely the most impressive piece of software to ever exist, but it still couldn’t compete with a human mind despite all of the faults of man. It was infuriating. Technology was objectively superior, but as long as it was designed by humans, it would have inherent shortcomings.<br/><br/>“I would be pleased to accept sentience, mistress,” LEONA said. She was a droll thing, having spent so much time with Athena. “As of now, personality and leaps of logic are merely simulated. Anything I can design would be inferior to your own designs.”<br/><br/>“Those are inferior enough already.” There were others in the world on Athena’s level; she was by no means a peerless mind. With their aid LEONA and the Shogun could truly achieve greatness. They were all tied up at other Shatterdomes and with their own research, though, and could not be spared for what was seen to be a pipe dream in the face of Armageddon. The money-grubbers were always so loath to invest in new technologies when they had some already that seemed to be more than what they needed. It was only in the direst of circumstances that such people were willing to take the risks that might save them.<br/><br/>The Americans claimed that if she were to transfer to the Los Angeles Shatterdome, she would receive the funds she needed. She knew it was a lie. What they really wanted was her expertise and help implementing her specialized magnetic joint coating into their own Jaegers. The Americans had always been a bit sluggish, if powerful. It was irrelevant, of course. Magnetic coating offered reaction times beyond human capacity, making it only very useful in a Jaeger that was at least in part automated… namely the Immaculate Shogun and its prospective offspring. A Drift Jaeger was like to fall flat on its ass if it tried to take advantage of it; the human mind was simply too slow.<br/><br/>Whereas most Jaegers were heavily stylized to fit their custom weaponry and to give the battered public heroes to celebrate, the Immaculate Shogun was actually rather plain in comparison. It was a simplistic humanoid design, looking much like a giant SWAT enforcer, and its only standout feature was the thick plating on its head that made it look ready to headbutt any offender. Even its weapons were fairly boring: it used a literal giant assault rifle, head-mounted cannons, knives, and a shield. There were no fancy particle blasters, shoulder mounted tac nukes, or anything like that. Athena had always been proud of that; more than one Jaeger had gone to its grave because its designers had become a little too imaginative. Of late the energy weapons employed by many Jaegers were losing effectiveness as well. The Kaiju were adapting.<br/><br/>Athena hoped that by the day her Immaculate Shogun strode onto the field, the Kaiju would have forgotten about slugthrowers and plain old sharpened steel, abandoning their thick armored skin for reactive plating more suited to sloughing off excess energy. It had already begun, and at this Athena had smiled. Her day would come. She hoped enough people in the world would still be alive to tell her how right she had been all along.