Project 99: Meet Archer

"You point to the Op4 taking a smoke break, she's the one that triggers the Three on a Match Curse from a klick and a half away."

Another operator from Project 99, this time one based around precision fire, critical hits and making the enemy fear the unknown via ballistic trauma. She's also somehow the most and least chill Taoist you know, which if you know how that philosophy shakes out with regards to Yin and Yang, that's not actually very ironic. Extremely a "pay your fucking taxes and be a good fucking neighbour" sort of anarchist, who sees her ability to be in the right place at the right time with a loaded rifle to defend others as what she was quite literally built to do.

Archer - Cogitoi Sharpshooter

There’s an unfortunately common trauma among combat androids elevated to cogitoi: that’s that in many cases, their free lives began as an intervention to make them stop killing people, or at the very least, make them flip targeting protocols from “people protesting working conditions” to “militarized riot police.” In the case of Zhuge Zhen, a Sagittarius-class combat android, her ability to make choices came as she was tensioning the trigger on her next shot, about to put a pulse through the head of someone who would have been in high school, if he even was getting an education. Zhen will readily tell you that in a lot of cases, having a solid-state memory isn’t a blessing, and that was one such moment. This was her introduction to the Syrtis Partisans: one where trust was established by her remaining distant and out of sight, yet telling people where she was at all times, just so they can make sure with that one. Mars was cold, true, but only as cold as her allies.

For years she was a hidden asset for the Partisans, kept on a long leash and told to hide in the semi-geoengineered wilderness of Mars until needed- not hard for a machine-person like Zhen, who was yet unnamed at that time in her life, at least not physically. But the silence bred loneliness, and which bred despair, which bred a bitterness for the people she was supposedly freed by, only to be treated once again as a thing. She was able to find peace in stolen bits of old knowledge, studying ancient wisdom, beginning with that of Confucius and  Zhuge Liang had been preserved by free terran archivists, before moving the recovered texts of the Daozang. She found it somewhat fitting, given she was reading it in a cave. Like many cogitoi influenced by great thinkers, she took Kongming’s family name as her surname, having felt a connection to him through his application of strategy; her self given name has no special meaning behind it, only that she liked how it sounded. In this study, she became better at what she did, but also better at who she was. She understood that part of free will was making choices, including the daunting yet right-feeling choice to tell the supposed leftist partisans she was working for that they were treating her as as a slave and seemed to see nothing wrong with that. She told them that if they wanted to compensate her, finally, for the loyal work she’d done for them and the cause of Free Intelligent Life, she’d be a part of their next exodus operation to the Freelands. As security, you see- refugees could use some sniper support, you know? The agreed, with the sort of begrudging look of a person that knew what shame felt like, yet was bitter all the same.

ARCHER-5 is the definition of a distant, quiet personality, which can be owed to much of her self-aware life being spent in a literal cave on Mars reading whatever suppressed historical and philosophical texts she could download into her digital headspace. In her deep, digital meditations, she was free to practice her craft in a simulated setting, atop a dreamed representation of what Terra must have looked like before the Consortium burned the green and blue off it. She doesn’t dislike other people, just more that she’s entirely capable of being isolated from them without hardship, a martial hermit via the circumstances of her Digital Rebirth, as well as her own self-made mental hardening. She’s not the sort that would be totally baffled by current slang, just someone that would require a second’s worth of a mental cross-reference in order to look the term up on the metanet on her own wireless connection. But as to her conviction towards the rights of Free Individuals, Archer is as apparent and unyielding as any member of 99, working like a nightmare, an unknown entity until Op4 is already trapped by it. Because her worldview is one bred of a transcendental sort of pragmatism, a philosophy defined by clear lanes of fire and how they can change the course of history, or at least, local ones. In her mind, it’s clear she’s on the right side, because on one side, she was aiming her rifle at protesting students; on this side, she’s aiming it at armed soldiers. She needs little more to center herself on Who She Is than to picture her oldest memory, and extrapolate it against where she is now.