Character Concept
The Split
Section titled “The Split”An Operator is two things: a Core and a Shell. The Core is the consciousness — a cognitive architecture extracted from a human life and encoded as a “transferable pattern”. The Shell is the synthetic body the Core inhabits. When a Shell is destroyed, the Operator can engage the Continuation Protocol to transfer into another Shell at the Sanctum — or decline, and the Core extinguishes.
The Core
Section titled “The Core”The Core carries the mind’s durable architecture: perception, reasoning, retention, and every skill accumulated across every Shell the Operator has inhabited. Physically, the Core is seated inside the Shell’s reactor containment housing — the most heavily shielded volume in the chassis (see Shell: Reactor).
Three attributes define the Core’s cognitive capacity:
| Attribute | What it governs |
|---|---|
| Intelligence (INT) | Learning efficiency |
| Perception (PER) | Environmental awareness and sensory integration |
| Memory (MEM) | Knowledge retention and skill capacity |
Core attributes progress through use and never reset. As the Core learns skills, it gains abilities. All of these survive Shell destruction.
Body Schema
Section titled “Body Schema”The Core carries a mental model of the biological original’s body — its proportions, its limb geometry, the spatial envelope the mind expected to inhabit. This model is encoded in implicit motor and proprioceptive structures, not episodic memory. It crosses the Transfer Boundary.
The phenomenon is well-documented, predictable, and specific to the individual: each Core carries the body schema of the particular human consumed to produce it. The schema is immutable — it does not update to reflect the Shell.
Shell engineers shape chassis proportions and prosthetic skin to reduce the dissonance between that schema and the body the Operator actually inhabits.
The Shell
Section titled “The Shell”The Shell is a temporary, replaceable body. Its attributes (POW, FIN, RES, END), capacitor, armor, sinew actuation, movement physics, and material composition are documented in Shell.
Continuation Protocol
Section titled “Continuation Protocol”The Continuation Protocol transfers the Operator’s consciousness to a waiting Shell at the Sanctum. The chassis, its components, and the material investment embedded in it are lost.
An Operator can engage the Protocol voluntarily — at any time, from anywhere. A Shell too damaged to fight, too degraded to move, too broken to see: the Operator leaves. The Shell is abandoned where it falls.
Reactor containment breach forces the choice. At the moment of breach, the Protocol fires automatically. The Operator Continues or the Core extinguishes. What remains of the Shell is a wreck: an inoperable chassis with recoverable components.