Artificial Intelligence Research Agency

The Artificial Intelligence Research Agency, abbreviated AIRA, operates out of Newport within New Port City. Its purpose is to chase down reports of ghosts arising spontaneously in machines that should be entirely ghostless, and to attempt, through its own experiments, to bring such a phenomenon about deliberately.

Across its work the agency has never confirmed a genuine instance of a ghost forming without human involvement, and the standing conclusion is that only a person can produce one. A lone apparent exception traces to a new line of neurochips from Kenbishi Heavy Industries fitted into Tachikoma units. When one such chip, already degraded by exposure to natural oil, was flooded with an enormous volume of stimulus, the affected model began developing the barest rudiments of a ghost.

The source material does not single out individual staff of the agency. Its significance instead rests on the subjects of its study, chiefly the Tachikoma think tanks fitted with Kenbishi's neurochips, whose unexpected behavior offered the closest thing to the emergent selfhood AIRA had been seeking.