Neurochip

Robotics took a sharp turn when Dr. Asuda, then employed by Kenbishi, produced a breakthrough form of artificial intelligence packaged as the Neurochip. The device made it possible for a Ghost to occupy a Cyberbrain built entirely from hardware, with nothing organic left inside. That absence forced a hard question: if none of the original biological matter remains, what still marks the occupant as a person? For Asuda and others, the continued presence of the Ghost answered it on its own.

Acting as the thinking core for machines and artificial minds, the chip carried a theory as much as a circuit. Asuda held that if such a component were handed only the most basic instructions, then given time, steady input, and room to develop, it could gradually assemble the earliest scaffolding of a Ghost by itself. Some observers extended the idea, suspecting that any robot or AI that ever crossed into Ghost-bearing awareness would do so through this very technology.

Despite that promise, the Neurochip never found a real market. Much of the hesitation traced to fear rather than cost, since a machine capable of forming its own Ghost unsettled the people who would have to deploy it.

Asuda was unable to secure the patents, and the blueprints slipped to his employer, Kenbishi. The firm used them to build the Fuchikoma and the Tachikoma, armed intelligent tanks fitted with the chip. Everything changed for one Tachikoma when it received natural oil: the fluid corrupted its hardwired programming and let the chip begin writing code of its own. Through that accident Asuda's ambition finally came true, as the unit became the first machine to grow the rough skeleton of a Ghostline.