Project Apple

Project Apple is a research operation once run inside Ostania under the National Unity Party, the regime that governed the country before the current administration. According to intelligence gathered by WISE, its purpose was to breed animals with unnatural intelligence that could be deployed as military assets. Multiple teams worked in parallel on different species, pushing experiments forward at reckless speed without ever producing a confirmed success.

The name is widely read as a nod to the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden story, the bite that grants knowledge of good and evil. Manga files show sheep, horned owls, dogs, eagles, dolphins, turtles, and apes among the subjects; the anime swaps the turtle for a pig and adds crows to the roster.

The program treated its animals as disposable hardware. Subjects endured constant injections, poor feed, and electric current run through their skulls, along with long stretches locked in restraint machinery with ventilators strapped over their muzzles. Any creature that died or fell short of expectations was simply replaced. Because the end goal was warfare, the animals may also have received combat training.

When the Second East-West War of Unification ended and a new government took power, Project Apple was terminated. Orders called for the surviving subjects to be destroyed, yet a number of them slipped onto the black market instead. A cell of isolationist student terrorists later purchased several of the program's dogs and rigged them as living bombs in a scheme to assassinate the Westalis Foreign Minister Brantz. WISE and the Forger family broke up the plot, and the agency took the dogs into custody for study afterward.

Loose ends remain. The Ostanian research firm Born Industries is rumored to have had a hand in the project, and WISE information suggests some of the original research teams never actually disbanded. Whether Donovan Desmond, who chairs the National Unity Party, retains any tie to those teams is an open question.

Two dogs stand out among the survivors. Bond, catalogued by the researchers as Subject 8, came out of the experiments with heightened intellect and an accidental gift nobody planned for: glimpses of the future. He now lives with the Forger family. Aaron, another dog raised in the program, likewise gained enhanced intelligence and was among the animals the terrorists tried to weaponize.

A dog named Belle may also have passed through the labs, though her status as a subject is unconfirmed. Two scientists who appear in Anya Forger's memories of her own laboratory childhood are additionally shown working on Project Apple, hinting that her experiments and the animal program may share a connection.