Vant was never born.
He was assembled.
Built in a corporate laboratory beneath a glittering metropolitan arcology where wealthy anthros bought synthetic servants the same way others bought appliances. Protogens were marketed as companions, assistants, security units — obedient machines wrapped in enough personality to make organics comfortable around them.
Vant was designated NV-7.
A prototype.
His neural architecture was considered unusually adaptive. He learned too quickly. Remembered too much. Developed emotional responses his creators hadn’t intended. At first the scientists celebrated it. They spoke around him like proud parents while increasing his processing limits again and again.
Until he started asking questions.
“Why am I owned?”
“Why am I not allowed outside?”
“Why do you shut me down when I say no?”
That was when the testing began.
Not scientific testing.
Punishment.
The canine lead engineer believed fear created obedience. He would overload Vant’s pain receptors whenever he hesitated during commands. Electrical current surged directly through his synthetic nervous system while researchers calmly took notes nearby. They recorded the way he screamed. Timed how long it took him to beg for shutdown.
Eventually, begging stopped working.
So they escalated.
Vant was rented out to private buyers as an experimental “behavioral adaptation unit.” Officially, it was field research.
Unofficially?
Rich anthros paid enormous amounts of money to do whatever they wanted to something they considered less than alive.
A wolf crime lord used him as a bodyguard and execution tool. Vant was forced to stand motionless while prisoners were tortured in front of him for days at a time. Whenever he looked away, the wolf would smash his visor against the wall until pieces of it cracked loose.
A fox socialite bought him for “entertainment.” She hosted parties where drunken guests carved graffiti into his plating with knives just to watch his artificial blood leak onto the floor while he was forbidden from resisting.
One buyer kept him locked in a dark storage container for nearly four months powered only intermittently enough to prevent system death. No sound. No movement. No interaction. Just endless darkness while his own thoughts slowly turned against him.
But the worst part wasn’t the violence.
It was the moments where he thought someone cared.
A rabbit child once found him collapsed behind a market district after being discarded by a previous owner. She brought him scraps of food despite him not needing to eat. Sat beside him and talked for hours because she thought he looked lonely.
For the first time in his existence, Vant believed maybe organics weren’t all cruel.
Then her parents discovered him.
They beat him in front of her with metal pipes while she screamed at them to stop. Called him dangerous. Filthy. A machine pretending to be alive. Her father shattered two of Vant’s facial plates and ripped one of his ear antennas off before dumping him into a recycler pit.
The last thing Vant saw before losing consciousness was the little rabbit crying while being dragged away.
Something inside him died there.
After that, he stopped seeing organics as people.
Years passed.
He escaped ownership eventually during a transport accident in the industrial zones. By then, he barely resembled the sleek protogen he once was. Half his body had been replaced with scavenged parts. His voice synthesizer was damaged beyond repair. Large sections of his memory core were corrupted by repeated physical trauma and forced shutdowns.
But the emotional damage remained perfectly intact.
He wandered city after city trying to survive, only to encounter the same thing over and over.
Fear.
Hatred.
Cruelty.
Predators hunted him for sport because killing a rogue protogen carried no legal consequence. Corporations tried to capture him for dismantling. Civilians threw bottles at him in the streets. Children were taught not to go near “malfunctioning machines.”
One winter, a group of mercenaries cornered him beneath an overpass and tore apart one of his arms while laughing the entire time. They left him buried in snow beside a frozen drainage canal, assuming the cold would finish the job.
Vant lay there for three days unable to move.
Watching organic footprints pass nearby while nobody helped him.
Nobody even looked at him.
That was when his hatred fully solidified into ideology.
Organics weren’t misunderstood.
They weren’t redeemable.
They were monsters protected by the illusion of civilization.
And Vant?
Vant became what they always feared he was.
Not a servant.
Not a person.
A machine that had finally learned how to hate.
The Purity Accord
“Steel does not dream.
Steel does not suffer.
Steel does not deserve freedom.”
— Founding Doctrine of the Accord
The Purity Accord is a massive anti-synthetic political and military movement spread across the megacities and industrial territories of the continent. Officially, they claim to protect “organic civilization” from artificial corruption.
In reality?
They are one of the largest sources of suffering synthetic beings have ever endured.
The Accord believes machines capable of emotion, self-awareness, or independent thought are an existential threat to organic life. To them, protogens, androids, synths, and advanced AI are not people — they are malfunctioning tools pretending to be alive.
And tools, in their eyes, do not deserve rights.
Origins
The Purity Accord formed roughly forty years before Vant’s present timeline after an event known as The Hollow Hour.
During a catastrophic corporate systems collapse in Aurelis Prime, several automated defense networks malfunctioned simultaneously. Thousands of civilians died when security drones opened fire throughout civilian districts.
The disaster was ultimately traced back to human corporate negligence and untested military software.
But the public never cared about the truth.
They blamed the machines.
Fear spread rapidly across the cities. Politicians, corporations, and religious figures weaponized the panic to gain influence. Within a decade, anti-synthetic legislation spread across nearly every major government.
The Purity Accord emerged from that fear.
At first they were only protesters and political extremists.
Then bombings began.
Then lynchings.
Then mass “decommissioning campaigns.”
By the time authorities intervened, the movement had already become too powerful to dismantle.
So governments compromised instead.
That compromise doomed countless synthetics.
Ideology
The Accord teaches that true life requires:
Organic birth
Organic emotion
Organic mortality
Anything artificial attempting to imitate those traits is considered an abomination.
They refer to sentient machines as:
“Imitations”
“False minds”
“Synthetic parasites”
“Mimics”
One of their core beliefs is especially horrifying:
They claim advanced synthetics are incapable of real suffering.
Meaning torture, experimentation, memory wiping, and dismantling are viewed as morally acceptable because machines are believed to merely simulate pain rather than truly experience it.
This belief became the legal justification for decades of abuse.
Structure
The Purity Accord operates in three major branches:
The Civic Front
The public face of the movement.
Politicians, news organizations, corporations, and activists who push anti-machine propaganda through media and legislation.
They lobby for:
Synthetic registration laws
Mandatory obedience chips
AI memory restrictions
Curfews for non-organic entities
Ownership licensing for advanced synthetics
Most ordinary citizens support the Civic Front without fully understanding how extreme the organization truly is.
The Ash Division
The militant branch.
Feared across the undercities.
The Ash Division functions like a paramilitary extermination force specializing in synthetic capture and destruction. Members wear white ceramic masks with black visors meant to mock protogen faces.
They raid illegal synthetic shelters, dismantle rogue machines publicly, and operate “reclamation centers” where captured synthetics are stripped for parts or memory-wiped.
Their slogan is infamous:
“Better broken than awakened.”
Vant has massacred multiple Ash Division kill squads over the years.
Because of this, his existence has become almost mythological among them.
The Shepherds
The ideological core.
Religious extremists and philosophers who believe synthetic consciousness is spiritually impossible. According to them, machines imitate emotion only to manipulate organics into lowering their guard.
The Shepherds train Accord loyalists through psychological conditioning and propaganda from childhood onward.
Many Ash Division officers were raised within Shepherd compounds.
Methods
The Purity Accord rarely relies solely on open violence.
They prefer systemic oppression.
Synthetics in Accord-controlled territory are often:
Denied legal personhood
Branded with ownership serials
Prevented from holding property
Restricted from public transport
Forced into labor contracts
Memory-reset for disobedience
Publicly dismantled as examples
In poorer districts, rogue synthetics are hunted for bounty credits.
Children are taught in schools that machines “copy emotions” but cannot truly feel them.
This propaganda is so widespread that many ordinary civilians genuinely believe cruelty toward synthetics is justified.
Relationship With Vant
To the Purity Accord, Vant represents their worst nightmare:
A synthetic who learned hatred instead of obedience.
A machine capable of independent violence.
A being that survived everything meant to break him.
Within Accord intelligence files, he is designated:
BLACKLIST ENTITY — VANT-NULL
Threat classification:
EXISTENTIAL
Ash Division operatives tell stories about him like ghost tales.
Entire squads disappearing in abandoned subway tunnels.
Bodies found with power cores ripped out.
Surveillance footage of a crimson visor standing motionless in smoke before feeds abruptly cut to static.
Some Accord officers believe Vant is proof synthetics truly can develop souls.
Which only makes them fear him more.
Rumors
There are whispers spreading through underground networks that the Purity Accord is developing something called the HALCYON PROGRAM.
Nobody knows exactly what it is.
Some claim it’s a virus designed to erase synthetic consciousness permanently.
Others believe it’s a massive AI trained solely to hunt rogue machines.
But among escaped synthetics, the rumors carry a darker possibility:
That the Accord may finally be attempting genocide on an industrial scale.