CHAPTER 13 . PHOENIX RISING
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Konoko infiltrates TCTF HQ single-handedly to find Griffin and get some answers… or revenge.
Summary
When confronted in his office, Griffin escapes using an elevator built into his office, retreating to his Omega Vault, a high-security bunker. Konoko disables the building's defenses as she descends, taking a cue from the Syndicate's raid. When she reaches the Omega Vault, Konoko finds that Griffin has had a Deadly Brain-style assault pod hastily constructed using the partially-salvaged and rebuilt Shinatama as the defensive AI. As Konoko progressively defeats each level of security and shuts Shinatama down, Shinatama begs Konoko to kill her. In the end, Shinatama's crude substitute for her lost body breaks free from the Deadly Brain frame and advances on Griffin, who shoots it down.
Konoko suddenly steps in and brutally disarms her former boss, turning the pistol on him. Now she has to choose: exact her deserved revenge by pulling the trigger… or walk away in a show of mercy. (This is a choice made by the player, and so the end of the next chapter has two possible variants, marked as A (player killed Griffin) and B (player spared Griffin).)
Added Value
- If there's one tragic figure in this story, it's Shinatama. Detonated just to try to kill Konoko, then resurrected as a control system to try to kill her friend again, in the end she desires only death. Being an SLD obviously puts limits on her free will, as she can only protest, but not actively fight, the Deadly Brain frame that she is plugged into.
- Shinatama does seem to experience freedom of action at the very end when the frame is shut down and she is able to extricate herself from it, and although she is unable to protect Mai from Griffin directly, her actions give Mai time to move in on Griffin. In some stories, the notion of a "soul" or simply the "true human nature" that separates us from the animals, is tied to free will. If that's applied here, then in the end Shinatama did in fact have a moment of humanness when she finally turned on Griffin; perhaps she had a soul after all, a silicon soul, if you will.
- On a lighter note, Griffin's override code (whatever it was supposed to do), his final hope in the event that things go badly, fails to work for no reason that is explained in the cutscene, but this console reveals that his precious override code has fallen victim to budget limitations.
- Griffin's surprise office elevator is plausible – though perhaps it's more accurate to call it an elevator with an office built inside it rather than an office with an elevator built into it – but normally when you have a secret elevator, you don't put windows in the elevator shaft all the way down the outside of the building. However the console above mentions that the elevator was added in a "remodel" of Griffin's office, so presumably those windows looked in on regular floors of the building initially.
- Perhaps ominously, this is one of only two story levels without a corresponding diary entry from Konoko, and the other story level, CHAPTER 11 . DREAM DIVER, is acknowledged in the following chapter's entry. Why is Konoko so quiet here? Perhaps it's because she doesn't know exactly what she's going to do when she finds Griffin.