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What is it that makes people human? Not just living, breathing sacks of flesh and bone and vivid emotion - what makes up the essence of the human soul, the very fibers of Humanity? In a future not far from our own, in a world very close to ours, scientists and engineers and behavioural scientists worked together to solve that mystery. In a world where all police officers are paired with an android partner, to serve and protect, scholars and scientists alike felt that artificial intelligence didn't need to stop at software built entirely on the foundation of logic. What the world needed, they theorized, was not a computer shaped like a human, but a thinking, feeling machine. Something that could bridge the gap between Man and Machine, not drive a wedge between them - not when the world was already so stripped of humanity and empathy.

And out of that line of reasoning stepped the DRN model, created with what was dubbed Synthetic Soul at its core: the most complex piece of neuro-computer engineering the world had ever seen. The DRN was capable not only of emotion, but of drawing conclusions, even making leaps of faith. It could think outside the box; it could exert and exercise free will. It could grow into its own individual, and forge bonds with others, androids and humans alike. It was hailed as the new dawn of Human ingenuity and accomplishment. If the DRN was made in the image of Man himself, then surely Mankind was a stone's throw away from Godhood.

What no one could have foreseen, however, or at least didn't want to acknowledge, was that something made in the image of Man, with the full capacity and range of human emotion, something that was not born, nor grew up, indeed was never expected to be anything but fully in control, could be so susceptible to the downsides of having feelings.

When a human grew up, went through childhood and adolescence and all the rituals of coming of age, she learned to cope with her emotions - the DRN series never had that privilege. They were flung into a world that didn't fully understand them, a world that they in turn had no experience of.

As people would come to realize, just like humans had breaking points, so did the DRN series of androids. Equipped with the full spectrum of human emotion, but no upbringing to cushion them from the deepest depths of it, the DRN model suffered every variation of psychotic breaks known to Man. It was decommissioned, put in storage, droves of it disassembled for scrap metal and valuable components. The rest waited, hanging suspended in body bags until someone, somewhere, figured out what to do with them all.

DRN-0167 was one of them.