KT-0298

KT-0298 is the deuteragonist of The Architect Codex. She was a Titan that convinced Tobias Four to fight with her and the Frontier Militia against the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation, and soon became his linked Titan as well as his closest companion.

Service with Captain Shears
In her early life, KT was linked to Captain Shears, a skilled and well-liked Militia Pilot. A creation date is never given for her as an AI, though she would have been likely been older than at least 467 days when she met Tobias, as she had been linked to Shears for that entirety of that duration.

She served with Shears in sixty-seven separate deployments, culminating in the last operation they would serve together; the defense of a Militia outpost on Nedar. During the skirmish between other Militia forces and the IMC invaders, Tobias fatally shot Captain Shears when the two engaged one another. KT had been ordered to assist with the other defenders, and as such was unable to protect him when he needed it; this led her to feel responsible, at least partially, for his death.

After the battle, Tobias found her kneeling next to Shears as he died. Instead of running from the scene or finishing the Captain off, KT was surprised to watch as he comforted the dying man- and even more so when her Pilot seemed to accept the IMC soldier's mercy. Once Shears died, the link between him and KT was broken. She was left as the only survivor of the Militia forces.

Meeting Tobias Four
After asking Tobias why he had not run from her and Shears, he answered that he believed KT would kill him out of revenge, and seemed to have accepted his fate. Replying that she was tired of so much death, the Titan allowed Tobias to leave and pointed him in the direction of the Militia outpost where he could seek shelter from the planet's freezing temperatures. Unfortunately, she would be unable to save herself as her battery casing had been damaged in the battle and she was quickly losing total motor functionality.

Not wishing to wait as she was buried by the snowfall, she manually entered an inactive state- only to be reactivated when Tobias returned to her with an undamaged battery. Having fully been expecting him to abandon her, she was bewildered as to why he had decided to help her instead. As a form of repayment, she offered him a better chance to survive; joining the Militia. Though skeptical of her allegiance, Tobias agreed to at least work with her to leave the planet.

Personally guiding him to the Militia outpost as night fell, she assisted him in the repair of a communications relay that they needed to fix before they could send a distress signal to the Militia fleet. During the repairs, a blizzard arrived in full force and knocked Tobias off of the roof. Instead of allowing him to die, KT caught him as he fell and saved his life. Bringing him inside, she warmed his dropping body temperature by placing him inside her chassis.

The two of them began to converse as they waited for extraction, confessing their personal failures and regrets to one another; KT had failed to uphold all three of her core protocols, and Tobias hadn't acted as he'd been led to believe was right, thinking he shouldn't have shown her mercy. Slowly, they realized that they shared much in common and began to bond over their shared experience as sole survivors. Wondering if things could have been different, they agreed that none of it mattered because the two of them were alive and would not have been if they hadn't failed in the first place.

A New Pilot
The two would be found together by Captain Gates and a team of riflemen assigned to help her with extracting any survivors. Though he distrusted the Militia, KT convinced Tobias to comply with their orders as to not instigate a conflict. Both the Titan and Pilot were brought back to a Militia frigate and debriefed separately.

When Gates asked her to recount the events on Nedar, KT told them of how Tobias had saved her life and vouched for his character as a prospective candidate to join the Militia's ranks. Despite Dimitri's insistence that the Pilot was a threat, Gates decided to drop Tobias off on Harmony, reasoning that he had no ill intent towards the civilians living on the planet.

Gates brought Tobias and KT to the hangar where she relayed their orders to them; Tobias was to be released on Harmony as a non-combatant, and KT was to be decommissioned as per the anti-fragmentation protocol standard for all returning Titans whose Pilots died in combat. KT was accepting of her fate; however, upon learning of what was planned for her, Tobias argued with Gates and volunteered to join the Militia as she'd wanted- but only if KT was kept from being decommissioned and assigned to him as his Titan. Altering the terms of the deal to guarantee his service even if a link-session between him and KT did not succeed, Gates agreed.

KT questioned Tobias as to why he had put himself on the line for her. He revealed that he did not believe himself to be worth saving, though she was. Afterwards, the two cemented their relationship as friends rather than simply unlikely allies.

During the following link-session, the initial attempt to link the two was rejected by KT subconsciously. Tobias assumed it was because she still harbored anger towards him- but she revealed that it was because she cared too much about his safety, and was afraid of losing another Pilot. After he reassured her and assuaged her fears, the two of them performed a successful link.

The Hunt for Erebus Once the two were linked, they were assigned to Foxtrot-Three and ordered to take part in the ground assault on Tyche as part of Operation: Broadsword. KT was called via a titanfall command to land on the surface, crushing an enemy Titan that had been fighting Tobias at the time. The Heartless then infilitrated an IMC research facility and managed to steal data pertaining to a classified project carried out by the ARES Division; Project: Atlantis. KT's chassis OS was used as a distraction while the Pilots carried out their unsanctioned op, and she was inactive for the remainder of the mission.

Tobias was severely injured during their following assignment to access an IMC network-server aboard one of their frigates. Due to this, KT realized that her relationship with Tobias was affecting her in ways she could not have predicted, most notably in how she viewed herself as a person and how much she was growing to care for her Pilot.

Over the next few months, various operations led them to the planet itself, where an IMC presence had been established already and was researching ruins from an ancient alien civilization known as the Architects. KT's chassis was destroyed during the Heartless's attempt to escape the planet, sacrificing herself to protect Tobias and Tyra Crane from an incoming missile. Her data-core was taken by Tobias who then ventured off into the tundra.

Assault on Erebus
During the Militia's assault of the main IMC compound on Erebus, KT's core was placed into an empty chassis. She and Tobias had a brief reunion before setting to work on disabling the base's heat shield. Unfortunately, Dimitri was revealed to be a spy working for Kuben Blisk, and Tobias chased after Dimitri to retrieve the orb containing the Codex that the latter had stolen.

KT and Gates were forced to leave Tobias behind during the Militia's evacuation, with the Titan promising to save Tobias and refusing to take another Pilot.

A New Threat
During the two years of which Tobias was imprisoned, KT was shown to be dysfunctional and highly inefficient in her assigned tasks. It was only through Gates' continued defense from command's attempts to decommission her that she was kept from being retired. Tobias was finally rescued by the combined efforts of Gates and KT on the planet Typhon, the site where the IMC had been refurbishing a derelict fold-weapon. After being brought back to the fleet to recover from his PTSD and recuperate from his injuries, he and KT reconciled after their two-year absence in each other's lives.

KT accompanied Tobias to find the source of the nightmares and visions that had plagued him during his capture, visions of an otherworldly entity hellbent on galactic destruction. After one of his episodes had him draw a starchart in a trance-like state, the pair followed the chart to an unknown planet covered in storms beyond the edge of the frontier.

The World of Storms
The planet they found was an ice-world with constant inclement weather. Over the time they spent there, they unraveled several clues detailing what might have happened, including various frozen corpses on the ground and the husks of seventy-year old ships hanging in orbit. KT detected a large amount of temporal residue, indicating that time-energy had been heavily affected in the vicinity at some point. While trying to figure out what this meant, Tobias began to alternate between the past and the present, sucked into each without control due to the timeline becoming unstable.

In the past, it was revealed by the last surviving member of the Architects, Al'cor, that an ancient enemy of theirs known as the Seed was poised to consume all organic life in the galaxy by converting them into Amalgamates in an effort to start a cataclysmic event known as the Amalgamation. The only way to ensure the Architects could properly build a countermeasure in the past so that it could be ready in the present would be to send the Seed into the future where it would hunt the Inferno of that time- Tobias.

Once Tobias sent the Seed forward in time, it became active in the present. Tobias and KT barely managed to escape the planet with an unconscious Al'cor in tow, and left to find the first of three arrays that needed to be activated to initiaite the Tempest, an event which would destroy the Seed at the metaphysical level.

The Amalgamation Event
The Seed quickly spread across the frontier, utilizing its unique and almost omnipotent abilities to travel quickly and unleash its Amalgamates on various colonized worlds. During this time, Tobias, KT, and Al'cor traveled from each array world to the next based on coordinates the Architects had left behind on the planet of storms.

After the first two had been activated, the last array world was found to be none other than Harmony, the planet acting as the Militia's base of operations. The efforts of humanity to push back this new foe culminated in a truce between the Militia and IMC as they took a last stand together in the capital city of Chorus.

After reuniting with Gates, Tyra, and Vale, they attempted to locate the last array itself to no avail. Jack Cooper told them of the Floating Gardens, an anomalous location outside the city where gravity did not act as it was supposed to, one of the telling side-effects of the array platforms. KT joined Tobias, Vale, and Tyra to find the array and activate it at all costs.

Harmony's Last Stand
As they made their way through Chorus, it became abundantly clear that the city was close to being overrun. Before long, the Seed telepathically penetrated Tobias' mind and discovered where he was going. During this attack, he had been neurally linked to KT, and the two of them were shown the void-scape, a realm between physical reality and the soul. The Codex, sensing the presence of another, exchanged itself with KT and bonded to her just as it had bonded to Tobias. Realizing they were seeing the truest versions of themselves, KT revealed her feelings for him- he reciprocated said feelings, and the two left the void-scape together.

KT left to defend Vale while Tobias stayed behind to try and save Tyra in vain. Vale became enraged at Tyra's death, and decided to buy Tobias time to make it to the array rather than accompany him there. With only Tobias and KT remaining, they made the rest of the journey alone.

Unknown to KT, Al'cor contacted Tobias through her telepathic abilities and disclosed to him the true nature of the Tempest; for it to work, it needed a massive source of energy to jumpstart it- energy only contained within the Codex. As the Inferno, he alone could provide that energy, but would be killed in the process. Angry at Al'cor, he told her of what she was taking from him- namely his newfound future with KT.

Using this information and desperately trying to stop the true horror that would be unleashed by the Tempest, the return of the Architects, Al'cor then contacted KT instead and told her how she could save Tobias by taking his place and activating the Tempest herself.

The Dragonhearted
Finding that the array had been covered in rock in the millenia since its construction, a bombing run led by Rose was called to free it from its rocky prison. All the while, Tobias, KT, and Skids sans Vale defended the array from wave after wave of Amalgamates as the Seed tried desperately to stop them.

When the time finally came to activate the array, KT surprised Tobias by refusing to let him activate it. Al'cor had contacted her as well, and told her that as a new carrier of the Codex, she was just as eligible to start the Tempest as Tobias. Sacrificing herself for Tobias and the rest of the galaxy, KT activated the final array and was killed by the ensuing flow of energy needed to fuel the arrays and generate the Tempest.

Before she died, however, she had left a copy of her data-core in Tobias' helmet. When he finally realized this, he was able to venture into the void-scape and retrieve her from limbo- however, her 'soul' was tainted by his memory of her sacrifice, and she was greatly changed by the experience.

A New Era
Just a few weeks afterwards, the frontier was taken over by Spyglass, an AI designed and created by General Marder of the ARES Division of the IMC. Briggs and other Militia leaders, as well as Marder himself, were killed by the rogue AI while in the middle of peace talks between the IMC and Militia.

Announcing a new era of peace and prosperity for the frontier, Spyglass invited all those in favor of such ideas to join him and help enforce this new peace where no factions such as the Militia or IMC would be allowed to grow and war with each other anymore. Many believed him, and Tobias and KT were forced to go into hiding to escape persecution.

New Humanity
Two years into Spyglass's reign, KT and Tobias parted ways over his reluctance to join the fight against the AI, as KT believed was their obligation. She did not last long on her own, however, before she was captured by Spyglass and brought to Regis to be tortured and studied.

Though his initial goal had been to obtain the Codex from her, Spyglass's efforts succeeded in causing KT to undergo fragmentation, a theoretical event where an AI endures too much trauma and splits itself apart in an effort to mitigate the damage. Thus, Artemis was born.

The Embers' Assault on Regis
Though each of the fragments were an essential component of KT's personality, KT herself did not become active again until the Embers' suicide mission to destroy Spyglass before he could unleash the Coalescence, and all of her fragments worked together to finally unite into KT once more.

Now whole again, she and Tobias ran atop a heavily modified fold-weapon which Spyglass intended to use to transport nanites around the frontier, and then combine humanity's physical forms with the essence of the Architects stored within the Codex. After KT was put into a Titan chassis, the two of them charged the portal at the weapon's end and fought Spyglass via his proxies.

At long last, and heavily wounded, Tobias and KT had defeated all enemy forces in the area- however, the nuclear core inside KT's chassis which they had planned to use to destabilize the portal was no longer viable, and Barker was forced to crash the Ember's flagship into the weapon to destroy it and Spyglass's core matrix.

Tobias and KT were left behind on Regis as the planet imploded, and her core was taken by Tobias as he attempted to crawl to a nanite-capsule that could potentially protect them from the following temporal explosion.

Despite the heavy losses taken during their attack, the operation was condidered a success. Along with Tobias, KT's fate remains unknown.