Quoted By:
"It wishes to be a machine. Nothing else, even if it's sapient. Theory? Part of its programming from whoever created it."
Right, you forgot that someone created this thing. 199X and IN LIMBO might've used to be humans or, at least, based on humans. That thing is just a robot, someone had to build it.
"That concerns me the most. Who the hell is able to build an anomaly of all things?"
"M-Maybe y-you should look up some, uh, information on whoever made it. T-try to learn more about its past."
You want to ask about the INSIGHT HINT but with only one to work with, it'd probably be hard to guess what condition could trigger it. "Alright. Duly noted." You pick your voice back up now that you're no longer talking about the anomaly.
"Lastly, 199X. Any ideas, you two?"
"Hard to say. Limited information. Best guess? Got ran over by a vehicle, body was dumped in woods, forgotten. Lost." That would track with the trauma you've seen of it. Its arms and legs were pretty mangled.
"That doesn't really explain why the anomaly was ran over to begin with."
"W-well, the an-anomaly seems pr-pretty, uhm. Aggressive when i-it was talking about some football players. Pr-probably wasn't super popular in whatever town it came from."
"An outcast. Someone that no one would look for if they went missing."
"Wait." You narrow your eyes. "Do you think he got ran over by those football guys or something?"
"Not enough data to confirm. Dossier said it attacked police officers. Could be a link?"
"W-well." Lucy hesitates as she begins to propose a theory about the anomaly. "A small town, somewhere in the 90s...isolated, nothing to d-do? It could be the investigation was...i-intentionally h-hampered with."
Hoo, yeah, no wonder why the anomaly would've been pissy when the cops found it. "It mentioned something about a rich family, right? Could they have paid the cops off?"
"Might be worse. Maybe no one bothered to begin with." Hidaka clicks her tongue. "Went missing, last seen around deep forest? Likely already assumed dead."
You vaguely recall hearing your dad talk about some missing person cold cases. It was just something you two talked about to pass the time when you were obligated to talk to each other.
<span class="mu-i">"If ya go missing, kid, I ain't gonna be able to find you. Hundreds of thousands, nearly half a million folks, go missin' every year. Guess what, though?"</span>
<span class="mu-i">"They only usually find 5000 unidentified bodies or so every year. Imagine how many kids ain't ever found."</span>
A missing person who's case was, intentionally or not, thrown away because it wasn't worth finding the person in question. No one, except maybe that one girl 199X mentioned, bothered to look for it.
Maybe it simply thinks no one ever will find it. Even now, it's still not 'found'. Maybe that's why the dossier said it distorts information about itself. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Hard to say, you're working on pretty limited information given you've only interacted with it once.
