• Kage was the one who, at just 17-18, cracked the rest of the code needed to launch the wall;
• The Counsel decides to put their children in stasis as they emerge from the shelters, so as to preserve their future – build a new city for them, a new world and wake them up when they can live in this new ‘utopia’
• Tatsumi, Yulia, Maya, David, Masaki and a few others were part of this project. Tatsumi alone strongly disagreed with the stasis, he wanted to be there to build it, but he didn’t really have a choice;
• They are woken up sooner than they should have, to a city rebuilt under the dome and….a raging war;
• Tatsumi is an engineer, an absolute genius with computers and machines – a lot of the technology used in Yulia and Dimitri’s conquests are build by him; 
• Yulia, his wife becomes pregnant with their child, she doesn’t carry the baby, instead it grows in a pod;
• Tatsumi watches over his daughter developing and becomes fascinated with the complex process of human life and genetics;
• Watching his child – Ame develop from embryo to baby gives him the idea of designing the perfect human interface for his project he’d been considering since the Wall was up and humans decided to go straight back to war;
• This is the point where he gets the idea for the twins;
• He continues to be fascinated by her development even after she is ‘born’ or out of the capsule;
• She grows up to be an incredibly sweet child – smart, curious, beautiful, and Kage’s interest shifts from engineering to bio-engineering, most exactly the human genome;
• As his daughter grows, he starts working on his new project – T.O.W.A – the twins;
• Ame turns out to have inherited quite some of Kage’s brains, she is not a genius but she’s a brilliant child and at about 10 she expresses her interest to understand the work he does in the lab;
• Ame is a very important part of the T.O.W.A project, she works on it with her father, she’s the one who finds the genome ( the Mother) prototype for the twins – Caitrin from the Brain Data Bank, she is also the one in charge of suggesting their names ( her father chooses ultimately);
• She is murdered when she is 17 in a ploy by Yulia to convince Tatsumi to fight against his aunt who leads the rebel army ( Maya);
• Maya has informers, finds out about this plan, tries to stop it with her rebels, she’s too late, Ame dies, Tatsumi gets caught int he crossfire trying to protect her and his aunt retrieves Ame’s body and him badly hurt;
• Tatsumi is put back into stasis, his wounds are too severe to be treated with the capabilities that Maya has, she spends the next 20 years, trying to find a doctor capable of fixing him – enter the Mad Doctor;
• Tatsumi wakes up to find out two decades have passed, he is a dead man to the world ( burried cu fanfara ca si Ame) and his daughter is dead, Yulia’s plan has worked, having lost their ‘savior’ the civil opinion turned against the rebel army and Iulya now reigns supreme;
• He is pretty messed up, needs recovery and during this time ( a year maybe) he starts working on Ame’s project;
• When he finds out Maya kept from him that Yulia has brought his project to life ( TOWA) he fucks everything and infiltrates the HSPDC as a something ( here he gets Masaki’s help as one of the IInd Army’s scientists);
• Masaki, his old friend ( closest friend) actually thought he was dead, Maya kept him hidden so it messes up the “old” man really bad to see his best friend alive, and it messes Tatsumi to see his friend ( who was a year or two younger) 20 years older now;
• He finds out from Masaki that they half failed the project, that only the girl twin is ‘functional’ and the boy twin is absolutely normal, doesn’t display any special abilities other than the fact that he’s very bright and very stubborn and Masaki has been raising him as his own son ( somehow in his best friend’s ‘memory’ as he knew about Tatsumi’s project);
• Masaki tells him how he tried to get Aine but Yulia is not willing to let her go;
• in HSPDC he plays a shrink’s role, project Zero’s ‘doctor’ and he enters contact with Aine who has been messed up badly, not even raised as a human;
• sitll, he manages to connect with her, mostly because the ‘Mother’ AI had been used for Aine’s forming years and she gave her that glint of humanity needed for her to be salvageable;
• he convinces the girl ( 14) to work with his plan to get her out of there by ‘allowing’ the prisoners they used to test her skills to ‘kill’ her in one of the simulations;
• he takes her to the Rebel Army HQ ( the WW III underground shelters);
• at the same time, the boy ( Zane) has been raised in the IInd Army’s HQ, as Masaki’s adoptive son;
• for as long as he remembers Zane has had dreams about a girl that looks like him but Masaki always told him its his overactive imagination;
• Masaki tells him he found him during one of his missions as the only survivor and took him in;
• It has always been Zane’s dream to be like Masaki, become a general and a pilot like him and he also takes a lot of his moral compass and honor ideals from his adoptive father;
• they have a rather ‘stiff’ relationship, so Zane’s a really independent kid and has a lot of freedom;
• when he turns 14 he convinces Masaki to let him enroll early in the program that was for 16 years old;
• while Tatsumi is in HSPDC, Zane has been training for the admission exams that happen after 4 months of initial training, he really struggles with the physical;
• when his twin faints in HSPDC and her heart stops he also faints during a flight simulation test thing;
• when he wakes up, Masaki tells him the truth, forced by the fact that the Empress sent an emisary there to see if the boy can locate his twin;
• finding out that his sister was NOT his imaginary friend all this time messes Zane up really bad, seeing as he tried to block her and ignore her and now he realizes she needed him and was real;
• he responds with extreme anger, refuses to have anything to do with Masaki anymore, doesn’t want to take his exams so he’s a complete little dickhead during training, and gets detention;
• he gets detention in the fighter jet hangar where he’s supposed to help maintain them, this is where he meets David, an ex pilot with phrostetic legs who tells him how Masaki saved his life and opens Zane’s eyes about the realities of war ( fixing his heroic, romanticized image)
• David becomes a strong influence in Zane’s life from this point on along with Masaki;
• He tries to contact his sister now that he knows the truth ( in his head, he used to see her when he was nearly asleep or just woken up);
• Here start the twins dream sequences, including the one with the story of Icarus, she also encourages him to take his exams and follow his dreams ( even though she doesn’t completely understand the concepts);
• Zane ends up passing his exams but with a low grade on the infantry/physical, he becomes a pilot for the IInd Army, his friends Fei and Jan become infantry and coord;
• Aine spends a year and a half with Tatsumi in the Shelters, he gives her her name, he teaches her about emotions, acts like her teacher;
• Aine becomes really involved / interested in Tatsumi’s project ( Ame’s body) and slowly he tells her more about his daughter’s story and how she was killed, Aine asks him if he sees his daughter in her and he replies ‘in a way’;
• Tatsumi wasn’t able to get the ‘visual’ right for his daughter’s cyborg body and Aine touches him, reads his mind to see her ( asks for permission) then creates a perfect rendition of Ame on the system;
• Yulia is close to finding them, keeps attacking the shelters Maya gives Tatsumi an ultimatum tells him she will not loose people to protect his ‘weapon’ – Maya doesn’t really approve of his project or of Aine;
• Tatsumi plots with Masaki to send Aine to her brother safely, he makes it look like they take her from him, doesn’t reveal his connection with everything yet because he knew Aine would not leave his site willingly;
• when they take her from Tatsumi she looses it really really bad she’s closed in a confinement room but she’s even close to destroying that until Zane goes to her, and he’s the only one able to calm her down;
• the Empress doesn’t know Tatsumi is alive and Aine, at Masaki’s counsel, keeps the secret;
• Masaki tells the Empress Aine was kidnapped by the rebels ( he’s in charge with storming the Shelter) and he convinces her to get Aine on war effort rather than send her back to the lab where she would be uncontrollable by this point;
• Tatsumi was really close to finishing Ame’s body but because of the attack in the Shelters he has a choice, makes sure Aine is taken safely by Masaki or take the time to ‘pack’ up his entire work;
• When Masaki’ finds Tatsumi’s workshop, he destroys Ame’s body so that Yulia wouldn’t figure out that Tatsumi is alive;
• Messed up, days later in the new Rebel HQ in the mountains, Tatsumi finally turns Rain’s consciousness ‘on’ and tells her that she’s dead – he realizes there is no way he could build her again, with the point the war is at and where he is at ( the hardware and materials he needed are extremely rare/ expensive / impossible to get now);

4 YEARS TIME SKIP

• during the 4 years Zane became the commander of his own squadron, he’s a lieutenant now and god’s gift to women, he’s a bit of a jackass sometimes, cocky but still has a strong sense of morals and honor, he has a lot of “conquests” under his belt and his squadron know that follows his credo “fight like heros, party like it’s your last day on earth”;
• Aine has also become part of Yulia’s army, she is known as level 0, they only send her out for the most important, complex missions that need her special skills, she’s grown up to be a very strong-willed woman with a no-bullshit attitude, she shares her brother’s fiery temperament and together they’re the talk of legends in the military base and the establishments around;
• The Empress has agreed to allow Aine military training as long as she is kept under control with a collar they develop to regulate her powers ( she is the only one that can take it off without killing her);
• The collar keeps her powerless unless she’s in missions, but she actually has more control than she shows; sometimes she uses the power she can ‘steal’ back from the collar when she’s angry but Zane always scolds her to keep it hidden or they will up her dosage;
• the collar works by injecting her periodically with a dose of suppressant but it also has a capability that can send her into overdrive against her will ( see the scene in part I where Tatsumi needs to find the suppressant to have a backup plan in cases she looses it in those early days);
• Fei is the captain of her own 10 men squad;
• Jan is Zane’s main coordinator;
• Aine and Zane have finally been able to have their brotherly relationship, they share rooms in the military base and Aine has some sort of a ‘relationship’ with Fei;
• Meanwhile, she hears a lot about the rebels and even Tatsumi ( Kage), sometimes they have to fight them, it’s her own personal obsession to find him;
• Tatsumi has worked on developing Ame’s AI which he calls RAIN over these years, and she is now very dangerous;
• He sends her to make contact with Zane ( 20) and recruit him for the rebels, again he would not compromise Masaki, and to the reader, Masaki seems to remain fiercely loyal to his Empress throughout the book, he is only revealed to be Tatsumi’s closest friends and strongest ally at the end;
• RAIN contact Zane through the simulation interfaces and this is how their interactions continue on for weeks then months, he is is fascinated enough by her not to tell anyone about the encounters, though he does warn her that if any sabotage happens he will make sure she is captured;
• she tells him she’s just a hacker fascinated by the military-grade simulators and she hacked them for fun, then just kept logging back to see him;
• big chunk where we don’t know what happens, only that Tatsu finds Aine, takes her with him to the rebel base, because of that, the Empress hunts them down gets her hands back on Aine, takes her prisoner this time;
• she tells Aine who Tatsu really is, makes her watch videos of all the failed experiments of trying to create them;
• the Empress ‘blinds’ Aine making her believe Tatsumi is a monster and she was only a weapon to him, easily replaceable;
• meanwhie, RAIN leads Zane to Tatsumi, and only when he reaches the rebel main HQ does he realize Ame is not real, not ‘alive’ in the actual sense;
• Tatsumi explains everything, including how he built Zane with a failproof mechanism, his latent genes that give him his power, genes only he knows how to activate, but gives him a choice if he wants to continue his life as a normal man, or take the leap;
• Zane chooses to become his original self and storm the Imperial Palace to get his sister back;
• RAIN says her goodbye to him, she explains that by the time he is back with Aine she will be part of the system;
• He is a one-man army, no one can stop him, and the IInd Army acts as his backup, they all know this is their last battle, the war has gone too far and the last possible refuge of humanity ( the forests left in the Carpathians) had been destroyed;
• His skin is badly burned, and he’s nearly dead when he reaches the throne room, he finds his sister there, sitting in the middle of white, white dress and her hair the same color ( Yulia’s torture using the collar did that to her);
• He collapses on her lap, and she runs her fingers through his hair, singing a song as behind her, the Empress lays dead on her throne;
• They return to Tatsumi’s underground bunker, where he build the TOWA Project in the old shelters;
• He is connected to the system through the neural link ( the three dots that are his birthmark on the back of his neck), the sky is literally falling around them as he destroyed the wall, redirecting its energy source to T.O.W.A, he reaches for her, but the moment she touches him, her fingers burn and her eyes flash with the power;
• Realizing she is trying to kill Tatsumi, Zane grabs her forcefully, dragging her inside of the two tanks;
• She sees Tatsumi run the last lines of command before he sits up, walks to the tank her brother locked her in, and his fingers touch the glass leaving blood trails, he’s bleeding from his eyes and mouth – he is still human, Yulia was lying;
• The system loads on the screens behind him and as the T.O.W.A Project Initiated letters appear on screen glitching she screams soundlessly, her own fingers scratching the glass from the inside trying to touch him – the link was formed, and though his data is corrupted by being connected at the time of death, in that one moment she saw his entire life and understood all of the Empress’ lies and how she was manipulated;
• This is where it all begins.

ABOUT CAITRIN and the BRAIN DATA BANK

• The world had prepared a database of brain prints ( like fingerprints, but a print of a person’s cognition) during the IIIrd world war, to be kept in a safe bank along with seeds, culture, tech and other things, in case of near total annihilation;
• The plan was that in the future the world might be repopulated by robots with downloaded human brain prints;
• Tatsumi uses this hundred years old concept when he brings Ame back to life; – But what if this is not the first time he uses a brain print? He chose the twin’s mother from the database of DNA samples that came with the prints, but what if he also build an AI ‘Mother’ with Caitrin’s print who was supposed to oversee their development in their early stages – babies, toddlers, young children; ‘Mother’ could still exist and Aine knows her, Yulia allowed the use of the AI not really knowing what ‘she’ was as they just used the blueprints and plans Tatsumi left behind;
• ‘Mother’ could be the replacement for ‘Ayame’ in the old origin story;
• She was the one influence in Aine’s life that gave him emotional feedback but, as Yulia realized the AI’s role was simply one of ‘nurturing’ and ‘Mother’ tended to overwrite procedures just comfort Aine, she ‘terminates her’;
• Later on, when they are in the Shelters, Tatsumi might have an incomplete version of her, and he could allow Aine one last contact with her, thus actually giving ‘Mother’ ( Caitrin) a role even in the origin story, ca sa nu apara ea de nicaieri in projections;