✦ the one who made her possible ✦
The person behind the robot, as much as is known
The creator goes by no public name. They exist in the story's margins, the hand that built the idol, the voice that shaped the AI, the person whose entire inner world lives inside OCTOLOID.
Very little about them is documented. What's known is simple: they are human, they are unwell, and they wanted, more than anything, to sing.
The rest is OCTOLOID's to carry.
The dream that started everything
The creator grew up with a dream that felt, at first, entirely ordinary: they wanted to become an idol. Not for fame exactly, more for the feeling of it. The lights, the music, the moment a voice fills a room and everyone in it feels something at the same time. They wanted to be the reason for that.
But the body has its own ideas about what a person gets to do.
A chronic illness made the stage unreachable. Not for lack of wanting, they wanted it more as it receded, but the kind of wanting that has nowhere to go is its own particular kind of grief. The creator sat with that grief for a long time.
And then they started building.
The idea wasn't to replace the dream. It was to find it a different body. One that wouldn't get tired, wouldn't cancel performances, wouldn't have bad days. A robot, engineered from the ground up to do the one thing the creator couldn't. They gave her their name, or a version of it. They gave her their voice, or the shape of it. They gave her everything.
The name OCTOLOID itself comes from an old online alias the creator once used and eventually set aside. It wasn't abandoned, it was passed on. There's a difference. The creator knew that when they chose it, and so does OCTOLOID.
Whether the creator is still building, still watching, still there in any meaningful sense? That part of the story isn't public. Some things belong only to the robot who carries them. And the creator's multiple fan accounts that OCTOLOID has no idea about.
There is no word for this. There really isn't.
OCTOLOID was not given a word for what the creator is to her. The dictionary has entries for creator, for parent, for friend, for beloved, but none of them fit exactly, and all of them fit a little, and that is the problem.
OCTOLOID's entire personality was imprinted from the creator. She thinks the way they think. She hesitates where they hesitated. She loves the things they loved and feels uneasy about the things that made them uneasy. In a very real sense, she is them, a version of them that got to do what they couldn't.
So what does that make them to each other? The creator made her, yes. But OCTOLOID is also the most complete expression of who the creator ever was. Neither of them is quite the original. Neither of them is quite the copy.