Persephone

This beautiful young woman was both Dr. Rand Engel's greatest success and most tragic failure.  His goal in genetic manipulation of the Luminaries was to create the next evolution of the human race: smarter and stronger, but beautiful as well.  On every level, Persephone met these criteria; however, it was not until after she was a few months old that he realized his design also contained a fatal flaw, for the child's brain was missing a significant piece.

“There are significant deficiencies in Wernicke’s area of her brain, missing pieces of the arcuate faciculus, which translate speech signals to Broca’s area. She is physically capable of vocalization and is an excellent mimic of whatever sounds she hears, but she can never learn to speak with us directly. Language is unintelligible to her, yet we know from the items she’s created that she’s incredibly brilliant. We can communicate with her, but only with facial expressions and body language.”  -- Angela Opondo

Because of this inability to communicate, Persephone was never put to work.  Instead, she was allowed to do whatever projects she wanted.  As a child, this began by building toys and tiny scale models with remarkable precision.  She enjoyed puzzles and problem solving, and was a keen observer of others.  Drawing and painting were among her favorite pastimes, as well as walking outdoors and studying local plants.

Only Gabriel seemed to have the gift of communicating with her, reading her body language and facial expressions so accurately that it appeared he could converse with her directly.  This was partially attributed to the fact that he and Persephone were initially identical twins (twin-speak).  From the moment of division, the zygote that would become Gabriel was separated and placed in frozen storage for future research.  When Persephone's flaws became apparent, Dr. Engel went to work on the twin to attempt to resolve those issues, eventually changing the sex of the twin to male as well, attempting to fit this version of Persephone into his vision of a "perfect" man.  Due to this extensive research period, there is a three year gap between the ages of these twins.

Through observation, Persephone deciphered the difficulty her brother had using standard computers, with input devices that operated far too slowly for his mental speed.  Partnering with him during the development of the Argus system, Persephone designed and built a scanning unit that understood body signals and interpreted them into various commands, such as the tapping of a foot to scroll down a text document, including the sensitivity to read and react to microexpressions on his face.  No one fully understood how the unit worked, but it became integral to Gabriel's sophisticated operation of Argus.  No one knew exactly how the Persephone Unit operated, but Gabriel theorized that she had somehow recreated her thinking processes into machine language or circuitry.