The year is 3425.  Humans have colonized many different planets and have spread out far among the stars.  The Galactic Federation has long since been established, and is the largest overarching government for all of humanity.

This is the very same government that was responsible for funding the Gungnir project.  And now they were funding a new one, codenamed the "Avalon Project".

What is Avalon?  Avalon, in mythology, is the realm of King Arthur.  The desire for powerful weapons and soldiers is always strong for increasing the Federation's military powers.  Many hostile alien species had confronted them before, and they wanted to be ready.  So they were creating new powerful soldiers, designed to be able to protect their Avalon, their land.

Originally, Project Avalon was intended to create machines that could fight alongside humans.  But the results were not satisfactory.  The robots themselves were of high-quality and fully capable, except that they simply were too 'dumb' to fight on the modern battlefront.  They were little more than shields.

So the project decided to branch in a new direction, try something new.  They decided to put a man in the machine, test what would happen.  After all, they were trying to create a machine that was as creative and ingenuitive as one.

And thus Ascalon, the first Calibur, was born.  This is his story.

Robert Manuel Sansquire was just the normal eighteen year old young man, freshly graduated from highschool.  New to the world, open mind, looking for new opportunities.  However,  on that fateful day, he had an appointment to keep.

During his final schooling years, he had agreed to be a part of a program, with his parent's consent of course, to be a tester of a revolutionary new technology.  He had been told that it was a completely new take on robotics, which had always been something that had interested Robert.  Not as much as swordsmanship though.

Swordsmanship.  An ancient method of combat largely considered obsolete.  But it had always caught his interest.  He enjoyed the feeling of fighting one on one with someone using a sword.  It was great fun, at least to him it was.  He'd even participated in tournaments, and won many of them.  He was talented, sure, but mostly his victories could be attributed to a great deal of training and practice.

So when the young man arrived at the testing facility, and stated his business, he went through a process of swearing secrecy until the technology was made public.  He then had to go through a checkup, just to make sure that he was truly stable.  It involved a machine similar to what's used for taking MRI scans.

However, not all was as it seemed.  Their plans for the boy was... not as he'd been told.

Using the machine that looked similar to a scanner, they robbed the boy's body of it's consciousness, and placed it inside an amazingly advanced super-computer about the size of a human chest.  Most of the size was actually armor.  The core itself was actually an armored hard drive the size of a novel or so.

Why all the armor?  They wanted to protect the specimen, at least.  If that core was destroyed, the body would cease to function.  It was the equivalent of dying.  Anything short of a large cannon couldn't damage that armor and get through to the core.

The boy had become something neither human, nor completely machine.  He was a new form of life, that would raise even more questions about what defines 'alive' for centuries to come.

They then disposed of his body by setting up an accident, and made it look like his braindead body had been killed.

However, while the transfer of consciousness had been a complete success, Robert wasn't the most obediant of subjects.  He wasn't happy about his situation, and what they'd done to him.  He wanted to see his family, his friends, everyone he knew.  He wanted to tell them he was alive, despite what the news had said.  But they couldn't let that happen.  Not yet, not so soon.  They needed an obedient and inteligent soldier in the machine.

So they tampered with the mind they had taken.  He was their property now, after all.  They owned his body, and he wasn't capable of getting out of it on his own, therefore, they owned him.  They erased his memories, while leaving his personality intact, creating the soldier they wanted.  He no longer had any distracting memories, after all.

Soon, Robert was completely aclimated to using a robotic body, and they moved his 'core', into the machine they intended him to use.  He was trained then, on how to fight using his new body.  Not much time was needed for that, he learned pretty quickly what to do and when.  He didn't have to train muscle memory, after all, he just had to know how to perform.

Once his creators deemed him ready, he was presented to the Galactic Federation, as a new generation of soldier.  The first empathetic combat unit, called a 'calibur', Ascalon.  Named after a sword of legend and armed with the same type of weapon, a few plasma sub-weapons, and an immensely powerful body, he was a completely new breed of supersoldier.  It was, however, never revealed that he was indeed human at one point.  It was still too soon.

However.  They did not take his freedom, despite everything else they had stolen from him.  Once he was introduced, he was pretty much just set loose.  If he recieved orders, he was expected to follow them, but otherwise his will was his own.

To Ascalon, the first order of business was finding out who he was.  He wanted to know who he had been, before he'd been turned into this.  He knew that he used to be a human, he just didn't know his name, where he'd been, or much of anything.  He was told that he'd been saved by being put into the machine, but the damage had given him amnesia.

And so, our young but determined Ascalon searches for the pieces of his past.  Between bouts of saving people, of course.  In time, the world met with others of his kind, made by the same people.  Other caliburs were borne to the world, though the process was still unknown to the populace.