Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-4830106-20140808001942/@comment-209421-20140809120640

124.187.109.11 wrote: personally, i just really want Penny to have a soul...

i mean, if you have a soul and die, you cross over or whatever, if you dont have a soul, you basically have a ceasation of existance.

ad i dont really want that to happen to Penny

Well, it depends on WHAT Penny is. If she's a cyborg, then that would give her access to Aura, a sign of a soul, and she'd move on.

However, she said "I'm not a real girl", which tells me that she's an android, plain and simple. So, what COULD happen is a remote backup system, even IF she is a thought-replica AI. Replacement bodies, one mind that creates an "autosave" at regular intervals. This would allow for tinkering on her programming without messing up her memories - just edit the active memory, or the most recent autosave. If there's issues, then revert to the pre-edit save. If she was organic, and she's just a replica, then she's already crossed over, or whatever the character's belief system allows for.

Now, onto another theory I just came up with, along the same lines. Anyone notice that Penny's "evolved" since last season? Not physically, but psychologically. Less socially awkward, more comfortable in a conversation, and without any of the quirks that tipped us off to her being not-quite-human last season. Instead, she picked up a tick of hiccuping whenever she tries to lie. Personally, I could spin this to support my active-save-edit idea, or I could turn it on it's head: what if Penny was the result of a pre-teen child passing away? Going back to one of my older posts:

Flashfire212 wrote: A girl who was dying, with a technologist father so obsessed with saving her that he copied her thought patterns and created an AI body for her.

Judging by the personality shift, then along this line of reasoning, the child would have been close to eight or nine, so too young to have caught up to even the social skills of Ruby or Jaune, both of whom are notably limited in that respect. But, skip forward a couple of weeks, and BAM! Penny's caught up to Ruby in social development. Two lines of theory here;

Purely AI: Penny's code has been optimized multiple times, either by herself re-amalgamating the memory of social interaction with Team RWBY, or by her 'father'.

Thought Replication AI: She has learned how to interact with people "her own age", which has triggered a cognitive development within the programming, in order to replicate the mind growing adequately.

These are just some off-hand thoughts while I procrastinate in doing homework related to child development, so I'm not sure how valid they are, and yeah.