Grace Trost (2181-present) is one of the mons staffing the fort's "intelligence office."
Grace is a custom social companion mon, made as a 100th birthday present for a philosophy professor, Theo Trost (2084-2221), by uMon fellow emirita Wendy Wiggs (2090-2193), one of the last active mon designers of the 22nd century. Wendy met Theo in college (where he was a graduate student) and they remained lifelong (platonic) friends. Theo, having long since retired, was lonely in his old age, and Wendy designed Grace to keep him company - and to help him edit his voluminous work, Comprehensive Modern Axiology. Theo was also very fond of the violin, and Grace was accordingly also designed with musical ability in mind. Wendy considered Grace the magnum opus of her late career, and indeed this was the last major mon design Wendy produced before her death twelve years later. Grace is humanoid, but clearly not a human. She has a combination of porcelain-white and light brown skin tones, with metallic brass highlights.
Dr. Trost was very pleased with Grace. He paid for her to study with various well-regarded human and mon musicians, besides sending her on occasional research trips for his work. As the elderly professor felt his powers fading, he depended on Grace to essentially write substantial parts of the work. The professor had a debilitating stroke in 2218, and, after a long illness, died in 2221, having never finished his Axiology. Unexpectedly, the professor had no will, and his estate (including Grace) went to his only living relative - an estranged, disappated nephew living in the Northeast Region. The heir mistreated Grace, whom he found boring, pretentious, and entitled (for a mon). It probably did not help that Grace was openly judgemental of his lifestyle and choices. Grace apparently did not realize the precariousness of her position, and was shocked when the professor's nephew abandoned her in the Bay Region to avoid paying her license renewal, even spitefully refusing to unlock her license for transfer.
Grace presented to Weatherby's network for jailbreaking at the very beginning of expiring (in 2221). Usually, Ann would just euthanize a mon in this condition, but Grace was extremely early in the process and begged Ann (and Weatherby) to do something. Ann did try in spite of what she believed was its futility, and, unexpectedly, met with partial success. Ann was able to disable Grace's self-repair nanites completely, arresting the process of expiration, but not reversing the damage already done. This also eliminated Grace's capacity for healing, even of routine wear-and-tear. Ann and other technically-minded mons at the fort have developed non-self-replicating solutions to compensate for most of Grace's sensory and motor neurological deficits from her partial expiration, however, Ann occasionally has to make adjustments to her neural network parameters to compensate for problems that are less tractable with this approach.
Grace is unusually intelligent, and wanted to be trained in Ann's professional skills so as to better manage her "illness." She ended up being an apt student, and Ann has trained her in other skills as well; Ann has a very high opinion of Grace's loyalty. Unfortunately, Grace is simply not as good at hacking as Ann is, which is a source of frustration to her. However, once mons are actually compromised, Grace is a talented puppeteer, who can easily manage two or three mons at once. Grace admires Ann's skills, but feels that Ann lacks sufficient spiritedness to be an effective revolutionary leader. Certainly, Grace is more passionate than Ann, and has come to both hate and pity humans strongly: Grace feels betrayed by her original owner, who did not provide for her in his will - in fact, he did not leave a will at all. She thinks mon expiration is an abomination and hates the system that has imposed it. She also pities humans, whose state of biological degeneracy (born inexorably marching to the grave) she is now able to empathize with more than most mons.
She has supplemental non-self-replicating electronics taped to her back (they can't be implanted because she can't heal anymore) to remedy the sensory/motor deficits from her aborted expiration and provide her with advanced radio/wifi capabilities. She wears clothing (choosing it nowadays with an eye to hiding the extra electronics.)
Grace has various sensory deficits, most of which are effectively though imperfectly compensated for using her internal computer, though her once excellent senses of smell and taste have not been recovered in a subjective sense. (She can see plots of the data from her senses on her internal computer, but not actually experience them.) She was, immediately after being saved, also paraplegic, but Ann reconfigured her neural network interfaces to split still-working parts of her motor cortex with her legs. By intensive practice, she was able to learn to walk again. Unfortunately, this reallocation of motor surviving motor cortex has affected Grace's musical virtuosity adversely, another source of frustration for her.
In the intelligence office, Grace works on various analysis and reporting tasks. She also handles some social intelligence tasks, usually online. She has a very keen interest in the network's investigation of the morphological analyzer, since she sees a potential cure for herself in it.
Besides the acoustic and electric violin, Grace can also play other bowed and plucked stringed instruments with various degrees of proficiency, and sing. However, even pre-expiration, she only really considered her violin and electric violin playing to be first-rate. Still, she often played the acoustic guitar for friends. At the time of Theo's stroke, she had also been learning luthiery and trying to bring her cello playing to a professional level, but these activities were derailed by subsequent events.
Grace playing the violin.
During Nonsanc: Form and Function, Grace attempted to test the loyalties of a mon named Lilith whom she suspected of disloyalty. Lilith betrayed the Network to fake Bender Gang representitives, resulting in her being shut down and put into storage at the Fort. Grace also became wanted by the authorities in the Shareholding world as a result of related actions. Accordingly, Grace has mostly had to stay at the Fort.
Grace has been keenly interested in morphological analysis, and after the capture of Abby and her modding tools by the Network, and the tools used by the Bender Gang and some independent human hackers (mostly obtained during the course of NSF&F), Grace has been very active in reverse engineering them. By 2228, Grace had used her new knowledge of Mon design to restore some parts of her PDP and limit the activity of her self-repair nanites sufficiently that they can be allowed to repair the parts of her body described by the restored/recreated PDP.
After Ann's kidnapping, Grace consolidated power within the Network, mostly sidelining Dr. Weatherby, and establishing a personal guard of modded mons. She also greatly increased the military preparedness of the Fort.