Metis Cykes

Dr. Metis Cykes was the mother of Athena Cykes and a psychologist who worked with robots at the Cosmos Space Center. She was the victim in the UR-1 Incident.

Life at the Space Center
Metis Cykes lived in residence at the Cosmos Space Center with her daughter Athena. She worked in the Space Center's robotics lab alongside Aura Blackquill. Aura's brother Simon was a prosecutor and learned psychology from Metis in order to gain an edge in court.

Metis's most well-known technological achievement is a joint project with Aura to build robots that can read and display emotions like humans. While Aura handled the engineering of the robots, Metis built the mainframe that served as the robots' "brain", controlling them remotely. These robots include Ponco and Clonco, as well as 15 other robots and a tiny computer named Widget, which is capable of displaying holographic images and houses the Mood Matrix. However, much of the rest of Metis's research revolves around Athena and her ability to pick up on emotional fluctuations in the voices of others. Metis built a special set of headphones for Athena that canceled out the emotional inputs that would overwhelm her when she was in crowds. Athena would not learn the true purpose of the headphones for years, and assumed that her mother was just forcing her to wear them for the sake of research.

Death

 * Main article: UR-1 Incident

In 2020, a mysterious international spy known only as "the phantom" threatened to sabotage the Cosmos Space Center's HAT-1 rocket launch. Simon pursued this individual, finding him nearly impossible to track. However, he finally managed to obtain a faint recording of his target's voice. He asked Dr. Cykes to analyze the voice to create a psychological profile of the spy. The phantom turned out to be a peculiar individual who showed very little emotional fluctuation.

On October 7, the phantom infiltrated the Space Center. In addition to his assignment to sabotage the rocket, the phantom aimed to steal the voice-print analysis of him and silence Dr. Cykes. He succeeded in killing Dr. Cykes and put on her uniform jacket to fool the lab's robots. However, his plan stated to go awry when Athena stumbled across him and attacked him with a utility knife. Some of his blood spilled onto a moon rock, which he stole in order to protect his identity. However, he never found the psych profile because Simon kept it hidden with the help of his pet hawk Taka.

Simon went on to take the blame for the murder in order to protect Athena. The only things that Metis left Athena with were Widget and an earring cut from the same material as the moon rock that the phantom had stolen. Simon kept the phantom's psych profile safe until seven years later, when Phoenix Wright uncovered the truth behind the incident. The moon rock earring proved as decisive evidence to link the phantom to his crime, and he was finally held to account.

Personality
Dr. Cykes was described as something of an introvert who was awkward with people. She found it difficult to convey her feelings about others, including her daughter, which led to major misunderstandings after her death. Despite this, in reality she cared for her daughter and her coworkers deeply. Simon Blackquill managed to pick up on this, but had to play along with other people's impressions of Dr. Cykes's actions to corroborate his false testimony about killing her.

Dr. Cykes was fond of traditional Japanese culture, and this showed in her attire and the artifacts that she had in her lab. She wore a kimono under her lab coat, and in fact rarely wore her Space Center jacket. Among her possessions in the lab was a Noh mask and a katana.

Name

 * Her family name in the Japanese version is "Kizuki", which consists of kanji that can mean "rare/hope" (希) and "month/moon" (月). This can make the surname mean "rare moon", "rare month", "moon of hope", or "month of hope"; the names "rare moon" and "moon of hope" make sense with the events of Turnabout for Tomorrow, since Athena's moon rock earring was a key piece of evidence in convicting Metis's murderer. The family name also sounds similar to "kitzuki" (気付き), which means "to notice", referring to Athena's ability to notice subtle emotions from people's voices.


 * Her Japanese given name, "Mari" (真理), can also be read as "shinri" (心理), the Japanese word for "psychology".


 * Her English given name, "Metis", comes from the Greek deity with the same name. The mythological Metis was the Titaness of wisdom and deep thought, with the name itself being a combination of the words for "wisdom" and "cunning". These traits would fit with Metis Cykes's study of psychological abilities and robotics. Additionally, the original Metis was the mother of the original Athena, who was the goddess of (amongst many other things) wisdom.


 * "Cykes" may be a play on "psychology" or "psyched".