Information/Background/App

[battle_droid]

Character Name: Serial #Z-2349856394568394696 aka Zee, Combat Unit v2.0

Background: It’s 2215, and the world is in chaos. The previous year, the President of the United States was assassinated, and Vice President Reynolds now sits uncompromisingly in the current seat of power, slowly but surely turning the government from Democracy to Autocracy like the rest of the world powers. Reynolds' rule was absolute, and rumors swirled about the death of previous (and far more benevolent) president Neece and the VP’s involvement in said murder, but nothing could be proved except that the man who had shot Neece had in turn shot himself.

The States were beginning to fall to ruin while Reynolds wipes cherry topping off his lips, blatantly ignoring the decline into chaos and instead enjoying the privileges of his newfound power and money. Drug use is high and the people are angry. Riots are common and politics, as always, are corrupt and businessmen make deals under the table while the have-nots starve to death under their upturned noses. World powers vied furiously for power over everybody else, and war was commonplace - random terrorist attacks on monuments throughout the globe no longer caused worldwide outrage. It was just what happened. Cities got bombed, people died and the masses of bodies were cremated, life kept moving at its slow, grueling and fucking miserable pace. No one cares; it’s gritty and it’s the system, and no one can do a damn thing about it.

The problem with this ‘system’ was that it damn sure made the country and the planet as a whole far more susceptible to alien invasion. While interplanetary travel and visitations were commonplace (everyone liked flying to other planets these days, earth was a scum bucket and those far off galaxies with their glittering beaches of blue water and dazzling white sands were paradise), there were always the ones who wanted more, more power and more control. Earth became a target for sporadic attacks, and when the European Union’s headquarters were attacked by a rogue battleship full of the war-like Xevians, the people had decided they’d had enough. World leaders met and devised ways to combat the frequent alien bombings (enough was enough, after all – Earthlings could bomb themselves all they wanted but when you bring the Xevians and Deltans into the picture shit gets ugly, fast). Their solution? Battle droids.

These beings were initially created way back when humans got sick of doing the grunt work and the NRA (National Robotic Association) came out with a simple solution – the Droid. Within fifty years after its initial appearance on the market (approximately 2079), droids were commonplace. In the beginning, they resembled something comical off of children’s TV – silver robots carrying teapots and taking out the garbage. As the world around them evolved, so did they. The NRA continued its marketing of droids for everyday use, and the robots followed the ever evolving trend of technology and were marketed as more human, more personable to have around. Eventually they resembled humans so closely the two were nearly impossible to physically tell apart. Male and female versions were created for the public's comfort (what little comfort they had, anyway), and eventually became a worldwide phenomenon. The NRA held a monopoly on the engineering and marketing of these droids, never letting the technology out that made these machines so versatile and lifelike. After another fifty years, some high scale and far more expensive versions even included personalities that were customizable by the owner, since many humans were unnerved by the droids monotonous way of speaking. Droids were impossible to hack, and operated on software only known to the NRA, and ultimately answered to the Central Processing Unit inside NRA headquarters. These functioning, lifelike worker droids followed Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, never harmed humans, and never malfunctioned.

The governments view on these droids was simple – droids were meant to perform tasks so that humans wouldn’t have to, therefore why not create a droid that was specifically meant for battle? It made sense for the government, and the people agreed. Why let their sons and daughters die, when a simple drone could be sent instead?

Battle droids were different than previous versions already on the market – instead of cooking breakfast, cleaning house and babysitting, they were weapons of mass destruction, capable of decimating entire cities with a simple flick of a grenade. They were created sans personality, built only to protect humanity and destroy invaders. Zee was a secondary version that came after an initial set of badly malfunctioning battle droids that were destroyed after disastrous test results. Initially, all battle droids were male, but Zee was the first of her kind - female, blond, and pretty. Her first assignment had been infiltration – she had been sent to sneak into an enemy ship, disable the controls and remote pilot it down to earth where it could be dismantled and the parts confiscated. Her mission had been successful, and she had effortlessly killed everyone on board. Her second assignment had been the assassination of a Xevian general, which was also successful. On her third mission, Zee had been sent to engage in one on one combat against a Deltan warship. She’d been given a fully loaded spacecraft of her own, and had successfully destroyed the warship, though she had unfortunately crashed and destroyed her own craft, and very nearly herself. The mission as a whole had been a substantial financial loss, and repair work on both Zee and the ship had been expensive and slow going. However, the destruction of a warship had given the people hope. Tentative production began on more droids similar to Zee, but it was also a slow process and costly. Zee was a complex unit, and there was only one of her which made her extremely valuable.

Zee’s maintainers and developers were two humans working for the NRA named Roger and Anita, and were the only ones that were allowed to work on Zee. Zee was still only a test unit, the battle droids were still in the developmental stages and she was viewed as unpredictable and dangerous, regardless of her successes and flawless ability to follow her programming and direct orders. It was Roger who secretly installed a personality chip in the droid; the aging man had taken pride in his creation and had done it despite his partner’s protests.

There were attempts to steal Zee, and on one such attempt, the NRA facility was bombed, which resulted in the grievous injury of Anita and the death of Roger. When Zee learned of Roger’s death, she spun out of control, and had to be deactivated until Anita was able to return to work and disable the personality chip that had caused Zee’s destruction of the lab along with any progress that had been made on more droids like her. Anita didn’t dare remove the chip, since it had somehow become ingrained in Zee’s processor, and removing it could potentially cause irreparable damage, and Zee was now the only one of her kind and therefore priceless. The only thing Anita could do was attempt to disable it.

It was several months before Anita could trust Zee enough to send the drone on missions. Once she did, however, Zee performed with the same perfection she always had. Anita assumed the ‘problem’ had been fixed.

This is when Zee is brought on board.

Personality: In her initial production, Zee actually had very little personality in that she’s pretty much a computer that’s only meant for combat and assault. However, when necessary, she’s able to engage a specific bit of programming that allows her to deceptively act like a civilian – a regular, everyday terrified human female that will cower and even cry. It’s a sort of infiltration technique, as well as a good defense mechanism. It wouldn’t do to have Zee destroyed by a bunch of soldiers that got angry because she just murdered fifteen of their comrades. Most of the time, when she isn’t feeling threatened, her mannerisms are smooth and unblinking, and her decisions are made and based largely on percentages of survival of both herself and humans alike, especially in instances where she’s alone, surrounded, and could possibly be destroyed.

She is a secondary, experimental version of the battle droid and is built with artificial intelligence that is capable of making split second decisions in times of need, like enacting the programming mentioned above. What has failed to register with her normal processor is that she does have another, secondary personality chip that is the rough equivalent of some of the more personable worker droids, compliments of her creator. Zee was not yet upgraded with the necessary downloads and software for the chip to once again work effectively (hence the spin out of control in the lab), but the chip will eventually reactivate on its own, due to Zee’s nanite self repair systems. The chip itself is now essentially blank, thanks to Anita’s disabling and wiping of it.

Zee does not know how to deal with emotions (as evidenced already), and won’t initially understand how to handle them. When it becomes apparent to her that she’s developing these tendencies, she will initially come off as panicked, frightened and out of control. Once that passes (and it will), her interactions on the boat will help define the characteristics that Roger initially installed before Anita’s tampering. The benevolent ways of her creator were what she witnessed and experienced upon activation and the months thereafter, and she will reflect his compassion for humanity, selfless nature, and a desire to protect humans. It will also, like her body structure, mirror some of Rogers’ daughter’s characteristics who was headstrong, smart and inherently curious, which ultimately led to the girl’s death.

Zee was special to Roger, and she was therefore shaped in his image, and his daughter’s. It was a partly selfish maneuver to make her features like Clarissa’s, and while he tried to write off that it would be useful, most knew it was an effort to duplicate the daughter he’d lost.

Her speech will be proper and formal as opposed to largely computerized, though on occasion words like STATEMENT, QUERY, and ILLOGICAL will slip through the cracks. As her personality evolves, so will her speech into something more casual and easier to converse with, as opposed to formal with no contractions.

Appearance: Zee looks, for an intents and purposes, like a human female somewhere in her mid to late twenties. Her hair is fine and blond, her eyes a very dark blue. She also bears a suspicious resemblance to Roger’s daughter Clarissa that was killed in the bombing of the EU building. Her PB Is Allegra Carpenter.

Spoken / written languages: She speaks the most common world languages, ranging from English to French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian.

Abilities: Zee is a combat unit android, which means she’s a humanized robot that was built solely for fighting. She specializes in short distance fighting (ranging from kung fu to dirty street fighting) to long distance combat (she has her own personal built in arsenal – for example; grenades, cross bow, and her left arm turns into a machine gun. Her knife sheaths will be empty upon arrival, and built in weaponry disabled and non-functional. Zee also has a self repair system composed of nanites that can repair internal circuitry damage, but for larger scale repairs she will need assistance. She also does not feel pain, and her strength will be nerfed on arrival as well.

Items: Zee will have a synthetic and skin tight silver fireproof suit on when arriving on board. Hidden in a secret pocket of her suit is a photograph of Roger and a young blond woman that is either Zee or Clarissa.