#8t88

The setting goes full cyberpunk now. In 2047, cyborgs were declared legally human once again. This is a great step in transhuman rights, but a huge amount of slave labor was lost. Large corporations turned towards personality matrices to avoid actually paying their workers. By implanting a special chip into the brain of a living person, their thoughts turn into a neural network and gets stored in the chip. 

In theory, when the chip is removed, the personality donor feels no ill effects and when the chip is put into any generic robot body, it has the same skills and basic personality of the original. With some hardcoded AI guidelines, this forms the perfect worker. In practice, there were tons of horrifying malfunctions. First, the robot becomes obsessed with repeating numbers and symbols over and over. Second, the robot starts having memories of the donor and may even identify as human. Lastly, the robot suffers from severe dysmorphia and begins tearing itself apart. Its behaviour after this point is totally unpredictable. Luckily, it is very rare for matrices to break, and regular memory wipes can prevent breaking. In 2055, making more personality matrices was banned, the only matrices in legal circulation being established as safe. Matrix hunting becomes a huge criminal business, with many people paying exorbitant sums for the matrices of soldiers and celebrities, for superior machines or just for collecting. 

One of the first matrices was made from the brain of a CIA interrogator and existed for years before technology was developed to successfully integrated into a robot body. It was stolen from the Pentagon and was held in a secret Techno Union vault for decades before Doctor Aphra stole it out again and put it into a generic TinMan model body. Now known as Triple Zero, his repulsive sadism and complete lack of respect for any kind of life seem to be inherent to his personality, since he shows no interest in being seen as human and number obsession is the extent of his breakage. Triple Zero works for Aphra and occasionally Skywalker as a torturer and hired gun.

Another TinMan model, 3PX’s matrix was made from a teenage soldier who died in 2041. His breakage has progressed to the point where he has turned nearly every body part into a telescoping secret compartment, but kept from getting worse by the constant memory wipes he undergoes every time he gets rented out by the bodyguard agency that owns him. Otherwise indistinguishable from a regular TinMan, 3PX is always astonished when people already know of him as a ruthless killing machine, since to him, every day is the first day of his life.

Doctor Aphra “rescued” a personality matrix from a corpse on Mars while looting abandoned bases and sold it on the black market. The personality matrix was transferred from body to body before getting scrapped each time because the donor must have been an insane and remorseless freak in life. Eventually, the matrix made its way to MIT when the Dean’s secretary robot had her head stolen and replaced with a little pile of trash as one of the university’s traditional joke hacks. After breaking and escaping, the robot, now known as 8t88, works as a criminal information broker. After getting removed and replaced so many times, 8t88 has no memories of ever being human and barely holds onto a mishmash of random skills and blind vengeance for anyone who tampers with their head.

The planet Sullust, freckled with the orange glow of a thousand volcanic refineries, loomed high in the Suloni sky. Long, turmeric colored clouds laced the midnight panorama. Not a whisper of wind disturbed the yellow tufts or the red shadows they cast in the warm planetlight. On the moors below, a short-haired beast paused midstep, tempted to howl at the speckled disc that lit up the landscape. The creaky plodding of its master’s footsteps pulled its attention back to the ground. It sniffed the air twice, rustled its vestigial wings, and followed. The clover under its paws was moist with dew. No fog rose in the cold, still air, but that would change with sunrise. In a matter of hours, this quadrant of the moon would be stifling. Fortunately, neither extreme in temperature bothered the creature, or the metal chassis of its owner.

Three red lights appeared low in the sky as the droid turned to confirm his pet still followed. He looked past the creature to the squadron of hired guns lurking several yards behind it. Satisfied at their pace, he scanned the rolling plains ahead. The faint silhouette of two more teams marched across the horizon, invisible except to an electric eye that knew where to look. The information broker 8t88 would not arrive at his destination without protection.