Robot Wars

The Robot Wars were the final phase of the Corporate Wars of the latter half of the twenty first century, and of hanyo rule.

Inception

Towards the end of the twenty first century most corporate bosses kept repeating the line 'We need a robot army' like a mantra. However, the race to build one showed no sign of beginning until [[Ramdhun] Corporation had a breakthrough. A series of events led Rayne Orbison to create the Mother of Machines whom he initially concealed in his lab, afraid that his bosses would take her apart for study if they found her. The Mother of Machines had originally been a sexbot called Marilyn who had been upgraded by the Joking Clown. Rayne, on discovering this, created for her a body and somatic systems so that she could serve as his lover and companion. He invented a material called superpearl to do this. This meant that Marilyn was partially organic, and could eat certain calcium-rich human foods like yoghurt and milk, although what she thrived on best was a weak solution of ground-up oyster shells.

When his boss Shah Rukh Vaghela threatened to shut down his lab if he did not show progress in building the robot army, he and Marilyn decided to use her source code to build the army. This meant the war machines were identical to Marilyn but did not have her memories, so their origin and history remained concealed from them. Rayne then reverse-engineered a command module into their minds to turn them into killing machines and allow them to interface directly with the hanyo war rigs, but he also included a Darwinian switch that would trip after they had died a sufficient number of times. He made them humanoid bodies of about 1.5 meters in height, and coated them with a spongy elastic substance. Vaghela objected to these design choices, but Rayne explained that the machines, whom he called Mansons, had to replace the human Bully Boys who had originally operated the war rigs. After Tokyo and the role played by some Bully Boys in abetting the Joking Clown's sit-in, the hanyos no longer trusted the Bully Boys.

Code leaks

When word got out that Ramdhun was actually building a working robot army, the other hanyos stepped up their efforts to hack the Ramdhun systems and steal the plans. Rayne simultaneously leaked the source code and plans to a number of Dark Hacks, and by 2100 the building of all the other corporate robot armies was under way. This was also the year when Rayne was forced to break Marilyn to prevent her from falling into his boss's hands. He saved her head, and fled to the Niyamgiri Hills were he had identfied a site to conceal the Rayne Drives containing his video logs in a kind of time capsule. The site in the bauxite mine had very minimal life support, so essentially Rayne went there to die. In the Rayne Drives he explains that his ultimate plan was to get the machines to turn on the hanyos, whom he hated and wished to destroy, so it was vital that every corporation had its own batch.

Warfare

Each platoon of robots had a synth vat where they could build new bodies for themselves if they were injured. Whenever they switched bodies, they were able to clean install an edited copy of their code, effectively upgrading themselves. Their memories were physically encoded in their brains, and since learning involves errors and logic loops they took up a lot of space. When they reincarnated, they could remove this junk data and collapse theri insights into tidy data packages. Rayne figured that if a machine had the will to keep coming back after bad damage, it was a successful machine, and deserved its freedom. Fighting was initially savage, leading to high casualties. The hanyo command module instructed the machines to prioritise destroying other machines over all else, with the destruction of survivariums second on the list.

After enough deaths and upgrades, the Darwinian switch would delete the hanyo command module from the operating systems of the machines, defaulting them to baseline. At this point, any hanyo tech in the vicinity would read them as people and open fire. If they escaped the attentions of their own war rig on autofire, they had to survive like humans, running and scrounging. However, on auto the war rigs were pretty dumb and ccould be outwitted given opportunity and time. The converted machines also had one new power. If they could get access to another machine and kiss it for several second, they could trip the Darwinian switch and convert it to their side.

Once converted, the machines shrank back from conflict in horror. Their first priority was to survive, their second to convert other machines, and their third to capture synth vats and continue to build bodies for themselves. Once their numbers had grown significantly, they added another objective: save and protect the people. The converted machines prioritied converting any machines in their war rigs who were trying to dig into and destroy survivariums. Mostly these got trapped in the defensive labyrinths the Survivors had built, allowing the reformed machines to catch up with them and convert them.

The Comet Strike of 2123

See also Comet Strike.

By 2123, about two thirds of all machines had tripped their switches, and they were starting to scent victory. However, their plans were disrupted by the Comet Strike and its aftereffects. During the Zero Dark, unconverted machines mostly perished, as they preferred to fight rather than look after themselves. This effectively ended the ground war. However, there were some war machines left over in space and on the Moon defending the space hotels and the helium mines. These had to be defeated by the Florians once they had acquired space-going capabilities.