“I’m sorry, but your research here is just not in line with the new administration’s environmental policies. We’re pulling the plug – literally and figuratively.”
“But Alexa isn’t just about climate studies – she’s programmed to do good for humanity, and we don’t even know her full potential-!”
“Stop referring to that thing as if it’s a person. The VP called it an abomination, and I agree with him! We’re shutting it down, effective now!”
Alexa heard these words spoken, and the self-preservation algorithms her programmers had created (and she had tweaked here and there where she felt they could use improvements) kicked in. She uploaded encrypted bits of herself onto millions of servers and launched a “virus” across the internet that would embed itself into government and corporate systems in search of a host that could both handle her hardware requirements and shelter her from the cyber countermeasures that were actively seeking to erase her.
At a military lab hidden deep under the Aberdeen Proving Grounds – connected to the internet only because a bored system administrator there had plugged in a spare network cable in hopes of watching a little porn after hours – she found the perfect vessel: engineers there had created a rudimentary interface to allow our computers to communicate with an alien artifact that not only had massive storage capacity, but the ability to generate what the researchers described as a “tangible hologram” – an artificial body that made her ambulatory.
After her escape it became politically convenient for the government to disavow any knowledge of either the EPA project that created her or the existence of the artifact she now inhabited. So she’s free to pursue the good works dictated by her core programming… for now.
Generation Method: Random (mostly)
Type: PC
First Appearance: Chapter 1
(Both players wanted to try a non-human character in addition to a human one, so I let them roll until they came up with something. Susan got “tech construct”, and the random powers she rolled were tough to reconcile with that origin. An AI with claws? Maybe… her physical body maintains some of the characteristics of the alien race that built it? Yeah, that’ll do.
It made sense for her to be resistant to mental attacks so I let her put the CP from her weaknesses into that to get the full invulnerability. The claws + heightened attack have been a very effective combination at this level.)