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Chapter Text

As I sit at my office desk—a floating tray of dark blue with a holographic monitor attached at the center—and my thoughts begin to clutter the screen, words and sentences materializing from my spirit, I can appreciate the level of relative safety that I live within. The walls of the University of Abel City are soundproofed, their titanium plating keeping out the vicious echo of Mavericks being shot to pieces in the background that occasionally accosts the senses, if only so the debates between scholars and students about the effects of those Mavericks upon the world can continue. It is a quaint feeling, knowing the position I find myself in: privileged enough to fight my battles with words and not blasts of the sun, I nevertheless adopt the same level of intensity and devotion to my work as would a veteran Maverick Hunter to their craft of killing.

My name is Zeta. They tell me that the letter ‘Z’ has a connotation with nothingness, that its emotive quality is embodied by empty space. I see it quite differently. After all, a blank is an opportunity: any number of words can fill it, and any number of things imagined can be thrust into reality. That potential of nothing, the infinity of finality, perhaps is the hallmark of the work I am about to share. For the greatest battles and conferences and dramatic tableaux can seem at once trivial; and the most insignificant of happenstance, from chance meetings at repair shops to a nameless Reploid’s slow fall into the grave, can move the unshakeable tectonic plates of history.

Indeed, I am a Reploid. What does that mean? Its definition has puzzled me ever since I was labeled the term. We are something like the past generation of machines: built to serve a certain purpose, our hearts not made of flesh but steel, even as we think our souls are not made of lead. But the problem is that that purpose is not defined. We possess an intellect capable of maneuvering our spirits towards any direction we choose, able theoretically to mark what our purpose is. Just as any human would, correct?

But we are not the same, are we? It isn’t just the anatomy or the physiology. We Reploids are of our own uncertain class, designated as human-like but not necessarily liked by humans. People still feel us unnecessary, artificial appendages of the human condition who should know their place, if not to be eradicated altogether to make way for the ambitions of humankind. We are perennially out-of-place, not organic enough to pass for human but not mechanical enough to enjoy a pure robotic identity. In a way, it is a depressing lot to be at the midsection of a Venn diagram.

And yet, we live and fight on. Our culture is defined by a productive-violent tension: the need to cleanse our people of the stain of the ones they call ‘Mavericks.’ Even years after their first appearance do they defy all concrete definition—is it a digital disease, a choice, or a malfunction? Why does it keep happening, despite all efforts to contain it? Is it just a natural occurrence that we will never truly be able to contain? Those questions, unfortunately, I am not equipped to answer. No amount of mind-wringing by historians will get the reader to believe that a knowledge of the past will aid definitively in one’s future.

All the historian can do, I believe, is provide perspective for the present. So that we may understand the how and why of the world around us, and through that esoteric knowledge, somehow endeavor to avoid the impending destruction that accompanies ignorance to the world. That is what I seek to do: to present a narrative that documents the build-up towards and unfolding of what we call the Maverick Wars upon my people and humanity alike.

History is not for the pure-of-heart. Any intentions on turning history into a production of child’s play are even more unfounded than not doing history at all. But between the scroll of the death toll, the descriptions of devastation and heartbreak across cities like the one I call home, and tragic depictions of valor and loss both, perhaps the full continuum of the sentient experience may be better comprehended. At least, that’s the prospect that keeps me writing. That keeps me from deciding to shutter my lights.

With luck, wit, and courage, I present this work to you, dear reader. I know not what will come of this world ten, five, or even one year from now; for all I understand, this text will be forgotten in the hellfire of the future, and in that case, if I were still sitting in this chair with the flames licking at my face, the only thing I could do would be to take pride in what I had set out to do.

Even if not a soul reads this, I will have done all that I could. I will have done all that is possible of the humble historian.

Let that fact give me, and you, solace.

Chapter Text

Before I begin with my narrative of the Maverick Wars, I must turn your attention to the crucible from which this period in world history arose, so that by analyzing the heat, arc, and intensity of the fires of time, their point of origin may be mapped out.

The Wily Wars were that crucible, extinguishing thousands of human lives and hundreds of thousands of robot lives because of the existential feud between two of robotics’ most revered thinkers: Drs. Light and Wily.

It is not within the scope of this work to comment on such a series of conflicts in any detail, for that will happen in a future history. But suffice it to say, the Wily Wars left an indelible legacy of trauma for human- and robotkind alike, the scars still visible on their faces.

The end of the Wars was such an inferno of calamity that scholars are still confused as to what actually occurred. It appears there was a final battle between the legendary Robot Master known as ‘Mega Man’ and Wily in the latter’s Pacific base, a showdown from which neither of them would ever return. It isn’t certain whether or not the Blue Bomber finally disobeyed the laws of robotics or if some unseen catastrophe felled them both, but whatever the case, the conflict was finally over.

Light passed away soon after, his death perhaps hastened by the perishing of his beloved creation (whom he often called ‘son’), and with him went the entirety of the older generations of Light Numbers, amassed in scrap yards and dismembered thanks to the return of oppressive expiration date laws for robots. While many writings of these Numbers were deleted by the ‘Clean-Up Crew’ (a group of newer, sleeker models designed specifically to track down and kill those who refused to be scrapped), precious few have survived thanks to their preservation by human allies, and they tell harrowing stories of desperation and fatal resolution.

The Last Gasps of an Age

‘Time is running out,’ one entry reads, ‘the Cleaners are fast approaching. I can hear the blare of their hoverbikes.

I always thought we robots were designed to last. That our metal bodies and digitized minds were meant to be indestructible compared to the flimsy flesh and tissue of the organics.

But I never realized that it doesn’t matter what you’re made of; death comes to us all, and particularly those who want to live most.’

Why did they need to die? The expiration laws have a long and deeply troubling history, but suffice it to say, they were instituted as a means of resource preservation and robot population control. Supporting so many obsolete robots, much less allowing them to run amok while their programming denatured over time (making them potentially dangerous to humans in city centers), was something that world governments were simply unwilling to do. Once a robot reached their expiration date, they were declared legally dead and sentenced to dismantling in the scrap yards, these ghastly graveyards of robotic kind with towers of smoke and arrays of metal corpses arresting the eyes.

Over time, however, these expired robots began to band together to fight for their lives, most notably under Wily himself at one point, and then under their own leadership. With Mega Man’s passing, the Cleaners were created to hunt the armies of the undead and send them six feet under. They proved startlingly effective: after only five years of uprooting hideouts and alcoves of the expired throughout the world, it was estimated that 95% of them had been eliminated.

One of the early victims of this catastrophe—the ‘Great Shutdown’—was Auto, a stout yet undying assistant of Light who had served his master faithfully for years, assisting him in research projects, blueprint designs, and daily life. The old robot had seen his family come back with the scars of conflict so many times, and yet even as he questioned along with Mega Man as to why they had to keep fighting, his resolve to pitch into the war effort never wavered, nor did his devotion to Light.

When the Cleaners arrived on Light’s doorstep, the ailing doctor begged Auto to escape to Antarctica, where he had established an outpost for expired robots as penance for complying with the laws all those years. Auto refused.

‘I have served humanity all my life. I will not be a thorn in their side now.’

Auto took himself into custody, and I can only imagine the distraught look on Light’s face, seeing Auto embody the mission that he had always taught his creations, only now to lethal effect.

Changing of the Guard

The classical age of robotics was over. It had been a period of incredible innovation, seen the flowering of robot life that nipped at the threshold of sentience, and promised to inaugurate a new period in the human species when people could learn to coexist and thrive with another type of life like them. But alas, that promise was paid back with the death tolls and despondent diary entries of the first generations of Robot Masters.

Never again would the leaders of the world allow two men to have such a vise grip over the development and application of robot technology. The rivalry between Light and Wily proved to be the ultimate cautionary tale, and from that point on governments strove to not only directly control scientists in an effort to limit the perceived excesses and dangers of robot research, but also to prevent robots from ever reaching the same level of intelligence again.

‘The automaton is meant to serve the human race; it has no other purpose in life,’ were the baleful words that began the United Nations Declaration on the Legal Status of Robots in the late 21^st century. But it was a twist of irony that the robot the humans so despised and feared was nevertheless to endure as the instrument of power politics and geopolitical strategy over the next century.

In the 2100s, the period of mass military mobilization known as the ‘Robot Rearmament’ began. Organic soldiers gave way to hordes of soulless robots who marched in perfect formation down the streets of the world’s cities, their chassis all the more humanoid in appearance even as their programming forbade them from tasting the forbidden fruit of sentience.

Fueling this rearmament was the search for the lost schematics and research of the two doctors. With their hidden bases still lingering across the globe, lush with technological secrets and prototypes for further analysis, hundreds of teams were dispatched to discover what the doctors left to posterity, in order to exploit their genius for the demands of a new age.

Soon enough, they’d find their crown jewel: Mega Man X.

The Great Excavation

The man known as ‘Dr. Cain’ was the first to discover Light’s final creation, buried in a capsule deep below his decrepit laboratory. Cain was a man inspired greatly by the biographies of Light, and seemingly had the thoughtful, insightful, and idealistic personality to become the old doctor’s successor. Graduating at the top of his class at the restructured Robot Institute of Technology in both robotics and archaeology, he quickly was tasked by the government with unearthing Light’s secrets and was sent to California (ostensibly for fossil archaeology) to fulfill his nation’s mission.

After months of careful digging and endless patience—Cain didn’t want the excavators to irreparably harm any of the devices still lying under the lab—the robot known simply as ‘X’ was discovered.

X was an enigma. Cain found that Light had somehow constructed an automaton that was decades ahead of contemporary ‘state-of-the-art’ models with the advancement of his weaponry and versatility of his arsenal, but the lynchpin of his discovery was that Light had finally cracked the code:

X had full sentience. Indeed, Light’s lifelong dream of entrusting the automaton with the full breadth of awareness, capacity for free thought, and ability to exercise independent will that humans had cherished for hundreds of thousands of years, had been realized.

And who better to take up the mantle of robotic freedom than the successor to Mega Man? He was taller, sleeker, with more humanlike limbs than the rest of the Light Numbers, bearing a cerulean-cyan chassis accented by a flash of crimson at the center of his helmet and the end of his buster cannon. True, he was still left in his battle armor when Cain found him, showing how even Light knew that he may well be used for military purposes—the crassest application of his beautiful mind—but he had the same curious expression that had so encapsulated his predecessor, now powered by the most advanced consciousness in the history of robotics.

It is said that when Cain first unearthed the robot from his sarcophagus, X smiled, seeing sunlight for the first time, his processors abound with wonder at the world into which he had awoken.

The world had plenty of wonders in store for him, for good or ill.

Chapter Text

The Great Predicament

Even as he reveled in the euphoria of his discovery, Cain knew in the back of his mind that the unveiling of X to the world would be a very precarious matter indeed. How would world governments react to such an advanced specimen of technology and military hardware? Would his sentience pose an existential threat to the balance of power, with X possibly going rogue against the commands of his new masters, necessitating his immediate destruction? These questions assailed Cain’s mind, but the doctor kept cool, knowing the future of not only X but a new generation of robotic life was resting on his decision.

He could have complied with imminent government pressure and activated a kill chip in X’s programming, destroying his remains while using the remnant blueprints to construct more docile machines for his government’s cause. But Cain saw something in X, as if the mechanical incarnation of his father—wise, deliberative, forced into war but desiring peace, and insistent on harmony between flesh and metal—that convinced him of the robot’s potential. How could he let fluorescent genius die?

Cain returned to his superiors in Abel City to discuss his findings, and there he concealed X in the guise of his assistant, fixed with a labcoat and clinical gloves, where his observations about the site of the dig offered novel insights into Light’s late breakthroughs.

“Doctor, who is this assistant of yours?”

“How could he know so much about Light’s designs?”

The stern military men barked at Cain, sitting at their desk in jet black fatigues and with the golden eagle on their caps starkly contrasting with the darkness. Cain merely smiled and laid his hand out towards the robot.

“Gentlemen, I present to you—Mega Man X. The last creation of Light, and the first of robots I call ‘Reploids.’”

The officers were stunned, having come face-to-face with the great doctor’s ultimate masterpiece, beholding both the keenness of his intelligence and the soft-spoken style of his speech.

Cain continued, not deterred by their reaction.

“He will mark the dawn of a new epoch in human civilization. And if you wish to stay with the times, you will ensure my research—and his life—continues.”

Reploid Revolution

Grave debate filled the halls of Congress following the discovery about what to do. For decades world governments had grown accustomed to viewing robots in the master-slave paradigm, stripped of any hope of sentience as they served human interests in grunt work jobs like mining, demolition, construction, and the front lines. But now that the dream of Light had been fulfilled, the question was how to use the new robot’s capabilities for the sake of improving society, without enabling X’s free will to become a danger to the world order.

Cain had a solution: as long as these new ‘Reploids’ were educated, trained, and conditioned to work productively in human society, the benefits of their advanced intelligence would far outweigh any minimized threat of rebellion or revolution. This was a hard pill of practicality to swallow for Cain, who himself secretly advocated for the independent will of the Reploids, and wished for them to create their own cultures and ways of life alongside their human counterparts. But he knew that the alternative was downright enslavement, and so he suppressed the radicality of his ideals and presented his proposal to the government.

With much reluctance, they agreed, and Cain was put in charge of directing the first production line of Reploid robots. They were made in X’s image, granted his plasticity and strength of mind, and even began to play roles formerly locked off to robots due to a past lack of intelligence. Infantrymen became officers and generals; nurse assistants, doctors; calculating machines and TAs, professors; paralegal programs, lawyers; and all manner of other members of the ‘intellectual class’ gradually were swelled by the ranks of Reploids. Cain envisioned this as the necessary next step in the evolution of robotkind, occupying positions where their enhanced computational abilities could be best utilized for the benefit of all, even as he understood that the very post he held would one day, under his own logic, be filled by a Reploid.

Internecine Tension

Not everyone was enthused about the idea of handing over their hard-fought career paths to robotkind, however. In the past century, those known as ‘Luddites,’ or humans with a vendetta against robots thanks to their jobs being occupied by them, had mostly been confined to the trades of manual labor, and as such were easy to suppress by military action or assuaging via empty-handed social safety net measures. But now those in the middle (and even upper) classes felt threatened by the Reploid Revolution, seething as their positions were allegedly snatched away from them by half-brained scum.

Governments found the new Reploids much more efficient and effective as administrators, researchers, officers, and other ‘high-brow’ posts than their human counterparts, and the governing class began to distill itself, shedding the dead skin of less talented and powerful individuals from the top, with an increasingly exclusive oligarchy of humans taking power in all places where Reploids were employed.

Even Cain himself was chastened by these developments, having not quite foreseen the scale of career annihilation that the Reploids had caused. He was forced to say goodbye to many of the scientists who worked under him, and almost instantly there was a target placed on his head by the most incendiary of these anti-progress groups, the ‘Hypernaturalists.’

The ‘Natural’ Terror

Inspired by the age-old Amish people, these radicals sought to live off the grid and independent of robots as much as possible, occupying their own little farms, running the last human-driven factories for manufactured goods, and living in small armed communes in isolated places such as natural preserves, uncut forests (for how many remained), and even the wastes of the tundra. Soon enough there were reports of Hypernaturalists donning leaf-green military uniforms and sneaking into Reploid manufacturing centers to disrupt production and cause malfunction in the new Reploid models: they did this by both tampering with their coding and exoskeleton, burning off steel armor into scrap metal after shuttering the factories into a black-out, and escaping under the cover of night.

They didn’t attract worldwide attention, however, until one frosty day in Abel City, when Cain was set to deliver a speech in the city square before a crowd of Reploids and humans alike. He had begun his grand speaking tour of the world just as Reploid production was getting into high gear, and mechanical-organic tensions were flaring; he thought that if he could express his vision clearly and bring his dream to the people, then they would understand it, and not be as likely to halt the hovertrain of progress.

“People of the world, you must see that the Reploids are a harbinger of the future. Their wit, strength, and empathy will make your lives better—more streamlined, secure, and prosperous. If only you’ll join me in welcoming them into the fold.”

His speech got a smattering of applause, even as many remained wary, but approbation turned to astonishment when a soon-to-be infamous individual in that same green uniform vaulted the podium and held a plasma buster out at him.

The nameless person’s voice still rings in the ears of those who first witnessed the assassination attempt:

“You are a traitor to the human race!”

The individual tried to fire, but he was met by an abrasive force barreling into him from behind! People screamed in amazement when they found that the soul who had saved Cain’s life—

Was none other than X himself.

Instead of firing a retaliatory blast, X sensed that it was his duty to protect his adopted guardian, and while he didn’t understand it then, to safeguard the Reploid Revolution as a whole. His enhanced reflexes kicked into high gear, and he dashed onto the podium, tackling the uniformed figure into the ground as the blast sailed inches away from Cain’s head.

“Clear the area! Everyone, now!”

The Cleaners, now repurposed into government police forces, began dispersing the crowd and securing the area, escorting both X and Cain away from the podium. Eyewitnesses indicated that it was at that time when Cain put his hand on X’s shoulder, and shockingly smiled after his brush with death, knowing he had on his hands a true defender of his values.

X’s Coming of Age

From that point on, X was to be Cain’s bodyguard on the political tour, serving as a symbol for what the bond between Reploids and humans could be on a wider scale. Sure enough, X, after significant military training—including an education sponsored by Cain himself that involved studies in history, literature, politics, philosophy, and the sciences—began his first ever strike missions by taking down epicenters of Hypernaturalist activity, using nonlethal methods to coax the Hypernaturalists out of their hiding spots, and when fired upon, shot back tranquilizer darts instead of plasma shots. The government was appalled at X’s apparent pacifism, but they soon found that his ‘softness’ was actually a boon to their cause: if Reploids could be seen as peaceful people, then the stigma of violence and oppression associated with them could be eased away, and the government project of integrating Reploids into society could be continued. Soon, the Hypernaturalists were defeated, and order was restored thanks to the efforts of X and an assortment of fellow Reploid officers that would eventually form the nucleus of the Maverick Hunters.

Moreover, Cain realized that it would take more than empty words to calm the justified frustration of the human masses, and so he set about establishing a global body of arbitration, the International Conference on Human-Reploid Relations (or simply the ‘IC’), to ensure that the Reploid Age marched on with respect to humanity, in an effort to foster harmony between the two sentient peoples. Cain made himself president of the IC and toured the world from Los Angeles to Berlin to Addis Ababa and Beijing, wherever there was grave conflict spurred on by the rise of the Reploids, working to give compensation to humans affected by them and ensure humans and Reploids could work alongside one another in local councils.

The IC, backed by world governments, was able to stem the tide on the tensions for a spell, even agreeing to limit the production of Reploids to ensure humans had more positions available to them, engendering a greater amount of goodwill than was present before. But soon enough, the greatest crisis of the Reploid Age as we know it would rear its ugly head and come to haunt the world:

The Maverick Menace.