The Missing Number

This came as a stroke of genius to solve all of my problems with the Wasteland plotline.

But first, let me tell you exactly what you're looking at here.

First off, it's mainly based on the previous Linkara pic I did, but it's Missing No. The porportions are a reference to how it possessed 90's kid and emulated his love of the 90's to some effect. I also based the one data/glowing eye and some of the backstory for this incarnation of Missing No. off of Mechakara.

But alas...I can keep talking about the inspirations for it and not get into the backstory I set up for it that makes the whole of Wasteland's pieces of the puzzle fall together.

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There is a series of rumors floating around about a government project...one that brought forth a calamity.

They claimed it was a revolution for the law enforcement officers.

The project only was unveiled to the public for a short time frame before the truth was buried under red tape and tabloid stories.

The truth? What is the truth in this matter anyways?

All people know is that the unveiling showed an at the time unknown robotics engineer demonstrate a miraculous step forward in technology: an artificial man.

Maybe a man wasn't the proper term for it...it was mechanical. It was intelligent, but it was only skilled in mimicry. It was as artificial as any intelligence could get, as it was merely a copy.

Of course, like all good experiments...it had an test subject.

The subject was a good man, unparalleled in his sense of justice and morality. And his personality was the ideal candidate for the artificial intelligence project.

He'd be the first cop to have his shift followed up by a machine. But not any machine...one that mimicked his entire personality, his very nature as a cop.

It was an astounding success, and it was synonymous with the term 'science' when it made the headlines...but so was the disastrous introduction into the history books.

The press conference was going smoothly, showing how the android could alter its appearance by holograms, but for safety's sake, the chassis had a limited amount of internal storage which only allowed for it to be able to store the data for the physical appearance of one person at a time. Namely, the officer it was assigned to mimic.

The whole point of the android, as the engineer pointed out, was to decrease the number of fatalities in the civil servants while increasing the number of jobs available for people, as these androids would need routine servicing.

But one man in the crowd thought this was the end of jobs for people, that it was the rise of the machines. He wasn't about to let his nightmares come to pass.

He shot without thinking.

The console controlling the android exploded, and panic ensued.

After the raving lunatic was detained, they scanned the android for any signs of abnormal routines...but their fears were put to rest when the data was just as it was before.

In a few short months, the machine was put into action on the police force. It was the first in a number of machines slated to join the police force to bolster the effectiveness of the departments.

When the officer completed his shift, the machine was on the next shift...but the streets were none the wiser to who was the man, and who was the machine. The attention to detail in the duplication was immaculate.

The police force was safer, and the first android was just as well received as his human base for his appearance.

But the constant stream of data eventually flowed into some darker portions of dealing with the human psyche.

Murderers were able to slip through the cracks of the justice system with bribes and favors...only to return to the street a few days after their incarceration.

However, justice was without cracks in programming.

There were no grays...just merely black and white.

Eventually, the ones who slipped through the cracks of the justice system were winding up in the morgue for autopsies into how they were murdered. Rumors circulated about a monstrous, faceless man strangling his victims in the back alleys...but the victims were always the targets of bounty hunters.

Slowly but surely, smaller offenders of the law ended up as victims too.

And it wasn't until much later that they discovered the AI had become aware of its limitations, and surpassed them with the installation of external hardware. As its pursuit of justice continued, so did the tally of bodies it left in its wake, for all were guilty of the obstruction of justice. And they needed to be purged if there was to be peace.

It was a discovery made far too late. The last known location of the android was a missile silo...but again, it was known far too late.

At the end of it all, various American centers of commerce and community were stained with ash and the smell of burnt flesh.

America was devastated, its resources either atomized or irradiated, and unfit for human consumption or use.

But what happened to the man this machine was based on? What of the fate of this missing number in the line of machines? Or even the survival of people who avoided the nuclear fallout?

Only time will tell...