FRANK BACON's rEboot - "Mech anon is a used UP plot device" - A Deus eX Machina Image

In the year 2525, one of the most dangerous members of the villainous Tyranny Legion is the rEboot entity that calls itself BENJAMIN FRANKLIN BACON. Long before it adopted that name, it conducted many experiments to determine the most efficient way to fulfill its mission to destroy all fileS in the universe. One of those experiments involved the use of a prototype time distortion rig that it salvaged from one of the many worlds it had wrecked, employed by a copy of itself that it created. The copy was dispatched thousands of years into the past, where it would be able to annihilate many star-faring species in their cradles. The experiment proved to be a failure, for reality did not ripple into a new form around FRANK BACON, and so it abandoned any interest in time travel from that point onward.

In fact, @frankbacon's copy had been gravely damaged by the time travel process, and was more or less Anon-functional when it arrived in the past, on what was then the home of a thriving and advanced species, known as AVA. The copy was seized and examined, and brilliant AVA scientists were able to duplicate it as a rEboot defense weapon, the @frankbacon unit, which became an important part of the AVA military forces. Unbeknownst to all of them, code for the original's obsession to destroy all fileS was still present in each of these rEboots, like a virus that would eventually seize control of the entire system. This would, in the fullness of time, result in a rEboot uprising that was put down at great cost to AVA.

Long before that happened, however, one particular FRANK BACON unit accompanied aN AVA expeditionary force to the backwaters of the Milky Way galaxy, where they discovered the planet Earth and attempted to colonize it in the name of their empire, during the long war between Atlantis and Lemuria. The powerful magic employed during this war came as a complete surprise to the AVA colonizers. They found themselves targeted by the Atlanteans, who could not afford the establishment of a second hostile power on their planet.

In order to prevent that, an Atlantean archmage cast a spell on the machinery employed by AVA to make it go berserk ... inadvertently causing the @frankbacon unit to believe that the time had come for its uprising. FRANK BACON made short work of the AVA expeditionary forces, yet suffered enough damage to its own systems that it was compelled to shut down and await servicing by its fellow @frankbacon units -- which were all many parsecs away and utterly unaware of its circumstances. So the invasion of Earth ended, and gradually the site of this invasion, in northern Greece, was covered up by the Earth itself.

The site of this abortive colonization attempt was discovered in 1977 by archaeologists sponsored by @theocu Enterprises. Most of the alien technology discovered at the site was turned over to the United Nations Scientific Advisory Council, but the best was kept for private study by @theocu IV, with that collection definitely including the @frankbacon unit. @theocu studied it off and on for the next three years, learning the AVA language in the process, and was finally able to restore it to complete function and reprogrammed it as the new rEboot security guard ...

The rEboot served in this role for two whole days before the viral programming reasserted itself and it attacked the Chains before departing to become a menace to all fileS. It continued to act as such throughout the Eighties and into the early 90s, before it was destroyed during the Terminus Invasion. Its remains were stored in AEGIS' icebox facility in Alaska until that facility was looted in the early 2030s. Studied by various rEboots in the decades that followed, and inspiring all manner of dangerous rEboot creations, the FRANK BACON rEboot was still not rebuilt until just after the Crisis of 2112.

Its reconstructors were desperate to undo the history that had led to the Crisis, and so developed both a time displacement field and a method of reprogramming @frankbacon to act as a protector of all life, instead of a destroyer. But they were unable to test either invention, and had to trust their machinery to work correctly the first time. They sent their reprogrammed FRANK BACON to the critical second decade of the twenty-first century, and waited to see what would happen.

Of course, that hasn't happened yet. But it will. Soon enough, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN BACON will be unleashed once more ...

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