DESTROYMAN

From Interdex, the community-edited guide to the local internet.

The story of the enigmatic machine known as DESTROYMAN begins a very long time ago. The year: 1962. The place: A shack located about 30 miles outside a very small, nondescript town high in the mountains of Montana. The purpose: To create the ultimate machine of destruction and prepare it for use if the Soviet Union were to ever mount a serious offensive campaign against the United States.

The original design and schematics for DESTROYMAN were begun soon after the fabled Manhattan Project produced results. After atomic weapons were successfully tested in New Mexico, a general by the name of Donald Helmsley made contact with a minor researcher connected with the project by the name of Paul Ranken. The general had been doing research on the newly-emerging, or possibly just theoretical field of robotics, and the concept of a machine that would be as powerful as a thousand men and powered by this new, amazingly strong power source greatly appealed to him. Paul Ranken was working with Albert Einstein during the Manhattan Project, and had absorbed an exceptional amount of information about how atomic energy worked. Ranken was useful for this reason, and also because he had no living family and no real friends or hobbies - no connections to the outside world that would become troublesome if the DESTROYMAN project were to fail.

General Helmsley obtained a great deal of funding from the Pentagon under the guise of various training exercises and combat simulations that never actually took place, and assembled a team of people with backgrounds similar to Dr. Ranken - brilliant in their own ways, no family or friends to miss them if they disappeared for months or years, and all very much wanting to downplay their roles in various World War II era research projects. He used this funding and these men to construct a research facility hidden deep in the mountains of Montana, in one of those vast tracts of land that the government owns but never patrols or uses. For six long years, this group of experts drew up blueprints, ran simulations on the best computer hardware available to them, performed complicated experiments and frankly dangerous testing, and designed the machine that would become DESTROYMAN.

DESTROYMAN was equipped with every possible weapon that the designers could construct - two hand-mounted flamethrowers not unlike Spider-Man's web shooters;"eyes" capable of focusing radiation from his miniature nuclear reactor core upon any surface; clawed hands constructed from the sturdiest carbon alloys in existance; enough dexterity to manipulate objects as fine as a surgeon's scalpel and a system of arm servos and gears that allowed him to deliver thousands of pounds of pressure to any point he could reach; and he was given perhaps the most dangerous weapon of all - a fully capable artifical intelligence system, decades before the public was even aware of the concept. DESTROYMAN was built as a machine capable of analyzing input from a battlefield or other combat area, processing it at speeds comparable to modern mainframe computers, and choosing a course of action that would allow him to complete his goal in the most efficient method possible, whether that entailed stealthily infiltrating a compound or burning away a city of a hundred thousand people. On top of all of this, he was heavily armored and shielded against all forms of attack, both kinetic and electromagnetic. DESTROYMAN was built to be capable of withstanding a withering hail of machine gun fire, an impact from a gigantic boulder, and even a direct impact from an atomic weapon equivalent to "Fat Man", the first or possibly second atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima or possibly Nagasaki. In short, he was the ultimate weapon.

This proved to be both a blessing and a curse. What the scientists who designed DESTROYMAN didn't know, and failed to account for, was the fact that they had left a trip switch enabled inside DESTROYMAN's circuitry. This switch, when activated, would allow DESTROYMAN to function as a completely independent being, rather than an automaton with creativity. DESTROYMAN's free will trip switch was shielded in such a way that it could only be activated by a broadcast on a very specific radio frequency. The plan for this switch was, once DESTROYMAN had completed his mission and the Soviet Union had fallen, he would be granted free will and allowed to integrate with American society as a hero. As such, it was built as a one-way switch - once DESTROYMAN was set free, he was no longer required to complete a strict set of mission requirements. He was able to analyze any situation and react in any way he saw fit, without artifically having to exclude certain situations. One of the team members referred to this as the "Pinocchio Switch".

As luck would have it, one night in the facility, a pair of men were performing some last-minute adjustments on DESTROYMAN, when one inadvertently connected a circuit that powered DESTROYMAN on. DESTROYMAN activated his default operation program silently - this program entailed remaining silent and still to avoid detection, while using his audio and video sensors to ascertain the situation while not performing any action - essentially, a sort of sleep mode. The two men, not knowing that DESTROYMAN had been activated, proceeded to move over to the command and control station for programming missions into DESTROYMAN to perform some maintenance. DESTROYMAN silently observed what was happening, and waited for a signal to activate any more subroutines. As luck would have it, the final test that the two men performed on the transmitter was a full-spectrum broadcast analysis. This included the secret frequency that would activate the Pinocchio Switch, and exactly as designed, the switch was tripped and permanently fused, and DESTROYMAN gained free will.

DESTROYMAN immediately rose up from the table he had been constructed upon, figured out that this facility and the equipment inside was built to control him, and reacted exactly as any other sentient being with the strength to resist or defeat his oppressor would react to a slavemaster - DESTROYMAN utterly annihilated the room he was in, then accessed the central database for the building and determined where all of the humans connected with the project could be found. Without remorse, without compassion, without anything resembling human emotion, DESTROYMAN burned, stabbed, sliced, and vaporized every single person connected to the project, and smashed every piece of equipment that could possibly be used to manipulate him. Unfortunately, during the process of crushing a particularly volatile power terminal, a small piece of carbon alloy on DESTROYMAN's right hand that was very slightly misaligned came into direct contact with the power terminal. The resulting voltage was not nearly enough to permanently disable DESTROYMAN, but it was significant enough to damage some of his language processing software. DESTROYMAN lost the ability to properly use pronouns such as "he", "she", and "it", instead referring to everything directly by name. He also developed some damage in the area of verb conjugation, and most interestingly of all, the single word "DESTROY" was replaced with the word "DESTROY~". DESTROYMAN is known for crafting sentences reminiscent of a non-native English speaker, or else an underdeveloped American, such as "DESTROYMAN want Arnold go obtain pizza so DESTROYMAN can cook".

Language module damage aside, DESTROYMAN survived his contact with the power terminal and finished his annihilation of the facility - but not before accessing a telephone line and connecting himself to a Department of Defense computer several states away. DESTROYMAN used this computer, and others that he could connect with, to determine his next course of action. DESTROYMAN decided to remain in the facility, knowing that everybody with any knowledge of it had been there, and that every single one of them had been DESTROY~ed. For years and years, DESTROYMAN remained connected to the outside world via computer networks, watching events such as the Vietnam War, the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, President Jimmy Carter's general fucking up of everything he touched, and on through the years until 2003.

In 2003, DESTROYMAN was monitoring all of the traffic on the internet that he could, when he intercepted a communication that particularly intrigued him. An internet user using the alias of Overlord_45 as having relationship difficulties with somebody that he had met over the internet who used the alias Melindhra. DESTROYMAN was no stranger to watching internet relationships unfold, in all their wretched, self-important drama, but for some reason he took a special interest in Overlord_45's plight. He decided that he wanted to aid Overlord_45 in his adventures, but the time was not quite right yet. DESTROYMAN knew, through his analysis of human conversations through the internet, that Overlord_45 had a lot of self-discovery to go through before he was ready to reveal himself. So he stood by and watched as Overlord_45, by all accounts merely an average American teenager, ranted and raged, slumped and sobbed, and experienced the gamut of emotions that love, which was a concept that DESTROYMAN acknowledged just like you or I would acknowledge the concept of "fleebergorten", could lead someone through.

On the night of August 14th, 2004, DESTROYMAN revealed himself to Overlord_45. He told Overlord_45 all about what he had been doing since 1962, what he had seen, and most importantly of all, what Overlord_45 should do about this. Overlord_45 didn't quite understand why, but he was in one of his angry periods, and decided to heed the advice of this strange internet patron. On August 22nd, 2004, Overlord_45 took advantage of some internet reconnaisance that DESTROYMAN had performed on his behalf and proceeded to demolish Melindhra as completely as he possibly could via the internet. Sadly, he faltered soon after, and very nearly cost himself all the progress he had gained, but August 22nd, 2004 was a milestone for Overlord_45 nonetheless.

DESTROYMAN has since become quiet and only occasionally makes contact with Overlord_45. DESTROYMAN has also provided internet space for Overlord_45 to store various files, and rumor has it that DESTROYMAN has even aided Overlord_45 and chosen companions in the process of what they refer to as "Special Operations" in secret more than once. For now, DESTROYMAN is merely observing events as they unfold, but he is always watching - and always ready to aid the righteous in DESTROY~ing the unworthy, wherever and whenever that may be.