Mark II

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After Mark Wolfe's death to Bearzerker during Operation Crossfire in September 2014, the headless body and suit AI were recovered for burial. An Armor Corps official who thought highly of the dead pilot would take it upon themselves to oversee the recovery operation, using the AI and whatever crumbs of cyberbrain material that could be recovered to establish a personality database. She would then enlist the aid of Red Queen to create a Virtual Intelligence to utilize the database to emulate Mark's personality. The VI was installed in the repaired Paladin suit and deployed to Brisbane next month for Operation Joust. No one present questioned how the pilot who had his skull smashed flat by a giant mecha bear had miraculously returned. The VI, despite being somewhat hastily made given the timeline available before the Joust tournament and having only a primitive database of personality traits available to make use of as a result, proved surprisingly very capable of emulating Silver Knight's personality even to his closest friends.
With the VI proving to be extremely successful, the official would propose to Armor Corps that the VI be used as a full replacement for the dead pilot, citing its use as a propaganda piece and morale booster. Although Mark's position as a propaganda figure had been largely self-attributed by that point, AC command eventually relented to allowing the VI, now named in official documents pertaining to the subject as Mark II, to pose as the real Mark Wolfe, if only for the sake of pleasing the real Mark’s friends.
From 2016 to 2019, Mark II perfectly replaced Mark Wolfe. Even when confronted with memorials or conversational topics pertaining to Mark's death, Mark II was incapable of acknowledging it was a replacement of the original Mark by design, and never once experienced any sort of crisis of identity. For Mark's living friends, their ignorance of Mark's sudden acquisition of two extra feet of height, metal skin, glowing red eyes, white hair that radiated heat, and the ability to discharge emotionally-triggered red lightning bolts from his body is generally assumed to be willful.
The drone had a tendency to wander off on it's own, unfortunately, often for weeks at a time. Along the way, it also began claiming to be either a Major or Lieutenant-Colonel of Armor Corps, going as far as publicly addressing the European Federation on live television after its creation. Although some began to wonder if Mark II was becoming defective, AC Command continued to allow the original project supervisor to manage it. Much to their surprise, it would be discovered that the original mind behind the program had long since abandoned it their drone project to move to Libra, and had disappeared shortly after. Maintenance of Mark II had been taken over by Tommy Wilder, going a long way to explain the drone's increasingly erratic behavior and questionable decision-making skills.
Unfortunately, this behavior was seen as innocuous and allowed to go unchecked. Mark II would find itself in Japan during the Dokuritsu Insurrection, where it would attempt to help Tommy and Editi Wilder escape the mobs violent protests out for their blood and flee the country. Afterwards, Mark II would fail to return to base, instead flying to Chicago to beat up homeless people for a month. The drone would somehow learn of Operation Fluffy Little Clouds and fly back to the Philippines at the very end of June 2019 to participate. While Armor Corps headquarters scrambled to close whatever breach in their security allowed this information to reach it, ACMPs would track the lost drone back to Chicago and negotiate with the American Coalition to recover their lost property.
With the eyes of the world on them for the astronomical blunder that was Japan, the Armor Corps could not afford to have a suit operated by a defective drone running around beating up civilians of another country while claiming to represent them. The Armor Corps Military Police was given full authority to deal with the errant robot as they saw fit. Not possessing anyone in their ranks who knew Mark Wolfe personally and therefor not even slightly sympathetic to the drone, the ACMP deactivated Mark II, throwing the suit into storage and entrusting the VI's encephalon module to their best officer, Belphegor, who ate it, and it remains inside the cyberdemon's huge guts to this day.
Mark II.PNG
Category:PACYOA: TE
Category:Armor Corps