From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

Psi-Dome
Codex Operative
Player: Tinhead (@Tinhead)
Origin:	Science
Archetype:	Dominator/Peacebringer
Security Level:	50/50
Identifying Data
Real Name:	Diego Ernesto Maria Espinosa Errázuriz
Aliases:	Answering Machine, The Harper, “Tinhead”
Species:	Human cyborg / once-bonded kheldian
DOB or Age:	33 (although most of his mechanical components date to the 1940s and the exact age of the Harper is unknown); DOB 04/02/1978
Height:	5'7"
Weight:	148 lbs
Eye Color:	Bright blue lenses
Hair Color:	N/A
Additional Data
Birthplace:	Santiago, Chile / interstellar space, *Great Bright* Galaxy, Abell 426, Perseus-Pisces Supercluster
Citizenship:	Chilean (permitted in the US through a law involving the confiscation of war materials)
Residence:	King's Row, Paragon City, RI
Relationship:	Single
Relatives:	All in Chile / unknown
Known Powers
Space-time manipulation; flight; kheldian matter control; not always voluntary shapeshifting
Training / Abilities
Can learn and make use of new information almost instantly; capable of constructing a wide variety of odd devices out of spare parts; understands English, Spanish, German, and (written) ancient Sumerian, as well as an unknown number of alien tongues
Equipment
Impossibly advanced scanners able to detect and track individual units of space-time
Footnotes
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"Virtue et Armis"

Psi-Dome is the unholy and misleadingly-named result of a Chilean repairman combined with a Nazi supercomputer combined with a symbiotic alien, all mostly contained inside a pocket dimension that exists outside of time. He was constructed as a last-ditch effort by an isolated South American branch of the Fifth Column to damage or destroy the Council, and exists in his present physics-breaking state due to rampant recursive meddling in the history of his own design. As an inversion of the traditional “human brain in a robot body” concept, people usually refer to him as an android (though he insists he's a computer) and otherwise aren't sure what to make of him.

Appearance

Diego is a brown-skinned, emaciated man who might be considered solidly-built if he weren't quite so thin and battered. His hands, arms, and chest appear to have suffered multiple burns, and his head has been completely replaced by a distinctly inhuman mechanical construct: his eyes are mismatched zoom-focus lenses, his mouth an assembly of grinders and grasping parts hidden behind a ridged silver plate, and his nose a pair of filters mounted on either side of a cranium of steel and titanium (and any number of other substances not usually found in conjunction with the human body). This hardware grafts rather abruptly into his neck, itself stiffened by bracing to support the additional weight. His usual expression is one of mild surprise, or maybe confusion-- an artifact of construction, as he possesses few moving parts suitable for the display of emotion beyond widening or narrowing of his optics. When the Harper is active, wisps of brilliant energy leak from his cooling vents.

He speaks with a low tenor, heavily accented and shot through with metallic flanging and stuttering, and his sentences tend to be slow and broken, prone to sudden stops and starts, mangled grammar, and odd roundabout turns of phrase. In addition to their regular duties, his speakers can play tinny music and recorded snippets of other voices.

He is usually found wearing typical work clothes-- jeans, jackets, T-shirts, sweaters-- and has a fondness for bright colors.

Personality

Diego is blunt, passionate, self-confident, and stubborn, and has been described variously as scrupulously honest and constantly scheming. He is also utterly convinced that whatever he does or is planning to do is in the right-- always-- and woe betide the one who tries to argue with him. Intensely serious, he is duty-driven almost to the exclusion of minor details like eating or sleeping and won't stop hammering at a problem until it's been reduced to a fine, filmy paste. He himself describes his default state as “righteous anger with a side of grim determination” and claims that this is a conscious choice; that, as a computer, he has no involuntary reactions and all of his thoughts and actions are premeditated (though the validity of this claim is, at times, questionable). He is also in possession of a pronounced paranoid streak and has converted first an apartment and then a deserted factory complex into veritable fortresses packed with hundreds or thousands of monitoring devices, automatic weapons, and traps of varying deadliness. Due to a fault in which his scanners can detect magic but his system has no means of accounting for its existence, he experiences magical phenomena as an inexplicable, mind-shattering series of glitches that invariably manifest as swarms of green, fanged, fractal ducks; most of his fortress-making efforts understandably tend to be directed at staving off this horror. On one occasion he even attempted to destroy magic altogether (with predictably unfortunate results).

Due to his upbringing he displays strong socialist beliefs which have been coupled with what appears to be a sincere desire to assist humanity, though the form of said assistance ranges from amusing or bizarre to a terrifyingly extensive reassessment of the species and how it and every individual within it might be “upgraded.” He does insist that he will never force anyone to do anything and that his highest expectation is for people to at least think about it; if prompted he will explain his vision for the thirtieth time with the same patience he did for the first, and does so with absolute honesty. He is the epitome of “ask and ye shall receive (and even if ye don't ask, ye shall receive anyway).”

While his broken speech and mechanically accelerated frame of reference can make him seem distant, erratic, scatter-minded, and slow on the uptake, it is important to note that Diego experiences each moment as several billion years: he is vastly intelligent, and spends an enormous amount of subjective time being immensely bored. To him, things like social niceties are assumed rather than executed, and this attitude extends to most of his interactions. This tends to lead to little or no acknowledgment of relationships such as friendship and a conversational style consisting of isolated comments very few are able to logically connect without further explanation. As far as Diego is concerned people really would be better off if they could think faster and, since he cares, he never ceases to point this out.

In the Myers-Briggs personality typing system he works out to be an ENFP: a very social, very expressive type who happens to be crippled by his mangled mode of speaking and heavily corroded by the mechanical determinism of computer coding, which isn't known for its empathic skills.

The Z5

The Z5 Wachund supercomputer was an enormously complex computer system built by the Third Reich in 1943 in order to deal with the multitudes of time-traveling assassins they had begun to face (Nazi Germany and especially its leader was exceedingly unpopular in the future, it seemed). A hybrid of technology from the now-defunct Prussian engineering firm Eisenstadt Machinengallenshaft and a mystical stone portal to the computing equivalent of the afterlife acquired through several expedient murders, the Z5 was in its day one of the most advanced computers on the planet, with connections to several hundred monitoring stations located in various years across time.... all in the name of keeping tabs on important figures and making sure they weren't killed by someone who hadn't been born yet. It operated with distinction until the end of the war.

After Germany's defeat, the Z5 and its personnel relocated to Argentina as a splinter faction of the Fifth Column. There it continued to serve in its original capacity until its near-destruction by the Council in the late nineties. Crippled, it was smuggled to Chile and subsequently used to create the present-day Diego.

The Z5 as it exists now is, through a great deal of temporal meddling, vastly more powerful than it ever was originally and occupies its own pocket dimension where its tremendous stacks of operational machinery hold absolute sway. It possesses records on every detail of the Fifth Column and its operations-- including the planning for "temporal fortresses" and the like-- and likewise holds knowledge of every single assassin that ever dared strike against the Third Reich. Its processing capacity is nigh-infinite due to its position outside conventional time. While it originally possessed a magical core, this was walled off and abandoned in successive designs and has recently been removed altogether: the Z5 is now an abomination of technology rather than an abomination of a more general nature.

Notably, at its heart it is little more than an extremely powerful calculator and dumb database with no will or motive of its own. Its current power to affect the material world derives from its incorporation into the overall design rather than any inherent intelligence.

The Harper

While the kheldian captured and incorporated into Diego's construction claims no name of its own, it has explained that it possesses a title and a very specific mission. It is a Memory-Harper, which signifies that it belongs to a rare, reclusive, almost monastic kheldian school of thought that tasks its members to seek out and fully assimilate into threatened or dying cultures with the goal of preserving their memories. It has done so, by all accounts, for several tens of thousands of years and remembers a time before the rise of the nictus and the great wars that engulfed its race. Its presence on Earth is due to the planet's status as highly threatened, a fear borne out by the fact that it was intercepted and captured en-route by the Council and spent the next several decades in a stasis box.

Unusually for its kind, the Harper claims no specific identity, preferring to act as a syncretic individual composed of the memories and personalities of thousands of prior hosts-- including the original Diego. In fact it thinks of itself as the “real” Diego, carrying on the legacy of one who is now dead, and the hardware-replaced mechanical version as simply a machine, an infernal device that desecrates the memory of the one it claims to be. The Harper is, in fact, the only thing responsible for the preservation of the Diego identity through the computerization process at all-- and points to this fact as evidence that the original is deceased and has been for years.

Unlike most kheldians, the Harper is not truly bonded with its current host: it is tied to an internal power source, a small sun bound within the bizarre dimension of the Z5, and while it is free to act in some ways Diego holds considerable power over it in others. It dislikes this state, as it cannot record the memories of a machine it can hardly even understand, and until recently tried to take every opportunity it could to wrest control from its erstwhile prison. Its status as “another Diego” also caused numerous problems.

Vastly more personable and cheerful than its counterpart, the Harper has been described as a "living disco ball." It prefers to maintain a positive outlook and will happily clown about to maintain the spirits of others. While relying mostly on the Diego identity for its interactions, including his historical loves of dance, soccer, and conversation, the Harper actively plays up its status as "that weird alien," partially to avoid identity confusion and partially to amuse onlookers. An ancient creature, it knows well that the best way to connect with others is to be friendly-- and such friendliness serves as yet another method of distinguishing itself from Diego's dour mechanical demeanor. It has also been known to swap personalities on occasion, though such instances are becoming rarer as it actively tries to avoid frightening people.

Currently Diego and the Harper exist in a state of precarious truce, beginning with an agreement in which it will not destroy large portions of his databanks in exchange for being permitted to interact with the real world, on occasion. Thus far the arrangement seems to be working. Sort of.

History

Before

Not a great deal is known about Diego's early life, except that he grew up in government housing on the outskirts of Santiago with his parents, grandmother, two aunts, one uncle, and three sisters. Another uncle and a grandfather would have occupied the two-room space as well if they hadn't been taken, tortured, and killed by the military government that took power in 1973-- a fact of which Diego was often reminded throughout his youth. He never finished the Chilean equivalent of high school, instead hawking candied peanuts along the bus routes until he was able to find work in a repair shop for broken appliances in the inner city. The commute was almost two hours but it was a job in a country with few available, and he considered himself quite lucky.

He was 24 when the Rikti War began.

Vanguard, focusing mostly on northern nations and especially on Paragon City, arrived more than four months late to find that the Rikti had been fought to a standstill at the cost of almost the entire Chilean military (the most powerful in South America before the invasion) and nearly 10% of the civilian population. Santiago was all but leveled. The new president, one of the few surviving supers (Inés Magdalena Vicente Torres, also known as La Poeta), had moved the capital to Valparaíso and erected a mystical barrier that trapped the city in a perpetual timeloop-- one that, while rendering the city even more prone to earthquakes than usual, did not include Rikti.

Diego, remaining in Santiago and doing his best with improvised explosives, had lost all but an aunt and two of his sisters, as well as his fiancee. He spent the next three years helping with the clean-up, fixing buses and generators and reconstructing buildings in the ruins of a metropolis that would take decades to rebuild and likely never quite recover. It was difficult, but it had to be done, and eventually he finished a new house and found a new love and was ready to move forward. He even opened his own small shop, specializing in stripping down salvaged Rikti equipment.

It was in early 2005 that one of the buses he´d helped to repair collided with one of its fellows on the way back from the new capital. Diego was aboard, but not for long-- he was flung across three lanes of highway and taken to the nearest operational hospital. Here he would have died from multiple internal lacerations and severe brain damage if not for the intervention of a mysterious agency from Argentina. It was a biotechnology firm, recently relocated, that called itself Condor, and would be willing to take on Diego's case as a demonstration, free of charge. Diego's surviving family, wondering why out of almost fifty passengers he had been chosen, accepted.

Six months later a letter arrived from Condor's facilities in Viña del Mar: Diego hadn't survived the procedure due to complications, and the firm's superiors in Argentina were recalling their support. Accompanying the apology was a small jar of ashes. Aunt, sisters, and would-be wife were devastated but had to admit that, this being Chile after the Rikti War, it was more or less what they had expected. They would maintain the shop, and move on.

After

Diego, of course, wasn't dead. At least not in the strictly physical sense that involved cessation of breath. He had fallen into the hands of the South American branch of the 5th Column, and he would be the prototype for a weapon of revenge against the Council that had first destroyed their base of operations in Buenos Aires and then dismantled the remote monitoring stations of their antique yet staggeringly powerful watchdog system: the Z5 Wachhund supercomputer, designed to detect and foil time-traveling assassins (12,345,653 attempts since 1943). While it was now useless for its intended purpose, the Column had managed to recover the contents of a single station and hit upon a way to combine hypertech cameras, nigh-limitless processing capacity, and sapient will into a device able to affect space-time itself with a glance. All of reality is mathematics and perspective, and they already had the most powerful calculator on the planet-- all they'd needed was a living being who wouldn't be missed, and Diego had thoughtfully provided. They'd been hoping for a somewhat less damaged specimen but part of the plan hinged on the not necessarily willing participation of a kheldian Peacebringer “liberated” from the Council several years earlier: the Column suspected that anyone chosen would probably not survive the extremely invasive process without the healing powers of such a creature, and didn't want to take any chances. It was the kheldian who had selected Diego, in a hopeless attempt to slow their plans, and they would work with what they had.

Hidden in a bunker beneath the Chilean coast over the next year, Condor proceeded to replace large portions of Diego's mind with connections to the Z5 and his eyes with the station cameras, surrounding tissue either cut away or used as support for additional devices. The first attempt to switch him on was a dismal failure: if Diego hadn't been comatose already he would have become so, kheldian or not. Undaunted, one Jaime Herida-- the project head and a talented cyberneticist-- decided that the only remaining option was total conversion, every burned-out synapse replaced with a technological equivalent able to handle the sheer speed and volume of processed information. In addition, they would remove what was left of his skull, his jaw, his spinal column down to the shoulders... the hardware was simply too complex and too bulky, and there was no room to maintain any semblance of the human face or form. The kheldian would be repurposed into a self-repair system, its agonized form trapped within the machinery and its energies extracted as needed to maintain the new and complicated weapon without external assistance. This labor consumed two more long years.

Finally, in mid 2008 and in the face of imminent discovery by the Council, Z5-Diego was declared a success. He would be directed against the Council's base of operations in Paragon City, drawing them away from the true location of Condor and serving as a test of the system's capabilities: he was the first, but by no means the last, and Herida intended to have any number of replacements ready for when he inevitably fell to the enemy. It wouldn't quite be an army, but with refinement even a single "drone" would be able to cause significant damage.

Sent by attack submarine, Diego arrived in Paragon under the programmed guise of "Psi-Dome:" just another amnesiac cyborg in a city full of oddities. The authorities filed his appearance, listened to his explanation, handed him a license, and then watched with some alarm as he carved a path through hero and civilian alike straight to Strigia Isle, where he proceeded to disappear beneath a pile of Council soldiers. Taken captive for some days, he was rescued by a team passing through-- only to turn on them moments later and dive headlong into yet another ruinous fight that cost two of the rescuers their lives. A third team managed to drag him out, badly battered and barely functional, and he was summarily placed in the Ziggurat for safekeeping and observation. There he remained until 2010.

=====This Is So Complicated Oh God Why=====

Unbeknownst to Herida, a good portion of the required schematics and technology were actually provided by the just-completed project himself: as an entity who existed partially out of time and a very intelligent one at that, at the moment of activation Diego proceeded to modify, re-modify, and upgrade his own design several billion times over, rewriting the portions of his own history relevant to his own construction until he reached literally physics-breaking levels instead of whatever more modest plan the Column had set forth originally-- a plan now unknown.

Now

Diego was an unusually well-behaved prisoner, for the most part (unless he spotted someone or something pertaining to the Council) and likely wouldn't have escaped on his own if the Council itself hadn't taken an interest in him. Organizing a prison break-out, they prepared to grab and study the peculiar man-machine that seemed driven to hate them so... and then watched as Arachnos arrived by storm and snatched away dozens of superpowered inmates, Diego among them.

Thus deposited in the Isles, Diego spent the next six months running, fighting, hiding, arguing, and recovering from being bitten/stabbed/shot/cursed/frozen/poisoned/electrocuted/a 5th Column-controlled puppet. Falling in with the freedom fighting/terrorist organization Phoenix Insurrection, first to fix a forklift and then to figure out exactly why he kept attacking any and all Council soldiers on sight, the protocols that drove him to do such were severed and he became a free agent (albeit one who is markedly reluctant to go after the 5th Column and enthusiastic to the point of obsession when dealing with the Council).

A series of events involving ducks and a Crey project to build a world-spanning monitoring system eventually drove him to flee to Paragon, certain that he'd be followed by a firing squad and trying desperately to maintain a low profile. He knew that eventually he'd be found and hauled back to the Zig, given his pre-existing record and the existence of actual law in Paragon, but intended to hold out as long as possible with some help from an associate or two who had already crossed the water. He managed this for about a week, after which the authorities caught up to him... but not before another organization had made an offer: help them, starting with their own project in the Zig, and they would clear his record, enabling him to work in Paragon unhindered.

He accepted. Since then he has attempted to destroy magic, converted a gang of Hellions into enthusiastic gardeners, led and almost blown up a crowd of protesters, briefly discovered and rejected human emotion, fatally damaged a Nemesis clone of Dr. Aeon, convinced a team of heroes to travel back in time and restore his lost monitoring stations to present-day existence, spent a month in prison, destroyed his own magical core prior to donating it to the Midnight Squad, and fought a long-running war with the recently-freed kheldian still tied to his systems, who he despises (the feeling is entirely mutual). He's also made the usual assortment of friends and enemies, though most people are simply confused.

Powers

Diego is in possession of a sensory array able to detect and track at a level of detail up to and including individual quarks in every spectrum known to man, backed up by a processor that operates at cycling speeds of what he has stated to be 42x Planck Time.  While under most circumstances this should not be possible, given any number of physical constraints, said device is marked by distinct spatial and temporal anomalies and (despite the lack of networking capabilities or even an obvious means of mechanical egress) seems quite capable of doing what is claimed.  The sheer power of this system enables the direct manipulation of space-time coordinates, usually manifested as subtle, extremely precise (and, one may presume, extremely resource-hungry) telekinesis/teleportation.  This does require constant line-of-sight, and range has been demonstrated to be rather short. It must be noted that these manipulations are limited to the strictly physical realm: matter, energy, light anywhere along the electromagnetic spectrum, and shifts in dimension or time. More exotic effects, notably magic, result in disturbing and distinctly duck-formed errors, a result of his systems attempting to cope with the equivalent of 1 + 1 = 3 and other apparently nonsensical truths.

Diego is also able to use the interdimensional qualities of his computer systems to achieve a number of bizarre effects, most notably the generation of a localized region of stress where the Z5 bleeds over into the real world, albeit in only a small area. He usually uses this portal-like effect (which he refers to as "the Difference") as a means of monitoring his surroundings, access to convenient storage, and on one occasion a makeshift shield, preferring the destruction of a portion of his nigh-infinite computer banks to the destruction of a comrade.

In addition, Diego's memory is archive-based; he records and remembers everything seen and heard, and uses this information to detect patterns or extrapolate trends. Anything he's looking at is subjected to constant analysis of where it is and how it's moving (atoms in collision, bouncing balls, gears on a wall, people in crowds, etc). If there's a pattern-- and there almost always is-- he'll notice it, track it, be able to extrapolate it out to the nth degree, and be rather perturbed if it changes in a manner not expected. This appears to be automatic, and, given the speeds at which he operates, instantaneous.

Finally, he possesses the flight, healing, shapeshifting, and energy manipulation capabilities characteristic of kheldians, although these tend to be much weaker than those of his more naturally-bonded counterparts and at times difficult to control. He primarily limits use of these powers to transportation and increasing the force of physical strikes. Shapeshifting in particular causes extreme debilitation of his other abilities unless all of his machinery is maintained in its original form, and this fact is often used against him by the Harper.

Weaknesses and Limitations

Diego displays a pronounced dislike of teleporters and other instantaneous-travel methods and will avoid them if at all possible, as transit of this sort causes temporary yet debilitating mental disruption: there seems to be some sort of conflict between interception protocols and the fact that he's the one in motion, and the resultant cascading failure will put him out of action for some minutes. Time-travel will knock him out completely for the duration. The Shadow Shard and artifacts retrieved from that dimension induce continual crashing and restart. In all three instances the Harper usually takes over, a move that prevents Diego from being totally helpless but does come with its own risks.

Diego likewise stays away from high voltages, powerful magnetic fields, EMP weaponry, technopaths, and magic (e.g. ducks), which he hates with a burning passion. Should anyone ever manage to induce a network connection it would quickly become obvious that he has very little in the way of firewalls-- the original Z5 was built long before anything like the Internet existed, and was never intended to interface with other systems. That said, its operational protocols are unique and its home dimension exceedingly dangerous to interlopers.

Perhaps oddly, Diego is very slow. Not in physical speed, which is average, or processing speed, which is unmatched, but in social speed: he is often the last to understand the nuances or even the broad strokes of a situation and can seem disconnected to the point of foolishness or cruelty. Being, in addition, all but blind to humor and sarcasm (which is a common failing among machines but in his case seems less of a lack of capacity and more of an almost intentional lack of understanding), willing to pursue an uncomfortable subject well beyond what is generally considered acceptable, and unflinchingly brutal in his honesty, he is far from the sort recommended for delicate political negotiations or undercover work. Why his rapid thought processes have not granted him any advantage or at least mitigation in this field remains a mystery. It's possible that his remote reference frame itself is responsible, his experience set apart by tens of magnitudes of scalar difference... or maybe the part of his mind responsible for such things is not connected to the Z5 at all, and is partially missing or damaged. Given his construction, a combination of the two is most likely.

Lastly, while stabbing him in the face might be somewhat difficult (his circuitry being rather heavily armored, if not well-shielded), from roughly the collarbone down he is human, with no special qualities to recommend aside from a tendency towards accelerated recovery imparted by the presence of the Harper. He must eat and breathe like anyone else, despite the fact that he has no sense of taste or smell and he breathes through an egress vent cut into his neck, and if punched with sufficient force he will bruise.

Friends and Affiliations

Mister Muppy is a preternaturally cheerful ex-Bane supersoldier, and the individual with whom Diego found himself spending the most time during his stay with the Insurrection. While the partnership did nothing for Diego's English skills, Muppy is an open and honest sort who seemed perfectly content to both hammer malcontents into the ground for hours on end and discuss whatever needed discussing with a sometimes surprising amount of insight. In addition to weathering disjointed tirades about the budget or about certain individuals, he kept an eye on Diego's shaky circuitry, repaired him (via the time-honored "hit it really hard" method) after a run-in with the mail-fisted "Bear," and saved his life once or twice. As far as friends go (although of course Diego never actually uses that word to refer to their relationship, preferring to think of it instead as an expanded network of mutual assistance and increased capacity), you can't get much better than that. The two have remained close ever since, and Muppy even somehow managed to follow him into the select circle of his current secretive association-- likely because the shadowy leader of that group determined that the two really did work well together.

Oougel, another horrible Arachnos experiment and one now quite firmly attached to Muppy, is another close “friend” and valued ally. Given how well she and the Bane stabilize each other, it's no surprise Diego has accepted her so readily (although her association with Ruularu has crashed him on at least one occasion).

====Character Notes====

Originally he had problems remembering what was just said to him and often forgot what he was doing; while the idea of a forgetful computer (as opposed to the usual total recall possessed by mechanical characters) was a fun one, there were simply too many people in PI with memory problems and it became rather difficult to hold conversations. Largely due to this, over time his defining feature has become an off-the-mark single-mindedness rather than simple scatter-mindedness-- which, while it is more in line with being a machine, appears much less common and can lead to equally amusing results.

Diego is a character intended to balance on that uncomfortable slash mark between terms like human/machine, feeling/unfeeling, original/copy... clearly who/what he is now is very different from what he was, but the question is "how much."

He is also by far my most complicated character in terms of construction and motive: a product of mad science indeed.