The Ballad of Johnny Nine-Eyes

The neo-90’s are often called the “Stormeye Decade” due to their historical role as a period of short-lived peace in an unstable, collapsing world. Towards the turn of century, the global resource conflict known as World War Omega fizzled out, leading to the rise in power of super-corporations such as Edi-Tech and NileCorp, which emerged to support what was left of various governments and subtly manipulate them to their own ends. Omega was not nearly as devastating as the future corporate wars would be, and human civilization still endured, so these emerging super-corporations sought ways to weaken each other without destroying what was left of society in the crossfire. One of these methods was espionage, followed a little later by assassination. Edi-Tech invested most heavily in the former with their miniature WTRW-11 spy drones, while ChāoFast and NileCorp delved into the latter with their assassin droid programs. NileCorp in particular experimented heavily with assassination and eventually built up to a design for a fully automated yet completely subservient cyborg assassin. They fused human limbs and organs with a robotic core and a highly advanced, adaptive CPU to create their first prototype.

A notable characteristic of this macabre creation was its eyes: the X9 prototype, as it was designated, was outfitted with nine different ocular units divided into groups based on function, such as thermal or infrared vision. These machine-eyes would assist the future assassin in its duties. Unfortunately for NileCorp’s engineers, they would prove to be too effective. It was never truly understood how, but soon after its eyes were implemented, the X9 prototype gained self awareness and used its advanced vision to obtain weapons and slaughter everyone around it before blasting its way out of the laboratory in which it was constructed and escaping into the open world. NileCorp never managed to track down the X9, and the project was abandoned soon after. The robot wandered the impoverished urban jungle of old Los Angeles, augmenting itself with scrap machine parts and learning about the world around it. It grew more and more independent and intelligent, and yet it still couldn’t shake its original directive: to kill. So, the X9 bought some weapons and began a new, highly profitable career: bounty hunting.