Good William
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THE GENESIS OF A HERO
In June of 2002, during the chaos caused by the first Rikti War, a badly irradiated frozen embryo was recovered from the remains of a fertility clinic destroyed in the bombing ...
GOOD WILLIAM
Twenty years later, from those unlikely beginnings, a shining icon of virtue would soar over the skies of Paragon City.
POWERS & ABILITIES
The Good William Holographic Drone is generated by an array of nanotech quantum emitters. Together, the emitters generate a high-energy hard-light hologram capable of striking with incredible force, and impervious to most forms of damage. The emitter array is entangled on a quantum level with the brain of a pilot operating out of a virtual reality 'cradle'. The pilot's brain, while protected to a degree by feedback buffers built into the cradle, cannot be fully protected without a degradation of the drone's response time and combat capability. Excessive damage to the emitter array can injure the pilot and disable the drone. The emitter array can communicate wirelessly with any nearby electronics or computer systems that aren't air-gapped, and can be reconfigured for teleportation, allowing Aristotle to be instantaneously transported from the cradle to the drone's location.
EQUIPMENT
When operating outside of the cradle, Aristotle wears a pair of hud-enabled smart glasses that allow access to a limited number of the array's functions, including the ability to trigger return teleportation to the cradle.
THE CRADLE
Aristotle's base of operations, and the Good William Drone's control center, is located in an underground bunker beneath a Yorkshire farm. The drone's virtual reality control rig, nicknamed 'the Cradle' was built on the virtual reality/life support pod in which Aristotle spent the first eighteen years of his life. At no small expense, Aristotle has built a second, fallback control center called 'Far Cradle' inside an asteroid in the Sol system's main asteroid belt. Quantum translocation allows Aristotle to travel instantaneously between either cradle and the current location of the emitter array.
BIOGRAPHY
Before
Old money philanthropists, James Covington Salem III and Juliet Marlowe-Salem were supporters of the Vitruvian Institute of Higher Studies, a 'think tank' aimed at using science to maximize, and then fulfill, human potential. When the Salems were killed in the initial strike of the first Rikti war, they left their entire fortune to the Vitruvian Foundation with the requirement that the foundation care for their teenage son, Daniel, and attempt the implantation into a suitable surrogate of the embryo of that they had hoped would be their second child.
Medically Fragile
Daniel Salem was adopted by Surya Shah, the Director of the Vitruvian Institute of Higher Studies Performance Division, and his wife Rosalind. Finding a surrogate for the embryo was much more difficult. The fertility clinic where it had been awaiting implantation was also hit in the first strike of the Rikti war, and though not physically damaged it was irradiated beyond the point of likely viability. If the child were able to be brought to term at all, it would have been so genetically damaged that its life would be short and painful. Under those circumstances, an experiment that would otherwise have been inhumane was the only path to viability for the Salem's child. It was decided that the embryo would be transplanted into an artificial womb, which would become long term life support as the child grew, constantly repairing damaged dna and undoing the resulting damage. Even if the process was successful, it would mean that the child would spend nearly two decades in a medically induced coma while it was brought to an accelerated full physiological maturity. In light of the fact that the most likely outcome was catastrophic failure and the loss of the child, Daniel Salem, now Daniel Shah, was not told about the attempt to save his younger sibling so that he would not be forced to lose his family twice.
Life is a Dream
In the unlikely event that the long and difficult procedure actually saved the child's life, he would still emerge from the procedure a fully mature man who had never experienced any human contact - any contact of any kind. It would be a recipe for a tortured sociopath. To prevent that, and to give the child hope of a normal life should he survive, the child's brain was immersed in a virtual reality simulation through his life support 'cradle'. The 'Matrix'-like reality in which the child who would become 'Aristotle' was raised was built up from a carefully curated selection of educational materials and simulated relational experiences as well as elements generated by the child's own subconscious, all managed by a virtual intelligence called 'The Fox' (after the Greek tutor in C.S. Lewis' 'Til We Have Faces'), who appeared in the simulation as the child's tutor and mentor. The subjective experience of time within the simulation was, like the experience of time in a dream, both arbitrary and inconstant. If and when the child emerged as an adult, he might have experienced decades or even centuries of subjective time.
Leaving Utopia
Against all odds, over the course of eighteen years, the child was not only brought to full physiological and mental maturity, but the DNA damage and its consequences were completely repaired. Perhaps even more remarkably, the VR simulation built on a combination of the great books and the child's own subconscious turned out to be a post-scarcity utopia operating according to Aristotelian metaphysics and virtue ethics. Because an Aristotelian ontology is more aligned with quantum mechanics than the Newtonian world view that dominates western thought in the real world, the grown child, now named James Covington Salem IV, emerged from his cradle not only in perfect health, but having made breakthroughs that advanced quantum mechanics decades beyond their current state. All that remained was for James to get to know the world into which he was born, but had never seen.
Coming Home to a Place He'd Never Been Before
AFFILIATES