CLEA DATA FILE
Asset of:
Partnership Identities:
- N/A
CLEA Classification:
- Cyborg
Special Skills and/or Abilities:
- Each model can be made to perform specific duties which range from kidnapping to acting as laboratory assistants.
Limitation(s)/Weakness(s):
- EM pulses can disrupt their systems
Rap Sheet/Criminal Traits:
- Kidnapping
- Assault
Notes/History
The Argonauts are the brain child of Dr Kenneth McEwan and Professor Ellie Watson as a means to kidnap Alphas for use in their research. Early on ARGO has hired mercenaries for the role but if caught by the police they would usually talk and reveal where their base was in order to save themselves. The three partners of ARGo therefore decided to use drones, supplied by the Mechaniac, to do the same duties.
Whilst robots did not talk and tended to follow their programming without fault, they were designed as machines of war and not for moving biological samples. The fighting abilities of the machines was useful when dealing with vigilantes and the law messing up ARGO operations but invariably kidnap victims would be harmed during transport.
What was needed was a machine that could be as gentle as a human but at the same time be as efficient as a machine. The obvious solution was a cyborg but Watson and Blanchard were not prepared to “turn” normal people into machines to do the job. ARGO’s whole purpose was to save people’s lives by finding a cure that naturally occurred in all Alphas.
McEwan proposed an alternative, a synthetic person, a robot frame with some sort of soft surface covering that could behave like flesh. This would prevent the people they kidnapped from being physically harmed to quite a degree. Blanchard and Watson liked this but when McEwan built a prototype he could not create a working AI to power a complex system. Watson proposed cloning a human brain and putting it in the machine. By doing that the brain could be genetically modified so it could be “programmed” like a computer. Though it took a while the pair got the prototype to work. Out in the field it proved itself so they built more which saved on hiring mercenaries or paying for the the Mechaniac’s drones. As well as retrieving test subject the machines would later be developed so that they could be programmed to act as lab assistants which reduced the number of staff that ARGO had to hire. This in turn reduced the security risk.
When the press got pictures of the machines kidnapping victims they came up with a whole host of names but when it was learned ARGO was controlling them the media quikcly settled on the idea of calling them “Argonauts” and the name stuck.
