Shaolin Robot
210 BCE - Lau Yuqi creates 8,000 terracotta soldiers in the tomb of his emperor, Qin Shi Huang, among them 100 clockwork automatons using his I Ching clockwork minds. When he is also sealed inside the tomb, he reprograms one of his automatons with his own insights and values, and a semblance of free will.
13 years ago - Shaolin Robot remains dormant when the tomb of Quin Shi Huang is opened, and the terracotta automatons break forth and attack Bejing to retake the Forbidden City, stopped only by Gu Lao & Fang Zhifu. Shaolin Robot is taken in by the Chinese government and updated with reverse-engineered Durlan technology.
8 years ago - Shaolin Robot becomes a founding member of the Great Ten.
The Great Ten represent one of my all-time favorite Grant Morrison creations. They did more than just build a new team of original Superheroes (Or Super-Functionaries, in this case), but they built a whole history around them, giving each character a truly unique story and sense of place, and structured it all around the history and politics and culture of a very real-world take on China and all it's complexity. It's an incredible piece of worldbuilding, and while it's tragic that they don't have that many appearances, it's also very understandable, because they are such an intricately woven tapestry, I can see why it would be difficult for other writers to pick them up.
Shaolin Robot's StoryYou can't argue with Shaolin Robot's design... he looks like Fullgore from Killer Instinct... but if he was just a badass robot that wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting. Shaolin Robot is one of the Terracotta soldiers guarding the tomb of China's first emperor. He uses a brain programned in I Ching, a binary language developed in China 4,000 years before the binary mathematics that form the basis of modern boolean logic were invented... which by itself is just a fantastic origin.
But then it goes one step further. The inventor of the I Ching binary brain, we learn, is Lau Yuqi, who was also enclosed in the tomb at the death of his Emperor. He reprogrammed just one of his clockwork automatons with his own insights and values before dying. This means that, on a team of Chinese superfunctionaries dedicated to the state, there is one ancient robot. who only speaks in I Ching, that has the memory of being discarded by the Emperor who once honored him. Brilliant. |
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