MAJOR DEEJ UNIVERSE

Seattle, Washington's biggest technical firms and industries were decimated after the 2000 Invasion of the alien Soltan Star Empire.  Thanks to the brave superheroes and military power, the Soltan's were run off from Earth, however, in their wake was enormous death and destruction, Seattle Washington was one of the hardest hit cities in the world.  Nearly 50% of its population was killed outright for food for the Soltans, as well as for their 'creatures' they used in combat.  With the area populace thinned and the need for the city to rebuild (as was the case everywhere else around the world), it became apparent that they were on their own in rebuilding their city until every other city was rebuilt first.

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Seattle Washington was not about to become a ghost town - not if their remaining scientists and engineers had anything to do about it.

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By 2002, one of the robotics companies that wasn't as damaged as most other industrial complexes were in the area, Dynamatronics, forged ahead with a brilliant plan.  With the aid of of the city's remaining internet geniuses, aerospace engineers, and computer hardware (and software) engineers, they all developed a system designated as the Dynamatronics Android for Repair, Construction and Integrated Engineering  (D.A.R.C.I.E.) solution.  The unit, which was a humanoid design, allowing for vital human interaction, housed thousands of picabytes of data on every single building design, infrastructure system, electrical grids, aircraft designs, vehicle designs, subway designs, you name it - if it was in the world's databanks, it was stored in DARCIE.  Using that data, the sole humanoid unit, when tasked with a project, would deduce the best architectural, infrastructural and social design for whatever building, factory, club, gas station or airbase was ever needed to be built.

 

DARCIE has the autonomy to have specialized workerbots created at the Dynamatronics facility using a completed automated workerbot construction assembly line.  The plan was to create hundreds of DARCIEs and program them to rebuild Seattle, all the while its citizens would enjoy the fruits of DARCIE's labors without having to drive a single nail or pour an ounce of concrete on their own.

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When the DARCIE solution was activated on October 1st, 2003, it was welcomed with great fanfare and hope for the decimated city.  The media updated the Seattle citizens every day of the status of the DARCIEs from Dynamatronics Seattle Plant. The media even held interviews with the DARCIEs so as to 'humanize' them as much as possible.  The citizens soon started naming the DARCIEs with their own pet names like "Downtown DARCIE" who was in charge of rebuilding two new high rises in downtown Seattle, or "Ditchin' DARCIE" that was programmed to dig infrastructure ditches for new sewer, gas, electrical and internet lines in and around Seattle. The DARCIE solution operated like...clockwork; their programming ensured that workerbots worked around the clock to speed up the rebuilding of Seattle, all the while meeting every single building code and safety standard every created or realized. Within months, the rest of the United States wanted DARCIEs for their own cities.  Dynamatronics had over 10,000 orders that created a backlog of demand spreading out to at least December of 2005...but that all changed on January 1st, 2004.

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In 2003, when Seattle's General Assembly voted on which businesses and industrial projects that would be on the DARCIE 'priority' list, several city engineers were given carte blanche to make the 'right' decisions for the city.  Things like water mains, restoration of electrical services, etc of course were important, but so were business like supermarkets and industrial manufacturers. As such, bribes were taken by the city engineers so that certain businesses got 'moved up' or even 'added' to the city's priority list.  Companies such as PETS-ARE-US were actually 'moved' up the list ahead of five urban water main rebuilding projects to neighborhoods that hadn't had piped-in water since the 2000 Soltan invasion.

 

As the city engineers made millions of dollars under the table, dozens of others suffered for their greed.  One particular business, a popular mob-owned Italian Restaurant chain named "Fast Eddy's", who's proprietors were under federal investigation at the time, couldn't come up with the money quick enough to get their business  'bumped' up in the construction list before the entire "Fast Eddy's" chain would go bankrupt.  As such, even after threatening the engineers and their families, the Italian Restaurant chain was still denied. 

 

The local mobsters finally had no choice but to contact CANIS (a cabal of worldwide crooks and racketeers) to do a little "code tweaking" at Dynamtronics and 're-program' one or more DARCIEs to 're-prioritize' its construction list to start building and rebuilding at least 5 Fast Eddy's restaurants in the city and surrounding suburbia.

 

The problem: there was only one cyber-security flaw which allowed a narrow window of one minute to do the coding between 31 December 2359 hours and 1January 0000 hours. A CANIS coder who was 'good' but not 'great' was tasked with the effort.

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That night, on December 31st, 2003, the CANIS' coder snuck into Dynamatronics HQ with the plan to recode several DARCIES to build and/or repair those few Fast Eddy's restaurants ahead of all other jobs.  The coder had problems getting through the security settings and as such lost over 40 seconds in the 60 second window. As a result, the necessary CANIS code was not done in time.  At 1 January 0000 hours, the DARCIE security protocols reset before the coder was finished, leaving out several subroutines thus leaving several critical routines and subroutines in programming loops.  The biggest problem, however, was that "Fast Eddy's" Restaurants were actually programmed to be built not just by several DARCIEs, but to be built by ALL DARCIEs worldwide...without stopping...and with safety and logic protocol programs compromised. 

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On 0000 hours on January 1st 2004, every single DARCIE unit (and their associated workerbots) stopped whatever job it was working on and instead started building "Fast Eddy's" restaurants - EVERYWHERE.

 

DARCIE highway construction projects were stopped in mid-construction and Fast Eddy Restaurants were built in the middle of the highway.

 

Sewer line projects started building Fast Eddy restaurants in the sewer ditches ten feet underground.

 

High rise construction projects had Fast Eddy restaurants sticking out the sides of 50 story buildings...

 

...and the wave of dangerously and precariously built Fast Eddy's restaurants didn't stop.

 

Once a Fast Eddy's restaurant was built, the unintended coding loop the CANIS coder put in to the DARCIE network basically ordered the DARCIEs to build even MORE Fast Eddy's restaurants, sometimes even inside a newly built Fast Eddy's restaurant.

 

By the afternoon (Pacific time) of January 2nd, over 400 Fast Eddy's restaurants had been built all over the world- and the DARCIEs and workerbots weren't stopping.  Dynamatronics tried every single system admin trick and backdoor to get back into the DARCIE programming, but thanks to the CANIS coder, no one was able to access them.

 

Finally, the Seattle mayor called for the destruction of the DARCIEs by the city police and Firemen, using bullets, axes, whatever to physically stop the DARCIEs and workerbots cold. Other cities, states and nations also followed suit. When the authorities tried shooting or damaging DARCIEs and workerbots to stop their endless Fast Eddy's constructions, the bots instead deployed energy shields to protect themselves. These energy shields were installed in DARCIEs and workerbots to protect civilians in the event of a construction site incident or accident, but were never programmed to protect the bots themselves, however, thanks to the CANIS coder, the 'protect self' setting was activated for all DARCIEs and workerbots to use as needed.  With that, the military was called in.

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In Washington state, the Washington National Guard used high-capacity machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars and even 101mm rounds from tanks to try and stop the DARCIEs and their workerbots, but to no avail.  Whenever ground troops approached the DARCIEs and workerbot to attempt to get close enough to destroy them, the DARCIEs and workernbots instead picked up the troops and put them in a 'safe zone' or pushed them back with their shields.  Finally, superheroes were brought in to stop the DARCIEs and workerbots; for Seattle, the Protectors super-group based out of San Francisco flew to Seattle to stop the DARCIEs once and for all.

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When the Protectors arrived, it nearly became a super-villain battle.  The DARCIEs and workerbots didn't attack the heroes, however, their defenses were formidable.  It took the Protectors over 20 hours of non-stop battling to finally destroy each and every DARCIE and workerbot that was activated. Eventually, nearly all DARCIEs and their workerbots were destroyed and/or immobilized.  It was an epic battle.

 

Nonetheless to say, Seattle had some major new issues.  Over 1000 Fast Eddys were built before the destruction of the last DARCIE. 

 

Other Fast Eddy's restaurants were compromised with now incomplete, poor built or downright dangerous buildings all over the planet.  Even the White House had a Fast Eddy's built in the Oval Office, as well as Great Britain's Windsor Castle's courtyard.

 

The world sued Dynamatronics for all damages, not knowing, at that time, the CANIS coder's involvement.  Seattle itself was sued for over 100 billion dollars of damages by businesses and citizens.

 

Dynamatronics was liquidated practically overnight and was left a gutted and dissolved company by January 10th.  The Fast Eddy's restaurant chain, although never indicted in any wrongdoing, had so much negative press that the restaurant chain was shutdown. 

 

A few years later, documents were discovered about CANIS' involvement and all of Fast Eddy's mob ties. CANIS of course couldn't be pinned down for damages or responsibility, however, most of the mobsters involved in Fast Eddy's got at least 10 years for their illegal activities (some are just getting out of prison this year). As for the DARCIEs and workerbots that were destroyed, including the ones on the Dynamatronics assembly and production lines, they were all sold for scrap and melted/smelted at recycling yards nearby that same year...that is, all except for one DARCIE (to anyone's knowledge, that is...).

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One of the production line DARCIEs that required factory repairs at the time of the CANIS coding incident had been taken offline before the CANIS coder screwed with the codes, thus leaving an original imprint of the 'working' codes still in its databanks.  Regardless, that one DARCIE was never reactivated. The one remaining DARCIE bot, while being moved to smelting, fell off a loader and landed on a pallet for office equipment that was to be sold at auction.  The DARCIE bot was covered in a pile of Dynamatronics office equipment with no one being the wiser over the unit's loss.

 

The office equipment pallet was one of 25 that were sold off as a group at the state auction.  The buyer of the 'office equipment' pallets was a South Dakota junkyard dealer who owned a 100-acre lot of 10 foot high piles of scrap metal, rusted out cars and old outdated electronic equipment that he enjoyed reselling to businesses need raw metals and materials (i.e., raw copper from cables and motors, steel from farm equipment, building frames, etc.). When he got the Dynamatronics office equipment pallets offloaded at his junk yard, he found the de-energized DARCIE bot amidst the office equipment and decided to keep it in his home as his own personal souvenir of the "Great DARCIE Incident".  

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Recently, the old junk yard scrapper died of natural causes.  With no family or relatives to turn his property over to, his home and its belongings went up for an state-run auction.

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At this same time the newly formed Peacekeepers super-group was having to figure out how to build their 1950s-era Minuteman Missile silo into a 21st century national super-powered police headquarters on a budget that didn't even cover their salaries.  One of their foragers and kit-bashers codenamed "Travelmaster" placed bids on dozens of pallets from the old junk yard scrapper's auction.  Amidst the raw materials Travelmaster received from the estate auction winnings that he needed in order to build new wings and equipment for the base, he also received the DARCIE bot.  Immediately realizing what it was, Travelmaster quickly took to rebuilding it as well as reprogramming its code, now at least 10 years out of date.  After a day's work, he not only programmed the DARCIE to help build the Peacekeepers new base, but also gave it it's own limited artificial intelligence (AI).  Once activated, it immediately started building its own workerbots and programming them to start the requested work. In a year's time, DARCIE and its workerbots had created a brand new state-of-the-art headquarters for the Peacekeepers using scrap materials and pallets of junk materials.

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This last year, Travelmaster deduced that he could reprogram the DARCIE to be more self sufficient and more interactive.  Using an updated  AI program, he gave the sole DARCIE limited independent thought.  It was still programmed with the Three Laws of Robotics, as were the workerbots, but as such, DARCIE was also allowed to operated with the Peacekeepers in the field as the need arose. 

 

Today, assigned to the TAMS Division, DARCIE is geared up to look like one of the Peacekeepers, as well as function as a vital member of the group's operations - much to the chagrin of Seattle and several nations that are unhappy that a DARCIE even exists at all....

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NOTE: As mentioned earlier, the residents of Seattle are unnerved over the sole remaining DARCIE that is being used by the Peacekeepers. civil injunctions have already been filed against the Peacekeepers for having the DARCIE regardless of reprogramming it.  There are multiple social media sites and movements that are currently lobbying to demand the Peacekeepers' DARCIE not only be completely destroyed in a 'public demonstration', but for the Peacekeepers (especially Travelmaster) to be fined and jailed for reactivating the DARCIE in the first place. 

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