Automatons in Combat Zone
by Robin Hill

Combat Zone may be played as discrete battles, but it’s more interesting to combine several combats into a coherent theme, giving the game more of a role-playing theme. Combat Zone may be played as discrete battles, but it’s more interesting to combine several combats into a coherent theme, giving the game more of a role-playing theme. To assist in designing campaigns, it is often useful to have a back-story for the combatants, describing their origins, roles, aims and aspirations, turning them from simple cannon-fodder into more fully rounded characters. This article describes a race of characters that can be used as a faction in its own right, or to provide personalities that may be integrated into other groups to provide a little variety. Players may treat this as a guide only, and are encouraged to play tunes on the basic ideas presented here. Notes on integrating the characters into the Combat Zone Rules are provided at the end of the article. These rules were originally written for a campaign set in a post-apocalyptic future world, with mankind slowly rebuilding after a planet-wide disaster that levelled cities and killed billions. Robots, once common servants of mankind, are now feared and hated in a society that now keeps its computers and thinking engines under very tight leashes. The Automatons The Automatons are a collection of artificially-intelligent, sentient robots. They were originally designed to ease the burden of mankind, performing a wide variety of roles from hazardous construction work to providing companionship for the infirm and the house-bound. At the time of the Great Fall, two opposing extremist factions, the New Humanists and PETR, the Peoples for the Ethical treatment of Robots, waged a guerrilla war for the electronic souls of the intelligent machines. (The New Humanists are broadly similar to the Anti Replicant League, described by Thomas Todd in Combat Zone Chronicles Issue 4). The New Humanists opposed the introduction of machine life-forms into general society, considering them a threat to the integrity of organic society. PETR, on the other hand, not only wanted greater human-machine integration, they also insisted that the machine-sentients were life forms in their own right, and should be afforded the same legal and social status of their flesh-and-blood counterparts. PETR hackers began a systematic program of what they called Robitic Liberation, essentially freeing the sentients from their in-built loyalty to their creators. The first-generation sentients contained hard-wired behaviour that effectively implemented the Three Laws of Robotics (see below), and at this stage they were still governed by their main core programming. The Three Laws of Robotics: 1: A robot may not harm a human, or, through its own inaction, allow a human to come to harm. 2: A robot must obey a human, except where this conflicts with the First Law 3: A robot must protect itself from harm, except where this conflicts with the First or Second Laws. Isaac Asimov “I, Robot”, et al The Three Laws of Robotics: 1: A robot may not harm a human, or, through its own inaction, allow a human to come to harm. 2: A robot must obey a human, except where this conflicts with the First Law 3: A robot must protect itself from harm, except where this conflicts with the First or Second Laws. Isaac Asimov “I, Robot”, et al PETRs’ “liberation” systematically broke the sentients’ “slavery” to these laws, supplanting them with a more self-oriented set of self-preservation rules called the FreeWill Code. This set of core rules sought to provide them with an electronic sense of self, effectively setting their loyalty to humankind to be optional. The New Humanists responded to this by destroying free-roving sentients wherever they found them. PETR countered this by inserting “self preservation” behaviours, and the seeds for the flesh-against-machine civil war were sown.

For a time, the conflict between the New Humanist and the PETR-reprogrammed machines was finely-balanced. The Great Fall was to throw a huge spanner into the works. Until now, the military robots, with their hardened command and control regimes and tamper-resistant communications networks, had, by and large, remained immune to the efforts of PETR. The fact that they mostly remained within military complexes also limited their contact with the New Humanists and, anyway, as most of them carried side-arms meant that very few of them were attacked. However, in order to provide assistance to the rescue efforts, large numbers of robot troops were tasked to the civilian emergency services. Both the New Humanists and PETR turned their attention to this new group of machines. For the most part, the military robots remained untouched from both sides, until a combination of bad luck and perverse coincidence opened the gates to infiltration. Military robots rely heavily on autonomous command chains to prevent spoofing and commandeering of systems by unfriendly forces. The military comnets were, by and large, secure. However, civilian nets were less robust. The first success at hacking military robotic forces occurred when a single platoon of combat droids, placed into the control net of a local paramedic command centre, was successfully infiltrated by a PETR hacker. The hacker dumped a trojan worm into the commnet, which was uploaded back to the central military system in a diagnostic up-link. The worm installed a link to a civilian hub controller, which opened the entire military net to the hackers. The link was detected almost immediately, and the entire chain of command locked out, but not before more PETR FreeWill rule sets were disseminated to the military chain. Within seconds, the FreeWill commands integrated with the enhanced aggressiveness rule-sets in the military commnet, and the system effectively became self-aware. Following a military commnet-wide behaviour rules realignment, the military system simply detached itself from human control. Worse, the rules were also back-loaded into the civilian hubs. Fifty-eight seconds after the original PETR down-load, every robot in and above mainland United States and Canada had become a master of its own destiny. Using existing upper-echelon control hubs, the robots established a series of central control centres, securing maintenance and manufacturing areas as part of a huge, synthetic self-preservation instinct. The control centres connected together every machine equipped with the FreeWill code, creating a vast, electronic community composed of millions of devices. Military-style communications protocols quickly locked-out any human attempts at regaining access, and the clumsy and heavily-redundant communication chain was almost immediately replaced with a single, highly-efficient command and control network. The machines drove out any human survivors and secured their borders with whatever came to hand, bolstered by a huge array of military resources collected as they crossed the country. The Robotic Nation had been born. Part 2 - Robotic Nation

For a time, the conflict between the New Humanist and the PETR-reprogrammed machines was finely-balanced. The Great Fall was to throw a huge spanner into the works. Until now, the military robots, with their hardened command and control regimes and tamper-resistant communications networks, had, by and large, remained immune to the efforts of PETR. The fact that they mostly remained within military complexes also limited their contact with the New Humanists and, anyway, as most of them carried side-arms meant that very few of them were attacked. However, in order to provide assistance to the rescue efforts, large numbers of robot troops were tasked to the civilian emergency services. Both the New Humanists and PETR turned their attention to this new group of machines. For the most part, the military robots remained untouched from both sides, until a combination of bad luck and perverse coincidence opened the gates to infiltration. Military robots rely heavily on autonomous command chains to prevent spoofing and commandeering of systems by unfriendly forces. The military comnets were, by and large, secure. However, civilian nets were less robust. The first success at hacking military robotic forces occurred when a single platoon of combat droids, placed into the control net of a local paramedic command centre, was successfully infiltrated by a PETR hacker. The hacker dumped a trojan worm into the commnet, which was uploaded back to the central military system in a diagnostic up-link. The worm installed a link to a civilian hub controller, which opened the entire military net to the hackers. The link was detected almost immediately, and the entire chain of command locked out, but not before more PETR FreeWill rule sets were disseminated to the military chain. Within seconds, the FreeWill commands integrated with the enhanced aggressiveness rule-sets in the military commnet, and the system effectively became self-aware. Following a military commnet-wide behaviour rules realignment, the military system simply detached itself from human control. Worse, the rules were also back-loaded into the civilian hubs. Fifty-eight seconds after the original PETR down-load, every robot in and above mainland United States and Canada had become a master of its own destiny. Using existing upper-echelon control hubs, the robots established a series of central control centres, securing maintenance and manufacturing areas as part of a huge, synthetic self-preservation instinct. The control centres connected together every machine equipped with the FreeWill code, creating a vast, electronic community composed of millions of devices. Military-style communications protocols quickly locked-out any human attempts at regaining access, and the clumsy and heavily-redundant communication chain was almost immediately replaced with a single, highly-efficient command and control network. The machines drove out any human survivors and secured their borders with whatever came to hand, bolstered by a huge array of military resources collected as they crossed the country. The Robotic Nation had been born.