Machine Man: Difference between revisions
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==Fiction==
X-51 was the last and latest in the X series
After [[X-35]] became the latest of the X series to become plagued with existential questions and go on a violent rampage, project head Dr [[Oliver Broadhurst|Broadhurst]] reluctantly activated the protocol to detonate all of the remaining robots. Becoming aware of the detonation order, Abel removed the bomb from Aaron, who was confused by his father's unusual behaviour. Abel insisted that he had taught Aaron everything he can, and that it was now time to go out and explore the world. He gifted Aaron with a humanised mask to help him blend in, and, as a final request, had Aaron scan a photograph of him to conserve forever in his memory bank. Aaron flew the nest, and was too far away to notice that the failsafe circuit had detonated, taking Abel with it. {{storylink|Introducing Machine Man}} Aaron vowed that his father's sacrifice would not be in vain, and endeavoured to life peacefully among mankind. {{storylink|The New Machine Man}} Nevertheless, he considered his father's death to be the time he had felt his most frightened and alone. {{storylink|Jolted by Jack O'Lantern!}}
Outside of his father's care, Aaron faced ostracisation from humanity due to his uniqueness in the face of conformity and the circumstances of his creation. {{storylink|The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls}} {{storylink|Kill Me or Cure Me}} In times of extreme duress, he would state that he had been hunted, hounded, and hated since the very first day of his existence. {{storylink|Baron Brimstone and his Sinister Satan Squad!}} {{storylink|Alone Against Alpha Flight!}} Though something of an exaggeration, anti-robot sentiment nonetheless caused him to distrust a species that made repeated attempts to dismantle him; {{storylink|Where Walk the Gods!}} the peoples' fear of Machine Man was so great that congressman [[Miles Brickman]] was elected to the senate off the back of a campaign based solely around demonising the living robot. Separately, a group called the [[Committee to Destroy Machine Man]] rose up to oppose him. {{storylink|Byte of the Binary Bug!}}
Machine Man once battled the [[Hulk]]. After defeating the green meanie, Machine Man threw the Hulk into space, attempting to remove him from civilisation; in his damaged and dazed state, he did not realise that he had apparently thrown him towards Canada.<ref>Machine Man faced the Hulk in {{Marvel|Incredible_Hulk_Vol_1_235|''The Incredible Hulk'' issue 235}} to {{Marvel|Incredible_Hulk_Vol_1_237|237;}} this story led into {{Marvel|Machine_Man_Vol_1_10|''Machine Man'' issue 10,}} the issue that was adapted into "[[Introducing Machine Man]]" and immediately followed by "[[Byte of the Binary Bug!]]".</ref> {{storylink|Alone Against Alpha Flight!}}
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Elsewhere, in Canada's [[Department H]], Machine Man's fight with the Hulk came under scrutiny after parliament received a dossier alleging that the robot had deliberately sent the Hulk to cause destruction in Canada under the orders of the U.S. government. To this end, a minister dispatched [[Agent K]] and members of [[Alpha Flight]] to investigate.
[[File:Machine Man strange puzzling unrobotlike emotions.jpg|thumb|upright=0.8|left|A little time with you is all that I get<br>That's all we need because it's all we can take]]
The following day, at Delmar, Aaron rebuffed attempts by Eddie to conspire to bet on high school girls' badminton matches, refusing to lend Eddie the cash. He also bumped into Pamela, whom he'd been trying to avoid due to the strange, unrobotlike emotions she stirred in him. The next morning, he and Peter discovered a message for him by Madam Menace in the classified section of the ''Daily Bugle''. Despite it obviously being a trap, it was Machine Man's only lead. The clue in the ad led him back to the waterfront warehouse, where he discovered a maser-controlled homing device intended to allow him to locate Menace's next hideout.
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Furiously asking if his aggressors were satisfied, Machine Man fearsomely attacked the henchmen. Aurora and Northstar attempted to blind him with their dazzling light power, but his finger sensors provided a workaround. When grabbed by Sasquatch, Machine Man lashed out and pummelled him senseless, stopping only on hearing Aurora call him an inhuman monster. The words caused Aaron to realise he had been acting every inch the menace that people like Brickman believed him to be. Horrified by his behaviour, he drilled his way out of the sewer, asking not to be followed.
[[File:Machine Man sight has sickened him.jpg|thumb|upright=0.8|And then this is the part when that waxwork Julian Casablancas melts.]]
In the meantime, Alpha Flight spy Agent K had managed to uncover evidence linking the incriminating dossier to Brickman's campaign office. Alpha Flight's Machine Man mission was abandoned; when the news media caught wind that Brickman was attempting to rig an election, his anti-Machine Man campaign platform completely deflated. Separately, both Brickman and Madam Menace swore revenge on the living robot.
As Gears and Peter paced the apartment, worried about their missing friend, Machine Man walked the cold city streets. Both emotionally and physically scarred from the loss of his temper, Aaron contemplated on his new understanding about the darkness in his soul, wondering how he could possibly face tomorrow.
{{storylink|Alone Against Alpha Flight!}}
Aaron turned up at Gears' workshop, imploring him to fix his face so he could once again walk safely among humanity. Despite bodywork not being his speciality, Gears reckoned he could rig something up within a few hours, so Aaron left for some fresh air, rebuffing Peter's offer to join him. Alone with his thoughts, Aaron considered how his upbringing by Abel prevented him from facing the face of the fifty other robots in the X series, concerned that, without the watchful eye of his programmer, he too may succumb to vengeful violence as a result of his constant rejection by humanity.
Early the next morning, and with some trepidation, Aaron donned his repaired face. Gears advised him that it hadn't yet fully hardened, but Aaron intended only to do his office duties, despite Peter's protestations about going back so soon. At Delmar, a frantic Eddie called Aaron into an emergency meeting held by Benjamin. The meeting was to announce that Delmar's newly-developed, impregnable [[super-embassy]] would be put on the market on [[Halloween]] with an inaugural costume party and a guest list full of foreign dignitaries... though Aaron's thoughts were on his yearning for Pamela and his contradictory belief that a metal man wouldn't make for a good romantic partner. As the meeting drew to a close, Benjamin collared Aaron and asked him to personally ensure that nothing went wrong with the grand opening – subtextually recruiting Machine Man for the task.
The following week, on the day of the ball, Aaron was given a tour of the super-embassy by one of its head staff members. Aaron was amazed that a singular computer system could control everything on site, but concerned by the large bulkhead doors that automatically seal at the first sign of danger, telling his guide that such a safeguard would trap invaders and diplomats alike. As he left, dismayed that human society created a need for such armaments, he spotted a notorious gangster named [[Geoff Peckman]] happily snapping pictures of the embassy. After changing into Machine Man in the upper reaches of a secluded tree, he tailed Peckman's car by magnetising his hand to it and negating his gravity – hoping that their route wouldn't go under an underpass with a low clearance.
Peckman stopped at a run-down athletic centre. Machine Man observed through the skylight as Peckman presented his photos to a fright-faced supervillain, though even his powerful audio circuits were unable to hear their discussion. Because of his recent outbursts, Machine Man was ready to leave and contact the authorities, but his weight was too much for the building's roof and it collapsed underneath him. Under attack by freebooters and athletics equipment as improvised weaponry, Machine Man attempted to avoid agitation by ending the battle quickly and decisively, wrapping up his foes ina gym mat.
He was next attacked by their ringleader, [[Jack O'Lantern]], who propelled him through a brick wall with a shot from his wrist-blaster. Caught off guard by the strength of his attacker, it took a moment for Machine Man to monitor himself and keep calm... but he caught his reflection in the changing room's mirror and realised that his face had once again become damaged by the battle. Through sheer force of willpower, he suppressed the rising tension within him and maintained his temper. On his return, he found that Jack O'Lantern and his men had fled in a truck that he was unable to follow.
Machine Man made his way across town, thinking about the death of his father and how he was facing his own similar time bomb. His analysis lead him to conclude that his blackouts were the result of a malfunction in his cerebral cortex. He decided that he must be terminated if a fix couldn't be found, lest he become a rampaging monster. Nonetheless, he had a final duty to perform in protecting the embassy from Jack O'Lantern's plans.
[[File:Machine Man a mask of my own face.jpg|thumb|left|upright=0.8|It's amazing what you'll find face to face.]]
With no time to get his face repaired or to pick up a costume, Aaron bribed a pair of young trick-or-treaters for a rubber superhero mask. He entered the party and met up with Maggie, Pamela, Eddie, and [[Brock Jones]]. Maggie showed her disdain for Aaron's "unimaginative" costume by ripping his mask off; as his colleagues laughed that he'd concealed one "man of steel" mask under another, Aaron was stunned that they thought his true, irreducible appearance was a costume.
Shortly afterwards, Aaron spotted Jack O'Lantern and his men being toured through the super-embassy. He left to follow them, unthinkingly snubbing Pam's offer of a dance. He'd made it into a corridor between the ballroom and security centre when Jack's men deliberately triggered the building's safety measures, locking down the bulkheads and trapping all inhabitants. Machine Man changed into his combat gear and used his finger sensors to communicate with the embassy's computer, attempting to cause it to cease all functions. He was attacked by Jack O'Lantern and his freebooters; the henchmen proved easy to overcome, but Jack tried to give him the slip, turning their encounter into a chase. After he'd burned through a wall into a ballroom, Jack threatened to toss a grenade into the crowd to get Machine Man to stand down. Machine Man took his only option and generated a highly-charged magnetic field around Jack, containing the explosion of his concussion bomb. Jack was knocked unconscious, unharmed thanks to his suit. Reasoning that his freebooters will surrender without their leader, Machine Man left before his Delmar colleagues could connect his appearance with Aaron's "party mask". The esteemed party guests watched him leave in stony silence, Aaron all too aware of the rejection he felt when none of them attempted to show him gratitude for saving them.
Machine Man returned to Garvin's Garage, where Gears took a look inside his head and found a mess of blown circuits and tangled wires. Using his intuition with machinery, Gears spent nine hours operating on Aaron. When he woke up, he was overjoyed to be in the land of the living. With his "final" duty all wrapped up, Aaron decided to take a leave of absence from Delmar, telling Gears to take as much time as he needed to repair his face. With a new lease on life, Aaron intended to go out into the world and experience its infinite wonders. Looking out to the city skyline, he told his friends that he has the rest of his life to figure out his future... and he intended to be around for a long, long time. {{storylink|Jolted by Jack O'Lantern!}}
After leaving Delmar, Aaron met [[Jocasta]], a female robot with whom he fell in love. Jocasta's creator, [[Ultron]], wanted her back, and in a conflict that also involved the [[Thing]], Jocasta was destroyed. Machine Man took her remains back to Gears' workshop, in the hopes could revive her. {{storylink|The New Machine Man}}
===Legacy===
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{{MarvelWiki|Aaron_Stack_(Earth-616)|Machine Man}}
*Though the September 1984 release of [[The Transformers issue 1|''The Transformers'' issue 1]] saw the first UK printing of comics from ''Machine Man'', the living robot had previously appeared in stories from outside his book on this sceptred isle, including {{Marvel|Hulk_Comic_(UK)_Vol_1_35|''Hulk Comic'' issues 35}} to {{Marvel|Hulk_Comic_(UK)_Vol_1_40|40}} in 1979, and {{Marvel|Thing_is_Big_Ben_Vol_1_1|''The Thing is Big Ben'' issues 1}} to {{Marvel|Thing_is_Big_Ben_Vol_1_4|4}} in March-April 1984.
*"[[Baron Brimstone and his Sinister Satan Squad!]]"
*In "[[Alone Against Alpha Flight!]]", Machine Man quips that he weighs 8501 pounds. For reference, this is about as heavy as a fully-loaded [[w:Oshkosh NGDV|USPS truck]], or just less than the [https://www.ford.com/trucks/super-duty/models/f450-limited/ biggest Ford Super Duty]. In "Jolted by Jack O'Lantern!", he instead claims to weigh a more reasonable 850 pounds, about as much as a small adult moose.
*Machine Man was included as part of a competition in [[The Transformers issue 21|issue 21]] which required readers to pair characters with their opposites.
*Machine Man was one of the many robot and cyborg characters pictured as part of the ''[[Techno-X]]'' pitch.
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