Disclaimer: We have no delusions about owning Mega Man. He belongs to Capcom and so do most of the characters that appear in this series. However all events and original characters, no matter how similar they are to real life entities, belong to the Plague.

Mega Man: Crossed Wires

Part I

Faulty Programming. That's how his human handlers labelled the problem. It was the sickness that seemed to be sweeping the world like a westerly wind. Faulty Programming had made his robot brothers, for lack of a better word, crazy. Now he was charged with hunting them down. It was he who would seek them out, find them and crush their silicon brains into dust, ridding the world of the faulty programming. He called them defective and all defective artificial life had to be eradicated. Robotic perfection offered no room for faulty programming.

His designer, mentor and father Dr. Light was against sending him after rogues but in the end he was overruled by those in charge, the true masters. They said that they had to fight fire with fire, robot with robot. He of course complied being the perfect robot that he was. Strong, fast, and obedient. Who else would be able to stand against those semi-perfect rebels? No one. It was more complex than the human's irrelevant idealistic good verses evil. It was the law of nature in action, the culling of the weak. Survival of the fittest. He'd read that statement in one of the Doctor's many books and it made a deep impression.

Dr. Light had named him Rock but the provincial government and the taskforce that had enlisted him dubbed the blue robot Mega Man. He was robotic perfection. Able to think and feel he was the pinnacle of AI technology. Originally he was one of over fifty thinking machines designed by Doctors Light and Wily but that number was constantly dwindling. Wily introduced faulty programming into their midst and only he, Mega Man, proved immune. No other robot that entered the contaminated areas walked away uninfected. Perfection, Mega Man.

He landed on the conveyer belt with a loud thud scattering scraps of metal and wire everywhere. His sensors immediately registered the small construction bots as they identified the source of the noise and moved to intercept. His emotion circuits sent an impulse through his circuitry and Mega Man laughed. In the two weeks that he'd been actively hunting down the rogue bots his blaster had reduced to slag 140322 of the small hardhat clad machines. It was documented by the taskforce that they were extremely susceptible to the faulty programming. Eventually his unique Operating System had written a subroutine for handling them as quickly as possible. He noisily charged across the belt to meet the first wave of the small robots, laughing as he aimed his buster cannon.

The first batch was destroyed before his subprogram could boot. He no longer needed the subroutine. He rode the conveyer belt another three meters taking carefully aimed shots at hardhats as he sailed by. He'd downloaded a blueprint of the factory and knew exactly when to get off. If his target was nearby, and Mega Man was certain he was, he would be in the largest room on the lowest basement level.

He dove off the belt and into a stocky machine carrying barrels under each of its four arms. The two robots went down in a heap of metal and flailing arms.

A Bright flash. The sound of a cannon discharging.

The air sizzled with the stench of ozone and evaporating silicon, and through it all stalked Mega Man. As molten metal showered him Mega Man let the last words of the doomed robot run through his artificial mind. 'Wait! Don't shoot I'm only following my program. I am a servant of humanity. Ple--' Again Mega Man laughed. Mega Man knew that the machine spoke the truth because standard robots were incapable of lying. But that knowledge didn't stay his hand. The perfect robot wouldn't beg for mercy… he wouldn't beg for mercy. Only the weak begged for mercy and there was no room in the world for weak and imperfect robots.

…Faulty Programming