Name: XM1A5 Mechanized Attack Hound
Ophois, though more commonly referred to by the nickname "Hokey."
Age: Hokey has been in operation for around three years and continually upgraded ever since his initial launch.
Gender: Masculine programming.
Appearance: Here
Hokey is roughly the size of an adult horse.
Personality: Mostly obedient, though is subject to intermittent "spaz outs" as the personnel in charge of his maintenance put it. These "spaz outs" consist of truly inexplicable behaviour. They're a cause for great concern, of course, but have yet to cause too much damage. A frequent complaint from anyone but his staff (who find his quirks endearing) is that Hokey is just plain "unsettling" to be around.
Abilities: Being a cybernetic war machine, this comes with several perks.
- Armor plating, though nothing especially durable. He was intended for fighting infantry, and struggles against heavier resistance.
- Tail tip mounted flamethrower.
- Minigun housed in a storage unit situated at the back of the throat, which, when active, shifts to emerge from the mouth. However, there is only so much ammo storage crammed into so much space, and firing time is thus extremely limited. In a combat situation, this would thus be used only extremely sparingly and if an enemy is for some reason out of reach of the claws, fangs or flamethrower. During his stay on the base, this ammunition is actually replaced with non-lethal, rubber bullets, as to avoid disaster, but no one actually knows this.
- Incredibly powerful jaws and claws. Fleshy bits should keep well out of reach, but sufficiently tough stuff can impede them.
- Hokey's movement system is modeled on that of a cheetah's, with speed to match.
- Hokey is absent of the needs of an organic creature (though does require downtimes for maintenance, with particularly vast ones required when operational for too long.)
Bio:
Hokey is the culmination of years of work invested into Project Ophois, a program aiming to produce autonomous combat vehicles to primarily serve as the vanguard for assaults by regular military forces, but also for the purposes of security as well.
While Hokey is ostensibly a war machine, a rather exotic one at that, he displays intelligence and personality far too life-like for what conventional computers are presently capable of. The secret, known only to the program and the maintenace crew attached to him, is that Hokey is operated by a brain-computer interface. The actual origin of the brain is an even more tightly guarded secret. Perhaps other participants in the program with the relevant expertise and powers would be able to shed more light on this mystery.
It is only in the past two years that the
Ophois project has outgrown its initial conceptualization to the point where new demands necessitated the usage of a human brain. Previously it was served just fine by ordinary computers. The machine was consequently transferred to Vlad's project, following the installation of the mind-machine interface, as he was certain to have what was needed to bring the program to its next stage: a live volunteer.