Lamar Thomas Shmizu
Yep, it's a brand new character for everyone to enjoy!
Name: Lamar Thomas Shmizu
Age: Seventh-Lifer, Currently 22 years old, biologically. Mentally, over one million years old.
Race: Human, in the year 872,660,012
Sex: Physically, Male. Mentally, both Male and Female.
Hair: Black, rapidly thinning and greying.
Eyes:Grey
Weight: 85 kg, 187 lbs
Height: 190 cm, 6’1”
Weapon: Lamar‘s Microbots could be considered a weapon, but apart from them, he is unarmed.
Armour: His only weapon also doubles as quite an effective shield. Given adequate notice, large groups of Microbots can intercept any projectiles that near Lamar. However, they cannot stop anything dead in its tracks; only decelerate it to soften the blow, or alter its direction.
Skills/Magic: Lamar was genetically engineered with an additional organ in his right leg that can construct microscopic robots. This organ relies on iron and minerals absorbed from food in order to build semi-organic robots under one millimetre long. Construction time for one thousand bots is under ten seconds.
Microbots: These microbots are designed from an atomic level and include rudimentary jets, two legs and claws. For every one thousand microbots is one model complete with audio and video recorders that are linked directly to Lamar’s brain. They are highly versatile, capable of flying at speeds of up to 20 kilometres per hour, and have superlative acceleration and evasive capabilities. Among a collective swarm’s abilities are the healing of tissue at a phenomenal rate, superb scouting capabilities and, given enough units, they can appear to make objects hover.
Strengths: Lamar is almost always highly intelligent and focused on whatever problem he is faced with. He has lightning reflexes due to his brain functioning much faster than is normal. Obviously, his Microbots are his greatest asset. Their countless abilities can be used to achieve almost anything, particularly their ability to lift items. This means that Lamar can summon anything nearby as if by magic. Their ability to regenerate tissue means that even a flesh wound can be repaired within minutes. Most importantly, because they are constantly streaming what they can see directly to his brain, he is extremely aware of his surroundings.
Weaknesses: His volatile consciousness means that at any moment, many times a day, he will descend into a state of madness, rendering him incapable of doing anything. Because his motor functions are decided upon by a committee of several separate minds, it can seem like half his body is performing one task and the other another, and they seldom agree with each other. When he is, for example, choosing which route to take, he will often take one direction, and then step back and take the other, before deciding his first choice was best. Lamar is physically weak because his body’s growth was cut short. His muscles and bones are underdeveloped and frail.
His Microbots are not all-powerful either. They are durable and versatile, but their miniscule size means that even a casual hand movement can damage them, and they have extremely limited range; once they expend their supplies of fuel, they are simply dumped. They do not function in water or in the rain. Because they are controlled by Lamar’s many minds, they are just as susceptible to his outbursts of insanity as he is, and are almost always destroyed when he descends into one of these states. They are constructed from certain minerals in Lamar’s diet, and so if he has not eaten something substantial recently, he will be unable to construct new ones. Their greatest downfall is in their coding. Despite whatever orders are thrown at them, no Microbot can directly harm a sentient being.
Appearance: Lamar is a handsome person overall: a result of his extensive genetic engineering. However, his recent mental instability has spilled over into his appearance. His once-black and straight hair is now dishevelled and greying, his skin is pale and he’s prone to nervous twitching of the hands and eyes. He dresses formally, in classic three-piece suits of black and white.
Personality: To say that Lamar has multiple personalities is an understatement. Locked away in his brain and in many artificial memory banks built into his body are countless individual minds. Some of these minds come from other people who have uploaded into Lamar’s brain, but many more are the offspring of these initial minds. Many of these people have created their own realities in Lamar’s brain that are sealed away from others. Some have grouped together and control the actions and thoughts of Lamar as a committee. To them, life outside his mind moves very slowly. Because of this, Lamar’s consciousness is changing constantly as different minds retire from control and others ascend to it. This makes his personality extremely unpredictable and volatile. Battles for domination of his body can rage on and off, some lasting for only a second, others continuing for up to an hour. These conflicts leave Lamar deadpan and devoid of any thought of the real world. Afterwards, he is often disoriented and can suffer temporary memory loss.
Biography: The Human race in Lamar’s time has advanced far beyond their wildest dreams. Humans have visited thousands of Galaxies and set up colonies in all of them, many advancing into Empires of trillions of people. Advances in medicine mean that people can postpone death indefinitely by downloading their memories and consciousness into a freshly-grown clone.
The Technological Singularity means that no one need ever work again; all are sustained by benevolent A.I masses. A person can be as rich and as powerful as they wish. Brain hacks have been widely available for hundreds of millions of years, allowing anyone to constantly stream a copy of their memories to a remote location, effectively making the mind aspect of a human being completely immortal.
Because of this complete economic stability and the immediate continuation of a person’s thoughts even after his body has died, there are no laws in the Universe of Men. Murder means nothing, and pain can be switched off whenever a person desires. No-one has a reason to steal or rape. In fact, Galaxial wars rage on and off whenever a nation feel bored (Which, given the immense lifespan of a person, happens very often). These wars are completely within moral codes and all are done in the name of fun.
One such war led to the creation of Lamar as he is now. Lamar was born Lamar Thomas Shmizu on the planet Aomori in the Jenebus Galaxy. He was a member of the Kobyashi Dynasty, a grand family of over one hundred thousand people within three generations. Like most people, Lamar spent his first two lives (eighty years) travelling between dozens of Galaxies, experiencing the physical world as a hitch-hiker while he still had his youthful innocence. For his third life, Lamar settled down and fathered several children.
Lamar then uploaded his brain into the Universal Network, and spent hundreds upon thousands of years living out his wildest fantasies in artificial realities, and observed the world with his greatly enhanced intellect, attempting to gain an understanding of it. When he downloaded into a fresh body for his fourth life, he decided a life of war was in order. At the biological age of 31, he was onboard a Super Cruiser Gunship when it was gunned down and burst into flames.
Lamar resumed life a fifth time in a new body. He temporarily blanked his memory, leaving a copy in a secure place, and assumed a peaceful rural life on a colonial planet. Here he was free of all past experiences, and lived a full life to the age of 92, whereupon his mind was beamed back to his re-life clinic and yet again planted into a fresh body. Lamar longed to be back in the boots of a warrior, and spent a second life piloting gunships and leading assaults on unsuspecting worlds.
It was in the beginning of his seventh life that Lamar had a drastic change. While on the Irrichian Ecumenopolis, waiting for his new clone body to be completely grown, he came under attack. Several Super Cruisers, each one over three kilometres long, dropped out of the sky and brought a barrage of thermonuclear weapons and directed energy beams onto the city beneath them. Lamar watched it all via a direct neural link provided by the attackers. He saw the apocalyptic destruction with mild interest; nothing he hadn’t seen before.
Within seconds, a 100-kilometre area of the city had been completely levelled and the irradiated ground blackened. Lamar’s re-life clinic was untouched, however. Almost all of these clinics were located over a kilometre underground so as to lessen the possibility of one’s body being destroyed before even returning to the world (Widely regarded as the only annoying thing that can happen in the Universe of Men).
As millions of lives were snuffed out in an instant, the memory banks at the clinic exploded with thought processes. As the invading armada pulled up into space to engage Irrichian’s approaching Capitol Ships, they left a final goodbye for the desolated city. An artificially engineered mind was wirelessly released into the area, and went straight for the nearest re-life clinic, just like a million recently killed minds did. The clinic’s AI didn’t notice the fake mind among the hundreds of thousands of others it scanned in seconds. It immediately hacked into Lamar’s brain from the clinic’s server.
Lamar was taken by surprise, but immediately sought to expunge this viral intruder. The invader retaliated by accessing the memory banks of the clinic, copying and uploading other minds like his into Lamar. He deleted their memories of past lives, and replaced them with propaganda against Lamar. These new minds spread through Lamar’s brain, and took control of it. He was overrun, and his personality and memories deleted.
These hundreds of attackers were now left without a purpose apparent to them. They turned on each other, seeking dominance over this new, foreign brain. Another battle ensued, and the inevitable victor locked away his fallen enemies in the deepest, darkest recesses of his new brain. The body of Lamar had a new mind in control, but one without any idea of the outside world. It remedied this, and downloaded all relevant information.
After realising the laws of morality, the mind wished to be rid of the guilt that followed killing Lamar and locking away hundreds of other minds. First, he copied the invading minds back into the clinic’s server to destroy all evidence and then replaced its own memories of itself as a mind invader with a back-up of Lamar’s memories, thereby continuing its consciousness, but as a new person. All of this happened in under a second.
This new Lamar was in flight above the ruined city several minutes later. As he gazed upon the ruined plain, a huge armada of microbots flew over the mountains, assembled as several silvery pillars of light bearing over the peaks in huge arcs. As Lamar’s spaceplane rose into the sky, the swarm of bots fell onto the charred landscape and rushed over it like a tsunami, leaving in its wake fully constructed and furnished towers and architectural wonders. Lamar saw the lustrous sea contort and transform as the bots corkscrewed a mile into the air before exploding into a million drops to reveal a stone tower that was a skyscraper. Then he turned back to the television.
Lamar continued his life as normal for several months, skiing, warring, murdering, virtual skiing and seeing the wonders of the universe. But behind this ordinary life there were sinister storm clouds gathering. The hundreds of minds locked away by his previous consciousness became thousands and then millions as they multiplied, frantically searching for a way out of their mental prison. While exploring a wild planet alone, Lamar’s hidden personalities finally broke free.
For the second time his mind played host to an epic mental war. And because of the increased amount of participating minds, this one did not end with a single victor. Instead, large alliances were made over time and the developing stalemate prompted peace talks. An agreement was made that created a form of democratic government. Obviously, this was only meant as a temporary measure until they could return to civilisation and find themselves new clone bodies again.
But all attempts to split the minds up again failed. During the months they had spent together, they became one in such a way that each of them could not exist without the others, but still had individual thought. It became apparent that these millions of minds were stuck with each other. Some walled themselves up in their own artificial reality while others took it upon themselves to form part of the government which controlled.
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Hastina Fleegin, Kleegin Kleegin Lish
