Qubit (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
superposition) wrote2018-01-31 09:00 pm
superposition) wrote2018-01-31 09:00 pm
[Recollé] Application
PLAYER
YOUR NAME: Kae
18+?: yes
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
caturday
CHARACTERS IN GAME: Aradia Megido
RESERVATION LINK: lonk
YOUR NAME: Kae
18+?: yes
CONTACT:
CHARACTERS IN GAME: Aradia Megido
RESERVATION LINK: lonk
CHARACTER: CANON SECTION
NAME: Qubit (real name unknown)
AGE: mid-30s, probably
CANON: Irredeemable
NAME: Qubit (real name unknown)
AGE: mid-30s, probably
CANON: Irredeemable
CANON HISTORY:
Irredeemable and Incorruptible wiki entries
Qubit's Earth starts out pretty much the same as our own, but with superheroes. All the major countries are there, and they don't reference any made-up ones. There's a large city somewhere in the US called Sky City - or at least there was, more on that later - plus Coalville and some other towns, but that's the only big difference geographically. Technology's about what you'd expect from Earth in 2009. Apple devices are Pears, though, so there's that.
On this Earth, superheroes and other comic-book shenanigans are a relatively new phenomenon - the Plutonian (the main character, and basically a carbon copy of Superman until his heel turn) was the first of them to go public, and that was only around five years ago. Thus, superheroes (and superhumans in general) are still struggling to be accepted by the public. As with any highly visible public figures, there are those who adore them, and those who despise them.
Qubit was one of those superheroes. Not much is known about his personal history - apparently he talks so little about it that his own teammates don't even know whether or not he's human. I operate off the assumption that he is, and more specifically (since he speaks German and uses semi-frequent Britishisms) that he grew up in West Germany in the late 70s-early 80s, and learned English as a second language. There's some subtle textual clues that imply he's Jewish, as well. I headcanon that he developed his technokinesis at a fairly young age, and thus spent his childhood accidentally breaking everything he touched, which would help explain some of his deep-seated insecurities. Learning how to fix the things he broke helped spark his interest in engineering, and the propagation of integrated circuits around the same time helped him hone his control of his power - but he still had to keep it under wraps, because abilities like his were completely unheard of, and he wasn't keen on being discovered by, say, Stasi spies or the CIA. When he eventually became a superhero, he went all in - he erased all traces of his civilian identity, and cut all ties with his family and friends for their own protection. At the time, he'd have probably wondered if it was excessive, buuuut as later events would prove, this degree of caution was completely justified.
And now back to canon: He invented and perfected his teleportal technology probably at least a decade ago, and used it to travel extensively among other planets and dimensions in the years before the Paradigm was founded, but Earth was always his home.
He first met the Plutonian around five years ago, when some friends noticed he hadn't come back from one of his interdimensional jaunts and asked for the guy’s help. So it was that the Plutonian rescued him from marauding aliens and a shotgun wedding in the cheese dimension (it’s a noodle incident, don’t ask). Qubit had already been following his career for a while, and seems to have drawn some inspiration from Tony, as he entered the superhero scene himself shortly thereafter.
Around four years ago, the Plutonian called together some of his hero buddies to meet and talk shop, and together they founded the Paradigm, the world’s first super-team. They chose the name not to claim they were better than ordinary people, but as a promise that they’d always act as paragons of morality. Qubit was a founding member, along with Kaidan, Metalman, the twins Charybdis and Scylla, Hornet, Bette Noir, and of course, the Plutonian himself. Those were the glory days. The Paradigm’s membership and mission expanded over the next few years. Though based out of the United States, they operated internationally, largely responding to threats that the regular authorities weren’t equipped to handle, like supervillains, demonic legions, and no fewer than three alien invasions in as many years. But they also responded to more mundane crises, and occasionally helped with public works and spoke at schools and stuff, as you do when you’re a celebrity.
Through all this, the Plutonian was the public face of the team, the symbol around which everything else coalesced. His teammates admired and trusted him (mostly), and so did the public (mostly). So when he suddenly went rogue, the world was completely blindsided. At first, the Paradigm couldn't even believe it was really him, but it was, and they were powerless to stop him as he leveled cities, murdered millions of people, and savagely hunted down the people he'd called friends, one by one. Metalman, Citadel, Gazer and Hornet were dead within the first day, and Scylla joined them about two weeks later. The rest of the Paradigm was forced to flee, keeping one step ahead of Tony only because he didn't bother to stop them.
As usual, Qubit coordinated the remaining team during this crisis, at least at the start. Reasoning that any information on how to defeat Tony would be critical to have, he sought out Tony's arch-nemesis, Modeus, the only person Tony had been afraid of. Trouble was, Modeus had been missing for years. So, naturally, Qubit built six lifelike androids with learning AI designed to imitate Modeus' thought processes and figure out where he went, apparently without stopping to consider what a terrible idea that was. They did find Modeus, sort of - or rather, they found the last person who'd seen him, though she didn't know where he'd gone - but then the robots escaped and started acting like supervillains (to no one's surprise but Qubit's), leading Tony directly to the Paradigm's location.
Though they managed to escape Tony that time - partly because Charybdis got a huge power boost after Scylla's death and could suddenly go toe-to-toe with the Plutonian - they were soon captured by what remained of the United States Armed Forces, plus the demon Orian, who said Armed Forces had summoned to subdue them. At this point they learned that Bette Noir had stolen the Plutonian's one weakness from his house the night she slept with him, but hadn't mentioned it sooner because she was ashamed of cheating on her husband, Gilgamos. Fortunately, Bette escaped in the confusion and returned to bust them out, at which point they finally headed to her house to retrieve the (quite literal) magic bullet.
Despite Qubit's repeated warnings not to trust or work with Orian, who was transparently interested in taking down Tony solely so he could launch his own invasion of Earth, the Paradigm did just that. Luring Tony out to the Grand Canyon to (in theory) reduce collateral damage, they used all the force they had to hold him down, and Bette took the shot for redemption... only for Qubit to intervene, using his teleportals to deflect the bullet and kill Orian instead.
When confronted about his decision, Qubit tried to justify it based on Orian's imminent invasion, and insisted there wasn't a need to kill Tony. To prove it, though, he had to tip his hand regarding some information he'd been withholding. Right after Tony turned, he'd received a posthumous message from their teammate Hornet, who explained that he'd sold Qubit's teleportal technology and the coordinates of every world they'd ever visited to alien invaders called the "Vzz-p'ah" (Vespa for short), in exchange for their departure and an agreement that they'd return and subdue Tony in the event that he turned evil (which he was still several years from doing, at the time). As he'd predicted, Qubit was absolutely livid to find this out, but he'd nonetheless kept the information to himself out of respect for Hornet's memory and last wishes. After all, it wasn't as if they could do anything about it now.
As per their agreement, the Vespa returned and successfully captured the Plutonian, then whisked him away into space, vowing to leave Earth alone forever henceforth. It was a great victory, and the world was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief and start recovering. However, there were still a lot of problems to deal with. Cary, now calling himself Survivor, had declared himself leader of the Paradigm, and though Qubit mostly cooperated, Survivor's immaturity, emerging megalomania, and constant stream of horrible decisions had the two of them butting heads at every turn. Cary's first act in the post-Plutonian world was a blanket offer of amnesty to every supervillain willing to help the Paradigm rebuild, a decision which caused at least as many problems as it solved, and which Qubit railed against every chance he got. (For the record, he nearly died trying to recruit one of said supervillains. But I mean, he's not bitter or anything.)
As if that wasn't enough, Modeus had finally resurfaced, first hiding in the body of the loyal sidekick Tony had lobotomized, but now having transferred himself into the last of Qubit's escaped Modeusbots. It turned out he had been madly in love with the Plutonian the entire time, albeit a twisted, psychotic, unrequited sort of love. He approached Qubit in secret with a simple proposition. First of all, he warned that Survivor was rapidly gearing up to be twice the threat to Earth that Tony ever was; this, Qubit was able to confirm by convincing a telepath to give him a covert glance into Survivor's mind. Second, Modeus wanted his help finding Tony and bringing him back to Earth. And third, he had kidnapped Kaidan and would kill her if Qubit didn't cooperate. Qubit grudgingly agreed to help, and together they set off for the Vespan homeworld. However, Qubit brought insurance - the magic bullet from before, which he'd secretly recovered just in case.
At first, the Vespan commander was unwilling to give up the Plutonian's location. To force the info out of him, Qubit used a dramatic show of force. The teleportal technology they were using was originally his, after all, and to show he still had complete control over it, he shut down a portal while a warship was partway through it, cutting it neatly in two (and probably murdering hundreds of Vespans in the resulting crashes). It worked. The commander folded immediately, but before leaving, Qubit used another portal to sever the guy's hand, as a warning never to cross him again. However, he fully intended to return later and take back his technology from the Vespans anyway.
Finally, Qubit and Modeus reached the prison planet Gehnom, an intergalactic insane asylum hidden in the heart of a star. There, as promised, they found the Plutonian, but Tony was just completing his own escape attempt with a handful of other inmates. Desperate to stop them from reaching Earth, Qubit collapsed the wave function behind his teleportals, rendering every device based on his technology useless - and apparently trapping him, along with Modeus, Tony, and Tony's new friends, inside Gehnom forever. The only problem was, one of Tony's alien friends was Mallus, a chronokinetic who could literally punch people back in time. Tony got Mallus to do this to him, and escaped to Earth with the rest of his buddies two minutes ago. And somehow, Modeus escaped with him, transferring his consciousness to one of the aforementioned buddiesbefore he should have known to do so.
This left Qubit stranded on a prison planet millions of light-years from home with nobody but Mallus. (He couldn't just have Mallus punch him back in time, too, because the Plutonian would have murdered him super hard if he did.) He immediately began work on a new portal to take him home, but on his own it was slow going. Mallus, both traumatized by the ordeal and lacking any technical skills whatsoever, was completely useless... until, after the first week, Qubit had an idea. He was able to jury-rig something to take advantage of Mallus' time powers and pull copies of himself from a week in the future back to the present. The process took a toll on Mallus, but they were able to repeat it no fewer than eleven times (probably more). Working together, the multiple Qubits - or rather, one Qubit looping through the same week twenty times - were able to put together his new portal within a week, and return to Earth.
So when Qubit got home, only two weeks had passed, but in spite of that all hell had broken loose. Survivor was dead, the returned Plutonian had carved his logo across the entire width of North America, and the US, Japan, and China had unleashed a pair of unfathomably powerful cosmic beings (the Eleos) in a hail-Mary attempt to stop him. In breaching the Eleos' containment, they'd also released a cloud of radioactive fallout that was rapidly spreading across the planet. The fatality rate was predicted at a third of Earth's total population, but Qubit quickly determined the estimate was low, and that all life on Earth would be wiped out within three generations.
Now, he did have an idea on how the situation could be fixed, but it was one that utterly fell apart without the Plutonian's help. So, recruiting a reformed villain named Max Damage as muscle, Qubit tracked Tony down (rescuing him from the heat death of the universe, where the Eleos had dumped him). However, Tony's exposure to his Eleos creators had caused his powers to evolve rapidly, forcing Qubit to change his plan right out of the gate. He struck a deal - if Tony helped him clean up the radiation, Qubit would "turn back the clock", giving him a fresh start. Tony assumed he meant using Mallus to send him back in time, not knowing that Mallus was dead, but Qubit let him believe it.
Their first attempt to clean up the radiation failed, as it didn't respond to known methods of purification. Stymied, Qubit finally decided to track down the scientists who had developed the radiation thirty-some years ago, but all of them had since died, except one: Modeus. Meanwhile, Modeus had taken over Bette's body, and when the Plutonian confronted him, he took advantage of her hitherto-untapped powers over gravity to subdue and sexually assault him. (Yeah, that, uh... that sure is a thing that happened.) Qubit couldn't make it there until afterwards, when the gravitational distortions subsided, but with Bette's powers at his disposal Modeus easily overpowered him.
Beginning to panic, Qubit pleaded with Tony to "do what has to be done" - to kill Modeus. Relishing the opportunity to make Qubit admit his hypocrisy, Tony did. Modeus attempted to save himself by transferring himself into Qubit's body, but he didn't expect all the psychic shielding. Qubit trapped him in his head and gained access to his knowledge, specifically that pertaining to the radiation he helped develop.
However, Tony had realized by now that Qubit could not send him back in time, and became hostile again; so Qubit used his last-resort option, and beamed the magic bullet into Tony's heart, forcing him to help if he wanted to live. This attempt worked, removing all traces of the radiation from the atmosphere, but Tony wasn't able to withstand its effects and died shortly afterward. But Qubit was still true to his word, in a way; as Tony was disintegrating, he opened a huge assortment of portals leading to a huge assortment of realities, to give the idea of him a chance to persist somewhere else. (Unbeknownst to him, it worked; a fragment of the Plutonian's essence made it to our reality, inspiring the young Siegel and Shuster to create the character of Superman.)
The three surviving members of the Paradigm - Qubit, Kaidan, and Gilgamos - have a long road ahead of them after the series' conclusion. Millions of people worldwide are confirmed dead, and billions more were exposed to toxic or outright lethal amounts of radiation before it could be scrubbed. Large portions of the economy have collapsed, leaving food, clean water, shelter, fuel, medicine, etc. as luxuries in many places. A total nuclear apocalypse may have been averted, but considering the sort of things people are doing in Incorruptible, they've still moved a considerable distance into "Mad Max" territory. Plus, a lot of supervillains survived, and the Vespa will undoubtedly be returning to Earth with a vengeance as soon as they're done licking their wounds, so... the Paradigm really has their work cut out for them!
CANON PERSONALITY:
Qubit derives his name from the smallest unit of data in quantum computing. Where a regular bit can only hold a value of 0 or 1, a qubit can exist in a superposition of both values simultaneously. So it is with Qubit the person. He's not a man of absolutes, but an uneasy mixture of values that can't help contradicting. Logic and emotion, idealism and pragmatism, morality and efficiency, the potential for good and for evil... all these coexist within him, and not a day goes by that he doesn't wrestle with it.
One thing that's beyond dispute is his intelligence. Qubit is considered to be one of the smartest people alive, on his version of Earth, at least. His specialty is quantum physics, including its applications in spacefolding, which allowed him to invent the teleportal devices that are his trademark. But it's not his only area of expertise; others include electrical engineering, computer programming, learning algorithms, cryptography, nanotechnology, psionics, and all of the math. His quick thinking and extensive knowledge base complement his powers, raising them from "useful" to "highly dangerous." If this were a tabletop game, he'd be the character who takes one versatile power, strategically minmaxes it, and spends the rest of his power points on Knowledge skills.
The downside of always being the smartest guy in the room, though, is that he's used to being the smartest guy in the room. Qubit's ego is large and hungry, but when it comes to his intelligence he's surprisingly insecure. He hates being outsmarted, he hates not having all the answers, and he hates being called stupid (seriously, he almost punches someone over this). He butts heads with anyone who thinks they know better than he does, even if they actually do. And although he may still cooperate, for the sake of the team, with a plan that he thinks is ridiculous and doomed to fail, he will sulk and bitch and snark about it the entire time. It's hard not to feel like you're surrounded by idiots when, comparatively, you pretty much are.
But he tries to keep his arrogance in check with a double dose of thoughtfulness. He's traveled all over the cosmos, and understands that despite his power and intelligence, he's still just one man, infinitesimal in the greater scheme of things. As hard as it is to accept at times, he realizes that it's impossible for him to be perfect, all-knowing, everywhere at once, or to save everyone. So, although he strongly believes he ought to do all the good he can in the world, he adopts kind of a "throw back the starfish" approach, focusing less on the numbers and more on the human side of things. If it were just a matter of statistics, even someone with his power and influence couldn't make that much of a difference; but to the people he does manage to help, he might make all the difference. He's a firm believer in the power of hope - that spreading hope is infinitely more powerful than anything he can do with his powers.
If that sounds a little sentimental for such a determined scientist, that's because it is.
Despite his self-proclaimed devotion to reason, science, and logic, Qubit is at his core a profoundly emotional being. He can try to be pragmatic all he wants, but ultimately he just cares way too much about absolutely everything. To his friends, he's loyal to a fault - and I do mean a fault, it's actually kind of a problem. His close friends are his family, and he'd do anything for them, up to and including "put billions of innocent lives at risk." He doesn't believe in acceptable losses, nor the good of the many outweighing the good of the few - it's a tempting logical argument, to be sure, but he will go far out of his way in search of the elusive Third Option, the one that allows him or his teammates to effectively deal with a problem without compromising their morals.
Which brings us to the fun subject of Qubit's morals. He's notorious among his world's super-community for his refusal to kill under any circumstances, or to allow his teammates to. Over the course of the story, however, he breaks this code several times. Given the circumstances, it's possible to justify killing the people he did - a demon about to invade Earth, a bunch of aliens known for being brutal conquerors, and a rogue Superman expy who'd proven many times there was no other way to stop him - but nevertheless, he broke the single most important rule he ever laid down for himself. The worst part is, he may have been able to find a third option in each of these cases, given more time or consideration, but he didn't. Despite having his reasons, whether he did it out of loyalty, hatred, or a very real lack of any other option, he still considers himself a hypocrite and a murderer.
That said, perhaps his greatest redeeming factor is his self-awareness. He's of the belief that, because there's very little that can be done externally to hold them accountable, those entrusted with great power should hold themselves to higher moral standards than anyone else. So, he does. Qubit carries an immense amount of guilt for what he's done, both the deaths he caused directly and the ones he failed to prevent. He might never be able to forgive himself. But, perhaps fortunately, he has also made the conscious decision not to. All he can do is keep moving forward, and do what he can from here.
Evil acts don't make a person evil, and good acts don't make a person good. Neither cancels out the other. Just as the Plutonian killing over ten million people doesn't cancel out all the good he did before his heel turn, Qubit's help rebuilding that world isn't going to clean the blood off his hands. Making the decision to kill changed him in a way he doesn't like - he can't help but consider the deadly option now, when before he could just reject it out of hand. And that's something he's going to have to live with.
... So! Now that that heavy, philosophical character arc is out of the way, who's up for something less depressing? Let's talk about how he acts on a day-to-day basis.
Qubit is the kind of person who thrives under pressure. In a crisis situation - which, as a full-time superhero, he gets into a lot - he steps up and takes charge. He thinks quickly, delegates effectively, and acts decisively, making him close to ideal in a leadership role. He's perhaps slightly more useful in the command center, but you'll always find him on the front lines once the fighting breaks out. He's a battlefield commander, more of a tactician than a strategist. One of his enemies mocks him for not thinking ahead, but he prefers to be flexible and leave room to improvise rather than try and plan for every eventuality.
Although these qualities made him the de facto leader of the Paradigm, it seems like his role on the team was downplayed quite a bit. In group pictures he'd be standing off to one side; he doesn't seem to make impromptu speeches or TV appearances; and the general public doesn't recognize him as instantly as they do the Plutonian or (later) Survivor. Being a public figure is a natural consequence of a job as high-profile as his, but he doesn't seek fame or compensation for his work. He views that as doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Along the same lines, Qubit doesn't sell his technology, even though it's easily worth a fortune. On the one hand, he's opposed to using his powers for personal gain, but there's a practical reason for it as well. Simply, the world isn't ready... or, more precisely, the technology isn't idiot-proofed. He once said (of alien technology, but the point stands) that handing it over to the scientific community would be "like giving hand grenades to orangutans." Given the great power and versatility of his inventions, the potential for misuse is too great to release them into society without a lot of modification. He has tremendous faith in humanity generally, but there's always that one moron who has to go and ruin it for everybody else. Seeing his discoveries weaponized and used for warfare is something he does not forgive.
Outside of a crisis, he's remarkably friendly and approachable. He genuinely cares about all the people he helps, and nothing makes him happier than making someone's day. It's a large part of why he got into the superhero business to begin with. He enjoys meeting new people and hearing their stories. Everyday people are what motivate and inspire him, and keep him grounded. He prefers to give benefit of the doubt unless given good reason to do otherwise. Having visited numerous alien worlds and distant dimensions, he's pretty open-minded, and tries to be culturally sensitive. He has an infectious enthusiasm, a sharp, witty sense of humor, and an informal but decently respectful manner that make him easy to get along with... provided you don't get on his bad side.
That said, what a bad side it is. Getting defensive when his intellect feels threatened is just the tip of the iceberg. If he needs cooperation from someone who's unwilling to provide it, he can rapidly turn into a manipulative bastard, though he doesn't try to deny that's what he is. He still values honesty, and as such avoids outright lying to get what he wants, but one of his favorite maxims is that "a smart enough man never has to lie." Half-truths, lies of omission, mistaken assumptions left uncorrected, and outright threats are all fair game... and he can come up with no shortage of creative and cruel things to threaten. Like turning a magic-user into a cyborg against her will, for instance. If he can't find an appropriate "carrot" to motivate someone, he'll promptly go for the "stick."
And if he's angry enough, he may use it. Qubit has a flash temper, quick to rise and quick to dissipate, but intense in between. During that in-between, he thinks about the consequences of his actions even less than usual, leading him to do things he'll regret later. Like, you know, murdering a warship full of aliens just to prove to their leader that he could. Hindsight is 20/20, unfortunately. He's also pretty good at carrying a grudge, especially if the offense was something he took personally.
Basically, just about everything Qubit does is at odds with some facet or other of his personality and beliefs. The trauma of dealing with a rogue Plutonian hardened him in ways he never wanted, but can't reverse. He was always sort of a workaholic, but by the end of the series he hasn't had a day off or a decent night's sleep in like six months. He was arrogant and self-righteous - and still feels that way instinctively, to a degree - but now he's a moral hypocrite with no room to judge anyone else. He fought monsters, and wasn't careful enough to avoid becoming one. So far he's been able to put off dealing with the guilt of that, and the grief from losing most of his friends in horrible, violent ways, by staying in constant motion, keeping his mind on his work and on the future. But he can't keep that up forever. Sooner or later he'll have to admit he's not okay.
Also, some miscellaneous points that I couldn't find a good spot for in that enormous essay:
- Qubit's a committed environmentalist. He refers to a water purifier as the best thing he ever accomplished, he prefers solar power to gas, he has an umbrella that teleports rain to "someplace that needs it", and when he was younger and living in the city he had an extensive roof garden. Green technology is his jam, and would probably be his career of choice if he hadn't gone into superheroing.
- He appears to have some interest in culinary arts, as he's readily gone dimension-hopping just to pick up a specific kind of cheese.
- He dislikes direct skin-to-skin contact with other people, describing it as giving him a "burning feeling." It's not explained why this happens, but I believe it's a side effect of his technokinesis (i.e. being more compatible with machines than people). He's more willing to put up with it for politeness' sake now than he used to be (shaking hands, for instance), but still finds it unpleasant. However, clothing's enough of a barrier to negate the effect, and he can actually be pretty affectionate where his close friends are concerned.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
Technokinesis / Perfect Kludge. As long as he has mechanical components available, Qubit can telekinetically reassemble them to form any machine he can imagine. The functions of the initial and final objects can be radically different, as when he made a batch of pocket-size quantum teleporters out of a cell phone, an iPod, a camera, and pocket change. Conservation of mass still roughly applies, but elemental equivalent exchange doesn't appear to. Thinking too hard about that part is not recommended.
However, he can't make something from nothing. If the components he has to work with are too simple, he can't affect them at all. At one point he repurposed basic electrical wiring to carry sound in addition to electricity, but described the effort involved as "exhausting." The devices must be electric or electronic on some level, so he can't use his powers on, for instance, a pure diesel engine or an analog lock (though digital locks are fair game).
Additionally, he can't use this power to create something he doesn't understand the principles behind. For instance, he can't just whip up a time machine out of nowhere, because he doesn't yet know how time travel works. If he does understand the mechanism in principle, though, he doesn't have to think too hard about it in practice - this is what I mean by Perfect Kludge. In effect that just means Qubit can slap new machinery together on the fly with remarkable speed, and it'll still work just as he wants it to.
He can also use this power to modify or repair existing technology, or to disassemble it (almost instantaneously). His power leans heavily toward the hardware side of things, but if the device would need programming or an interface for basic operation, it'll have it. More advanced software, he has to type up the old-fashioned way. He can't hack into a computer with his mind or anything like that.
This power has a maximum range of about 10 meters. It doesn't work directly on nanomachines, but can be used to make devices that interact with them.
Teleportal Devices. Qubit's signature invention is quantum teleportation. Using a wrist-worn control device, he's able to open portals of varying size just about anywhere on Earth. These can range from millimeters to meters in diameter, and are freestanding (i.e. they don't need to be attached to a surface, they just sit in midair wherever they're opened). The same technology can be used to create portals large enough to fit spaceships through, or that can bridge planets or even dimensions, but either application requires a device that's far too big to carry.
How this technology's actually supposed to work is kind of handwaved in canon (because comic books I guess), but a few features and limitations are fairly consistent across the board. Firstly, there's the process of working out where the portals are going to open. Qubit appears to have this down to an art - he can open them quickly and precisely enough to intercept a bullet after it's left the gun, if he knows in advance that's what he's going to do. Given that he knows how to make tech that interacts with psionics, it seems likely that there's a psionic component to the targeting; that is, his device can, to a limited extent, intuit where he wants the portal to appear, and convert that into usable coordinates. He can also use this intuitive function to find specific people, even if he doesn't know where they are geographically, though it has to be someone he's personally met and is familiar with. The device is calibrated specifically to Qubit's brain, so anyone else trying to use it would have to enter their desired target manually.
The targeting algorithm automatically avoids opening portals on top of people or solid objects, but he can override this limitation if needed. For example, he can beam objects into people's bodies, or even "disassemble" them, separating parts of their body relative to local space, even though the person is technically still in one piece. (At one point he even reroutes the signals from someone's nervous system "to Neptune and back" to slow them down, but since that makes no sense I'm not going to let him do it here.) If a portal closes while something's partway through it, though, it will be severed along the plane of contact.
He can use this device to put up a "teleport shield," as well - a spherical field that relocates anything that impacts it to the other side of him. However, it's not designed for this application, so using it as a shield will overload the device in under a minute. Trying to open or maintain more than a handful of portals at once will also rapidly overload the device (i.e. it literally explodes).
The quantum nature of Qubit's teleportals means they're all linked to a single, extremely complex wave function. If this wave function collapses, so does every portal linked to it, instantaneously and permanently (all linked devices become completely useless). Qubit can do this from his watch, but only as an extreme last resort; once it's collapsed, he has to establish a new function completely from scratch before he can use any teleportals again. This is an uncertain process that can take months or years to complete, even for him.
He can use his technokinesis to duplicate this technology on the fly, albeit on a less powerful scale. Any secondary quantum jumpers created in this manner can only be used to open or close one portal at a time, one end of which must be within a few meters of the jumper, and the portal only comes in one size (big enough for an average-sized person or two to comfortably walk through). These have a shorter absolute range than his personal device. If his personal device is lost or destroyed, he can recreate it, too, but I'm going to say this would take several days to a week due to the complex programming involved.
He's also invented a prototype umbrella that uses his portal tech to send the rain falling on it to drought-ridden areas. Seriously. That's all it does.
Psionic Shielding. Qubit's rogues' gallery included at least one wicked powerful telepath, and apparently psychics gave him enough trouble that at some point he invented psionic shielding and implanted a significant amount of it in his brain. As a result, he's effectively immune to telepathy, mind control, and other psionic attacks. There was also at least one prominent telepath on his own team, though, so he included the ability to whitelist interactions on a case-by-case basis. Basically, the only way someone can get into Qubit's head is with his express permission, and nobody gets an all-access pass.
A weakness of this shielding is that it's still possible to steal information by parsing the latent electric signals in his brain, if you can perceive those and know how to parse them, but he's aware of this issue. (For reference, the difference between psychic access and the brain-signal method is like the difference between a software interface and chunks of unfiltered binary code in uncertain order. The Plutonian was able to glean useful info from it, but he's sort of a special case.)
At one point he actually traps someone in his head who tries to possess him, and in doing so gains access to that person's entire knowledge base and intellectual capacity. Since this "prison" will be vacant once regained (Modeus is an appable character in his own right), he could conceivably trap someone else the same way. It's purely defensive, though; he can only do it to someone who forces entry into his mind.
Irredeemable and Incorruptible wiki entries
Qubit's Earth starts out pretty much the same as our own, but with superheroes. All the major countries are there, and they don't reference any made-up ones. There's a large city somewhere in the US called Sky City - or at least there was, more on that later - plus Coalville and some other towns, but that's the only big difference geographically. Technology's about what you'd expect from Earth in 2009. Apple devices are Pears, though, so there's that.
On this Earth, superheroes and other comic-book shenanigans are a relatively new phenomenon - the Plutonian (the main character, and basically a carbon copy of Superman until his heel turn) was the first of them to go public, and that was only around five years ago. Thus, superheroes (and superhumans in general) are still struggling to be accepted by the public. As with any highly visible public figures, there are those who adore them, and those who despise them.
Qubit was one of those superheroes. Not much is known about his personal history - apparently he talks so little about it that his own teammates don't even know whether or not he's human. I operate off the assumption that he is, and more specifically (since he speaks German and uses semi-frequent Britishisms) that he grew up in West Germany in the late 70s-early 80s, and learned English as a second language. There's some subtle textual clues that imply he's Jewish, as well. I headcanon that he developed his technokinesis at a fairly young age, and thus spent his childhood accidentally breaking everything he touched, which would help explain some of his deep-seated insecurities. Learning how to fix the things he broke helped spark his interest in engineering, and the propagation of integrated circuits around the same time helped him hone his control of his power - but he still had to keep it under wraps, because abilities like his were completely unheard of, and he wasn't keen on being discovered by, say, Stasi spies or the CIA. When he eventually became a superhero, he went all in - he erased all traces of his civilian identity, and cut all ties with his family and friends for their own protection. At the time, he'd have probably wondered if it was excessive, buuuut as later events would prove, this degree of caution was completely justified.
And now back to canon: He invented and perfected his teleportal technology probably at least a decade ago, and used it to travel extensively among other planets and dimensions in the years before the Paradigm was founded, but Earth was always his home.
He first met the Plutonian around five years ago, when some friends noticed he hadn't come back from one of his interdimensional jaunts and asked for the guy’s help. So it was that the Plutonian rescued him from marauding aliens and a shotgun wedding in the cheese dimension (it’s a noodle incident, don’t ask). Qubit had already been following his career for a while, and seems to have drawn some inspiration from Tony, as he entered the superhero scene himself shortly thereafter.
Around four years ago, the Plutonian called together some of his hero buddies to meet and talk shop, and together they founded the Paradigm, the world’s first super-team. They chose the name not to claim they were better than ordinary people, but as a promise that they’d always act as paragons of morality. Qubit was a founding member, along with Kaidan, Metalman, the twins Charybdis and Scylla, Hornet, Bette Noir, and of course, the Plutonian himself. Those were the glory days. The Paradigm’s membership and mission expanded over the next few years. Though based out of the United States, they operated internationally, largely responding to threats that the regular authorities weren’t equipped to handle, like supervillains, demonic legions, and no fewer than three alien invasions in as many years. But they also responded to more mundane crises, and occasionally helped with public works and spoke at schools and stuff, as you do when you’re a celebrity.
Through all this, the Plutonian was the public face of the team, the symbol around which everything else coalesced. His teammates admired and trusted him (mostly), and so did the public (mostly). So when he suddenly went rogue, the world was completely blindsided. At first, the Paradigm couldn't even believe it was really him, but it was, and they were powerless to stop him as he leveled cities, murdered millions of people, and savagely hunted down the people he'd called friends, one by one. Metalman, Citadel, Gazer and Hornet were dead within the first day, and Scylla joined them about two weeks later. The rest of the Paradigm was forced to flee, keeping one step ahead of Tony only because he didn't bother to stop them.
As usual, Qubit coordinated the remaining team during this crisis, at least at the start. Reasoning that any information on how to defeat Tony would be critical to have, he sought out Tony's arch-nemesis, Modeus, the only person Tony had been afraid of. Trouble was, Modeus had been missing for years. So, naturally, Qubit built six lifelike androids with learning AI designed to imitate Modeus' thought processes and figure out where he went, apparently without stopping to consider what a terrible idea that was. They did find Modeus, sort of - or rather, they found the last person who'd seen him, though she didn't know where he'd gone - but then the robots escaped and started acting like supervillains (to no one's surprise but Qubit's), leading Tony directly to the Paradigm's location.
Though they managed to escape Tony that time - partly because Charybdis got a huge power boost after Scylla's death and could suddenly go toe-to-toe with the Plutonian - they were soon captured by what remained of the United States Armed Forces, plus the demon Orian, who said Armed Forces had summoned to subdue them. At this point they learned that Bette Noir had stolen the Plutonian's one weakness from his house the night she slept with him, but hadn't mentioned it sooner because she was ashamed of cheating on her husband, Gilgamos. Fortunately, Bette escaped in the confusion and returned to bust them out, at which point they finally headed to her house to retrieve the (quite literal) magic bullet.
Despite Qubit's repeated warnings not to trust or work with Orian, who was transparently interested in taking down Tony solely so he could launch his own invasion of Earth, the Paradigm did just that. Luring Tony out to the Grand Canyon to (in theory) reduce collateral damage, they used all the force they had to hold him down, and Bette took the shot for redemption... only for Qubit to intervene, using his teleportals to deflect the bullet and kill Orian instead.
When confronted about his decision, Qubit tried to justify it based on Orian's imminent invasion, and insisted there wasn't a need to kill Tony. To prove it, though, he had to tip his hand regarding some information he'd been withholding. Right after Tony turned, he'd received a posthumous message from their teammate Hornet, who explained that he'd sold Qubit's teleportal technology and the coordinates of every world they'd ever visited to alien invaders called the "Vzz-p'ah" (Vespa for short), in exchange for their departure and an agreement that they'd return and subdue Tony in the event that he turned evil (which he was still several years from doing, at the time). As he'd predicted, Qubit was absolutely livid to find this out, but he'd nonetheless kept the information to himself out of respect for Hornet's memory and last wishes. After all, it wasn't as if they could do anything about it now.
As per their agreement, the Vespa returned and successfully captured the Plutonian, then whisked him away into space, vowing to leave Earth alone forever henceforth. It was a great victory, and the world was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief and start recovering. However, there were still a lot of problems to deal with. Cary, now calling himself Survivor, had declared himself leader of the Paradigm, and though Qubit mostly cooperated, Survivor's immaturity, emerging megalomania, and constant stream of horrible decisions had the two of them butting heads at every turn. Cary's first act in the post-Plutonian world was a blanket offer of amnesty to every supervillain willing to help the Paradigm rebuild, a decision which caused at least as many problems as it solved, and which Qubit railed against every chance he got. (For the record, he nearly died trying to recruit one of said supervillains. But I mean, he's not bitter or anything.)
As if that wasn't enough, Modeus had finally resurfaced, first hiding in the body of the loyal sidekick Tony had lobotomized, but now having transferred himself into the last of Qubit's escaped Modeusbots. It turned out he had been madly in love with the Plutonian the entire time, albeit a twisted, psychotic, unrequited sort of love. He approached Qubit in secret with a simple proposition. First of all, he warned that Survivor was rapidly gearing up to be twice the threat to Earth that Tony ever was; this, Qubit was able to confirm by convincing a telepath to give him a covert glance into Survivor's mind. Second, Modeus wanted his help finding Tony and bringing him back to Earth. And third, he had kidnapped Kaidan and would kill her if Qubit didn't cooperate. Qubit grudgingly agreed to help, and together they set off for the Vespan homeworld. However, Qubit brought insurance - the magic bullet from before, which he'd secretly recovered just in case.
At first, the Vespan commander was unwilling to give up the Plutonian's location. To force the info out of him, Qubit used a dramatic show of force. The teleportal technology they were using was originally his, after all, and to show he still had complete control over it, he shut down a portal while a warship was partway through it, cutting it neatly in two (and probably murdering hundreds of Vespans in the resulting crashes). It worked. The commander folded immediately, but before leaving, Qubit used another portal to sever the guy's hand, as a warning never to cross him again. However, he fully intended to return later and take back his technology from the Vespans anyway.
Finally, Qubit and Modeus reached the prison planet Gehnom, an intergalactic insane asylum hidden in the heart of a star. There, as promised, they found the Plutonian, but Tony was just completing his own escape attempt with a handful of other inmates. Desperate to stop them from reaching Earth, Qubit collapsed the wave function behind his teleportals, rendering every device based on his technology useless - and apparently trapping him, along with Modeus, Tony, and Tony's new friends, inside Gehnom forever. The only problem was, one of Tony's alien friends was Mallus, a chronokinetic who could literally punch people back in time. Tony got Mallus to do this to him, and escaped to Earth with the rest of his buddies two minutes ago. And somehow, Modeus escaped with him, transferring his consciousness to one of the aforementioned buddies
This left Qubit stranded on a prison planet millions of light-years from home with nobody but Mallus. (He couldn't just have Mallus punch him back in time, too, because the Plutonian would have murdered him super hard if he did.) He immediately began work on a new portal to take him home, but on his own it was slow going. Mallus, both traumatized by the ordeal and lacking any technical skills whatsoever, was completely useless... until, after the first week, Qubit had an idea. He was able to jury-rig something to take advantage of Mallus' time powers and pull copies of himself from a week in the future back to the present. The process took a toll on Mallus, but they were able to repeat it no fewer than eleven times (probably more). Working together, the multiple Qubits - or rather, one Qubit looping through the same week twenty times - were able to put together his new portal within a week, and return to Earth.
So when Qubit got home, only two weeks had passed, but in spite of that all hell had broken loose. Survivor was dead, the returned Plutonian had carved his logo across the entire width of North America, and the US, Japan, and China had unleashed a pair of unfathomably powerful cosmic beings (the Eleos) in a hail-Mary attempt to stop him. In breaching the Eleos' containment, they'd also released a cloud of radioactive fallout that was rapidly spreading across the planet. The fatality rate was predicted at a third of Earth's total population, but Qubit quickly determined the estimate was low, and that all life on Earth would be wiped out within three generations.
Now, he did have an idea on how the situation could be fixed, but it was one that utterly fell apart without the Plutonian's help. So, recruiting a reformed villain named Max Damage as muscle, Qubit tracked Tony down (rescuing him from the heat death of the universe, where the Eleos had dumped him). However, Tony's exposure to his Eleos creators had caused his powers to evolve rapidly, forcing Qubit to change his plan right out of the gate. He struck a deal - if Tony helped him clean up the radiation, Qubit would "turn back the clock", giving him a fresh start. Tony assumed he meant using Mallus to send him back in time, not knowing that Mallus was dead, but Qubit let him believe it.
Their first attempt to clean up the radiation failed, as it didn't respond to known methods of purification. Stymied, Qubit finally decided to track down the scientists who had developed the radiation thirty-some years ago, but all of them had since died, except one: Modeus. Meanwhile, Modeus had taken over Bette's body, and when the Plutonian confronted him, he took advantage of her hitherto-untapped powers over gravity to subdue and sexually assault him. (Yeah, that, uh... that sure is a thing that happened.) Qubit couldn't make it there until afterwards, when the gravitational distortions subsided, but with Bette's powers at his disposal Modeus easily overpowered him.
Beginning to panic, Qubit pleaded with Tony to "do what has to be done" - to kill Modeus. Relishing the opportunity to make Qubit admit his hypocrisy, Tony did. Modeus attempted to save himself by transferring himself into Qubit's body, but he didn't expect all the psychic shielding. Qubit trapped him in his head and gained access to his knowledge, specifically that pertaining to the radiation he helped develop.
However, Tony had realized by now that Qubit could not send him back in time, and became hostile again; so Qubit used his last-resort option, and beamed the magic bullet into Tony's heart, forcing him to help if he wanted to live. This attempt worked, removing all traces of the radiation from the atmosphere, but Tony wasn't able to withstand its effects and died shortly afterward. But Qubit was still true to his word, in a way; as Tony was disintegrating, he opened a huge assortment of portals leading to a huge assortment of realities, to give the idea of him a chance to persist somewhere else. (Unbeknownst to him, it worked; a fragment of the Plutonian's essence made it to our reality, inspiring the young Siegel and Shuster to create the character of Superman.)
The three surviving members of the Paradigm - Qubit, Kaidan, and Gilgamos - have a long road ahead of them after the series' conclusion. Millions of people worldwide are confirmed dead, and billions more were exposed to toxic or outright lethal amounts of radiation before it could be scrubbed. Large portions of the economy have collapsed, leaving food, clean water, shelter, fuel, medicine, etc. as luxuries in many places. A total nuclear apocalypse may have been averted, but considering the sort of things people are doing in Incorruptible, they've still moved a considerable distance into "Mad Max" territory. Plus, a lot of supervillains survived, and the Vespa will undoubtedly be returning to Earth with a vengeance as soon as they're done licking their wounds, so... the Paradigm really has their work cut out for them!
CANON PERSONALITY:
Qubit derives his name from the smallest unit of data in quantum computing. Where a regular bit can only hold a value of 0 or 1, a qubit can exist in a superposition of both values simultaneously. So it is with Qubit the person. He's not a man of absolutes, but an uneasy mixture of values that can't help contradicting. Logic and emotion, idealism and pragmatism, morality and efficiency, the potential for good and for evil... all these coexist within him, and not a day goes by that he doesn't wrestle with it.
One thing that's beyond dispute is his intelligence. Qubit is considered to be one of the smartest people alive, on his version of Earth, at least. His specialty is quantum physics, including its applications in spacefolding, which allowed him to invent the teleportal devices that are his trademark. But it's not his only area of expertise; others include electrical engineering, computer programming, learning algorithms, cryptography, nanotechnology, psionics, and all of the math. His quick thinking and extensive knowledge base complement his powers, raising them from "useful" to "highly dangerous." If this were a tabletop game, he'd be the character who takes one versatile power, strategically minmaxes it, and spends the rest of his power points on Knowledge skills.
The downside of always being the smartest guy in the room, though, is that he's used to being the smartest guy in the room. Qubit's ego is large and hungry, but when it comes to his intelligence he's surprisingly insecure. He hates being outsmarted, he hates not having all the answers, and he hates being called stupid (seriously, he almost punches someone over this). He butts heads with anyone who thinks they know better than he does, even if they actually do. And although he may still cooperate, for the sake of the team, with a plan that he thinks is ridiculous and doomed to fail, he will sulk and bitch and snark about it the entire time. It's hard not to feel like you're surrounded by idiots when, comparatively, you pretty much are.
But he tries to keep his arrogance in check with a double dose of thoughtfulness. He's traveled all over the cosmos, and understands that despite his power and intelligence, he's still just one man, infinitesimal in the greater scheme of things. As hard as it is to accept at times, he realizes that it's impossible for him to be perfect, all-knowing, everywhere at once, or to save everyone. So, although he strongly believes he ought to do all the good he can in the world, he adopts kind of a "throw back the starfish" approach, focusing less on the numbers and more on the human side of things. If it were just a matter of statistics, even someone with his power and influence couldn't make that much of a difference; but to the people he does manage to help, he might make all the difference. He's a firm believer in the power of hope - that spreading hope is infinitely more powerful than anything he can do with his powers.
If that sounds a little sentimental for such a determined scientist, that's because it is.
Despite his self-proclaimed devotion to reason, science, and logic, Qubit is at his core a profoundly emotional being. He can try to be pragmatic all he wants, but ultimately he just cares way too much about absolutely everything. To his friends, he's loyal to a fault - and I do mean a fault, it's actually kind of a problem. His close friends are his family, and he'd do anything for them, up to and including "put billions of innocent lives at risk." He doesn't believe in acceptable losses, nor the good of the many outweighing the good of the few - it's a tempting logical argument, to be sure, but he will go far out of his way in search of the elusive Third Option, the one that allows him or his teammates to effectively deal with a problem without compromising their morals.
Which brings us to the fun subject of Qubit's morals. He's notorious among his world's super-community for his refusal to kill under any circumstances, or to allow his teammates to. Over the course of the story, however, he breaks this code several times. Given the circumstances, it's possible to justify killing the people he did - a demon about to invade Earth, a bunch of aliens known for being brutal conquerors, and a rogue Superman expy who'd proven many times there was no other way to stop him - but nevertheless, he broke the single most important rule he ever laid down for himself. The worst part is, he may have been able to find a third option in each of these cases, given more time or consideration, but he didn't. Despite having his reasons, whether he did it out of loyalty, hatred, or a very real lack of any other option, he still considers himself a hypocrite and a murderer.
That said, perhaps his greatest redeeming factor is his self-awareness. He's of the belief that, because there's very little that can be done externally to hold them accountable, those entrusted with great power should hold themselves to higher moral standards than anyone else. So, he does. Qubit carries an immense amount of guilt for what he's done, both the deaths he caused directly and the ones he failed to prevent. He might never be able to forgive himself. But, perhaps fortunately, he has also made the conscious decision not to. All he can do is keep moving forward, and do what he can from here.
Evil acts don't make a person evil, and good acts don't make a person good. Neither cancels out the other. Just as the Plutonian killing over ten million people doesn't cancel out all the good he did before his heel turn, Qubit's help rebuilding that world isn't going to clean the blood off his hands. Making the decision to kill changed him in a way he doesn't like - he can't help but consider the deadly option now, when before he could just reject it out of hand. And that's something he's going to have to live with.
... So! Now that that heavy, philosophical character arc is out of the way, who's up for something less depressing? Let's talk about how he acts on a day-to-day basis.
Qubit is the kind of person who thrives under pressure. In a crisis situation - which, as a full-time superhero, he gets into a lot - he steps up and takes charge. He thinks quickly, delegates effectively, and acts decisively, making him close to ideal in a leadership role. He's perhaps slightly more useful in the command center, but you'll always find him on the front lines once the fighting breaks out. He's a battlefield commander, more of a tactician than a strategist. One of his enemies mocks him for not thinking ahead, but he prefers to be flexible and leave room to improvise rather than try and plan for every eventuality.
Although these qualities made him the de facto leader of the Paradigm, it seems like his role on the team was downplayed quite a bit. In group pictures he'd be standing off to one side; he doesn't seem to make impromptu speeches or TV appearances; and the general public doesn't recognize him as instantly as they do the Plutonian or (later) Survivor. Being a public figure is a natural consequence of a job as high-profile as his, but he doesn't seek fame or compensation for his work. He views that as doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Along the same lines, Qubit doesn't sell his technology, even though it's easily worth a fortune. On the one hand, he's opposed to using his powers for personal gain, but there's a practical reason for it as well. Simply, the world isn't ready... or, more precisely, the technology isn't idiot-proofed. He once said (of alien technology, but the point stands) that handing it over to the scientific community would be "like giving hand grenades to orangutans." Given the great power and versatility of his inventions, the potential for misuse is too great to release them into society without a lot of modification. He has tremendous faith in humanity generally, but there's always that one moron who has to go and ruin it for everybody else. Seeing his discoveries weaponized and used for warfare is something he does not forgive.
Outside of a crisis, he's remarkably friendly and approachable. He genuinely cares about all the people he helps, and nothing makes him happier than making someone's day. It's a large part of why he got into the superhero business to begin with. He enjoys meeting new people and hearing their stories. Everyday people are what motivate and inspire him, and keep him grounded. He prefers to give benefit of the doubt unless given good reason to do otherwise. Having visited numerous alien worlds and distant dimensions, he's pretty open-minded, and tries to be culturally sensitive. He has an infectious enthusiasm, a sharp, witty sense of humor, and an informal but decently respectful manner that make him easy to get along with... provided you don't get on his bad side.
That said, what a bad side it is. Getting defensive when his intellect feels threatened is just the tip of the iceberg. If he needs cooperation from someone who's unwilling to provide it, he can rapidly turn into a manipulative bastard, though he doesn't try to deny that's what he is. He still values honesty, and as such avoids outright lying to get what he wants, but one of his favorite maxims is that "a smart enough man never has to lie." Half-truths, lies of omission, mistaken assumptions left uncorrected, and outright threats are all fair game... and he can come up with no shortage of creative and cruel things to threaten. Like turning a magic-user into a cyborg against her will, for instance. If he can't find an appropriate "carrot" to motivate someone, he'll promptly go for the "stick."
And if he's angry enough, he may use it. Qubit has a flash temper, quick to rise and quick to dissipate, but intense in between. During that in-between, he thinks about the consequences of his actions even less than usual, leading him to do things he'll regret later. Like, you know, murdering a warship full of aliens just to prove to their leader that he could. Hindsight is 20/20, unfortunately. He's also pretty good at carrying a grudge, especially if the offense was something he took personally.
Basically, just about everything Qubit does is at odds with some facet or other of his personality and beliefs. The trauma of dealing with a rogue Plutonian hardened him in ways he never wanted, but can't reverse. He was always sort of a workaholic, but by the end of the series he hasn't had a day off or a decent night's sleep in like six months. He was arrogant and self-righteous - and still feels that way instinctively, to a degree - but now he's a moral hypocrite with no room to judge anyone else. He fought monsters, and wasn't careful enough to avoid becoming one. So far he's been able to put off dealing with the guilt of that, and the grief from losing most of his friends in horrible, violent ways, by staying in constant motion, keeping his mind on his work and on the future. But he can't keep that up forever. Sooner or later he'll have to admit he's not okay.
Also, some miscellaneous points that I couldn't find a good spot for in that enormous essay:
- Qubit's a committed environmentalist. He refers to a water purifier as the best thing he ever accomplished, he prefers solar power to gas, he has an umbrella that teleports rain to "someplace that needs it", and when he was younger and living in the city he had an extensive roof garden. Green technology is his jam, and would probably be his career of choice if he hadn't gone into superheroing.
- He appears to have some interest in culinary arts, as he's readily gone dimension-hopping just to pick up a specific kind of cheese.
- He dislikes direct skin-to-skin contact with other people, describing it as giving him a "burning feeling." It's not explained why this happens, but I believe it's a side effect of his technokinesis (i.e. being more compatible with machines than people). He's more willing to put up with it for politeness' sake now than he used to be (shaking hands, for instance), but still finds it unpleasant. However, clothing's enough of a barrier to negate the effect, and he can actually be pretty affectionate where his close friends are concerned.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
Technokinesis / Perfect Kludge. As long as he has mechanical components available, Qubit can telekinetically reassemble them to form any machine he can imagine. The functions of the initial and final objects can be radically different, as when he made a batch of pocket-size quantum teleporters out of a cell phone, an iPod, a camera, and pocket change. Conservation of mass still roughly applies, but elemental equivalent exchange doesn't appear to. Thinking too hard about that part is not recommended.
However, he can't make something from nothing. If the components he has to work with are too simple, he can't affect them at all. At one point he repurposed basic electrical wiring to carry sound in addition to electricity, but described the effort involved as "exhausting." The devices must be electric or electronic on some level, so he can't use his powers on, for instance, a pure diesel engine or an analog lock (though digital locks are fair game).
Additionally, he can't use this power to create something he doesn't understand the principles behind. For instance, he can't just whip up a time machine out of nowhere, because he doesn't yet know how time travel works. If he does understand the mechanism in principle, though, he doesn't have to think too hard about it in practice - this is what I mean by Perfect Kludge. In effect that just means Qubit can slap new machinery together on the fly with remarkable speed, and it'll still work just as he wants it to.
He can also use this power to modify or repair existing technology, or to disassemble it (almost instantaneously). His power leans heavily toward the hardware side of things, but if the device would need programming or an interface for basic operation, it'll have it. More advanced software, he has to type up the old-fashioned way. He can't hack into a computer with his mind or anything like that.
This power has a maximum range of about 10 meters. It doesn't work directly on nanomachines, but can be used to make devices that interact with them.
Teleportal Devices. Qubit's signature invention is quantum teleportation. Using a wrist-worn control device, he's able to open portals of varying size just about anywhere on Earth. These can range from millimeters to meters in diameter, and are freestanding (i.e. they don't need to be attached to a surface, they just sit in midair wherever they're opened). The same technology can be used to create portals large enough to fit spaceships through, or that can bridge planets or even dimensions, but either application requires a device that's far too big to carry.
How this technology's actually supposed to work is kind of handwaved in canon (because comic books I guess), but a few features and limitations are fairly consistent across the board. Firstly, there's the process of working out where the portals are going to open. Qubit appears to have this down to an art - he can open them quickly and precisely enough to intercept a bullet after it's left the gun, if he knows in advance that's what he's going to do. Given that he knows how to make tech that interacts with psionics, it seems likely that there's a psionic component to the targeting; that is, his device can, to a limited extent, intuit where he wants the portal to appear, and convert that into usable coordinates. He can also use this intuitive function to find specific people, even if he doesn't know where they are geographically, though it has to be someone he's personally met and is familiar with. The device is calibrated specifically to Qubit's brain, so anyone else trying to use it would have to enter their desired target manually.
The targeting algorithm automatically avoids opening portals on top of people or solid objects, but he can override this limitation if needed. For example, he can beam objects into people's bodies, or even "disassemble" them, separating parts of their body relative to local space, even though the person is technically still in one piece. (At one point he even reroutes the signals from someone's nervous system "to Neptune and back" to slow them down, but since that makes no sense I'm not going to let him do it here.) If a portal closes while something's partway through it, though, it will be severed along the plane of contact.
He can use this device to put up a "teleport shield," as well - a spherical field that relocates anything that impacts it to the other side of him. However, it's not designed for this application, so using it as a shield will overload the device in under a minute. Trying to open or maintain more than a handful of portals at once will also rapidly overload the device (i.e. it literally explodes).
The quantum nature of Qubit's teleportals means they're all linked to a single, extremely complex wave function. If this wave function collapses, so does every portal linked to it, instantaneously and permanently (all linked devices become completely useless). Qubit can do this from his watch, but only as an extreme last resort; once it's collapsed, he has to establish a new function completely from scratch before he can use any teleportals again. This is an uncertain process that can take months or years to complete, even for him.
He can use his technokinesis to duplicate this technology on the fly, albeit on a less powerful scale. Any secondary quantum jumpers created in this manner can only be used to open or close one portal at a time, one end of which must be within a few meters of the jumper, and the portal only comes in one size (big enough for an average-sized person or two to comfortably walk through). These have a shorter absolute range than his personal device. If his personal device is lost or destroyed, he can recreate it, too, but I'm going to say this would take several days to a week due to the complex programming involved.
He's also invented a prototype umbrella that uses his portal tech to send the rain falling on it to drought-ridden areas. Seriously. That's all it does.
Psionic Shielding. Qubit's rogues' gallery included at least one wicked powerful telepath, and apparently psychics gave him enough trouble that at some point he invented psionic shielding and implanted a significant amount of it in his brain. As a result, he's effectively immune to telepathy, mind control, and other psionic attacks. There was also at least one prominent telepath on his own team, though, so he included the ability to whitelist interactions on a case-by-case basis. Basically, the only way someone can get into Qubit's head is with his express permission, and nobody gets an all-access pass.
A weakness of this shielding is that it's still possible to steal information by parsing the latent electric signals in his brain, if you can perceive those and know how to parse them, but he's aware of this issue. (For reference, the difference between psychic access and the brain-signal method is like the difference between a software interface and chunks of unfiltered binary code in uncertain order. The Plutonian was able to glean useful info from it, but he's sort of a special case.)
At one point he actually traps someone in his head who tries to possess him, and in doing so gains access to that person's entire knowledge base and intellectual capacity. Since this "prison" will be vacant once regained (Modeus is an appable character in his own right), he could conceivably trap someone else the same way. It's purely defensive, though; he can only do it to someone who forces entry into his mind.
CHARACTER: AU SECTION
AU NAME: Michael Quinn
AU AGE: 30
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES: He wears glasses now. That's it.
AU NAME: Michael Quinn
AU AGE: 30
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES: He wears glasses now. That's it.
AU HISTORY:
Michael was born and raised in upstate New York. His family is Jewish, and he has one older brother. He had a completely normal childhood during which he developed no superpowers whatsoever. That said, he was still extremely gifted, especially when it came to math, science, and computing, but he underachieved his way through most of his school years. Being smart was "uncool," so he hid his intelligence in favor of popularity. He was still a voracious reader, but only in private; if his friends found out he was a secret nerd, he'd never live it down.
This, as you might imagine, was completely unsustainable. In his last year or two of high school, he had a huge identity crisis, realizing that he'd spent his whole life playing dumb, and if he was surrounded by idiots all the time, he had only himself to blame. He pulled a hard 180, withdrawing from his social life almost completely and throwing himself hard into academia. This phase lasted long enough to get him admitted to a prestigious engineering university.
Unfortunately, when he actually applied himself, he outpaced all his classmates and even some of his instructors, and college rapidly bored him to tears. For his sophomore year, he tried studying abroad in the UK to shake things up, and that's when he discovered his hitherto untapped sense of adventure. On little more than a whim, he dropped out of school and went backpacking across Europe without telling anyone. This only lasted about a year before he ran out of money, got horribly ill and had to be flown back to the US, but he had a good time nonetheless.
Following that, he drifted between cities and jobs for a while before finally settling down in Recollé, where he breezed through some technical certifications and started working in IT and tech support. Currently, he works for the IT department at Recollé University. Of course, tech-illiterate people drive him up a wall, but hey, it pays the bills.
In his spare time, he writes. So far he's published a handful of sci-fi short stories, developing a theme of man's relationship with technology, and they're actually pretty insightful, if kind of preachy. He's been working on a novel for several years, but he keeps getting preoccupied with the research rather than actually writing it, so it's been slow going. He maintains a blog where he mostly vents about Big Issues that make him angry.
(Also, he has recently adopted a pitbull that was rescued from an abusive situation, and is working on rehabbing him. The dog's name is Pluto because of course it is. Do not pet Pluto. He bites.)
AU PERSONALITY:
Michael is still a genius, but he's much less accomplished than his OU counterpart, because he doesn't have a superpower that compensates for his general lack of patience. He reads a lot, especially nonfiction, so he has a strong theoretical knowledge base, but not a lot of practical scientific experience. His specialty is networking and computer security, and he can code circles around most of his coworkers, but for anything else, he generally needs to consult the manual.
Like Qubit, he's insecure about his intelligence, often feeling like he has something to prove. However, since he hasn't actually done much that objectively proves him yet, this typically manifests in self-deprecation rather than over-the-top arrogance. As a result, he tends to come off more unconfident than egotistical... most of the time.
He has an intense creative drive, and in fact has had some of the same ideas for new technologies as his OU counterpart, but where Qubit went on to actually invent those things, Michael writes about them instead. This gives him room to explore the potential consequences of introducing advanced technology to an unprepared world (and spoiler alert, there's a lot of apocalypse and dystopia in his work). Sooo he'll probably have better foresight this time around, and his writing forces him to be a little more in touch with his emotional side, too. Also, writing sci-fi in particular has made speculation, connecting dots, and extrapolating events to their logical conclusions come easily to him (which is funny, because he also hates conspiracy theorists).
His morals are still a little complicated. Michael's never really been in the public eye (or at least, no more than any other guy with Big Opinions and a blog), or set himself up as a Light on the Hill, so he doesn't hold himself to the impossibly high moral standard that Qubit does. He does want to make the world a better place, and he does give in to anger at times, but both the good and the bad in him are a lot more moderate, in both intensity and outcome. Best case, he rescues a dog, or encourages people to start roof gardens. Worst case, he gets banned from a forum or three. His relative lack of power and influence mitigates the good and harm he's capable of... at least, for now.
Michael was born and raised in upstate New York. His family is Jewish, and he has one older brother. He had a completely normal childhood during which he developed no superpowers whatsoever. That said, he was still extremely gifted, especially when it came to math, science, and computing, but he underachieved his way through most of his school years. Being smart was "uncool," so he hid his intelligence in favor of popularity. He was still a voracious reader, but only in private; if his friends found out he was a secret nerd, he'd never live it down.
This, as you might imagine, was completely unsustainable. In his last year or two of high school, he had a huge identity crisis, realizing that he'd spent his whole life playing dumb, and if he was surrounded by idiots all the time, he had only himself to blame. He pulled a hard 180, withdrawing from his social life almost completely and throwing himself hard into academia. This phase lasted long enough to get him admitted to a prestigious engineering university.
Unfortunately, when he actually applied himself, he outpaced all his classmates and even some of his instructors, and college rapidly bored him to tears. For his sophomore year, he tried studying abroad in the UK to shake things up, and that's when he discovered his hitherto untapped sense of adventure. On little more than a whim, he dropped out of school and went backpacking across Europe without telling anyone. This only lasted about a year before he ran out of money, got horribly ill and had to be flown back to the US, but he had a good time nonetheless.
Following that, he drifted between cities and jobs for a while before finally settling down in Recollé, where he breezed through some technical certifications and started working in IT and tech support. Currently, he works for the IT department at Recollé University. Of course, tech-illiterate people drive him up a wall, but hey, it pays the bills.
In his spare time, he writes. So far he's published a handful of sci-fi short stories, developing a theme of man's relationship with technology, and they're actually pretty insightful, if kind of preachy. He's been working on a novel for several years, but he keeps getting preoccupied with the research rather than actually writing it, so it's been slow going. He maintains a blog where he mostly vents about Big Issues that make him angry.
(Also, he has recently adopted a pitbull that was rescued from an abusive situation, and is working on rehabbing him. The dog's name is Pluto because of course it is. Do not pet Pluto. He bites.)
AU PERSONALITY:
Michael is still a genius, but he's much less accomplished than his OU counterpart, because he doesn't have a superpower that compensates for his general lack of patience. He reads a lot, especially nonfiction, so he has a strong theoretical knowledge base, but not a lot of practical scientific experience. His specialty is networking and computer security, and he can code circles around most of his coworkers, but for anything else, he generally needs to consult the manual.
Like Qubit, he's insecure about his intelligence, often feeling like he has something to prove. However, since he hasn't actually done much that objectively proves him yet, this typically manifests in self-deprecation rather than over-the-top arrogance. As a result, he tends to come off more unconfident than egotistical... most of the time.
He has an intense creative drive, and in fact has had some of the same ideas for new technologies as his OU counterpart, but where Qubit went on to actually invent those things, Michael writes about them instead. This gives him room to explore the potential consequences of introducing advanced technology to an unprepared world (and spoiler alert, there's a lot of apocalypse and dystopia in his work). Sooo he'll probably have better foresight this time around, and his writing forces him to be a little more in touch with his emotional side, too. Also, writing sci-fi in particular has made speculation, connecting dots, and extrapolating events to their logical conclusions come easily to him (which is funny, because he also hates conspiracy theorists).
His morals are still a little complicated. Michael's never really been in the public eye (or at least, no more than any other guy with Big Opinions and a blog), or set himself up as a Light on the Hill, so he doesn't hold himself to the impossibly high moral standard that Qubit does. He does want to make the world a better place, and he does give in to anger at times, but both the good and the bad in him are a lot more moderate, in both intensity and outcome. Best case, he rescues a dog, or encourages people to start roof gardens. Worst case, he gets banned from a forum or three. His relative lack of power and influence mitigates the good and harm he's capable of... at least, for now.