![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
application | tu shanshu
Player Information:
Name: Zed
Age: 24
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
Chatvert
Other Characters Played: Gene Khan, Jackie Ma; most recent AC is here
Character Information:
Name: Deon Wilson
Canon: Chappie
Canon Point: Riiiiight when his consciousness is being transferred from his dying body to the prototype Scout droid, BECAUSE I’M AN ASSHOLE.
Age: 24
Reference Links: Wikipedia.
Setting: Johannesburg, 2016. Due to the rampant crime in the city and the deaths of many officers, the police force has opted to contract with weapons manufacturer Tetravaal to construct a force of indestructible police robots (as seen in Neill Blomkamp’s 2004 short film/fictional advertisement that Chappie grew out of, Tetra Vaal.)
Mostly, it resembles the real world of 2015, with of course the existence of both combat-ready androids and AI smart enough to pilot them. Johannesburg is more of a dystopian wretched hive of scum and villainy than it is in real life, which necessitates the police droids in the first place.
Tetravaal itself is a South African defense contractor with an international employee base; it is headed by an American, Michelle Bradley, and two of its star engineers, Deon Wilson and Vincent Moore, are respectively British and Australian. It’s headquartered outside of Johannesburg, and seems to be the fictional counterpart to the real-world corporation Denel - with the exception that Tetravaal is publicly-traded and not state-owned. Tetravaal stocks what are recognizable as Denel firearms in its armory, so it’s not a stretch to imagine that they manufacture those weapons in this universe.
(Tetravaal also has the worst opsec in the goddamned universe, but that is a subject for another time.)
Their police droids, called the Scouts, are built to take a lot of punishment - and boy, do they ever take some punishment. Scout 22, the droid that later becomes Chappie, is introduced as it’s being taken back to Tetravaal for repairs on a stretcher, looking very beat-up, because “they used him as a speed bump!” The robot is then repaired and sent off on a raid, where it takes a direct rocket-propelled grenade hit to the chassis, fusing the battery to it and making the droid a write-off.
Another Tetravaal project is a big bad battle mech called the Moose, the brainchild of Deon’s office rival, Vincent Moore. Moore distrusts AI in general and is annoyed at the positive reception of Deon’s Scouts, and his own machine is piloted by a human operator wearing a neural interface helmet. Vincent claims a human-operated police droid would be more humane...but not if the human operating it is a bloodthirsty whackjob, which. Well. Let’s just say Vincent gets the opportunity to take his Moose out for a test drive in the climax, and it’s not pretty.
In the world of Chappie, the South African rap/rave/genre-defying group Die Antwoord are gangsters hiding out in Soweto, but also at one point they might have been the musicians also? There’s a lot of Die Antwoord references, including Ninja and Yolandi wearing shirts with their names and the name of the band on them, and their music is used interchangeably as diegetic and non-diegetic music, and honestly, don’t think about it too hard.
Ninja and Yolandi, and their fellow gangster Amerika, are in debt to a terrifying gangster named Hippo after a botched drug heist, and they owe him 20 million rand (about $1.6 million USD). If they don’t pay him off within a week, he will come and kill them.
This is where Deon comes in. Yolandi has the brilliant idea that the police robots must have some sort of remote to turn them off (they absolutely do not) and the equally brilliant idea to kidnap the man who created the robots because he would know how to disable them (he absolutely does not). Luckily for them - and luckily for Deon, otherwise he would have been killed for not being able to do what they wanted - in the back of his van he’s got the busted remains of Scout 22 and some spare robot limbs, which he “borrowed” from Tetravaal (remember what I said about their shitty opsec)? The gangsters decide that having their own Scout programmed to help them would be just as good as turning off the police Scouts, and they force Deon to upload his AI software to Scout 22.
(Interestingly - the reason Scout 22 was broken in the first place was because Hippo was the one who had shot the robot in the chest with an RPG. So, honestly, this whole movie is Hippo’s fault.)
He sets up Scout 22 with his new program, and begins teaching the robot, named “Chappie” by Yolandi, before Ninja throws him out of the gangsters’ lair and threatens him with death. Deon keeps returning to teach Chappie right from wrong, and the gangsters teach Chappie to commit crimes by pretending they aren’t crimes, per se, like that stabbing people is just “helping them go to sleep”. The rest of the film is the struggle for Chappie’s soul and Chappie’s own race against time to figure out how to transfer his self to a new Scout body instead of his own, doomed one. Later, Chappie ends up stealing and cannibalizing a prototype Moose neural helmet from Tetravaal, and figuring out how to copy and transfer the ineffable thing known as consciousness like it’s data. And not just from robot to robot, either.
Personality: Deon is, unquestionably, a robotics genius. Deon is also, just as unquestionably, an enormous dork.
He’s a bit prone to sesquipedalian loquaciousness; he attempts to explain his organic artificial intelligence program while under extreme duress, and even being threatened with mutilation and death isn’t enough to get him to shut up about his project or to stop tetchily correcting the gangsters about his robots. He talks more than he should, leading him to get menaced at multiple points during the film (which really ought to be renamed Deon Wilson and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Week) - first by Vincent, who responds to his immediately-walked-back quip of “Engineer? I thought you were a soldier,” by slamming Deon into his desk and jamming his (unloaded) gun into Deon’s cheek, and later by Amerika, when Deon asks him to count his narcotics somewhere else instead of in front of Chappie and is threatened with a shanking for his pains. He gets a little tongue-tied when he’s angry and scared (“You’re a terrible - shitty person!”), though usually, his insults tend towards the highbrow (“He’s smarter than you’ll ever be, you Philistine!”) whether his targets will understand the sick burn or not.
Deon has a bit of a temper - when things don't go his way and he's frustrated, he has a tendency to kick walls and practically shove everything off of tables in his anger. (He doesn't actually flip a table, but I imagine that wouldn't be far off if things got really dire.) He's somewhat arrogant and often takes up a holier-than-thou attitude, viewing himself as far intellectually and morally superior to the criminals that have taken possession of Chappie and looking down on them as a result. There’s also a sense of entitlement to him (e.g. taking the busted Scout because he wants it) that is basically beaten out of him by the end of the film. He begs to be spared when he’s first threatened by the gangsters who kidnap him; towards the end of the movie, when he’s dying from a wound sustained in what amounts to a carjacking, he begs Chappie to not bother with saving him at his creation’s own expense.
Deon is incredibly driven and passionate about what he does. He spends entire nights (most nights, it’s implied) practically shotgunning Red Bull to work on his AI pet project, and struggles to contain his excitement when pitching the same project to his unenthused boss when he’s finally cracked it. He’s generally pretty twitchy and animated, usually chewing on the end of a ballpoint pen while he works, but that may be a result of the fact that his bloodstream is about 90% Red Bull. He’s also more than just a gifted programmer; it is implied that not only did he code the AI for the Scouts, he had a hand in actually designing the robots themselves, while recognized as the project lead. Deon is still young - in his early-to-mid twenties, and Vincent calls him “practically a baby” - so it can be inferred that he’s somewhat of a prodigy in the robotics field.
He’s friendly and agreeable, seeming to have a good relationship with his co-workers (excluding Vincent), who all come by to congratulate him when the South African police order one hundred additional Scouts for the force. However, he seems to be lacking in interpersonal skills or at least isn’t that interested in friendships outside of work, because he has two robot buddies that he talks to at home: Dexter, who cleans up after him, brings him Red Bull, and activates the electric kettle, and Rory, a stationary robot kept near his home computer setup that he converses with (and may use for rubber duck debugging). A social life would take time away from his AI project, after all! In Keeliai, now that he’s completed his project, he ought to be more willing to socialize.
He has a strict moral code, differentiating right and wrong in clear categories (at least, at the beginning of the movie, and there’s somewhat of a gradient as the story progresses). He tries to impart this moral code to Chappie, telling the robot that he shouldn’t commit crimes and that you can’t break a promise once you’ve made it. Deon holds to this himself; once he makes the deal with the gangsters to teach Chappie, that’s exactly what he does, at great risk to life and limb, without calling the police on them. He takes his role as teacher and de facto parent seriously, bringing the robot such things as a stuffed bear, a deeply relevant picture book, and an easel and paints. He also looks up information on early childhood development, trying to better understand how his AI is going to learn and function in the world...and is utterly blown away by how quickly Chappie has evolved upon seeing the robot again later.
However, he’s not immune from doing things that apparently violate his own moral code in the service of science or what he considers to be the greater good. He’s respectful of authority, but not too respectful. When he goes to pitch his proper AI to Michelle Bradley, the CEO of Tetravaal, she waves him off because a publicly-traded weapons manufacturer doesn’t need a robot that can write poetry. Of course, he opts to steal the Scout droid that he’d intended to test his program on anyway, as well as the all-important guardkey needed to install new software on the robot, because he thinks he knows better. He threatens Ninja with calling the police for mistreating Chappie - Ninja points out that Deon would be in far more trouble for stealing the police robot from his employer in the first place, which actually makes him back down. Towards the climax, he also gets into Tetravaal’s armory and steals weaponry to furnish Chappie and the gangsters with so they can defend themselves against the Moose - though he never uses the weapons himself. When Vincent notices the guardkey is missing and asks if he can borrow it from him, not letting on that he knows it had been installed in the missing Scout 22, Deon tells him, straight-faced, that it’s against the rules. So he’s a bit of a hypocrite, too, when it suits him. His words are thrown back in his face when he tells Chappie that he can’t learn what consciousness is because it’s ineffable; Chappie quite reasonably responds that Deon had told him not to let anyone tell him he couldn’t do something.
Additionally? Deon has literally no common sense. He’s stubborn as hell and seems to have little regard for his own safety, as he mouths off to Ninja and Amerika in their hideout, both of whom are armed when he’s sassing them, and keeps coming back to teach Chappie even after Ninja had shot at him and told him if he ever saw Deon back there he’d kill him. He ended up finding somewhat of an ally on that front in Yolandi, which emboldened him to keep trying to teach his creation despite the consequences.
There’s some impulsivity and rashness to him as well as the stubbornness; aside from stealing the busted droid and the guardkey, he runs out to his company van and brings a rubber chicken for Chappie to play with, and runs back to the hideout, which makes Amerika suspicious that he has a weapon and nearly gets him shot (just why he has a rubber chicken in his car in the first place is never explained, but it’s further proof that he’s an enormous dork). He later, seemingly very ill at ease, goes and buys a revolver after Ninja threatens him the second time, and brandishes it to get Ninja to back down and let him take Chappie to Tetravaal to fix Vincent’s disabling firmware push that crippled the Scouts. It is unclear whether he actually would have fired the gun or if it was even loaded; he may resort to violence in desperation, but he may just as well bluff and hope he has a good poker face.
Deon thinks he’s a good person, overall, even if he’s done some questionable things in the name of science. He’s proud of his Scouts, viewing them as necessary life-saving tools for the South African police, and views the AI that becomes Chappie as his magnum opus, something he’s willing to sacrifice his life for in the end, to ensure that Chappie survives.
Appearance:
It is potentially worth noting that his PB, Dev Patel, is 6’2”. So he’s a nerd, but he’s a tall nerd.
Abilities:
“You’re practically a baby yourself, aren’t ya?”: Deon’s a robotics prodigy, recruited by Tetravaal while he was still at Oxford, and attending university early for all that, given his age and the fact that the Scout program seems to have been in place for about two years (per Vincent’s conversation with Michelle about his funding being cut). He has been working on his own AI project for 945 days, which are implied to be largely consecutive - at minimum, two and a half years, likely closer to three or four years if nights where he actually sleepsor crashes out of exhaustion are taken into account.
Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto: Deon is a brilliant programmer, seeing as he’s the first in his universe to create a seed AI with a hard takeoff. He also had a large part in designing and building the Scouts, showing that he understands physical principles of engineering as well as computer science. The Tetravaal technicians call him down to the maintenance bay to get his opinion on whether Scout 22 can/should be salvaged, which illustrates that he’s seen as the authority on the Scout droids' construction as well as their coding. He has also coded and constructed his own robots, at home, for fun, because he is a nerd. Given that he has created a program that can establish consciousness in a robot, it’s a fair bet that he’s also a student of the computational theory of mind and can hold his own in a discussion about consciousness and ethics (whether it pertains to robots or not).
Multilinguish/Weeabot: Deon can understand a fair amount of Afrikaans, but he can barely speak it. Additionally, given that the design of the Scouts, particularly their “rabbit ears”, is an homage to Briareos Hecatonchires from the Appleseed franchise, per Blomkamp, it would only make sense that in-universe the design was inspired by Briareos as well, leading to the conclusion that Deon is a fan of the animes, and probably knows a little Japanese as a result - enough to hold a rudimentary conversation, and probably talk about robots some.
Abilities that will only be of note if he’s canon-updated (and if the canon update mechanic turns him into a robot):
Indestructible Robot Gangsta #1, Son!: Deon’s consciousness has been uploaded from his dying body into a robot; specifically, the safety-orange prototype Scout droid that had been hanging in the Moose bay. This will come with the following benefits and restrictions:
Inventory:
x1 set of clothing - shirt, tie, glasses, slacks, socks, shoes, underwear
x1 Tetravaal ID badge on retractable holder (front / back)
x1 Webley .38 Mk III revolver and small case of ammunition
x1 wallet - contents include South African Code B driving license and approximately 1,000 ZAR (roughly equivalent to 80 USD)
x1 cell phone, Sony Ericsson G502
x1stupid calculator watch Casio Data Bank DBC-32-1A
x1 pen, ballpoint
Suitability: At first, Deon’s going to be in the grip of both some heavy psychological/metaphysical shit and a Red Bull comedown the likes of which has never been seen before on Konryu...and also bleeding out from a visceral gunshot wound, but that’s besides the point. Once he gets healed up and acclimated to Keeliai, though, he’ll enthusiastically go to work for the Metalworkers (and avoid the hell out of the Snakes because gangs? NO THANKS). He’d earnestly attempt to get the kedan and the Foreigners to work more closely together, with none of Gene’s guile or ulterior motives, and - if he gets canon updated and the update includes him becoming a robot - he can safely explore places that might be too dangerous for organic life-forms (cough cough Kerro Raris cough cough). Even if he doesn’t, he can work to construct robots that can explore the wasteland, because robots are the answer to everything. He’s personable enough to attempt to get along with even the prickliest characters and NPCs, even potentially make friends. (Especially if his new friends are just as jazzed about robots!) Just...don’t ask him to try and make anything like the Moose, okay, Zanru? He’ll have several objections to that.
In-Character Samples:
Third Person (Prose):
At least, Deon thought dimly, the bullet had gone entirely through him. He remembered hearing somewhere that no exit wound meant that they’d have to dig around until they found the bullet embedded in something important, or floating around and causing more damage to one’s internal organs with each movement and jostle. It was probably the best outcome of being shot, if one had to be shot at all. Not like he’d had a choice in the matter.
He stayed slumped against the wall, hands pressed to the wound, trying to stem the flow of blood from either end and not succeeding overly well. His shirt was soaked through, utterly ruined, and he’d lost so much blood his heart was pounding like a kettledrum in his ears, his head swimming. His own heartbeat was slowly killing him.
The only reason he was aware of briefly blacking out was that Chappie had suddenly returned from chasing after Vincent and was helping him to his feet, guiding him to the chair and console for the Moose. But there was no Moose now; Vincent’s pride and joy had been blown to smithereens, the only prototype destroyed beyond repair. All that remained was the control console and the neural helmet.
He wavered out of consciousness again, blacking back in when he heard Chappie talking to him. “Don’t go to sleep, Deon. Don’t go to the next place.”
The next place. Deon wondered where Chappie had learned about an afterlife. Yolandi must have told him - not Ninja or Amerika, that was for sure, even if they had informed Chappie about his own mortality. They hadn’t seemed overly concerned with Chappie’s education in any way other than criminal. But Yolandi had gone to ‘the next place’ now, and so had Amerika; the man’s brutal murder by the Moose - by Vincent piloting the Moose - was going to cause Deon nightmares, he was sure, if he managed to survive long enough to dream again.
He wondered if Chappie had actually killed Vincent in his pursuit of revenge for the deaths of his ‘family’. He decided not to ask, and not just because talking was a supreme effort. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Besides, he thought with sudden dark humor, if Vincent’s still alive, he’ll kill me for getting blood all over his chair. The thought almost made him laugh, but his wound hurt too much, and laughter would make him lose even more blood. He decided not to risk it. He had little enough left, after all.
It took him until Chappie approached with the neural helmet for him to rouse himself enough to object to the process. A problem had arisen - there was only one spare Scout, the orange-painted prototype Deon had spent so much time crafting and perfecting before sending the model to mass-production. Deon would much prefer that Chappie save himself with the spare rather than bothering with him. I brought you into the world, and it wasn’t just to die. Leave me be. I’ve done my part. You’re here now. You’re alive. And I want you to stay that way.
But Chappie wouldn’t brook any argument on the subject, securing the helmet on Deon’s head and retrieving the prototype Scout from its hangings. Deon was dimly proud of his creation’s selflessness, and too weak to protest more. He wasn’t even sure if it would work, or if he’d die, or worse - if he’d die but the prototype Scout would think it was him. That would be uniquely morbid: a robot that thought it was a dead person. Not that I’d be alive to object.
Time was running out. The police were attempting to break into the robotics bay, in pursuit of the rogue Scout that was trying to save his life. He could feel himself getting even weaker, dizzier, slipping away, and holding onto awareness was a battle that he knew he was losing. He’d known in some way that the wound would be fatal ever since that gangster’s bullet had taken him through the abdomen; it was a testament to his sheer bloody-minded stubbornness that he’d managed to hold on even this long.
He realized that he couldn’t see; for a moment he wasn’t sure if he’d closed his eyes, before realizing that the neural helmet for the Moose covered them, with barely any outside light leaking in. Usually it would show the camera feed and HUD for the Moose, he knew, but there was no output on the screen. It was blank. Empty. That was worrisome.
Quite suddenly he was seized by fear that Chappie’s brilliant solution wouldn’t work after all. There had been a brief moment of hope raised - he really didn’t want to die - but the idea of transferring his consciousness to a Scout was almost unthinkably impossible. At least if I die, I won’t know it failed, he thought grimly.
Chappie asked him if he was ready. It had to be now or never if this plan was going to work at all. With the last of his strength, he gave the robot - the being he gave life to, now attempting to give life right back to his creator - a thumbs-up. Go.
He heard the rapid movement of metallic fingers on a keyboard.
And he abruptly knew no more.
Network:
[Deon’s staring intently at something just below the camera - so, on the console screen - the end of a ballpoint pen in his mouth.
Then, ruefully:] I don’t suppose these things are USB-compatible, are they? Just my luck. Loads of data, and no way to access it. [He holds up an external hard drive, labeled with his name, in the camera’s field of view.]
...would it be too much to hope that anyone’s got a laptop I can borrow? Just for a few hours. I want to make sure nothing on here got corrupted. It’s going to drive me mental if I can’t find out.
Special Notes: Due to the game mechanic that the character’s soul is drawn from their world, and that the canon update process notes that “changes to the character’s body such as injuries and aging” will be preserved upon their return to Keeliai, would the canon update process transform Deon into his robot body, or leave him as a human? Given that the theme of consciousness and souls is so heavily woven into the movie, this really is an important question. I can work with it either way, of course - he’s going to be messed up no matter what - but it’ll be good to know one way or the other so I can plot for futuretrauma shenanigans.
Name: Zed
Age: 24
Contact:
Other Characters Played: Gene Khan, Jackie Ma; most recent AC is here
Character Information:
Name: Deon Wilson
Canon: Chappie
Canon Point: Riiiiight when his consciousness is being transferred from his dying body to the prototype Scout droid, BECAUSE I’M AN ASSHOLE.
Age: 24
Reference Links: Wikipedia.
Setting: Johannesburg, 2016. Due to the rampant crime in the city and the deaths of many officers, the police force has opted to contract with weapons manufacturer Tetravaal to construct a force of indestructible police robots (as seen in Neill Blomkamp’s 2004 short film/fictional advertisement that Chappie grew out of, Tetra Vaal.)
Mostly, it resembles the real world of 2015, with of course the existence of both combat-ready androids and AI smart enough to pilot them. Johannesburg is more of a dystopian wretched hive of scum and villainy than it is in real life, which necessitates the police droids in the first place.
Tetravaal itself is a South African defense contractor with an international employee base; it is headed by an American, Michelle Bradley, and two of its star engineers, Deon Wilson and Vincent Moore, are respectively British and Australian. It’s headquartered outside of Johannesburg, and seems to be the fictional counterpart to the real-world corporation Denel - with the exception that Tetravaal is publicly-traded and not state-owned. Tetravaal stocks what are recognizable as Denel firearms in its armory, so it’s not a stretch to imagine that they manufacture those weapons in this universe.
(Tetravaal also has the worst opsec in the goddamned universe, but that is a subject for another time.)
Their police droids, called the Scouts, are built to take a lot of punishment - and boy, do they ever take some punishment. Scout 22, the droid that later becomes Chappie, is introduced as it’s being taken back to Tetravaal for repairs on a stretcher, looking very beat-up, because “they used him as a speed bump!” The robot is then repaired and sent off on a raid, where it takes a direct rocket-propelled grenade hit to the chassis, fusing the battery to it and making the droid a write-off.
Another Tetravaal project is a big bad battle mech called the Moose, the brainchild of Deon’s office rival, Vincent Moore. Moore distrusts AI in general and is annoyed at the positive reception of Deon’s Scouts, and his own machine is piloted by a human operator wearing a neural interface helmet. Vincent claims a human-operated police droid would be more humane...but not if the human operating it is a bloodthirsty whackjob, which. Well. Let’s just say Vincent gets the opportunity to take his Moose out for a test drive in the climax, and it’s not pretty.
In the world of Chappie, the South African rap/rave/genre-defying group Die Antwoord are gangsters hiding out in Soweto, but also at one point they might have been the musicians also? There’s a lot of Die Antwoord references, including Ninja and Yolandi wearing shirts with their names and the name of the band on them, and their music is used interchangeably as diegetic and non-diegetic music, and honestly, don’t think about it too hard.
Ninja and Yolandi, and their fellow gangster Amerika, are in debt to a terrifying gangster named Hippo after a botched drug heist, and they owe him 20 million rand (about $1.6 million USD). If they don’t pay him off within a week, he will come and kill them.
This is where Deon comes in. Yolandi has the brilliant idea that the police robots must have some sort of remote to turn them off (they absolutely do not) and the equally brilliant idea to kidnap the man who created the robots because he would know how to disable them (he absolutely does not). Luckily for them - and luckily for Deon, otherwise he would have been killed for not being able to do what they wanted - in the back of his van he’s got the busted remains of Scout 22 and some spare robot limbs, which he “borrowed” from Tetravaal (remember what I said about their shitty opsec)? The gangsters decide that having their own Scout programmed to help them would be just as good as turning off the police Scouts, and they force Deon to upload his AI software to Scout 22.
(Interestingly - the reason Scout 22 was broken in the first place was because Hippo was the one who had shot the robot in the chest with an RPG. So, honestly, this whole movie is Hippo’s fault.)
He sets up Scout 22 with his new program, and begins teaching the robot, named “Chappie” by Yolandi, before Ninja throws him out of the gangsters’ lair and threatens him with death. Deon keeps returning to teach Chappie right from wrong, and the gangsters teach Chappie to commit crimes by pretending they aren’t crimes, per se, like that stabbing people is just “helping them go to sleep”. The rest of the film is the struggle for Chappie’s soul and Chappie’s own race against time to figure out how to transfer his self to a new Scout body instead of his own, doomed one. Later, Chappie ends up stealing and cannibalizing a prototype Moose neural helmet from Tetravaal, and figuring out how to copy and transfer the ineffable thing known as consciousness like it’s data. And not just from robot to robot, either.
Personality: Deon is, unquestionably, a robotics genius. Deon is also, just as unquestionably, an enormous dork.
He’s a bit prone to sesquipedalian loquaciousness; he attempts to explain his organic artificial intelligence program while under extreme duress, and even being threatened with mutilation and death isn’t enough to get him to shut up about his project or to stop tetchily correcting the gangsters about his robots. He talks more than he should, leading him to get menaced at multiple points during the film (which really ought to be renamed Deon Wilson and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Week) - first by Vincent, who responds to his immediately-walked-back quip of “Engineer? I thought you were a soldier,” by slamming Deon into his desk and jamming his (unloaded) gun into Deon’s cheek, and later by Amerika, when Deon asks him to count his narcotics somewhere else instead of in front of Chappie and is threatened with a shanking for his pains. He gets a little tongue-tied when he’s angry and scared (“You’re a terrible - shitty person!”), though usually, his insults tend towards the highbrow (“He’s smarter than you’ll ever be, you Philistine!”) whether his targets will understand the sick burn or not.
Deon has a bit of a temper - when things don't go his way and he's frustrated, he has a tendency to kick walls and practically shove everything off of tables in his anger. (He doesn't actually flip a table, but I imagine that wouldn't be far off if things got really dire.) He's somewhat arrogant and often takes up a holier-than-thou attitude, viewing himself as far intellectually and morally superior to the criminals that have taken possession of Chappie and looking down on them as a result. There’s also a sense of entitlement to him (e.g. taking the busted Scout because he wants it) that is basically beaten out of him by the end of the film. He begs to be spared when he’s first threatened by the gangsters who kidnap him; towards the end of the movie, when he’s dying from a wound sustained in what amounts to a carjacking, he begs Chappie to not bother with saving him at his creation’s own expense.
Deon is incredibly driven and passionate about what he does. He spends entire nights (most nights, it’s implied) practically shotgunning Red Bull to work on his AI pet project, and struggles to contain his excitement when pitching the same project to his unenthused boss when he’s finally cracked it. He’s generally pretty twitchy and animated, usually chewing on the end of a ballpoint pen while he works, but that may be a result of the fact that his bloodstream is about 90% Red Bull. He’s also more than just a gifted programmer; it is implied that not only did he code the AI for the Scouts, he had a hand in actually designing the robots themselves, while recognized as the project lead. Deon is still young - in his early-to-mid twenties, and Vincent calls him “practically a baby” - so it can be inferred that he’s somewhat of a prodigy in the robotics field.
He’s friendly and agreeable, seeming to have a good relationship with his co-workers (excluding Vincent), who all come by to congratulate him when the South African police order one hundred additional Scouts for the force. However, he seems to be lacking in interpersonal skills or at least isn’t that interested in friendships outside of work, because he has two robot buddies that he talks to at home: Dexter, who cleans up after him, brings him Red Bull, and activates the electric kettle, and Rory, a stationary robot kept near his home computer setup that he converses with (and may use for rubber duck debugging). A social life would take time away from his AI project, after all! In Keeliai, now that he’s completed his project, he ought to be more willing to socialize.
He has a strict moral code, differentiating right and wrong in clear categories (at least, at the beginning of the movie, and there’s somewhat of a gradient as the story progresses). He tries to impart this moral code to Chappie, telling the robot that he shouldn’t commit crimes and that you can’t break a promise once you’ve made it. Deon holds to this himself; once he makes the deal with the gangsters to teach Chappie, that’s exactly what he does, at great risk to life and limb, without calling the police on them. He takes his role as teacher and de facto parent seriously, bringing the robot such things as a stuffed bear, a deeply relevant picture book, and an easel and paints. He also looks up information on early childhood development, trying to better understand how his AI is going to learn and function in the world...and is utterly blown away by how quickly Chappie has evolved upon seeing the robot again later.
However, he’s not immune from doing things that apparently violate his own moral code in the service of science or what he considers to be the greater good. He’s respectful of authority, but not too respectful. When he goes to pitch his proper AI to Michelle Bradley, the CEO of Tetravaal, she waves him off because a publicly-traded weapons manufacturer doesn’t need a robot that can write poetry. Of course, he opts to steal the Scout droid that he’d intended to test his program on anyway, as well as the all-important guardkey needed to install new software on the robot, because he thinks he knows better. He threatens Ninja with calling the police for mistreating Chappie - Ninja points out that Deon would be in far more trouble for stealing the police robot from his employer in the first place, which actually makes him back down. Towards the climax, he also gets into Tetravaal’s armory and steals weaponry to furnish Chappie and the gangsters with so they can defend themselves against the Moose - though he never uses the weapons himself. When Vincent notices the guardkey is missing and asks if he can borrow it from him, not letting on that he knows it had been installed in the missing Scout 22, Deon tells him, straight-faced, that it’s against the rules. So he’s a bit of a hypocrite, too, when it suits him. His words are thrown back in his face when he tells Chappie that he can’t learn what consciousness is because it’s ineffable; Chappie quite reasonably responds that Deon had told him not to let anyone tell him he couldn’t do something.
Additionally? Deon has literally no common sense. He’s stubborn as hell and seems to have little regard for his own safety, as he mouths off to Ninja and Amerika in their hideout, both of whom are armed when he’s sassing them, and keeps coming back to teach Chappie even after Ninja had shot at him and told him if he ever saw Deon back there he’d kill him. He ended up finding somewhat of an ally on that front in Yolandi, which emboldened him to keep trying to teach his creation despite the consequences.
There’s some impulsivity and rashness to him as well as the stubbornness; aside from stealing the busted droid and the guardkey, he runs out to his company van and brings a rubber chicken for Chappie to play with, and runs back to the hideout, which makes Amerika suspicious that he has a weapon and nearly gets him shot (just why he has a rubber chicken in his car in the first place is never explained, but it’s further proof that he’s an enormous dork). He later, seemingly very ill at ease, goes and buys a revolver after Ninja threatens him the second time, and brandishes it to get Ninja to back down and let him take Chappie to Tetravaal to fix Vincent’s disabling firmware push that crippled the Scouts. It is unclear whether he actually would have fired the gun or if it was even loaded; he may resort to violence in desperation, but he may just as well bluff and hope he has a good poker face.
Deon thinks he’s a good person, overall, even if he’s done some questionable things in the name of science. He’s proud of his Scouts, viewing them as necessary life-saving tools for the South African police, and views the AI that becomes Chappie as his magnum opus, something he’s willing to sacrifice his life for in the end, to ensure that Chappie survives.
Appearance:
 “Hello again!” | |
 Examining one of his creations, the Scout droid. |
 Deon with the prototype Scout droid...which is Deon’s eventual new body. Say hi! |
The prototype Scout, now live with Deon’s consciousness. | |
It is potentially worth noting that his PB, Dev Patel, is 6’2”. So he’s a nerd, but he’s a tall nerd.
Abilities:
“You’re practically a baby yourself, aren’t ya?”: Deon’s a robotics prodigy, recruited by Tetravaal while he was still at Oxford, and attending university early for all that, given his age and the fact that the Scout program seems to have been in place for about two years (per Vincent’s conversation with Michelle about his funding being cut). He has been working on his own AI project for 945 days, which are implied to be largely consecutive - at minimum, two and a half years, likely closer to three or four years if nights where he actually sleeps
Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto: Deon is a brilliant programmer, seeing as he’s the first in his universe to create a seed AI with a hard takeoff. He also had a large part in designing and building the Scouts, showing that he understands physical principles of engineering as well as computer science. The Tetravaal technicians call him down to the maintenance bay to get his opinion on whether Scout 22 can/should be salvaged, which illustrates that he’s seen as the authority on the Scout droids' construction as well as their coding. He has also coded and constructed his own robots, at home, for fun, because he is a nerd. Given that he has created a program that can establish consciousness in a robot, it’s a fair bet that he’s also a student of the computational theory of mind and can hold his own in a discussion about consciousness and ethics (whether it pertains to robots or not).
Multilinguish/Weeabot: Deon can understand a fair amount of Afrikaans, but he can barely speak it. Additionally, given that the design of the Scouts, particularly their “rabbit ears”, is an homage to Briareos Hecatonchires from the Appleseed franchise, per Blomkamp, it would only make sense that in-universe the design was inspired by Briareos as well, leading to the conclusion that Deon is a fan of the animes, and probably knows a little Japanese as a result - enough to hold a rudimentary conversation, and probably talk about robots some.
Abilities that will only be of note if he’s canon-updated (and if the canon update mechanic turns him into a robot):
Indestructible Robot Gangsta #1, Son!: Deon’s consciousness has been uploaded from his dying body into a robot; specifically, the safety-orange prototype Scout droid that had been hanging in the Moose bay. This will come with the following benefits and restrictions:
- Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: And now that you have that Daft Punk song in your head: The Scouts are built for police and military use. They are stronger by far than an ordinary human - Chappie is seen karate-kicking a cinderblock wall into powder and ripping a car door off its hinges and flinging it several meters with no apparent effort. They can also run without stopping.
- “Plug and play.”: The design of the Scouts is modular; if one limb or component gets damaged (e.g. Scout 22’s “ear” at the beginning of the movie), another with the same input design can be slotted in to replace it. This opens up the possibility of interchangeable limbs for different applications. Who wants to see a robodork with a chainsaw arm like Ash in Evil Dead 2? Bearing available supplies in mind, you may yet get your wish.
- “This robot could be smarter than a human!”: Enhanced capacity and processing power would boost Deon’s already considerable intellect and enable him to think and react at superhuman speeds.
- “It’s called a guardkey. You need it to update the software on the droids.”: The Scouts have their firmware encoded with a magical little tiny USB niblet (that’s the technical term) called the guardkey, which is proprietary Tetravaal technology. No guardkey, no alterations - rendering the Scouts essentially unhackable by outside means. Barring a Tetravaal employee with the proper clearance and the administrator password going rogue, of course (looking at you, Vincent).
- “I’m titanium! I’m indestructible!”: The Scouts are built out of heavy-duty titanium alloys, and able to shrug off bullets and small explosions like they’re nothing. The only reason Scout 22 had been written off in the first place is that the direct close-range RPG hit had fused the battery to the chassis so it could not be removed and recharged. Which leads to...
- “What does that say?” “...low battery.”: The downside of being a battery-operated robot is of course that you will need to recharge your batteries every so often. For a Scout, a fully-charged battery will last approximately five or six days. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if Deon had access to the Tetravaal facility, but he’s a ways away from that on Konryu, so he’ll have to work quickly with the rest of the Keeliai Robotics Club to find an alternate method of power.
- “...I don’t know what this means.”: Essentially dying and having your soul uploaded into a robot without the proper time to adequately psychologically prepare for the transition is not something you can just get over with a good night’s sleep. And not just because robots don’t sleep. (Cue obligatory Philip K. Dick joke about androids dreaming of electric sheep.) Deon’s going to be pretty fucked up as he tries to adjust to not needing to eat or sleep, having no sense of smell or taste and no sense of touch beyond recognizing force and heat. He will also have to readjust to his new strength, lack of ability to make real facial expressions, and method of perceiving the world (as the Scouts see the world through a sort of video-camera HUD).
- “You go sleepy-weepy now!”: The Scout droids are briefly vulnerable to EMP blasts, rebooting in a matter of minutes. But a matter of minutes may be all someone with nefarious intentions could need…
- “You’re just a bunch of wires, mate!”: If a Scout is caught unawares by someone who knows what they’re doing, they can break into the panel on the back of the Scout’s head and remove or damage the CPU, essentially rendering them inoperable/“dead”. That would require the aforementioned EMP blast and some power tools to finish the job before the Scout could get back up. So if you want to take robo-Deon out? Now you know how!
Inventory:
x1 set of clothing - shirt, tie, glasses, slacks, socks, shoes, underwear
x1 Tetravaal ID badge on retractable holder (front / back)
x1 Webley .38 Mk III revolver and small case of ammunition
x1 wallet - contents include South African Code B driving license and approximately 1,000 ZAR (roughly equivalent to 80 USD)
x1 cell phone, Sony Ericsson G502
x1
x1 pen, ballpoint
Suitability: At first, Deon’s going to be in the grip of both some heavy psychological/metaphysical shit and a Red Bull comedown the likes of which has never been seen before on Konryu...and also bleeding out from a visceral gunshot wound, but that’s besides the point. Once he gets healed up and acclimated to Keeliai, though, he’ll enthusiastically go to work for the Metalworkers (and avoid the hell out of the Snakes because gangs? NO THANKS). He’d earnestly attempt to get the kedan and the Foreigners to work more closely together, with none of Gene’s guile or ulterior motives, and - if he gets canon updated and the update includes him becoming a robot - he can safely explore places that might be too dangerous for organic life-forms (cough cough Kerro Raris cough cough). Even if he doesn’t, he can work to construct robots that can explore the wasteland, because robots are the answer to everything. He’s personable enough to attempt to get along with even the prickliest characters and NPCs, even potentially make friends. (Especially if his new friends are just as jazzed about robots!) Just...don’t ask him to try and make anything like the Moose, okay, Zanru? He’ll have several objections to that.
In-Character Samples:
Third Person (Prose):
At least, Deon thought dimly, the bullet had gone entirely through him. He remembered hearing somewhere that no exit wound meant that they’d have to dig around until they found the bullet embedded in something important, or floating around and causing more damage to one’s internal organs with each movement and jostle. It was probably the best outcome of being shot, if one had to be shot at all. Not like he’d had a choice in the matter.
He stayed slumped against the wall, hands pressed to the wound, trying to stem the flow of blood from either end and not succeeding overly well. His shirt was soaked through, utterly ruined, and he’d lost so much blood his heart was pounding like a kettledrum in his ears, his head swimming. His own heartbeat was slowly killing him.
The only reason he was aware of briefly blacking out was that Chappie had suddenly returned from chasing after Vincent and was helping him to his feet, guiding him to the chair and console for the Moose. But there was no Moose now; Vincent’s pride and joy had been blown to smithereens, the only prototype destroyed beyond repair. All that remained was the control console and the neural helmet.
He wavered out of consciousness again, blacking back in when he heard Chappie talking to him. “Don’t go to sleep, Deon. Don’t go to the next place.”
The next place. Deon wondered where Chappie had learned about an afterlife. Yolandi must have told him - not Ninja or Amerika, that was for sure, even if they had informed Chappie about his own mortality. They hadn’t seemed overly concerned with Chappie’s education in any way other than criminal. But Yolandi had gone to ‘the next place’ now, and so had Amerika; the man’s brutal murder by the Moose - by Vincent piloting the Moose - was going to cause Deon nightmares, he was sure, if he managed to survive long enough to dream again.
He wondered if Chappie had actually killed Vincent in his pursuit of revenge for the deaths of his ‘family’. He decided not to ask, and not just because talking was a supreme effort. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Besides, he thought with sudden dark humor, if Vincent’s still alive, he’ll kill me for getting blood all over his chair. The thought almost made him laugh, but his wound hurt too much, and laughter would make him lose even more blood. He decided not to risk it. He had little enough left, after all.
It took him until Chappie approached with the neural helmet for him to rouse himself enough to object to the process. A problem had arisen - there was only one spare Scout, the orange-painted prototype Deon had spent so much time crafting and perfecting before sending the model to mass-production. Deon would much prefer that Chappie save himself with the spare rather than bothering with him. I brought you into the world, and it wasn’t just to die. Leave me be. I’ve done my part. You’re here now. You’re alive. And I want you to stay that way.
But Chappie wouldn’t brook any argument on the subject, securing the helmet on Deon’s head and retrieving the prototype Scout from its hangings. Deon was dimly proud of his creation’s selflessness, and too weak to protest more. He wasn’t even sure if it would work, or if he’d die, or worse - if he’d die but the prototype Scout would think it was him. That would be uniquely morbid: a robot that thought it was a dead person. Not that I’d be alive to object.
Time was running out. The police were attempting to break into the robotics bay, in pursuit of the rogue Scout that was trying to save his life. He could feel himself getting even weaker, dizzier, slipping away, and holding onto awareness was a battle that he knew he was losing. He’d known in some way that the wound would be fatal ever since that gangster’s bullet had taken him through the abdomen; it was a testament to his sheer bloody-minded stubbornness that he’d managed to hold on even this long.
He realized that he couldn’t see; for a moment he wasn’t sure if he’d closed his eyes, before realizing that the neural helmet for the Moose covered them, with barely any outside light leaking in. Usually it would show the camera feed and HUD for the Moose, he knew, but there was no output on the screen. It was blank. Empty. That was worrisome.
Quite suddenly he was seized by fear that Chappie’s brilliant solution wouldn’t work after all. There had been a brief moment of hope raised - he really didn’t want to die - but the idea of transferring his consciousness to a Scout was almost unthinkably impossible. At least if I die, I won’t know it failed, he thought grimly.
Chappie asked him if he was ready. It had to be now or never if this plan was going to work at all. With the last of his strength, he gave the robot - the being he gave life to, now attempting to give life right back to his creator - a thumbs-up. Go.
He heard the rapid movement of metallic fingers on a keyboard.
And he abruptly knew no more.
Network:
[Deon’s staring intently at something just below the camera - so, on the console screen - the end of a ballpoint pen in his mouth.
Then, ruefully:] I don’t suppose these things are USB-compatible, are they? Just my luck. Loads of data, and no way to access it. [He holds up an external hard drive, labeled with his name, in the camera’s field of view.]
...would it be too much to hope that anyone’s got a laptop I can borrow? Just for a few hours. I want to make sure nothing on here got corrupted. It’s going to drive me mental if I can’t find out.
Special Notes: Due to the game mechanic that the character’s soul is drawn from their world, and that the canon update process notes that “changes to the character’s body such as injuries and aging” will be preserved upon their return to Keeliai, would the canon update process transform Deon into his robot body, or leave him as a human? Given that the theme of consciousness and souls is so heavily woven into the movie, this really is an important question. I can work with it either way, of course - he’s going to be messed up no matter what - but it’ll be good to know one way or the other so I can plot for future