Hammerstein (robot)

Hammerstein
Publication information
Publisher	IPC Media, Fleetway
First appearance	Starlord 1978
Created by	Pat Mills Kevin O'Neill
In-story information
Alter ego	War Robot Mark III "Hammerstein"
Team affiliations	ABC Warriors
Notable aliases	Old Red Eyes

Hammerstein is a fictional robot created by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill, who first appeared in 1978 as a member of Ro-Busters in the British comic Starlord but is best known as the leader of the ABC Warriors in 2000AD.

Hammerstein is described as a Mark III war droid and was commissioned in the early 21st Century to fight in the Volgan Wars. Hammerstein's right hand is a hammer that is used in hand-to-hand combat while on the back of his left he has a missile launcher. There are tank tracks on his feet to aid mobility. Hammerstein also has two sockets in his waist to attach auxiliary arms but he finds these embarrassing. During combat operations his head has a grim human like face but after he was decommissioned this was replaced with 'civilian' head that features a single square 'eye'.

Years after the Volgan occupation of Western Europe, the United States began a counter-invasion to, officially, liberate the area; unofficially, Earth's oil reserves were running low and they wanted to seize the Volgan's oil reserves. To do this they created expendable robot soldiers - ABC Warriors - designed to wage war across any terrain in any kind of combat, atomic, bacterial or chemical. The first of their number were called Hammersteins. Developed by Howard Quartz's Ro-Busters corporation, they first saw use at Fishguard in 2009, leading the Allied liberation of the United Kingdom.

The first two models were failures. The Mk I robot was an effective killer but could not distinguish between targets on their own, killing civilians as well as Volgan soldiers. When controlled remotely by human soldiers in 2009, the Volgans were able to seize control and redirect them against American forces, driving them back across Wales and causing the American public to protest the use of war-robots. Thousands of Hammersteins were destroyed for fear of Volgan reprogramming. The later Mk II was given an artificial intelligence, with different stories giving different reasons why they failed. In the original Ro-Busters story, that meant Mk II platoons surrendered to the Volgans instead of fighting; in the later ABC Warriors, the MK II's were said to be given "genuine moral values" and had become pacifists, and were killed for trying to convert human soldiers; and in Savage, the MK II's ethical values included the price of collateral damage and they surrendered rather than damage the property values of Virginia Water (a deliberate set-up by the US so the British insurgency groups would be culled).

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