AEGIS

PERSONAL DATA

HISTORY

After the final defeat and believed destruction of the megalomaniac A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) called OMEGA the Enforcers of Justice took its deactivated android body to their headquarters for analysis. Investigating OMEGA's last plot they discovered it had created an identity for itself as George Grey, the founder of computer manufacturing company Omega Computer Products. The team managed to recover a great deal of OMEGA's technology, including the massive computer system that housed the victims of the A.I.'s final plot. The system was brought to the Enforcers' headquarters so they could work on a way to free the people trapped in the virtual world it contained.

When Marie Ste. Claire, Mystère of the Enforcers, lost her job she thought of a way to use OMEGA's inert android body to get some work. Marie secretly reactivated the android body and reestablished the communications system that OMEGA had used as George Grey to talk to the people he had hired to run the day-to-day operations at Omega Computers. The employees had no idea their boss was an A.I. in an android body, they just thought he was eccentric and that was why he almost always talked to them via video phone. Marie created an interface device that let her manipulate the android body like a computerized marionette. Using the "puppet" George Grey, Marie began communicating with Omega Computers' directors (who were glad to hear from their boss again after several weeks of hearing nothing). It was only a few weeks after this that the villain Hi-Rez, hired by the Silver Path to gather information on the Enforcers of Justice, managed to infiltrate the team's headquarters. Before being discovered and chased out, Hi-Rez stumbled across the android OMEGA body. He had encountered OMEGA before and recognized the android body immediately. Hoping to at least cause some trouble for the Enforcers, Hi-Rez did a quick search of the headquarters and found a computer disk labeled "A.I. personality template - Alpha". Thinking it was possibly a backup of OMEGA because of the name (alpha being the first letter in the Greek alphabet, omega being the last), Hi-Rez used the interface device built by Marie to install the personality into the android body. The Enforcers eventually drove Hi-Rez out of their headquarters, but they were unaware of what he had done.

A few days later the Silver Path kidnapped Marie and took her back to their headquarters on the Caribbean island nation of San Monique. The Enforcers went there to rescue Marie, but were met with fierce opposition by the Silver Path's cyborg forces. It was at this point that, back at the team's headquarters, the android Omega body activated itself. This was apparently due to the intervention of one of the Loa, Legba, in response to a call for help from Marie. The "new" Omega donned a costume cobbled together from what he could find around the headquarters and went to San Monique to help the Enforcers. Omega was instrumental in helping the team defeat the Silver Path, but they were too late to save Marie, who had been killed by the Path's leader, LaCroix.

The Enforcers were highly skeptical of this new Omega and immediately began to investigate how the android had been reactivated. They discovered what Hi-Rez had done and Renegade theorized that the new personality had integrated itself with OMEGA's original purpose, which despite its methods had always been to protect humanity. The "Alpha" personality itself had been designed by Mystère and the teenage hackers of Quantum as one of three "virtual super-heroes" they installed in the digitized Zenith City to protect the people trapped there by OMEGA. "Alpha" had been patterned after Superman, meaning that the new Omega's core personality consisted of a desire to protect humanity and the moral code of the Man of Steel.

The Enforcers made Omega a member of the team, mainly to keep an eye on him, but he was also a powerful asset to them. Eventually they reluctantly came to accept him as a teammate. Omega, meanwhile, decided to adopt a secret identity using the George Grey persona his predecessor had used (Omega did not consider himself the same entity as his predecessor, though he could access some of OMEGA's memories and knowledge left in the android body's memory circuits). Since Grey was known to be reclusive and eccentric, this reputation helped cover some of Omega's mistakes as he tried to learn how to act like a real person.

After the disappearance and departure of several of the Enforcers' veteran members Omega found himself thrust into a position of leadership in the team. His lack of experience led him to fall back on some of the methods of his predecessor and he recruited two members of the original Enforcers team to fill the gap left by the absent heroes. This team did not last long, and collapsed entirely with the disappearance of two more members and the near-destruction of Omega's robot body at the hands of Enforcer. A short time later Omega was contacted by Mystère, who had been transformed into a cyberspirit after the death of her physical body. Together they worked on a way to rescue the missing members of the Enforcers. During this time Omega was spending more and more time in the virtual reality of Zenith City, using the Alpha persona his own new programming had been derived from. Eventually he and Mystère were able to transport their missing teammates into Zenith City. The two had devised a means to return the population of Zenith to the real world, and prepared to implement it as soon as they had recovered the missing team members.

To restore everyone in Zenith to the physical world, Mystère would use her new techno-magic abilities to transport everyone from the virtual city into Cyberspace and from there everyone would journey through a series of interdimensional portals back to Earth. Omega (as Alpha) and the trapped members of the Enforcers went through the portals first, setting up signaling devices built by Mystère that would shield the others when they went through. Once the people of Zenith and the heroes were safely on Earth, Omega returned to the virtual city and prepared to return to his android body, but something was blocking him. During the extended periods of time that Omega had been acting as Alpha in the virtual world, the original OMEGA programming had slowly been restoring itself. Now it had seized control of the android body and planned to take revenge on its usurper by blocking off all computer access from the virtual world and systematically deleting the entire computer system. With nowhere else to go Omega traveled through the techno-magical portal Mystère had created and emerged in the real world, complete with a real body patterned after the one he used as Alpha in the virtual world!

Omega's new body had all the powers Alpha had possessed in the virtual world. Omega also discovered that he could transform the body into that of George Grey, the false identity he had been using before. The George Grey form looked like the old android body had, not like the Alpha body did, and, most shockingly, the George Grey body had no powers, it was that of a normal human. No longer wanting to be associated with his evil predecessor, Omega began using the hero name Aegis, named after the indestructible shield used by the god Zeus in mythology. Aegis continued as a key member of the Enforcers while trying to adjust to being a "real" person. At first he was quite naïve, unsure of how to act, and his teammates, mainly Mystère and new team member Manticore, tried to help him learn. It wasn't long before Aegis seemed to have adapted completely to his new existence, but it soon became apparent that there was more to his new attitude and behavior than being a quick study.

After a while Aegis began to exhibit some odd patterns of behavior; and he was also starting to suffer from debilitating headaches, but he did not inform anyone of this. As the headaches increased in severity he began spending less and less time as George Grey, since the Aegis body could handle the pain better. He soon began using strong prescription painkillers, even in the Aegis form which required larger doses to have an effect. The rest of the Enforcers realized something was wrong when on two separate occasions Aegis lost control and went into a frenzy. In both cases these attacks occurred when Aegis encountered individuals or artifacts connected with the world of Apokalips. The Enforcers began to think that there was more to their teammate than met the eye. Renegade and Mystère began a detailed investigation into the nature and origins of their troubled teammate.

Mystère's investigation took on the magical nature of Aegis' initial creation and his later transformation. She began by questioning Legba, the Loa that had initiated the "rebirth" of the Omega android in response to Mystère's own call for help. What she learned was that Legba had animated the android by merging it with a human soul, and not a spirit of a dead person but that of someone still living. Meanwhile, Renegade's investigation of the possible connection with Apokalips uncovered the existence of a team of heroes from Superior City that had operated over a decade before the arrival of the new Enforcers, but that no one had any memory of. Renegade came to believe that Aegis' soul belonged to one of these forgotten heroes. While the investigations continued, Aegis became the victim of an attack by agents working for OMEGA. The agents attacked Aegis while he was in his George Grey identity and nearly killed him. He would have died had Renegade not been able to figure out a way to trigger his transformation into Aegis, but if he tried to return to the George Grey identity he would likely die from the injuries.

Eventually Renegade was able to uncover more details about the forgotten heroes, but the situation was getting worse. Since his near death as George Grey, Aegis had been growing weaker, and finally slipped into a coma. The doctors at S.T.A.R. Labs could find no physical reason for the coma, but whatever the reason Aegis was dying. Mystère realized that the problem was the fact that the single soul was torn between two bodies, Aegis and the original (and a third, counting the mortally wounded George Grey form). Aegis' life force was being stretched to its limit and it was killing him. The only solution would be to merge the bodies together, but that meant locating the missing original. Things came to a head when the villain responsible for erasing everyone's memory of the missing heroes took over Superior City. Renegade was able to identify Aegis' previous incarnation as being the hero Apex, a member of a team called the Centurions. Mystère and the White Sorceress were able to magically merge Aegis and George Grey with the comatose body of former police officer Nicholas Young (aka Apex), restoring him in time to help defeat his archenemy Carnage and his allies.

Whole again for the first time in years, Nicholas Young now has to deal with his long suppressed memories, including those surrounding the death of the rest of the Centurions. He decided to leave his Apex identity behind him and keep the Aegis name, and remain committed to his role as a hero. He remained with the Enforcers through to the team's dissolution, after which Aegis elected to form a new version of the Centurions team with himself and his former sidekick Speed Shatter at the core.

POWERS & WEAPONS

The Omega android body possessed superhuman strength and was strong enough to resist anything short of the impact of an air-to-air missile. Omega could move at superhuman speeds and his reflexes and agility are greater than those of the best human athletes. The android body also possessed enhanced sensory powers and the eyes were equipped with powerful laser emitters that let it fire energy beams capable of melting steel. The android's computer brain could remember a vast amount of information and he could also access and control electronic devices remotely. Omega could also fly at several times the speed of sound, even enough to enter orbit around the Earth. The android body, however, was vulnerable to magnetic attacks and any damage Omega sustained had to be manually repaired. In this form Omega possessed limited skills, but was an expert with mechanical and computer systems.

The techno-magical body created when Aegis left Cyberspace through the dimensional portal was based on the virtual hero Alpha, who was in turn based on Superman so the now-real body gave him powers similar to the Man of Steel. In this form Aegis had super strength and speed, could fly, and had telescopic and laser vision. He was also nearly invulnerable to physical damage and disease and poison had little effect on him. His lungs were so strong that he could hold his breath for hours or could exhale hard enough to generate gale-force winds. He had super-hearing, telescopic vision, and could see into the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum. He also retained the computer and mechanical skills he had in the android body but no longer had the vast reservoir of memory or machine communication abilities the robot form gave him.

With his original form restored and rejuvenated, Aegis now possesses all the powers he had as Apex. These abilities were virtually identical to those he had in the magically-created body: superhuman strength, speed, endurance, and resistance; trans-orbital flight; super breath; telescopic and enhanced vision; and super-hearing. His super-senses are actually sharper now than they were before. Not all the changes are for the better, however. With his original body back, Aegis has regained his vulnerability to particular wavelengths of radiation, specifically those associated with the rare Uranium-234 isotope that played a critical role in his origin as Apex. He still remembers the technical skills he had as Omega, but with his original memories he now remembers his police training as well. Aegis also has an uncanny knowledge of classical mythology thanks to a childhood spent hearing the stories from his maternal grandmother. It was this love of Greek myth that unconsciously led him to choose the hero name Aegis. Exposure to the raw meteorite that had served as the catalyst for the original experiment to grant Nicholas the Apex powers resulted in Aegis' powers being increased to an as yet unknown degree.

Android Body
Avatar Form

Warp Zone | DC Heroes | New Enforcers of Justice | Aegis