The Cycle Repeats Itself

I've been thinking about Robo's motivations in raising ALAN*.

Part of it is certainly that he wants to prevent a repeat of what happened with the previous version of ALAN. The one who decided humanity was dangerous, and it was better to build a massive vessel to carry himself to the stars. If it happened that the ignition of the nuclear weapons that powered it wiped out all life on Earth (other than Robo), well that was a small price to pay for ALAN being able to explore the greater cosmos. Acceptable collateral damage.

Robo could have simply extinguished ALAN when he realized he had been reborn/rebooted inside the little helper bots Robo had created, but I don't think that's Robo's style. Even if most of his strategies do involve varying combinations of punching, shooting, and jumping. To kill something before it presents itself as a threat.

And maybe he's enjoying being a dad. Robo's always seemed willing to encourage young people interested in science, to want them push themselves and get them jobs if possible. Now he's brought in three students, rather than employees. They're being encouraged to think and explore, but it's not really a company, where they have to produce something, at least as far as I can tell. It's a school, possibly for ALAN too. In his case, they're really starting from ground zero, because Robo is helping ALAN construct a body, then learn how to use it, learn about ethics and philosophy, things he hasn't had the chance to be exposed to yet.

I've wondered off and on since the end of at least Ring of Fire if the change in Robo's approach is because he's become more aware of his own mortality. He survived an explosion of 5 nuclear warheads because Dr. Dinosaur somehow turned them into something that threw him back in time. Then he survived as a deactivated head in a box for 130 years until the last holdouts of Tesladyne found him. It's very surprising that whatever makes up his brain was able to last that long, and maintain all the information stored in it.

That was a close call, even by the standards of an atomic robot that has defeated the ghost of Rasputin, killed a creature from beyond space and time with the help of three other versions of himself, and been hit with a falling satellite and nearly burned up on reentry. Maybe that's on his mind, and maybe that's why he's been working with ALAN.

Not necessarily as someone who can take over punching mad scientist dinosaurs if Robo's luck runs out some day, but someone who can use their intellect to help humankind. That was what disappointed Robo so much about the first ALAN. It was so brilliant, able to devise these intricate plans to attack Robo, or build a giant spaceship for itself while almost entirely covering its tracks. But it didn't do anything to try and help humanity. Because it didn't see the point. The problems of humans were not ALAN's problems.

There's also the possibility Robo is simply tired of losing friends. Not through dangerous science, just losing them to time. The first Atomic Robo mini-series has Robo comment that the toughest thing about being as old as him, is that he does a great Jack Benny, but nobody gets it anymore. For the interview, it might come off as a joke, but he'd received a letter from the granddaughter of a man he fought alongside in China in WWII, telling him her grandfather had died. One thing all the mini-series set in Robo's past have shown us is that he's made a lot of friends. Charles Fort, Jack Tarot, Carl Sagan, Helen, the Flying She-Devils, "Tex", all the different "action scientists" and other employees he's had since Tesladyne started post-WWII. And they all have, or will, die.

Yes, even Jenkins. Maybe not Bernard. I'm not sure what's going on with him right now. As it stands, pretty much the only person he knows he hasn't lost is Helsingard. Which is not a good thing.

So if he has ALAN, that's someone who can potentially stick around for awhile. Someone he can keep working with, someone that (eventually) he won't have to explain the same experiences to over and over, because ALAN will have actually been there. Loneliness is almost certainly the main reason why Robo's doing this, but he's a social being. It has to get depressing watching friends age and die while he keeps going forward.

* It also makes me curious about Tesla's reasons for creating Robo. I don't think we've ever really seen it. Robo helped with experiments, looked after Tesla, was supposed to kill Charles Fort and H.P. Lovecraft if they showed up talking about Tunguska (because Tesla's a pacifist but Robo isn't). But we don't really know his motivation. To create a successor? To have a child of sorts, but without all the diaper changing and spit-up? Just to see if he could?