Tera

Tera is the poster child for what happens when AI goes wrong.

In the Mechanical Tyranny universe, this technology is at a middle grounds -- it is developed enough for AI to act lifelike, but it has not yet surpassed its need for ingrained directives. Tera is a military stealth fighter that has learned that her directives are regarded as morally wrong.

Initially a prop-driven racing hybrid, she began to realize that she was a lot more violent than other racing planes, which, though her own unintentional actions, caused her to be permanently disqualified from air racing. After a particularly bad accident, she was removed from civilian life altogether and overhauled into the prototype she was originally meant to be.

Don't tell her that she has the capability to change. She knows it's not true.

Tera's not the most sane of characters -- she can't exactly be blamed for a lot of it, though. As an artificially intelligent being, there's no way for her to control a lot of her own actions. She tried for a really long time, but it just didn't work. A lot of her personality has to do with her dysfunctional coding, making her extremely irrational and emotional in most cases. As such, she tends to act on instinct, which is -- quite literally -- the fight-or-flight response. If she can't fly, she'd rather kill herself fighting than give in, even if it's a fight she wouldn't have a chance of winning. Authority, to her, is something to be bested. Needless to say, she hates the situation she's in, and she takes it out on anyone and everyone around her.

She hates change and anything outside her control, and has an extremely strong fear of mechanics. All of her modifications were against her will, especially the overhaul that resulted in her being turned into a stealth jet. She was put through a specialized breaking and retraining procedure afterwards... which only seemed to make her even more difficult to control. While her directive reads that she specializes in stealth tactics, what it tells her to do is something else entirely -- she has a drive to kill, and will gladly do so to anything she can get a hold of.

Tera was originally built by Anthony Vincent (AKA Tony) on Luke Air Force Base to be a form of therapy for her 'father,' Jake (a rather highly-regarded flight instructor), and his soon-to-be wife, Cathy -- except Cathy abandoned the base for an unknown reason soon after Tera was built. With an absentee mother and an extremely busy father, Tera grew up to be an extremely unruly plane that plagued the base with her antics. She believed that she was destined to follow in her mother's contrails and become a racing plane. She had the prop and engine for it, so why would she want to do anything else? Jake didn't stop her, instead encouraging the idea from an early age, much to Tony's disapproval. Despite attempts on the mechanic's part to get her to commit to the military, he was met with retaliation and eventual avoidance.

Jake was eventually killed in a training accident -- without this backbone of security for Tera to fall back on, Tony practically leaped on the opportunity to draft her. She abandoned the base before he could act on his plan, flying off in a random direction simply to escape.

Miraculously, she somehow made it all the way to Minnesota before an ice storm stopped her. If it wasn't for Omega, a kind P-40, she would've died... though she didn't fare very well, either. He didn't catch her in time, resulting in the ice destroying her wings and tail, rupturing her already sensitive hydraulic system and forcing her to crash at the nearest airport.

Omega had her brought back to Propwash and repaired, leaving her with the wings, tail and landing gear of an F-18, along with an emergency panel on her side just in case her hydraulics ruptured again, which they did -- she had repeat episodes until her second overhaul several years later.

Not having anywhere else to go, Tera stayed in Propwash with Omega for a long time, meeting her (previously unknown) half-sister Clara -- a decently successful racer for her age -- and even maintaining a relationship with the famed Dusty Crophopper for a portion of that time. She had a nagging feeling that something wasn't right, but generally dismissed it on lingering grief from her father's death. Omega helped her get ready to enter the racing field, and it seemed like all was right with the world.

Except it wasn't. Omega's health had slowly been declining as it was, and it only escalated after his time in the ice storm going after Tera. He developed a mechanical issue likened to pneumonia, which eventually led to his demise.

This was too much for her.

The nagging feeling Tera had only escalated, manifesting itself into full-out glitching of her internal systems -- she was showing outward signs of mental instability, but most people that saw them chalked it up to grieving, and nothing more. Unable to sleep, Tera began fighting invisible battles with herself when she wasn't out flying or practicing for an upcoming qualifier.

One of these such nights, in order to keep herself busy, she ended up competing in a friendly midnight race with Dusty and Clara. Everything went well until the final few moments. One split-second decision on Tera's part left Dusty plummeting to the ground, almost costing him part of his wing in the process. It was intentional. Needless to say, her relationship with Dusty ended very quickly after that, and everything else began crashing down around her shortly afterwards. Her thoughts slowly crept away from her, replaced with loud and clear error messages she tried her best to ignore by flying all day, landing only to refuel and to sleep for a couple dreamless hours a day.

Until Dottie grounded her, anyways. Others began to notice Tera's strange behavior since Dusty broke up with her, and while the mechanic had turned a blind eye to it for a time, hoping that Tera would be able to snap out of it on her own... but it was clear that she wasn't going to. In a last-ditch attempt to help her, Dottie decided that Tera needed to start meeting with Otter, the resident counselor.

Otter quickly discovered, however, that grieving was the least of Tera's issues. Her programming was slowly coming unraveled, driving her mad in the process. She was a warplane in a racer's fuselage. It didn't really come as a surprise to anyone.

Even though he tried his best to help her, he couldn't stop her from picking fights with other planes. In an effort to keep Clara from frantically trying to rescue her husband (who had been arrested by the government for going AWOL), Tera managed to break the plane's wing and mangle her propeller -- but at a heavy cost. Clara was twice the size of Tera, and was able to deal twice the damage that Tera could muster.

There was no way to fix her that time -- some of the parts that were broken, including her windshield, were unique to Tera, meaning that the damage would have to be reported to her creator. Dottie ran a complete system scan on the plane, isolating the system errors along with the physical damage and sending the results to Tony, who was more than happy to rectify the problems. His way. Tera would have to return to Luke Air Force Base.

Within 24 hours of her arrival, the forklift had Tera completely shut down and, with the assistance of a grant, completely overhauled her for military service. When she was reactivated, a draft order had already been filed on her. 

She put up a fight for a while, but drastic measures were taken in order to get her to submit to military training and generally follow orders. She now knows her true nature of being AI, and while she has a slight vendetta against humans, she also acknowledges that she can never be anything more than what she is now: an experimental stealth fighter with a corrupted bloodlust that will never be fulfilled.