Rabi

Rabi was originally a general labor model from a factory in the industrial sector of Dubai. After only a couple months of living and working entirely in the confines of a single kitchen, his owner was arrested for an unknown and sentenced to life in prison. With no family immediate family to inherit him, Rabi was left alone with no master, in a city where having no master was extremely dangerous.

He lived out of his kitchen for a few weeks following, unable to go farther than the small, high-fenced yard with no gates or through the locked door separating the kitchen from the rest of the house. It wasn’t until authorities broke down the door after receiving reports from neighbors of a vagrant sync living in the house that he was able, or rather, forced to leave. He was lucky that the two police officers pointing their rifles at him hesitated long enough for him to hurriedly explain what happened to his master and why he was still there. Given the name of his owner and his registration number to corroborate his story, he was arrested and escorted to the Muzawara District, where he was dropped off just inside the gate with a number of other syncs and left to fend for himself.

Only a few days of life in the district quickly took their toll on him. The heat hindered his processing speed, and avoiding detection from curfew patrols was becoming increasingly difficult. Kind citizens saved him on multiple occasions by pulling him into their homes before he could be seen. Eventually, he had the clever idea of climbing to the rooftops, which provided an escape from both the patrols and the oppressive heat.

But his core had a limited battery just like any other sync, and Muzawara’s harsh conditions only accelerated its depletion. Unable to convince himself to brave the heat on the off chance he might find a safe place to recharge, he laid himself out on the roof, accepting his own death, where at least he wouldn’t be cooked alive or scrapped for parts.

The roof he chose to die on happened to be that of the single-story wing of a brothel. Aaliyah found him from her second-story window that overlooked that same roof and convinced him to come inside. She made sure he recharged overnight and took him to get a cooling system installed the next day, using her entire savings to do so. From that moment onward, she made him her personal responsibility and had him stay with her every night. This continued for years, long after Aaliyah had left the brothel permanently, until Rabi took up vigilantism.

The longer Rabi spent in Muzawara, the more he understood the depths of human cruelty. The world outside his kitchen was so much worse than he could possibly have imagined, sheltered and uneducated as he was. Every injustice he witnessed stirred an anger deep in his core, pushing it ever closer toward resentment and eventually hatred for their human oppressors. It became more and more difficult for him to stay silent, until finally he decided to take action. But to confront the humans directly was a death sentence, for him and whoever he was trying to protect.

Instead, he came up with a plan. He became a pickpocket, practicing on sync neighbors and returning the stolen possessions before they realized they were missing in the first place. The petty theft started as a way to help ease Aaliyah’s burden and support himself, but the satisfaction of getting back at the humans that terrorized his family was a definite bonus. Before long he realized he had quite the talent for it, and that pickpocketing would do nothing to improve his or anyone else’s lives long-term. He had to take the next step.

Rabi spent every moment he could trading his stolen goods or working in exchange for illegal mods. He made friends with a strange ;Turkish sync named Kadir , who acquired and outfitted him with EMP resistance, basic hacking software, and softer soles for his feet to quiet his footsteps. He learned everything he could about firearms from neighbors who had first hand experience, then acquired one of them too, as well as aim assist software, as he would have no opportunity to practice. He was careful that any mods would not drastically change his shape, so he could easily hide them underneath clothing. With his new defenses poised and ready, Rabi sneaked out of his home, disabled the EMPs at the top of the wall, scaled it, and slipped silently into the human areas of the city.

His first targets were middle-class homes, where he stole jewelry, small electronics, and anything else that could fit in his pockets or be carried silently back to Muzawara. He spaced his burglaries out carefully to avoid patterns that would attract suspicion, and gradually raised the stakes. He began cracking safes and hacking bank accounts, and stealing art and jewels worth three times as much as all his hardware and software combined. The more he profited from stealing, the more he realized he would never need so much, but others would. First he shared with friends and loved ones, and when profits allowed, began donating to local, regional, and global pro-sync charities.

What little money Rabi did keep for himself was fed directly back into his operation. Kadir continued to supply him with any tools or mods he asked for: reinforced armor plating, hand-to-hand combat systems, stronger environmental sensors, retractable blades in his forearms, and strategic planning software. Anything he bought was carefully chosen to make himself a more effective thief and better equipped to protect himself and others. Once suitably armed, some of his targets guilty of more heinous crimes were discovered dead the following morning with their belongings missing. He also did not shy away from killing any human private security that stood in his way or tried to apprehend him, though he rarely went out of to do so. He did actively avoid killing police when possible, if only for the additional heat it would put on him and the district.

He built a reputation quickly. While no one knows his true identity, the locals have begun calling their resident thief Numair, or “little panther”. Rabi adopted the moniker and began tagging his more high-profile heists. Before long, Numair tags started appearing in Abu Dhabi and Muscat, then spread even further: Medina, Damascus, Beirut, Ankara, Cairo. To this day it is unclear which of these, if any, were the work of Numair himself, and which were copycats. His prized possession, and to this day the only loot he never traded or sold, was an ancient Persian golden mask molded in the likeness of a lion, which he modified to connect to his optical sensors so he could see through the lion’s eyes. There are a number of urban legends surrounding Numair, including that he is some sort of supernatural or divine entity punishing the greed of the upper class. Lower class humans hail him as a folk hero, unaware that he is the very thing they hate, and that the work they praise him for is a direct assault on everything they hold dear.