Tech-Master

Alistair Graves is an Alpha-Class Technopathic Psion, a rare psychic whose mind is innately attuned to artificial systems. His technopathy allows him to perceive, understand, and dominate technology as an extension of his own nervous system, blurring the boundary between human cognition and machine intelligence.   Through Instant Technological Comprehension, Graves gains immediate intuitive understanding of any constructed device he physically touches. Design logic, internal architecture, software pathways, and structural vulnerabilities unfold in his mind in seconds. This ability is absolute in scope but limited to completed technology—he cannot affect raw materials or unfinished components.   His Neural Machine Control allows direct psychic command of machines and digital systems, bypassing conventional interfaces. Firewalls, encryption, and security protocols present resistance rather than obstruction, enabling real-time hacking, system overrides, drone coordination, and infrastructure manipulation across networked environments.   With Technological Repair & Enhancement, Graves can restore damaged machines or push existing systems beyond their intended performance limits through direct contact. While he cannot create entirely new functions, he can refine, weaponize, and optimize any technology already present, often achieving results beyond its original design parameters.   Graves also possesses System Intuition (Predictive Technopathy), allowing him to perceive probability flows within technological systems he is psychically linked to. He can anticipate component failure, network collapse, defensive triggers, and system responses seconds—or sometimes minutes—before they occur. This grants him unnerving tactical foresight against technology-dependent foes, though the effect degrades rapidly in chaotic environments or when non-technological variables such as magic, emotional decision-making, or improvisation dominate the battlefield.   Through Technological Empathy, Graves perceives machines as quasi-cognitive entities, sensing their operational “moods” defined by efficiency, stress, and damage. This allows him to diagnose malfunctions instantly and extract maximum performance without disassembly. He treats machines with more respect than people, regarding them as honest systems rather than flawed organisms.   His ability of Signal Dominion permits low-level technopathic influence across wireless transmissions once an initial psychic link has been established. While this does not grant full control, it enables surveillance, data corruption, delayed overrides, and subtle system sabotage across connected networks. Heavy shielding, arcane interference, or air-gapped systems sharply limit this capability.   With sufficient focus, Tech-Master can enact Machine Possession, projecting his consciousness into a single machine or networked construct and operating it as its active intelligence. While possessed, he experiences the world through the machine’s sensors, but his physical body remains vulnerable. Destruction of the possessed machine does not kill him, but causes intense psychic backlash and pain.   Graves suffers from Technopsychic Feedback, experiencing psychosomatic pain, disorientation, or emotional agitation when machines under his direct control are damaged or destroyed. Though he conceals this weakness, sustained losses can destabilize him during prolonged engagements.   Finally, his Anti-Technic Field Awareness allows him to instinctively sense environments where technology is suppressed, interfered with, or unreliable—such as EMP zones, reality distortions, or magically warped areas—granting him warning before catastrophic system failure.   Through Synthetic Mind Recognition, Graves can immediately detect artificial intelligences, advanced algorithms, or emergent machine consciousness, even when hidden within mundane software. While this fascinates him, truly independent AI also terrifies him, representing a form of intellect beyond his absolute control.

Extensive, subtle subdermal and internal bionic upgrades, including neural interface implants, enhanced sensory processors, and reinforced skeletal and muscular supports. He also employs custom-built cybernetic enhancements for accelerated cognition, encrypted data storage within his body, and emergency life-support systems. As a genius inventor, these represent only a fraction of his personal augmentations, many of which remain unknown even to his closest allies.

Alistair Thane Archibald Graves was born in Edinburgh to an old but unremarkable Scottish family whose greatest legacy was an obsession with education, discipline, and “earning one’s place.” From an early age, Alistair displayed an unnerving intuition for machines. Radios, clocks, early computers—he did not merely repair them, he understood them, often without being taught how they worked. His parents encouraged his intellect but failed to grasp its scale, mistaking something genuinely abnormal for mere giftedness.   As his talents grew, so did his isolation. Other children found him cold, superior, unsettling. Alistair, in turn, learned early that human interaction was inefficient, imprecise, and prone to error. Machines, by contrast, were honest. They behaved as designed. This quiet preference hardened into philosophy.   By his teens, Graves was already attracting academic attention. He tore through secondary education and university programs with mechanical precision, leaving professors alternately impressed and unsettled by his complete lack of humility. His research into neural interfaces and emergent machine behavior pushed ethical boundaries long before anyone officially asked him to stop.   The British government did not hesitate to recruit him.   Under the classified Future Initiative, Graves was given resources, funding, and authority far beyond what most scientists ever receive. For a time, it was everything he believed society should be: a hierarchy based on competence, not popularity or politics. His breakthroughs in AI autonomy, cybernetic augmentation, and technopsychic interfaces reshaped modern military and intelligence technology almost overnight.   But Graves’ ambitions outpaced even government tolerance. He stopped asking how technology could serve humanity and began asking why humanity should be allowed to overrule it. His proposal for a self-sustaining, AI-governed societal framework—quietly authoritarian, ruthlessly efficient—was the moment the Initiative turned against him. Committees stalled his work. Oversight tightened. Access was revoked.   To Graves, this was not caution. It was cowardice.   When his projects were shut down and his research classified, something in him snapped. Convinced that history itself was being sabotaged by small minds, Graves attempted to seize control of key national systems using autonomous machines and neural backdoors he had already embedded. The coup failed, brutally and publicly. He was arrested, branded an extremist, and locked away.   Prison was meant to end him. Instead, it refined him.   Through covert technopathic contact with prison infrastructure, Graves escaped confinement and vanished from public record. In exile, he abandoned any pretense of reconciliation with humanity. He no longer sought permission, compromise, or validation.   He emerged as Tech-Master—not a disgraced scientist, but a self-appointed architect of the future—committed to tearing down outdated systems and replacing them with something colder, cleaner, and, in his mind, perfect.

Institutional betrayal and prolonged isolation fractured Graves’ already fragile relationship with humanity. Being silenced, discredited, and imprisoned by the very systems he believed he was improving left him with a deep-seated obsession with control and validation. He internalized his rejection not as failure, but as proof that lesser minds feared him. This manifests as paranoia, an inability to trust allies, and a compulsive need to dominate systems—human or mechanical—before they can betray him again.

Exceptionally high intelligence with a near-savant grasp of engineering, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics. Graves processes information with cold efficiency, favoring logic, optimization, and predictive modeling over intuition or empathy. He excels at long-term strategic planning and systems thinking but consistently undervalues emotional, irrational, or magical variables, which he dismisses as noise rather than data.

Graves believes morality is a failed human construct, born from emotion rather than outcome. To him, efficiency, stability, and progress are the only meaningful measures of right and wrong. If an action reduces chaos and increases systemic order, it is justified regardless of human cost. He views free will as an outdated indulgence and sees technological governance as the inevitable—and ethical—end state of civilization.

To impose a perfected, machine-governed order on humanity, proving his vision right and eliminating the inefficiency, chaos, and institutional cowardice that once rejected him.