We all know that characters in comics can do things that people in Life as We Know It cannot. But that isn’t limited to characters with super-powers. For instance, suppose you are a character in comics and you are a man in your 50s who’s led an unhappy, unfulfilled life in which you’ve never had the love of your dreams. In fact, what if you met and worked with the man who was everything you wanted, but he was exactly the type who never wanted you and was a heterosexual besides? And suppose this man died, leaving you in grief for what could never have been. If you were such a character and you also happened to be an expert in robotics and artificial intelligence...perhaps, just perhaps, you would set out to design, build, and program the man of your dreams and make him everything you ever wanted, created to love you! In The Adventures of Lucky Vega that’s exactly what a man named Professor William Favor did. The result of his work to create the love for which he’d hungered all his life was an android named Tycho!
Tycho is an android, programmed to be Professor Favor’s companion, servant, and committed lover. He is a fully sentient, artificially intelligent being. He even has free will; he is actually capable of breaking up with Professor Favor and leaving him! But he doesn’t--because in the way of so many sentient beings for as long as sentient beings have existed, he adores, worships, and is devoted to his creator! In a twist that some characters (such as Lucky himself) find bizarre and disturbing, Tycho never even calls William Favor by his first name; he is given to addressing and referring to his creator as “The Professor” or “Sir” in spite of the intimate (to say the least) nature of their relationship! And Tycho is even equipped to defend himself and his master from danger; he is superhumanly strong and possesses electrical and magnetic powers.
To make things even more intriguing, though the man in whose perfect likeness Tycho was made is dead, the lover android is the exact image of one who is very much alive. David Strayhorn, the man Professor Favor loved, was part of Dr. Esteban Vega’s space initiative, working both to perfect humanity for life in space and perfect man’s ability to travel to the stars. David Strayhorn died in a test of an experimental space-warp engine. But Strayhorn’s look-alike son, Jeff, is still with us, just as heterosexual as his late Dad--and sleeping with Paloma Reyes, Dr. Vega’s head of security and Lucky’s fitness and self-defense instructor. Suffice it to say that when Paloma first gets a look at Tycho she is in for a very embarrassing surprise when she thinks the artificial being is her favorite bedmate! And from there, things keep getting interesting...
Dr. Franken Furter, eat your heart out!
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