When you complain that you hate babysitting the A.I. doing your job:

I'm more than a little glad this came out when it did, and not now: Artificial Intelligence used to be a glorious dream for a brighter future, not regurgitating slop and hallucinated 'facts.' Aaron's still cool, but is he as cool as he thinks...? From 2020, 2020 Machine Man #1, featuring "Computer Love, part 1" Written by Christos Gage, art by Andy MacDonald; and "If They Be Heroes--!" Written by Tom DeFalco, pencils by Mike Hawthorne, inks by Andriano Di Benedetto.

This was part of a big Iron Man 2020 crossover: six issues of that, some Force Works, Rescue, Ironheart, and even something called "iWolverine. (That last one features Albert and Elsie-Dee, who I remember wandering around seemingly a gazillion issues of Wolverine in the 90's! Like they were looking for him, but not super-hard?) It feels like a lotta books for a kinda sidebar event, but sure, why not. The larger plot involves Arno Stark and Sunset Bain both elevating, and enslaving, AI; but our old pal Machine Man, a.k.a. X-51, a.k.a. Aaron Stack, goes somewhat rogue for personal reasons, to recover his lost love, Jocasta. Who may be like, um, over him. Chasing after her, Aaron has to fight his way through robots he thought were long deactivated: his brethren, the X-series robots like himself! Arno has a holographic message for Aaron: these were actually the rebuilt X-series, now with a pesky design flaw removed: free will. Arno points out, a proper robot wouldn't have gone off-mission for love like Aaron.

Swamped by the other fifty X-robots, Aaron finds an additional component within them, like a hardware limiter; but removing it makes them a bit touchy and unpredictable. (In the original Kirby story, all of them except Aaron had gone insane!) Fighting his way to Jocasta, she finally greets him, not as a liberator but as a stalker: she felt better about herself as she was then, "cured" of her previous issues like wanting to be human. On the other hand, wasn't Aaron a loose-cannon drunk with authority issues and a disturbing tendency towards calling humans "fleshy ones"? Hadn't he threatened the humans with war crimes, and was he the boss of her? Who really needed the help here? Aaron still doesn't think she's making decisions of her own free will, but Jocasta had found peace and a new love for herself: X-52, the Machine Man of 2020! Who has the red armor of the old DeFalco/Trimpe/Windsor-Smith mini-series.

The back-up feature was by DeFalco, and features the Midnight Wreckers from the old mini-series. It's alright, but the main story over the two issues of this series has some interesting things to say: Jocasta and X-52 almost have a compelling argument, comparing themselves to a cat forced to take a pill for its own good. Does Aaron need guidance, or is free will the way to go, mistakes or not? It's a Marvel comic, so you can probably guess which way it leans...and so do I, even though some people maybe should be forced to take pills...(One of the biggest influencers pushing how they were "free" and not going to be forced to take the proverbial blue pill, was literally throwing a ####fit over their mom making them take their anti-diarrhea medicine. Seriously.)