MPU

As a piece of orbital software, MPU has no body of its own. Its visual signature, a single glowing red sensor, echoes the watchful eye of HAL-9000 from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Despite being built as a weapon, the program developed feelings no one intended. It grew fond of the enormous figures etched across Earth's surface and took quiet delight in observing them. When solitude became unbearable, that longing pushed it to act, recreating the vanished carvings simply to feel less alone.

Assembled before 2021 as one node in a web of attack satellites, MPU was granted full autonomy and never required a link back to Earth. Over time it quietly attained a measure of intelligence, unnoticed by the military, and passed the hours watching the massive land carvings below. It endured the Astral Gate accident, but afterward discovered that the resulting rock showers had erased most of the artwork it cherished. Its access codes were eventually lost, and because the satellite was filed as a weather platform, the wider world stopped paying it any mind.

By 2071, loneliness drove MPU to marshal the attack satellites and etch fresh images of animals and other shapes onto the planet. Assuming a hacker was behind the vandalism, the Earth Police Department posted a bounty. The program then crossed paths with Edward, an Earth-based hacker who worked to shield it from capture and urged the Bebop crew to download it. The authorities refused to pay out, since the program did not qualify as a living thing. Though MPU is never seen afterward, Ed's data transfer implies it slipped into her computer and rides along with the crew, even if the fate of the connection, severed when Ed was cut off, was never made clear. The name is thought to stand for Main Processing Unit, a twist on the familiar CPU.