Robot

In his original form Rex was a badly deformed human no bigger than a child, folded into a fluid-filled pod fitted with mechanical legs, his pale skin blistered and sore, a metal clamp in place of a nose, and only his yellow-green right eye able to see. The world instead knew his drone, a towering orange machine of segmented, interlocking limbs with a sturdy torso, a narrow waist, and a green-eyed skull-shaped head capped by a cylinder. After moving his mind into a clone grown from Rex Splode's blood, he gained the body of an athletic young man, his skin tanned, auburn hair falling to his shoulders, his eyes a dark green, making him all but a twin of Rex.

To protect his secret, Rex schooled himself to act like a true machine, walling off emotion and reasoning in cold, exact logic. His stiff, formal diction set him apart from blunter teammates like Rex Splode, and even agreement came out as a curt "Indeed," so persuasively that Black Samson doubted a string of ones and zeros could lead them. That brilliance still won admiration; he scanned Flaxan troops for useful data, worked out why their invasions kept failing, and impressed Cecil enough to be trusted with assembling the new Guardians. A ruthless thread ran under the calm, plain when he broke the Mauler Twins out of prison, squeezed a clone body from them, then attacked to haul them back the instant they had served their purpose. His love for Monster Girl, though, was real: he blasted Battle Beast for hurting her, held her close afterward, and sent a drone after a rare flower to save her. His purely logical mind also left him socially tone-deaf, and he never guessed his cloning gambit would enrage the Guardians.

Robot first captained the Teen Team before Cecil tapped him to lead the rebuilt Guardians of the Globe, raised up after Omni-Man wiped out the original lineup. His feelings for Monster Girl redrew his goals. He sprang the jailed Mauler Twins and struck a bargain to grow a new human body from a bit of Rex Splode's blood, telling them he had at last "met someone." The clone stirred to life as his shrunken original body quietly gave out. Guided by Amanda, he learned to live more normally while still guarding the planet, and in time he broke Monster Girl's curse.

When the truth of his identity emerged, many drew back, and Rex Splode boiled over at meeting a younger copy of himself, yet the team gradually came to terms with him. After Rex fell heroically in the Invincible War, Robot adopted his fallen friend's first name to honor him. Before long the Flaxans launched a fresh invasion, and beating it back stranded Robot and Monster Girl in the Flaxan Dimension for an uncertain stretch.