So I swear I've seen pictures of both the All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc. fighting a robot woman who looks a lot like Maria from the old movie Metropolis,
but googling anything about her seems to be a little difficult. Am I going crazy? Or can you help?
Oh for sure, she's one of the more obscure villains that the Squadron ever faced. Mostly because she's one of the few villains that ONLY menaced the Squadron without being tied to one of the more famous members of the Justice Society, being a charter member of the INjustice Society or surviving the war years to menace the new world order.
The woman you are looking for is named Mekanique
(Picture I took on my phone of the model we have of her here at the Perisphere)
As her very *Metropolis*-esque look implies, she is from the future. Or rather A future, as these things tend to go. Most of the information we have on her early "life" is pieced together from the tape recordings left behind by Robert Crane, the original Robotman combined with what the heroes were able to glean from the times she showed back up.
She was crafted at some point in the 23rd century, in a reality where a small upper class of authoritarian technocrats ruled over the majority of the world's population like a slave race. This balance was upset by a woman named Maria who became the head of a rebellion against the ruling class. In an attempt to stamp out the rebellion the head scientist of that time created the being we would come to call Mekanique, wrapping her in false skin and forging her in Maria's image in an attempt to quash the rebellion from within. This effort failed, Maria was freed and the revolution succeeded in overthrowing the ruling class. In a last ditch effort, a rebuilt Mekanique was sent back in time with a list of esoteric instructions to complete to assure that Maria would never be born.
It was only the final siege of the rebellion, seemingly, that damaged her transport and sent her back to the 1940s rather than the 2240s where her original destination lay. But her internal computers were able to extrapolate out the sources whereby she could still prevent Maria's birth. Arriving at the Perisphere in her damaged shape she set about flirtatiously ingratiating herself with the original Robotman even after she got into a scuffle with Danette Reiley the second Firebrand.
Playing on Robotman's fears of being mistrusted by his teammates, she convinced him to rebuild her before showing her true colors and turning against the Squadron.
She would hang around for a few years after the war. Including an absolutely absurdist case where she shrunk the Squadron down to the size of dolls and chased them around a model futurist city. Eventually teaming up with the illustrious company of Per Degaton and the pair became...involved (no judgement on doing the robot...I AM judging the robot for doing Degaton though). As time traveling robots are want to do she also showed up closer to the present in a scheme to complete her original programming that ran afoul of Infinity Inc. It ended in a REAL fustercluck where she met both a young AND old version of Degaton, realized neither truly loved her, and blew all three of them up with her self destruct which did the rest of us a favor.
The really interesting thing about her though is that she seemed...cognizant of some things. She spoke to the original Robotman of "holding back" some kind of time anomaly from affecting her then present time until her mission was complete. The event she's describing SOUNDS like the first Multiversal Crisis. While its well trodden ground that Crisis events like that have the ability to affect the whole timeline at once, any single being not only being aware of its effects ahead of time and being able to divert them AROUND a single bubble of linear time, even temporarily implies that her method or powers of time travel are different than the ones we're theoretically aware of.
She's been glimpsed here and there in the modern era but it's impossible to tell from what we know whether she's been rebuilt OR if what we're seeing are point during the 40+ odd years she was unaccounted for. We DO know that, for the moment, she has been unsuccessful in her mission. Time traveling heroes like Booster Gold and Rip Hunter DO know the freedom fighter Maria of the 23rd century but do NOT know of Mekanique before arriving in our time period.
So...sucks to suck for her I guess.
