UHHHHH so this is the most dorky niche-interest thing I’ve ever worked on but here it is anyways I guess?
Enjoy :^|
FTL Atom is an
Astro Boy AU where Atom grows up to be the world’s first faster-than-light spaceship. I used a grab-bag of canon, so it's not connected to a particular iteration of the show.
The ship is essentially Atom's body–- he is wirelessly connected to it at all times and can control and run all of its processes and RC drones. The server room of the ship contains Atom’s memory backups and additional processing power, so he sort of thinks with two brains at once? His original body is more of a social-interfacing limb from his perspective now, the relative amount of sensory data and physical influence it has is minuscule compared to the entirety of the ~20 mile long ship he controls.
The backstory is that around Atom’s sophomore year college, people really began pressuring him to upgrade to an older-looking body. He initially agreed but kept putting it off, eventually realizing that he didn’t actually want the upgrade. Suddenly struck by how his entire life and physical presentation had been defined by human expectations, he had a bit of an existential crisis… he could put his AI in a bulldozer and be the same person, so did it really matter if he “grew up” into an older body? Did he even want a humanoid body? It had never occurred to him that he had a choice in the matter. He joked to Reno about growing up into a spaceship instead (both were majoring in engineering, Atom in aerospace specifically) and then it became… not a joke anymore. Atom’s PHD thesis was basically “Hi I’m going to turn myself into a starship and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
Tenma in this AU was mostly a terrible dad, him and Atom hadn’t really talked much in the 25 odd years since the whole selling Atom into slavery… thing… Tenma did before the AI rights laws were passed. Atom and crew have just set off on their first long trip out of the solar system, heading out to colonize the nearest hospitable exoplanet, and now a very regretful 70 year old Tenma has been hired as an engineer to work on Atom’s ship. Neither party is very comfortable with the situation, but it’s gonna take a few years to get there and back so hmmm they better sort out their issues huh?