Thomas Harkin

Thomas Harkin was chief engineer of the United States of America Robotics Technology Facility RB-2851 prior to the Great War of 2077.

Background
Responsible for the advancement of the Robobrain he noted a series of setbacks and failures in the development on their design. One of which was the using of a sulfuric acid dome polishing compound which resulted in the loss of the brain CPU. Another was the attempt to maintain cohesion between the neural interface and the spinal column nerve endings a latest prototype. This would fail due to the nerves rejecting the connections faster than they could rebind them. Noting that they were unable to keep the spinal columns intact for the Robobrains, and would have to revert back to the original plan - the old brain in a jar prototype.

After getting the original batch back from field deployment testing he was surprised at the robobrain's unexplained malfunctions. Although there was nothing physically wrong with the units, the brains of the cyborgs would continually overthink their instructions and "decide" to rewrite them for efficiency purposes. Most of the time, resulting in property damage or even a few civilian fatalities.

When one of the robobrains rolled off the assembly line with a "faulty" voice module – it speaking in reverse – he had them shut down the line for almost eight hours while he checked the software for issues and then gave the audio output assembler a thorough diagnostic. He couldn't find a reason for such a malfunction and wrote off the incident – officially – as a glitch. Himself believing that it was more likely someone upstairs in production would think that it would be funny.

Appearances
Thomas Harkin is mentioned only in the Fallout 4 add-on Automatron.