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Angie Spica is the second Engineer, a member of the Authority. She has a liquid body due to nanites in her bloodstream. With this metal alloy, she can create solid objects.

Angela "Angie" Spica was born in Queens, the youngest child of seven. Her family wasn't rich but they were happy, her father was a bus driver and her mother worked in a launderette.

From a young age Angie was obsessed with superheroes. While dreaming of becoming a superhero, Angie became the smartest child in her school, she was building circuit-boards while other children in her class were still playing with toys.[2]

After the first Engineer was killed, Angela "Angie" Spica's home computer filled up with all his nanotechnology notes and started linking it to her work in human-machine fusion. Spica had known him in real life, but she didn't know he was the Engineer until then. She distilled an incalculable number of intelligent devices into nine pints of liquid machinery and replaced her blood with it. This nanotechnology gives her vast mechanical abilities: the liquid metal covers her body at will, allows her to fly and to create many things, such as radio-telepathy bugs, weaponry, rocket engines, replacement lungs to cope with unfamiliar atmospheres and even additional copies of herself.

Jenny Sparks recruited her as a founding member of The Authority.

In the events of "Transfer of Power", Spica was replaced by "Machine", a woman from Japan who received the nanotechnology extracted from the Engineer's body. Spica's blood was temporarily replaced with that of an HIV Positive heroin addict. She was given memory implants and forced into the life of a minimum wage worker in a Seven-Eleven, with an abusive husband and six children (all of them actors paid by the Powers-That-Be), until she was saved by Swift.[3] Spica's deep desire for revenge on Machine was thwarted when it was learned she had been killed by fellow teammate Apollo.[4]

WorldStorm

 Main article: Captain Atom: Armageddon

Captain Atom (by Gabriele Dell'Otto)

Captain Atom and The Engineer.

When Captain Atom was displaced into the WildStorm Universe after destroying a kryptonite meteor in protecting his Earth's destruction, the Engineer developed a deep, even if somewhat short, relation with him. Spica first met Atom after the Authority teleported him through a door to the moon. At first Spica tasked from Jack Hawksmoor himself to keep an eye over Captain Atom, using her charms if needed to keep him close and devise a plan to bring him back home, or kill him should he become a menace for the Wildstorm Universe.[5] Spica, unable to find his proper universe, used her nanotechnology to apparently disable the fragment of the Void lodged in Captain Atom's body, defusing the threat posed by his survival in the WildStorm Universe, and starts a relationship with him, sharing some intimate moments (much to Hawksmoor's annoyance/jealousy) and trying to mold him into the proactive hero needed by her world.[6] However, upon discovering that the Mark of Void was never purged by his system, and finding Captain Atom embracing Nikola Hanssen, the current host for the Void entity, Angela turned against him, and mixing jealousy to anger and self-righteousness, attempts to slay him.[7] Captain Atom, still deeply in love with her, disabled her powers, until Void was able to reboot the universe, leaving Angela no memories of the events surrounding the destruction and recreation of her world, and possibly, no memories about Nathaniel Adam.

World's End

 Main article: World's End

Due to the cataclysm of World's End, Spica lost her powers due to an electromagnetic pulse and became an engineer, trying to fix the Carrier and help the refugees living in it. However, she was able to use her machine blood to reactivate it - partially - and this in turn awoke her powers. She could use her superhuman powers for brief periods. But, this never lasted long, so she wore normal clothes over her metallic skin.

When a Warhol Virus-infected Apollo vomited on her and causing her to become infected, her nanites were able to destroy the infection. When Apollo attacked the rest of The Authority, she gave each teammate a layer of Nanite skin to protect them from infection [8].

When Angela was captured by Sliding Albion prince Lorenzo Slzfi and forced to work on a miniature Caged Baby Universe to power a Shift-Door to his dimension, she made communication with the Caged Baby Universe and find it to had a similar origin to the Carrier and had been captured ever since by the Establishment in the 1950's. In so Angela was asked to help it, which she agreed allowing the Caged Universe to restart and upgrade her abilities.[9] After regaining her powers, Angela confronted The Golden and convinced them in siding with her as she can help them in finding one of their missing sibling. Both she and The Golden fought through Lorenzo's forces, and the former used her upgraded tech in accessing a shift-door and finding Swift and along with the lost Golden from Sliding Albion. At this point, Lorenzo took the chance to return to Sliding Albion. But, the Engineer quickly closed the shift-door in which Lorenzo was split in half.[9]

Powers

  • Blood Nanites: The Engineers blood has been replaced with 9 pints metallic liquid full of nanobots; tiny machines controlled by her will. She can do almost anything she imagines with her nanobots including adapting to the environment or any other adverse affects that afflict her. Her main use of her nanites are to coat herself in a metal liquid form to allow for better and more complete control over her powers as well as giving her protection.
  • Shape-Shifting: Her liquid metal form provides her the ability to shift her shape and form as she sees fit, the fluid nature of her nanites.
    • Plasticity: She can extend and stretch her metallic form with ease.
  • Adaptive Durability: She usually coats her skin with a layer of metal to protect herself from harm. This ability makes her a being of complete liquid metal allowing her to morph at will. In battle and it's shown to be stronger then that of the first Engineers, allowing her to take direct hits from atomic bombs without sustaining damage.
    • Self-Sustenance: She is able to modify her own body to survive in space unharmed.
  • Nanite Fabricating: Visually, her most impressive power is the ability to create almost anything out of the trace elements that exist in the air and soil that surround her, from machine gun hands to literal clones of herself. There really is no limit to what her machines can do other than her imagination.
    • Self-Duplication: Her body allows her to make an exact duplicate of herself; which she is mental contact with. Each copy possesses the same abilities and knowledge as the original and each can act in conjunction with each other. The Engineer can create up to 82 of these duplicates before her mind starts to dissociate.[10] Angela needs to maintain concentration to actively control the details of what her duplicates do.
    • Radiotelepathy: These implants were designed and created by the Engineer. They initially resembled tiny flies which implanted themselves painlessly in the recipients temple. The implants allow all the users to use "radiotelepathy", a form of mechanically produced telepathy. The upper range of this communication is unknown, all that is known is that all the members of the Authority were capable of instantaneous communication world wide.
    • Nanite Infection: Her ability allows her to spread viruses (that can affect both machines and people). She can send it into the body of another to determine how they work physiologically or even to shut down their body or gain some measure of control.
    • Nanite Disintegration: By extending the nanoload in a sphere from her body as far as it'll go without killing her, she can extrude the machinery out into a web of knives small enough to slip between atoms.
    • Nanite Knowledge: For all intents and purposes her nanites are a vast repository of information and she is capable of literally storing the knowledge of every book on earth in a drop of her blood.
  • Nanite Sensors: She has developed an invisible web of atom-sized machine sensors around her, it acts a security field, its highly sensitive to environmental changes.
  • Technopathy: She has the ability to interface directly with machines using her nanites as connection. She can also interact with computers and accumulate all the data within.
  • Electrokinesis: Her Technopathy could manifest as a special form of electrical manipulation, a type form of shape-shifting which allows physical interaction with machines.
  • Flight: Angie can also fly without any visible form of propulsion.
    • Interstellar Travel: Angie needs to generate massive boosters to attain escape velocity. Once she has she can return to the use of her nanites to drift and propel herself through space. As such she can operate on The Carrier without need for any special equipment.

Abilities


  • Angela Spica is based on a previous creation of Warren Ellis: Steel Rain, a character Ellis created with artist Gary Erskine. Steel Rain's first and only appearance was in Marvel Comics' 2099 Unlimited #9 (July, 1995).
  • Since her incorporation into the DC universe, she hasn't yet exhibited the full breadth of her previous abilities, but she has been shown to be able to power up Jack Hawksmoor's synapses as well as interfacing directly with the Eye of the Storm, which in some senses makes it an extension of herself.
  • Spica has an open on/off relationship with Jack Hawksmoor, but she also slept with The Doctor on one occasion, although she revealed she regretted doing so sometime later.[11] She once stated that breaking up with Robin was the best thing that ever happened to her.[2] She also had a brief fling with a squat, hairy Mexican she picked up in a bar. It ended badly.
  • Spica was apparently sexually assaulted during her school-age years by a renegade Doctor who traveled back in time while they were fighting.[11]

Related

Footnotes


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