I don’t tend to delve too much into X-series Lore so forgive me if I get certain aspects of this inaccurate. But I’m going to just jump right into one of the two main points of this and work from there. There is no Maverick Virus. In the early X series games we’re made to believe that a lot of these Reploids have been going Maverick due to some virus causing their programming to be corrupted. However I’ve drawn up the conclusion that the Maverick Virus is just a false flag notion proposed by the government(s?) in 21XX to cover up the darker secret. Reminder that during 21XX, Reploids have become commonplace in society. There are thousands, if not millions of Reploids in all sorts of daily life. They have become engrained in everyday activities. Can you imagine having something like that given that much freedom but at any given point, could just snap and rise up? Here’s a quick refresher on Reploids:



Dr. Cain discovers X’s sealed Capsule in the remains of (one of?) Dr. Light’s Labs. X was supposed to only be sealed for 30 years but wound up being sealed for 100 years! He also was undergoing significant mental diagnostics and training for his experimental free will AI to ensure that he would not become dangerous. Dr. Light also left warnings logged in the capsule for whomever found him. Dr. Cain, being an archeologist and not a computer scientist, decided to ignore these warnings by the renowned roboticist from 20XX and decided to replicate X’s AI programming, mass market these untested robots who share X’s unlimited potential, and send them off onto the world.



So why the hell is all that important? Well, X had significant testing to ensure his free will wouldn’t be a danger to the world. THREE DECADES WORTH OF TESTING!!! Dr. Cain went “okay, this is fine” and went all stupid, not understanding the massive problem of unleashing robots capable of free will onto the world.



Well, untested robots start to go crazy and react as any sentient being forced to do mundane tasks and thought of as lesser beings would do and rise up. One or two instances would be fine, but this apparently became such an issue that THEY CREATED AN ARMY DESIGNED TO COMBAT THEM! This was known to be an ongoing problem with the Reploid population. But again, at this stage they’ve become so engrained in civilization that you can’t just pull them all off the streets. Imagine if computers started attacking their users. You can’t just eliminate all computers at this point. We’re too reliant on their existence. So I believe they had to take some action to keep the general population calm (as calm as they can be when there are continued issues of Reploids going Maverick) while also dealing with the situation. Hence, the “creation” of the Maverick Virus. Clearly some outside influence was infecting these innocent robots and causing them to go irregular. (This was sarcasm which is hard to convey in text).



Now, this is where it starts to get fuzzy and where I feel Capcom tripped over itself. It’s been suggested in certain media that that Maverick Virus was created by Dr. Wily and put into Zero. Further inferred by the inclusion of Roboenza in Mega Man 10. But here’s my concern. In X4, we see the fight between Zero and Sigma. This response means that the Maverick Hunters already exist and are fighting Mavericks! So the Maverick Virus couldn’t have come from Zero because X4 retconned any of that to saying that Zero just appeared in some warehouse while Reploids were already going Maverick. I argue that this was just the Reploids’ natural tendency, just as some humans go against what is considered normal and lash out onto the world and cause harm or other intolerable acts.



Let’s switch gears for a moment and focus on Dr. Wily now. We know Wily built Zero. We know Wily’s last creation was Zero. We are made aware that Zero is a strong fighter who easily works his way up in the Maverick Hunters’ ranks and becomes a Special A Class Hunter, on par with Vile and Sigma. But what is the deal with Zero in the end? During the fight with Sigma he is shown to be ruthless, resourceful, (not using his buster for whatever reason), and powerful. He is only incapacitated when his forehead crystal starts glowing with a “W” and brings him extreme pain. This is the only way Sigma was able to defeat him, by punching him in the crystal, shattering it. This moment is supposedly when Sigma is infected with the so-called “Maverick Virus” which supposedly been “leaking out from [Zero’s] capsule for quite some time”. I don’t mean to question how programming works, especially with the idea that in 1997 I doubt that game developers at Capcom knew or understood the “Cloud” concept that we are now familiar to, but I’m pretty sure programming can’t “leak” out like a liquid or gas and infect others. It just seems unfathomable, especially given how computers were at that time. Hell, Wi-Fi wasn’t introduced to the general public until 1998. So a virus in of itself couldn’t leak…but now we get into the fun stuff so buckle your butts.



By the time Wily was working on Zero he was getting desperate. He had lost to Light and Mega Man anywhere from 11(12) to 16(17) times (if you include the Game Boy games, MM&B, and the forthcoming Mega Man 11). He had failed in his attempts at Proving his Worth, Revenge, Revenge again, Espionage, Time Travel, Extortion, Eco-Terrorism, Blackmail/Kidnapping, Reprogramming, Alien Doomsday Weapons, Deception, Backup Plan, Tinkering with Unfamiliar Energy Sources, False Flags, Deception again, and external infection (and gears of destiny, whatever that means). He is annoyed, frustrated, angry, tired……dying. Dr. Wily is not a young man anymore. His body is wilting and failing around his mind. Zero is meant to be his ultimate creation to destroy Dr. Light (or Mega Man, or the world, or the moon, it’s hard to keep track what his goal was in the end). So he did what any other good Doctor mad with rage and with a massive vendetta and ego would do: he uploaded his consciousness into Zero.



Keep in mind that he likely had already designed Zero’s personality and AI at this point. Wily had already inadvertently tinkered into the concept that we consider Free Will numerous times. Ballade and Bass being notable examples of robots (in our eyes) willingly disobeying their creator. But that isn’t the focus. Wily knew he needed to advance this inadvertent technological breakthrough as a means to finally defeat that small blue Light bot that can’t shoot up. So Zero was given a personality. Probably not too different from what Ballade and Bass had along the lines of “Be the Strongest”. Zero is shown to be exceptionally powerful in 21XX. What Wily couldn’t anticipate is that Zero would fight on the side of good rather than his own nefarious intentions. But that personality clashed with Wily’s own consciousness being inside of him. Wily used Zero as a vessel to essentially bring himself into 21XX. This is why Zero seems to be ruthless, almost feral in his personality during the fight with Sigma in the warehouse. He is running on the raw hatred and emotion that emanates from Wily’s consciousness. It’s why when the “W” shows up Zero is in physical pain. That is Wily’s consciousness attempting to take full control over Zero. Sigma smashing the crystal had some unexpected consequences: it transferred Wily to Sigma.



Now wait a minute! I just said that viruses can’t “leak”. Correct. But this isn’t a virus in the understanding of “malicious program designed to disrupt a system”. This is a virus in the sense of “foreign substance invading a body”. When Wily transfers over to Sigma, this is when Sigma’s personality and outlook gets altered. It’s blamed on the “Maverick Virus” again but this isn’t the case. If anything, Sigma embraces Wily’s consciousness and even confers with him about things. This is shown in X5 when Sigma reveals he’s been working with Dr. Wily. This is where the “Zero Virus” comes into play apparently. Obviously a virus spurred from Zero is what that name implies. But the Zero Virus is basically Wily’s consciousness. Can also be said that Wily gave himself a new body for a while as Serges in X2. Going back to the “leaky viruses” aspect of all of this, Sigma is shown to be able to transfer himself/his consciousness to different bodies. So it can be assumed that sentient viruses have the ability to transfer themselves in the way that normal viruses (like a cold or flu) can. Sigma does this, and Wily seems to do this.



But this is ridiculous! A human can’t just upload their entire consciousness into a computer! It’s science fiction nonsense! This may be true, but in a world with sentient robots that shoot concentrated solar energy at 8 thematically pleasing robots who somehow all have a rock-paper-scissors format of weaknesses based on each other, some things we do have to put aside and accept as a reality in the world of 20XX. It’s generally accepted that the Light Capsules that X finds during his many different adventures don’t just happen by coincidence. These are vessels through which the consciousness of Dr. Light is able to exist in 21XX. This is backed by the fact that in Mega Man X5, Zero comes across a Light Capsule and Dr. Light talks to Zero! Zero asks Dr. Light about visions he’s been seeing in his head (of Dr. Wily) and he said that once he saw Light he felt compelled to ask him. It’s an interesting dialogue, especially for a Capsule that supposedly is preprogrammed. So if we accept that Light uploaded his consciousness into his Capsules (or a server that feeds these capsules scattered throughout the world) we should also be able to accept that Wily took the opportunity of having a strong, powerful new vessel that he had just finished and uploaded himself into that as well. But due to the personality clash between Wily’s raw emotion and Zero being a robot with likely no understanding of emotion during the roughly 100 years they had to spend together, it wasn’t a good match. Those 100 years could also have been what honed Zero’s mind. Do you want to spend a century trapped in a capsule with Dr. Wily who continuously obsesses with defeating Dr. Light and proving his genius to the world? I’d rebel against him too!



Once Wily is transferred into Sigma, (which ironically has an AI based on Light’s design for X, so I’m sure Wily was thrilled about that notion), Zero is able to come into his own and adapt to the world he awoke to. It’s only when Wily transfers back into Zero in X5 during one of the endings that we see what Zero is like with Wily at the helm. Evil red aura, Wily’s Skull as the symbol on his health bar, just insanely powerful. Wily’s rage manifested to its fullest.



So where does this come full circle. Well, again we have to accept that uploading the consciousness of a living being is something that we need to accept is doable back in 20XX, when robots are the norm and no one is ever concerned about random giant skull fortresses popping up here and there. But it could be a technology that was experimental, even if two competing scientists happened to develop it at the same time. This is because if we go further back into the timeline, there is a split that is cited as the creation of two worlds. One that was the development of robotics, and one that focused more on networking and AI programs. This created the timeline we know as the Battle Network series. In that series, we come to find out that MegaMan.EXE isn’t just another NetNavi, but is actually the consciousness of Lan Hikari’s twin brother, Hub. Hub died during infancy from some random heart disease and his father used Hub’s DNA to create MegaMan.EXE. Essentially Hub was reincarnated as a NetNavi. In the same token, Dr. Cossack in the BN Timeline is able to upload his consciousness into Cyberworld to help MegaMan.EXE. There’s a lot of brain transference going on in the two timelines. This whole notion gets even weirder in the Zero and ZX series when we start uploading souls into Biometals and just what the hell.



In summary, The Maverick Virus is a hoax, Wily is the actual virus that infects Sigma, and Wily just can’t get over that blue Light robots that can’t shoot up continue to foil his plans.