Hello everyone. So this was a character that got approved before, but as far as I am aware that was only the version that appeared in the original show due to the canon discrepancies Reboot: The Guardian Code had. Curiosity regarding his status got the best of me here, hence me going back to this mediocre show and making this (to this day, can’t believe they made an episode where the User is a middle aged fanboy who lives in his parents basement; as much as I would have liked seeing a face to the User, this feels like a mockery to fans of the original, don’t get me started on that scene where Dot is hiding behind Enzo). Anyway, let the trail commence!
What's the work?
The infamous Reboot: The Guardian Code is a television series produced by Mainframe Studios which aired on YTV in 2018. The show is a reboot of… well, Reboot … and it follows four teenagers from Alan Turing High School named Ausin, Parker, Tamra, and Trey as they are chosen (via an online game called Cyber Guardian for having the top scores) to protect Cyberspace from threats like The Sourcerer, who is actually Austin's father who developed the technology in Room 0, but gets corrupted by Dark Code after faking his death to protect his family from the Department of Internet Security (D.I.S.). An A.I. named Virtual Evolutionary Recombinant Avatar (V.E.R.A.), who gets accidently kicked out of Cyberspace by Parker, assists them as our heroes secretly enter Cyberspace through Room 0, a room in the basement of the school that’s hidden behind a holographic wall.
Who is he? What did he do?
Megabyte is one of the two main antagonists of the show, alongside The Sourcerer. Basically, The Sourcerer re-activates him in Mainframe (the place in which he apparently created prior to being corrupted by Dark Code) and places a delete code in him to do his bidding. He spends most of the show helping The Sourcerer with his schemes such as (amongst others) removing a cyberpatch on a rift the Guardians placed to release Cyber Locusts to cause a blackout in the city, helping him steal the Nova X3J, trying to enhance a tropical hurricane, and having him replicate himself to cause an outbreak by releasing all of the viruses on Virusylum (a prison for viruses), but the schemes usually fail ue to the Guardians intervention. The Sourcerer would contact him using a vid window. At around his second appearance, he corrupts the mobile game Fortress Command while having its army of sentinels brainwashed to his will and he would frequently kill one only for him to create another Alpha Sentinel afterwards. At around the middle of the show, he returns to Mainframe and recruits Hexadecimal, his sister, to his side presumably to help overthrow The Sourcerer; however, she eventually gets captured by the D.I.S. while Megabyte abandons her.
The Sourcerer eventually finds out that the Guardians are human entering Cyberspace, so he has Megabyte capture them in hopes of using their technology for future schemes. Megabyte captures them and bargains with The Sourcerer: he threatens to kill them unless he removes his delete code. The Sourcerer reluctantly accepts but the Guardians end up escaping. Now finally free of The Sourcerer’s control, he begins his conquest at Social Media City but his plot gets foiled by the Guardians and is taken to Virusylum. While there, he encounters Hexadecimal and they work together to escape, wanting to rule all of existence. The show gets cancelled so that means we don’t see them making efforts towards this.
Mitigating factors?
I don’t think he has any. He only works with The Sourcerer because he is literally threatening his life, and while he does abuse him with the delete code to get him to do his bidding (with The Sourcerer showing no regard for him in some episodes such as forcing Megabyte to replicate himself at full strength despite knowing that it will drain his power and make him weak), this doesn’t make him a tragic figure as the show hardly treats his predicament with sympathy. The show also makes it clear he was a villain beforehand and only wants to free himself from his control so he could rule all of cyberspace and the real world himself. While he does end up holding his end of the bargain with The Sourcerer, it was likely that he was only doing it to bring pain to the heroes (specifically using the extractor device The Sourcerer was going to use to get information from them). Considering he remarks to Austin that he wants to do it when Austin tries telling him that he doesn’t have to follow through with it, I don’t feel this makes him honorable. The moment dies when our heroes flee, as when The Sourcerer orders him to go after them to continue the extraction, but he responds to this by destroying his vid window while telling The Sourcerer that he has issued his last command. He even blocks his vid window in his subseqent appearance, officially abandoning him.
He doesn’t care about his sister as he was threatening her at one point and leaves her to be captured by the D.I.S. while not even lifting a finger to help rescue her. He does team up with her near the end of the series, but that was only to escape Virusylum. He does spare a binome when he was conquering Social Media City, but this doesn’t make him honorable as he was using it to view everyone from the real world’s reaction to his plans due to finding it amusing. Now, onto the matter of moral agency. Nothing suggests he has issues here beyond being classified as a virus. Considering the original has it (since he admits in the end of the series he was rejecting his predator instincts), I don’t see much of a reason he wouldn’t have it here since it is made clear he had conflicts with Bod prior to the events of the show (even if it is vague on how much of the original show took place here). If I remember correctly, Hex still had affection for Bob and he is willing to hold back on killing or follow through with bargains, so I don’t feel he has issues here.
Heinous Standards?
Not taking the original show’s villains (such as Daemon) and his crimes into account because Reboot: The Guardian Code is ambiguously canon at best, so I am just going to compare him to The Sourcerer and his sister. The former has a few nasty schemes under his belt such as (amongst other crimes) wanting to start a nuclear war by launching a nuclear war head, trying to enhance a tropical hurricane which is noted to put lives at risk and homes being destroyed, and tortures Megabyte with the delete code. Hex doesn’t do anything impressive in the show beyond killing a few binomes.
So how does Megabyte stand out from them? Well, the dude corrupts the mobile game Fortress Command while having its army of sentinels brainwashed to his will. He has bad boss tendencies as he frequently kills a sentinel either for failure, when he’s mad, or for no particular reason. While done for pragmatic reasons, the dude helps The Sourcerer with some of his nasty schemes such as enhancing a tropical hurricane and infects a children's toy just to please him which is noted to be burning up in children’s rooms and the heroes worry about the harm it could do to the children. I would also factor in the fact that he and his army took out numerous security binomes whether through helping The Sourcerer with his plots or his own schemes.