Since the discovery of an alien vessel’s crash-site in the early 40’s, the nations that had divided the find’s spoils had labored tirelessly to crack the secrets found within. By the 70’s, technology was starting to leap ahead at incredible rates as the leading minds of the scientific communities of multiple nations learned to utilize the advancements this find had unearthed. In the late 1970’s, Dan and Carol Carter were leading developers and inventors in the computer revolution that had swept the United States, and were living a very comfortable existence. They even decided to have a second child, five years after believing it too great a strain on their then-meager finances.

Nikki Carter was born in the spring of ’78. By the fall of ’84, she had built her own computer. Her younger brother, Kyle - only a year her junior - was her ever-present partner-in-crime, and the two were able to achieve as toddlers what some couldn’t grasp as adults.

It was 1984 when the members of the newly re-formed League of Seven came seeking the help of the renowned elder Carters. An old foe had strung together a potentially devastating logic-bomb that endangered the networks of the world’s military institutions. Together with the League, Dan and Carol were able to avert the catastrophe and catch the mastermind. At the end of their adventure, the Carters were asked by Kinetic and Mentor to become permanent members of the team, not as field agents, but serving as technicians, engineers, dispatchers, communications officers and intelligence gatherers. So it was that young Nikki began living the life of a child of heroes. She, Kyle, and their elder brother Ryan were the typic siblings, growing and playing alongside the children of the uniques in the League.

For some children, this might have been quite an adjustment. For Nikki and her brothers, adaptation was life, and this was just the start of a new adventure. Nikki in particular welcomed the influx of other kids who would like her because she was different, rather than in spite of it. The whole group of children and parents were like one large family, spending as much time together out of costume at picnics, barbecues, and holiday celebrations as they did fighting crime. Before long, Nikki and young Hope Sage had become best friends, with little Katie Flynn tagging along at super-speed.

Nikki and her brothers all followed in the footsteps of their parents, but Nikki was the only one to show interest in pursuing a position with the League. As Hope grew into her own, eventually taking a costume and the name of Telepath, Nikki started working by her side, acting as her eyes and ears in the sky as Motherboard, providing technical support, information, and witty quips as Telepath learned to be a Super Hero on her own.

When the New York Disaster struck, Nikki knew that most of her best friends were there. Not only were they all gone, but she soon heard that all Psions (uniques with mental powers) had died at the same time. If a low-level telekinetic in Siberia couldn’t escape the shockwave, surely Hope, was gone, too. When Katie Flynn, now Kid Quick, turned up alive, it renewed Nikki’s hope that her best friend had somehow survived.

She hacked every system in her path, hunting for clues - any scrap of information that could tell her whether Hope was alive or dead. She found what she was looking for buried deep in the government’s records. Hope, now the last known psion on the planet, was in a deep coma and being held in a secret Sky-Carrier holding facility. Knowing that Sky-Carriers - massive airborne battle-stations - were all-but impregnable, and trusting from the documents she found that Hope was being taken care of benignly until such time as she woke up from her coma, Nikki resigned herself to closely monitoring her friend’s progress until the day she woke up.

For the next two years, Motherboard worked on developing new technologies to occupy herself. She would build some new device, patent it, and sell it off - she didn’t care about the money, she was just scratching an inventor’s itch that she couldn’t ignore. Her greatest creation, though, she kept for herself; cybernetic implants that allowed her to connect her brain to her computer network. Now able to perform all manual operations at the speed of thought, with advanced computations running exponentially faster, her output and inventive capacity soared.

Telepath woke up at the end of those two years, and she and Motherboard were reunited. Without her parents, Hope wanted to continue where she had left off, but it wasn’t long before the duo realized it would take more than the two of them to achieve everything they wanted. Motherboard pulled a list of other teen heroes who showed the most promise, and Telepath began recruiting them for a new team.

Motherboard generally acts as the sarcastic, surly den mother of the group. She works tirelessly to make sure that they have all they need to do their job, as well as coordinating all their actions in the field from her computer hub at the Headquarters and providing plenty of sardonic barbs along the way. She is the one that literally watches their backs, and in many ways is the glue that keeps the team together. Between this new venture, and her group of techno-savant friends, the ‘Nerd Patrol,’ Motherboard has her plate full to overflowing - just how she likes it.

"The Uniques" and all related images, text and characters Copyright 2008 Comfort Love and Adam Withers. All Rights Reserved.