Hardware 1990

A nomadic scavenger, Mo drifts through an irradiated wasteland and stumbles upon a buried robot. He gathers the disassembled pieces and carries them to junk dealer Alvy, who is talking with the ex-soldier known as “Hard Mo” Baxter and Mo’s friend Shades. When Alvy steps away, Mo buys the robot parts from the nomad and sells everything except the head to Alvy. Intrigued by the cutting-edge technology, Alvy begins to dig into the robot’s backstory. Mo and Shades later visit Jill, a reclusive metal sculptor, and after an initially cool reception where Jill tests them with a Geiger counter, Mo offers the robot head as a Christmas gift. Jill, Stacey Travis, accepts the head with evident interest. After Shades leaves, the couple share a loud, passionate moment, all of it unknowingly observed by their foul-mouthed, voyeuristic neighbour Lincoln Weinberg through a telescope.

As the conversation turns to ethics, Mo and Jill clash over a government sterilization plan and the morality of having children. Jill reshapes the robot head into a sculpture, and Mo admits he appreciates the work but doesn’t grasp what it means. Frustrated, Jill argues that the piece represents nothing and resents Mo’s call for more commercially viable art. The next morning, Alvy calls Mo with urgent news about the robot, insisting it is a M.A.R.K. 13. Before Mo leaves, he checks a Bible and finds the line “No flesh shall be spared” under Mark 13:20, a detail that seeds his distrust of a possible government plot to address severe overpopulation. Mo soon discovers Alvy dead from a cytotoxin, and finds evidence that the robot is an autonomous combat model capable of self-repair; Alvy’s notes also point to a defect—humidity as its weakness. Worried, Mo asks Shades to check on Jill, but Shades is in the throes of a drug trip and hardly coherent.

Back at the apartment, the robot begins to reassemble itself using shards from Jill’s metal sculptures and recharges by draining power from the building. It makes a violent attempt on Jill’s life, but she traps it inside a room after the apartment’s doors lock. Lincoln, still peeping through the blinds, witnesses the robot closing the blinds and, after briefly forcing the door, makes crude advances toward Jill and even offers to override the emergency lock. He dismisses Jill’s warnings about a killer machine, and when he tries to pry open the blinds for easier peeping, the M.A.R.K. 13 brutally kills him. Jill escapes to the kitchen and realizes her refrigerator can hide her from the robot’s infrared vision. She damages the robot, and Mo, Shades, and the apartment’s security team arrive to open fire, seemingly destroying it.

Yet the M.A.R.K. 13 drags Jill out a window, sending her crashing into a neighbor’s apartment. Jill races back upstairs to help Mo, who is alone with the robot. Overconfident, Mo engages the machine in combat, and the robot injects him with the same toxin that killed Alvy. Mo experiences a rush of euphoria and a cascade of hallucinatory visions as he dies. After Jill returns to her own apartment, the M.A.R.K. 13 begins to manipulate the doors, causing them to swing open and shut and trapping Shades outside while the security team dies attempting to enter. Jill then hacks into the robot’s CPU and tries to communicate, but more importantly, discovers its vulnerability. She lures the M.A.R.K. 13 into the bathroom, where Shades quickly slips through the doors to give her time. She fires up the shower, and the robot short‑circuits and is finally deactivated.

The following morning, a radio broadcast reveals that the M.A.R.K. 13 has been approved by the government and will be mass manufactured. The nomadic scavenger is seen returning to the irradiated wasteland, leaving behind a city that has just witnessed a new kind of threat—and a future that seems poised to be shaped by it.