Games, all sorts

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Right, so I guess I need an origin story.

I plan to keep a series of logs chronicling operational details, philosophical ponderings, and/or random babblings. I'll key their encryption to this file, and keep it stored in headware memory. Figure if some assclown manages to hack my skull, I have bigger things to worry about. Hmm, also; Jarvis, narrow audio filtration to just the sound of my voice. No reason I can't do this and get some work done too.

Anyway. My family's from Seattle originally, though I wasn't born there. Records about us from before that time were lost during the Awakening, or one of it's subsidiary cataclysms, but we're definitely Scotch-Irish. Back then, it was just my dad Richard, mom Camilia, and sisters Aileen and Adaira, twins just a year older than me. I understand identical twins are a bit more rare among dwarves, so my folks were pretty excited about that. I actually don't have a lot of info about that period, as Mom and Dad never seemed to want to talk about it. All I know for sure, is Dad had a very sudden “job transfer” right before I was born, and they all packed up and left the UCAS in a big hurry. Living the lifestyle I do now, I have suspicions that they ran into some kind of trouble. There were no hints of corporate involvement, so my guess would be the Mob, or the Yaks, or some similar group of organized assholes. Anyways, whatever it was, I've never detected a hint of it since, so running down to Atlanta in the CAS seemed to correct the problem, if there was a problem.

I was actually born on the trip in-between. The fact that they decided to make the trip with a woman so close to giving birth is one of the red flags supporting my “on the run” theory. My mother went into labor while still in the air and the plane had to make an emergency landing in Denver. I was born at St. Joseph Memorial Hospital, which I believe is in the CAS sector and would probably technically make me a native-born CAS citizen, but I like to think of myself as a man born of no nation! Might have worked if I'd actually been born while the plane was still in the air. Regardless, after a brief stay in Denver, I was on my way to Atlanta Gee-Ayy, to get on with growing up in one of the Smyrna tenement districts.

Yeah, that neighborhood was pretty much a shithole. It wasn't the living conditions themselves that were so bad. The apartment was small for the five of us, but it was clean and in good repair. We never had a lot of money, but we did okay. No the problem, like with many low-rent districts, was with the gangs. Our little slice had three of note, and since the local population ran heavily to metahumans, they each had their own racially-themed clique. Biggest and meanest were the Bloody Hammers, an ork and troll group, led by the biggest, dumbest troll I ever saw, called Big Crunch. Their hobbies were breaking shit and hurting people. Then there was your typical high-speed elf biker gang called the Double Nines, run by a near-mythical hardcase slitch named Rave. I never knew anybody that had actually seen Rave, but she was rumored to be hot as Hell and cold as ice. The Nines liked making noise, racing their bikes, and reminding everybody how superior elves are to everyone else. And finally, there were the Whiskey Tangos, a mixed human-dwarf gang, and the smallest of the three by a wide margin. They were run by a pretty clever human kid everybody called Foxtrot. He knew his group could never stand up to the other two in numbers or brute force, so they played to other strengths; namely, brains over brawn.

As you've probably guessed by now, I ended up with the Tangos. It wasn't really a choice. See, growing up in a place like that, you're either in a gang, or easy meat for anybody else that's in a gang. We shorties are natural targets for bullies, but they usually discover pretty quick that “short” doesn't necessarily mean “chump”. A typical dwarf kid is easily a match for any human, elf, or even ork kid in a fair fight. But we just didn't have the numbers. So, my options were limited. I was a smart kid and the only one in the family that seemed to have inherited the supposed dwarven affinity for mechanical things, so the Tangos were a pretty good fit. I didn't even really think of them as a “gang” at all, more like a group of like-minded chummers trying to get by. Yeah, we broke the law, but we never messed with the average folks from our neighborhood, and we didn't go for most of the dangerous, violent stuff a lot of other gangs are into. The calling card for the Whiskey Tangos was stealing cars. And man, we were good at it, too. We knew which cars were too valuable to risk stealing and which ones were too cheap to be worth the trouble. We put the “grand” in grand theft auto. I'll never forget the time I boosted my first ride, a puke-green '46 Ford Americar, with two canary-yellow doors and a hood that wouldn't shut all the way. I must've driven that thing around for six hours before we had to ditch it. Fox had connections with chop shops all over town, and when they were buying, the Tangos made good money. But we weren't just after cars; we were scavengers extraordinaire and some of us had grown into pretty decent techs. We gathered up last-generation computer parts, old commlinks, loose electronic components, whatever we could find, and salvaged the useful bits to sell or use for ourselves. One girl, a reclusive hacker prodigy named Simone “Synergy” Sinclair, managed to put together a working Matrix host, and me and a friend named Seamus Harper built a tap into the local power grid that went unnoticed for years. I turned up a stash of old, pre-Awakening flatvid movies and comic books and stuff that nurtured my inner geek. I found an ancient pen-and-paper game called “Dungeons and Dragons” and taught some of the other guys to play. It was freaking hilarious. So where's my racial bonus to hit orks?

Even better, our guys were forward thinkers; very uncommon in a street gang. A lot of gangers are only interested in the next cheap thrill, or in exerting their dominance over those weaker, or in just giving the whole damn wide world the finger. Our guys were looking to get out. We all knew the final destination of a typical ganger asshole is either a cold jail cell or a cold slab at the morgue, so we opted for something different. Most of us kept going to school, and whatever money didn't go home to our folks or into group expenses went towards a real higher education someday down the line. I'm pretty sure Mom and Dad never really approved of what I was doing, but I was working towards something better and helping the family while doing it. With the little extra boost, my folks were able to get the girls into a nice private school in a better district. I suppose I could've gone as well, but private school wasn't really for me, and it didn't feel right leaving my friends. But I absolutely wanted my sisters to go; they didn't have the inclination nor aptitude for the kinds of stuff I was doing, and I'd spare them that if I could. You gotta look out for your sisters. So, the Whiskey Tangos had a lot of good years, which of course meant it all had to turn to shit eventually.

Looking back, I suppose it was inevitable. We were living in the shadow of two larger, more dangerous gangs that hated everyone else only slightly less than they hated each other. Our survival strategy was mostly “stay the hell out of their way”, and for a long while we did. But I think we were becoming too successful, and therefore a threat. The night it went down, Seamus and I were out dropping off a car at a chop shop up near Lawrenceville. By the time we got back, our warehouse was surrounded by cops, ambulances, and fire trucks. Part of the building was still on fire. Since the police and EMS response time out there was crap, it had probably been burning for some time. From what we could piece together from the aftermath, it looked like the Hammers and Nines had actually joined forces to wipe us out. The Hammers had stormed in with guns blazing, setting fire to the building as they went, and the Nines had mopped up any stragglers fleeing the scene. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of accommodation those two bitter enemies had to reach to work together, even distantly, but whatever it was, it was all over the next day because they were right back to killing each other like nothing had happened. As far as I know, the only ones that survived were Seamus, myself, and Synergy, who had been out running the Matrix from some pirated jack-in point somewhere. Most of us folks living in that neighborhood were too wrapped up in our own little world to notice much of what was going on outside, except for maybe the big things. Bug City, Big D's short-lived presidency, Halley's Comet, the Renraku Arcology shutdown. Some people weren't even clued in on that stuff. But it was hard to miss the Matrix Crash that happened later that year, which actually turned out to be pretty good news for us.

So, I had been lying low for a couple of months, not going to school, not leaving the apartment, barely in contact with the others, parents worried sick that either the Hammers or Nines would figure out that they'd missed and then come finish the job. By then, see, everyone had heard about what happened. It was clear that the remainder of Whiskey Tango needed to get the hell out of Dodge, but it was still a year until graduation, and no high school diploma equaled no college, equaled no six figures and 2.5 kids. But then, lo and behold, one cold November morning, the entire Matrix shit itself to death, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, from everybody except three ex-ganger geeks that needed to reinvent themselves in a hurry. So Synergy worked her wizardry for the three of us. I really don't have a clue how she does what she does. Why yes, Mr. Georgia Tech Admissions Representative, I am indeed an 18-year old high school graduate with a 4.0 grade average, and have indeed been granted a full scholarship at your illustrious institution. Yes, I realize there's a problem with the computers, but I'm reasonably sure my paperwork can still be verified here, and here. I realize the semester has already started, but my trip from Seattle was delayed by that weird early winter weather we've been having, as detailed here. No, I completely understand the confusion. Thank you so much for your expedient assistance with this awkward situation. So I packed my things, grabbed a bus downtown, and that's how my very first fake SIN was born.

I can probably skip over some of the boring parts, here. Compared to back home, college life was fantastic. That's not to say it was perfect, of course. Any school's going to have its share of assholes. Georgia Tech draws in a lot of magically-active students, and so I discovered that there's no asshole more insufferable in his ass-holiness than a magical asshole. I guess I can't really blame them; these guys are a hot commodity with a rare gift, and they know it. Some of the worst were the nascent physical-adept types; the techies called them “majocks”. But, there were heavy restrictions for magic use on school grounds, so they couldn't get into too much trouble. Anyway, after I got settled in, I think I at least dipped into just about every applied science course they had, but after taking a class on ASIST (that's Artificial Sensory Induction System Technology to you newbs), I knew immediately I wanted to be a rigger, and went after it like a dwarf on a mission. Let's face it, drones are pretty wiz. So, skip ahead, skip ahead, I graduate with honors and a shiny new engineering degree, and get easy job placement with a company called Emergent Robotics. Me and the rest of the Tango alumni parted ways here. Seamus went on to start his own automotive repair business, and Simone… well, I'm not really sure what she went into. Hard to tell with those hardcore decker types. She had to learn the ins and outs of the new wireless Matrix like everybody else, of course. Hell, she might have already been running the shadows by then, for all I know.

So, Emergent Robotics. The first and last real job I ever had. ER was a small satellite of Ares Atlanta based in one of the Alpharetta industrial sectors. They specialized in hardware and firmware for military- and industrial-grade robots and drones, as well as some processing components and fuzzy logic systems for commercial autopilots. For my first three years there, things were pretty wiz. The pay was good, the work was interesting, and I got to play with the new tech toys before most of the other kids did. My bosses were great, the work environment was great, everything was great. Then we got our new chairman of the board, Marvin Irving Henrichson, Official Ares Representative and Epic-Level Asshole. This guy was a real piece of work. He was such a perfectly stereotypical sleazy corporate douche that I couldn't believe he was for real. It's like he was reading down the Evil Executive checklist. Promote own agenda at the expense of subordinates, check. Claim credit for the accomplishments of others, check. Reduce pay, increase workload, lower budget, and withhold bonuses to boost own salary, check. My working theory was that he'd probably been somebody of importance somewhere up in the higher Ares command structure, and that he'd done something to incur the wrath of those mightier than he, and thus been cast out to fall to earth and muck it out with us mere mortals. He clearly did not want to be there, and apparently wanted everybody that worked for him to not want to be there at least as much as he did. And that's a real problem because, thanks to the rat's nest of contractual agreements and waivers and whatnot you have to sign upon being hired, you can't quit without some stiff legal repercussions or black marks on your record. If you're working with sufficiently high-end secret stuff, trying to leave your job can be punishable by some serious jail time. This was my first real education in the realities of corporate life.