cH | application

[liberaition]

PLAYER STUFF
Name: z
Pronoun: she or they
Email address: thistroper@gmail.com
Preferred contact: snarkings on aim/skrulls on tumblr/my email
Other characters: NOPE


CHARACTER STUFF
Name: Rielle "Kit" Peddler
Aliases: Her blog The Uplink is published anonymously, and she's primarily referred to in the hacker community as "uplink," but she doesn't call herself that and she doesn't have a codename, or anything.
Canon: Android Universe (slash android: netrunner, netrunner is the SPECIFIC GAME)
Role: morally ambiguous hacker
Species: Human, which is really more of a starting point.
Gender: Lady
Age: 22
Appearance: like this but with fewer robot parts. Alternatively, her pb is kiko mizuhara.
Origin story:
Kit's parents took having a superpowered child in stride. A physics professor and a music teacher, they saw no reason Kit's technopathy should affect their parenting. It may have been a naive view, but for the most part, Kit's childhood was relatively normal. She went to public school, played with her friends, and went to soccer practice. As a child, Kit was often overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data surrounding her, making it impossible to focus on anything else. After several unhelpful meetings with a child psychologists and a few unhelpful medications, her parents took her to the local Buddhist center where Kit was taught how to meditate. With time and practice, she learned to push the overwhelming input to the back of her mind, and narrow down on whatever was in front of her. Concentrating in school still wasn't easy, but it was manageable enough.

Born a technopath, Kit had always been totally, completely obsessed with robots. First with cartoon robots in children's shows, then with science fiction AIs and real-world robotics and artificial intelligence research. Kit never really understood the separation between the biological and the mechanical. The lines between human and machine, artificial and organic had always seemed vague. Science fiction and the internet introduced her to the concept of transhumanism, the idea of enhancing oneself (and the entire human race) and transcending the boundaries and limitations of the human mind and body. Over months of practice, meditation, and training, Kit honed her technopathic abilities until she could disconnect from her physical body, her mind free to wander the internet free of material distraction. Eventually though, she always had to return to her body.

Kit's long-term goal is to eventually be able to abandon her corporeal form completely, and have her conscience exist in the net. In the meantime, if computers could get upgrades, why couldn't she? At age 12 Kit started designing the cybernetic enhancements she planned to give herself, blueprints detailed down to each circuit and wire. The designs have evolved and grown more sophisticated over the years, but Kit's obsession has remained.

She started hacking seriously as a teenager, with the intent of creating real freedom of information. Information wasn't just for patent holders or CEOs or governments. Information was for the people. In high school, Kit released dozens of source codes, pharmaceutical formulas, government documents, and lots of other generally classified information on her anonymous blog, The Uplink. After a couple of years, it wasn't really about the information anymore. Hacking was a riddle, an art, and Kit was one of the best.

She graduated high school in Boston at age 17, and after a mildly-disastrous first semester of college, Kit was offered a job at a Silicon Valley startup and dropped out. The job didn't work out either, but Kit did stay in California, jobhopping and eventually winding up in LA. She finally started working on her cybernetic enhancement project, designing the hardware and the neural interface from scratch. It took some searching, but eventually Kit's underworld contacts lead her to a surgeon willing to take her (mostly stolen) money and not ask questions. The brain implants were relatively minor, a metal plate replacing about a quarter of her skull and a few chips and circuits embedded just under it, designed to connect to external hardware. The arm was more complicated, it took a while to adjust and there are still kinks to be worked out (not much in the way of sensation, a tendency to twitch, fingers getting stuck), but to Kit it's all been worth it.


Personality:

In person, Kit is reserved and quiet. She usually seems a little distracted - even as an adult, it's hard for her to completely focus on physical space. But when she is focused, it's like nothing else exists. Kit will sit hunched over whatever new electronic she's working on for hours, checking up on the feeds she tracks in the back of her brain, forgetting to eat or drink or sleep. Online, Kit isn't especially reserved. She's still generally polite, but she's much more confident, speaks her mind, and doesn't pull punches. She's not one to take any bullshit either. Being quiet doesn't mean Kit isn't good with people - she often prefers the company of machines, but she has a few close human friends back home and a handful of hacker friends she talks to every day online. She's not bad at interpersonal relationships, they just aren't a main priority for her. Her sense of humor can be a little hard to pick up on if you don't know her, as it's quite dry and tends toward subtle sarcasm.

Kit's obsession with upgrading and then no longer needing her meat body is a driving force in her life, and at age 20 nearly everything she does is done with that eventual goal in mind. Though she's an extraordinarily gifted programmer and engineer, she's always had problems holding down a job or with school. It's not just the constant distraction of the internet tugging at her mind, Kit has never been that great with authority. She was reprimanded countless times in school for questioning her teachers, and ultimately it's what's lead her to angrily quit or be fired from every job she's ever had. If Kit doesn't believe there's a good reason for doing something, she won't do it. And "because I told you to" is definitely not a good reason. Kit is methodical, thorough, patient, and rational, almost to a fault. A task will be completed in the time it takes to do it well, no later and certainly no sooner. You can't rush art. Though Kit is a perfectionist, she isn't overly concerned with receiving credit for her work, preferring to let her performance speak for itself. If you're the best, it doesn't really matter what people think of you.

Kit's parents were raised Buddhist, but by the time Kit was born they had both stopped meditating regularly, and weren't especially involved with the local Tibetan-American community. But when they took Kit to their local Buddhist center to learn to meditate, Kit got really into it. It's a big part of her life, and she meditates at least daily, sometimes two or three times a day. Kit often thinks of her mission to become a robot as her way of reaching enlightenment.

Because the internet functions as another sense to Kit, without it she feels isolated and limited, like she's wearing a blindfold she can't get off. She won't go anywhere she can't get some form of access, which in the US mostly just cuts out very rural areas. The more wifi signals, the safer Kit feels. Major cities are where she's the most comfortable, and that's where she stays.



Differences from canon: A LOT. LA isn't quite at the level of dystopian future cyberpunk megacity that New Angeles (which may or may not be in Ecuador) is, and there aren't a lot of enslaved AIs hanging around for Kit to liberate. Kit doesn't really have much in the way of backstory or canon material, other than a short story and Word Of God and some quotes on cards. Like, I made this all up, ssssoo.


Power level: C. She's great with computers, not so much with meatspace.
Powers: Technopathy! Hecka technopathy. Kit's preferred way to interface with the internet is to sort of astrally project her consciousness (which she refers to as her atman) directly into it, made even easier via some of the implants she has given herself. The internet is like another sense to her, she's always peripherally aware of it. Kit is also gifted with hardware, machines just make sense and engineering comes naturally to her. She also has some brain implants and a COOL ROBOT ARM. It's not superstrong and it can't shoot lasers or anything, but it sure is awesome.
Team affiliation: FREELANCE, BABY.

First person sample: bam


Prose sample:

Kit couldn't say how long she'd been working. It was slow going, and she was only halfway through the dozens of tiny wires that needed to be soldered together - maybe an hour? But the ache in her back and the painful emptiness of her stomach told her she'd been hunched over the workbench much longer than that.

With a sigh, she switched off her soldering iron and stretched, arms reaching toward the ceiling. Her mechanical left arm whirred quietly as she flexed her fingers, and Kit smiled to herself. With the latest software patch her augments were working better than ever, which was all the more motivation to finish what she was working on. The table, like most of the other surfaces in Kit's tiny apartment, was covered in wires, bits of circuit board, titanium rods, and pieces of cable. Tangles of brightly colored wire spilled from a pair of sleek black carbon fiber casings, and in the center of it all was a near-perfect model of a human foot. Kit's foot, as she'd been thinking of it from the beginning. It felt much more hers than the flesh and blood one she'd been born with, anyway. She'd put in countless hours of work, designed every inch of the synthetic, molded the casings, sculpted the foot. All Kit had done to get her organic foot was to grow it in utero. The neural interface was coming together nicely, much better than her arm had been, at first. One of those things one had to learn from experience, she supposed.

The chair legs scraped across the linoleum as Kit pushed back from the table, her stomach sending out a sharp reminder that she needed to put something in it. It was a hardware problem, one that could be fixed with a few simple upgrades. Soon, she thought to herself as she opened the fridge. There wasn't much inside, but she did find a few slices of pizza that had no visible mold. It wasn't that Kit didn't like eating, but there was a vast array of more efficient ways to draw power. Electricity didn't produce so much waste, if it was generated properly.

Not bothering with the microwave, Kit ate the pizza cold as she scrolled through her various bank accounts. She'd have to make some cash soon if she wanted to keep this apartment - maybe pick up a couple freelance coding contracts, something for ARTech or maybe one of the dime a dozen local startups. Even with that, though, it might be time to look for something a little more permanent. Kit didn't have the greatest track record with longer-term jobs, but she had to eat. For now, anyway. The digestive system replacement project was a long way off. Dipping into her considerable "savings" (saved from corporate accounts, that is) was out of the question. That was her upgrades money, not to be used for anything else even in emergencies. Especially in emergencies.

There was a half-drunk can of energy drink (Diesel gives you flames!) sitting on the counter, and Kit gulped it down with a grimace. She couldn't remember the last time she slept. Meditated, certainly, but not real sleep. Still, she didn't need to. Her hands shook slightly but her mind was clear, and she could feel electricity running through her veins. Her mind was open, and suddenly it was as if she could understand everything. All those perfect moments, hanging like droplets in the tangled spider web of time and space. Shimmering, beautiful. Teasing her with their promise of knowledge.

It was time to get back to work.