Name: Midnight "Iris" Fairchild
Gender: Female
Age: 27
Home Planet: Afthona. Named after the Greek word for "Plentiful," Afthona is an industrial world of cityscapes. Most of its landscape is terraformed heavily, and vast tracts of land are dedicated to massive metropolises. When it was first discovered, huge deposits of many kinds of valuable minerals were found readibly available just beneath the surface, thus the name the planet was given. Several UPN nations and megacorporations rushed to colonize it, and it ended without a majority population, giving it no singular owner. There is a slight majority of Englishmen, but not enough for England to claim the planet. Outside of its great cities, much of Afthona's land is given over to mines, as even years after its discovery there is still a bounty of metal to be found. Corporations run the show on the metallic world, as it is a place of commerce. Excercising their right as colonists to extraterriotoriality (although they are still subject to the UPN overall) many of the cities are governed by corporate executives who use their wealth to keep the machine well oiled and running smoothly. Money is king on Afthona, and everyone knows it.
One of Afthona's key traits is its extremely long day-night cycle, lasting slightly over fifty hours. A common joke among residents is "the sun never sets on the skyscrapers" and this is almost true. Because humans cannot work fifty hour days without sleep, each day on most cities is divided into three periods. When the sun rises, the first Light period begins. Most residents rise late and then work for much of this period, which lasts until 20:00 PM. Then, the Dark period begins, and the cities dampen lights and use gigantic domes to simulate night. Citizens rest during this period, pursuing recreational activites and otherwise taking a break from the tireless Light period. At 30:00, the dome is retracted, and the second Light period begins, which is another twenty hours of sunlight. Contrary to the first Light period, this time is usually spent in sports or other recreational activites that necessitate sunlight and the outdoors. Some people still work, while others play. It is the most varied time. When the sun sets, Afthona's thriving night scene comes to life. The night is not separated into periods like the day, and darkness means the residents flock to the planet's many nightclubs, as well as shadier places. The streets are as alive at night as they are during the day, especially around 10:00 to 30:00 AM. Criminal organizations also operate at night, blending into the crowds and using clubs as fronts for their dealings.
Afthona's climate is mild, the temperature varying little across the year. The seasons are still distinct, but the coldest temperature in winter is almost never below fifty degrees fahrenheit, and the warmest it gets in summer is eighty. This is agreeable to most of the residents, who are happy with the middling weather. The skies are cloudy most of the time, and rain is relatively common, but more extreme weathers are very rare.
Home System: Lance
Occupation: Commercial hacker; Midnight is hired by corporations, large and small, to test their defenses in cyber-space. She attempts to crack their security after some target, such as substitute "confidential" data, and whether she succeeds or fails, reports the weaknesses and strengths of the system to her employer. It is a high-paying, very in-demand job on Afthona, affording her a life of luxury.
Appearance: Midnight is rather short, standing at barely five feet, two inches. Her lax occupation is apparent in her slim, slightly underweight, frame that lacks sturdiness or strength. She is caucasian. Her hair is black with a noticeäble blue sheen that is visible when the light shines on it. It is long, thick, and straight, hanging a ways down her back. She usually lets it hang loose, but ties it into a ponytail occasionally. Her eyes are both artificial--cybereyes that were installed to replace her faulty birth eyes. Midnight can change their color to anything imaginable at will, even forming patterns in the irises, but usually keeps them at a circular rainbow pattern that gives her an exotic gaze. She has withdrawn cheekbones, slightly slanted eyes, and a small, rounded nose.
On formal occasions, Midnight wears a lacy black and white dress with a victorian flare to it, but it is much more form-fitting and tighter than the dresses of that period, and the frills are toned down severely. Along with it, she wears shiny black slippers and several articles of jewelry. These include a silver pendant, shaped like a pair of wings spreading outward with sapphires inset in the feathers, and matching rings on the index finger of each hand. These rings have a technological theme to them, lacking gemstones but being intricately carved in hex patterns and set with tiny lights that cause the shapes to very softly glow green. Casually, Midnight wears a form fitting black long sleeved shirt, black slacks, and a light black jacket with a high collar. She dislikes formal wear in general, only wearing her dress to business meetings and the like; anything less and she wears her casual wear, causing her to receive many odd looks when she shows up to a high-class party in a jacket and slacks.
Distinguishing Features: Aside from her startling cybereyes, Midnight has a few cosmetic alterations under her skin, forming vaguely blue-glowing hex patterns visible to the casual observer. These are only set in certain places, including her wrists, the back and palms of her hands, her cheeks, next to her eyes, her breasts, and her back.
Personality: Midnight is scatter-brained, disorganized, and unfocused. She is friendly, anxious, and apologizes for any slight she gives, real or imagined, no matter the magnitude. She's not good with people, although she wants to be and tries her hardest to overcome her anxiety. She doesn't really get formal occasions and acts like she would any other time, leading to awkward situations. She's incredibly intelligent but sometimes has trouble putting her intellect to use. Small things bother her, like a crooked painting on a wall, a slanted desk, and so on. She can never arrange her surroundings to her satisfaction. She's very practical and resourceful, able to find things in her surroundings to help with a given problem. When attempting to concentrate on one of her areas of expertise, she shuts out other people and becomes only vaguely aware of her surroundings. In this state she is startled easily by outside interference, and is jumpy and high-strung. However, when she tries to focus on anything else, she's very distracted and usually unable to get much done. When it comes to business dealings, she's shrewd enough to stay afloat, but not good at lying or spotting lies. She's distracted easily when talking to a client, leading to rather haphazard business meetings. Her living areas are always untidy, random objects laid out in random patterns. Despite certain things irritating her, she prefers her possessions laying out in the open, because "they're easier to find this way." She is a perfectionist at heart, but long ago gave up trying to be perfect in favor of trying to be good enough.
Midnight has eidetic memory, a rare condition which means her brain stores information differently than most people. It's impossible for her to forget anything (sights, smells, sounds, anything), but her disorganized and distant manner originates from this. She often loses herself in her own thoughts and memories or loses touch with reality, becoming unresponsive until she snaps back. She has hyper-realistic dreams that are very often nightmares, and she often appears frazzled and tired because of a sleepless night.
Talents: Coding, hacking, cyber-security, problem-solving, encrypting and decrypting, memorization, mathematics, logic.
History: Midnight was born with defective eyesight, being totally blind. Her family was too poor to afford treatment or replacements, so she lived with it for years. Her mother died when she was young, and her father was a disgruntled soldier. Through her childhood and adolescence she was a quiet, subdued girl, taught that she was to be seen and not heard. She received a very sparse education, limited by her blindness, and was almost never allowed to go out into public. When she was seventeen, her father vanished, leaving Afthona without a trace she could follow. Reduced to begging, the blind girl could barely get enough to eat. She discovered her incredible memory upon meeting a man named Adamson when she was eighteen. She had known she didn't forget things before that, of course, but it was only now did she know that it was unusual. Adamson took pity on her and provided her shelter, and realized she was an eiditicker. He explained to her that he could use her help. He turned out to be the leader of a group of robbers, but she was in no position to refuse. He didn't actually threaten her, but he was providing her with food and lodging and she knew he would stop if she didn't help. He cleverly used her abilities to plan and execute a heist against a large corporate building. It went off without a hitch at first, but three days later he and his entire crew were arrested and put away fro life. Midnight's involvement was never known, and the money was never found. She had taken it and fled, and was smart enough to use it appropriately so no one would be suspicious how a beggar had come into such a large sum. She had her faulty eyes replaced with a cybernetic pair that finally allowed her to see. Now able to use her powers in memorization to the full extent, she researched a number of subjects, devouring as much information as she could and learning skills. However, she found herself to be little good at most practical professions, lacking technical expertise, social skills, or talent in art. However, when she was nineteen, she finally found a calling that suited her:
Coding.
Coding relied so much on memorization and not much else that Midnight excelled at it, becoming an experienced coder in a matter of days by simply decompiling extremely advanced programs and looking at what made them tick. As her knowledge grew, she expanded her horizons and focused on three primary areas: Cyber-defense, encryption/decryption, and hacking. She knew at this point that she didn't want to be just a programmer for some big company, underpaid and underappreciated, so she took a rather more dramatic career choice. Knowing how well they were paid, Midnight became a commercial hacker, advertising her services to large corporations and telling them that if she couldn't crack their security, no one could, and if she did she could improve it for them. Business was slow at first, but after she finally received her first customer, a moderate sized corporation that focused on exportation of non-practical metals like gold. She tore through their security in less than three hours, then upgraded it far past anything it was before. Impressed, the corp paid her a large sum, and her reputation began to get around. Soon she was the premier commercial hacker across several Afthonian territories, constantly traveling and spending much of her time meeting with corporate bigwigs and then hacking straight through the security. She single-handedly decreased corporate espionage in the territories she operated in, as her upgraded security systems were too difficult for most other spies or hackers to get through. She was soon offered several jobs by UPN nations, but refused, and is quoted as saying. "I don't want to get too mixed up in intersystem politics, and this is a good way to do just that."
While barely known to the general public, she became well known to the higher ups of large businesses and enjoyed a steady stream of customers all across the iron world. She worked like this for years, enjoying her wealth but not exactly being extragavant with it. She preferred a low profile (to the general public at least) and still lived in an apartment until she was twenty four. She finally decided to get a house in one of the less populated areas (which isn't saying much) of Afthona's sprawling cities. However, she is very rarely there, usually traveling on a job. When she was twenty five she finally journeyed off planet for the first time, having been sought out by an intersystem nanotechnology corporation that was afraid one of their rivals was attempting to hack them. Arriving at their facility on Alva, she delved into their security system to find traces of another presence in cyber-space that the corp's guards hadn't detected. Realizing they were both hacking the same system at the same time, Midnight "battled" the rival hacker across the virtual reality for several hours, both of them using firewalls, antiviruses, and any other tool within the matrix to attempt to block or eject the other. She finally expelled him from the system after an exhausting five hour duel, and with the information gained from his traces was able to locate him. He was arrested, and Midnight received the biggest payday she had ever had. She finally splurged a little and had several cosmetic alterations installed, more for herself than to impress her clients. She continued working like this until, just after her twenty seventh birthday (in earth years), she was called by the UPN to participate in the AI Project.
Other Notes: The computer Midnight carries is wirelessly connected to her cybereyes; it projects a pseudo-augmented reality interface appears within her field of view. Only Midnight can see this HUD, and it functions nearly identically to a handheld computer. It is manipulated with motion control (i.e. sliding a window around with a finger). If it's turned off, she becomes uncomfortable and high strung.
Midnight speaks with a noticeäble British (non-rhotic) accent.
AI Name: Amethyst
AI Character: Amethyst is imaginative and thoughtful, pondering questions of no practical significance and using her database of novels to actually write the occasional story herself, but she is usually simply puzzling out questions of theoretical physics or trying to improve on space-flight. A contrast to her host's practical knowledge of code, the AI is more interested in art and abstract science, determined to figure out the meaning of life and other such grandiose questions, if such can be reduced to an equation. She appreciates all kinds of art, visual, interactive, and text-based, and takes advantage of her host's web connection to search for as much of it as she can and hoard it within her database. She can view Midnight's AR interface and access its web connection to perform actions independent of the hacker's interface. If allowed in by her host, she can alter the interface as seamlessly as Midnight herself coud.
AI Appearance: Amethyst takes the appearance of a young woman with strange and abstract features like color-changing skin, physically impossible hair, and the like. She appears to be wearing a pink labcoat and glasses. She is always visible on Midnight's AR interface, usually pretending to sit on one of the open windows, projecting an image in front of her of whatever she is currently looking at (for her host's benefit, so the hacker knows what she's doing).
Whew.
First draft, will probably edit this as time goes on.
