The Wirehead
| Callsign | Origin | Age | Sex |
|---|---|---|---|
| Root | Al Presa (Free City) | 26 | X |
Guns get a crew aboard. They don’t get it paid. At the end of every contract worth taking there is a system — a vault, a ledger, an array — and the payday goes through it. The Wirehead is the one who talks to it, and everyone else on the boarding roster is, on some honest level, an escort.
Root has been talking to machines since before it was legal for them to answer. Al Presa raised them — the free city, where a criminal record in every proper nation is a judicial opinion, not a fact — and the body shops finished what the arcologies started. The X on the manifest is Root’s own filing: this much machine doesn’t owe anyone a category.
The rest of the crew wears its survival — suits, frames, seals. Root grew theirs. No exo, no EVA shell: an oxygenator where the lungs used to negotiate and a pressure-woven dermis where the skin used to be, and when the hull opens — on this job, the hull opens — Root keeps working, in their own skin, on borrowed minutes. They hold a working theory that there is no such thing as a system without a back door. This job is where the theory gets tested.
Sheet
- Class: The Wirehead (Skill: System Cracking)
- Initial Attributes: Ghost 12, Mind 8, Body 6
- Gear Loadout:
- Combat Deck: tactical analysis unit — the cracking suite. [Binds 3 Mind]
- Ghost Link: operator’s slate. [Binds 2 Ghost]
- Augmentations:
- Neural Link: data port behind the ear. [Binds 3 Ghost]
- Internal Oxygenator: artificial lung. [Binds 3 Body]
- Dermal Vacuum Weave: pressure-sealed skin graft. [Binds 2 Body]
- Calculations:
- Mind Binding: 3 (deck) = 3 · Ghost Binding: 2 (slate) + 3 (link) = 5 · Body Binding: 3 (oxygenator) + 2 (weave) = 5
- Current Pool:
- Body: 6 − 5 = 1 (one point that is still meat — the machinery is the body now)
- Mind: 8 − 3 = 5 (the reserve the QNA job will eat)
- Ghost: 12 − 5 = 7 (the deep sense of self that lets a person carry this much machine and stay a person)
- The pools are the gear: while everything runs, Root is cracker, ghost, and vacuum-walker at once. Break the deck, vent the slate, tear the weave — each loss doesn’t just hurt, it deletes a capability. Everyone on this crew is a wizard until their wand snaps.
In this scenario
- The only one who doesn’t fear the vacuum. No exo, no suit: the weave and the oxygenator carry Root through hard vacuum for minutes at a time, in their own skin. When a compartment vents mid-crack, everyone else’s problem is their seals — Root’s problem is only the clock. Stage at least one moment where that asymmetry is the whole scene.
- The QNA is their scene — and their toolkit pointed backwards: when the array borrows a crewmate’s brain, Root is the one who understands exactly what just happened.
- The sheet is the design thesis: Body 1 on the character standing closest to the thing in the cargo — the most machine-integrated body on the crew, in the scenario where the machine does the integrating. The Ghost 12 is why Root can be this: it takes an enormous sense of self to carry this much cyber. What’s left after binding (7) is real resilience against Compromise — origin-17 doesn’t get Root cheap. It has to earn them.
Hooks (draft)
- Believes, privately, that the Copenhagen Protocol is a bedtime story to keep contractors from asking what the Foundation actually burns.
- Every augmentation is paid off except one. Root doesn’t talk about who holds the note.