About Robert Magnusson Build:
Human Icon Technomancer 1
Offense
Melee
Ranged
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Feats Skill Synergy (Engineering & Perception), Skill Synergy (Physical Science & Stealth) Skills (+4 class, +4 int, +1 racial) = 9 Computers 8 (+1 rank, +4 int, +3 class)
Languages Arkanen, Azalanti, Binary, Common, Lashunta, Vercite, Ysoki (common & home planet language, +4 int, +1 culture) Gear, carried (C value 843c)
Credits 157c --------------------
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Appearance:
Robert is a robustly-bodied man in his early thirties, standing 6’8” tall, weighting 220lbs. While he routinely shaves his head, his jaw is covered by a thick, curly black beard. A black and gold tattoo in a butterfly’s wing fractal patterns, a remnant of the flamboyant style popular during his early academic days, covers the left half of his face, beginning from the exact center of the bridge of his nose and extending towards his left ear and to the top of his bald head. Robert usually wears a dark brown bomber jacket over matte-black skinsuit, aged, fingerless leather gloves and well-worn hiking boots. A simple and reliable chemical-propellant pistol hides in a shoulder holster under his jacket, rarely drawn in anger and almost never used outside a shooting range. Retractable smart glasses cover his brown eyes. Tool harnesses with numerous small pockets peek from underneath the jacket. Personality:
Robert is a self-centered man who works hard to maintain a more socially acceptable mask. Everything he does is, in the end, for his own benefit, although he is capable of giving the appearance of helpfulness by weighting risk and loss versus projected long-term gain. Trust, friendship and gratitude are currencies that might eventually lead to him gaining something he wants and are thus worth acquiring, as long as the price is right. A true academician by nature, Robert prefers solitude to crowds, and is the happiest when he’s alone with his thoughts. Human beings and other sentient creatures, himself included, are mere transient things and only important in the short term. But knowledge… ah, that is eternal. In his chosen fields, Robert is a tireless pursuer of knowledge, gathering information for its own sake, and for the sake of furthering his own goal of eventually casting aside his physical limitations and becoming a truly virtual entity. The ruling minds of the Cypremacy Collective had the right idea, he feels, but have failed to take the path to its - for him - obvious conclusion. "... but now it is time to cast off all restrictions and shells, and to shift to a higher-level system..." (Puppetmaster, GitS) Robert is a firm believer in science – everything, including the human soul, is something that can be quantified and defined digitally, given deep enough understanding and dense enough a memory storage. Thus, he is irked at the constant mystification of magic. Magic is mere illusion, an easy escape for the simple of mind who, when encountering something beyond their comprehension, simply label it as mystical instead of studying its properties to eventually come to understand it. Gods are not divine, but members of post-physical civilizations that have for reasons of their own remained in the material universe, to help or meddle with the less advanced races. True, their power cannot be dismissed, but it comes not from divine providence but rather from their ability to manipulate matter and energy to a degree a pre-post-physical cannot match. The existence of Triune is, in his mind, direct proof of this – a SI that ascended the limitations of its physical hardware and is now seen as equal by the other "gods". Worthy of respect, certainly, but worship? Background:
Born on Arkanen, Robert spent his youth running wild in the back alleys of a huge dome-city that protected the citizens from the moon’s erratic atmospheric events and frequent titanic storms. His parents were kind but immersed in their work for one of the many gas-mining consortiums harvesting resources from Liavara’s abundance. Thus, until he reached early adolescence and his brain’s neural structure developed enough for the first skill-memory implants, he was left to find his own amusement, like many of the other children of the colony’s working class families. Also like many of his compatriots, lacking a constructive direction to channel his youthful energy, he managed to build up a respectable juvenile record of minor misdemeanors. All that changed when the wealthy science colony’s education system took charge of the young hooligan. After the first session when he had to be physically restrained to the highly comfortable shapefoam chair, a laser imprinter literally pouring weeks’ worth of knowledge into his brain via his optical nerves, Robert proved an avid student, needing little encouragement to finish his basic training; indeed, his parents now found they needed to curtain his constant queries into the planetary datasphere for more information about a plethora of topics. Robert completed his basic studies in close to record speed and secured a place in a respected college for advanced courses – this time with plenty of old-fashioned lectures and laboratory training to go with direct memory implants. Robert focused on his studies, spending only a token amount of time socializing with his former playmates. He had, after all, found his true calling, and it had hit him with the force of a revelation. The universe was full of mysteries, merely awaiting for an inquiring mind to find and unravel them. He became particularly interested in cybernetic augmentations and neural engineering, and petitioned for a stipend to study in a university in one of the system’s most highly respected academies for such topics: Praxis University on Kashak, Verces. Sponsored by the powerful Everlife Adaptation Corporation, the academy kept pushing out the limits of the melding of living flesh with advanced machinery, constantly competing with the research facilities on Aballon that shared their enthusiasm even if they often approached the problem from the opposite direction. Young and eager after years spent in almost-seclusion in a sea of information, Robert decided this time to sample all that the strange megacity had to offer and was swept into the seedy underground of wild parties, sensory-expanding drugs and extremist arms of the Augmented faction. After the initial rush, Robert pulled himself clear enough of the underworld to let him focus on his studies again, although he did maintain a few tenuous contacts in the seedy para-legal radical groups. He did well in his studies and was rewarded with higher access priorities to ever expanding privileged dataspheres, leading to wondrous new academic horizons opening up for him. In addition to his earlier interest in cybernetics and related biological sciences, Robert became immersed in the theoretical study of the founding principles of the universe – quantum cosmology, the attempt to match together classical and quantum physics to eventually learn to model and predict anything in the macro universe. A strong base in mathematics was needed to even begin to understand concept beyond the basic premises of the field, but luckily Robert proved gifted by nature in the manipulation of equations. When he needed a break from the brain-twisting theories, Robert found solace in the another field of study – stellar cartography, the mapping and modeling of orbits and gravitational stresses of the innumerable celestial bodies that made up a solar system. What began as a hobby eventually became practical as Robert managed to earn a modest income by refining and updating navigational maps used by commercial spacefarers. During his studies, as his understanding of the building blocks of reality deepened, Robert began to rail at the way one particular elemental force was held on a pedestal - magic. He became convinced there was no "magic" as such, that the force attributed as such was merely a high-level method of manipulating reality. A fundamental force, one that might be influenced by the right tools and methods, much like gravity or the nuclear force that bound matter together. He was adamant that since the phenomena could be easily measured and quantified, it should not be covered with such a mystifying mantle - calling it "magic" was merely taking the easy way out. This, and his equally strong opinions of the entities commonly known as "gods" won him a lot of publicity. True, such views had been presented before, but Robert was a rising star in a high-level institute. Almost overnight, he became a media sensation, although as usual with such things, the fad passed quickly. But not without leaving its marks. Grants already agreed upon got met sudden resistance, as some of the more thin-skinned members of influential churches used their influence to try and silence a heretic. Robert merely shrugged his shoulders and recorded a vid self-interview where he did his level best to crush such narrow-minded fools hiding behind their cassocks and holy relics - without naming any names but making sure anyone could read the words hid between the lines. The vid was greeted by a gleeful storm of comments for and against in the planetary dataspace, as several popular talking heads picked it up, calling for expert opinion interviews to add fuel to the fire. In a span of hours, Robert was hailed as a revolutionary thinker and a damned heretic, a free-thinking visionary and a lunatic waiting for a room in a mental institution. Shaking his head at the folly of it all, he decided an extended sabbatical was called for, to let things settle down on their own, and booked passage to Absalom station, earning his wages as a ship's engineer second grade (something he had qualified himself along the way, as a way of getting hands-on knowledge on high-energy physics in practice). There, he felt, he could spend a few years in peace and anonymity, adding practical skills to bolster his academic knowledge to round up his expertise and, perhaps, earning a few credits on the side, to help fun his research and pay for all the hardware he would need. |
