Echo

February 13, 2075.

Rain fell in sheets. It thrashed the tarmac in half-second intervals. Seattle's streets - despite their impressive infrastructure - could not keep up with the sheer force of nature that was the sky's fury, and succumbed quickly under inches of standing water. It was not long before Alyx felt the stinging cold, felt the icy spray against her face. The clothes wrapped around her body that had been barely enough in the freezing winter were nothing against the soaking anger of the coming spring's downpours. She shivered and cowered against the alleyway's walls, the concrete overhangs barely providing protection from the storm.

For all the strength of humanity and its technological hubris, there was one thing it could not beat - nature. Neon signs flickered and fought bravely against being obscured by the screens of droplets flooding the air. Holographic projections looked strangely out of place on AR and contacts, solid and glowing when all else real faded into the grey obscurity of the crashing rain. Days like this brought ice-cold reality down on society’s eternal suspension of disbelief.

Alyx loved it.

Braving the cold was one thing, but peeking out from under her hood and watching the scurries of day-to-day life – ah, that would never get old. She could watch for days on end. The feeble protection of myomeric fabric shielding them from the water as people darted from overhang to overhang, raincoats and armoured jackets glistening dark with the smog-filled water. There were so many things to do, so much nuyen to make, so many people to meet…

She looked up, her ears perking at the sounds of footsteps.

“Hey, Echo.”

‘Echo’ stood up to all four and a half feet feet of her 11-year-old height, drawing back her hood despite the relentless spray spattering them. “Why do you call me that, again? Alyx is so much better.”

There was a pain in her voice, under her faux-petulant lilt. A pain that no 11-year-old should have had.

“I suppose I owe it to you to tell you, eh?” The man – barely a man, really, at 19 – knelt beside Alyx, crouching to her level – orcish, yet intelligent features blinking sharply at her.

He coughed.

“In the old days, before the Matrix,” the orc started, in a voice that she clearly knew well from her grin, “there were three big operating systems. Now, you know what those are.”

Nod.

“Well, they all had terminals. We still use something similar, when we’re not hot-simmed or the like, when all we have access to is… say, a Meta Link, and we’ve lost our trodes.”

Alyx grimaced. The orc chuckled in his raspy way, never missing a beat.

“So you’d pull up the screen, and there’d be a little underscore, blinking at you. And you could enter little commands, you know? Like ls, for example, to list files in a directory. It was simple, back then, when they used their fingers instead of their minds to work with information.”

If one looked closely enough, they might have been able to see the thinking cap almost literally materialising over Alyx’s head as she stretched her mind to imagine the past – so close, but so far away.

“When you typed in a command… any command, really – the terminal would say it back to you before it spat out whatever you asked for. It would follow your lead, and sometimes, if you were writing a script, you could use it as a sort of messenger, to give whoever was running your script information or instructions. Following me so far?”

Alyx’s eyes were squeezed shut, half against the rain, half in thought, but she nodded.

“Well, that setting was called echo. You could turn it off, if you wanted, to shut it up, or use it, if you needed confirmation that you were doing the right thing. Or if you just wanted to see what you typed.”

Her eyes shot open in realisation.

“I never turn off echo,” the orc continued, the smile threatening to touch both ears as Alyx leaned against his side. “It’s too helpful, and besides – it’s pretty good company. I call you Echo because… well, you get it.”

Tears nearly formed in Echo’s eyes as she looked up, a smile breaking like the sun behind the trembling of her lower lip.

“Echo… Echo. I like it.”

Echo

Error creating thumbnail: File missing
Alyx Ester
Decker | Scout
“Am I supposed to put something here? Oh, drek… um… I’m really bad at these. Uhh… don’t die, and try and live the best you can.”
Player	unbiased
Metatype	Human
Street Cred	0
Notoriety	0
Public Awareness	0
Titles and Awards	0
D.O.B.	c. 2069~2070
Folder	Alyx "Echo" Ester - drive
Priority	Metatype - C Attributes - B Magic/Resonance - E [Mundane] Skills - A Resources - D

Character Information

Summary

Born from Seattle’s own alleyways, Echo has beaten the odds and survived – thanks in part to her natural wit and cunning, and in part to pure luck and good-hearted companions along the way. She has picked up important skills in her rough and wounding journey – how to defend herself (with firearms, as she is not especially physically capable) and to make a living (leveraging her technical aptitude and natural memory as a decker).

Thanks to the company she kept during her street upbringing, she’s just as capable with her tongue as she is with her cyberdeck or pistol, despite her reserved and almost mousy nature. If she must, she can wield her force of personality like a club, or a rapier, to what the situation demands.

Goals

Echo wishes above all to not have to live like her SINless and homeless adoptive mother did, destitute and dying on the streets. She wants to live comfortably, to make a home and future for herself, and find friends to share the memory of those she has lost.

Her passion for the technical pushes her to strive to be the best. Her rapid and dependable absorption of information allows Echo to learn unhindered, and she will always have perfection in mind, no matter how impossible it seems, or is, to achieve.

Background

A street kid in both heart and deed, Echo lived rough for the first decade of her life. If not for being taken under the wing of a woman she can no longer clearly remember, she would have frozen to death long ago as a baby abandoned in the streets of Seattle to crime and poverty. But she was given a chance - and given a life, for a life. Her 'foster' mother, who took care of her to give herself a reason to live until the next day under the worst conditions America of the Sixth World had to offer, succumbed to the burdens of the world before Echo was seven. Still, she left her with a name - Alyx - her own, Esther, and hope, hope that one day her adopted daughter would not have to live, and die, as she had.

To survive alone as a child was both difficult and traumatic. Echo still bears the scars of those times - the rough-and-tumble of street gangs, the heart-rending nature of those so-easily-formed emotional bonds torn by distance and death. Against the odds, she pulled it through, and learned how to survive from those who were lucky enough to, learned how to drag herself up from the bottom from those who were still hoping to. She was taught to fire a pistol, use the Matrix - but most importantly, wield her mind, and her tongue. Those skills served her well during her teenage years, and somehow she flourished, a diamond in the rough, a blooming lily in stagnant marshland.

Now, she scrapes together a living with those same skills - a SINless shadowrunner, a treader of the liminal, a girl who steps between light and dark, real and unreal, as easily as ever-so-light feet over a skipping rope. The cares of the world are nothing to her - so long as she has her cyberdeck, a pistol, and her trusty backpack.

Narrative Significant Qualities

Positive

Bilingual. Growing up in the streets of Seattle allowed Echo a different upbringing, an exposure to the clashing of cultures in the Sixth World. She was lucky enough to be taught both English and Mandarin as a child due to the Chinese-American nature of the areas she frequented to survive. Over the years, she has also picked up smatterings of Japanese and the elusive Elvish language - the complex and beautiful tones of Sperethiel.

Photographic Memory. It's not quite photographic, but if it matters, Echo is both unwilling and unable to forget. Both a natural tendency and something trained, it was born from her fuzzy memory of her adoptive mother who gave her life for her own - and her refusal to let anything like that slip her mind ever again.

Jury-Rigger. Nothing trains your ad-libbing and improvisational skills like scrambling to survive on the streets. Combined with her technical know-how and intuitive skills in engineering, Echo is an (admittedly self-proclaimed) master of Plan C - for when both plan A and plan B have been thrown to the wayside.

Negative

Pollen/Particulate Allergy (Common, Mild). Lack of shelter in the streets has left Echo with a slightly weaker respiratory and immune system than she would like. Spring often sets her up with hayfever, and dust is an incredible annoyance to someone otherwise small, silent, and stealthy.

Run History

~ $ ssh echo@224.139.12.10 -p 7654 v6x!p3nd
The authenticity of host '224.139.12.10 (224.139.12.10)' can't be established. ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:9lyrpzo5Yo1EQAS2QeHy9xKceHFH8F8W6kp7EX2O3Ps. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? y
Warning: Permanently added ' 185.52.53.222' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts. 
echo@horizon-flow:~$ cd /home/echo/diaries
echo@horizon-flow:/home/echo/diaries~$ ls -l
-rw-r--r--. 1 echo root  3420 Aug 09 09:23 rainy-day-sort.txt
-rw-r--r--. 1 echo root  3420 Aug 08 21:02 running-sort.txt
-rw-r--r--. 1 echo root  3420 Aug 06 13:11 futureplans-sort.txt
-rw-r--r--. 1 echo root  3420 Aug 01 16:45 inspiration03-sort.txt
drwxr-xr-x. 1 echo root  4096 Jul 31 02:48 Runs
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root  4096 Jul 31 02:49 Writing
drwxr-xr-x. 4 root root  4096 Aug 16 02:55 Daily
echo@horizon-flow:/home/echo/diaries~$ ./checkfolder.sh /Runs
Folder Runs is empty

Affiliations

Contacts

• Michelle Delacroix - Connection 6, Loyalty 3 - Street Doc
• Ral Tenyo - Connection 4, Loyalty 2 - Fixer
• David Guenther - Connection 2, Loyalty 1 - Parasecurity Expert