 ”No machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.” | Laneya Kinney Age: 18 Race: Caucasian - Finnish Gender: Female University and Degree: MEng Computer Engineering, London South Bank University Appearance: Laneya has grown into one of those intimidating women, the sort with a dead-eyed stare from an otherwise beautiful face and body. She’s tall and shapely, clocking in at 5’6 and a dense 140 pounds of muscle and well-placed fat. Her blue eyes are piercing and cold, not helped by her very pale skin and golden-blonde hair. |
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Personality:
Laneya is about as interesting to converse with as she looks from a glance: that is, she’s not. Boring, factual conversations, she can handle, and chit chat she can do in the driest, most terse manner possible, but that’s only because she can have the right answer to those. Questions about feelings require deep meditation to determine her current state, which then makes any answer she might give on the spot unfactual. When it comes to dealing with people in a personal way, she fails spectacularly, much preferring to beat a hasty retreat if the person wants to talk about something that doesn’t have a clear answer. She’ll return with an answer in a few hours, perhaps, but that generally kills the mood.
The deeper problem in Laneya’s behavior is an incredible need to be right. It’s the reason she can’t communicate with others very well, the reason she works so seriously at schoolwork, side projects, and even her only real “hobbies,” video games and fitness blogging. It’s the reason she’s a terrible blunt instrument that rubs others the wrong way with her poor social graces and ends up with no friends. It’s the reason for the crippling loneliness that she sometimes tries to escape through virtual relationships and online popularity, but has never managed to defeat.
Laneya also walks an uneasy tightrope between depressive self-loathing and entitled self-pride. Being beautiful and smart, but also ostracized and continuously let-down by her only support groups will do that to one.
Biography:
Laneya did not naturally come by such an odd method of interaction. For her, a life-long expectation of excellence from her parents and researchers, and the seeming futility of her own feelings and desires, created such a robotic personality. From her earliest vivid memories, she can recall the quizzing she would receive, far beyond what one might reasonably expect from a three year old, multiple times every day. They would give her math questions, tell her to add giant numbers, tell her to take them to the Nth power without writing down anything but the answer. They would step her through computer programs, tell her to guess what it would do at every if statement. They would read her books, tell her to recite them back word for word. And she would. The plan succeeded, mostly.
Laneya ended up skipping three grades, hailed as a prodigy by the outside world, and failing expectations back home. Three grades wasn’t good enough; being held back from testing straight into the next grade by consistently under-average performance in the arts and humanities over and over was a disgrace. Her parents and the doctors would groan, wondering how they had failed to make such a failure. And Laneya would apply herself more to appease them, and eventually escape to college early.
There, she found a little more freedom. The coursework was more difficult, but she could mostly avoid classes she knew she would do poorly. More importantly, she was away from her parents, and finally growing up into her own person. She found herself well-suited to competitive video games, which she funded through side work and tutoring older students. She found herself growing up, into the curves that the doctors had assured her parents would come. And she found that with these skills and gifts, she could gather people who would say nice things to her. People who would say that she was beautiful, or that she had done a good job, or that she was amazing.
Things were going well. But one employer, for whom she was doing freelance work more and more often, asked her to do something that finally tripped her morality. Her response that she would no longer be accepting their contracts received a frightening response of its own: not only had she already gone beyond the limits of the law in her work for them, with which evidence they would gladly throw her under the bus if she didn’t cooperate, but they also knew her family’s secret. Her secret. And all of the people who would make her life null and void, in more than just the physical sense, if they found out.
With hands tied, Laneya goes along with those who have Power Over her… for now.
Skills:
Computer Mind:Laneya was designed with certain things in mind, chief among them being academic excellence. She has a photographic memory, capable of remembering minute details if she decides to capture a moment; she crunches numbers faster than most can punch them into a calculator; she can process large amounts of data through logical algorithms with astonishing speed; she has extremely sharp reflexes.
Peak Figure:Second among Laneya’s design goals was physical beauty and capability. She would not seem out of place in the ritziest of balls, and she has the training and muscle to deal with less classy individuals who might take a pass at her.
Hacker Prodigy:Laneya has the coding and hardware knowledge to execute most networked and physical cyber-security workarounds. Her ability to build a computer for a specific task is adequate for almost any job, given access to components and fabrication facilities.
Weaknesses:
Personality:Pretty much everything in Laneya’s personality makes her hard to get along with, or simply nonfunctional in a social atmosphere.
Creative as a Rock:Laneya got by in classes that required “creativity” by brute-forcing her problems, trying many options until arriving at a working answer. She completely lacks an “instinct” toward what answers may or may not work. She still applies this method to daily tasks, causing her to work on many potential solutions that end up resulting in failure, or taking a very long time to stumble upon answers that are “outside of the box.” She often never arrives at answers that seem illogical, however right they may be.
Extreme Focus:Most people can handle multiple tasks at a time: Laneya requires full attention even for small things, often unable to process non-imperative attempts to interrupt whatever she’s working on, and only catching up to things after she finishes her current activity.
Slow Recall:Though Laneya has an expansive memory, access to any single memory can require a lot longer than is convenient. Most people will remember something instantly, or after a few seconds of focus, but Laneya has to focus to play through her stored memory in near-realtime in order to access even the more detailed layers that most people can recall.
Zero Friends:The network of people who care about Laneya beyond what she can do for them is close to non-existent. She would never confide anything real to anyone whom she currently knows.
Other: Laneya is one of the first “designer babies,” leaving her in a legal and moral grey area that is currently being used against her.
