Henry Franklin

From AdamWiki

Character for Cyberpunk via Sorcerer

(Jon finished his late at night and asked me (Anik) to wikify and tweak it, so, changes are bound to be occurring).

• Stamina 2 (Muscle Memory Enhancements)
• Will 5 (Designer Personality, Free Thinker)
• Interface 3 (Assembler)

• Humanity: 5
• Passion: Psycho-Medtech (5)

• Telltale: A blinking chip on his skull, by his ear

• Demon: The personalities implanted in Henry's head have built up their influence and are fighting for control. The software putting them in allows Henry to appear as a different person when viewed through the augmented reality, but make it harder for Henry to remember which personalities are artificial and which were him. The personalities have a need for information, and being in the network gives it access. But when they're not fed new information, they go out and take it for themselves, stealing it from other people on the network. Of course, the blunt force of the software "learning" often fries the circuits of the victim's interface. And a fried interface usually means fairly significant brain damage.

• History: Henry Franklin is a noted psychiatrist, working for MINOR as a researcher in mental illnesses. His son, Thomas, has for as long as Henry can remember suffered from Social Dissociative Disorder, thought to be on the autistic spectrum. SDD is not very well understood, but causes those affected to have extreme difficulty relating to the needs of overall society. Instead, those classified as SDD sufferers are focused on individual advancement, and have a tendency to focus too narrowly on their own ideals and desires.

In some cases, SDD strangely causes sufferers to have an extreme reaction to being interfaced with the network, and more severe sufferers have become involuntarily institutionalized to help them deal with the shock. It is with these patients that Henry has been working, developing treatments for SDD sufferers with funding from MINOR.

Thomas, luckily, is not quite as badly-off as those Henry works with. When interfaced, he experiences nausea and cannot stay on for long, but is able to live at home with his father. His educational development, however, has suffered because of his difficulty with the network, and he is considered by society to be mentally unfit for most jobs, despite a flair for innovative thinking and a strong will. During the day, he works at the MINOR offices as a janitor. In an attempt to make up for his lost education, Henry has built Thomas a collection of old paper-based texts, which are often woefully out of sync with modern understanding.

Henry, for his part, has been feeling like he's at a dead end with his research, at least when following the accepted/proven procedures and practices (The AP&P) developed by the social sciences examination group (SSEG) at MINOR. Most of the treatments he can expect to work with any certainty reduce SDD sufferers to little more than fact processing drones, using electrical interfaces and drug therapy. While Henry's colleagues might consider this an acceptable solution, Henry cannot see its value to society.

On the other hand, he's been reading some of the books he bought for Thomas, and the two of them have found some evidence that the behaviors commonly associated with SDD have been evident in famous historical figures that simply aren't discussed in the modern educational system, and that it may be the network that's causing them to get worse.

Henry has started to explore a new avenue of research -- classifying SDD as a natural personality, a functional and acceptable brain pattern for those who have it. He knows that MINOR will have nothing to do with this theory, so he's decided to accept this understand on his own. And because he doesn't know of any high-functioning people with SDD, he decided he has to see the world through their eyes himself, and has started implanting artificial personalities of historical figures into his own head, painstakingly, but two dimensionally, developed using the material in Thomas' books.

The paper books are understandably rather hard to find, as the unsanitized and unstreamlined information they contain has been deemphasized by common scholastic authorities. As a result, Henry resorts to an underground dealer to acquire them. While going through his latest stack, delivered in a package labeled as new interface equipment, Henry came across a note. In it, the anonymous author claims to know who Henry is and the nature of his work -- and lets him know that there is a community of people who have what mainstream society would call SDD, but are still able to interface with the network as long as they use an implanted personality that shows no signs of SDD. In other words, the personality determines how the network affects a person with SDD, rather than any dysfunction of the brain. The note ends with a brief story of a former member of this community who had turned off his implanted personality too soon, and while de-interfacing from the network had an automatic update applied to his device which disabled his personality injection module and suddenly caused him to suffer all the symptoms normally associated with SDD and the network. The man's name was Dr. Saul Osmene, a former colleague of Henry's at MINOR who recently died rather suspiciously and suddenly

Kicker: Henry now realizes the truth, that SDD is a virus created by MINOR designed to neutralize free thinkers, and that if he is caught doing what he's been doing, his death will come as surely as Saul's. If Henry gets on the grid unprotected, he will surely be given the virus himself. And if he never goes back, not only will the voices in his head cause him pain, but he will never find the information that he might be able to use to cure his patients and, most importantly, his son.