Leroy was born on October 13th, 1985 in West Chester PA. His middle name came from the fact that his mother really liked Roots. He had a fairly normal childhood, with friends and such, but was very into projects that would often keep him inside for long periods of time. His parents had an old computer, they didn't really have the money to upgrade or anything, and his mother happened to have a copy of Basic Computer Games that she didn't really use much. So he got a bit obsessive about reading it and reproducing the programs, learning the foundations of programming over time as a child.
Most of his friends were on the internet when he got a little bit older and his parents could actually afford it. He got much deeper into the hard science of programming, studying things like algorithms and how things worked at the hardware level to the best of his ability. He did make a few friends in person, but it's difficult maintaining in person friendships when you spend most of your time in front of a computer.
By college things changed a bit. His first four years were in straight up computer science. And while he more or less knew it already, it was the prerequisite for something he really wanted to learn, which was much harder to do on his own, which was computer engineering. He actually made a lot of friends during these years, they'd do interesting group projects and machine learning experiments, mostly involving trying to teach crude A.I to finish old school video game levels. He didn't want to leave far from home, at least not yet, so he went to college at Temple in Philadelphia.
The Bomb happened when he was around 21. When people learned about, well, abilities, it was cool but it also kind of sucked since he didn't have one. But it was around when he started to realize that there were goddamned super hackers that he started stepping his game up. By the time he started studying for a Masters' in computer engineering, he was also going hard into machine learning, which meant using whatever free time he could steal from studying to do freelance coding work. He needed to pay for hardware and there were certain things he didn't want to do on school computers.
Some of his friends thought he was a bit obsessive, and he became a bit neglectful with relationships, getting broken up with enough times that he just sort of threw his hands up and said fuck it. He was trying to create crude small scale supercomputers by linking ten computers together and murdering his electricity bill. His intent was to learn how alleged Evolved hackers even goddamned worked, to create some sort of firewall or… whatever you'd even make for that kind of thing.
Of course, he was never really lucky enough to even attract their attention, let alone sustain his projects at home, mostly due to incredibly high utility bills. But he did eventually get his Masters'.
He got his job at Yamagato by presenting the project he'd been working on for years. The crude supercomputer didn't work out for what he originally intended, but it was still an exceptional endeavour into using machine learning for enhanced security, and his interest in learning how to defend against Evolved digital threats was uniquely of interest, so they wanted to give him a position and actual funds to pursue that.
At the time he had to relocate all the way to Japan, which meant leaving everything he knew behind and practicing a whole new language, among other things. But he did it, and that's pretty much how he spent his life for a while, doing research and development in Yamagato. His belief was that even though he lacked an Evolved ability, there's no reason computers can't catch up with them eventually.
After the second Bomb, he was making enough money that he talked to his family, and eventually got them relocated to Canada. He wasn't having it but he also wasn't moving back to the U.S or anything any time soon, only for holidays and special occasions and such.
It wasn't until Yamagato decided to have their New York branch established that he finally moved back, mostly doing the same thing except in the U.S. He hasn't really worked out work-life balance, work is basically life, he sleeps in his office a lot. His superiors worry even though they admire his work ethic.
