Aidan was born and raised in Brooklyn along with his older sister and brother. His father was a professor of literature for Brooklyn College, while his mother stayed home raising the children. With two healthy preschoolers, it was a surprise for his parents that the third pregnancy did not go so smoothly. Aidan was born over a month early and spent extra time in the hospital before coming home. He was quite sick at first, but with medical intervention, he started to gain weight. After this rough start in life, he seemed to be healthy, if still smaller than the other babies. His parents noticed over time, though, that he seemed to be able to sleep through anything and wasn't startled by loud noises. They took Aidan to an audiologist to have his hearing tested and were told that their boy was profoundly deaf, possibly as a result of a medication given to him in the hospital after he was born.
Aidan started early intervention programs with the public school system from a young age designed to teach sign language not only to him, but also to his family. Starting in preschool, he attended a school for the deaf within New York City being taught in sign language. Once he was fluent in sign, he also began speech and language therapy designed to help him learn to speak and read lips. With the support of his parents at home, as well as support at school, he did well learning to read, write, and do math. At the age of ten, he underwent surgery to install a cochlear implant. This gives him some hearing when turned on, and with the help of therapy, helped him to make progress in both speaking and understanding spoken communication.
College was great for Aidan. The first time away from home, making his own choices and his own mistakes. He probably spent too much time holed up in his room with his computer, but he did make many friends around campus. College was also Aidan's first full time foray into the hearing world. He gained confidence in his ability to combine the input from his cochlear implant with his ability to read lips to communicate without ASL. In the classroom, he made use of assistive technology such as an FM transmitter to make sure he was understanding his professors. While he was not a straight A student in college, he did well academically. Upon graduating, Aidan moved back to Brooklyn, taking a job with NYPD helping to keep their computers and systems up and running.
The bomb changed life for everyone living in the New York area, and Aidan was no different. He lost friends from high school and college in the initial blast and the radiation that followed, but he was so busy it was hard to find time to mourn them. Aidan was busy with attempts to help keep some lines of communication open for the police, not an easy task when electricity and phone lines were hard to come by. It was during this time of struggle and stress that he started to have odd things happen around technology. Suddenly, the system would work, or he would get odd flashes of insight into the system. He chalked it up to stress, but even when things started to settle down, it continued to happen. When the evolved came forward, it was a flash of insight for Aidan. That was why he was having these times when technology seemed to do more than it should. That's what he was.
Life went on after the blast, but not as easily. When the dust started to settle, the pain of lost friends hit Aidan. Working with the police, he was often in contact with the people who saw the worst of it. Around those who went in to find survivors, only to find most of those survivors already had a death sentence. Aidan's innocence was gone. While he wouldn't consider himself a cynic, he would say that this time gave him a harshly realistic view of the world. The cost of living went up, making anything that wasn't a necessity harder to come by. For Aidan, it meant that things like new books and upgrades for his computer just weren't going to be happening. Not when he was worried about having enough left after the rent to buy food and keep what utilities he could running. Power outages were not his favorite thing. Not when it caused major issues with keeping the technology running for the police to keep in contact with each other or worse for him personally, the times when he wasn't able to recharge the batteries to keep his implant running. When the Linderman Act was passed, Aidan quietly kept to himself the fact that he could do these things. His control over his Technopathy is still rather shaky, though he has learned how to keep it from happening when he doesn't want to. He is still working in Tech Support for the NYPD, more often than not at the Crown Heights Police Station, but his status as an Unregistered Evolved makes him more sympathetic towards groups like PARIAH and the Ferrymen.
