Skyler Martin

Registry of the Evolved Database

File #25 Oct 2010 02:37

Summary

Name Skyler Elise Martin Aliases None Status Registered Evolved (Tier 0) Ability Technopathy Gender Female Race/Eth. Caucasian Birthdate May 18, 1980 Age 30 Height 166cm Build 55 kilos Eyes Brown Hair Black with Pink accents Residence Homeless Employment Self Employed Parents Henry and Elise Martin Siblings 2 - One younger brother, one older brother. Marital Status Single Children None First Seen 2010-10-25 Broken Watch Last Seen Found dead in her apartment on or around January 14, 2011 Profile Skyler is (fraudulently) registered as a Tier 0 Evolved. Gainfully employed by Warren's soon-to-be named faction Page him for the name. Yesterday's hackers (aughties) might remember the White Rabbit, if the term got bandied about. Sent the White Rabbit message from Suresh the day of the riots. Page me if you're trying to track the White Rabbit.

portrayed by Neve Campbell

Background

Skyler was always good with computers, virtually from birth. People said she was a natural, a born genius, one of those wunderkind who go to college at 11, and have corporate jobs at 16. But it didn't work out that way. She was too restless, too much of a free spirit to settle down and work that hard. She went to college, sure, got her degrees, sure. (Information Technology and Electronic Engineering, btw), and bummed around graduate school for quite a while until they bothered to throw her out for continued poor grades, and what appeared to be a growing drug habit.

The truth was far stranger. From menarche on, Skyler had a secret. She wasn't just good with computers. She could feel them. Talk to them. Touch the circuits and understand them, influence them, control them, first with her fingertips on the bare printed circuits, and then at greater and greater range. With practice, she could communicate with without the benefit of a keyboard, mouse, or even a monitor. It terrified her. At first, when she was 13, she figured she was going crazy, probably spending too much time messing with her computer. So she devoted her time to more normal pursuits. Shopping. Alcohol. Drugs. Sex. None of them really distracted her very long. She kept it to herself, and never told anyone what she could really do.

It got worse in college. Moreso in graduate school. The stress. The workload. The late hours. Pretty soon, she had to use her gift, just to keep up, just to keep from going nuts. It started with Ebay, and some thing or other she doesn't even remember what now, that she wanted badly enough to use her gift for sniping. Skyler can snipe like nobody else in the universe. From there, it was a slippery slope to reach out and rig her grades, get test answers, fatten her bank account a little, and so on. They said she had an addiction, and she did. An addiction to control. An addiction to the growing, godlike power she could exert, and to the danger, the terror that she would be found out, and heaven alone knew what would happen to her. There were hints around the net. Allegations even then of secret corporate and government organizations that dealt in /exceptional/ humans, and while most conspiracy theory on the net can be safely ignored, the possibility terrified her.

It came to a head. It reached the point where she had to control her net addiction, or it would control her. She won. She left graduate school and bummed around the country for a while, hitching rides, doing odd jobs, farming. Being a real person again. The gift called, every time she passed a car with antilock brakes and an engine computer, and a cd player in the dash, every time a digital watch wandered by her. It called. She could feel the circuits, feel the electrons moving through them, know what they meant. Even dairy farming wasn't immune. Even dairy farming. That's what sent her home to the city. To try and get a job. A legit job. Do something with this thing she had. She arrived back in Gotham on November 7, 2006.

History records the chaos, the violence, and ultimately the truth, or at least part of it. Skyler was homeless, but lots of people were. She was hungry a lot. So were others. She was cold, especially during the blizzard. She learned to distrust buildings after being snowed into them too many times. She survived, but at what cost? A shell that cut her off from the world. She did what she had to in order to survive, and not too much more than that. Shell shocked and paranoid, she registered herself with the database. It was easy enough. Go close to a police station. Feel the data flow from the drones entering the data, and where it went. After that? Easy. Add herself to the database. List herself as a tier 0 power - affinity for electronic circuits and their repair. Assign the record to someone who'd done three or four hundred others that day. Simple. And yet every day she worries that her work in the database will be discovered. Every year when she re-ups her ID, she worries. So far, so good. So what?

And then she turned 30. And began to take a look at her life, at her existence, cowering next to a cardboard box in Central Park fixing iPhones and Crackberries and any other gizmos people bring her. It's a living, to be sure, but the benefits suck, the hours are long, and she's been robbed often enough that she bought a handgun. And you bet she has that baby registered and a city permit to carry it. Why yes, that would be on a database somewhere, why? Another risk. Another chance at discovery, but Skyler Elise Martin is tired, and what she is tired of most of all is being afraid.

Psych Profile

Nerdgirl: Skyler is, above all, a nerdgirl and a gadget freak. She tries to control these tendencies out of paranoia (see: Paranoia) but the truth is there. She loves machines, loves electronics. Her ideal career: being a Mythbuster. Preferably married to, or at least carnally and passionately involved with Grant Imahara.

Paranoia: Skyler was never comfortable with anyone knowing her gift, and from its manifestation until after the storm, she's hidden it. Now? Well. She's legal. And slowly, painfully, she's begun to let people know that she's Evolved, and that she has a minor, non-scary power. But she lives in fear, constantly, that someone will know, someone will catch her, someone will figure out that she's a whole lot more powerful than she lets on.

Guilt: There are a lot of things a database goddess could have done to help her fellow Evolved out in the early days. Skyler did none of them. And a lot of people who could have been saved are now dead, imprisoned, and who knows what. Skyler frets about this.

A Bit Off: Like many nerd types, Skyler's view of the world is skewed somewhat. She's better with machines than real people, and real people sometimes make her terribly uncomfortable. Even her customers, but worse are the people who want to be part of her life in other ways.

Addict: They say once you quit an addiction, you can never go back. Never take another drink. For Skyler, this is impossible. It's all around her, all the time, and she can't not feel it. It takes a lot of willpower to keep that addiction under control, and she's not always equal to the task. But Skyler tries.

Evolved Ability

Technopathy - Overview: Skyler can instinctively understand and interact with electronic circuits of arbitrary complexity.

Computers: As a function of her Technopathy, Skyler can communicate with any computer within a 100 meter radius of her head. What happens then depends on the computer. Many computers, most computers really, are dumb. The computer in your car's antilock brakes, its engine, are designed to do what they're told. They have no security at all. Any normal function of that computer, Skyler can trigger or disable, or she can crash the computer. More sophisticated computers - desktop computers, smartphones - have operating systems with security built in. While Skyler can communicate with these machines equally easily, she then has to break into them the same way an attacker at the keyboard would. No more, no less. Once she has control of a more sophisticated computer, she can use it to connect to other computers it could reach with a normal operator, write programs, manipulate its behavior, corrupt it, steal data, crash it, and so on.

Hacking: Skyler's hacking is partly a function of her skills in this matter (she does have a degree in IT and networking) and partly a function of her innate understanding of the system itself, but it really is mostly the same process as a normal person would do from keyboard and mouse. It can take less than a minute for a Windows XP machine as it comes from the factory, to hours, days, weeks, or never for machines with extraordinary security capabilities.

Endurance: Eat when hungry, sleep when tired, hack whenever. How long can one person, unassisted by drugs, sit in front of a computer and hack before she has to stop, use the bathroom, eat, or sleep? Assuming the bathroom is within Skyler's range of the computer she's connected to, and that she has a plentiful supply of Mountain Dew, Skyler can go 16 hours or so before exhaustion makes it impossible to continue. If no-one has detected her intrusions, of course, she can resume her work where she left off after a good night's sleep (8-12 hours).

Bandwidth: Skyler's ability to funnel data into or out of her head is limited by bandwidth and size. The human brain really wasn't meant to have a high speed internet connection, so her bandwidth is limited to a T3 or so: 45 megabits a second. Medium business internet connection or really fast cable modem speeds.

Simultaneous Connections: Two at a time. One for each hemisphere of her brain. Skyler can break into machine A, and funnel data from it, across her power link, through her brain, to machine B - say, her iPhone. Connecting to two computers at the same time cuts Skyler's bandwidth in half, and /then/ divides the remaining bandwidth between the two machines, for a quarter of her total bandwith capability to each machine. Doing this for even a second gives her a headache, and after an hour that headache becomes a crippling migrane that forces her to stop using her abilities and sit in a dark room taking pain medication for 24 hours.

Data Storage: Skyler can store about 32gb of data in her head. Not surprisingly, this is about the same amount of data that fits on her iPhone. She can't store raw data in her head indefinitely, however, as the brain really prefers to remember things in other ways, so the data begins to be corrupted in 15 seconds, and is worthless except as what she remembers in a more normal sense within half an hour. Skyler normally uses her brain only to buffer downloads before disconnecting from the other machine and sending the data onto her phone.

Naked on the Net: Skyler can communicate with any electronic circuit. This means she can, in theory, reach out to a network jack in the wall, and connect her brain to it. It does work. But not very well. Sorting out all the communication layers in an ordinary network connection is a lot of work to do with your brain, so Skyler can get maybe, if she works at it, a T1's bandwidth (1.544mb/sec) and she can't do it for more than a few minutes (less than 5) before she looses concentration and drops the connection.

Making up Data: Skyler can create data out of her imagination. If she is naked on the net, it's pitifully difficult, as she has to do all the translation into binary in her head as well. She can pull this off putting voices into telephones, but that's about as far as she can go unassisted. Given a computer to help, what she imagines can be on your screen, in your headphones, controlling your robot, right now.

Der Blinkenlights: Some evolved get a cool glow in their eyes when they use their abilities. Sky's tend to flicker more, rather like that link light on your ethernet board. The flickering increases proportionally to the amount of data Sky is sending back and forth.

Use a Condom: Skyler's brain does not run software at all, and is therefore immune to computer viruses. However, if she should happen to copy data from an infected computer, she can infect another computer easily enough. Conceivably, she could do this deliberately, too. Practice safe computing.

I can fix anything but a broken heart.

Appendices

Skills

** Bachelor of Science: Electrical Engineering **
Skyler's power made it quite easy for her to understand electronic circuits, which in turn made it easy for her to be the wunderkind in Electronic Engineering. While doing her work in the park, she used this skill every day.

** Bachelor of Science: Information Technology **
(Lots of Graduate school work too). Skyler is an expert at computer networking, operating system theory, security, and programming. With her black hat on, this skill translates to hacking.

** Survival **
Skyler has survived some of the most tumultuous years in American history, and to do this, she has a lot of little skills - making fire, trapping, skinning, and eating rodents, knowledge of the underground tunnels of the city, some basic fighting, con-jobs, buying and selling stolen goods, streetwise, even exchanging intimate favors for necessary things. She could give Survivorman Les Stroud a run for his money, at least in an urban environment like this. (And that mental image of Les and intimate favors? Try not to think about it. >:)

The White Rabbit

During the undergraduate and graduate years, Skyler had, as the saying goes, two lives. One was Skyler Martin, grad school student at a reasonably respectable university. She had a student ID, she went to class … sometimes … she paid her student fees, she helped her roommates throw really legendary geek parties. In the other life, she was the White Rabbit (and that because every possible spelling of Trinity was taken). While the average Joe on the street wouldn't know who she is, and because she wisely didn't sign all her work, the average law enforcement person might not either, in hacker circles, and in net security circles (who were hackers in the aughties) the name White Rabbit might earn some respect. She was known for breaking into computers and taking complete control of them, and especially for her very careful, disciplined recon and analysis of nets before she made her attacks. Some people rush in foolishly, but this was not the White Rabbit's way. Skyler likes to think the White Rabbit thing is behind her now, for the most part. But that tattoo that keeps her from wearing micro-kinis is a reminder of what the addiction was to her.

Update - New White Rabbit sightings:
November 9, 2010, at the onset of the riots, a call went out to anyone the Suresh center phone system knew. In it, a synthetic voice said, "This is the White Rabbit. If you are Evolved, you are in danger. Flee to safety while you can."