Lester Seventeen-Dot-Phelps

Job Title: Technician 1st Class

Gender: Male

Age: 29

Nationality: British/English

Department: Old Characters

Life-form: Human

Player or NPC?: Player

Physical Appearance

How he is:

Still tall and lanky, Lester still looks like someone with extra knees and elbows, but now that the old him is in charge (mostly) he carries it better. Gone is the nervous stoop and jerky, bird-like movements, instead he knows exactly where each part of his body goes at any one time. Or at least he gives that impression. He has taken to laundering clothes now, a new concept on the old Lester and while technically he is a Droid repair technician and has to wear the uniform and lab coat, he does so with disdain.

Lester's implants still glitter and gleam on his forehead and his hand is still a shiny metal gauntlet etched with circuitry patterns, a testament to his employment as a drudge-class programmer.

How he was:

Tall and skinny, that's the first noticable thing, lost in a baggy, grubby, off-white labcoat. Under the labcoat are oil-marked jeans and a T-shirt with "I 2x4J23Q you". A badge hangs off the coat with a photograph of a twenty year-old Lester with military haircut and massive glasses.

The next thing you may spot is the glittering piece of technology embedded in his temple. Lester has a permanent startled expression as if the world keeps saying "boo!" His hair is wild and while clean, has had no attempt to place it in anything approaching a style. His right hand is a complex gauntlet of brushed steel and on his feet he wears battered black Converse knock-offs.

A tiny service mechanoid, the size and shape of a Jaffa Cake on four spidery legs, is often present, usually taking up residence on his right shoulder.

Personality and Interests

The Real Personality

Cold. He regards everyone with the same, flat gaze as if studying them. He seems to be reckless, devil-may-care, but when confronting hideous slavering beasts, or riding to his almost-certain-death on a cruise liner he doesn't show the slightest sign of emotion. Occasionally he has been known to get angry, particularly at his other self when it interrupts or cramps his "style". That's what Lester is really all about: style. If you have to do it, do it coolly and walk, don't run. Lester appears to like gambling, either with money or greater stakes such as his life.

There is a quiet, burning rage in Lester that simmers under the surface, but rather than freak out and take on the world, he seems to direct it, sharpening his anger until it becomes almost a surgical tool. He has a serious resentment for his artificial personality, tempered only by his usefulness when it comes to technology.

Confident enough to chat up women, Lester seems very interested in the opposite sex. However, having been "out and about" for a very short time his attempts have so far been limited.

High levels of stress, such as being killed, tend to "shut down" his real personality, leaving his body in the command of the artificial one.

The Artificial Personality

Artificial life intrigues Lester Seventeen-Dot-Phelps and not a lot else. People don't have rules or subroutines, or decision paths. He feels the usual human need for society and companionship, but doesn't know how the process works. He's slightly hampered by the Cybernetic enhancements evident on his body, but more hampered by his attempts to engage people in conversation. "Oh, that's like the fourteen series service 'noid," he might reply to an anecdote, "always assuming the worst of a directive and cataloguing priorities inappropriately." In truth, he's a nice guy. 100% trustworthy, friendly, generous to a fault and kind to all. He just suspects that there's some big devious joke out there that everyone else gets and he doesn't. So he's a little bit suspicious of people. He knows they probably won't understand him, same as they don't understand the machines he tends and cares for.

He has a fondness for robotic and intelligent machines, knowing them instinctively and taking pride in their abilities and wellbeing as a parent might. This led to the creation of SNIDE, the Symbiotic Neural Interface DevicE, a tiny robot spider that shares half a mind with Lester via his implants. SNIDE has developed personality quirks through constant contact with Lester and unfortunately has picked up on those inhibitions and fears that Lester displays... and rejected them. If not attached to Lester's clothing, SNIDE can be found at the Cinema or the ladies gymnasium locker room, downloading vid files for their shared porn collection. Lester is embarrassed to have a part of him so open for display but since SNIDE can only communicate through beeps, ticks and expressive dance, he hasn't the heart to deactivate him. Lester's other interest is virtual role-playing simulations.

His current favourite is the 1950s era vigilante sim Silver Shadow in which he and SNIDE play masked heros, breaking up protection rackets and solving crime in 1950s Chicago. If you wanted to sum up Lester in a few words they would be: a specific genius, socially inept and yet so very nice and humble.

History

Lester Seventeen-Dot-Phelps is a lie. A prison created for a man through an artificial personality overlay that kept the real him surpressed.

Being shot by his "friend" Justin Pancake, Lester suddenly found his personality re-awoken and, with massive gaps in his memory, he was very annoyed to find his life had been abused by what amounted to a pretend person, walking around in his body.

Lester Phelps was born in England to a middle-class family. From an early age he demonstrated aptitude for computing and studied Artificial Intelligence development at the University of East Anglia. Upon graduation he was headhunted by a game development company and became a small part of the team that developed the Better Than Life simulation.

When BTL was made illegal and taken off market Lester Phelps was arrested and brought to trial with the rest of them. The Company's lawyers had been executed the previous night and things did not look good, until a government agent approached Lester with a proposition: submit to experimentation and be spared the almost certain prison sentence.

Along with ten other, Lester agreed and so underwent Cybernetic Enhancement to become a second-stage programmer on the Space Corps project to develop new forms of technology. His role was basically a bug-fixer, trawling through the hastily created code to mend what needed mending and re-write what needed trashing.

Three years later, the Space Corps project heads decided that it would be more cost-effective to market the bugs as "security features" and so the entire second-line of programmers was decommissioned. Lester was saved from the scrap heap by the early prototype SNIDE and left the department and signed on with the Space Corps as a Mechanoid technician. Not batting an eyelid at his appearance, he was duly assigned a ship. Lester asked SNIDE to write a letter to his parents explaining what he was doing and then edited it to remove the profanities. As we join his story, he has just despatched the letter on the interplanetary network and is bording a shuttle with his meagre belongings in a kit bag and SNIDE making suggestive remarks on his shoulder.

Favourite Sayings

"Oh that's easy. It just needs a total network registery defragmentation followed by a complete synaptic diagnostic scan. Once we've done that we'll be able to stop him using a collander to attack the soux-chef."

"No SNIDE!"

"Stop it SNIDE!"

"Do that lady's bra up right now!"

"Do you have a subroutine problem? Do you? I think you do. Yes you do! Who's a naughty skutter hey? Who's a naughty malfunctioning little mechanoid? But we're going to fix you. Yes we are."

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