Alt Cunningham

Codename: Gaia

“I am here for you. No matter where you are. No matter what it will take to reach you. Know that I am here.”

Fifteen years have passed since that fateful day when programmer Altiera Cunningham’s soul was ripped out of her body and doomed to an intangible existence within the Net. Fifteen years since Saburo Arasaka’s agents kidnapped her to gain access to the deadly black ice program called Soulkiller, an infernal creation that was used to condemn Alt to life as two hundred million lines of code travelling from system to system.

But Alt has not been sleeping. With the twenty million dollars she took from the Arasaka mainframe deposited in a blind account, the resourceful programmer began to plan her escape. She had money. She had all the time in the Net She began to make plans.

With her original body (now a mindless husk) safely deposited into cold sleep by her unsuspecting lover, Johnny Silverhand, Alt set up a small, highly secret research corporation through her now huge web of dummy investment accounts. Over the next nine years. she directed her employees to study the most advanced techniques in cloning technologies (including stolen data on Biotechnica’s failed cloning attempts in 2019), with an eye towards replicating her frozen body. Getting access to her cell tissues was child’s play to someone who could run freely through almost any system with the abilities of an Al—with typical Aft efficiency, she hired Morgan Blackhand through a cut-out account and sent him to it the job.

By 2019, Alt knew how to reverse the Soulkiller process, with a new program that allowed her to download an engrammatic personality into a blank and waiting clone . She called it Phoenix an appropriate tag for the programming wizardry that would allow her to rise from her computerized "death.:’ She instructed her employees to bring a cloned body to the lab, and prepared the downloading process.

But something went wrong.

Alt discovered to her dismay that Phoenix couldn’t transfer her basic personality into a clone. It could only write a copy of her neural net into the waiting brain—leaving the original Alt still trapped in the Net. It was a bitter pill; she could move a copy of herself into a real body, but would it really be her? Alt¹ released her clone (Alt²), and dejected by the failure, abandoned her quest and went off into the Net to de-rerz. For two long years, she wandered from system to system, finally coming to rest in a huge abandoned mainframe. Once part of a Pre-Collapse billionaire’s arcology stronghold, its Realspace coordinates were now buried at the bottom of a collapsed mine shaft. It became her home, and later the home of hundreds of Soulkilervictims and other disembodied personalities transferred into the Net. They called it Shangri-la, the Ghost Town.

Then the Kids started showing up in the Ghost Town. At first, it was just a few, wandering through Netspace as though they were travelling through a child’s fantasy land. Some were terrified by the experience. Others were fascinated; daring and unstoppable Peter Pans of cyberspace, they were already beginning to tackle their first Datafortresses and Netwatch citadels.

Alt¹ took care of them as well as she could. Eventually, as the trickle began to turn to a flood, she emerged from her hidey-hole to start processing the news nets. She learned about the Carbon Plague— how the Wizard variation tumed even small children into inadvertent Netrunners, tripping unawares through the deadly reaches of Netspace.

She also learned how the ISA was hunting the CyberEvolved down and killing them.

Altiera Cunningham had never had a reason to live before, other than money and a good time. Before the Change, she faced a nearly endless existence as a disembodied soul. Now she had something to live for—a ragtag family of Wizard•weefs that needed her.

The battle was joined. Through her contacts in the Net, Alt¹ began to pull together the loose federation that would soon become the CyberRevolution. She enlisted Rache Bartmoss, now frozen in cryosleep but still Net-linked, to run the Intelligence ops side. She found Morgan Blackhand in his Trinidad hiding place and enlisted his aid as a tactical leader. And eventually, she reached spectral fingers out of the Net to saw a dying Johnny Silverhand and give him a second chance at life.

Her adopted children call her Gaia, which means Earth. She trains and protects them; they love and guard her in return. She teaches them about the Eden Dream a parable of a world where animals and plants will once again cover the Earth; where Mankind will finally be at peace with itself.

She is the mother of the CyberRevolution.