badgernet app

[turingcompletionist]

Player Information

Name: bii
Age: 38
Contact details: obiisama
Other characters: none yet

Character Information

Name: Dr. Charlene Durante
Canon: Isekai/Online
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: OU, baby! (Albeit a minor character who hasn’t yet shown up in the currently published part of I/O. But she’s fully canon and will show up eventually.)

World info: The year 204X is a cyberpunk-y near future, where Virtual Reality MMOs are totally a thing, nanofabrication is also very much a thing, and FTL space travel is at the very least in the experimental phase. Social distancing technology is also something that is super a thing due to the pandemics of a quarter century before. Unfortunately, unbridled capitalism is even more of a thing than it is in the present day. Dr Charlene Durante (Charley to her friends and family) is a programmer and artificial intelligence specialist living on the California coast half the year and in Lyon, France the other half of the year.
History: Let’s do some bullet points so I don’t have to write everything out because that will take forever. Light spoilers for the parts of I/O that are currently released. None of the deep spoilers are included, but there’s enough for a barebones history:

-- Charlene Durante was born in San Diego during the summer of 1989, to Luis and Donna Durante (a computer programmer and a social worker respectively) and named in honor of her late uncle Carlos Durante, who’d become a casualty of the AIDS crisis the year before
-- she had an nine years older brother named Steven who she was incredibly close to despite the age difference; he in turn was extremely protective of her; he was the first to call her by her lifelong nickname “Charley”
-- when she was five years old, Luis got work in Silicon Valley and the entire family moved north, settling in Santa Cruz
-- at some point in all this, little Charley was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum; however, due to being very well-socialized by her family, she managed to keep from being stuck in special education hell
-- she had a fairly conventional if highly nerdy childhood and after her brother Steven left for college she kept up with him via frequent skype calls
-- was accepted into Berkeley, but due to miscommunication and misapprehension on the state of the family’s finances (she thought they were doing worse than they actually were), Charley chose to attend nearby CSU Monterey Bay instead
-- contemplated doing computer science like her father had, but the treatment of women in STEM ultimately led her to get her B.A. in literature instead
-- had planned on going to grad school but the death of a cousin her final semester of college threw her off-balance and she failed to get her applications in on time
-- decided to take a gap year and work on a novel before applying again, but then her college boyfriend who she’d trying to do long-distance with broke up with her in a messy fashion and she was so fucked up she missed her grad school application deadlines again
-- that summer, knowing that his daughter had the same knack for coding he did, Luis found Charley some freelance programming work to keep her occupied
-- she rediscovered a love of programming and when it came time to apply for grad school again, she applied to Caltech as part of their PhD program, with the intention of doing her thesis on artificial intelligence
-- while at Caltech, she met her future partner Alain (a French then-university student) online via fandom (under her long term screenname of ‘Thorne’); she also had a few personal revelations and realized she was a lot more queer than she previously thought
-- also during her time at Caltech, she ended up emotionally manipulated by the engineering professor she was working part-time for, but thanks to Alain’s long-distance virtual support and her brother Steven’s occasional in-person support (as he at that point lived a very manageable two hours from Pasadena) she managed to break free of the toxic relationship
-- got her PhD for some very original and ground-breaking work on AIs; shortly thereafter ended up heading up the team that created the Turing Complete Artificial Intelligences, which revolutionized the field
-- Charley and her team end up working with DARPA on various AI projects
-- Charley herself ended up stuck in Lyon, France for the length of the pandemics of the early 2020s, after going to visit Alain; was luckily able to work remotely
-- later on Charley and her team publicly cut ties with DARPA in order to form the Other World Tourism Bureau, ostensibly a virtual reality game company, which ends up extremely successful as the parent company of the world’s first VRMMO, Another World Online (AWO)
-- in actuality, OWTB is using its games to raise funds for other projects they weren’t able to get grants for from conventional sources, such as terraforming and colonizing other planets
-- Dr Durante and her team create fourteen highly sophisticated post-singularity AIs to serve as the virtual pantheon for AWO as well as to administer and run the game; all of them also have various other capabilities relating to OWTB’s other projects
-- the deaths of various AWO beta-testers (including her brother Steven and his husband) lead to OWTB learning that if you die while playing, your mind remains uploaded into the game
-- release was only slightly delayed; AWO went on to earn worldwide acclaim and also make bank; somewhere in all this, Charley moved back to the central coast she’d grown up on
-- three years later, AWO releases its Pepper, Silk, Gunpowder and Steel update; a few weeks after, a cyberattack is committed against the North American ‘Chimaera’ server that grievously wounds the artificial intelligence Io.tcai, leaving him more or less ‘dead’ as far as that server is concerned and also leaving the players on said server unable to log out period, stranding them inside the game
-- attempting to physically unhook players while still logged in ends up killing their bodies back on earth; all the players are now on life support
-- everything has completely gone to hell and the OWTB is left scrambling to fix things on their end; they have suspicions as to who sponsored the attack but have no proof
-- a number of DARPA-sponsored volunteers, including Charley’s partner Alain and an IRL friend of I/O’s protagonist Deedee by the name of Ralph head in to re-establish communications with the outside world, knowing that they’ll be as stuck as anyone else on Chimaera server once they do
-- Dr Durante is forced to remain on Earth and handle things on that side
-- eventually the day is saved and people get freed from the isekai, but to explain how would be SPOILERS

Canon point: slightly pre-canon, prior to her playerbase getting isekai’d; that is roughly concurrent with Jake/Deedee's canonpoint (so just as the PSG&S update drops)
Age: 57!

Personality: Wow, what a giant nerd.

I joke, but honestly, being a nerd is an important facet of Charley Durante's personality. She loves getting down into the minutiae of things, she truly enjoys research, and she's got a distinct tendency to hyperfocus when it comes to working on projects. And yeah, some of it is the autism but the rest is pure nerdery, baby. She gets fannish about things she enjoys, like manga, anime, tabletop gaming and visual novels.

She’s scary ambitious, as you can see from her being a trailblazer in her field, helping to create fourteen post-Singularity AIs and countless other ‘lesser’ AIs (which are in themselves pretty damn impressive) and from being part of an organization whose secret goal is to bring humanity the stars, once they’ve got enough capital to do it.

She’s extremely clever and very good at coming at problems from odd angles. She’s surprisingly intuitive as well. She’s highly empathetic, but also not all that good at reading other people’s emotional tells sometimes, so that empathy isn’t always displayed or put to use as it should be--although all work at socialization her family did with her can help on occasion

Charley is also a former Millennial and even though she’s found success and prosperity now, as an older adult, she still carries some of the mental and emotional scars of her generation. There was a time when she was sure she’d never be able to own her own home--when she wasn’t entirely sure she’d ever be able to support herself without the help of her parents. That she did finally end up achieving many of those markers of adulthood, even later in life than expected of people, is something that constantly boggles her mind.

She never really lost the cadences of her generation either, still choosing to speak in largely the same fashion she did as a twenty-something in the 2010s. She swears casually and unthinkingly and is one of those ridiculous people who uses memespeak in real life. She loves playing with words. It would be accurate to say she speaks like she swallowed a dictionary and chased it down with tumblr.

She also has a terrible tendency to ramble and possesses the assumption that letting people babble-on about their current obsessions while only half-listening to them is part of the social contract--if you do it for them, they’ll do it for you, right? That’s how it’s always worked in her family. (She is not the first person in her family to be on the spectrum, even if she was likely the first to be formally diagnosed.)

She has a tendency to operate from a position of good faith and to presume other people are operating in good faith until proven otherwise. Given that she’s not always the best at outwardly understanding where other people are coming from, she realized that she could either operate with a blanket assumption of good faith or a blanket assumption of bad faith and chose the one that was easier on her heart and mind. This has, however, led her to being fucked over from time to time, most notably by her second college boyfriend and her old boss, the engineering professor.

She’s a friendly person in general. She likes people, even though she doesn’t understand a lot of them, and just wants to be liked in turn. Charley has a tendency to make a lot of friendly acquaintances, although she likes to call them just 'friends.' But the truth is that most of these 'friendships' are shallow things based on shared interests and causes and the people who she lets herself get truly close to are much fewer in number--and all the more precious for it.

The cyberattack against AWO is going to hit her hard--AWO was her baby and she’s very emotionally attached to the whole project-- and she’ll be spending a lot of time during I/O’s canon arc being extremely freaked out and worried about every damn thing, especially when her partner of decades volunteers to join the DARPA-sponsored crew to go inside the game and re-establish communications with the outside world. There’s a very real fear of losing Alain this way and being alone forever.

Character changes: having an otherworldly support network has a good chance of making the upcoming crisis when her game gets sabotaged by outside forces a little easier to live with--and there’s also a decent chance it might help her find some solutions from the outside faster

Capabilities:
-- brilliant programmer and designer of artificial intelligences; she revolutionized the industry
-- damn good GM and game designer
-- capable seamstress/costumer, if not wholly an original one (she did her time in the cosplay mines)
-- competent cook
-- can drive a stick shift
-- writer of very enjoyable, readable genre fiction + fanfiction
-- second generation total nerd/weeb; has a good background in speculative fiction + anime in her world for roughly the last century from her perspective
-- fluent in English, near-fluent in French and Mexican Spanish, knows enough Japanese and Korean to get by after all those years in programming

Sample:
TDM thread
Another TDM thread with a canonmate

Notes: As you might have guessed from my apping a character who technically hasn’t shown up in the published part of I/O yet, I’m a member of the production team! (The I/O logo? That’s my work, baby!)

Also, uh, I’m going to also own up to the fact that Dr Durante herself began life as a VtM PC of mine from a game six years ago (hence why a minor character has a surprisingly thorough life history) and there’s a few paragraphs of the personality section that were taken from my app for her 20-something alternate self from a prior game.