T.C. Mitnick

Concept: Black Hat for hire.

Desc: Terribly near-sighted. Overweight. He has a bit of a neckbeard. Although against the stereotype, He tends to dress well enough. He is scrupulously clean and does not smell at all of cat-pee.  He’s got good teeth which he takes care of and his breath is always nice.  His hair is short-ish by choice and reddish-brown. His gaze tends to wander because his mind tends to wander when people are talking to him.  He falls down a bit on the introvert side and talks little until he warms up to you, then, his brain is like an unleashed torrential storm.  He has a touch of Aspergers. (His girlfriend has it worse than him.) 

History: For the first 3 years of his life, Templeton Christopher Mitnick was more or less non-verbal. His parents were afraid that he was never going to be functional. But as they got him involved with some occupational therapy and some special schooling that they really couldn’t afford, he began to open up a bit. By the time they got him enrolled in actual public school he was verbal enough to get around and be functional.  And everyone relaxed a bit.  

   Although he was a voracious reader, he still wasn’t much for talking. He became fascinated at an early age with the family computer. (The first one they had, he ended up taking apart. It was never exactly the same afterward.) But after that, he began to get the idea that knowing how to program a computer was a lot like knowing how to cast spells in the fantasy novels he liked. Being a programmer was a lot like being a wizard.  And being a wizard was something that he coveted. No one talked to a wizard like they were stupid.

T.C had trouble in school. It wasn’t that he wasn’t smart. He was. He wasn’t able to focus on things that didn’t interest him. He also didn’t have a lot of friends. Most of the other kids thought he was weird, and even the couple of friends that he did have had trouble keeping up with his grasshopper-like brain. He was something of an underachiever at anything that didn’t involve math or computers. Often, the parents had to curtail his computer time in order to get his English and history grades up.

    T.C. got a scholarship to go to a technical school. He’d always been a machine at standardized testing and was able to simply crush both the ACT and the SAT. Once there, and on his own, and in his element for the first time in his life, he blossomed. 

     T.C. didn’t really get into professional hacking because he’s evil or even because hacking is illegal and therefore forbidden and fun.  It’s just that he’s always been interested in systems and taking them apart and putting them back together. He has to, occasionally stop himself, from fixing the vulnerabilities that allowed him into the systems in the first place.  

It’s just that, maybe the kid played a bit too much Cyberpunk or Shadowrun.  Something about the “Romance” of the hacker in those settings appealed to him and that probably would have faded after he got bored with it...Until he discovered that you could make ridiculous amounts of money doing it.

    He’s got a job working at Allied Business Data, working as a tape operator in their ancient tape machine facility. Cutting edge server tech, cheek by jowl with tape machine readers and reel to reel readers.  To date, he has never ever used any of the data that flows through the facility. Most of it is useless for the purposes of industrial espionage.   He works this job on the overnight because it requires 0.15% percent of his actual personal energy.  He spends much of his workday internet chatting and snacking, with the occasional catnap.  His co-worker Parikh does much the same.

     However, the one thing that his job at ABD does give him is a certain amount of anonymity. ABD is a large company, used to be huge and multi-national, back when huge multinational computer companies were a thing. He uses his access to borrow vast amounts of computing power for hacking and code-breaking. And in fact, TC found some useful tools in those old mainframes from when ABD had government contracts.  He’s improved on them since.  The very few times that they’ve been able to trace a signal back, they discovered that the hack came from “North Carolina”.  That’s as specific as they can get.  Part of the NC mainframe has an actual splice into the trunk lines there.  

Industrial espionage is nice and all, and the money is good, but it’s never steady.  And TC is just paranoid enough to expect that “Mr. Johnson” is always going to try to screw him on the deal.  This is why he is careful to never meet clients in person.  It’s also why he’s usually more interested in local and municipal systems. That money is a lot more steady. He’s got tools that can slot a new ID into the computers all over town and he’s got a co-op deal with a guy that makes fake ID’s that brings in steady money.  It’s nice knowing that if you need to leave the country, you’ve got papers that will get you out and money stowed in offshore banks. It brings a certain amount of bulletproof chill. 

Back in the day, he used to hustle hacking jobs at a place called the Donut Hut.  Now he pays a younger kid to do the hustling and pass the interesting work up the chain to him.  Much of the rest of his clientele comes from fellow black-hats looking to trade for something or looking to unload work that they themselves can’t do. 

Attitude: “Hrmph. Well. I like the challenge.  The money’s nice. *Wanders away if there are no more questions.*

Skills: Yeah. This guy is going to be loaded up on Intelligence, Wits, and Resolve. In roughly that order. He’ll have the kind of dots in Computer that you normally only see in an antagonist. He’s got a couple of dots in investigation because he always says that in order to be good at being a criminal you have to learn to think like a cop.  His social dots are, as you can guess, somewhat anemic, but he’s got a small amount of streetwise, and he can LIE on the phone like a virtuoso. If you have the Carthian Movement book there is a social merit called “Coder Clique” that is perfectly apt for TC. It gives him 9 again on any computer based roll. it comes from contact with a social coterie of fellow hackers and as long he’s part of the community he gets to use the advantage. 

As you may imagine, T.C. is pretty useless in a fight. He has no training, although he’s got several weapons.  He’s easily winded and a bit chickenshit. Fights in the schoolyard never went well for him.  But, on the other hand, He might just able to hack police and military drones. So there’s that.

Also: He can speak Japanese.  He just got annoyed with subs on his anime.

Gear: This part is going to be a bit complicated. So strap in. TC has four main tools that he uses in his work. His base station “O-Katanna”,  his laptop, “Wakizashi” and his phone, “Tanto”.  Each is networked to one another, and there are a number of preset hacks that can be triggered by voice commands on the phone. Each of the machines is tempest hardened and the basement of his house has an ingenious back-up system. The back-up system is in a small closet that's wired with a small amount of plastique. Anybody poking that is in a for a rude shock. Tanto is the most free of any kind of hacking stuff. But it can connect to the other systems by voice or text and initiate all sorts of mischief.  T.C. fourth main tool is a virtual system that he built that he calls “Ghostwheel”  Ghostwheel has been seeded into dozens of places.  Its compressed package will fit on a 10 gig thumb drive, but he likes having it in lots of places, each with its own skype number.

His laptop bag also has two spare phones, a taser, power bars, gum, 6 thumb drives, and a tiny tool kit.

Home: T.C.’s actual home that he shares with Suzanne, is fairly spacious, and in a quiet neighborhood. He doesn’t know his neighbors AT ALL.  Neither he nor Suzanne are interested in yard work or indeed, the out-of-doors either in the practical sense or even as a concept. There is a grill out on the back deck, but it’s been used all of twice and will likely rust away before it gets used again.  While the house itself is spacious, Both T.C. and Suzanne are borderline hoarders, especially when it comes to books. Nearly every flat surface that isn’t in the kitchen  has books on it.  The only exception being the Dinner Table.  The DT, as they refer to it, is not for dining of course, but for RPG games. Granted, a number of their friends have children now and so getting together for a game is not as easy as it used to be. Many times, they have to be satisfied with Skype or Google Hangout. But still, it’s a rule of the house not to clutter up the DT. T.C. and Suzanne have separate bedrooms, as they both snore, have personal space issues, and work weird hours. Which is not to say that they don’t get it on, it’s just that they tend to sleep alone.

Suzanne has crippling allergy issues when it comes to pets, like hives and throat closing up issues. So they have fish in tanks.

In addition to this place. T.C. also owns a houseboat under another name.  They’ve been on it all of twice. He maintains it because they might need to get out of town or some half-assed escape plan he’s concocted like that.  Each time they took the houseboat out, they got terrible sunburns.

Circle: T.C.’s circle of personal friends is kind of small. Even among fellow nerds and geeks, he can be a bit of an acquired taste. Beyond his gamer group, and his co-workers he doesn’t have much going on socially... Online, however, is a different story. T.C. comes out of his shell there and is known in the hacker world to be pretty fucking good at what he does.  He doesn’t bill himself as the internet equivalent of El Cid, Batman, and Kung-Fu Jesus all rolled into one, but he’s got a good rep and is known to be willing to trade for things and expertise he doesn’t have. (Expertise in government systems, government strong crypto, and anything involving particularly abstruse mathematical constructs.)  He has the expertise, but not necessarily the empathy to participate in Anonymous, but occasionally pitches in on some projects just to keep his hand in.

Story Uses:

T.C.’s obvious uses as an Ally/Contact/ Mentor/ Retainer/ Whatever are obvious. He can also make a decent antagonist if hired by the right sort of people.  

What gets interesting, is what might happen if T.C. gets found out, and then is forced to scramble. If he has enough time to group call, all of the seeded versions of Ghostwheel and say or text, “Initiate the Omega Protocols”

Well. things in your city, possibly even the whole state...are going to get REAL jacked up.

Connections:

*Like many people who fancy themselves the smartest guy in the room, T.C. is a fan of stage magic and has been to Caligari's more than once. Not that he's a regular, but he does like to go and so does Suzanne. The only person he's talked to there at all was Deondre Washington. But Deondre would probably recognize him.

*Aldous Church has a working relationship with him online. While Aldous can respect a man who protects his anonymity professionally, he has pieced together that T.C. lives in this city and is into nerd culture. Finding him, should it become necessary, might not be as hard as T.C. would like. Aldous often requests background information on targets. Pays extra for crash jobs.

Clavo Hernandez is naturally, T.C.'s ID guy.  Weirdly, the two are good friends in the way that people who are VERY dissimilar can be. Clavo has also put T.C. in touch with Alejandro Dean from Holmes, Gillis, Baker, Savage, North and Dean

*DJ RazorBurn from The Caboose used to bully T.C. in school when they were both children.  This may explain why his bags get searched every single time he travels and why he gets audited every other year, and similar problems like that.