A character I'd like to see an SR4 update on would be Cinder (Renraku Arcology Shutdown, Threats 2). She was an Otaku present when Deus' minions attacked Shadowland and after the Shutdown she was targeted by Pax who said she could 'hear the ressonanace and the dissonance'.
Perri has that ability in the SR4A story, Happy Trails. And Perri has rotated through a ton of names.
I actually had to read this one completely; didn't think it was true. Ah, well.
Some people are just born unlucky.
I always thought Peregrine/Perri is the same as Fastjack's daughter, who is the same as the sysop at the Nexus. Partly because she gets away with calling him Jack in Spy Games, while Sticks gets booted.
Now, Perri, the technomancer SysAdmin at Denver's Nexus, is apparently the same Perri introduced in Target: Matrix to make the Otaku "public" to Shadowland there. Apparently this is FastJack's daughter, which makes all of Emergence and everything that MUCH more interesting in Jackpoint.
There's never been clarification that they aren't one and the same, and they're both about the same age (at least, the Perri from Target: Matrix in 2055 "sounds" like she's about 12). That would put them both at around 30 in 2073. And about 21 in 2064 when Crash 2.0 hit, which again seems like the right age since Perri's in (a) University at the time. But nothing says they are/aren't one and the same (at least nothing in the books or here I'm not that active on Dumpshock, so I don't know if anything was revealed there).
Just a point here -- Peregrine was 17 during the Arc Shutdown of 2059; if Perri was 12 in 2055, she'd've been 15-16. Close in age, but the two are definitely not the same.
There's no way Peregrine is Perri. Remember, the first generation of otaku were forgotten, abandoned children who had no families. They made the Matrix their homes, and their tribes were their families. Also, at the time most otaku were concentrated in the Denver Data Haven. Worrying about her father would not be an issue because I doubt she ever knew her real father. If there were otaku in the SCIRE, they were Banded or they were the rare otaku a runner team going into the arc might have with them. Or they're Overwatch, who operated outside of the Arc.
Not ... exactly. The Denver Data Haven was the most distinct (and thus semi-accepted as being 'the first') collection of them, back in the Denver: City of Shadows boxed set that's placed in 2055; by the time the Arcology closed its doors for the Wannabe's experiments, there were otaku worldwide. Remember that Jay's background on Demonseed Elite (on SL6) was that he was originally from an otaku group in India; as well, there are canonical tribes in at least Boston at the time, and if the 'survivors' of broken tribes were recruited to make up the sub-groups of Overwatch (which, following the then-rules for tribes, is what they had to have been) it means that there needed to have been scores of otaku tribes worldwide.
IIRC, the DDH actually had two -- one of technoshamans, the other of cyberadepts. They tended to keep apart, but didn't really
dislike each other, per se.
I doubt FastJack is Perri's biological daughter. She doesn't even call him "dad" until the end of Happy Trails when he kills the piece of Jormungand trying to eat her.
This is one of the reasons why I actually think that Perri
is Jack's biokid. Her irreverence for him (specifically in calling him by his given handle) would be both a natural rebellion of a child which was abandoned (or even never known of) by their father, and the sort of professionalism / detachment of a Matrix-centric individual. After all, naming real names or relationships can be Very Dangerous in the shadows.
However, note that the Jormungand here is a very, very limited one -- a baby, in fact. I have no doubt that
at the start, plenty of corporate deckers / decker teams waxed Jormungand, And then it respawned, bigger and nastier than ever, the way it did with Fastjack. The only reason
he could put it down for good was that he was in a secured and isolated system
that held the code egg. If it hadn't, he'd've been eventually whacked as it grew beyond the limits of what he could have handled, into the colossal juggernaut that is described in
System Failure. You kill it, it respawns, bigger and nastier than before.
Of particular interest is the fact that this follows, in almost every particular, the story of Thor (old man, hammer -- which returns to him, eh?) battling the Wyrm Jörmungand at Ragnarök, the Doom of the Gods. Thor is destined to slay the serpent by smashing its head, but will be poisoned by its venom, taking nine steps and dying as well, which is essentially what happens in "Happy Trails". Pax, in this, plays Hela, who (oddly) welcomes him to Valaskjalf, Odin's hall of the slain, in which rests his high seat. Would have made that Éljúđnir (Eljudnir), Hela's hall in Niflheim. Also, Gunningagap is the primordial void between Niflheim (ice) and Muspell (fire), the void into which the rest of the universe is created. While declaring that the IPO was 'Critical mass. Ground zero.' it would have made more sense to refer to the future event as being Ragnarök, during which all of what was old is destroyed, and after which the universe is created anew -- or at least transformed ...
