Game: Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. (version 2.01 – R. Talsorian Games, 1993)
My Experience: Not as much as I’d like. I played in a couple of sessions of stuff Tracker7 ran in the late ’90s or early 2000s. I’ve tried once or twice to organize a play-by-post but never put in the sustained effort to get anything off the ground.
Vera Rodriquez, Account Adjuster
Precision Horizon isn’t a corporation that gets a lot of discussion on the streets – nor, really, even in the boardroom. It’s a small corp, as such things go – and if anyone could trace its ownership, they’d learn that it’s one of those rare, odd, small independent corps that isn’t someone else’s subsidiary. It makes very good money selling its services to larger corps, and while its employees do rake in decent pay, the lion’s share of that revenue goes into overhead and internal development.
Precision Horizon doesn’t actually advertise itself, but if it did, it would advertise itself as a consulting and forecasting company. Most edgerunners, upon hearing that, would shrug – it doesn’t build or sell anything tangible, after all, so there’s nothing for them to steal or break. Netrunners’ ears, on the other hand, would prick up, because that sounds like paydata. In that realm, obscurity is Precision Horizon’s second-best defense. Its best defense is vigorous IC and its own cadre of security sysops whose combined virtual firepower leaves survivors convinced that the corp’s actual line of business is IC field-testing.
The truth is that Precision Horizon is exactly what it doesn’t advertise itself as. Its business model is rooted in the big iron in the basement levels, a server plantation (well beyond any mere server farm) where expert systems grind away tirelessly. Down in the stacks, big data is sifted, sorted, contemplated, folded, spindled, and mutilated into product. Predictions. Prophecies. Whether a proposed Hack Shack marketing campaign will succeed. What a 3% increase in gang activity in a certain district will mean for Trauma Team service calls. Who’ll win that vacant senatorial seat. It’s the kind of competitive edge that corporations will (and do) kill for. Of course, Precision Horizons’ never-seen executives, the high priests of the algorithms, devote a slice of that processing time to anticipating and countering anyone’s attempt to buy out or take over their temple – or to burn it down to deny it to the competition.
Precision Horizon’s organic workforce is divided sharply between those who occasionally see the sun and those who do not. The latter consider themselves the corp’s heart and soul. They’re the coders, the machine-whisperers, the analysts who divine the truth in the output, the cyberneticists who train the large learning models to create and intuit. The former are Precision Horizon’s interface with meatspace and the rest of the corposphere. They’re sales executives and account managers, and more esoteric specialists like data sourcers (read: HUMINT collectors).
Then there’s Vera Rodriquez’ group: the Data Reconciliation Division. DRD takes some pains to sound as boring as possible. Maybe it’s like an internal audit function, a bunch of accountants making sure the money flows line up, or maybe its people spend all day in the interface, checking for errors or corruption in the data sets before they’re fed into the big machines. In truth, they work in quality control – it’s just that the controls are all outward-facing.
Sometimes the models don’t account for every variable. The data set is incomplete (or, worse yet, incorrect). The dice settle on a low-odds outcome. Precision Horizons’ pure crystalline predictions don’t align with dirty street reality. A certain amount of uncertainty is anticipated, and even written into the contracts, but too much will make Precision Horizons look bad. Sloppy. Incompetent. Might make clients question whether they’re truly getting their money’s worth.
So Precision Horizons needs a way to reconcile the discrepancies between the models and the meat, between the data and the street. That’s DRD. That’s Vera’s job.
And she’s starting to suspect that some of her assignments are coming directly from the big iron itself.
Traits
Role: Corporate
Age: 24
Intelligence (INT) 7
Reflexes (REF) 9
Cool (CL) 10
Technical Ability (TECH) 5
Luck (LK) 10
Attractiveness (ATTR) 7
Movement Allowance (MA) 6
Empathy (EMP) 8/9 (Humanity 81/90 after cybernetic implants)
Body Type (BT) 4
Skills (* denotes career skill)
Resources* +6
Awareness/Notice* +2
Education* +3
Handgun +4
Hide/Evade +2
Human Perception* +6
Intimidate +3
Leadership +4
Library Search* +3
Personal Grooming* +4
Persuasion* +6
Programming +1
Social* +4
Stock Market* +2
Streetwise +4
Wardrobe & Style* +4
Life Path Connections and Complications
Aleto Luka, former friend who turned on Vera after losing face at their then-mutual place of employment. He’s unlikely to go beyond casual verbal abuse, but he’s still working there and has risen through the executive ranks.
Oliwia Wozniak, Vera’s tutor in street culture and tactics.
Emma Meyer, Vera’s closest friend and fellow fashion maven.
Two months ago, Vera was in a horrifying accident (which, as far as she knows, had nothing to do with her job). She escaped serious injury but the edgerunners and bystanders around her weren’t so fortunate. She still wakes up screaming (80% chance each night).
Equipment
fashionable businesswear attire
pocket computer
cellular phone
light armor jacket
Militech Arms Avenger autopistol w/ 5 magazines
Chrome
neuralware processor
chipware socket
contraceptive implant
Notes and Afterthoughts
Vera was another character with ridiculous random rolls of the sort I’ll never see when building a PC for actual play. It should be easy to work with numbers like that, but I also rolled randomly to see what role I was going to build, and I was stalled for a few days on exactly what to do to make a corporate concept that was both (a) something I’d want to play and (b) something that would integrate well with other (more traditional) cyberpunk-archetype edgerunner PCs. I kinda like the results.
Vera and Precision Horizons would fit equally well in Cyberpunk Red with only a mechanical rebuild.