# ALTIFICIAL a canon divergent and private [ ALTIERA CUNNINGHAM ] sourced from CDPR'S game series CYBERPUNK : 2077 written & loved dearly by LU ( twenty-six, any pronouns, cst ) a focus on lost connections, lost souls, and learning what it means to be dead.
Seeing pictures of yourself -the real you, the one people miss, the one people look for in your eyes- is like staring into a foggy mirror. The parts are there, you think, but the details are lost.
Someone who loves you makes you breakfast. You thank him and eat it despite the fact the eggs are too crisp on the sides and missing much needed salt. He says its how you like it, but that just makes that angry, unfettered itch in the back of your brain grow stronger.
How I used to like it, you want to say, how I used to be.
You grip your butter knife harder and light catches the polished metal. The glimpse you catch of yourself in the cutlery looks nothing like the photo on the mantle.
altiera in her engram verse acts more closely to her ai counterpart, mainly because of how long she was left in cyberspace unsocialized & fusing with endless amounts of data for almost a full decade before they were able to put her back into her body.
she's a little colder and mechanically articulate when she speaks, there's distance in her actions; not at all how she was when she was alive. there are moments, though, when her personality data shows through & alt will make jokes that can fall a little flat. her words come thru a little more tender towards those the old alt had love for. her hands become just a ghost more gentle.
she'll never be how she used to, now only warm body housing a cold heart and a dead soul- but every now and then, a sliver of her peaks out and it's as if she'd never left.
absolutely nutty of johnny silverhand, who is so vehemently anti-establishment and vocal about the evils of corporate monopolies in nc, to fall in love with a rich nepo baby who works for a software corporation and birthed one of the biggest threats-slash-technological evolutions of cyberspace.
alayna cunningham was a well established doctor while sawyer worked as a marketing officer in a corporate organization from visalia, both coming from respectively comfortable backgrounds themselves. while neither owned their own business, alayna became well known in plastics ( soon as a ripperdoc ) for a few decades while sawyer remained hovering a comfortable position on the corpo ladder for most of their careers.
something something love at first sight something birds of a feather
soon after altiera was born, the cunninghams lost their jobs and were displaced because of the civil wars and skyrocketing growth of gang activity in SoCal- and so they moved closer to the southwestern edge of california which was where night city became established not even a decade later.
despite the financial crash and near-crippling rates of inflation, the cunninghams still had access to their funds and made do with a slightly above average lifestyle. this is when alayna cunningham found her new calling in becoming a ripperdoc- whereas sawyer was stuck licking the boots of corpo suits to try and work his way back into the white collar force.
alt's childhood wasn't entirely hopeless; her parents played an active-enough role in her development despite their demanding careers but nobodies perfect. like many tired parents, altiera was often shoo'd away and young alt was forced to put her time and attention elsewhere. schooling was digital, thanks to the access granted by her father's workpath- and this was one of alt's first experiences with the NET.
something something youthful curiosity got the better of her something this began her love for the NET as well as her ever-growing desire to keep learning.
by the time she'd entered her teen years, altiera became even more familiar with the continuously growing advancements of cyberspace and started dabbling in programming.
something something she'd met a few likeminded people in this time something made friends on the NET and decided to wreak havoc as teens with unlimited access to the internet do
this being said, alt wanted the best hardware she can get her hands on. with well-off parents, it wasn't hard to gain access to good equipment on this side of NC that'd help alt achieve exactly what she wanted, bought the neural processors and interface plugs needed to navigate the Net. her little projects and hobbies were continuously funded by alayna and sawyer, family still kept afloat by their medium success in their respective careers.
unfortunately, alayna and sawyer didn't live to see alt's 19th birthday. car jacking turned violent, shot down in the middle of the highway while altiera was home alone. she didn't get to bury them.
needless to say, alt was granted access to the remainder of her parents' funds ( of which most was burned through a few years later bc of her spending habits ) after their death and chose to continue living out on her own in NC. due to the near crippling grief of losing her parents, alt spent most of her time interacting with cyberspace as a means to cope. she found a home in the 0's and 1's and never truly turned back from it.
in the years passing, alt has since healed and eventually landed a few jobs here and there ranging anywhere from flipping hot dogs at a vendor cart to working digital security for local businesses. somewhere along the way, she'd met rache bartmoss and ran the entire pacifica region of the NET alongside him.
at age 23, she was poached by ITS because of her indomitable skill and presence in cyberspace- all where she'd soon find herself developing what could be considered to be digital immortality.
𝐖𝐇𝐈𝐂𝐇 𝐅𝐀𝐌𝐎𝐔𝐒 𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑 𝐃𝐎 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐖𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐊𝐄 ? ray douglas bradbury (august 22, 1920 – june 5, 2012) was an american fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. best known for his dystopian novel fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as the martian chronicles (1950) and the illustrated man (1951), bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century american writers. many of bradbury's works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films.
tagged by : @sherez kissing u
tagging : anyone who sees this <3