Meet Fitzroy “Fitz” Clarke, the Mutt’s all ’round techno wizard.
Fitz hacks. He puts together tech, he makes friends with things that go BEEP. He’s been doing it since he was a kid on Mars, ‘cause poor kids on poor colonies don’t have much else to do in the meat world. But invest a little in a good rig, or better yet, build your own from thrown away parts from the better part of town, and a kid can go anywhere, do just about anything, so long as it’s virtual.
Unfortunately, the things Fitz got up to weren’t always the most legit. In fact, a lot of them were downright un-legit—Illegal, even.
But what was a little hacking if it meant that his friends lived a little better? The corps on Mars weren’t exactly known for paying fair wages. And what little they did pay wound up right back in their pockets as colonist workers and their families had little choice but to buy their food and sundries from the corp stores.
Fitz liked to think of himself as Robin Hood. The corp cops would have just called him a hood. Either way the result was the same: a little corp bank hacking and the people that needed it ate better and lived better. The corps didn’t miss a little scratch, not the way Fitz hid it, but that money went a long way to the people who needed it.
Besides, the corps were easy to outsmart.
Who wasn’t so easy to outsmart? The people Fitz got involved with that were looking for a murdering thief by the name of Olivia Singh. He took their mob money, tracked her down in cyberspace, led them to Olivia in the meat space. That’s when he realized she wasn’t the baddie these mooks were making her out to be. That’s also when he realized that he had probably led these people to quite a few other not-so-bad people. People that tended to disappear, for good.
Fitz helped this Olivia woman to escape. But the kind of people Fitz was working for don’t like it when pieces on the board change color… They had connections, even to the corp cops, and suddenly Fitz’s hacking hobbies were being exposed.
The colonies of Mars aren’t spacious; the surface of the planet isn’t fit for life, and Fitz didn’t have much of a chance hiding out from both the cops and the mob in the cramped, sequestered cities. But Olivia was heading to the asteroid belt, maybe even farther out, and surely that would be enough space for Fitz to get lost in…