Verity Nguyen

Verity Nguyen is the most influential young media artist of the Edgerunner movement in 2030. She appears in Cyberpunk V3.0.

History
A resident of the D.C. enclave, Verity Nguyen is the most influential young media artist of the Edgerunner movement today, with an astonishingly high rating in the Veracity Index for her work. Born to Edger parents, she was raised in a kaleidoscopic cut-up culture of high-tech mixed media, where truth was relative and reality subjective. Even as a child, she was obsessed with the notion of Truth as a fixed and inviolate thing, and the more her parents and peers tried to convince her that the world didn’t operate that way anymore the more she rebelled and tried to fix it.

An intense and uncommunicative teen, she soon hooked up with other young Edger outcasts to start hacking local newspools, uncovering and publicizing raw footage from the sanitized stories that made it to the mass media. By illuminating the conveniently forgotten details she hoped to give her audience the chance to choose the truth for themselves without clever manipulations or distracting flash and noise. Other Edgers thought her pranks well-meaning but childishly naive at best and a pointless and irritating waste of bandwidth at worst, but despite their opinions Verity persisted: She had faith.

She spent three years cracking LANs and sifting other people’s data, earning kibble money by outing dirty secrets and despising herself for the compromises she made in order to eat. As her friends began to drift away, Verity remained true, trawling datapools accompanied only by Chad Ransom, another introverted teenage hacker. At sixteen, her activities brought her public notoriety when she intercepted a live feed from a police helmet camera during a food riot in downtown DC. While the streets burned and aerodynes whined overhead, two cops cornered a number of teenage looters in a candy store. While one cop covered them with his rifle and chuckled away, (cheerfully chewing on a stolen chocolate bar), the other systematically beat the terrified kids to a pulp and left them to die in a pool of their own blood. Chad hacked into the live news feed from Net54 camera crews, while Verity coolly inserted the cop’s brutal contribution to the story. Mixing in real time, Verity’s live cut up mix of images went nationwide, while she added a little reportage of her own when the dialogue became indistinct (due to the thump of the cop’s baton on flesh and the kid’s pleading and screaming).

The country exploded in outrage and the two cops were arrested and sentenced to twenty years in a very public trial. While everyone wanted to know who was behind the coup, Verity wasn’t interested in fame; she was interested in the truth. But she couldn’t escape what she had done. Word got out, as word always does, and people began to scan the airwaves for her signature mix of stolen images and uncompromising honesty. They’re waiting for the message behind the vids, but the fact is she doesn’t have one. Verity just wants to give people the chance to choose the truth for themselves from unbiased, un-sanitized facts.

A remarkably pretty young woman, her shaven head, quiet, intense demeanor and minimalist approach to personal dress and adornment is striking in its modesty when compared to other Edgers. Now only 23, and still supported by Chad’s expertise, Verity is unquestionably the Edgernet’s most respected media, not for her style, but for her unbiased honesty and her unstained reputation. And in a world where you are your word, that means a lot.

Skills
Composition 8, Renown 4, Basic Tech 6, Credibility 8, Surveillance 6, Eidetic Memory Photo & Film 6, Library Search 9

Outfit
Neural Net, Media NuCybe package, beat-up AV-4 with broadcast gear, fiber-op jacket patches, Armorjacket (SP16), medium handgun.