Redout/Clint
Clint C2972 is old, at least as far as Somatek neo-gorillas go. His serial number and overall aged appearance link him to the third batch of 'deployable, marketable' neo-gorillas...As opposed to the experimentals... But there are still distinct and noticeable differences between Clint and his successors.
Clint was decanted on Earth, back in the glory days before the Fall. He remembers seeing open blue skies before they shipped him up into the black, packed him off to Mars to grind out his life turning that red rock green. At thirty-four years, he's already showing advanced signs of premature ageing. A neo-gorilla half his age will likely live twice as long before gaining the deeply wrinkled and silvered look of the earlier batch Clint came from. Clint spends a great deal of his time working out to maintain a physique appropriate to his aggressive, alpha-male nature, and is a non-competitive but fairly capable freerunner. Admittedly, he's cheated a bit. Cloned and implanted muscle tissue helps give the old ape the bulky figure he remembers from his glory days, and as an experimental adaptation of the process to an uplift, it didn't cost him as much as it might have otherwise.
Still, genetics will tell. Clint has developed a rather noticeable beer gut despite the corded muscle in his limbs, and certainly his fixation on cheap cigars hasn't done much to aid his endurance despite nanitic assistance in his lungs. That cough? That's nothing. It'll go away. Someday. The bifocals? Yeah, replacement eyes are cheap. If your eyes are a nice, common, human model. But even if he found a good match, Clint fears losing the tweaks he was given when he proved himself to be a capable mechanic. If you're going to try and maintain a reputation as a good techie, it doesn't hurt to be able to see where electrical currents twist, break, or jump, and being able to keep a close watch on where you're laying a bead in a hurry makes for better welding.
Besides. That look of old, leathery, silver-backed age and thick beveled glasses has a kind of authority, doesn't it? Especially for folks brought up seeing old documentation of pre-Fall scientists.
Not that Clint's a scientist, of course. No, Clint's a hard-working, rough-handed engineer. The kind of fellow who helps keep those drills running and puts that little extra effort in to damp that vibration or jack down those grips, trying to make life a little bit easier on the others like him who've sweated away their receipts in the red dust.
Old Mars-hands will remember him and others like him (most of whom are dead or dying now...genetics will tell) who were sold en masse to MDOT, doing the heavy, grueling work of keeping the big road-laying machines running as they ground their way across red desert. They built and rebuilt the huge machines on the move, racing against the fine, abrasive red dust that got into everything and sanded fittings down almost as fast as they could be replaced. Back in the days before humans learned it was cheaper to build machines that Mars wouldn't chew up and spit out in hours.
Still others may tell of having met Clint in Mars orbit, where he and others like him repaired systems and worked with drill and charge to crack and sculpt the big icy asteroids into projectiles which met TTO spec, dug in and anchored the massive rockets that would send them spiraling down the well into the red globe below.
A few will talk about Clint during the bad years...Which weren't so long ago...When a big gorilla with solid muscular bulk could earn some coin to buy down his indenture piece by piece, fighting with shock clubs or knives in the pits of Pembroke Gardens; building the dream one night at a time, trying to take the other guy down without killing him or maiming him too bad, because you never knew when it might be you on the sand, looking up with nothing between you and death but the crowd and the willingness of the other guy to feed their bloodlust. Medical bills for 'negligent injury' cut into an indenture something fierce, but the winnings on a good night could make up for it. Clint's past that now, but those who remember can still pick out the scars in his wrinkled face, remember the flash of fang and knife and the heavy pressure of the expectant crowd as prehensile feet hit the bloody, muddy red sand.
Some who know him very well will talk about his buy-out party three years ago: the big, ugly lug crying as he tore up the printout of his paid-off indenture, while the few dozen who knew him cheered and the cheap beer flowed. Mostly apes, that night at the Broken Bit, because the Broken Bit was an indenture bar where primate riggers and miners drank away futures they'd already spent. A buy-out was big news in that crowd, and none of the crusty apes even bothered the human, Victor, who Clint dragged in with him for his celebration. Paid off the last payment, Clint had said, after Clint'd broken one leg falling off a drill-scaffold. Not because Clint couldn't have made it on his own a few months later, once it was healed. Clint was that kind of guy. But so Clint could get out on time, and be damned to the leg and the luck and the company doctors.
But most folks...Most folks nowadays know Clint from the souks of Noctis. His battered, ancient rust-orange buggy-van with its neon-green wildscrawl signs ('Locksmith/Tinker: things fixed, ways opened') is usually located at one market or another during the week (those who know him well can usually predict where and when). Weekends he heads out into the red to do some private scavenging or on contract to fix one thing or another, doing a tour of outlying ecostations that are either independent or can't get their own corporate tech support to come in and fix their systems for a damn. Fridays he invariably turns up at the big Valley of the Apes movie night down southwest in Red Jakarta. Clint's a social animal, he is.
Of course, there are always those who like to drag down the name of a fellow who's made his own way out of the creche. If he hangs out occasionally with Free Mars types, runaway uplifts, anarchists, smugglers and crooks, well who doesn't? And what scavenger and tinker ever could give a good accounting of where he found every bit and part he bought or sold? Clint buys and sells parts, working and not-so-working items of all kinds, from refurbished tools to reworked marsbuggy engines. He's even been known to help jury-rig repairs for broke clankers, gratis. After all, you never know when you'll be the one hoping for good karma to come around. Sure, the constant flow of merchandise is an easy place to submerge and lose certain kinds of stolen goods, and a salvage prospector and travelling repair service is an easy cover for the occasional smuggling job, but that's not what Clint is about, see?
When it comes down to it, Clint may seem surly to outsiders, but he's the sort of ape who looks after his friends. You don't get anywhere in this life without them. Are you one of Clint's friends? A co-worker? A client? Another indenture...Primate or otherwise...Who hacked themselves free of the chains that brought them to Mars? Free Mars types, pro-Uplift Rights, anti-Indenture...Almost anything works. The only thing Clint tends to steer clear of is people who burn other people for their livelihood...Not thieves, mind you, folks should know not to leave their doors unlocked...But egosnatchers, slavers, indenture-brokers, pimps...Those who make their living off the suffering of others will have a somewhat harder time being in Clint's trust. Doesn't mean he can't work with them...You don't stay alive as long as he has in Noctis by having unrealistic standards and sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, but he's less likely to trust such folk or stick his neck out for them and he will absolutely not cooperate with a slaver if he can avoid it.
