1  NAME: Vera Vorakoff
 2  
 3  NICK NAME: -
 4  
 5  AGE: 31
 6  
 7  POSITION IN FAMILY: Only child, orphaned at age 12, adopted by alcoholic
 8  aunt who worked as a prostitute.
 9  
10  FAMILY STABILITY: Parents were Russian, and Vera was born there. Parents
11  emigrated from (read: fled from) the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when
12  Perestroika made it possible. 
13  
14  RELIGION: Atheistic or maybe Greek Orthodox Christian. Needs to be 
15  discussed.
16  
17  PHOBIAS AND FIXATIONS: Extremely distrusting of other people,
18  particularly authorities, partly because of early childhood in the
19  Soviet Union, where the family was badly treated, and partly because of
20  the way police and social welfare people treated her after her parents
21  died.
22  
23  HIDDEN PAST: A juvenile delinquent, stealing cars and breaking into
24  stores. No criminal record, however.
25  
26  SEXUAL PREFERENCES: Heterosexual. Enjoys sex with men, but does not
27  get involved with them emotionally. Has a steady lover, a married
28  man.
29  
30  UNDISCLOSED AGENDA: Would like nothing better than to be left alone
31  to live her life.
32  
33  POSSIBLE CASTING: Maria Bello, Claudia Black, Angelina Jolie
34  
35  LIFE STORY:
36  
37  Vera was born in the Soviet Union, in 1976. Her parents were engineers,
38  and in 1986 managed to emigrate to the United States. They settled down
39  in a Boston neighborhood with many ethnic Russians, where the living was
40  somewhat poor and rough, with many gangs and the Russian mobs
41  prominently present. In 1988, Vera's parents were killed in a drive-by
42  shooting, and she was taken care of by a distant aunt, an aging
43  prostitute.
44  
45  Growing up among criminals, her morals became somewhat lax: she would
46  think nothing of stealing a car if she needed one. On the other hand,
47  she would not demolish the car, and would even lock it up afterwards
48  wherever she happened to leave it. Although she would shoplift with a
49  clear conscience, she would only take what she needed. She would never
50  hurt someone except in self defense. However, since she was considered
51  weird, she would often attract teasing and would react aggressively, and
52  this often led to fighting. She quickly learned to fight and took
53  martial arts lessons to protect herself better.
54  
55  Being mostly alone, without friends or family, rarely having any
56  positive relationships, made Vera extremely self-reliant and extremely
57  untrusting of other people.
58  
59  Doing petty crime made her interested in learning about electronics and
60  such things to be able to better circumvent security systems in cars and
61  shops. At the age of sixteen (1992) she realized that computers would be
62  good for what she wanted to do. She went to hang with people in the MIT
63  AI Lab who were more than happy to teach her to program. (XXX timing is
64  wrong: AI Lab was pretty much closed by 1985 already)
65  
66  Vera quickly realized that she had a great natural ability for real
67  programming. In just a couple of years she learned the equivalent of a
68  college degree in computer science, and by the age of nineteen got her
69  first programming job. She would not have to use computers to commit
70  crimes to get stuff, she could earn a lot of money just by programming.
71  
72  By 2006, Vera was one of the star programmers at her current employer,
73  ObCompany, a California firm that develops tracking and control systems
74  for warehouses and warehouse forklifts. She is not a team player, but
75  she is brilliant in what she does, so she works alone and is in charge
76  of the part of the system that keeps track of how the warehouse
77  forklifts are driven by the human drivers. This is embedded programming,
78  which involves a fair amount of electronics work, and getting greasily
79  intimate with the trucks. This suits Vera perfectly.
80  
81  Vera lets no-one very close to her. She has sexual relations with men,
82  and a married lover, but they are purely physical. She still has few
83  friends, but is cordial with her co-workers.
84  
85  Vera respects Carl, or the fact that Carl does not bend under pressure.
86  She has witnessed how Carl would do what he thought was the right thing
87  (turning in a colleague for a relatively minor security breach) even
88  though this enraged most people at the company. Vera thinks Carl is
89  tough and has courage and indeed living by a strict personal moral code
90  requires both.
91  
92  Carl is also one of the few men at ObCompany who has not hit on Vera.
93  Vera is quite attractive, and most men make passes at her at least once.
94  Vera likes sex, but she doesn't like being approached about it, she
95  wants to do it herself.