Atrophy — Roleplayer Guild

Okay! A week ahead of deadline. That means in precisely 169 hours I will notice a terrible, terrible spelling error or an incomplete senten

5’10”
 135 lbs
Sashi Shah

Age: 35
Gender: Female
Citizenship: Indian

Date and place of birth:
July 15th, 2024. Mumbai, India.

Official occupation:
Head Researcher & Biomedical Engineer for ISSOco’s Sopahn Division

 Profile                         

Residence: The Northern Pointe, penthouse apartment. The name is a bit of a misnomer, as the Northern Pointe apartment building is located in the west end of Harbourfront. The ridiculously expensive rent is coupled with a ridiculously gorgeous view of the ocean; it's arguably the most beautiful sunrise money can buy. It also offers a rather sobering view of the flooded parts of the city, although some tenants find that there is something powerful about looking down at all the desolation from the safety of their ivory tower.

Affiliation: Corporate - ISSOco 

Appearance: Nobody’s perfect, but that hasn’t stopped Sashi from crusading against the natural faults of her body and try to transform herself into something statuesque. Anti-aging cream, injections, and experimental gene therapy has kept her skin smooth and relatively healthy looking. Precise surgeries fixed the shape and size of her nose, improved her lips, straightened her teeth, lifted her brows, widened her brown eyes, shaped (or rather, gave) her breasts, flattened her belly, tightened her butt, and defined her arms and her legs. Sashi is the human ship of Theseus, and everything that expensive surgeries, creams, and pills cannot fix she hides underneath clothing or makeup. Still, despite all of this, she walks with her head down, folds into herself in public, smiles with her mouth closed, and generally tries to imitate wallpaper. 

Background: The bad thing about being born rich is that all of your accomplishments are met with someone exasperatedly sighing and saying, “Well, no shit, they have money.” The good thing about being rich is that, well, no shit, you have money. If Sashi wanted to she would never have had to work a day in her life, coasting off of trust funds and, later, inheritance. Of course, Sashi’s parents made it clear from the beginning that they expected a lot out of their daughter. However they didn’t expect the best, only for her to just try the best she could.  They were supportive. Sashi knew that she was lucky, that karma smiled upon her, that she was born privileged, and she knew this because her parents instilled that sense in her. She wasn’t born better, she was born with a better chance. And, since she had it so good, it was her duty to do good. That’s what they wanted.

Of course, just because she was dealt a winning hand that does not mean she didn’t have struggles throughout her life. Much like everyone else in the whole entire world, Sashi can look back and pick out key moments in which it felt as if her life was hanging, if not plummeting head first without a bungee cord, over the edge of ruin. Unlike everyone else in the entire world, Sashi can look back and pick out those moments with a perfect memory. Like, an actual perfect memory. Ever since puberty she was able to remember nearly everything that she had experienced. So, while other people were eventually able to bury and forget all of their horrible, awkward teenage years, Sashi to this day can vividly remember every pimple, every period, every bad kiss, every sweaty hand. 

She might remember it all, but what she focuses on the most from her youth is the bullying. Sure, children are monsters, but taken from a bystander’s point of view it honestly wasn’t even that bad—but, since the memory is fresh even twenty-something years later it feels worse than it really should. Sashi was convinced that she was ugly by a peer back in middle school, and that thought has permeated inside of her ever since. And, let’s be clear, Sashi was ugly back in middle school; she looked like a long two by four with bad hair, greasy skin, and braces. Let’s also be clear: she didn’t have a lot of friends, but she didn’t try to have a lot of friends, either. Much easier to just read a book or watch a film than to actually try and talk to someone.

Yet, the lonely girl convinced herself that she would be happier with friends, even if she did not want to put in the effort to make them, and so she decided to get rid of the one issue that she believed was holding her back from blossoming into this beautiful social butterfly. That one issue just happened to be her whole entire body. Fortunately, Mumbai had a burgeoning cosmetic surgery scene. Her first surgery was to take care of acne scars, and it would only be the start. Throughout her undergraduate at the University of Mumbai she went to the plastic surgeons multiple times; it seemed as if after every break she would come back with some part of her body changed. Boys would even talk to her now. Naturally she didn’t know what to do in those situations, so they would often move onto somebody who could at least have a proper conversation, but it was a start.

Maybe it would go better next time if she got a rhinoplasty.

Of course, everything would change when she went to America. Sashi did want to honor her parents and do some good in the world, and so she decided to study biological sciences with hopes of becoming a biomedical engineer. The girl had lofty dreams of editing genes to improve the well-being of all humanity and other idealistic bullshit that would eventually be mostly beaten out of her by reality some years later. She got a scholarship to MIT and saw it as an opportunity to further change herself. No longer would she be the Sashi, who ate lunch alone in the bathroom with her feet up on the toilet seat so that nobody would know that she was there, or Sashi, the girl whose breasts grew three cup sizes over a weekend. Instead she became Sashi, the quiet girl who, after spending a semester sitting next to you, would eventually warm up enough to talk to you about the last movie she saw. 

Still, with only so many people in the program and a large number of them being other international students who now all shared the common, terrifying problem of being in a foreign country she was able to make a small group of friends. She finished her program, took a tour of Europe as the third wheel for two of her friends that had become an item, and then went back home to India without a single fucking clue of what to do next.

Mumbai did not have many opportunities for a young geneticist, but salvation came in the form of a job offer from a company establishing itself in Sopahn. ISSOco was the name of the company, a Japanese and UK based medical company that had recently made headlines through a series of further and further floundering business moves by its now former CEO. The new CEO was looking to expand the company out to different markets, especially ones that did not associate the name instantly with the company that had bought the manufacturing rights to  a new kind of cancer-treating drug and then price gouged the ever loving shit out of it. Sashi had heard about all of the nastiness associated with the company’s name, but she was convinced that they were trying to turn over a new leaf.

Plus, she was truly enticed by their offer. Sashi was offered a position where she would be the head of a lab developing and testing new technology. Considering all of the other work opportunities she had were entry level at best and overpaid coffee runner at worst this was a huge deal to her, and after talking it over with a few people she took the gig. She got her corporate picture taken, got her biometrics all scanned and filed away into their corporate system, moved into her corporate apartment in Sopahn, met her corporate team, and setup pictures of her college mates on her big, wooden corporate desk. Then she went to work on what she declared would be the start of her solving all of the world’s problems through genetics, with the first issue on the table being the greatest problem that currently plagued society: ugly kids.

Well, that’s how she sees it when looking back on Project Cybele. During the development cycle of the project she was a bit less cynical about the whole thing, remembering with red, embarrassed cheeks how she used to think that the device would be a godsend to parents everywhere. Project Cybele was ISSOco’s attempt at making an artificial womb, a piece of tech that was already being used in some hospitals, that could be purchased and operated by consumers. Then, with the help of a CRISPR and a simple user interface, would-be parents could pick and choose traits that they would want their child to have or, in other words, Sashi was making a machine that made designer babies. Oh, she told others that the project had so much potential to help parents who were unable to have children naturally or to help guarantee that a consumer’s child would be born without any complications or prematurely. However, ISSOco intended to market the machine as a premium product and sell it at a premium price. 

So in short, no more ugly rich kids. Perfect.

Time passed. Tests followed by tests followed by tests followed by tests. The first year and a half was fairly banal, focusing on programming and experimenting with genetic modification on a granular level, making sure that every i was dotted and every t was crossed. Then, the prototype was manufactured, followed by a second and finally a third that actually worked. After that, Sashi’s world turned into a Cronenberg film as she watched life try to grow inside of the artificial womb. She cannot look back on it today without getting sick to her stomach when she thinks about how many failed attempts of which they had to discretely dispose, harvesting stem cells from lumps of flesh before sending them into the incinerator. 

Eventually her team made a breakthrough and the first child, Manu, was successfully born from the consumer-grade artificial womb. A dozen other child would be created shortly thereafter, raised in the laboratory so they could be monitored for any defects or issues later down in life. However, an early project document was leaked onto the Internet and soon the company came under heavy fire from conservative and religious groups and were accused of violating basic ethical rights by liberal groups. Artificial wombs were already somewhat controversial when in the hands of trained medical professionals for the use of assisting with childbirth; the thought of turning one into a luxury item for rich people that wanted perfect babies was reprehensible. Common belief in the company was that a rival medical corporation had bribed a member of the lab to leak the information, but no rat was ever found. An ethics committee was called against the company, and investigators came and picked over the lab with a fine tooth comb. 

They didn’t find much. ISSOco had dealt with controversy in the past, and over the years they had perfected their method of crisis control. They clearly implicated that if Sashi did not assist in the clean up efforts that she would certainly be made to fall on this sword. Almost immediately after the leak the lab had been scrubbed clean, any information outside of the original project document burned from the servers and dropped into oblivion. Prototypes were destroyed, equipment was repossessed, and personnel was shifted around to different labs in different countries. Mock projects were generated, some pulled from other labs, others completely fabricated on the spot, anything to make the lab look more like a medical think tank than a place that had been solely focused on one project for several years. As for the children? They never existed. The company avoided a disastrous turn of events, and Sashi avoided being crucified in front of the medical world.  As a reward for her being so complicit, the company gave her a six-month paid sabbatical. 

During her time off her mood fell into a dark hole, a type of postpartum depression. Project Cybele had been her baby, her world, her entire life, and now that it was canned she could only look back on the past few years and realize how unfulfilling they had been—every day had been the same, someway or another consumed entirely by work. Now that she had nothing to work on, she had nothing period. Two weeks remain on her sabbatical, and all that she has accomplished on her break so far was the consumption of several cases of wine, around fifty half-watched TV series, twenty dogeared books, a tummy tuck, and an overwhelming sense of existential dread. With the threat of a new, life consuming project looming over her head in the not so distant future Sashi has promised herself that she will make something out of her last few days of freedom.

Starting tomorrow. 

Outlook and Motivations: Sashi is an idealist struggling against the tides of reality, moments away from giving into exhaustion and letting the current pull her under. She wants to use her knowledge to help improve society, and tends to have a borderline transhumanist ideas when it comes to what improving society means. She tries to do good, and if doing good is not an option then she tries to be good at it. Still, she almost constantly doubts her actions, both in her personal and professional life, and has lately found it more difficult for herself to get motivated. Seemingly, the only motivator in her life right now is fear that she would inconvenience others and warrant their disapproval, which is something that certainly crush her.

 Capabilities                    

Language(s): Hindi, English, and very stilted sounding Japanese.

Skills: 
Unforgettable - Sashi has hyperthymesia, a condition that gives her an incredible autobiographical memory that allows her to recall in vivid detail just about every day of her life since she was a preteen. This ranges from the mundane, like being able to remember what podcast she was listening to while making breakfast sixteen years ago, to the useful, like being able to recall the entire text of a case study she read three months ago. 

In The Flesh - While Sashi has an expansive knowledge of human biology, her first and foremost focus is on genetic engineering and modification. Given the right amount of time and the proper equipment Sashi can easily recode DNA, cutting away the undesirable trait of an unborn child and replacing it with a wanted one or modifying cells to better combat cancer and other diseases.

Save Me - Although she is not a health practitioner, Sashi does have an above decent ability when it comes to first aid thanks to corporate mandated certification classes. She can easily take care of minor scrapes and bruises, help clean and stop the bleeding of moderate wounds, and attempt to resuscitate and stabilize seriously wounded individuals.

Flaws: 
Blue Monday - Time heals all wounds unless those wounds are constantly being torn at by the talons of an uncanny ability to remember.  Sashi is obsessed with the past, and cannot go a single day without regretting the minor actions she has taken years ago. This has helped cultivate a heavy level of depression and self-loathing in the woman, and so often feels low on energy as a result of it. 

Dancing With Myself - Sashi isn’t great with other people. She backs down from confrontation almost immediately and tends to overthink even the simplest of conversations when it comes to having ones with strangers. She seems to be unable to maintain simple eye contact, and is the office wallflower when she is forced to make appearances at company parties. She may know a few languages, but she is truly only fluent in the art of mumbling.

I Wanna Be Your Dog - Sashi may not be great with people, but that doesn’t mean she’s misanthropic or antisocial. In fact, she almost constantly seeks the approval of others, and a little bit of praise or an unexpected kindness is all it takes to win over Sashi’s trust. 

Connections:
Corporate - ISSOco is an international organization and a medical giant, and Sashi has access to their vast network of corporate resources and contacts. However, ISSOco primarily plays in the light, meaning that any help Sashi gets from within will likely be heavily documented and under surveillance. After all, the reputation of the company is greater than that of one individual, and any person found acting unbecoming as an employee of the corporation will soon sense the ax above their head.

Collegiate - Sashi was able to make a small group of friends while studying abroad. They have drifted apart over the years as they grew older, delved into their careers, and (some) got married and had kids, but she still communications semi-regularly with them online. Of course, with most of them living in the States still  they cannot offer much more than morale support.

Anonymous - Sashi is a member of a forum that was originally designed to assist bounty hunters named 3B, and like all things on the Internet it has since been twisted and corrupted into an absolute hellhole full of memes and shitposting. Most posts that aren’t just complete filler or spam are just people gushing over both bounty hunters and the wanted criminals, although there is the occasional post with actual useful information every once in awhile. Still, Sashi’s been an active member of the board for a few years now, and she regularly chats with a few members about rumors surrounding their favorites. 

Accomplishments:
Project Cybele - ISSOco was primarily concerned with shifting to commercial products, and Sashi worked nonstop with her team of researchers and engineers on “Project Cybele”. The goal was to create an artificial womb with a user-friendly interface so that they could bypass hospitals and directly market the device to consumers. As well, consumers would be able to easily pick and choose which traits their child had, even if neither of the parents had it in their own DNA. Simply put, she created a designer baby machine that was about as complicated to use as a dishwasher. Although it was completed, the project was scrapped before going to market and the publicly issued statement regarding the device was that it never even made it to the prototype phase.

Crimes: Although she and her team had been under investigation, no charges were ever brought to them and as far as the law is concerned she is an innocent woman. Sashi, as an employee of ISSOco, is contractually obliged to agree with that statement.

 Inventory                      

Cash, saving and debts:
Inconsequential. Between personal investments, inheritance, and a company credit card money will not be an issue for Sashi unless, somehow, she manages to break her contract and lose her job. She typically pays via her phone or through biometrics scanners, but carries enough paper rupees on her to buy an expensive meal and pay for a cab fare home for emergencies. 

Tools and weapons:
Pepper spray. She’s yet to use it, but she never leaves the house without it.

Electronic devices:
The JNH Atlas, only the most top notch smart device that will be on the public market coming this December. It has all the bells and whistles of any modern device, a biometric locking system, a holographic projector, an integrated headphone jack, and comes installed with the newest version of Cookie Cranks. It can also, allegedly, make phone calls. Being a prototype, it’s battery always seems to fall instantly to the twenty-percent panic zone, and it’s too big for most pockets.

Apparels:
Sashi style of dress falls on the conservative side of business casual, expensive but not flashy. Button-ups and blouses, tailored pants, modest heels, the occasional cardigan depending on the weather, and thick-framed glasses for reading. Color scheme is almost always black, white, or grey. She wears a labcoat while on the clock. There are some traditional clothing tucked away in her closet for certain occasions, but largely her dress is influenced by the West. 

Credentials and ID cards:
ISSOco Level 2C Access Card, ISSOco ID Card, Non-Drivers ID card, Passport (locked away in home safe). 

Jewelry and valuables:
Sashi’s only worn jewelry is a watch with a blue face and silver band. Otherwise, she doesn’t bother with necklaces, rings, or bracelets, and has never gotten her ears pierced. She does carry a jeweled compact mirror that would probably fetch a decent price in a pawn shop.

Consumables:
A pack of sugar-free gum to keep herself from chewing pens and biting fingernails.

Load bearing equipment:
A black purse cluttered with makeup, prescription medication, napkins covered in notes and doodles, and a variety of other useless shit. 

Illicit goods: 
None.

Vehicle: 
None. Sashi relies on company cars, taxi apps, and the occasional public transportation to get around.

Pet and animals: 
Sashi doesn’t have any pets, but she does see a cat going through the dumpster behind her apartment building every couple of nights. This cat she has affectionately named “Garbage Cat” and has on more than one occasion left food out for him.

The Iris-Sakamoto Corporation

In 2030, the UK based Iris Medical Technologies and the Japanese based Sakamoto Group merged together and form the Iris-Sakamoto Corporation. The company’s vision was to create a international medical corporation that, with the help of cutting edge technology, would build a better world for tomorrow if by building a better world it meant building a bigger bank account for its investors. In its early days the company was known for following the letter of the law to help with its expansion, driving up prices through handshake deals without forming actual monopolies or lobbying to gain political support for their goods without directly bribing politicians. Thanks to their strong legal team, the company managed to tread the line of legality fairly unscathed.

Still, by 2050 the corporation was almost universally hated by human rights activist and other bleeding hearts, but it wasn’t until their stock started to dip that they did anything to change their methods. Once it hit red the board replaced its CEO, rebranded its vision, and renamed itself to ISSOco. The new CEO, Ingrid Robertson, was a young, charismatic, public-facing figure that gave off the persona of a visionary, openly admitting to the company’s past mistakes and promising to do better in the future through a series of very explicit interviews. A number of charities were formed under her leadership and overall she improved the public’s impression of the company, although little actually changed when it came down to how it conducted business.

Personnel & Structure

ISSOco is a medium sized medical corporation with joint headquarters located in both London and Tokyo as well as a number of research labs and factories located in Cape Town, Tehran, Hong Kong, and Sopahn. They employ around 100,000 people worldwide, from legal and sales to research and security. They are a publicly traded company that is run by a board of twelve individuals split between the two HQs. Since the switch in CEOs, the company has begun to provide employees with housing and transportation on top of their salary, and most employees report a high-level of job satisfaction. 

ISSOco contracts are notably dense and fairly restrictive, and employees are very discreet when it comes to their work. The corporation is broken up into various levels of access. Level 1 Access is for the baseline employees, giving entry only into public areas and the floors focused on sales, HR, and IT. Level 2 Access is broken up into three separate divisions: 2A is for legal, 2B is for security, and 2C is for research. Level 3 Access is restricted to board members and people chosen by their discretion.

Resources, Relationships, & Associations

The company has pulled in quite a bit of assets from its past predatory business practices, and the charities they now run are also for-profit and add a little bit of revenue to the company’s coffers. However, they still largely make most of their profit through selling medical supplies and technology to hospitals, although in the past few years they have begun to branch out and sell supplies directly to consumers. Occasionally they will partner with governments or other businesses, but largely they operate independently. The company has a few factories that allow them to produce some of their materials, but largely they partner with local distributors to lower cost and “support local economy”. 

Part of the reason that they have begun to sell directly to consumers is because the company’s past actions of price gouging and having a negative reputation has slightly burned them when it comes to dealing with some medical conglomerates. This is largely true when it comes to the West. Their market in Europe is fairly small and their presence in the Americas is almost nonexistent. Therefore, the company has shifted its focus to the developing world and has doubled-down on its African and Asian markets, selling cheaply produced and highly marketed over-the-counter antidepressants, cold medicine, skin injections, and “male enhancements in addition to the various projects its research teams are working on. As of late, they have recently begun business talks with various private security companies and military tech developers.
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