Backstory

Bertel Stanison was an only child of corpo parents. His parents were of Norwegian origin, but fled their country to make a better life for themselves. They moved to Athens, Greece. Both of them were corpos with comfy administrative jobs. They just did paperwork and dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s of various documents. Both of them were raised on EarthFirst! literature and owned a first edition of Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski. After recognizing the prophecies of Technopoly by Neil Postman come true before their eyes with their jobs, they knew they had to get involved. They left their jobs and joined Europa Sur in Rhodes in the Aegean Sea. Although they were just traders, they did their best to smuggle Luddite material through the nation using Europa Sur’s infrastructure. The Stanison’s made great money from their career in black market trade, so they created a fake company to embezzle the money into a trust fund as soon as they became pregnant with Bertel. Unfortunately the good times were not to last as the Greek military launched a coup in 2007. As a result the entire country was in a shuffle and top level members of Europa Sur were targeted by the military. The Stanisons were among those assassinated. Orphaned as a young child, Bertel was raised by fellow Europa Sur trader Renoldo Giannopoulos and his wife until she succumbed to the plague ten years later. Thanks to the trust fund, Bertel was given a very generous childhood on Rhodes. He finished high school and pursued a bachelor’s in music. He was accepted in Night City University’s music program and the rest of the trust fund paid for the tuition. After graduation, Bertel was unable to find any jobs with his degree and resorted to basic entry level positions wherever he could as he developed his craft with industrial music. After ten years of ups and downs, he has made a name for himself with his music career. He was in a two-piece band until his partner was killed by a cyberpsycho. After such a traumatic experience, Bertel decided to pick up where his parents left off. He consumed all their old Luddite literature and realized society was doomed. After coming to terms with how humanity has raped the earth with ravaging wars and filthy industries, he decided he that “it would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences,” (Kaczynski, 1995). He continued his music career by using it as a way to propagate Luddite ideals. He keeps up with Europa Sur, whenever they have jobs in Night City, which is not often. He does what he can to find more ways to develop trade networks to smuggle Luddite literature. He refuses to “chrome up” and views it as a denial of nature’s process. Nevertheless he still has to use many kinds of technology to survive in Night City. Lately, he has been growing suspicious of Biotechnica ever since their deployment of CHOOH2. He is wanting to spy on their operations to expose how fraudulent their pro-nature stance truly is.