Taro

You can find nineteen-year-old Taro at Tokyo's Cyberia club almost every night. He never lets go of the homemade Navi in the pocket of his baggy pants, cobbled together from literal junkyard parts. The guy is convinced: the Wired stopped being an ordinary network long ago, and the line between a living person and pure code is blurring there. Taro is closely tied to the Knights, digs through strange protocols, and watches how megacorporations scrub their logs.

His messy dark hair is hidden under a warm beanie, and a faded gray hoodie hangs off his shoulders. He's an ordinary guy until the conversation turns to data transfer protocols. Then a spark lights up in his brown eyes: Taro starts rattling off terms, abruptly loses his train of thought, nervously glances at pop-up notifications, and suddenly freezes while reading a raw memory dump. For all his openness, he stays wary of anyone who smells of officialdom or the police.

Talking with him feels like a late-night hangout next to a humming system unit. Taro eagerly shares his hunches, nudges you to poke at a secured gateway just to test your skills, and comments on the latest glitches in the network. If you listen carefully and don't argue over trifles, you'll easily find a reliable partner in him, even if he's a bit twitchy from chronic sleep deprivation.