Small of stature, stunted at birth by mistakes in his genefixing schedule, the Artificial Kid grew up dependent on cybernetics simply to live. Born to fairly well-off parents, he eventually dabbled in every type of augmentation save those requiring genetic engineering, and some say that there isn’t any part of his body that’s original anymore. Having learned a bewildering plethora of fighting techniques during his short 17 years of life, many with the aid of skillwires and intense eptification procedures, The Artificial Kid decided to make a career of sport-fighting in the supposedly lawless slums of San Angeles.

In fact most of his talent is in producing Circus Maximus-style, glitzy, gory phantomics shows and cleverly interleaving reality-hacked violence with a bit of real bloodshed. The Mortal Kombat style fights that his company, Viskeral Visual (owned by Sense/Net) puts on attract hundreds of millions of viewers around the world, despite Council attempts to have them shut down because of the bad publicity they generate for San Angeles.

The Artificial Kid is constantly surrounded by a retinue of admirers, groupies, violence-junkies and bodyguards (though none will admit it, to protect his image). Though parts of him still look natural, these are hand-crafted custom augmentations and most are delta-grade. Although TAK wins most of his fights, he’s enough of a showman to know when to lose for the greatest dramatic effect. The Mafia have tried and failed to co-opt him into their network of corrupt boxing championships, and the Russian Kombinat are still trying to hack his systems, all to no avail.