Ayla Campos was born in São Paulo in 2159 to Enzo Campos and a woman who left the family when Ayla was only two weeks old. Her name has been lost to history. Prior to Ayla’s birth, Enzo was a self-taught hacker who made a decent living through various ransomware schemes he ran with a group called Comitê Sombra. It was a lucrative, if legally precarious, life, but single fatherhood made him realize that an endless series of schemes was not the most stable way to provide for a child. He needed to think bigger. Working with the rest of Comitê Sombra, he created the Reach, a totally immersive virtual reality world. The exclusive few who initially had access to it could find anything for the right price. A tightly guarded secret at first, legend of the Reach and the digital wonders it contained soon began to spread among the rich and well connected. Within two years, Comitê Sombra wasn’t running from the authorities – it was buying them.

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Ayla’s early childhood was one of leisure and material comfort. She was precocious and eager to learn, absorbing everything she could about programming by watching her father work. But the family’s good fortune wouldn’t last long. When Ayla was 11, there was a schism between her father and the other members of Comitê Sombra. While the exact nature of the dispute is a closely guarded secret among the few surviving members of Comitê Sombra, like many conflicts, it ultimately boiled down to money and control. Emyen was forced out of the group he had helped create, and when he tried to rally other members to retake control, died under dubious circumstances in a hit-and-run car accident. 

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Ayla was now completely alone. While her father had been a very wealthy man, because of the legally gray nature of the Reach, very little of his assets actually existed on paper. The surviving members of Comitê Sombra were able to gain control of almost all of them, leaving Ayla with nothing. With no family left in São Paulo, she was sent to live with her father’s elderly Aunt in Petrópolis, just north of Rio de Janeiro. 

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Life in Petrópolis being raised by an elderly relative she did not know was hard for Ayla. She was an angry child, separated from everyone and everything she ever knew, and her constant acting out led to her never quite finding her niche in school. When Ayla decided to drop out at the age of 16, her Aunt was furious. She kicked Ayla out of the house, telling her that she could return when she decided to go back to school. Ayla never would –instead she made her way south to Rio de Janeiro, where she would finally find her community. 

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After a rough few nights on the streets, Ayla was taken in by a group of cyberpunk artists squatting in an abandoned building that had been heavily damaged in World War III decades before. With her extensive knowledge of programming and virtual reality, Ayla was able to bring the collective’s digital artistic dabbling to the next level, and the group began to gain prominence in Rio’s art circles for their digital masterpieces.

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The year before the Collapse, when she was 21, Ayla finally had her big break – an art exhibition at one of Rio de Janeiro’s most prestigious art galleries. After a decade of struggle, she’d finally achieved community, recognition, and financial stability. But again, her good fortune was not to last. 

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Ayla was in Rio when the Collapse happened, still living in that same building, although massively upgraded now with the proceeds her Collective had made from their art. Although low lying areas of the city had been damaged by tidal waves, her immediate area still stood. For the first few months, things weren’t so bad – the Collective had an ample supply of food and their own generators. But as the night grew longer and all emergency services ceased, things began to grow dire. Food ran low. Infighting began. The violence broke out when one member of the Collective was discovered stealing food for themselves from their meager supply when he thought the rest of the group was sleeping. Several of the Collective died in the fighting that followed, and Ayla was barely able to escape with her life. On the streets, she did what she had to in order to survive. She was one of the first groups of people admitted to the Brasilia Bunker when it opened. 

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Ayla’s computer skills made her a valuable member of the bunker system’s support staff, and it wasn’t long before Dr. Marcus Taylor himself enlisted her to help him with a new project he was working on – The Everreach. Almost instantly she recognized it as being built on the same framework that her father had created. She would keep this fact from Dr. Taylor. It was clear that he was in contact with Comitê Sombra, perhaps even the people who murdered her father, and the closer she can stay to him, the closer she may get to them.

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She’s one of the most trusted and valuable assets inside the Network. 

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