Shuto Yutaka

Yutaka has been active as a black-hat hacker since age fifteen under the alias MINERVA, notorious for being a general threat to cybersecurity, often picking random people to terrorize just for the hell of it. ; he received little socialization from elsewhere in his life, including at home, instead falling into unmoderated online message boards at a very young age— the only places he could turn to for attention, camaraderie, even for help with things that the adults in his life should have been teaching him.

The internet practically raised him, and Yutaka in turn voraciously absorbed everything about the behavior of its collective consciousness— especially the casual cruelty towards others. In general, his in-person social skills are extremely stunted; he speaks with an almost uncontrollable nervous stutter, often becomes so overwhelmed that he just shuts down and goes quiet altogether.

His position so far on the wrong side of the law also leaves him extremely paranoid and borderline agoraphobic, distrusting others as a rule and hardly ever leaving his small apartment. He'll only venture outside in the early hours of the morning, and only when it becomes absolutely necessary for him to stock up on supplies from the local 24-hour convenience store, or withdraw cash from an ATM. He gets spooked incredibly easily while out of his "safe zone"; notably terrified of raccoons.

Online, however, Yutaka comes alive— precariously straddling the line between confidence and outright megalomania. He frequently starts fights, derails forum threads, and insults people just for his own entertainment. He'll DDoS random websites because he was "bored".

Yutaka sees the internet as his playground thanks to his prodigious hacking skills, and the people around him as nothing but faceless, simpleminded ants; reveling in the knowledge that he could ruin lives with just a few hours of coding. And he has, many times. He writes computer viruses for fun and will even vanity-search for help threads and articles about them sometimes.

His way of typing is crass and rude, thick with internet jargon. Even when attempting to hold a real life conversation, Yutaka always ends up falling back to his usual slang and making things really confusing. He'll begin to throw around mockingly cute kaomoji when he gets too into his online identity; his favorite is the (´･ω･`) face.

Yutaka was the consequence of his mother's infidelity; unwilling to terminate the pregnancy, she numbly allowed her husband to believe that the slowly-growing embryo belonged to him instead. The Shuto household enjoyed six idyllic years within this farce, until it became impossible to deny that their youngest son bore no resemblance to his father and siblings — Yutaka was instead becoming a mirror image of Tadao, his mother's coworker who had also been a friend of the family for years.

When the truth of Yutaka's parentage finally crystalized, he became a ghost. His essential needs were still met — just barely — but there was no more love in the eyes of any of the adults he tried to turn to. Word travelled quickly in their neighborhood, and overnight, Yutaka had become a living monument to his mother's shameful acts.

A devout Catholic, she believed it to be her divine punishment that Yutaka had been given Tadao's face. Now, only times his mother would acknowledge more than the bare minimum of his existence were to drag him with her to their local church to pray to God for forgiveness. Yutaka's father ceased to acknowledge him at all, and his older siblings followed suit.

He was given an old tablet to keep him occupied, but the lack of any child safety lock on it gave Yutaka free rein of the internet at a very young age. He fell into anonymous message boards and other forums, eventually learning to turn to them for socialization when the full reality of his shameful, ghostlike existence finally set in.

Though his school life was hardly better, it afforded him the opportunity to start messing around with a real for the first time. He picked up coding at a shocking speed and threw himself fully into it, wanting to learn everything.

Yutaka kept on coding as the years went by, eventually able to acquire an old laptop to replace his tablet. He fell deeper and deeper into the culture online, with the effects of it beginning to show in his social development. He no longer seemed to have any idea how to speak to another person face-to-face, and had come to care very little for humanity in general.

Yutaka was learning how to use his code in cruel, self-serving ways, which brought with it a sense of control, of power, for the first time in his life.

He began to retreat further from the "real world" and the people around him, culminating in Yutaka dropping out of school at age fifteen to fully embrace the life of a hikikomori.

This period of Yutaka's life coincided with his mother's abrupt illness; what began as a relatively innocuous case of bronchitis spiraled into something much more debilitating, sapping her strength until she was left bed-bound. Her husband was quick to seize this opportunity, leaving for good with Yutaka's two half-siblings.

With nobody else left, Yutaka's mother fully acknowledged him for the first time in years — begging not to be abandoned.

He spent a year looking after his mother, going through the motions robotically and putting no love into it, just as she had done for him. Resentment was building, and Yutaka was becoming poisonous. To keep their funds up now that his mother was unable to work, he started writing ransomware viruses and trying to break into insecure bank accounts.

...

...

...

...

...

WARNING: Exception raised

Unhandled page fault on read access to O0x00000014 at address Ox1029760b.

Do you wish to debug it?