Anthony Mafalo

Anthony "AJ" Mafalo is a character role-played by cyb0rgasm.

Background
Anthony J Mafalo - known to his friends as ‘AJ’ - is a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker from a fourth-generation Italian-American family. Hard work and respect for your parents was AJ’s daily bread growing up. His father was an electrical contractor and his mother ran a delicatessen, and as soon as he was old enough, AJ was expected to help out with both.

It started with him helping his mother in the kitchen making sauces, bagging and weighing walnuts and keeping an eye on inventory, and suchlike. His mother was, to put it frankly, something of a luddite and it caused her much consternation when she was under increasing pressure to conduct parts of her business virtually. In particular, her customers were practically begging her to let them place orders online to collect later, and her suppliers expected her to place her orders through a website.

AJ’s father was very proud the day he brought home their first computer - something the Mafalo family were severely behind the times in not owning. That didn’t solve the problem of nobody knowing how to use it. This, as it turned out, was AJ’s time to shine.

As a young teen, he was already far more aux fait with technology than his parents, even his father who worked on electrical systems day to day and used a PDA for his work. AJ set up everything for his mother, even designing an app the customer could use to order ahead of visiting.

Nobody could deny that this was good for the business. And yet AJ’s mother was clearly unhappy with the direction things were going. She would continually pine after the ‘simpler times’ when people just did business face-to-face without all this internet nonsense.

Putting it down to unfamiliarity, AJ strived to help his mother’s business benefit from technology, implementing a stock counting system and contactless payments, all before he was sixteen.

At that time, he was eligible to begin an apprenticeship with his father. He found his father’s work to be rather less technical and far more repetitive than he’s always imagined it to be. It was literally just wiring and system installation, usually from a manual. There was little ingenuity or creativity to it.

What was worse was that the whole time he had to listen to his father complain about how unhappy AJ’s mother was, and ‘did he really have to charge in there, making everything complicated for her’?

This was a shock to AJ. He thought he’d been applying himself and helping, making himself an asset. Now it seemed like he was being accused of making things difficult for his parents.

One day, AJ and his father attended a job for a man named Winter Greenwood who was having a new network cable installed in the basement of his office. AJ’s father was ill that day, and had to be absent for long stretches of time. Fortunately, AJ was more than capable of doing the work required.

As AJ started chatting with Mr Greenwood about what ports he wants and what system he was setting up, Greenwood was impressed with the knowledge AJ already had. He asked if he’d ever dealt with security systems or programming of any sort. AJ answered truthfully that all he’d done was designed an app for his mother’s deli.

That was enough to impress Greenwood, who offered to teach AJ some additional skills in programming and hacking. He showed him technology he was working on to subvert security systems. The whole while, AJ was concerned that they were doing something illegal, but Winter Greenwood explained that he was what is called a ‘white hat hacker’: someone who tried to break into someone else’s security system and then contacts them to inform them of the weaknesses. At that, AJ was interested.

It wasn’t long before his time learning and working with Greenwood ate into the time he could spend helping his parents. He thought they would be happy about that considering how much they complained about what he’d already done. On the contrary, his parents began to accuse him of shirking his duty to the family by pursuing… “What is it you do all day anyway?”

AJ made a concerted decision to help Greenwood’s business work so that he could join him full time and earn enough money to get a place of his own to live. But it turned out that Greenwood had been keeping some secrets. He’d told the truth about hacking into systems and contacting the owners, but he wasn’t just ‘selling’ the knowledge of their security weaknesses - he was blackmailing them into buying their own systems and websites back.

Eventually, Greenwood overreached and tried this with a large pharmaceutical company who, as it turned out, had gang connection. Some unsavoury people paid Mr Greenwood a visit while AJ was at his office, and AJ managed to escape through a window. He ran home, but the mobsters followed him and knocked on the door, threatening his family. His father was only able to get rid of them but handing over a chunk of money and persuading them that Greenwood was the person they really wanted.

But as soon as the gang thugs were gone, AJ’s parents rounded on him for the trouble he’d brought down on the family. They demanded that he pack his things and go. They didn’t care where.

AJ had to act quickly, securing himself a job at an IT helpdesk in which he quickly rose to the role of manager. But it was basic, uninteresting stuff, so he supplemented his income by doing both white and black hat security hacking jobs to private clients on the internet. He got himself an apartment, but his troubles were not over.

Greenwood disappeared, taking all his money and fleeing the country. The gang associates of the pharmaceutical company paid AJ a visit, saying they intended to hold him responsible for what the company had lost.

AJ didn’t stand a chance of paying all that money back, and he couldn’t turn to his parents. So he did the only thing he could do - he packed up his life and fled, heading west as far as he could.