Kael Dunning was a Tier 3 dock worker who lost his legs in a cargo platform accident at age twenty-two. The corporate insurance covered basic prosthetics — functional, ugly, painful. The pain was the problem. The nerve interface between flesh and machine was botched, and for six years Kael lived with a burning sensation that started at his hips and never stopped. He could work. He could not sleep. The distinction between those two states mattered to the corporation that employed him exactly as much as you'd expect.

The Tessera military augmentation trial was looking for volunteers with existing prosthetics and a high pain tolerance. Kael had both. The trial replaced everything below the neck except a strip of spinal cord and enough endocrine tissue to keep the brain chemistry functional. Full military-grade prosthetic body: reinforced titanium skeleton, synthetic musculature capable of flipping a cargo vehicle, integrated weapons systems, hardened communications suite, and a neural bridge that connected his biological brain to the machine body with zero latency. The pain stopped. Everything stopped. He could feel pressure and temperature and the proprioceptive sense of where his body was in space, but the texture of the world — the warmth of skin, the grain of wood, the difference between rain and tears — was gone. Replaced by data.

Kael Dunning walked out of the trial facility and did not go home. Home required a body that could hold his wife without calculating the force required to avoid crushing her. He became Razorback. The name is from a dock worker's joke about a man who was too stubborn to die and too metal to live. He hunts bounties because the work matches the body: locate, pursue, apprehend or eliminate. Clean problems with clean solutions. The part of him that was a dock worker, a husband, a man who liked the smell of lake water in autumn — that part lives in a partition of his brain that the neural bridge has not overwritten. Yet.