Cormac Alcott
Alias/Handle: "Cowboy"
Age: 21
Ethnicity: Caucasian
Birthplace: Ashwaker Caravan Territory (Former Snake Nation Splinter), Mojave Wastes, NorCal Exclusion Zone
Appearance:
Background:
Family Ranking:
Middle-tier; respected within the Ashwakers for his mother's emotional BD work and his father's convoy leadership.
Parents:
Mother: Mira Alcott, a BD archivist and salvager who specialized in reconstructing lost emotional loops from corrupted data.
Father: Father – Judah Alcott, convoy tactician and Ashwaker caravan lead. Both presumed dead after the drone strike that annihilated the clan.
Childhood Environment:
Raised in the Ashwakers' mobile salvager convoy—a tight-knit but philosophically driven group dedicated to preserving human memory and digital artifacts. Childhood was marked by movement, storytelling, ritual music, and an eerie kind of peace among the noise of a dying world. Everything changed after the clan was wiped out.
Personality:
Driven. Volatile. Charismatic. Cormac speaks like he's halfway through a eulogy for the world and halfway through starting a riot. He's emotionally raw, poetic in a jagged sort of way, and allergic to anything fake or polished. Wears grief like armor, and intensity like gospel. Beneath the bravado is someone still carrying the weight of ghosts—and trying to make something beautiful out of the wreckage.Friends:
Raine – Former Ashwaker cousin, now a rumored BD splicer in Pacifica. Status unknown.
Moss – Current Capsule; mute, communicates via modified BD soundboard and chromatic sign. Unshakeably loyal.
Hex – Fringe netcaster who distributes Cormac's feeltracks on the black signal. Possibly in it for profit, but helped build early Capsule mythos.
Enemies:
Tyger Claws – After stealing a Yaiba Kusanagi CT-3X from a courier, Cormac has been marked for retaliation.
Kang-Tao / Unnamed Corpo Wing – The presumed orchestrators of the Ashwaker wipeout. While no official target exists, Cormac sees their corporate silence as the root of his war.
Night City's Media Machine – Not an official enemy, but he actively resists being packaged, recorded, and sold. He's already punched one BD label scout mid-pitch.
Lifepath / Role:
Lifepath: Nomad (Ashwaker Lineage, Snake Nation Splinter)
Role: Rockerboy (Street Musician / Feeltrack Engineer / Capsule Founder)
Skills:
High-speed motorcycle operationEmotional BD splicing & feeltrack creation
Electric guitar playing
Charisma and presence (rallying, manipulating, leading)
Proficiency with handguns
Sound modulation and live guerrilla performance
Deep survival instinct and urban stealth
Language(s):
English (Fluent)
Spanish (Conversational)
Old Nomad Sign / Slang (Fluent)
Some scattered phrases in Japanese, learned through scavenged media and BD fragments
Cyberware:
Kerenzikov Reflex BoosterSynaptic Accelerator
Smartlink Interface (pistol-focused)
Subdermal Audio Suite
Emotitone Feedback Loop
Ocular Display with Ghost Overlay
Vehicle Link Interface
Subdermal Armor (Light Weave)
Whisperspine Blade (wrist-mounted monoblade)
Empathy:
8
Humanity:
74
Gear & Style:
- Custom smart pistol "Heartbeat" with sonic-flare mod
- Wrist-mounted monoblade "Whisperspine"
- BD recording rig & looper pedal
- Neural guitar jack
- Hollow pill emblem necklace (Capsule sigil)
- Bike: heavily modded Yaiba Kusanagi CT-3X named Ashwake
History:
The Ashwakers were strange even among other Nomad packs. They didn't worship speed or chrome or family in the traditional sense. They worshipped signal—songs, echoes, corrupted braindance footage from before the DataKrash. They carried libraries of memory on bone drives and passed down emotional BD loops like scripture. They said the world died because people stopped remembering what it felt like to be human.
Cormac grew up with sound in his veins. At six, he was splicing loops into campfire broadcasts. At ten, he built a 3-string fretless guitar from motorcycle scrap and salvaged audio coils. His first real education came from damaged BD libraries—old documentaries, musical performances, protest speeches. His people called him "Echo Kid", because he didn't talk much. He listened. And he remembered.
But by the time he was twelve, the world reminded him how quickly it deletes those who don't belong.
The Ashwakers had salvaged a corporate data packet off a downed Kang-Tao satellite array—a fragment of black-budget firmware that could rewrite neural interfaces. They didn't know it was marked. Within a week, the clan's convoy was gone. Drone strike, precision napalm, no survivors confirmed. It wasn't even on the news.
Cormac survived only because he'd been on an exterior sweep with two older cousins. They returned to find the desert silent, still hot with chemical fire. There were no bodies. Just ash and wreckage. The kind that tells you there's no justice coming.
They buried what little they could recognize. Then they ran.
The next few years were an unraveling. The three drifted across dead zones and fringe territories, dodging corpos, scav squads, and other Nomads who wanted what little tech they carried. His cousin Mace disappeared during a booster raid in Yuma. His cousin Ilya sold herself into a synthetic cult to pay off a debt Cormac didn't even know they owed.
At 15, Cormac arrived in Night City with nothing but a dead guitar, a cracked feeltrack drive, and a message burned into his chest: REMEMBER US.
He squatted in the broken tunnels beneath Arroyo, in a derelict substation the locals called The Coil—once part of a long-forgotten metro expansion project that never opened. Now it was full of rust, ghosts, and red light. The Coil sits beneath the fractured industrial gut of Arroyo, tucked near the old transit access points that once fed Rancho Coronado before the war. Nobody remembers who built it—maybe a Corpo transit line that never launched, maybe an old smuggler's route. Now, it's the heart of the Capsules. You won't find it on a map. You'll know it by the sound—reverb in the rust, and that low hum like a track waiting for the drop. Abandoned, unpatrolled, and resonant with every sound he made. He scavenged for food and spare parts by day and by night wandered into black market BD lounges, offering custom emotional overdubs to anyone who'd trade a safe place to sleep. His early work—sloppy, raw, dripping with grief—got passed around the pirate nets under the tag "//cowboy"
Some called it noise. Others couldn't stop watching.
By 17, he had a reputation in the underground: a "ghost-looper" who could layer pain like paint and tune a memory into music. He played rooftop shows with stolen amps, slicing his palms open and letting blood drip down the frets. One of his earliest feeltracks, "Redline Grin," fused riot footage, synesthetic overlays, and a cracked guitar loop so intense it reportedly caused two viewings to end in vomiting and one in blackout. It was banned across several black-market distribution nodes—but that only made it viral.
He didn't build his voice in a vacuum. Night City didn't hand him a stage—it gave him a target. He was just another broken Nomad kid with a weird way of talking and a busted guitar slung across his back. He got jumped. Mocked. Beaten. Broke his nose in back alleys for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person in the wrong tone. But every time he hit the ground, something new formed underneath him. His voice sharpened. His body learned to twist just before a punch landed. He began to recognize the room before it turned.
He learned to command silence before he broke it.
He learned that charisma isn't charm—it's conviction in the wreckage.
And somewhere in those bruises and monologues, people started listening.
It was around that time he saw it—an old bootleg BD, half-corrupted, of Johnny Silverhand playing on a rooftop during a riot. The image shook. The sound clipped. But the scream—that scream—cut through the glitch. It was the first time Cormac truly understood what performance could be. Not entertainment. Not politics. Ritual. After that, he buried himself in scavenged media. Rare Silverhand sets. Fringe Nomad poets. Wild recordings of anti-corp noise cults like Tainted Overload and the suicidal flamethrower guitar shows of Hallie Coggins. They weren't rockstars—they were conduits. And Cormac didn't want to be them. He wanted to feel like they felt when they played—bigger than silence.
He first saw the Yaiba Kusanagi CT-3X while walking the broken overpass near the industrial edge. A Tyger Claw courier, too deep into unfamiliar territory, too cocky to notice the shadows. Cormac waited until he stopped to piss behind a cracked vending shell. In thirty seconds, the courier's neural key was overridden and the bike was gone. He didn't ride it out of that alley—he escaped on it, like it was already his.
He named it Ashwake—because it burned, and because it reminded him what he'd lost.
He stripped the logos. Welded scars into the fairing. Overclocked the engine. It runs too hot. It growls like a wounded animal. And it never, ever stalls. Covered in memorabilia, stickers, insignia of idols and symbols long gone and lingering only as some aesthetic atavism. Then he found them.
The Capsules weren't a gang. Not at first. They were misfits who showed up to his shows, his chases, his rooftop monologues. Half of them were addicted to DreamDust. Some were cyberpsych cases on the edge. One was mute. One was a BD artist who spent months on a single loop. But they followed him—not because he led, but because he burned.
The death of the soft-eyed Juno, one of the first, broke something. She died during a botched convoy job trying to get BD rigs for a planned signal bomb in Pacifica. Nobody came to claim the body. No news feed mentioned it. She was erased.
So he gathered the others, said nothing, and they rode.
That first ride—no lights, no noise, just synced audio feeds—was a funeral and a manifesto. They called it a Capsule Run. Not everyone came back. But everyone who did was changed.
From that point forward, The Capsules became real. They didn't claim turf, but their name started showing up in alleys, in glitch-loop tags on BD networks, in whispers passed between angry kids with fast bikes and broken hearts. They didn't recruit. They called. You heard the music, or you didn't.
Now, in 2081, at 21, Cormac lives in The Coil, the same hollowed-out station he once squatted in. It's been rebuilt with cobbled sound rigs, a chopped Yaiba Kusanagi he named Ashwake among other cyberbikes, and walls pulsing with red light and half-finished poetry. He still rides. Still performs. Still edits feeltracks in the dark while the rest of the Capsules sleep in hacked hammocks above generator hums.
He hasn't seen another Ashwaker in nearly a decade.
He doesn't know if any are alive.
But he remembers them. Every note. Every ride. Every scream swallowed by static.
And he's building something now—maybe a legacy, maybe a name—mostly just a signal loud enough to outlast the silence. To spur other voices.
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