Lee Sampson

Sampson favors a red vest over a mint-green long-sleeved top. He has thick, bushy eyebrows, a broad nose, small ears, and wears little square glasses.

For all his talent at a keyboard, Sampson treats life as though it were one long arcade session, approaching serious matters like a game. He is obsessed with twentieth-century entertainment and old cabinet titles, and that fixation runs so deep that his dying words drift back to a game called Sporky Dorky and his failure to rack up enough points.

A rising talent in the hacking scene, Sampson crossed paths with Vincent Volaju in 2071. When Volaju offered him a chance to play terrorist, the notion appealed to him, and he set about breaking into systems on Volaju's behalf. The work earned him a bounty, and Faye Valentine picked up his trail by tracing a credit card he had used while Volaju drove a truck during the first strike on the city.

Faye cornered him inside an arcade and leveled a gun at him, but he killed the power to the room and slipped away, leaving his hat behind. Ed and Ein soon traced him to an apartment he had shared with Volaju.

Returning there, Sampson was betrayed by his partner, who turned the nanomachines loose on him. He smashed through a window and drew the attention of Faye, who was close by, and his final glimpse was of her bursting into the room as he muttered about pressing his reset button.