Future Boy

Francis Bouie (pronounced "boy") is a natural variant whose powers manifested at age 18, in 1974. His primary ability (precognitive inspiration) let him develop and patent a number of revolutionary computer technology breakthroughs. Key among these inventions was the Independent Graphics Architecture chip. IGA chips greatly improve computer systems, separating and accelerating the graphical aspects and increasing the effective power of the rest of the system. (This lets computers work in real life the way they work in the movies.) These patents provided him with a huge amount of capital, and he used it to found his own company, New Horizons Technologies (Motto: Five Minutes into the Future!).
     Bouie has always had an adventurous streak, and spent the latter half of the '70s both managing his company and investigating variant activity with his family. His wife, Samantha Greystoke Bouie, is the daughter of the WWII English heroine Lady Elizabeth Greystoke. She is 15 years his senior, an established adventurer, and a widow. The pair married in 1975. Her sons are a pair of exceptional, capricious youngsters (aged 10 and 11 in '74). Their dog is exceptionally intelligent and has special forces training. Together they fought variant monsters, alien presences, and foreign governments threatening freedom. The family stopped actively adventuring in '79, when the boys went to the family preparatory school in Africa.
     In 1979 Bouie was approached by the Pentagon to design Variant Suits using his breakthroughs. Apolitical, he accepted the job for the represented challenge, without a thought to the consequences. He provided the prototype suits to the Army and began work on streamlined systems. The prototype suits were destroyed in a Host-associated action shortly after delivery. CHIMERA pulled political strings and cut the funding, and Bouie agreed to drop the project. He canceled his research team's budget and began reassigning them. A week before the project's final closing, one of the researchers hired some criminals and stole the suits. Calling themselves TECH, they encountered Ground Zero but escaped.
     Out of gratitude for their intervention, Bouie provided funding for the young variant team. This provided for the formation of not just the team and its HQ, but the Ground Zero Defense Forces (an anti-gang/neighborhood watch project) and the Harborview police Variant Tactics squad. Bouie still maintains these commitments, and is seen as a major philanthropist in the Harborview community. Bouie is also a significant contributor to other young variant teams, has and made donations of technology to the teams across New England founded after Ground Zero's dissolution.
     During the Plovian invasion, Bouie took to the front, fighting the aliens with his precognitive abilities and technological skills. After the war he accepted founding membership in the United Nations world defense team, UNEarth, under the code name Future Boy. Bouie is a dissonant voice in the current UNEarth, whose original purpose (defending humanity from extra-planetary threats) is being slowly subverted by the current UN leadership, who want to use the group to enforce terrestrial UN decisions such as peacekeeping actions and embargoes. Bouie is easily disgusted with such people, and has stated that diluting Earth's first line of defense can only lead to another incident similar to the Plovian invasion.
     Under his scientific leadership, New Horizons is one of the United States' vanguard technology companies, along with Renaissance Technologies, Taurus Industries and GDC. New Horizons keeps up with this pack solely on its innovation—Bouie lacks the business acumen of the other movers and shakers, and is too easily distracted from mundane affairs. That, along with his unwillingness to relinquish day-to-day control, keeps New Horizons from being as large or influential as possible.
     Bouie is a natural genius with a flair for high technology. Within other realms of intellect, his IQ is well above normal. In the fields of computers, engineering and physics, he is just over the edge into variant intellect. He is young and in excellent shape for his age, and has applied himself to Tai Chi for over a decade as both exercise and self-defense. He is skilled with a variety of weapons, especially those of his own design.
     Bouie's major variant power is his highly accurate short-term precognition. In combat, this allows him to know what will happen before it occurs, increasing his accuracy and making him functionally impossible to surprise. Maintaining his precognition during a combat situation is draining, and Bouie can only do so for twenty or thirty minutes before he needs to rest (more than enough time for individual battles, less useful for large-scale combat). The more important function of his powers is their out of combat use. Bouie is sometimes struck with precognitive inspirations, seeing the steps he would have taken in order to solve a problem. This tells him what he needs to know—the process for problem solving—even if he does not yet have the skills required to see the project through. This greatly speeds his research and development time, and sometimes arises in combat, letting him solve the opponent as if he were an engineering problem.
     Bouie's greatest dream is the construction of permanent room temperature superconductors. To reach this end he has applied himself to a variety of disciplines, and while he hasn't succeeded yet, his inspirational designs led to breakthroughs in anti-gravity, thermal dispersal, electrical containment and projection, and a variety of other fields. Bouie's research has led to the development of several variant technologies, including functional anti-gravity for monorail systems and small vehicles, electrical pulse weapons, thermal dispersal fields and materials for reducing temperature. When active as Future Boy, Bouie will have a handful of such objects on himself, as well as whatever device he is working on at the moment.
     Bouie has one other particular personal quirk: he has no sense of taste. This is not to say that he doesn't have a gourmet palate (well, actually he doesn't, but that's not the point), or that he lacks tact and decorum (though he seldom suffers fools, or holds back in his scathing opinions). It's that he has been voted the worst dressed person alive for seven of the last eight years (Cher beat him once).

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