David Martinez
Street kid scraping by at Arasaka Academy on his mother's dream. Picked up by Malcolm somewhere along the line and dragged into Section 9's orbit as a friendly puppy with no street instincts.
// Appearance
Skinny teenager who looks the part of a corpo academy student in over his head. Wears the cheap end of the corpo-kid wardrobe and earns it. When Malcolm drags him into gun training he shows up in a basic bulletproof vest and a crappy helmet Malcolm scrounged for him.
// Background
Motoko first met David as the BD-pushing kid in front of Arasaka Academy, selling Nox's stock to other students out of a tablet and pocketing change for himself. A street kid living a corpo-kid life, working hard not to get crushed between the two worlds, with a mother who poured everything into getting him into the Academy.
By chapter 244 he is part of Malcolm's orbit, picked up at some point and brought along when the crew needs a fourth body. Motoko runs him through gun-tag training in an abandoned warehouse and lectures him on aiming his pistol properly instead of imitating gangoons. He panics through a terrible alibi when his Mama calls him at Lizzie's mid-meal — Motoko's read on him is that he is a moron with no street survival reflexes, but Malcolm covers for him and Hiromi quietly tells him to stop listening to Katsuo at school. Motoko privately worries his Arasaka trajectory ends with him dead in someone's office politics, or dying in a blaze of glory if he ever leaves.