abstract
| - Burns Flipper is a smart mouthed computer hacker, spare-parts dealer and purveyor of information who lives secretly in a warehouse on the Newport Docks. April is pointed his way by Warren Hughes and gains admittance by knocking on the warehouse door three times - though she has to endure about ten minutes of verbal abuse first. We never know how he got his name, though it seems to be a feature of the circles he operates in (he has another friend called Freaky Sales, and mentions someone called the Oracle). Burns - as he asks April to call him later on - is a manic fast talker who spends most of his time in the 'pit' at the back of the warehouse, hooked up to the computers through some sort of neural interface. He also rides in a grav chair because he's missing most of his lower body. If asked about this, he'll demand to know if April is a virgin or not: if she tells him she isn't, Burns tells her his story. At the age of eighteen Burns was hacking into the MTI servers when he hit a security protocol that caused a massive amount of feedback and "fried my brain like breakfast sausages". He spent a week comatose and woke up to find MTI goons standing over his hospital bed, telling him that if he tried that again, he'd die. Burns then realised his legs had been cut off as proof they were serious. Not surprisingly, this has left him not only paranoid - he encrypts all his transmissions with a scrambler - but with a deep hatred of MTI - and therefore the Vanguard. Once April has earned his trust, he's happy to help her crusade against them. Burns gives April a great deal of vital information. She swaps a salvaged anti-gravity unit with him to pay for a fake ID Card to get onto Grendel Avenue. It is Burns Flipper who decodes the data cube she gets from the police station that contains the greater part of useful information on the Vanguard, including Jacob McAllen's identity as their leader and, more importantly, data about Gordon Halloway. Finally, Burns also deciphers the Dark People's Star Map that gives April the location of the singularity that leads to the Guardian's Realm. However, when April returns to get the location, she finds Burns shot and dying of his injuries. It turns out the Vanguard had approached him and offered to help him to walk again, in exchange for information about April, but they double-crossed him once they had what they needed and stole the Star Map. Burns hangs on just long enough to tell April what he discovered, but after apologising - and being forgiven by April - he finally dies.
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