Ditto is one of the coolest characters in Red Agent. I just finished reading these stories over the last few days, and he's one of the people I wanted to spend more time talking…

Ditto is one of the coolest characters in Red Agent. I just finished reading these stories over the last few days, and he's one of the people I wanted to spend more time talking about. There's a lot going on with him for somebody who initially comes into the story as the hacker everybody is trying to find. At first, he's a man whose abilities make him incredibly valuable. The Circle needs him because of Eve's technology, and Britney has to find him before Alpha does. He's good enough at what he does that an entire operation depends on getting access to him. That also puts him in a terrible position, because being able to work with computers doesn't automatically give him a way to survive the person they've sent after him. He's physically connected to the systems he uses. When Britney and Avril find him in trouble, it's his own body that is caught up in what's happening through that connection. There's a point where he's plugged in and having a seizure, with his equipment heading toward a meltdown. Britney has to disconnect him and get him out. You can see both sides of what his abilities mean there. He can reach into things most people can't, but something can reach back. Then his story takes him past his original human body. He ends up continuing in an artificial one, and that change is a huge part of why I find him interesting. The technology starts out as something he's especially capable of using, and eventually it becomes something he depends on to keep existing. By the start of The Human Order, he's dealing with missing memories after that transfer. Eve helps him try to recover them. That gives the two of them something much more personal to work on together than just another mission. His mind has survived, but getting back the pieces of his past still matters. He wants to know what happened to him and confront the people who experimented on him. And then he loses that artificial body too. He's basically gone through two deaths of the body he was living in, continuing in a different form each time. After the destruction at Cheyenne Mountain, he can still communicate electronically even though the android body is gone. He's still there, but the way the others can reach him has changed again. That progression is what really stuck with me. Human body, transferred consciousness, artificial body, then existence beyond that body again. It's a pretty big amount of change for one character in a relatively short stretch of reading. I liked him and Eve together too. She's an android from the beginning, while he arrives at artificial existence after having lived as a human. They have different experiences with something that now connects them, and she has a real role in helping him through it. I wanted more of those two together. Ditto became much more than the hacker who needed protecting, and he's one of the characters from this run I'm most interested in talking about.