My first memories are of the black. That cold rush at the airlocks... my breath steaming up the ports as I watched my mom eva... the idea of living on a rock would have horrified me. I'd been born out here, free from confusing social demands, perspective on your insignificance but a glance in any direction. I grew up crawling thru the innards of old bulk cruisers, helping my mom overhaul the old tubs, flipping her shares from one corp to another. A nomadic life. A good life, if harder than for some. My parents split up pretty early; he was an intolerant Fed loyalist, blind to facts, always yearning for Earth, or his romanticized version of it anyway.  When I was 15 I fell for a crewman on an old Boa class cruiser, The Illicit, and off I went. Kinda funny I ended up taking his billet but unlike most, I had no delusions about the deep; hell, I'd purged my first CHT system when I was 9... couldn't smell anything right for about 6 months.  He jumped ship at Ring Mine station and just like like that, Engineers Mate. So it went for a few years, the Cap picking up whatever sort of sketchy work she could round up to keep us flying and fed. Living on the fringe, just how how I like it.  
    One rotation, the Galaxy finally opened her arms to me.  At that point we'd been in a Lanner class heavy trader for a year or so that the Cap had "won in a round of Queen's Poker"... or so she told people.  I was the one who had purged the bloody chunks out the airlock but hey, Cap was family, so who am I to judge. We'd set down at some creepy old spot, Taylor Keep I think it was, mostly stripping parts and anything we could flip for a few credits when I found my first true love... a pile of parts in a shipping container.  I probably wouldn't have bothered with it given the smell wafting out of it but tucked way back I saw the corner of an old plasma manifold, still wrapped in cryolite, that couldnt, wouldn't in fact, be for anything but an old Gecko. When the Cap came down to bay 4 to see what was with all the noise I was making, she just looked at me and my pile of foul smelling parts and gave me that sideways smirk around her stogey.  After a couple of chomps on that nasty camel turd she told me not to name it anything stupid, spun on her heel and went back to the con.
      Took me a year off duty shifts to get that beautiful shitbox so I was pretty sure it wouldn't explode (only manuals i could find in the database were in an old Terran lingo called Swedish, a group I'm sure has long since died off as every system had at least two pieces that weren't in the container), but finally the day came when she was ready.  I was ready.  I fired up her power plant, not literally for once, returned the Cap's rarest of gifts (a salute) and off I went; finally a Cmdr in the "Anything Stupid".  The rest is history.