Jessica Murdock was fascinated from an early age by science and technology.  When other girls wanted dolls, Jess wanted a chemistry set.  She loved to read, but her real talent was computers.  As she grew older, she also developed an interest in psychology - specifically, how the mind seemed to function not unlike a computer.  Intrigued by the dual concepts of organic and artifical intelligence, Jessica focused her considerable intellect on researching the concepts.  Jung and Turing's works could be found side-by-side on her bookshelves, along with works by notable cryptographers (to determine the study of encoding and decoding language) and classical thinkers.

Jessica was ecstatic when she learned that she would be completing her undergraduate degree under the famous Dr. Silverback himself!  As part of her undergraduate thesis, Jess worked with a virtual reality simulator to track how the mind tried to recognize the differences between real-world stimuli and holographic stimuli, faithfully cataloging all of her results.  But one night, a catastrophic system failure shut down the simulator - while Jessica was still inside of it.  In desperation, as her body began to shut down due to the lack of mental stimulus, Jess forced her mind out of the machine and back into her body, only to learn that on a deep, almost undetectable sub-conscious level, her brain had incorporated the programming of the virtual reality simulator.

Fascinated by this, Dr. Silverback asked Jess to volunteer for a series of tests, and soon determined that while Jess was hooked up to the VR simulator, she could actually use her physical brain in the same manner as a computer program.  With some time and deep psychological work, they slowly determined which subroutines had been downloaded into her mind.  Later, Dr. Silverback developed a smaller version of the VR's mainframe that could be installed in Jess' body.  She only hesitated for a moment to have her left arm cybernetically modified to hold the mainframe, thus removing her need to be physically hooked up to the VR machine.

The mishap was not without its side effects, however.  Now constantly bombarded by the flow of information around her, Jessica was repeatedly finding herself distracted from what she was doing by catching hints and whispers of 'the ghosts in the machines', as she calls them.  She has also unfortunately developed something of an obsessive-compulsive disorder, where she has a near-addiction need to be around communications devices of some kind.  A bizarre form of claustrophobia, Jessica routinely feels the need to connect with other networks, re-affirming that her mind can freely move between the real world and the virtual one unhindered.  Dr. Silverback is working with her on dealing with this disorder, one method of which is the experimental drug Psyche.  Originally designed for use by PSI for telepathic individuals who could not handle the constant barrage of others' thoughts, Dr. Silverback has prescribed it for Jessica to help her deal with the same problem, but dealing with the bombardment of network data.  This has both alleviated and aggravated the problem - while Jessica slowly finds it easier to deal with the real world, it has made her powers harder to use; by 'grounding' her mind, it has a harder time interfacing with the mainframe installed inside of her.  Jessica and Dr. Silverback, however, remain optimistic about her treatment.

However, Dr. Silverback is not the only one monitoring Jessica's progress.  PRIMUS, alerted by the fact that Jessica's abilities and intelligence now made her remarkably good at computer hacking, is keeping a very close eye on the young graduate student.  Jessica has, on more than one occasion, blithely cruised right past firewalls or security measures in her wanderings along the networks, and even though she has never done it for personal gain of any kind (other than seeking a more direct route from one place to another), PRIMUS fears that it is only a matter of time before Jessica decides to bend her talents toward more illegal activities.  Only Dr. Silverback's staunch support of her has kept her out of jail... so far.