Right at home with the acedemics that his parents afforded him, Lanzer found himself drawn to machines at a young age. Anything as complex as a biomod or as simple as a diesel truck, he would always study his subjects with care until they were completely predictable and could be integrated with his life.

Disjointed with the social pressures of higher learning, even despite his accolades in engineering, it didn't even seem out of place to him that he was pulled from education and sent to intern for the Murfreesboro Regional Mining Company in rural Arkansas at the age of 16. Combining Lanzer's burning passion for discovery with the blank-slate of an obsolescent Cinnabar mining facility he quickly became a corporate favorite, displacing more and more jobs every month with drone labor that he could repair and coordinate without adding any overhead; over the year's he would become the sole operator, foreman, technician, and mechanic of the entire facility, eventually expanding it to be a self-sufficient refinery on top of a mining facility.

Over the years he fell in love with confined spaces, learn to treat his own injuries, manage computer systems, and even brush up on his pistol skills to  hunt broods of Rockworms that would threaten his mining tunnels. All whilst never directly talking to another sentient being, other than the occasional BBS conversations digging up pirated vehicle-piloting sims.

Despite the safety net that the Million Nuyen Hermit should have provided, though, the Murfreesboro Regional Mining Company would get in over their head, and whilst attempting to poach larger and more precious resources from megacorps ended up at the business end of a pile of hostile takeovers and political assasinations. The Cinnabar plant where the 22 year old Lanzer resided was forgotten in the scramble. It was never worth the paperwork to legally steal out from the dead company who owned it,  but it was never shut down or decommissioned because of its self-sufficient state.

Because of the failing communication infrastructure combined with corporate  black-outs, Lanzer never caught wind of the fact that he was working for ghosts. He'd toill day in and day out hoping for the fanfare of surpassing his previous accolades for nine years. His salary was deposited, his supplies were delivered, the trucks left full and came back empty and most importantly his drones marched on. That is, until the material depot who was buying his stock (paying the profits to a nebulous account handled by a Matrix financial system, which in turn payed Lanzer's payroll) was taken over by gangers.

When the trucks stopped coming back empty, the lights couldn't stay on, his drones ran out of juice, and his life was uprooted. Without job references from the now-defunct and forgotten MRMC he could barely find a car dealership who'd let him wipe windhields, nonetheless provide him with challenging and fulfilling work. The money he'd grown accostomed to experimenting and researching with dried up, without a CEO his unrestricted access to every whim was illegal, and he only had one solution he could deal with: Shadowrunning was brutally attractive, social tact or not.